European Union Uses Greek Bailout to Grab More Power: Tories Silent
The Tory Party, which campaigned on “rolling back the EU’s powers,” has remained predictably silent on the latest European Union Greek bailout power grab which has seen the Lisbon Treaty “fundamentally changed” overnight without being voted upon in any way.
The French foreign minister, Pierre Lellouche, has said that the Eurozone’s €440 billion debt guarantee scheme is “tantamount to the adoption of a NATO-style mutual defence clause” and “marks an unprecedented change” to the Lisbon Treaty.In a newspaper interview, Mr Lellouche said that the emergency stabilisation scheme agreed earlier this month “amounted to a fundamental revision of the European Union’s rules and a leap towards an economic government for the bloc.
“It is an enormous change,” Mr Lellouche said. “It is expressly forbidden in the treaties by the famous no bailout clause. De facto, we have changed the treaty.”
Mr Lellouche explained that the bailout was “nothing less than the importation of NATO’s Article 5 mutual defence clause applied to the Eurozone. When one member is under attack the others are obliged to come to its defence.”
Meanwhile, EU president Herman Van Rompuy has admitted that the Lisbon Treaty contains "uncertainties and gaps.”
Mr Van Rompuy agreed that the Lisbon Treaty needed to be changed and added that he hoped “we can achieve these objectives within the framework of the Lisbon Treaty."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced that “changes to the EU treaty are unavoidable” if the bloc is to survive the Greek debt crisis.
Ms Merkel says that the EU budget rules, known as the Stability and Growth Pact, need to be beefed up and harsher penalties implemented against “offending” member states which could include the withdrawal of structural funds and the voting rights.
The bailout has direct implications for the ConDem regime’s EU policy.
The Conservative Party fought the general election campaign on a promise to “roll back” the powers of the EU, while the Liberal Democrats promised to increase Britain’s involvement in the EU and to adopt the euro currency.
The Greek bailout has in effect translated into a further punitive power grab by the EU — something against which the Conservatives campaigned.
Given the nature of the coalition government, it is of course unlikely that the British government will oppose the latest expansion of EU powers, and that Britain will also soon be subjected to EU budget “scrutiny” in yet another stripping away of Westminster’s powers.
* In an unrelated development, the British Pest Control Association (BPCA) has warned that a new EU rat poison ban will see Britain “overrun” by rodents.
The EU in Brussels wants to ban rat poisons which contain warfarin on the obvious grounds that they are “dangerous for humans.”
“It would mean a massive increase in the rodent population,” Richard Moseley, of the BPCA was quoted as saying.
“You would have to go back to using traps and dogs. You have a spurt of the population and you could be overrun.”
