Eurocrat typical of everything that is rotten in Brussels
NO MODERN organisation has ever failed more dismally than the European Union. Its founders promised a new era of peace and prosperity. Instead, it has brought its member states debt, despair, discord and dislocation.
The single currency has become a vehicle for economic paralysis and mass unemployment. If it were a private company the EU would have been declared bankrupt years ago. Accountable national governance has given way to oligarchical rule by a Brussels cabal which is a byword for corruption, greed and bureaucracy.
Even worse, the obsession with open borders, cynically used as a means of promoting the idea of European citizenship at the expense of national identities, has resulted in the biggest peacetime migration crisis in the continent’s history.
As was revealed this week, the number of foreigners reaching Europe across the eastern Mediterranean amounted to 1.2 million people in 2015, a total that seems certain to rise in the coming year.
Yet the EU refuses to allow all this self- inflicted economic meltdown and social upheaval to divert it from the goal of a new European superstate. Catastrophe has bred only further arrogance. The answer to every crisis is more central control, more unification, more destruction of national rights.
Nothing is allowed to stand in the way of political integration, as has been shown in the desperate charade of David Cameron’s attempt to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s EU membership in advance of this summer’s referendum.
EVEN the most trivial change to the welfare entitlements for migrants has incurred the ferocious opposition of the Brussels establishment, while Europe’s bosses have refused to countenance any alteration to treaties or restrictions on free movement.
The EU’s intransigence is exemplified by the hectoring, overbearing form of bearded German socialist Martin Schulz. To Britain’s misfortune, Schulz is the President of the European Parliament, that self- important talking shop which is a monument to the EU’s disdain for national democracy. He is a classic example of the cadre of modern European politicians, far more interested in fulfilling the ideology of federalism than in providing good governance.
This week he has been throwing his weight around. When Cameron met him to discuss the draft deal, Schulz haughtily told the Prime Minister that he “could not guarantee” that the European Parliament would accept it. There was certainly a chance of a veto, he said with ill- disguised relish as he made a mockery of Cameron’s pledge about the watertight nature of any agreement.
This is a theme that Schulz has taken up before, partly because it emphasizes his own power as the EU’s Parliamentary boss. Last month he told British television that no deal between Brussels and London would be “irreversible” because “nothing in our lives is irreversible”.
As a federalist fanatic, he has also expressed his exasperation at British Eurosceptic attempts to halt the juggernaut of unity. “The British often test our patience with their continuous demands,” he said in a recent lecture to the London School of Economics.
In his sneering at the concepts of national identity, sovereignty and governance, Schulz encapsulates everything that is wrong with the European project. A socialist since his teenage years, he is a former bookseller who became a member of the European Parliament in 1994, rising to the Presidency two decades later.
On this odyssey,
his
adora- tion for Brussels has intensified. In a speech last year he claimed absurdly that the creation of the EU is “the greatest achievement of our European civilisation since the Enlightenment.” Like a true religious zealot, he does not allow reality to intrude on his faith.
“To my mind hardly anything so perfectly embodies the achievements of European unification as open borders,” he declared as the migrant crisis was deepening. He should try peddling that line now to some of the women of Cologne who were abused on New Year’s Eve by predatory North African and Middle Eastern gangs.
As with all dogmatists, he grows angry at any heretical challenge to his creed. He can be “really bossy, sometimes maybe even too bossy,” admits one of his fellow socialists in the European Parliament, though Schulz’s socialism, all too predictably, does not inhibit him enjoying the finer things in life. “I recommend the foie gras,” he told a journalist during an interview over dinner in Strasbourg’s best restaurant.
It says everything about the EU’s destruction of our independence that the fate of our nation should partly be in the hands of a Left- wing German apparatchik. No one in Britain ever voted for Schulz. Why should he have any say over immigration or welfare policies? Previous generations of Britons fought to keep our country free from rule by German National Socialists, yet now our future is dictated by this socialist nonentity.
SCHULZ first sprang to prominence in 2003 when, during an angry exchange in the European Parliament, clownish Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi said he would make a good “concentration camp guard”. Schulz was infuriated. “My whole life I spend in the fight against anti- Semitism and Nazism,” he fulminated.
Yet the war on nationhood waged by Schulz and the rest of the European elite is dragging the continent towards a new dark age. Open borders and free movement have meant the import of extremism, conflict, anti- Semitism, terrorism, urban violence and institutionalised misogyny.
The sooner Britain votes to break free from this new German imperialism the better.
‘ He’s an overbearing,
bearded socialist’