Outmanoeuvred Brown endangers recovery

Bob Dixon

"Who will rid me of this tubulent priest?"

Where is Mountbatten when we need him?

Who have we got who will arrange the firing squad in Horse Guards Parade?

Dennis Churchill

The real issue, and one a Conservative government will need to address, is whether in a case where membership of the EU had such adverse effects on the economic interests of the UK they would recommend withdrawal.
An official Cost Benefit Analysis early on in their administration would send a warning to Brussels as the consequences of the UK leaving needs to be understood there before it becomes inevitable.

Publius

We are about to start seeing the results of ratifying Lisbon. Prior to ratification, the federalists had to keep certain things quiet in order not to scare the horses. Now they can let rip.

Perhaps, when England is a mediaeval agricultural economy again, we can benefit from the Common Agricultural Policy.

Dorothy Wilson

My inclination is that this pushes the day nearer when the UK will have a almighty bust-up with the EU. In fact, in a perverse way I would suspect this plays into Cameron's hands.

Mitch

Is there anything at all this fool can do properly??

Andy Leeds

Yet another reason why we should leave this cursed Union.

Sean O'Hare

With a bit of luck this will result in a few thousand city workers voting for UKIP.

David Lindsay

Like William Hague, you think that an economically patriotic friend of agriculture, manufacturing and small business, who wants to regulate the City and compel it to pay some tax – in a word, a Gaullist – will go down badly in Britain.

Hague might consider consulting the Turnip Taliban – the British Gaullists – of, say, the Richmond division of North Yorkshire. Much of the social agenda of Christian Democrats might not go down too badly in the Tory (or Labour) heartlands, either.

But the point is that it is the Parliament of the United Kingdom that should be doing these things. It certainly wouldn’t under Cameron, and he would go out of his way to stop the EU from doing them, either.

David Ossitt

“Brown has been completely outwitted.”

That is because he is as thick as three short planks, a dimwit, a bungling fool, an incompetent coward, a disgrace to the Nation.

local local

Good. Now we can look forward to the regulation of the City by the French and the disaster that will ensue should result in a referendum on the terms of our membership of the EU about May 2012.

Roy Simpson

Sean O'Hare - "With a bit of luck this will result in a few thousand city workers voting for UKIP".

And what good would that do other than improve Labour's election chances.

Marcher Baron

Clearly we will be much, much better off out!

NM

Alternatively, you might say that Brown played an extremely weak hand rather well. As the Economist's Charlemagne observed, given that "Anglo-Saxon liberal capitalism" is basically a term of abuse across much of continental Europe these days (there was this big economic crisis that basically came out of Wall Street and the City, you know), it is very hard to imagine that the other European countries would have stood for a Brit in one of the economic portfolios. Brown got as much as any (!) UK government at this point was likely to get.

The assumption prevalent here that the City as currently constituted actually makes real (as opposed to fictitious) contributions to the UK economy might deserve a bit of serious scrutiny. The other assumption, that the rest of Europe should put up with the regular wealth destruction unregulated financial markets tend to cause is peculiar too, to say the least.

toco

Brown's swopping of Michel Barnier for Baroness Ashton(yes that is her title!)is like swopping a diamond ring for one of those plastic replicas one finds in a cheap Christmas cracker.Having sold ALL our gold at the bottom of the market he persists in looking for opportunities to bring this Country to its knees.Shame on you Gordon Brown for putting at least another 250,000 well paid City jobs and their taxes at risk.

Kittler

Quite right Mr Lindsay. Patriotism and the national interest went out the window with Thatcher, surrendered to global commercial and financial enterprise and 'the market'.

wonderfulforhisage

Hmmmm..... I can't believe Brown to be the mind behind all this. Seems to me to have Mandelson's fingerprints all over it. Mandelson is nobody's fool and I'd say this was a deliberate step towards the federal state of Europe.

denis cooper

Well, there's not a lot we can do about it, is there?

If a City-destroying Directive is proposed then presumably it will come under the internal market; so it could be passed by QMV in the Council of Ministers, even if opposed by the UK government, and it would just sail through the EU Parliament if that was necessary.

Thanks to the Thatcher government pushing for the Single European Act, with the intention that other countries would no longer be able to obstruct proposals that the UK government wanted - they'd find themselves outvoted and with no veto, and their national sovereignty would be vitiated, hurrah! Unfortunately of course that cuts both ways, and now we see just how deep it could cut.

If such a Directive was passed before the general election, Brown would tell the Labour MPs to vote for its rapid implementation; and similarly if the Directive was still being passed at the time of the general election, and Labour won again.

On the other hand, if the Directive was still being passed at the time of the general election and Cameron won, he would try to resist it but would almost certainly fail to stop it, and once it was passed he would tell the Tory MPs to vote for its implementation - which they no doubt would.

There'd be no question of Cameron asking Parliament to exercise its sovereignty and refuse to implement the Directive, or to reverse its prior implementation.

It would already be too late, it would be "part of European law", like the Lisbon Treaty; and as both Cameron and Brown accept the false claim that EU laws are inherently superior to British laws, neither of them would ever seek to strike any of them down.

So we'll just have to hope that whatever may be launched against the City from Brussels can be deflected enough to miss its target, or it'll be a dud, or it won't cause too much damage.

thedarknight

Any party which allows foreigners control of such a key industry is certainly not conservative.

Number7

@NM

Don't Feed the troll. They only get excited.

As an aside:-

McBruin's attacking on the blind side again!

General Zod

The French and Germans are jealous of the City because try as they might they cannot compete with it, let alone replace it. The problem for them is that trying to hurt it through regulation is the one thing that will force the Tories to say enough is enough.

Dennis Churchill

Wonderfulforhisage
Yes but Mandelson seems rather overestimated by his friends and enemies.
A great Machiavellian intelligence would surely have been able to organise a simple mortgage scam---and needing to resign twice?
Sometimes these “Great Minds” are so blinded by their arrogance they don’t see how they can kill the Golden Goose by pushing too far.

2trueblue

Wonderfulforhisage. Too true it has Mandys prints all over it. Brown has never had an original thought in his life and lacks the mind to see what is at play, and he has been played.

Can't see Cameron taking this too well. HE does have a couple of things he can do. He must get 'difficult' like he French do and kick up about anything that would neuter the city. We are the 2nd biggest contributor and if the city goes, no money mates. Why play 2nd fiddle to France who is the biggest taker in Europe.
It all comes down to the money and he must play that card, not like the current idiot. who has given everyting away.

He must also sort out the foreign office, they must ealise they are meant to look after our affairs not foreigners. Poor chaps are confused by the name.

Moraymint

Just ignore EU laws and rules that we don't like, and plough our own furrow. What can the EU do exactly? Invade us? Refuse to take our billions of pounds of dosh? This is madness.

R King

Broon surely will go down in history as the biggest blunderer in british politics.
Three things come immediately to mind.
The sale of our gold at the lowest price, running up the largest national debt in our history whilst assuring us that he had put an end to boom and bust and ratifying the Lisbon treaty, which we were assured was just a tidying up exercise, and immediately getting stitched up by the french.

Can't someone ask the queen to step in and put an end to the crackpot?

TomTom

With a German at the ECB and Frenchman in the Commission the British speculators will have their Casino Capitalism brought under some kind of regulation which should be a relief to the Americans who have lobbied for controls on oil traders in London driving up prices.

London has built itself on having laxer regulation than New York or Chicago to attract businesses that like lax regulation; and so AIG could write Credit Default Swaps and other lovely products out of London to insure CDOs worldwide. Merrill Lynch could park its global losses in London.

RBS could become a major provider of credit in the USA, Canada, Australia, Russia, Dubai and the British taxpayer would underwrite everything.

British railway carriages could be owned by RBS and HBOS and then sold off to German banks and Australian funds just as the taxpayer cash of £62 billion flowed in so the taxpayer did not get to fund the railway leasing businesses as well.

Parliament did not concern itself when the BoE sloshed out £62 billion for two banks, nor when the Treasury sloshed around 1.3 TRILLION supporting British banks.....they were too busy fiddling expenses and behaving like town councillors

So it is probably good that the grown-ups have taken charge of the Economic Portfolios in The Commission; the British are simply not up to the job of running a country properly nowadays and have become property speculators and gamblers who have mortgaged their entire inheritance

Yarnesfromhorsham

Moraymint - simple and effective.

Dennis Churchill

Moraymint
Use our own judiciary and police against us. Remember the role of the Milice in occupied France or the Stasi in East Germany?
How the Stasi would have loved our CCTVs, DNA records and Data bases!

Frank Leader

What else would we expect from Calimity Brown. The man is a walking disaster.

denis cooper

Moraymint

I would never suggest that we "Just ignore EU laws and rules that we don't like", as that would undermine the rule of law.

By which I mean above all the rule of British law, which is infinitely more important to us than the rule of EU law.

What we need is a clear procedure (or procedures) whereby Parliament, still the supreme legal authority for the United Kingdom, and still recognised as such by the courts of the United Kingdom, exercises its sovereignty to formally disapply seriously unacceptable EU laws.

The Conservative MP Bill Cash proposed one such mechanism in May 2006, with his New Clause 17 to amend the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

The debate about it starts at Column 750 here:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/vo060515/debtext/60515-0010.htm

with John Redwood speaking.

Cash's proposal was that by passing his amendment to the Bill, Parliament would authorise ministers to use secondary legislation to disapply specific EU laws.

Column 751, Bill Cash speaking:

"That would be a valid point, were it not for the fact that the only way in which it is possible to assert the legislative supremacy of this House is under, and by virtue of, primary legislation. The hon. Gentleman is a distinguished lawyer, and he probably anticipated my saying that. In my legal opinion, it would be impossible to seek to override section 2 of the European Communities Act merely by order. However, I can assure the hon. Gentleman that the mechanism that I have employed in my new clause has been before parliamentary counsel and cleared for this purpose. It says

“notwithstanding the European Communities Act 1972”,

and refers to any order repealing, amending or replacing other legislation that has been introduced under section 2 and is therefore binding on this Parliament only by virtue of the 1972 Act. We could not change that by order, but if the authority were given by primary legislation, using the words

“notwithstanding the European Communities Act 1972”,

that would attract the legislative supremacy of the primary legislation that the Bill before us would then provide."

And again at Column 753:

"With respect, my hon. Friend might consider that matter again. The mechanism to enable the constitutional procedure to have the effect that I desire is contained in the new clause. I think that the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) understood that. We need the backing of primary legislation, using the magic words,

“notwithstanding the European Communities Act 1972”,

and then referring to the fact that it shall be binding in legal proceedings in the United Kingdom. That provides the mechanism whereby the judiciary are under a duty to give effect to that latest Act of Parliament."

Surprisingly, Cash had somehow managed to get official Tory support for the establishment of a formal mechanism to strike down EU laws, and 137 Tory MPs dutifully voted for it - including notables such as David Davis, Iain Duncan Smith, Liam Fox, Cheryl Gillan, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, Nick Herbert, Andrew Lansley, Oliver Letwin, Francis Maude, Theresa May, John Redwood, Grant Shapps, Caroline Spelman, Theresa Villiers, David Willetts - and Dominic Grieve.

Yet less than two years later in March 2008, Grieve advised Cameron that the party should not support Cash's proposed New Clause 9 for the Bill to approve the Lisbon Treaty, reportedly on the grounds that a provision to affirm and protect the legislative supremacy of Parliament would "create a constitutional contradiction", for God's sake, and on November 4th this year Cameron publicly ruled out ever striking down any EU law.

In other words, the Tory party has gone backwards on this since May 2006, and Cameron has now pledged his total subservience to the EU.

Verity

Dennis Churchill, good point. The somewhat wanting Machiavelli couldn't even execute a mortgage scam without getting caught.

StephenW

@ R King, November 28th, 2009 11:42pm

"....ask the queen to step in...."

Yes we can, see here: http://www.gopetition.co.uk/online/27778.html