Forget the EU – we need the Hanseatic League

I think it is time to put into effect my plan for the re-shaping of the European Union. A somewhat scaled-down European Union: Greece wouldn’t be in it, for a start. Nor Portugal or Spain or France or indeed Italy south of a line which I have just drawn on my Times Atlas of the World in felt-tip pen, stretching east north east from Genoa to Trieste. And even that northern bit of Italy (Venice in, Bologna definitely out) is there on a sort of probation — and on the understanding that they take their orders from the German-speakers in the new capital Bolzano (or Bozen, as it will become once more).

The European Parliament will be abolished and Brussels (or Brussel, henceforth) stripped of its EU capital status. My new EU would employ a staff of about 18 people in total, costing each member state perhaps £10,000 per year in contributions. They would reside in a pleasant suite of offices situated in the Holstentor — the beautiful 15th-century gate to the city of Lubeck, located in northern Germany, on the Baltic coast. There would be, in addition, representative offices in Groningen, King’s Lynn, Gdansk, Bergen and Novgorod, but these are little more than tourist information centres, in all honesty. This new confederation would consist of 22 or perhaps 24 countries — I have not yet made my mind up about Hungary and Luxembourg. It would be primarily a trading bloc, although there might be a joint military presence to patrol the borders and keep undesirables (i.e. southern Europeans and jihadi Maghrebian migrants) out.

I originally envisaged that it would operate under the somewhat cumbersome acronym AHWTPLAPOONEP – the Alliance of Hard-Working, Tax-Paying, Largely Agreeable Protestant or Orthodox Northern European Peoples.