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  1. Wealth
May 3, 2011

Forget AV – it's EU we need a vote on

By Spear's

Would you vote to join a club where the insolvent members are paid for by the solvent ones?

As the nation prepares to go to the polls over the AV issue, it would be better off to revisit the poll over whether it wants to stay in the EU, as the EU is fast becoming a club which cannot do anything for its members’ benefit or citizens’ well-being. I sense a critical moment politique is looming, something akin to Peel’s Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, or Disraeli’s Reform Act of 1867.

I mean, would you vote to join a club where the insolvent members are paid for by the solvent ones? And where the solvent ones then have to lend money to the insolvent ones, which can never be repaid? Or where the member with the hardest currency is enjoying an export boom because of the weak state of the weakest profligate members, but at the expense of future inflation? Or where the banks are in danger of dragging the whole club into insolvency on account of their loans to the monstrously indebted ones?

And would you join a club whose auditors have not signed off the accounts for sixteen years? And where at a time of international retrenchment, the unelected committee want a budget increase of 6.2% in order to foist further meaningless and job-destroying beurocracy onto the membership? While the unelected EU Court of Human Rights tells, or rather orders, our elected representatives to let prisoners have the vote; next, they’ll be ordering turkeys to exercise their animal rights and have a vote on Christmas!

And when the club has to deal with an unscrupulous dictator on its doorstep, would you go to the rescue of the afflicted with just one other member, while all the others looked the other way and the German carried on exporting cars while the Italian carried on with his Bunga Bunga parties, in the embrace of the under-age Moroccan prostitute Ruby the Heart-Stealer?

And when the afflicted and displaced ones flee to Italy, the Bunga Bunga man gives them all 6-month visas so that they can get lost all over the clubhouse, as the Gauls and Teutons stop the trains at the border and seek to repeal a treaty that promised free movement all around the club’s premises. (I refer to the Schengen Agreement – mercifully not signed by Britain – which was signed on behalf of most of the other members under a bridge on the Mosel River, so that the Press couldn’t report it.)

The EU now costs every British family £400 p.a., say the newspapers. Nonsense! That’s just for our EU budget contribution, or membership fee. The real cost is over £2,000 p.a when you add in £1,200 p.a. for the higher cost of food from the CAP subsidies, the cost of defence not contributed by the other members, and now the extra costs of pensions for the MEPs and bureaucrats, whose pay is tax-exempt anyway and comes with lards of freebies. For what, exactly? I can see no good reason to stay as a member of this club. None.

As fast as Osborne manfully reigns in the profligacy of “New Labour”, it’s disappearing into the EU to prop up the PIGS, the bureaucrats, the CAP, ’Elf and Safety – the latest is that Butlins has been forced to ban bumper-cars from hitting each other! – and all the other senseless decrees that emanate from Brussels.

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Cameron has to take a decision, or go down in history as just another minor foot-note. The EU is as daft as the idea of AV. His problem, however, is he is in office supported by 66 Lib-Dem MPs, who are a pro-EU and pro the euro and pro-AV and all the other stupid acronyms that they can haul before the electorate – I remember when Ken Dodd from Liverpool referred to their predecessors, the SDP, whose only achievement was to abolish the Grammar Schools, as the “Small Diddy People”!

Let’s hope the Lib-Dem drifters suffer wipe-out on 5 May, that Cameron then has the guts to call a General Election and become his own man, and that the central ongoing issue is our involvement with the EU, before the right wing abandons ship in disgust and joins UKIP in frustration and in droves, leaving HMS Coalition well and truly on the rocks in a collapsing eurozone. Now, that really would galvanise debate on things that really do matter and do affect us all.

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