Bluemerle

Sunday Telegraph
Christopher Booker's notebook
(Filed: 17/04/2005)

The biggest issue of all can't be mentioned

The real reason for the collapse of the Rover-Shanghai deal, it turns out,
was the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations.
These enact EU directives which would have imposed on the Chinese greater
obligations towards redundant employees than they could and would accept.

Even the BBC now asks why "Europe" has become the great unmentionable issue
in this suffocating election - but it is missing at least half the point.
It is true that all parties seem eager to keep the EU out of view (Tory
candidates, for instance, were startled last week to be issued with a set
of focus-group-tested mantras on this topic and warned not to vary from
them by an iota).

The politicians' stock explanation is that discussion of "Europe" should be
deferred until the referendum on the European constitution in a year's
time. This could prove to be more than just a convenient excuse: with the
voters of France and Holland seemingly set to kick the constitution INTO phpbb_
the long grass, we may find ourselves denied any debate on this issue at all.

There is, however, a more serious respect in which "Europe" has become the
black hole in this election. The discussion of many vitally important
issues is now avoided because they are in fact no longer the responsibility
of our Westminster Parliament. When even the Cabinet Office website admits
that half our laws are now made in Brussels, this means that a whole range
of policy areas which would once have been at the centre of election debate
are off the agenda.

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Here are nine key issues which have effectively been excluded from
discussion, because the views of British voters are no longer relevant to
how they are handled.

1. The Coming Energy Crisis

Within a few years, with the rundown of North Sea gas and our ageing
nuclear power stations (currently providing nearly a quarter of our
electricity), we face the prospect of a major energy crisis, which in the
electronic age would be far more devastating to economic life than Heath's
"three day week" in the 1970s.

Yet no party is prepared to argue the unworkability of an EU-agreed energy
policy which pledges that, within 15 years, we will derive 20 per cent of
our energy from "renewables", mainly wind. To achieve this - which would
entail building 20,000 turbines - is out of the question. No party dares
question the EU-Kyoto orthodoxy by pointing out that wind energy is
hopelessly unreliable and uneconomical, and that without a new generation
of nuclear power stations a crisis is inevitable.

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2. The Waste Crisis

Our waste disposal policy is in chaos thanks to the insane complexity of EU
waste rules and its diktat that we must replace most of our landfill sites
with giant incinerators. This is not going to happen. Thanks to the EU's
bizarre definitions of "waste", Britain is prohibiting all sorts of
imaginative recycling systems, such as the use of sewage pellets to fuel
power stations.

Labour ministers' slavish attempts to comply with ill-drafted EU law are
proving increasingly self-defeating: eg the current nationwide wave of
fly-tipping, or the fiasco of the EU's ban on burying "animal by-products",
from fallen farm stock to old supermarket chicken tikka. Yet neither of the
other parties dares question this shambles because they accept the EU's
right to dictate waste policy.

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3. The Defence Crisis

The Armed Forces face an unprecedented crisis in the provision of their
materiel - their planes, ships and vehicles - which is intimately connected
to the demands of EU defence integration. The recent award of the Army's
biggest ever truck order to a German firm rather than an Anglo-American
consortium was just the latest instance of how the politics of EU
integration are now overriding military considerations.

The Tories promise to spend more on defence and to reverse the abolition of
old regiments. But neither pledge makes sense without addressing the
central issue of whether our armed forces should be reorganised and
re-equipped according to the needs of EU defence policy.

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4. Immigration and Asylum Rules

In January when Michael Howard first proposed a limit on immigration, he
was caught out when Brussels officials explained he had no powers to do so.
The Labour Government had signed up to directives which prevent Britain
deciding its own immigration and asylum policy.

Mr Howard responded that he would repatriate those powers. But although he
has continued to make immigration a central election issue, he has
carefully avoided getting drawn INTO phpbb_further discussion of how he could
implement a policy which would be viewed by Brussels and his EU partners as
illegal.

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5. Road Safety and Traffic Control

Few issues have become more contentious than speed cameras and congestion
charges. Even Labour's manifesto admits they will consider a new system for
charging road-users. What no party explains is that Brussels now plans to
take control of all "road use policy" across the EU, through its proposed
Road Safety Agency, including speed limits. Furthermore, among the declared
intentions of its Galileo satellite system is a plan for electronic
charging for road use of EU roads, including congestion charges; and
satellite-controlled automatic "speed limiters", making it impossible for
drivers to break the limit even if they want to.

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6. Overseas Aid

Tony Blair makes play with his plans to more than double Britain's overseas
aid spending to £6.5 billion a year. What he doesn't highlight is the
frustration of his ministerial colleagues at the extent to which UK aid
priorities are now dictated by the EU, and how inefficiently and corruptly
much of it is administered.

A junior aid minister, Gareth Thomas, recently complained at the way EU aid
is weighted towards Mediterranean countries, in the hope of deterring
emigration - so that Egypt, for example, receives 100 times more per head
than the much poorer Bangladesh. The Tories say they would "repatriate"
some aid policy, but do not explain how they would do this in face of
unanimous opposition from Brussels and EU partners.

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7. Foreign Policy

Because it is obscured by headline exceptions such as Iraq, few people,
even politicians, are aware how much we must now comply with the EU's
common foreign policy. In 28 policy areas we have already handed over our
right to decide our own policy, which is one reason why the British
Government has appeared to take such a pusillanimous line over such issues
as the tyranny of Mugabe, Botswana's persecution of the Kalahari Bushmen
and appeasement of the mullahs in Iran.

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8. Competition and State Aid Rules

When, with Government support, Peugeot planned a car plant at Coventry
which would have contributed more to the Midlands economy than Rover, the
deal was scuppered because it took too long for Brussels to approve it
under EU "state aid rules". Although the rules are widely flouted by
France, Germany, Italy and Spain, Britain is punctilious in its efforts not
to use subsidies in a way which might "distort competition". This has also
resulted in abandoning such socially desirable policies as the Public and
Private Partnerships which helped to clean up scores of former industrial
sites and put them to beneficial use.

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9. The Growing Deadweight of EU Regulation

When one West Country MP was recently approached by a constituent asking
why, as a lorry driver, he was forced by the EU's working time rules to
take a 20 per cent cut in wages, the MP had to point out that there was
nothing any British politician could do about it.

EU regulations are regularly put at the top of the list by business
organisations, from the CBI to the British Chambers of Commerce, as by far
the biggest single factor undermining the efficiency and competiveness of
British industry. Despite weak noises from the Tories, no British
politician has any practical idea as to how to curb this regulatory
blizzard, which is why it is not an election issue.

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These are just some of the issues which will remain undiscussed at this
election, reflecting how much of our government has now passed to the new
system centred in Brussels, unaccountable to any electorate. This inflicts
endless damage, from the chaos over our new "118" system for directory
enquiries to the continuing disaster of our fisheries.

But the more the power to run our country is taken out of our politicians'
hands, the more reluctant they are to talk about it. This is why debate
will continue to centre round the same obsessive little list of issues -
schools'n'hos-pitals, crime'n'tax - ignoring that ever greater "European
black hole" INTO phpbb_which our right to govern ourselves is steadily vanishing.

C_steam

More good writing!

mkpdavies

That article is dynamite for us. In the Torygraph too, is the industrial stregth coffee smell we have been brewing finaly wakign a few people up?

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My ignore list

Labour, Blue Labour, Lib Dems

Percy the Poodle

This is not really a surprise coming from Booker. He did afterall write the Bible of Eurorealism 'The Great Deception'.

This makes it even more odd that he doesn't mention the one party who will do something about all this. He smelt the coffee a long time ago - why can't he bring himself to drink it?