In response to arrival of Czech President Vaclav Klaus at the EU helm the Guardian has unsurprisingly jumped onto the "we-need-a-permanent-EU-President-in-order-to-silence-critics of the EU" bandwagon - a profoundly anti-democratic argument made in the Independent just a few weeks ago by Roland Rudd.
Just one EU leader - out of 27 - expresses scepticism about the direction of the EU, and everyone gangs up to insist that he shouldn't be allowed a platform to speak. Anyone would think that less than one 27th of the population of the EU shared his views...
The piece is also an argument in favour of EU unity for the sake of EU unity and at the expense of democracy.
The reference to “the egos of Eurosceptics” in particular seems a bit rich... Don't they remember Sarko?!
What a dire Guardian editorial! Particularly: "As David Miliband warned last night, the Eurosceptics should stop beating up the straw man of a federal state. He rightly argued that they cannot both be in favour of a single market and against the very institutions that preserve the rules of game."
ReplyDelete"Rightly argued"? Sheesh! First, someone please tell the Guardian that the EU's "rules" extend a bit beyond the single market these days. In which era are these people living?
Second, it's considerably more accurate to suggest the likes of David Miliband cannot both be in favour of passing ever more decision-making to the EU such as through the Lisbon Treaty and still deny there is a federal state in the making.