The top six achievements of our new government
When our Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, flies to Lisbon this week to sign the treaty representing the EU's "constitution by any other name", something very eerie will be happening. He will sign away another huge chunk of Britain's power to run its own affairs to a system of government which, wherever we look at it, is breaking down. Yet there seems a general wish among our politicians to ignore the failure of all the EU sets its hand to.
Here are brief updates on some of the EU's major policy areas.
1. Common Defence Policy
The most ambitious expression to date of the EU's desire to project its military power in the outside world was its decision to send a force of 4,000 men to co-operate with the "African Union" in bringing order to Darfur, Chad and surrounding areas. Although the force, drawn from half a dozen EU countries, was meant to be operational by mid-November, the only nation with any troops so far in place is France. The French commander has long made it clear that he cannot operate across an area half the size of western Europe without at least a dozen helicopters. None has been forthcoming.
Last week, the rebel forces in Chad announced that they would deal with any EU troops that appeared as "enemies". The rebels thus set a historical precedent, as the first people ever formally to declare war on the EU - if they can find an enemy to fire at.
2. Common Foreign Policy
The EU's ambition to act on the world diplomatic stage, under its Common Foreign Policy, has inspired negotiations with the murderous regime in Teheran, through a troika of the UK, French and German governments. In four years these efforts at projecting what the EU likes to call "soft power" conspicuously got nowhere. But they provide a twist to the shocking story of the People's Mujahideen of Iran (PMOI) that I reported last week.
The High Court ruled that our Government acted illegally when, at the behest of Teheran, it outlawed the PMOI, Iran's chief opposition movement, as a terrorist organisation. It was puzzling, I said, that our Government not only acted illegally in this way, but also incited the EU to follow suit and proscribe the PMOI. When this was ruled illegal by the European Court of Justice, the EU twice agreed to ignore its own court.
The mystery has now been solved. It emerges that the "EU-3" signed a "Paris Agreement" with the mullahs on November 14, 2004. In return for an Iranian promise not to develop nuclear weapons, the EU pledged to keep Iran's main pro-democratic opposition on its list of terrorist organisations. For this, the EU was prepared to break its own law - to appease a regime which now insists that it never had any intention of making nuclear weapons anyway. Whether or not this is true, the fact remains that the EU's most grandiose foreign policy initiative has ended in disgrace.
3. Common Agricultural Policy
A frequent misconception about the CAP is that it was set up to encourage farmers to grow more food. In fact its purpose was to manage food surpluses created by the post-war subsidy system. These were either stored or dumped on the outside world at knockdown prices, inflicting untold damage on many Third World countries. But in the past two years those beef, grain and butter mountains have all but vanished, as the world faces a meat, wheat and dairy shortage.
The EU is left with its cupboard bare, and a system designed to cope with surpluses, but not shortages. It is now making the problem much worse with a policy whereby 10 per cent of transport fuel is to come from biofuels by 2020. To meet this target would require almost all the EU's farmland, just when world food prices are soaring (not least because so much land is already being given over to biofuels).
Britain is no longer in a position to prepare for food shortages: all power to do so has been surrendered to Brussels, which has no policy on the matter.
4. Common Fisheries Policy
Last week the EU's Court of Auditors (which, for 13 years running, has refused to sign off the EU's accounts) produced yet another devastating report on the system whereby Brussels manages the EU's "common fisheries resource". On all four counts it examined, from the reliability of data to the effectiveness of enforcement, it found the system had comprehensively failed.
Only once, it reported, has a country been prosecuted for failing to obey the rules, when France was fined €2.37 billion (£1.65 billion) for systematic lawbreaking over many years. Only 3.3 per cent of this was paid. Yet the report's sole recommendation was to more powers should be given to those same Brussels officials who have already made the CFP synonymous with one of the world's worst ecological disasters.
5. Common Immigration Policy
When Italy's prime minister, Romano Prodi, recently decided to deport some of the estimated 500,000 Romanians who have poured into his country, he breached a directive that allows free cross-border migration throughout the EU which he issued himself in 2004, as President of the EU Commission. "Nobody could have expected such an influx," he said.
This recalled the forecast of British ministers in 2004 that only 13,000 immigrants could be expected from Poland and other eastern European countries following the EU's enlargement in 2005. The true figure emerged as nearer 600,000. It was recently reported that 13,000 Polish babies alone will have been born in NHS hospitals this year, while teachers have had to cope with 240,000 eastern European immigrant children joining our schools.
6. Common Policy on Global Warming
As Commission President, José Manuel Barroso likes to boast that Europe "leads the world on climate change", the cornerstone of its policy being the world's largest "emissions trading scheme", based on buying and selling "carbon credits". In its first year, Britain paid out £470 million while Germany made £300 million profit (despite ordering 26 new coal-fired power stations).
NHS hospitals had to spend £1.7 million on credits, while BP and Shell made £40 million. The EU's electricity supply industry enjoyed a windfall profit of £13.6 billion, with the biggest losers UK electricity consumers, whose bills rose by as much as 12 per cent. The net result was that EU carbon emissions rose by 1.5 per cent.
There are many other glaring examples of how the EU regime is "not fit for purpose" - such as Galileo space policy (due to cost UK taxpayers £1.7 billion); or the waste policy which has reduced our rubbish collection system to chaos (and threatens us with fines of billions of euros). Yet Gordon Brown is so keen to hand even more power to this system that he is prepared to lie about the new treaty, to avoid giving us the right he himself promised us - a vote on whether we want it or not.
