OECD Outlook hints non-democratically ratified Lisbon Treaty will finish the EU

The June OECD report is linked from here. Hamish McRae writing in The Independent this morning, linked here, concludes as follows:

"But if it (the world economic downturn) is not going to be deep, maybe it will be long. The banks will be scarred (and scared) for a decade. Squeezing out this burst of inflation will take three years at best. The about-turn by the US Federal Reserve this week suggests that the next move in interest rates will be up, not down. The scope for interest rate cuts in the UK and in Europe is limited at best, even though rates are much higher than in the States. Were this a normal cycle you would expect the recovery to be pretty evident by 2010, but somehow I feel a growing concern that this might be wrong: that though this downswing will not be particularly deep, it will be unusually protracted. It will certainly be unusually uneven.

To say that goes far beyond conventional economic forecasting. We don't have the tools to help us envisage what economic growth and inflation will look like in 2014, when presumably our next government will come up for re-election and the next US president will be in his second term, or not. But I am pretty sure the next few years will be difficult for governments in all western democracies. Voters will expect higher living standards and it will be tough to deliver them – tougher even than it is now."

So it would appear that the objective of this blog and its forerunner can at last be seen as attainable, at least somewhere far out on the distant horizon, but what a miserable way to see a small chance for the restoration of democracy and what pain seems in store to arrive at that end.

True, Stuart Wheeler's legal case and the Irish referendum, both almost upon us, could still prevent the worst, but it looks increasingly likely that the Lisbon Treaty will be ratified without the open consent of the peoples of most of Europe. Against the background of the growing economic storm clouds the repercussions could be explosive and those individuals responsible must now clearly be seen to be even more self-serving,callous and incompetent than already evidenced by their disatrous policies which have brought the world to its present sorry plight and destroyed the powers of 27 democratic parliaments almost completely .