Britain's relations with the EU following Brixit

The EUCO yesterday issued a report on its relations with what remains of EFTA, the once British led group of free trading sovereign nations that unsuccessfully fought to fight back the corporatism, restrictive trading and coercive arm-twisting practices of the entity that has today become the EU, as so fittingly illustrated by this picture available on Twitter last evening.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office under William Hague should be preparing the strategy for our once-again independent and sovereign nation after we are free of the restraints of the EU. Rejoining EFTA, should be one option presuming we would be invited and welcomed.

In this blog's view bruised feelings on the Continent would be likely to last for some considerable time, and that diplomatic efforts on EU relations during that early period would be largely wasted, not least as other national exits would almost certainly follow.

Britain's most prosperous periods of history were those when our foreign policy acted as though Europe barely existed, but was an unhappily placed lump of land, with often fractious inhabitants, making a long circumnavigation to our markets a necessity. Thus we broke free of the ties, burdens and wars resulting from our flirtations with the Hanseatic League, freed by the bravery and exploits of the first Elizabethan Merchant Adventurers. 

Such is the spirit we need today, EFTA can wait!

Irish trade union calls for civil unrest if no General Election is called

The report of the motion carried at the conference of the TEEU is in the Irish Times, linked here. The following is an extract from that report:

The emergency motion, which was put forward by the union’s executive, “condemns the Government for its criminal negligence in the management of the economy and for colluding with the banks in misleading the Irish people as to the seriousness of the crisis we face”.

It says that “this policy of economic sabotage has led to the betrayal of our country and to the loss of the last shreds of our economic sovereignty.

“We now call on the Government to resign, hold a general election and face the verdict of the electorate.

Elsewhere across the Irish Sea in Britain one newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph, carries a report of the threat by major US companies such as Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and Intel, among other stories on the Irish tragedy, to quit Ireland if the country is forced by EU heavyweights to raise the rate of corporation tax in the country. Another Sunday paper, The Observer has a hard-hitting editorial in which it blames Ireland's politicians for the mess and also calls for an early election, apparently failing to recognise that Britain's politicians are equally rotten and culpable in bankrupting their nation whose own complete sacrifice of sovereignty presently seems merely somewhat delayed. In signing up to the Lisbon Treaty all countries accepted the single currency of the union as being the presently structured euro (albeit some with highfalutin sounding opt outs), economic governance of the eurogroup will in future it is proposed be enforced by a special agency of the ECB described in the ECB document I linked yesterday morning, which for convenience is linked again here. Britain tried to remain outside the centralising non-democratic clutches of the putative EU in the fifties and sixties by forming EFTA, a free-trade zone beyond the borders of the freedom sapping Common Market. Predatory and protectionist trade practises were imposed by the six founding members of the EU to destroy EFTA and its concept of free trading democratic sovereign states. Regardless of the opt out supposedly contained within the Lisbon Treaty, similar blackmailing economic practises will almost certainly be brought to bear on the UK and other non-eurogroup EU member states if anything like the proposal outlined in the linked ECB paper, now backed by Dominique Strauus-Kahn, head of the IMF, are ever put into effect. Seventy years on a new battle for Britain is taking place, our politicians and media are either unaware of that fact or endeavouring to keep the British public in ignorance of the facts by pretending the disaster taking place in the former sovereign state of Ireland is something of little other than financial concern to the other peoples of the archipelago of Britain. Nothing could possibly be further from the truth!