MemHT Portal Roger Helmer MEP

• Dan Hannan just wrote an interesting piece with his predictions for the EU.  He believes that the Euro-Corporatists of the “centre-right” are realising that they can’t make austerity stick in the face of popular unrest and the revolt at the ballot-box.  So they will revert to type: more spending, more stimulus projects, more integration, common taxes and budgets and a common Finance Minister.

He could be right.  Never mind that excessive government spending got us into this mess.  The Eurocrats will do the one thing they know how to do — more of the same.  And the effect will be to accelerate Europe’s decline, and facilitate the triumph of the East.

]]> John Bufton MEP

• For more than four years now I have been writing articles on the problems in the Eurozone. It is becoming a rather wearisome subject, despite the twists and turns in the plot line. That’s because we all know how the book ends.

But what we don’t know is what story follow up books will tell. For this first time European Central Bankers have explicitly discussed a Greek exit. Over the course of the last two years I have challenged the Commission President over the possibility of Greece being booted out of the single currency. He repeatedly denied that this was even a possibility. I wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Minister for Business in the Welsh Government to enquire whether an impact assessment had been drawn up and how we would deal with the implications of overnight chaos in the Eurozone. The response was one of silence.

]]> Roger Helmer MEP

• Guy Verhofstadt [pictured] is a former Prime Minister of Belgium, and now leader of the Liberals in the European parliament.  He is also the most splendidly unreconstructed €uro-zealot you could hope to meet.

With the European House crashing about his ears, his cry in the plenary on Wednesday was “More federalism! More political integration! €uro-bonds! Debt mutualisation! More Europe!”.  And yet elsewhere in his speech he reminded us that we faced not a world crisis or a world recession, but a European crisis.  He seemed oblivious to the obvious flaw in his logic.

I wrote to him afterwards in the following terms:

]]> "As it is now demonstrating, the Euro was a political, not an economic project – conceived by politicians who beneath their grand vision saw greatly enhanced career prospects. Rolling back the mistake will also involve rolling back the growing political class which created it. It will be difficult, but it is necessary."

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Marta Andreasen MEP

• I spoke on Friday over in Copenhagen at a European Parliament organised conference called: “Solving the current crisis: What role for the EU?”. The title of the debate was almost oxymoronic as you can see.]]> Gerard Batten MEP | Daily Express

• According to Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament, “the two great achievements of the European Union are the euro and freedom of movement”.

Only a Europe fanatic could see these as achievements. The euro has helped bring Europe to the edge of an economic abyss and open borders mean we have not just had hard-working decent migrants but benefits claimants and criminals too.

]]> There is a successful English wine company on Nigel Farage's South East patch, Chapel Down Winery at Tenterden, Kent. Of course they mostly use local grapes, but they entered into a deal to import some Malbec grapes from Argentina, to celebrate "World Malbec Day", and made a small batch of wine from these grapes. They called it "An English Salute".

Then starts the problem. According to Commission rules, European wine must be made from European grapes, and if you use imported grapes, you may not sell it as wine. It's a "fruit-derived alcoholic beverage from produce sourced outside the EU". No, honest.
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Roger Helmer MEP
 
• Last Wednesday I attended a "Non-Wine Tasting" in the Brussels parliament.  It was well attended, and was graced by the visit of a very senior, distinguished and well-loved MEP Astrid Lulling (Luxembourg), who is also inter alia Chairman of the parliament's Wine Intergroup (which counter-intuitively exists to work on issues facing this major European industry -- not simply to test the products).
]]> John Bufton MEP | Related VIDEO

• New EU laws are looking to broaden the scope of patenting what are called “essentially biological processes”

What is meant by this is selective breeding and crossing for example, to create new strains of plant or genetically selected animals.

However the process used is rather more natural than simply a laboratory based exercise - so how does one copyright it?

]]> Roger Helmer MEP

• George Osborne says that Coalition policies will now focus on delivering benefits to that clichéd constituency, “hard-working families”.  This is widely seen as shorthand for higher taxes on the rich (“Sorry we reduced the top income tax rate from 50% to 45%”). But it shouldn’t be.  The best thing that George can do for hard-working families is to prioritise growth, and that means making the UK a more attractive place to invest in.  And in turn, that means deregulation, flexible labour markets, regulatory certainty, and lower personal and business taxes.  Put simply, if you make conditions unattractive for entrepreneurs and investors (for example by punitive income tax on the better-off) you damage everyone, by driving business off-shore, slowing growth and increasing unemployment. 

If you’re a worker on the dole, you’d rather get a job than hear that the rich are taking a caning.
]]> William Dartmouth MEP

• Britain is now engaged in two wars, the War on Terror and the War on Crime. Opinion is divided as to whether we are winning these wars or not.

But Britain is fighting another war and this is one we are losing.

In this war we are failing in the fight against the wiping-out of hard won tradition and fair play established over centuries. This war is the War to protect our Liberties.

Britain faces a twin attack on our Liberties, on the one hand via the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), on the other from the European Arrest Warrant (EAW).

]]> Roger Helmer MEP

• The following alarmist paragraph seems typical of what we read today, “The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot. Reports all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.” 

Yet it’s a quote from the US weather bureau from 90 years ago, dated 1922. ]]> John Bufton MEP

• It's not often I read an article in The Guardian with such zeal, especially not an opinion piece.

But today's column [01.05.2012] by Costa Douzinas, a professor at Birkbeck University in London who has authored and co-authored texts examining the philosophical underpinnings of law making such as human rights, was interesting indeed.
]]> Derek Clark MEP | Related VIDEO

• Strasbourg: Plenary session, 17-20 April

A strange session. Strasbourg Plenary is usually Monday to Thursday, this time it was Tuesday to Friday since Monday was the Greek Orthodox Easter. The organisers evidently knew this would be not too well attended for the agenda was very light on real EU business. There were debates on Human Rights, Mali, Syria, Burma, the Black Sea, World Security systems, Jordan, biometric passports, Women and Climate Change, biodiversity. There was no business at all on Friday afternoon when there is on a normal Thursday last day.]]> Banking rules: UK begging for flexibility just shows lost sovereignty

• Responding to news that EU finance ministers are holding a snap meeting in Brussels (02.05.2012) devoted to new capital rules for banks, UKIP Economics spokesman, Yorkshire MEP Godfrey Bloom this afternoon said:
 
"Listening to George Osborne beg for flexibility just shows that the UK has lost sovereignty on this issue.

]]> Roger Helmer MEP

I’ve just returned from a flying visit to Vaasa, Finland, with the European Energy Forum.  The delegation was led by Slovenian MEP Romana Jordan [pictured, with Roger Helmer, 25.04.2012]. 

Vaasa boasts an “energy cluster” of cutting-edge companies in the energy field, and we spent a very solid day with Wärtsilä, a global Finnish company developing and making very large internal combustion engines.  These have been widely used in shipbuilding, where the company has a substantial market share, and has production and assembly operations around the world, including key ship-building nations like China and Korea.
]]> Marta Andreasen MEP

• Hold on to your hats. The European Commission yesterday asked for a budget increase of 6.8% for 2013. The demand comes at a time of national austerity and as the European Institutions are imposing savage budget cuts on Eurozone countries.

This demand is cloud-cuckoo land stuff. Have the European Commission finally completely lost their grip on reality?

]]> John Bufton MEP

• Today (25.04.2012) the European Commission will announce a 6.8% increase in budget - equivalent to €138 billion extra.

This is truly extraordinary when the majority of member states (25 out of 27, excluding the Czech Repubic and the UK who refused to sign up to the latest 'non-EU treaty' financial pact) are under mandate to enforce austerity measures imposed by Brussels. How then can the EU defend such an enormous hike in its own budget?

]]> Godfrey Bloom MEP | PS Europe

Let us hope a new day will dawn when we can return to our libertarian roots and government can retreat into the shadows where it belongs, says UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom.

• As a libertarian, I was deeply shocked to watch the sad story of the British bed and breakfast couple being prosecuted for refusing a homosexual couple hospitality in their own home. Not a hotel, big or small, but their own home. I wondered how it could be possible in what used to be the most liberal of societies that this could somehow be a criminal offence. Even under the most appalling fascist, communist or theocratic junta this would be considered extreme.

]]> • MEP Paul Nuttall has hit out at EU hypocrisy over the cost of quangos.  His comments follow a briefing by Open Europe showing that the cost of EU quangos to European taxpayers has risen by 33% over two years and now stands at €2.64bn.

“This is a prime example of the EU wasting money on funding more bureaucracy while demanding other people and our own Government cut spending,” said Mr Nuttall, local Euro-MP and UKIP deputy leader.

“It is plain that when the EU demands spending cuts it excludes itself – what utter hypocrisy.]]> Marta Andreasen MEP | Related VIDEO

• An EU funded fusion power project is turning into a multi-billion nightmare running billions over the original €5 billion 2006 estimates. The actual end costs may never be known as the project is divided amongst seven partners who are under no obligation to divulge them to the central body overseeing the Project.

I should say at the outset that I am not against nuclear fusion per-se, I am simply against multi-billion wastage of your money.]]> VIDEO

• Speaking in Strasbourg this week (18.04.2012) during the debate on the "means to combat the economic crisis... in the eurozone" UKIP Leader Nigel Farage said that the question now is not whether the euro can be saved, but how it will break up.

"Economists the world over now say that it is inevitable that the euro will break up. It is just a question of how," he said. "And I really hope that the IMF now decide to stop pouring good money after bad into these bailouts and I really do hope that not one penny piece more of  British taxpayers' money goes into propping something up that should be allowed to die."

]]> VIDEO

• In a report debated today in the European Parliament, French Green Party MEP Nicole Kiil-Nielsen claims global warming ‘is not gender neutral’.

In response UKIP MEP for the East Midlands, Roger Helmer said: "The idea that climate change affects women disproportionately to men is laughable. This silly report is simply linking the gender hobby horse to the cause de jour."

]]> Marta Andreasen MEP | Related VIDEO (ITER project, 19.04.2012)

• How can the EU be expected to be taken seriously on the financial crisis whilst in the space of a few short months it pleads poverty in its own 2011 budget, only to post a surplus in April? This is the question I asked yesterday in Strasbourg as Commission President Barroso continued his attempts to offer solutions to the financial crisis.

]]> John Bufton MEP

• Tomorrow and Friday the Council of Europe, representing 47 member states and over 800 million citizens, will meet in Brighton to discuss reforming the figure head institution of the European Court of Human Rights [Strasbourg, pictured]. At the helm of the discussion is Britain, who currently chairs the Council of Europe, although rumour has it that David Cameron himself will not be attending. ]]> "Yet again we see the Government being forced into doing something deeply unpopular and counter-productive because of EU rules." - Godfrey Bloom MEP

• New rules that the Government is introducing to restrict tax relief to Charities are already compromised by EU legislation.
]]> There was even a proposal to establish an official EU ratings agency. You can imagine just how credible that would be.

Roger Helmer MEP

• Yesterday I attended a lunch-time briefing with the European Parliamentary Services Forum on the EU’s plans to regulate the Credit Ratings Agencies. ]]> Don’t let the Green Zealots bring back the Window Tax!

By Roger Helmer MEP

• The government is proposing that householders who want to build a conservatory, or replace a boiler or install new windows, are to be forced to spend hundreds of pounds in addition on loft insulation and other green measures, all in the name of saving the planet.
]]> By Roger Helmer MEP

• A Survation Poll for the Daily Mail (April 8) shows UKIP and the Lib-Dems tied for third place at 11%.  UKIP in double figures and third equal.  OK, so one opinion poll doesn’t prove a lot by itself, just as two swallows don’t make a summer.  But this follows a period when UKIP has been heading up steadily (and attracting large crowds to public meetings).  And of course the Lib-Dems have been edging down fairly conspicuously. ]]> By John Bufton MEP

• The tragedy unfolding in Greece has escalated to such a stage now that I am increasingly concerned by pan-European complicity in the austerity measures planned to save the Euro - a currency nobody wanted - which are putting so many human lives at stake.

I have talked about Greece repeatedly in this blog. It's been hard not to. It has after all been the focal point of European news for over a year.
]]> By Godfrey Bloom MEP

• The Grand Mufti of the Syrian Arab Republic and His Beatitude Ignatius IV Patriarch of Antioch and all the East recently met with Kofi Annan. Annan has spoken to the Security Council, and with high-ranking political individuals in the UN and elsewhere urging them to let Syria solve its own problems.
]]> • The Eastern Counties MEP, Stuart Agnew, has angrily condemned the European Commission’s abrupt decision to ban Desinewed Meat (DSM) even though there is no evidence that it is dangerous to human health, describing the decision as “wasteful of perfectly good meat” and pointing out that it “should be for the British government to make such decisions, not unelected European Commissioners sitting in Brussels”.
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