Expunging the past

Totalitarianism or what? The European Court has declared that “in appropriate cases” information should be deleted from articles on the Internet. The example given was of a Spaniard who some years ago received a conviction for debt and he successfully argued that this fact should not be there at the click of everybody’s mouse to haunt him for the rest of his life. I can see the humanity in this. But where do you stop? Should Bill Clinton be allowed to delete all that stuff about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky? Should one of our own MPs convicted for fiddling his expenses be permitted to remove all reference to it? What about free speech, including freedom of the press? George Orwell said, “Journalism is printing something which someone doesn’t want to read. Everything else is public relations.” On the other hand, Tom Stoppard wrote, “I’m all in favour of a free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.”

When it comes to the monstrous machinations of the EU, I suspect murky self-interest. I mean, I read some scandalous stories about the EU only this week which the Commissioners and the Bureaucrats would dearly love to have deleted. For example, in 2009 they produced a document instructing their own clerks and officials to write two sets of minutes for each meeting they attended: a so called “full” set of minutes but also a “neutral” one. Being translated, this means that the “neutral” minutes are what remain when the incriminating bits have been removed. And this “neutral” account of the meeting is what is made available in case of a Freedom of Information request.

The European Commission’s president, Jose Manuel Barroso must surely hope to see deleted the reported fact that he ran up a $55,000 hotel bill – funded by us of course – for a four days’ visit to New York.  Another Commissioner appointed her dentist to a very well-paid job as an adviser on HIV/AIDS. Then there was the Galvin Report into outrageous expenses run up by 160 MEPs: the EU bosses suppressed and withheld it.

It is becoming shockingly clear that the EU set up is nothing more than a hugely expensive and deeply corrupt swindle, a power-trip for the unelected, self-appointed Commissioners who invent most of our laws. The European Parliament is powerless, nothing more than a rubber stamp. They have impoverished the European people – except the Germans – by messing up the economy. Greeks, Spaniards, Portugese and now even the French are paying the price in catastrophic unemployment for the overvalued Euro. All to pay for Germany’s “economic miracle.” There is truth in the observation that what Bismarck failed to achieve by force of arms in 1870, the Kaiser failed by the same method in 1914 and again Hitler failed in 1939, Angela Merkel has achieved by economic bullying since the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992: Germany’s domination of the continent.

The EU operates the ruinous Common Agricultural Policy. It has destroyed the British fishing industry and with it the livelihood of thousands of families. It is not the free trade area it wants us to think it is, but a protectionist customs union crippling our trade with the rest of the world and so artificially inflating prices for all of us – especially the poor about whom EU socialist apparatchiks claim to care so much. They haven’t even signed off the annual accounts for nineteen years.

And Nick Clegg says that eurosceptics are “unpatriotic”! I’m hoping that Thursday’s elections will see overwhelming success for candidates who know that we are better off out.