Chairman of the European Foundation, Bill Cash MP, had an excellent letter in The Times a few days back, questioning the European Union's guidance in the financial crisis:
Sir, It is truly disturbing in the current economic and financial global crisis to witness Presidents Sarkozy and Barroso strutting about at Camp David with President Bush. The idea that the European Union can offer a solution to current world problems must be weighed against its own systemic failures over the last few decades.
The failure of the Lisbon economic agenda, the high and increasing levels of unemployment in the euro-zone, the massive costs of over-regulation which are destroying enterprise, the total failure of the Stability and Growth Pact, the assumed irreversible nature of the European Union legal framework, and the promotion of bureaucracy at the expense of democracy is testament to the reasons why the current model of the European Union is not fit for purpose.
International conferences and co-operation based on free and fair markets and democratic principles are necessary and laudable, but no confidence can possibly be placed in the track record of the current model of European Union speaking with its so-called single voice, whose economic failures precede the current financial crisis and are partly responsible for it.
Economic success will only come about if the European Union reverts to an association of democratic nation states co-operating together but without a centralised, bureaucratic, undemocratic model of government.
Bill Cash, MP
House of Commons, SW1
