News from the madhouse

I don’t suppose it will come as a surprise to anyone that the EU auditors have refused to sign off on the accounts. This is the seventeenth year running. We do know that a Hungarian company received £350,000 for a dog hydrotherapy project (that isn’t an adjective, its a hydrotherapy unit to improve the lifestyle of dogs), that £4.5 million was spent on a fleet of limousines in Strasbourg (there is already one in Brussels) and that EU officials spent £4.4 million on a cultural centre for themselves. Of course all this is as nothing to the usual fiddles. Millions are spent on persuading people not to smoke, and more millions are spent on subsidising tobacco crops in the EU. The fiddling of agricultural subsidies, particularly in the South, is nowhere near being tackled. Each year the propaganda publicity budget increases by millions, so we are paying them to tell us how wonderful they are.

It has got to stop and the only way it is going to stop is if countries refuse to pay in their contribution unless the accounts receive a proper audit certificate.

In other news President Rumpy has declared that euroscepticism leads to war – opting for the nation state rather than his corrupt bureaucratic madhouse apparently means Nazism. This would be news if we hadn’t heard it so many times before and it weren’t such a discredited old chestnut. Norway has never declared war on Portugal, Switzerland has never fought Hungary, even though these two countries are not members of the EU. Britain has a rather prouder record of fighting Nazism than Rumpy’s home country Belgium.

In fact Britain could leave the EU easily and peacefully. The Common External Tariff is down to 4% and the World Trade Organisation would prevent EU countries penalising the movement of British goods (which they wouldn’t do because they sell more to us than we do to them). We would save massively on regulatory cost – more than any conceivable tariff - and not have to shell out on infrastructure projects such as useless roads in Slovenia and the attendant corruption. We would no longer be subsidising France’s farmers or Italy’s mobsters or social clubs in Belgium.

And more than anything else we would return to being a self-governing democracy. Our elected parliament would actually mean something and the executive would be accountable to the people (Rumpy's army of overpaid penpushers is accountable to no-one). None of this means we would also attack Belgium. We would tolerate them, as we do now.

The case for Britain leaving is growing and more and more are supporting it. I think Rumpy is rattled.