Quote of the day
“Everything about this process rubs our noses in how undemocratic the EU is. It’s not just the way Baroness Ashton was appointed; it’s her whole career. Lady Ashton is a lifelong quangocrat who has never once been elected to anything. She went from running a health authority to working at the National Council for One Parent Families to being a Labour life peer, to leading the Lords, all without facing the voters. She steered the Lisbon Treaty through the Upper House, cancelling the referendum on it that all three parties had promised. She was then appointed to the European Commission because Gordon Brown wanted to avoid a by-election. Now, she gets the top job as a kind of compensation to Labour over the rejection of Tony Blair. Every chapter in the story is a denial of the democratic principle.”
- Dan Hannan takes aim at Baroness Ashton, newly appointed EU foreign affairs supremo (full article HERE)
Witanagemot Blogs
‘She steered the Lisbon Treaty through the Upper House, cancelling the referendum on it that all three parties had promised.’
Thanks LFAT. I wondered how someone like her got this job. Good to see the old Commissar network is not letting us down.
I’d wager that was the carrot for ’steering’ the Lisbon Treaty through the Upper House
Democracy is soooo last century.
Five years will never be enough for a Conservative government to undo the extent of Labour friends’ enrichment that pervades the quangos in this country. She is a complete nobody who has been elevated to one of the senior politician in Europe without ever once having to prove herself to voters or achieve anything notable.
Unbelievable.
However bad it looks now, this is actually a great result for all of us who still believe in the nation state. She is a total nobody, and the President is hardly any better.
Despite Clinton’s praise, Obama will not be dealing direct with the EU president. He will deal with the heads of the countries who send troops out for NATO, and Clinton will deal with the Foreign Sec, not this apparatchik who has no real influence over the heads of state.
The level of horse trading has made it very clear to all those who were undecided on Lisbon that democreacy has been declared to be ‘dangerous’ and unmanagable by the new elite, and that they intend to govern as a benign dictatorship. What they are competing for now, is to see who can occupy the 27 posts on the ‘politburo’ on the day when those seats cease to be held by the elected heads of state but become held by the incumbant permanently, with regional assemblies set up to give the impression of democracy with the dissolution of the nation state.
I hope that with the appointment of such nobodies, that point may have been pushed back several years.
On the whole, I think I would prefer to have the Habsburgs back.
@Tony E – and ‘benign’, I’d suggest, is entirely in the eye of the beholder…
I cannot for the life of me see why we would want a President chosen by democratic vote. Just look at what three general elections in our own country threw up over the past twelve years. It’s been a nightmare! And there are signs that the lumpen proletariat might well throw a hung parliament at us next time round! If you look at the sort of people elected to sit in our HoCommons, you would surely prefer the results of a quick ask around.
Yet Cameron seems prepared to go along with this abuse of our Sovereignty! Where is a REAL leader when you want one, Dan?
@Shaun Pilkington – Benign, until the wrong person gets the right job!
It sounds crazy, and I wonder if I’m being a little alarmist when I type. Somehow I just believe that, whatever the intentions of those who put this ‘plan’ in place, (and I can understand that they believe that benign dictatorship is more stable and harmonious than democracy which has a less auspicious history in mainland Europe), it will be used eventually to create something that will be no different in principle from the Soviet Union.
@Tony E – That’s the real problem, isn’t it? It’s always about the *unintended* consequences. Did the high-minded prohibitionists mean to put a generation into sympathy with organised crime while funding the Mafia for 80+ years? Did we intend to blow over the twin towers when funding AQ & the Taliban to take out the Soviets in Afghanistan? Did the US mean to piss two generations up a rope to lose Vietnam that had nothing to do with the Domino Effect they thought they were fighting anyway? When we loosened the rules around wheel clamping did we envisage unleashing privatised hordes of metal-boot storm troopers running around on performance related pay? I’d wager not.
And you’re probably not being alarmist; I’m actively working on remaining calm and blog comments are a part of my self-administered therapy
But still – Stalin was called ‘the grey blur’ because nobody saw him coming as he amassed influence and authority by taking all the dull, s*** jobs on in the Soviet structure. That’s how he positioned himself to take the leadership – and I suppose, in our anti-democratic EU bound world, you do have adequate reason to worry about it.
The trick is to know when worrying or speaking about it becomes legally riskier than procuring the recreational pharmaceuticals required to tolerate it. And on that note, I’m off for a wee spliff!