Posts Tagged Reform Treaty
‘Outie’ or ‘Innie’? The EU belly button
Posted by Pete Quentin in European Union on 15/11/2007
Apparently David Miliband was felt today by the ‘hand of history’, when delivering a speech to the College of Europe in Bruges. You would have thought that hand belonged to Baroness Thatcher given her famous speech of September 1988 at that location, when she laid out the fundamentals of British euroscepticism.
Instead it seems it was Miliband’s “personal history”, of a family history embroiled in continental strife, which directed his proclamation that the EU should not become a superpower but a global “role model” (yet more school boy language from the Foreign Secretary, who only recently childishly described the world as “rather a scary place”). This is skewed on a number of levels but more importantly acts as an opportunity to raise the points made by Thatcher in 1988 and their continued relevance to Britain’s place in Europe today.
The Loudmouth Across the Channel
Posted by Pete Quentin in European Union on 12/11/2007
There is one man across the English Channel who Gordon Brown must wish would shut up, writes Cem Suleyman.
The man I’m talking about is Valery Giscard d’Estaing (VGE), former President of the French Fifth Republic (1974-81).
VGE was President of the Convention on the Future of Europe, which drafted the original, and failed, EU Constitutional Treaty. Ever since the Constitutional Treaty was torpedoed by the non / nee votes in France and the Netherlands, VGE has made it his mission to make the people of Europe realise the error of their ways and eventually adopt the Constitutional Treaty in full. In the case of France’s non VGE has said “The French did not vote for or against this text, they avoided the text. This mistake must not happen again”. As you can see I’m not discussing the most humble of men!
They don’t like it up ‘em!
Posted by Pete Quentin in European Union on 30/10/2007
I had my own Dads’ Army experience this weekend – strangely not when accompanying a Veterans’ Association on its battlefield tour of France, but outside the Palace of Westminster…