Cooking Your Books
eursoc.com
By EURSOC Two
03 March, 2005
The EU Referendum Blog reports that the European Commission is now demanding the right to investigate national governments' accounts.
Ostensibly demanded as a Eurozone safeguard after it emerged that Greece and Italy fiddled their books in order to meet the requirements of the single currency, the new requirement will give Eurocrats unprecedented access to accounts of nations outside the Eurozone, including Britain.
According to The Sun, Britain's chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown has already advised the European Commission of where they can redirect their demand.
As the report says, these Commission investigations come on top of the regular fraud check ups carried out by the EU's dodgy statistical offices, Eurostat. Governments will be obliged to ensure that EU accountants are given unrestricted access to treasury accounts.
Unfortunately, the EU's accounts are even ropier than those of many member states. The EU's accountants have been unable to sign off the union's books for the past decade thanks to discrepancies and irregularities in the accounts.
But never mind that the corrupt EU has a cheek demanding to investigate the books of member states: This development has deeper political implications. As the EU Referendum Blog concludes,
"No country which is required to open its books to a higher authority, and which stands to be penalised if it does not meet economic criteria set by a group of which it was only a minority member, can be considered sovereign or independent.
"And since in these important respects, member states are effectively second-tier governments, and more powers are handed to the central government via the EU constitution, it would do well for the MacShanes (Denis, Britain's minister for Europe) of this world also to admit that the EU is no longer (and never has been) an association of sovereign nation states, freely cooperating with one another.
"It is time for the sham to end." |
