The EU is a free association of nations. We are still a sovereign country. Oh yeah?…

European Commission will propose tomorrow that the UK’s budget deficit be brought down from a prospective 12 per cent of GDP to just 3 per cent by 2014-15, requiring tax increases and public spending cuts as yet unimagined by the main political parties. It would mean about £25bn in spending cuts and tax rises every year.

The EU is just regulatory, they say. It does not affect ‘money Bills’. Britain still has a veto over taxation, so says Alastair Darling as recently as June 2009…

Chancellor Alistair Darling said Britain had upheld the principle that “taxation is clearly a matter for member states”.

Pull the other one! If the EU forces Britain to balance its budget, it is indirectly forcing us to raise taxes and/or cut public spending. But I suppose we are ‘free to do what we like….within the parameters set down…!

And this is precisely the problem. All policy areas are ultimately intrinsically linked to one another and have knock on effects which ripple through other policy areas. Thus it is not possible to ‘pool’ sovereignty in some areas without losing it materially in other areas.

Quite why it is any other country’s business what the British government choses to do with its finances is beyond me. Surely it is up to the British people and their government to decide whether to raise taxes and cut spending, and how to do so, or whether to keep borrowing, or print money, or whatever?

And since the UK has a floating exchange rate I don’t see why it should concern other countries at all, since the positive or negative effects will simply be absorbed by Sterling.

I know we have a Prime Minister who shouldn’t be trusted with his own lunch money, let alone anybody elses, but that is no business of unelected bureaucrats, whether British or EU.