Wheels Coming Off

The trouble with the EU “project” is precisely that it’s a project. It’s all been a planned project. We’ll have a single currency. And we’ll have open borders. And we’ll have a rubber-stamp parliament. And bananas will be straight. Oh, and it’ll be smoke-free too. It’s a long wish-list of things.

And for a while it was all going so well. And now, if it’s all coming apart, it’s actually because they got everything they dreamed of. Only what they dreamed of doesn’t actually work very well.

If they’d let Europe evolve naturally, and not planned everything, it would have worked a lot better. Instead, they stuck rigidly to The Plan. And now nothing’s working.  The wheels are coming off. And even the European political class can see it.

Express:

EU will FALL amid terror and migrant strain – and it’s starting in Germany, admits EU head

THE European Union faces being destroyed under the growing threat of terrorism, which has sparked the influx of migrants into Europe, the European Parliament’s President has warned.

Martin Schulz, the German president of the European Parliament, fears the 28-member bloc will crumble under the to political unrest caused by the migrant crisis.

He said: “The worst nightmare for the European project is an outbreak of populism or political upheaval in Germany. Now it is looking like a real possibility.

“Nobody knows what we are facing this year. We are threatened as never before.”

This week’s deadly attacks in Istanbul have intensified the gravity of the growing problem.

Following the arrival of 1.1 million migrants into Germany alone and in the wake of sickening sex attacks in Cologne, member states are telling German Chancellor Angela Merkel ‘we told you so’.

As the EU attempts to stem the threat of deadly terror attacks, Germany is straining in its attempts to solve the chaos by opening reception centres and apportioning asylum seekers between nations.

An explosive political fallout is now feared.

A veteran EU diplomat warned: “Looking at Germany, especially after Cologne, there is the objective basis for political explosion if someone lights the fuse.”

The concerns were echoed by Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, who added: “The EU was tested to its limits [in 2015] and I cannot see anything to indicate this year will be any different.”

Express:

French intelligence sources said Europe is expecting far more professional and better organised attacks in 2016 after attacks on Charlie Hebdo and series of attacks in November.

A senior counter-terrorism official said: “Unfortunately, I think 2015 was nothing.

Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Mail:

Lord Lawson yesterday declared Britain has ‘nothing to fear but fear itself’ from leaving the European Union.

The Tory grandee said the country would retain control of its destiny and stop having to send a net £10 billion every year to Brussels.

In a speech to academics, the former Chancellor also insisted that British trade would prosper outside the EU.

For the past 15 months, the UK has exported more to countries outside the EU than to those who are members.

Yesterday Toyota announced it would keep making cars at its plant in Derbyshire even if the UK votes to leave, defying the doom-mongering of pro-EU campaigners.

Lord Lawson, who is leading the Tory campaign to quit the Brussels club, said UK concerns about red tape and meddling by Europe were being routinely ignored.

At King’s College London, he added: ‘The EU is a political project whose objectives we do not share. That objective is to create a United States of Europe. The EU is economically damaging and profoundly undemocratic.’

He cited the Council of Ministers, the EU’s main decision-making body.

On the 72 occasions when the UK has voted against a measure in the Council, it has gone on to become law. This has included 40 times since David Cameron entered Downing Street in 2010.

‘There is not a downside to Brexit. If there is, it is trivial compared to the upside. We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’

With the polls neck and neck, Lord Lawson said he did not have the ‘faintest idea’ what the result of the referendum will be.

Anyone who pretended otherwise was ‘foolish’, added the peer. But he said that if the British were being asked now to join the EU, they would vote No.

He said what people overwhelmingly wanted was to become a self-governing nation again which would decide its own future.

Lord Lawson dismissed as ‘arrant nonsense’ the idea that the EU had helped to secure peace in Europe since the Second World War, saying this was the work of Nato.

He also attacked claims by the Prime Minister and the ‘remain’ campaign that staying was vital for national security.