The EU’s efforts to use the Greek crisis (a crisis made far worse by the way in which the eurozone’s leadership–Merkel and others–facilitated what Greece was doing) to extend its own powers grind on.
Daniel Hannan has news here on the latest turn of the screw:
As predicted, the European Parliament has voted for a tax on financial transactions, to be levied directly by Brussels. The vote went through by 536 to 80: only my own group, the European Conservatives and Reformists, voted solidly against the measure, although we had some support from UKIP and its allies as well as two Danish liberals and two Portuguese conservatives…The Tobin Tax might well be vetoed by one or other of the national governments. But the campaign for pan-European taxation is only just beginning.
Note this too…
Anyone wondering why David Cameron broke with the palaeo-federalist EPP need only look at its automatic support for such measures as this. With a handful of exceptions… the Christian Democrats invariably vote for higher taxes, greater state intervention and Euro-corporatism. I do wish British journalists would stop lazily refering to the EPP as “Centre-Right”; the EPP itself angrily insists that it is “a party of the Centre”.
That matters. Within the EU there is very little genuinely free-market right presence (at least outside the UK). And that, of course, is why Tony Blair was so keen to integrate the UK more closely within it.