The emperor has no clothes – or vaccines - by Professor David Blake 06.02.21
The European Union is turning out not to be a ‘friend and ally’, but a much more malign force – for both its own citizens and ours
This 15 page article by Professor David Blake of the City of London University for Briefings for Britain is a "tour de force" setting out in detail his views on these key issues:
· The EU is illegally blocking our trade
· The UK must respond robustly
The two key issues that have affected the UK-EU relationship since the beginning of the year ‒ trade and the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine fiasco ‒ are, of course, intimately linked. They are both related to the EU’s ‒ and, particularly, the European Commission (EC)’s ‒ imperial view of itself.
This has manifested itself in two key ways:
First, there is the abiding bitterness at the UK’s audacious decision to escape the EU’s colonial stranglehold. This has turned into vindictiveness when it comes to how the EU has implemented the TCA (Trade and Cooperation Agreement).
Second, the EC, locked away in its imperial palace, the Berlaymont, has constructed a worldview for itself so divorced from reality that it believed that it could take all the time it wanted to negotiate contracts for the vaccine and then as much time as it took to have these vaccines approved on the basis of its famous ‘precautionary principle’ (i.e., very, very slowly). But, like all emperors throughout history ‒ it then demanded that these vaccines be delivered immediately – without any understanding of production processes and whatever else was happening in the real world.
Professor David Blake also makes these comments:
But this will not be enough. The emperor has no clothes and this has just been revealed for the whole world to see. The EU is a nasty, incompetent, unaccountable, anti-democratic, anti-competitive protection racket that is destroying Europe. In a normal functioning state, von der Leyen would be fired for incompetence – but she and the European Commission cannot in effect be fired. She has not even apologised. Instead, she insists that the handling of vaccine procurement had been a great success, while Selmayr tweets that the jabs were proceeding marvellously: the EU had vaulted ahead of Africa.[66] This cavalier response is a predictable consequence of the Commission having no democratic accountability.
The vaccine fiasco is all you need to confirm that Brexit was the right decision. This single incident has proved everything Brexiteers have been saying about the EU for the last 50 years. But it is not just the right decision for the UK, it is also the right decision for all other member states of the EU. What the fiasco has shown is the importance of the nation state and how only the nation state has the nimbleness and agility to deal with crises such as this. The European Commission spent months trying to get 27 member states to agree on a strategy for supplying the vaccine, with Germany and France both jockeying to get their own vaccines ‒ from CureVac and Sanofi ‒ adopted by the whole EU.[69]
The European Commission is deliberately fomenting distrust between friends and allies in order to grab ever more power and control over the citizens of Europe. In particular, it is treating us similar to the way it treats a hostile third-country when all we wanted to do was be able to hire and fire the people who determine the laws we have to obey. The citizens of Europe cannot do this, since 85% of laws in the EU are initiated by the Commission and 100% of domestic laws can be overruled by the ECJ due to direct effect – yet neither the Commission nor the ECJ can be hired or fired by EU citizens. It is clear that Europe is in deep trouble unless it returns to being a family of free democratic nation states that can fully cooperate with each other on the basis of trust and mutual respect.
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Article by Professor David Blake for Bri
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