Barroso tells it as it is

IT IS OFFICIAL. The retiring president of the EU, Jose Manuel Barroso, has poured a bucket of cold water over David Cameron's attempt at restricting the number of migrants from the EU from paying us a visit. The prime minister was set to announce various restrictions on the issuing of national insurance numbers and putting a time limit on their effectiveness.

            

            Mr Barroso has done a great service to Ukip, and in a statement after his interview on the Andrew Marr Show, Mr Barroso was warmly thanked by Nigel Farage for his contribution which included a reminder of the illegal nature of what the prime minister will propose if stories in this Sunday's press are to be taken seriously.

            

            It appears that the EU's apparatchiks are not prepared to help Cameron see off Ukip before the next election. Perhaps Cameron thinks that Angela Merkle will have the final say, and these things can be solved once he has her on board. For it is she who pulls the strings in Europe including those of the EU presidents - whomsoever they may be.

            

             Perhaps in the coming days the puppet master will say something to the effect that will, using diplomatic phraseology, redress the balance in Cameron's favour without any commitment to what the British prime minister proposes. The words will be warm and comforting, without any real purpose beyond mood music such as an insistence that the EU cannot afford to see the UK leave; leaving open the possibility of compromise. Or so it will be interpreted as such by the Tory press

            

              Such vagueness will set the pro-Tory papers bristling with talk of the possibility of an accommodation. They will try to argue that it is Merkle who is really in charge and her warms words, should be the real focus of attention rather than the ones used by the retired puppet or his replacement.

AS MR BARROSO  pointed out in his interview;  'The freedom of movement is a very important principle in the internal market, the movement of goods, of capital, of services and of people.' The free movement of peoples are the fulcrum upon which a federal internal market relies. If we are to have a federal Europe comprising political and economic union, then Mr Barroso's logic is sound, when it comes to the free movement of peoples. This is what the European Union has all been about for God's sake.

            

              The free movement of people within a federal union of 28 different nations, is as vital as the free movement of people within the 50 states within the United States of America. This is what a federal union means. The Americans fought a civil war to achieve this. Barroso is right in his federal logic. Cameron on the other hand is naive or politically opportunistic for pretending that he can exempt the UK from the free movement of peoples. He his leading this nation toward a situation where we may be compared to the American South during the American civil war.

CAMERON IS NOT naive. He is the opportunist par excellence who believes the British people are naive, and is counting on that naivety to once more trust him. His ambition is to stay in power as a Conservative prime minister. To this end he has had to offend his natural allies within the EU. He desires this country's incorporation into a European Federal Union, as did past Conservative prime ministers beginning with Ted Heath, but ending, temporarily, with Margaret Thatcher. But he knows many among his party's members and voters who do not share his fascination with the EU.

            

              Now enter Ukip, and its ever more threatening presence over the Conservative Party's ambition for government. Once treated with contempt as swivel-eyed loons by Cameron; but who, he thought, would always remain emotionally tied to the Conservative Party; if only because they had nowhere else to go: such people now have an alternative with Ukip.

 UKIP HAS transformed the electoral battlefield for both the Tories and Labour. The three party triumphret of ToryLabLib have been complacent and, like the ancient regime of the 18^th century French aristocracy, have taken their people for granted… let them eat bread; for who else do they have to turn to?

            

            The people know where their political masters wish to take their country – toward an eventual United States of Europe. This, the Grand Idea, promulgated in almost Napoleonic terms, shortly after the Second World War in the hope of avoiding further European conflict between European nations, has become a foetid proposition.

            

             Since the end of the Second World War, it has not been the creation of the EU that has prevented further conflict on the European continent; but the creation of NATO with its promise to stand by any member nation under attack from any none member nation.

           

NATO stood four square behind Europe during the Cold War when the might of the Soviet Union threatened Western Europe; but was successfully protected by a vastly superior American NATO contribution: an American 'interference' later objected to by many European members of the EU, as an Anglo Saxon intervention.

            

              Barroso has reminded Cameron of the realities of EU membership. He is right in doing so. For what Cameron proposes in order to see off Ukip is indeed illegal under laws we signed up to …still, perhaps Angela Merkle will play good cop and give Cameron enough of a political carrot to allow him some political credulity on Europe.