28/04/2014
When I wrote
yesterday of Roger Bootle being "another of those economists who has remarkably little understanding of the nature of the EU and how it works", it didn't expect him, within the space of less than 24 hours to so completely prove my point.
But here we have in the
Telegraph the great man being given yet another free pass to demonstrate his ignorance.
Writing under the headline "Britain would be better off without the EU's 'ever closer union'", he blithely tells us that, "The trouble with Europe is that the EU
's drive towards ever closer union brings with it an urge to harmonise and integrate â and that brings a welter of regulation" - thereby demonstrating that he doesn't have the first idea of the fundamentals of European integration.
The point is, of course, that the process of European integration is achieved by what is known as the Monnet method. This, Monnet devised after the near failure of
le project after the French Parliament rejected on 30 August 1954 the European Political Community and the first European Constitution.
It was then that Monnet realised that he was not going to be able to create his United States of Europe by overt means, and thus came up with a new strategy: deceit. He would use economic integration as a means of securing political integration.
To pursue this, he initiated the drip-by-drip process of what became known as
engrenage, pushing a series of harmonising regulations to bring the economic activities of the member states closer together. Thus, the "welter of regulation", is not the consequence of the process of integration - it is the means by which it is achieved.
It is the complete inability of Roger Bootle - and many more like him â to understand this simple point which render them completely useless as commentators about the EU. They have never bothered to study the history of the beast, do not even understand the basics. As a result, nothing they have to offer about how the EU should develop has any value at all.
The tragedy is that there are so many people like Bootle, and so common is his brand of ignorance that newspapers and politicians parade it as if it were sensible analysis. That, as much as anything, stymies the debate. We have intellectual pygmies who are not even past the first grade, parading as experts.
Until we have better understanding amongst the
ignorati, it is going to be very difficult to progress, especially when those who are most ignorant seem least able to recognise how little they know.
FORUM THREAD
