a little on the EU

I haven't posted much about the EU in ages, since the death of the Constitution it has slipped down the list of interesting political events. Way bellow New Labour's creating the conditions for a totalitarian police state, or Islamofascism's violent intolerance anyway.

A small note however is that EU seems to be further moving away from the few good things that it contains. The services directive was turned upside down, according to the German Socialist MEP Evelyne Gebhardt, so after 50 years there still isn't a free movement for people to live and work around Europe. France is becoming increasingly protectionist about it's industry stopping the free movement of capital, with Italy making some rather loud, and rather hypocritical, noises about this. But dispite this fairly obvious breach of the principals of the EU the Commision remains silent.

That said the bad bits are still there and growing, such as the ECJ making up the law as it goes along to further the aims of integration:

"The realisation of the European Project," says Cavada, "entails the creation of a single, judicial area … founded … on the primacy of Community law … conforming to the jurisprudence of the ECJ … and suppressing all penal provisions incompatible with it …

"However," he continues, "even in the absence of unequivocal treaty-provisions for interaction, between the EU's Judicial Order and the criminal codes of the nation-states … the ECJ has affirmed that nothing prevents the EU-legislator taking measures relating to the latter …"

Cavada goes on to "re-affirm … the urgent need to proceed with … the process of absorbing judicial and police-cooperation into the competence of the EU"