EU `out of control'

By Jeffrey Titford

AS I have watched the unfolding events in the EU during the last few weeks,

I have been irresistibly reminded of the speeches I was making at public meetings five or six years ago. I often came away from such events pondering over what I had said. Had I been too apocalyptic in my dire predictions about what the future held for us?

Now, as I see all my worst fears coming true, I realise that in my early campaigning days, I was right on the money and could, if anything, have understated my case! We see Parliament debating EU proposals for a single judicial area with a European Public Prosecutor, EU border guards and Europol being given new powers that will enable it to arrest people in this country.

Did the British Government oppose this as is should have done? No, it simpered on about the bits of all this that it thinks would be good and, bizarrely, the 'opt-ins' it felt it has at its disposal. Even as I write, David Blunkett is off to Luxembourg to sign away control over our borders.

Follow that with the European Court of First Instance's ruling against Stern

Magazine's investigative journalist Peter Martin-Tillack. He had written a

number of hard-hitting articles using inside sources that exposed EU corruption and, significantly, irregularities in the way OLAF, the EU's own anti-fraud office, conducts its business.

OLAF in conjunction with the Belgian police had him arrested in the small

hours of the morning and kept him incommunicado and without legal

representation for 11 hours, while his office was raided and all his notes and computer records were removed. Martin-Tillack applied to the court to have his records returned and to protect his sources within the EU bureaucracy.

In a landmark ruling over turning decades of legal precedent, the Court threw out his case and made journalistic investigations of the dark side of the EU all but impossible. In other words, Brussels can now control the media.

If all this weren't bad enough, we have also seen the recent sacking of

Marta Andreasen, the former Chief Accountant at the European Commission. In the course of her work, Ms Andreasen found the EU's finances to be

completely open to fraud and had the courage to try and draw it to the

attention of her superiors including fraudbuster-in-chief Neil (zero tolerance) Kinnock. When she refused to sign off the latest set of accounts, because it would have compromised her professional credibility, Mr Kinnock suspended her, beginning a long drawn out disciplinary persecution (I won't dignify it by calling it a procedure) culminating in her eventual

dismissal this month.

The EU is very clearly not interested in putting right its many internal

wrongs. It is entirely preoccupied with shutting up and/or controlling

those who speak out and in extending its powers, in every possible way. We

are now seeing it flexing its muscles. We have created a monster that is

out of control.

www.jeffreytitfordmep.co.uk

Jeffrey Titford is a UK Independence Party's Euro MPs for the East of England.