“Clawing Back Powers from the EU”—Yet Another Broken Tory Election Promise

The news that a new European Union fiscal policy treaty will be in place within the next 24 months flies directly in the face of the Conservative Party’s election manifesto promise that it would “claw back powers from the EU.”

The announcement about the new “EU fiscal union treaty” was made by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne at a meeting of the G7 Summit in Marseilles.

“It is on the cards that there may be treaty change imposed in the next year or two,” Mr Osborne was quoted as saying. “This would be for the eurozone. This would be to further integrate the eurozone, to further strengthen fiscal integration now,” Mr Osborne added.

Only a few weeks ago, Prime Minister David Cameron said that the eurozone crisis would not cause a new EU treaty.

Mr Osborne’s remarks are, of course, the more accurate interpretation of evens. The EU will be obliged to take some sort of action if the euro currency is to be saved, and will inevitably result in a new dispensation.

Mr Cameron was being either deliberately deceitful, or just plain ignorant.

More disturbingly, Mr Osborne added that it was in “Britain’s interest that the eurozone is stable and one of the routes to making it more stable is to have more fiscal integration.”

In December last year, the deputy Governor of the Bank of England, Charles Bean, warned that the eurozone crisis “would derail Britain’s recovery.”

Mr Bean warned that “an intensification of the difficulties in the euro-area periphery could also derail the recovery here” and that although Britain’s banks “should be able to absorb the likely losses on their direct exposures to Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain without too much difficulty,” the indirect impact of a resurgent eurozone crisis holds serious dangers.

“Harder to gauge is the potential effect on household and, especially, business confidence. In the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, this was arguably the most significant transmission channel to the real economy,” Mr Bean said.

The truth of the matter is that Britain’s continued association with the failed EU experiment will inevitably result in ever greater powers being handed over to that body and ever more “treaties” having to be signed.

The admission by Mr Osborne is final proof—if any was actually needed—that the Tory party was lying once again in its election manifesto. Membership of the EU, as endorsed by that party, inevitably results in Britain’s submission to Brussels.

There is no middle ground in the matter.