Motorcycle Protest

This weekend I joined hundreds of bikers before they embarked on a protest cavalcade down the M4 - one of 12 major demonstrations up and down the UK, organised by the Motorcycle Action Group to protest against proposed EU legislation that will limit the right to modify new bikes and make on board diagnostics compulsory.
 

At 1300 the motorcyclists set off from the12 meeting points - representing the 12 EU Parliamentary Constituencies.

 In Wales, the protestors embarked upon their ride at Junction 49 of the M4 and were accompanied by police escort.


There is no evidence to support this notion that modifications are unsafe or environmentally unfriendly. Compulsory ABS and automatic headlights will render older models illegal and also shift more responsibility onto motorcyclists and away from dangerous road users.

 Similarly the proposed On Board Diagnostics are a breach of liberty and will force motorcyclists to take bikes into dealerships, preventing any mechanical work from being done at home.
 

The burden of the regulation far outweighs any sort of justification and will cost motorcyclists heavily. 

The turn out is incredible which just goes to demonstrate how passionate many motorcyclists are about their vehicles and the disgust that is felt about the EU interfering with probably the most liberating form of transport.


The message from Brussels demonises motorcyclists. 


Everyone I spoke to agreed that safety and respect are paramount in motorcycling, which is why they take such umbrage at being persecuted this way. 

 
It's simply another example of the EU churning out legislation simply because it thinks it can.

Teach Your Children Well

I once read an opinion piece in a newspaper which said that if the Tories wanted to turn back the clock twenty years, then UKIP wanted it turned back fifty. The comment was likely designed as a slur, a reference to some sort of idealistic nostalgic retrospect of the way things were. However, isn't this more and more society's inclination, and if it is, what is so bad about that?

From buying organic to local provenance and the sudden return to popularity of "old fashioned" cuts of meat and traditional British dishes, to the ever evolving cycles of fashion and music, remodelled classic cars and remakes of films, the presence of our past is pervasive throughout popular culture, and so it should be. It is our identity

But what about in politics?

We often hear the phrase "old fashioned values". You rarely hear the past being spoken about as something dire or squallid. Not in the UK anyway.

History has shown us that everything from the maxims that bind a society, to geo-political landscapes, to the earth's climate changes, are bound by varying concentric circles of change. Empires come and go. Benchmarks for prudency, decency and hedonism undulate. Some summers are good. Others are a washout.

When it comes to judging things from a latterday era, it is fair to say that nothing was perfect. Looking at the world through rose tinted glasses will not help push forward an ever changing global population. But learning from history will.

Forgive me if I have come across rather Keatsian in my introduction. I remember learning his works at school. Something which sadly, few peoples could lay claim to today. Which brings me on to the topic of this blog post. Education.

As an individual and as a party, UKIP and I resolutely support the announcement by Michael Gove of the restoration of the O Level. In our manifesto we champion the need to return to previous methods of teaching and examination.  

From effectively teaching the "three R's" and using phonics to teach reading, to reintroducing the traditional methods of arithmetic and basing targets around those expected in the 1950s, I strongly believe the school system needs a big shake up. 

We are falling behind, and nowhere more so than in Wales.

In recent PISA rankings Wales scored below average in reading, maths and science, putting it below a number of developing countries and former soviet satellite states in educational acheivement.

Yet the younger generation are our investment in the future. With an ever increasing global economy and access to education improving around the world, without inspired minds, our future is bleak.

When the GCSE was introduced in 1988, it was quickly extended to accommodate the full range of academic abilities. The result was inevitably one of "dumbing down". The system then extended upwards to A Levels, and with Government targets on getting more and more school leavers into University, the value of the degree began to plumment and students who otherwise may have excelled in vocational courses that would contribute invaluably to manufacturing and design in the UK found themselves with Mickey Mouse qualifications, little life experience, reduced job prospects and in debt up to their eyeballs.

There are two reasons why society however continues to champion this vain pursuit of pseudo-academia. First of all, it's the centrally imposed social status of those with a degree. We have been told repeatedly that you 'need' university to get on in life. That it would be ill perceived of to not have spent 3 years in full time education after leaving school. It is also a trick played by Governments to bring down youth unemployment statistics, yet what it creates is a bottle neck of jobless graduates who cannot contribute to the economy.

It also comes down to the very tetchy subject of ability. 

The differences in our capabilities must be papered over. Whilst we cannot deny that some people are naturally better at maths, others are proficient linguists and others are just generally good all rounders, we tend not to like to separate children on ability  too divisively for fear that it will harm those who, for want of a better expression, don't make the grade.

When it comes to sports, music and arts, these are often regarded as more inherent, and as such, less teachable skills, so promoting ability in these areas tends not to come under the same level of scrunity.

I am a firm believer that every child deserves the best possible education. 

Is selective education about separating the wheat from the chaff or about tailoring the classroom environment to the needs of the pupil to the closest possible degree?

One thing is for certain. Any selective education should be based purely upon how the child will perform in a set environment via empirical testing, not upon socio-economic background.

It's an emotive subject. However, in terms of segregating different groups of pupils, what is the difference between establishing grammar schools, and organising year groups into sets based upon ability within one school? 

I tend not to look at the debate from the angle of pushing on the brightest, although I do applaud the access a great grammar school can give to a pupil from a low income background with great potential. 

I look at it more from the perspective of what is most likely to demoralise the young, and through which structure we can best achieve creating an education system suitable for all.

The reintroduction of the O level will see better performing students siphoned off to sit a separate test. Is it therefore logical, if there is to be a two speed of teaching, to conduct this via separate educational establishments where each can focus upon its own needs and requirements and as a result, offer the best fit product for the greatest number of people?

Have we become far too sensitive about matters which, when I was growing up, were taken more as "facts of life"?

I believe social mobility and broad spectrum inclusion have certainly improved over the decades. There was a lot wrong with the incredibly schismatic wrenching apart of teenagers under the former system 

Some pupils were destined to only ever learn tertiary or blue collar skillsets while others were pushed towards white collar professions. Opportunities were denied and potentials abandoned in favour of a drachonian and cruel intellectual class system. This cannot be allowed to happen again.

But taking on board the positives that grammar schools have and still offer, is it not time we open our minds to their re-establishment?

It is a thorny debate often dependent upon your own life experiences and political persuasions and one perhaps with no right answer. However one thing is for sure.  

Our schools are simply not performing. I welcome a radical change with open arms.

Power and the money, money and the power, minute after minute, hour after hour.

It's not often one feels compulsed to entitle a blog post with American Gangster rap circa 1995. But it's a rather apt extract.

First of all let me praise the industriousness of our emergency services for their hard work during the flooding in Aberystwyth ad Machynlleth. Until something of this nature happens to you it is difficult to understand the traumatic affect it can have. As parts of Ceridigion were submerged under five foot of water and clean up operations continue to take place in Talybont, Dol-y-Bont and Llandre I trust that the Welsh Government will do all it can not just to help households and businesses seek compensation but to prevent such incidents ever happening again. It is also imperative that authorities thoroughly screen flood waters for potential contamination which could affect farms or even the local water supply.

While it poured here in Wales, the rain in Spain thundered down from a dark economic storm cloud hovering over the banking sector. Indeed despite weeks of protestations we all knew to be vacuous, Spain finally had to plead for a bail out to stabilise the country’s inexplicable nexus between state funds and banking finance. The Spanish Government had borrowed extensively from the banks to fund a burgeoning structural deficit, yet after the property bubble burst in the 2008 credit crunch, the Government was then forced to start bailing out the banks. Now however finances ministers have agreed to pour £100bn to shore up Spanish finances. However a more conservative estimate for the figure needed is £400bn. Even though the sticking plaster may calm the markets temporarily, what is startling is how this will have a knock on effect across Europe. Mediterranean neighbour Italy is responsible for providing no less than 22% of the bail out at a shrivelled repayment rate of just 3%. But in order to cough up the funds, Italy herself must borrow from the markets, at a rate of interest of 7%, inevitably dragging her below the gathering rip tide. Meanwhile the loan to the Spanish Government itself will actually add a further 10% on top of already astronomical state debt. You could hardly make this stuff up.

And still the problems with Greece are not solved. In fact on the 17th June Greece is set to go to the polls again – a day which could see a newly elected government steadfastly refuse to abide by the austerity measures conditional of receiving future financial aid. No wonder. These imposed cuts have ripped the economy to shreds throwing hundreds of thousands out of work, leaving pharmacies empty of life saving medicines, slashing welfare payments as the state finance pot runs totally dry forcing families onto the streets to beg for food. A ‘Grexit’ is liable before the month of June is even up. The exposure of the European Central Bank to bail out countries such as Greece is almost €500 billion. If Greece leaves the single currency, that is likely to cause the ECB itself to go bust, unless it can recoup money from Portugal, Ireland and Spain.

Speculation among Eurosceptics and Financiers alike is that the whole sorry mess was intentionally engineered to force Europe into becoming a European Republic. It has been common consensus for years that a single currency cannot work with so many different Exchequers. As the crisis struck, instead of Brussels shrinking from its disastrous fiscal errors, instead the call has been for deeper integration, forcing the burden of debt to be passed from neighbour to neighbour dragging each and every country into the same calamitous myre. The next country veering headlong towards bail out is Cyprus, and while we are not in the single currency, the exposure of British banks to European debt is an eye watering $430bn, or 19 per cent of our GDP.

Customers of Santander may fear the fate of their savings given the bank’s Spanish parent, but the bank is one of the least vulnerable in the wake of a dramatic and increasingly likely Euro crash. Barclays and RBS, the latter having been already bailed out by the British taxpayer, have the greatest amount of money tied up in the Eurozone. A total of £191.8 billion is estimated to be at risk.

Should the Eurozone fail to repair its problems, the global financial sector would breach under a ripple effect far greater than observed in 2008 after the Lehamn Brothers collapse. Yet it is more and more apparent that perhaps Brussels does not want the problem to be solved. Whilst economic crisis may lead to human misery as we are seeing in Greece, it also, rather conveniently, allows Brussels to conduct the most flagrant power grab for the final slice of federal pie – fiscal integration. For he who controls the money also controls the power

Welcome to my club

How easy it is to jump onto the bandwagon of popular opinion.

For years, UKIP have been labelled everything from fanatically anti-European to xenophobic for holding the view that the European Union was bad for Britain. As recently as a couple of years ago, throughout the early months of my tenure as an MEP, I received accusations of scaremongering if ever I suggested the Eurozone was doomed. Those critics have fallen strangely silent of late.

Now politicians from across the political spectrum are championing a British exit from the EU, warning of the dire economic consequences of prolonging the single currency without fiscal unanimity and bandying about suggestions of an in-out referendum. All of a sudden our party line is trendy.

One thing is for certain. For the single currency to survive member states must forge closer economic bonds, to the extent of becoming a single federal entity (the argument is that the EU has borders, a flag, an anthem, a Parliament, an army, foreign policy, a currency and laws, so the only thing separating it from a federal state is the lack of tax raising powers). If this does not happen, the Eurozone will, eventually, implode, and in doing so, force the UK into a decade of depression.

Of course, the UK would resolutely not wish to be part of a federalised super-state. It raises the question of what sort of relationship we could have with a new Europe. UKIP has always championed a relationship akin to the current Swiss model, where free trade and continental cooperation remain priorities, despite not being a member. This is now being mooted by politicians who but a few months ago championed a more integrated European Union, only to find their subject today ridiculed by fate.

Either way the tapestry that has been woven by Brussels over the last five decades is unravelling at an alarming rate. Spain requires a £100 billion bank bail out to save her finances. The incomprehensible nexus that has formed between the Spanish state and the banking sector means the Government can no longer sensibly bail out the very banks that have been bailing out the Government. The Spanish Finance Minister has resolutely denied needing a bail out, but we’ve heard this before. Greece, Portugal and Ireland all said the same thing. In the UK, the Government recapitalised British banks to the tune of £1 trillion, a measure that was widely criticised on the continent as too closely bound to Anglo-Saxon capitalism. But it saved us from the economic disaster we are now seeing affect banks in the Eurozone’s largest economies – even in Germany. It’s estimated at least £200 billion must be injected into Eurozone banks to stimulate borrowing capacity, but in order for this to happen Germany must essentially underwrite all single currency loans.

It’s understandable that Germany doesn’t like the idea of so-called “Eurobonds”. Why would they? Holding them culpable of the debts of their neighbouring countries is hardly going to seem fair to the majority of Germans. Meanwhile Spain wants a bail out with no strings attached. Of course they would. They can see what has happened in Greece, where desperately ill people are queuing outside pharmacies for life saving medicines as stocks run dangerously low. Germany does not want Spain to get a free handout without agreeing to fairly stringent conditions. And thus we are left trapped in an ever revolving circle of national self-interest that is leading critics to cry out for the greatest seismic shift in political power ever seen by Europe – the move to federalise the Eurozone before the clock ticks down, despite such a schismatic resolution flying in the face of democracy.

What about the UK? What do we want? We need Eurozone banks to be protected. Barclays is exposed to Spanish banks to the tune of £26.5 billion. RBS is liable to £14.6 billion if they do collapse, while Santander, one of the high street’s biggest financial retailers, is actually Spanish owned. Then there’s our economy. In many respects inextricably intertwined with European markets, not just through EU membership but as the result of simple geographic positioning.

The most sensible answer would be the UKIP option. Leave the EU, enhance trade with traditional partners in the Commonwealth and demonstrate neighbourly cooperation and free trade with Europe as is the modus operandi of Switzerland and Norway.

As part of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, a lunch with Commonwealth leaders was hosted at Buckingham Palace. We were reminded that our Queen is not just the head of state in the UK. She is Queen of Antigua, Barbados, Bahamas and Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica and New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, St Kitts, St Lucia, The Grenadines, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Australia, as well as being head of the 54 countries that make up the Commonwealth of Nations, including India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa and Kenya. These are long established natural allies of Britain, countries with a diverse diaspora, different geographical landscapes and as a result, present true international trade opportunities.

This year Commonwealth GDP will soar past the Eurozone’s. While the Eurozone will grow by only 2.7% if it manages to avert fiscal disaster, the Commonwealth will be boosted by 7.3% growth.

I’m not bitter that my views are now being championed when for so long they have been slated. I would be a poor politician were my pride more important than my conviction. I just hope the newest recruits to Eurosceptic ideology have strength enough to hold as steadfast to their beliefs. For what Britain and Europe needs more than anything right now is a steady hand on the tiller.

Oil, banks and democracy - a potent blend

Oil carries with it so many connotations.
The social, moral and geo-political implications create a quagmire as opague and viscous as the crude substance itself.
When Ghana discovered oil off its coast line a few years ago there was a sharp intake of breath. Everyone saw what had happened in Nigeria. The Government were not prepared to fall into the same trap, creating a feral landscape where natives and multi-nationals go head to head over the black stuff, where misery is wrought across borders such as in Sudan, and where corrupt governmental allegiances and illegal wars exacerbate religious and ethnic divides. Where there is misery and oppression, there is often oil.

In the case of Spain, Italy and Greece however the interconnection between oil and misery is different.

Oil in Spain?

Yes. The Golden Stuff.

Olive oil.

For in Spain the price of oil olive has slid so drastically, caused by a sharp decline in domestic demand, a failure of potential foreign export markets to embrace the oil - such as the Far East, and a supply overload flooding the market. As a result, the EU has been forced to intervene. [Sigh]

Taxpayers' money is now being driven in to shore up the prices in order to maintain employment in rural areas that rely almost exclusively upon olive plantations.

We all know what happens when the EU intervenes, fixing prices and stockpiling resources.
Should we expect olive oil producers over the next few years to become completely dependent upon single payments?

The future of the Mediterranean economies in the Eurozone is bleaker than is being made out. In Spain, the Government are beginning to realise there is little they can do to avoid becoming the next Greece. The likelihood of the country needing an EU bail out is almost certain. Spanish banks have been propping up state finances to the tune of €316 billion borrowed from the European Central Bank. Those banks now emergency finance, to the tune of €23.5 billion, which the Spanish Government has been determined to find itself - creating an ironic cycle of debt that cannot be broken without outside stimulus.

Yet the people of Spain have already shown vehement opposition to the Government's own austerity measures, and with a quarter of the adult population now unemployed, who could blame them? Yet any EU bail out comes with a multitude of conditions that must be met - however unsympathetic to the plight of the normal person. This is the situation we are now seeing in Greece, where the democratic choice is an end to austerity, yet the EU refuses to climb down on the demands stipulated in return for propping up the single currency. One can be assured that if Spain ends up in a similar position, the opinion of the public would be known the world over.

In Ireland,  the public have gone to the polls to vote in a referendum on Irish approval of the "EU fiscal pact" set out last December. Prime Minister Enda Kenny has urged the nation in a televised address to back the proposals, in order to ensure the rug isn't pulled from under their feet, and for the time being, the propaganda appears to have worked with early results indicating voters would back the fiscal pact. Of course in Ireland they also have the added security of sterling propping up some Government debt after George Osborne signed off a £7 billion bilateral loan, but this also means our loan, which is due to be repaid with interest in the future, is at risk of falling into a fiscal blackhole if the single currency collapses.

The coping mechanism that has been rolled out during the course of the last four years has been for deeper integration and mutualised responsibility, yet this flies in the face of the will of the majority of voters in the EU,  be they Germans who do not accept their share of any burden or Greeks forced out of work, unable to access medicines and even food. The public conception is that closer EU integration has weakened national economies, rather than providing the reinforcement that it was purported to achieve.

Economics is more of an art than a science, it is often argued. It involves theorising, when nobody can understand or predict what any outcome may be, however well read they may be in the field or practised and proven in managing national debts. While one side of the argument would state that breaking the single currency up would cause a lot of short term pain but enable each country to forge an idiomatic platform upon which to compete and rebuild, others would argue that disintegrating the Euro would leave huge unaccounted for wounds of debt that would plunge the global markets back into disarray, creating shockwaves more severe than those witnessed in 2008 and the first global credit crunch.

One thing is for sure. The break up of the single currency would not be good for the EU. It would undermine the entire European project and pit disenchanted countries against one another, further enhancing the risk of member states applying to leave the EU, potentially resulting in the domino affect of the entire dissolution of the entireUnion. It is argued that nowhere in any treaty is exiting the single currency accounted for, further enhancing the risk of the break up of the Euro resulting in ejection from the EU itself - by law.

June is set to be an interesing month. If Greece runs out of money before the elections, and if Brussels are resolute in their stance that a bail out would not be provided without obeisance to their conditions, we could have a humanitarian crisis on our hands.

I hope, for the sake of the people of Greece, this is not the case.

FFS the FTT is not FFP

What a difference a day makes.

In the rapidly unfurling madness that hs gripped the Eurozone, the summer may prove to be a cataclysmic season. Yesterday European finance ministers gathered to thrash out plans for growth and investment ahead of an EU summit at the end of June. It was an opportunity for new French President to bring the the table the concept of Eurobonds - a policy idea on the back of which he competently rode to election victory. Yet the concept of drawing up co-liability between Eurozone member states for debt, as such becoming eachothers' guarantors, has never sat easily with the Germans. This is despite the fact that simply sharing in a currency is enough to allow economic contagion to rip through the continent like an Australian bush fire.

Last year, 25 of the 27 member states of the EU signed a fiscal treaty. Only the Czech Republic and the UK refused to be signatories. The treaty essentially outlined austerity measures that all member states agreed to in order to try to protect the fragile economic situation in Europe from further sharp blows. Yet also in this treaty was a proposition to add the Tobin Tax, or Robin Hood, tax, on financial transactions. The concept that the tax robs the rich (bankers) to give to the poor (Brussels) is a twisted distortion of what would likely be the outcome. As we all know, incurred costs are more often than not passed down to the consumer. In this instance, all members of the general public with bank accounts. The other potential repercussion is the mass exodus of the banking sector from the European Union to more liberalised financial sectors in other countries, such as Zurich or Hong Kong, This of course would result in a disproportionate blow to the UK, who houses more than three quarters of the banking sector of Europe in The City of London, as well as many corporations around the world. Were these institutions and multi-national conglomerates to up and leave, the impact on the UK economy would be substantial. The contribution to GDP of the financial sector in the UK is hugely significant, as well as the jobs it provides and the capital that flows to the country.
And so for this reason, in December last year, the UK vetoed the treaty. As a result of not being able to achieve unanimity, such a schismatic legal change could not be made under EU terms. In effect, the withdrawal of the UK ace should have brought the house of cards down

And yet it hasn't. For yesterday the European Parliament voted 487 votes in favour, 152 against, with 46 abstentions for the Podimata report which paves the way for the Financial Transactions Tax to be levied.

An amendment to shoot down the report brought forward by the ECR group, to which the Conservative Party belong, was strongly defeated, leaving the UK Government with little room for manoeuvre. The question now is whether the UK Government can do anything at all to prevent the FTT from coming into affect. 

The proposal is for both sides of the transaction to be taxed. Those who signed up to the treaty vetoed by the UK Government on the basis of this tax would benefit from a reduction in EU contributions. The UK veto has as such been rendered useless, placing the onus on the UK taxpayer to pay the tax on all transactions for member states who had signed the treaty, yet without receiving the benefit of a reduction in EU contributions. 


The tax essentially allows the EU to finance itself directly from taxpayers’ pockets  - and yet without any recourse to a public vote. Giving the EU tax raising payers without any democratic scrutiny is utterly unacceptable and is also the final step in making the European Union a federalised super-state.

In theory the tax cannot be approved without the unanimous backing of the European Council. Surely the British vote would most steadfastly be against the introduction of the FTT. However the Parliamentary report calls for the implementation of the tax by the beginning of 2015 "even if only some member states opt for it".

Nine countries have come out in favour of the tax including Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, with it being labelled as the main route of exit from crisis. Yet rapporteur Anni Poadimata's view that it would brung a "fairer distribution of the weight of the crisis" is utterly skewed. The majority of the weight of such a tax would be carried by the UK, and it would appear the intentions are to use the extra finances to shore up the single currency.

The FTT is not FFP

The Financial Transactions Tax is not Fit For Purpose

A report by the Institute of Economic Affairs warns agains the dangers of a Financial Transactions Tax. In it, it is suggested that

• An FTT can be imposed with varying effects depending upon how many other governments do so at the same time. A purely EU FTT would see much trading leaving the EU, as happened to Sweden when it unilaterally imposed such a tax in the 1980s and 90s. A global tax would not have the problem of trading moving but would still have all of the other associated problems
• There would be no net revenue. While there would be revenue from the tax itself there would also be falls in revenue from other taxes. The net effect of this is that there will be less revenue in total as a result of an FTT
• The FTT simply means it would be the EU's own money to spend as they wish. The revenues from the FTT would be designated as the EU’s ‘own resources’, that is, money which comes to the centre to be spent as of right; not, as with the current system, money begrudgingly handed over by national governments. The EU bureaucracy therefore has a strong interest in promoting such a change. What’s in it for the rest of society is harder to spot.
• It will be the taxpayer who carries the burdern. All taxes and any tax, means less money in the wallet of some live human being. The first and great lesson of tax incidence is that taxes on companies are not paid by companies. They are not, despite legal personality, live human beings and therefore cannot carry the ultimate burden of any tax. With the FTT the one place we know the tax cannot fall is on the banks. Banks are corporations and corporations cannot bear the burden of a tax; it has to be some human being. Some part falls upon capital, making raising capital more expensive. This, in turn will affectworkers’ wages: more expensive capital leads to less of it being employed. Yet this does not mean bankers earning less: it is the workers who earn less as a result of less capital being employed. The second part is the incidence upon the users of the financial markets: a fairly obvious result of a transactions tax. Pensions would yield lower returns, partly as a result of lower share values as a result of the tax and partly as a result of paying the tax itself. The FTT would thereforeimpact upon all users of any financial instrument.
• The loss in GDP as a result of the tax is larger than the revenues raised from the tax. The total incidence, the total lost from all pockets, is higher than revenues and thus the incidence of the tax is over 100%.
• A transaction tax would increase, not decrease volatility. Since an FTT would decrease the size of the financial markets, prices would jump around rather more than they do at present - completely the opposite of what certain supporters of the FTT suggest.
• The markets that do high volume, low margin trades  would be affected by an FTT such as the foreign exchange (FX), futures, options and stock markets. None of these markets failed in any manner in the recent or current troubles. So the FTT doesn’t even work as a way of avoiding the recent financial crash: for it taxes the things that did not cause problems and would not make much difference to those things which did.

 The situtation in Greece is appalling, with drugs at an all time low as a result of deep austerity measures cutting healthcare budgets and forcing families onto the streets. The country is on the brink of a healthcare crisis, with panic spreading among high risk patients who fear they will have no access to life saving drugs. One healthcare profssional predicts that within two weeks, if the European Union does not grant Greece the loans it needs, chaos will erupt on the streets. Another healthcare worker, a cardiologist, has told the press of his horror at treating mean, women and children for sickness due to eating out of bins. A member state of the European Union is quickly degrading into scenes of a third world dictatorship.

Yet the money currently being dangled in front of Greece would not restock pharmacies.Instead it would be placed into a separate account, inacccessible by public service financiers, to simply pay off interest of Greek debt. In return for the loan, further cutrs would have to be implemented by the Greek Government - itself non-existent after dramatic election results left no one party with a big enough majority and 70% of Greek people voting for manifestos that promised an end to the crippling austerity measures.

It is without doubt a crisis situation in Greece, and the country desperately needs money. The causes of the problem, the finger pointing, the accusations of profligate waste during boom years, have been rendered vacuous. These are real people's lives. But what people must understand is taxing the banking sector is not going to directly resuce Greece. Far from it. It will line the pockets of Brussels and enable them to continue with their single currency project while using their new found security as a mallet with which to strike the Greeks into submission.Where they stand now, a Grexit could seriously harm the single currency, removing some of the might from Germany's arguments. Yet if the FTT is pushed through, Europe would be once again armed with power. And this time, not just the war-tanks of legilsation that have ridden roughshod over national interests. They would also have a constant and controlling source of income.An FTT will not reduce volatility, it will increase it. It would shrink those parts of the financial markets which did not in any manner contribute to these problems. It would increase revenue collected directly by the EU - as the Union's first tax raising power, while reducing total national revenues by shrinking the overall economy. Meanwhile those who would carry the economic burden of the FTT would be workers and consumers iplacing dependency straight back into the hands of the federalised superstate.

Over the next few days decisions made by financial and political leaders in all member states could have a profound impact on the future shape of Europe for all. With picture changing so rapidly on a daily basis, who knows what the autumn will bring.

By Zeus!

In an ironic twist of events, Francois Hollande's much anticipated meeting with Angela Merkel to forge a new cooperative dominion over the Eurozone was halted after his plane was struck by a bolt out of the blue.

Could that be an act of Zeus?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18078845