David Martin's EU Tribune

Now that initial humanitarian aid is taking effect I am pleased that the European Union (EU) has decided to take a special initiative on trade as a longer term but sustainable reaction to the devastating impact of the floods in Pakistan. It was important to get emergency aid into Pakistan to help with the humanitarian [...]

With the news that the authorities in the US state of Virginia have executed Teresa Lewis the 41 year old woman with learning difficulties ( 0100 GMT today), the first woman to be put to death in the US for five years and the first in Virginia since 1912 it once again reminds me why [...]

This week in the European Parliament the Socialist and Democratic Group will raise serious concerns about the safety of a proposed new agreement with Pakistan on the readmission, by that country, of individuals illegally living in European Union (EU) member states. Without the closing of numerous loopholes and the sorting out of several ambiguities, I [...]

Thank goodness Justice Commissioner Viviane Redding has done the good deed and not only spoken out against President Sarkozy and the French Government but started fast track legal proceedings against them on the grounds of discrimination and in violating the right to freedom of movement. If good people do not speak out they will come [...]

Recent events in the European Union (EU) bring to mind two famous left wing quotes. They are both about history repeating itself. The first, above from Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, where Marx compares, unfavorably, Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état of 2 December 1851 with that of his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte’s decisive action on [...]

Big Brother Buzek backs down over State of the Union Address by Borroso The Conservative President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek had to back down over a proposal to force Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to attend the European Commission President’s (Manuel Barroso’s) first ever ‘State of the Union’ address (07 September 2010) [...]

The perception many in Scotland and the UK have of the Lisbon Treaty is a negative one, that it was designed by foreigners – Brussels Bureaucrats – to take away our sovereign power. That it’s all part of, in the words of Nicholas Ridley, ‘a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe’, adding, that giving up sovereignty to Brussels was a bad as giving in to Adolf Hitler.

Like her pal, Old Nick, Margaret Thatcher was paranoid when it came to the European Union (EU). In her eyes we all risked being squeezed into a sausage machine that would ‘fit us into some identikit European personality’.

Of course this political caricature could not be further from the truth. Since the Second World War the EU has allowed the small and medium sized nations of Europe to live and work together for prosperity and peace: to come together on many important issues, to compete with the USA and not be left behind by the emerging mega states of China and India. The EU has allowed us to maintain our identities as small nations but compete as a large bloc. Rather than smashing the nation state the EU has helped preserve it.

That coming together in a Union of nations that helps preserve identity and uniqueness could not be better illustrated than in sport…

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