(Borrowed) Quote of the Day

Letters from a Tory has picked up Dan Hannan's powerful comment on the recent imposition by secret committee of an over-promoted, over-gonged socialist/Labourist paper shuffler, "Baroness" Ashton, on the half a billion people who make-up the entirely undemocratic EU as some sort of "Foreign Minister". In spite of the fact that the BBC was desperately trying to play down the shocking anti-democratic gall of this appointment, proposing - laughably - that it, and the choice of a "boring" Belgian as the so-called EU President, represents the end of the road for EU federalism, the reality remains that, as Michael Portillo said yesterday on This Week to slimy Europhile Chris Huhne, the Eurozone is "not a democratic space". As Portillo went on, it is therefore "impossible to be anything other than Eurosceptic" since, I assume he meant, that that half billion people, including 65 million Britons, are being railroaded into some weird form of liberal/socialist paternalistic authoritarianism.

All these appointments, and the increases in central EU powers they embody, will achieve is to increase the frustration felt by literally hundreds of millions of people at what is rightly perceived as a further undermining not only of the sovereignty of nation states, but also of the principle of representative democracy itself. The EU's democratic deficit has just grown much larger - and, therefore, by the same token, has the threat to European peace in terms of social and political stability. Frustration, if left unassuaged, often boils over into fury. An awful lot of people don't like power grabs, especially surreptitious socialist ones, which is what this latest shameful episode amounts to. It's an insult to our intelligence, not to mention to the memory of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers who died fighting to protect British democracy from a foreign menace.

But, ultimately, to me that's all Ashton's appointment really represents: a bloody insult - and a deliberate one at that.

Dan Hannan:

“Everything about this process rubs our noses in how undemocratic the EU is. It’s not just the way Baroness Ashton was appointed; it’s her whole career. Lady Ashton is a lifelong quangocrat who has never once been elected to anything. She went from running a health authority to working at the National Council for One Parent Families to being a Labour life peer, to leading the Lords, all without facing the voters. She steered the Lisbon Treaty through the Upper House, cancelling the referendum on it that all three parties had promised. She was then appointed to the European Commission because Gordon Brown wanted to avoid a by-election. Now, she gets the top job as a kind of compensation to Labour over the rejection of Tony Blair. Every chapter in the story is a denial of the democratic principle.”

- Dan Hannan takes aim at Baroness Ashton, newly appointed EU foreign affairs supremo (full article HERE)

There's nothing more to add to that. What should follow is action.