Seems only yesterday we were told by the BREXIT lot that everything in the EU was controlled by non elected Commissioners and civil servants.
Yet it now appears a major treaty - a trade deal between Canada and the EU
- can be blocked by a region of Belgium.
Could it be that Belgium actually has MEPs who do the job they are paid for - rather than the self promoting wankers the UK seems to prefer?
It would be intersting to know why. Is it becaseu there is some local industry that will be overwhelmed by imports from Canada? Or, is the region just trying to get recognised?
"Wallonia, a french-speaking area in southern Belgium, has voted 46 to
16 against "Ceta" because of fears local workers will be laid off if the agerement leads to cheaper farming and industrial imports."
Farming.
Or, is the
Nope.
Note that once again EU free trade actually means EU protection for EU businesses.
I think at the end of the day people are realising that the EU is neither loose enough to allow individual nations to do their own thing, nor tight enough to have eliminated nationalism or the need for national legislatures and executives.
In short it's a tussle between localism and centralism.
With britain having delivered a massive blow for localism.
I've only heard a brief bit on the radio, but that said it was do do with cheap meat imports from Canada damaging the local agriculture.
Yet is was common to hear in the meja that the EU could damage UK industry etc with impunity - for the EU good or whatever.
Both can't be correct, surely?
The MEPs have no say in this current matter. This is a district issue.
I honestly thought Belgium was a sovereign country when it came to the EU and didn't realise that one small area of Belgium could effectively veto the whole of the EU. It makes a nonsense of the whole process.
It is a peculiarity of the Belgian constitution. The treaty has to be ratified by all member states and the constitution requires that each regional government must back a deal before the federal government can sign it. It has nothing to do with MEPs.
Point of fact 1: as already stated, it is not MEPs blocking it, it is the regional legislature. The Parliament has already indicated consent.
Point of fact 2: it only requires ratification by every legislature because the Commission sought to avoid delay by taking it forward as a "mixed agreement" for political reasons. The Commission made this clear in July:
"From a strict legal standpoint, the Commission considers this agreement to fall under exclusive EU competence. However, the political situation in the Council is clear, and we understand the need for proposing it as a 'mixed' agreement, in order to allow for a speedy signature."
So arguably it demonstrates both (a) the difficulty in getting agreement with the EU and (b) the way Brussels operates by deals done behind the scenes.
In article , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes
Everyone knows that trade deals in the EU are negotiated by the commission and then have to be approved by all 28 member states. Similarly with Brexit. There has been an internal battle between the Commission and the Council as to who will control the negotiations and it seems the Commission has won.
The MEPs in question are using this as a weapon to gain concessions. If they all did this then there would never be a single EU trade deal That is why EU trade deals take years and years to negotiate. On the other hand once we leave the EU we can negotiate our own deals much more quickly. This is something you should celebrate rather than sit there hoping something goes wrong just so you can say "Told you so".
In article , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes
Inventing stories yet again. You lost get over it.
Belgium is an uneasy coalition of two areas.
What? Plowman wrong again?
Turnip, don't change the subject. Why haven't you posted your sources which back your understanding about SSDs?
In another thread, John Rumm asked you a few days ago to remind him of exactly where you got your unusual technical info from.
I can't wait to see what links you post.
MID:
It's a federation
each of the 3 regions of Belgium has to agree a stance on EU items before the Belgium Prime Minister can exercise that view.
Of course this only matters where the EU rules require unanimity, which Trade deals do, but most stuff does not.
we could have the same here if we gave the Nutty Scots woman a power of Veto
tim
That was half of it. The government also have (very rightly in my mind) concerns about the commercial courts which are established by the treaty, which gives large nulti-national companies the right to sue a foreign government for interference in their commercial interests (e.g. loss of profits due to plain packaging cigarettes), which is something that not even national (i.e. the local) companies can or will be able to do. Elevating North American companies to have more power over your government than local companies have is just plain wrong.
I rather suspect the Belgium goverernment is the only EU government which actually read and understood the treaty.
I think I heard somebody from Walloon saying exactly that, except he didn't refer to the whole Belgian Government, only the Walloon one.
Exactly the problem with the EU.
Dave Plowman (News) wrote
More of your bare faced lies. They actually said that with plenty of stuff like with treatys and which countrys could join the EU, each country already in the EU has a veto.
Only terminal fuckwits like you are so pig ignorant that they don?t realise that that has always been the case.
It isnt the MEPs that decide that, f****it.
Well, he's not wrong about the UKIP MEPs and this does show that making a trade deal with the EU is not as straightforward as the Brexiteers would like to believe. Canada has been working on this deal for seven years.
You couldn't make it up.
Making a trade deal with Canada would take about ten minutes if there was nothing to argue about.
The chance of there being something to argue about increases exponentially with the number of people who can refuse to sign.
And that is the problem with the EU. It isn't a Union. IT's not even enough of a soviet style republic for the central bureaucracy to enforce its will on the nations.
And that fact arises because the EU has bribed the politicians of its comprising nation states to sell the idea to their electorates. It has never actually done the hard work of creating a bureaucracy that works . So it is just one massive elite carving up tax euros and distributing it to each other. Just as the CP in the Soviet Union did, except they were smart enough to spend some of their money on tanks, so when Hungary tries a Sovexit, they stuck Russian tanks into Budapest to make the point, that no one leaves the Soviet Union.
And that may be teh fatal; flaw of trying to create a soviet style command economy by stealth. Even the mass migration hasn't yet become enough of a problem to justify a Euroforce of armed military and so on to enforce martial laws on the continent.
So what we have is an executive that has failed to buy enough people to get to do as it likes.
And hasn't the guts to do more than murder the odd objector, and is thoroughly unpopular with the European citizen, pretending that such a political entity as 'Europe' actually exists, and they actually represent it, when the third largest at least member has said 'The Euremperor has no clothes'
And the canadian deal is just yet another reasons why it appears to have been caught with its trousers down. It isn't wearing any. Not even Merkel.
It's the staggering naivete of remoaners that I find worrying.
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