Ireland's No Vote is Pointless

It is doesn't seem to me that the Irish getting a referendum on the fiscal treaty is a great victory for democracy. The treaty will still come into operation so long as 12 euro countries sign up to it unconditionally. Thus the treaty can only fail to pass into law if more than five countries reject it. As this is not going to happen Ireland's no vote in a referendum will not need to be reversed and the EU can pretend that the demos has been satisfied. Daniel Hannan has a great blog on this here. It should be of great concern to the Irish that despite voting no they will become subjected to ever tighter control from Brussels, which basically means ever tighter control from Germany as Simon Miler explains well in his Commentator blog here. I attended a Chatham House event yesterday evening on what, if any, role gold should have in the international monetary system at which the inevitable question of the euro arose. It was pretty clear that one panellist in particular thought that the euro was like gold by being pro-cyclical and as deflationary as was being pegged to the gold standard in its heyday. This panellist thought that Greece should leave the euro and that the euro should be split into two so that Germany and acolytes would end up in the hard euro with the remainder in the soft euro. We must thank our lucky stars each day that Gordon Brown never succumbed to the siren call of the euro and thus have some destiny over our economic future. We would of course have much more control over our destiny if we left the EU altogether. The EU is an inward looking, undemocratic organisation that takes more from us than we get back and is adversely changing our culture to an alien one that it is hard for us to recognise and one that does not respect the rule of law, competition or free trade or a free press. No wonder those of us who were around at the time rue the day we joined what was sold to us as a common market. It was and is nothing of the sort.