Reply With Quote
nah, not turkey. they have tons of things to work on before being accepted. especially their economic situation.
What pace? The thing is going down in flames!
nah, not turkey. they have tons of things to work on before being accepted. especially their economic situation.
Britain chickens out on their referendum and now Italy is thinking of abandoning the EUro and go back to the Lira?
Folks, pay attention, you're watching history in the making!
i am just hoping the euro keeps dropping so i can go back and visit on the cheap!
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain is expected on Monday to consign the European Union cons ution to limbo after voters in France and the Netherlands overwhelmingly rejected it.
But, afraid of being the first government to publicly declare it dead and therefore bear the blame for its demise, the move is likely to take the form of an indefinite postponement of the government bill paving the way for a promised referendum.
A spokeswoman for Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Sunday that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw would make a statement on the cons ution to parliament on Monday, but following parliamentary protocol she declined to hint at its content.
However, Anthony King, professor of politics at Essex University, had no such qualms.
"I will be amazed if Straw doesn't explicitly or implicitly make it clear that Britain will not go ahead with the referendum plans," he told Reuters after voters in two of the EU's founding members threw the bloc into crisis.
"My guess is that he will signal -- even if he doesn't say in as many words -- that he and the British government regard the cons ution as dead," he said.
Advocates argue the cons ution is needed to streamline the bloc's unwieldy bureaucracy and decision-making process, while opponents say it centralises power in Brussels and reduces national governments to bit players.
Ten EU countries, accounting for about half the bloc's population, have approved the cons ution but the rejections by France and Holland have triggered doubts about whether it remains viable.
EU SUMMIT
Opinion polls in Denmark, Portugal, Poland and the Czech Republic -- once favorable to the cons ution -- have tumbled since the French and Dutch rejections.
The official position in Britain, which takes the helm of the 25-nation EU in July for six months, is that everything should wait for the EU summit on June 16 to mark the end of Luxembourg's presidency.
That period of abeyance holds despite a call on Saturday after an emergency meeting of French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder for ratification to proceed at full speed.
"We have set out our position. We believe that it is necessary to have a period of reflection leading up to discussion at the Council of Ministers meeting on June 16," the Downing Street spokeswoman said.
Blair, in power for a third and final term and keen to secure a legacy other than the unpopular Iraq war, has long declared an ambition to put Britain at the heart of Europe.
But while ratification of the cons ution could have been just the epitaph he is looking for, deeply Euroskeptic Britons were unlikely to have done him the favor.
"I suspect that Blair would have liked the cons ution to have been adopted by the whole of Europe -- after all the British government put a lot of effort into drafting it," King said.
"But now that the French and the Dutch have said 'no', Tony Blair has got off a political hook because it would have been rejected by the British people," he said.
The issue has come as EU leaders search for an agreement over the next mid-term budget for the bloc for the 2007-2013, which has been held up by the refusal of major contributors, including Germany, to increase their payments
With us current account deficits running 600Bn per year, don't bet on it.
Not a whole heck of a lot. The proposed cons uion was a bad idea on lots of levels, so I won't shed any tears over it, but the loose confederation now does provide some efficiencies and a good framework to resolve problems.
euro is down from 1.36-1.37 to 1.22
aw man
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions