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"Let's have a European competition policy that truly takes into account the realities of international competition. Let's strongly support the creation of European industrial champions. We have all the assets and all the talent that we need to succeed."
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Jacques Chirac, French President. Speech to France's top diplomats, 30 August 2004. He is obviously thinking of those other great European industrial champions, the computer companies Olivetti, ICL, Bull and Siemens-Fujitsu (the only one successful, thanks to Fujitsu, not to the EU). |
"The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create the Soviet Union in Western Europe."
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Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet President 1985-1991. Date uncertain.
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"Today, Europe is imperilled, not by the issues which excite chauvinist fantasies in the British right, but by its self-imposed monetarist straitjacket and its preoccupation with free market competition. Instead of full employment, growth, investment and redistribution being the overriding goals of European economic policy, price, currency and interest rate stability are being pursued to an obsessive degree, together with tight restrictions on public spending, public borrowing and public debt."
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Peter Hain. Labour Minister for Europe, speaking in 1995 on why Europe should not have to impose budgetary discipline. Looks like Continental Europe heard the message as their deficits spiral...
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"In May last year, when addressing the European Trade Union Congress, I made three proposals which were designed to clearly show the social dimension of the European construction... (continues with comedy French accent here)"
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Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission 1990-95. Speech to the UK TUC in 1991, outlining the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty. The UK won an exemption, but the provisions now risk being imposed via the new EU constitution.
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"Labour has converted to Europe because Europe has converted to socialism"
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Roy Hattersley, Former Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and unelectable spitting buffoon. But he was right about this. Sunday Times, 9 August 1992.
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"We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels."
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Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister 1981 - 1992. Bruges speech, 20 September 1988. it was such a good speech it had a whole think tank named after it. Sadly the frontiers of the state are indeed being rolled back by Brussels.
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Historians will one day look back and think it is a curious folly that, just as the Soviet Union was forced to recognise reality by dispersing power to its separate states and by limiting the powers of its central government, some people in Europe were trying to create a new, artificial state by taking powers from national states and concentrating them at the centre."
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Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister 1981 - 1992. Date uncertain.
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"The European Commission is the evil empire, [fighting the low cost airlines who are] the good guys.
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Michael O'Leary, CEO of Ryanair. Commenting on the European Commission ruling payments by Charleroi airport illegal, 3 Feb 2004.
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"The Federated Republic of Europe - the United States of Europe - that is what must be. National autonomy no longer suffices. Economic evolution demands the abolition of national frontiers. If Europe is to remain split into national groups, then Imperialism will recommence its work. Only a Federated Republic of Europe can give peace to the world."
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Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), Russian revolutionary. Conversation at Smolny, Petrograd, 30 October 1917. Nice to see Trotsky's dream making such healthy progress 90 years later. Hasn't brought peace to the world, mind you.
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If you have an authenticated quotation on Europe, the EEC or the EU that you think should be listed here, then email me .
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