Like so much EU regulation, this ban will create barriers to entry which will support big corporations and militate against smaller or artisanal producers, writes UKIP MEP Roger Helmer.
• No. Honest. I’ve checked the date, and it’s May 19th (as I write), not All Fools’ Day (except in Brussels, where it’s All Fools’ Day all the time). It really does seem to be true that the EU wants to ban olive oil from restaurant tables, unless it’s served in individual sealed containers carrying mandatory information and declarations. Bizarrely, a restaurant will be able to serve house wine in a decanter — or water in a jug — with no provenance at all. But not olive oil.
Tory MEP Martin Callanan rightly asks whether the EU has nothing better to do than to instigate this ban. No government or legislature should be interfering in this way in the fine grain of our daily lives, and seeking to regulate the minutiae of the dining table. One of the great problems of our age is the hubristic assumption by governments of all stripes that they can legislate for anything at all that they happen to think is a good idea, without considering whether this is a legitimate area for state action.
The solution to the euro debt crisis and also the worldwide debt crisis is for Germany to leave the European Monetary Union, re-establish the deutsche mark and tie it to gold. These actions are the right of Germany as a sovereign nation and are non-coercive, in that no other nation is forced by Germany to take any specific action, write UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom and Patrick Barron (pictured). • The eurozone debt crisis is the logical and inevitable result of a worldwide delusion that central bank credit expansion is a cure for debt, and that it will stimulate economies to higher levels of prosperity out of which ever increasing welfare entitlements may be paid.
The truth is that credit expansion is the cause of the current debt crisis and all its ancillary evils, which include high unemployment, a lower standard of living, and the threat of civil unrest. Central banks have distorted the market mechanism in which the interest rate brings the savings of real resources by real people into harmony with the credit demands of business and industry, creating a sustainable economic process. It is replaced by phony liquidity, which encourages longer term investments which cannot be completed due to lack of resources with which to complete them.
We are growing in Scotland and have every intention of winning seats both at Holyrood and in next year’s European Elections in Scotland, writes UKIP Leader Nigel Farage.
• I’m looking forward to coming to Edinburgh this week. Maybe I’ll stand Alex Salmond a drink just to explain how UKIP is relevant to Scottish politics and how things are changing North of the border, just as they have to its South.
We’ll be announcing our Aberdeen Don candidate on Tuesday [May, 14 - see here] and we are aiming to talk, not to the rump of Scottish Tories as he thinks, but specifically and deliberately at those he thinks are his voters. Patriotic Scots are tired of his dissembling over Scotland and Europe.
UKIP is nothing if it isn’t a national party. The clue of course is in the name. But if you ask almost anyone in the party the key letter isn’t the UK, important though that is, it is the I. Independence, from Brussels yes, but also from Westminster, from Holyrood and further, from the town and city halls that so bedevil life and set bounds to those things we can and cannot do.
The fundamental reason why an EU referendum is on the agenda; why Tory backbenchers are terrified of losing their seats; why Tory activists are baying for action; why even Vince Cable is shifting his stance, is quite simply pressure from UKIP and our amazing results in the local elections, writes UKIP MEP Roger Helmer.
•It’s quite extraordinary to see the contortions into which Cameron has got his Party over the John Baron amendment “regretting” the lack of an EU referendum Bill in the Queen’s Speech. First Downing Street was reportedly “relaxed” about Tory MPs — and Tory cabinet ministers — supporting the amendment. It was even suggested, improbably, that Cameron himself might support it. But the latest position is that Ministers (and PPS’s — the whole payroll vote) are being “advised” to abstain if they can’t bring themselves to oppose it.
The EU should scrap its Climate & Energy Package, and the British government should focus on gas, nuclear and coal, and abandon its unpopular and disastrous commitment to wind energy.
By Roger Helmer
•Back in October, I published UKIP’s Energy Policy Statement, warning that “the lights could go out by 2020″. Many people thought I was being alarmist. But a new report from analysts at Liberum Capital, a London-based investment bank, suggests that I may have been underplaying the threat. They foresee a generation capacity crunch in 2014/2017, with a lack of dispatchable generation by the end of the decade, together with spiralling consumer costs which they describe as “untenable”. Find the full report. There’s also a more comprehensive summary on the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s web-site.
Key conclusions:
There will be an inevitable crisis in UK energy policy, which will impact three stakeholders: the government of the day; the consumer; and the investors who have funded the programme. Government will do its best to protect itself and consumers, so investors will take most of the damage.
• Nigel Lawson’s interjection that Britain would be better off out of the European Union is spot on.
This is all the more relevant because when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer he pegged the exchange rate of the pound to the deutsche mark in 1988, prior to John Major taking us in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1990 when he was Chancellor.
Both of these measures were meant to be precursors to Britain joining the European Single Currency – which fortunately never happened.
UKIP has finanlly broken the first-passed-the-post barrier which has prevented any new political party breaking into domestic politics since the Labour Party did it in the early 20th century.
• The local election results of 2nd May show that the English people have cleary understood the extent to which the EU adversely affects their lives.
People understand that membership of the EU means that we cannot tackle issues such as mass uncontrolled immigration. They accordingly voted for UKIP in large numbers. UKIP is the only Party that wants Britain to leave the European Union and restore democratic sovereign government to the UK.
A damning parliamentary report claiming that the EU is being defrauded of more than £4bn a year means its time to take drastic action, writes Godfrey Bloom MEP
•The European Union's own fraud figure of £348m a year is staggering enough but a British House of Lords committee report estimates the figure to be 12 times as much. The Fight Against Fraud On The EU's Finances published by the Lords' Justice, Institutions and Consumer Protection EU-sub-committee says that the real size of annual EU budget losses is likely to be around £4.8bn or even more.
The major areas said to be most susceptible to fraud were the cohesion fund at £176m and agriculture at £66m, which goes to the poorest countries including the former Soviet bloc as well as Spain, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus. Member states, which administer 80 per cent of the EU's funds, are also said to be failing in their duty to report suspected abuse including bribery, corruption and cigarette smuggling.
• During a session of the European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee on biofuels and fuel quality (24.04.2013), East of England MEP, Stuart Agnew (UKIP) has excoriated the EU’s obsession with biofuel, which takes good arable land out of food production at a time when it is most needed.
Mr Agnew, who is the Party’s spokesman on agriculture, said that EU subsidies are tempting the farmer in the next field to not grow wheat but to “turn it into maize which will be put into an anaerobic digester, which will be connected to an electricity grid and that maize will be removed from agriculture.”
He pointed out that as a poultry farmer: “I need quite large quantities of electricity and I get a quarterly bill and on that electricity bill is a surcharge. It is called Climate Change Levy. This is the subsidy I have to pay to the man or the firm in the next field to make his electricity competitive.
"It is a bitter irony that a project that was designed to make war impossible, and to bring friendship and reconciliation, seems now to have had the opposite effect, creating division and rancour to go along with unemployment and hardship, and levels of devastating poverty not seen since the Second World War."- UKIP MEP Roger Helmer. •Personally, I am sick to death of Europhiles telling me that with all its faults, ”the EU has at least kept the peace in Europe since the Second World War”. Absolute nonsense. The peace in Europe has been maintained by the Transatlantic Alliance, by NATO, by 100,000 American GIs in Germany, by nuclear deterrence and Mutually Assured Destruction. The Cold War was won not by the European Commission of Jacques Delors, but by the courage and vision of people like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and perhaps Pope John Paul).
Nonetheless, it must be admitted that keeping the peace in Europe was a genuine, early and honourable motivation for the European project. The Coal & Steel Community was predicated on the proposition that if the sinews of war were jointly owned and administered, it would be that much more difficult for France and Germany to have a go at each other. Again. Though as William Hague memorably remarked, it was “a 1970s solution to a 1950s problem”, and of vanishingly small relevance to 2013.
UKIP Employment spokesman, MEP Derek Clark writes about last week's meetings of the Employment and Social Affairs Committee, plagued by lingering discord over budgeting and control of the European Social Fund among the three EU institutions comprising the Trilogue.
•A great number of votes in one day, most concerning money. European Funds, budget priorities, Social housing, Aid to the deprived and so on.
Among these were the European Social Fund and the Globalisation Adjustment Fund. These had gone to a Trilogue because there was no agreement as to the amounts of money to be put aside from the budget. The Trilogue is the Commission, The Council and Parliament meeting to thrash it out. Parliament is always represented in such trilogues by members of the committee concerned, in this case Employment. Council is represented by some of the appropriate Ministers of member states.
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We are growing in Scotland and have every intention of winning seats both at Holyrood and in next year’s European Elections in Scotland, writes UKIP Leader Nigel Farage.
The fundamental reason why an EU referendum is on the agenda; why Tory backbenchers are terrified of losing their seats; why Tory activists are baying for action; why even Vince Cable is shifting his stance, is quite simply pressure from UKIP and our amazing results in the local elections, writes UKIP MEP Roger Helmer.
The EU should scrap its Climate & Energy Package, and the British government should focus on gas, nuclear and coal, and abandon its unpopular and disastrous commitment to wind energy.
UKIP has finanlly broken the first-passed-the-post barrier which has prevented any new political party breaking into domestic politics since the Labour Party did it in the early 20th century. 
A damning parliamentary report claiming that the EU is being defrauded of more than £4bn a year means its time to take drastic action, writes Godfrey Bloom MEP
UKIP Employment spokesman, MEP Derek Clark writes about last week's meetings of the Employment and Social Affairs Committee, plagued by lingering discord over budgeting and control of the European Social Fund among the three EU institutions comprising the Trilogue.
