No-one delivers a good dressing-down like an Englishman. They may have lost the Empire, but they still do a good job of verbally kicking ass.
Good ol' Nigel Farage! There should be more like him! Read [more].
And here's the transcript of his speech:
Good morning, [EU Council president] Mr. [Herman] Van Rompuy. You've been in office for one year, and in that time the whole edifice is beginning to crumble, there's chaos, the money's running out, I should thank you - you should perhaps be the pinup boy of the Euroskeptic movement. But just look around this chamber this morning, just look at these faces, look at the fear, look at the anger. Poor old [José Manuel Durão] Barroso [president of the European Commission] here looks like he's seen a ghost. They're beginning to understand that the game is up.
And yet in their desperation to preserve their dream, they want to remove any remaining traces of democracy from the system. And it's pretty clear that none of you have learned anything. When you yourself Mr. Van Rompuy say that the euro has brought us stability, I suppose I could applaud you for having a sense of humor, but isn't this really just the bunker mentality?
Your fanaticism is out in the open. You talked about the fact that it was a lie to believe that the nation state could exist in the 21st century globalized world. Well, that may be true in the case of Belgium who haven't had a government for 6 months, but for the rest of us, right across every member state in this union, and perhaps this is why we see the fear in the faces, increasingly people are saying, "We don't want that flag, we don't want the anthem, we don't want this political class, we want the whole thing consigned to the dustbin of history."
We had the Greek tragedy earlier on this year, and now we have the situation in Ireland. Now I know that the stupidity and greed of Irish politicians has a lot to do with this: they should never, ever have joined the euro. They suffered with low interest rates, a false boom and a massive bust.
But look at your response to them: what they are being told as their government is collapsing is that it would be inappropriate for them to have a general election. In fact [EU Economic and Monetary Affairs] Commissioner [Olli] Rehn here said they had to agree to their budget first before they are allowed to have a general election.
Just who the hell do you think you people are? You are very, very dangerous people indeed: your obsession with creating this euro state means that you are happy to destroy democracy, you appear to be happy with millions and millions of people to be unemployed and to be poor.
Untold millions must suffer so that your euro dream can continue. Well it won't work, because it's Portugal next. With their debt levels of 325 percent of GDP they are the next ones on the list, and after that I suspect it will be Spain, and the bailout for Spain would be 7 times the size of Ireland, and at that moment all the bailout money has gone - there won't be any more.
But it's even more serious than economics, because if you rob people of their identity, if you rob them of their democracy, then all they are left with is nationalism and violence. I can only hope and pray that the euro project is destroyed by the markets before that really happens.
