We're really best off out of the EU's publicity scam

The EU has twenty-seven nations and each has a capital city. If each takes it in turn to be Europe's Capital of Culture, a designation begun in 1986, the earliest - Athens, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris - would now be in their second go. Except of course that Berlin wasn't Germany's capital in 1988 - it was the capital of a country called East Germany, which was not a member of the EU. 

Actually the programme wasn't called 'Capital of Culture' until 1999. Earlier, it was named 'City of Culture' so great cities such as Florence and Glasgow could be included. I think some 58 cities have enjoyed the designation since it was initiated.

But of course such is the fame and universal recognition that the award brings that all of Europe celebrates each year the designated places, and one can ask any person on the street the two cities so designated in 2017. Or rather you can't. I suspect that only wonks know that Aarhus and Paphos are this year's cities. I haven't visited or seen pictures of either, but I know with utter certainty that both will be absolutely smothered in those ghastly blue speckly flags that signal the dominion of the EU.

It's actually quite a clever scam. The cities pay for it all themselves; all it costs the other taxpayers of the EU is a bit of publicity and boozy lunches for a commissioner or two. In return the EU gets its sovereignty proclaimed in every single city in Europe in turn. Utterly irrespective of merit. It's Italy's turn again in 2033 and if the failing, mafia-dominated crime ridden slums of Gela in Sicily, one of Europe's most dangerous, uncultured and unattractive conurbations, are chosen I would not be at all surprised. 

Now they've kicked us out we ought to set up our own scheme - 'Partner City of Light' or some such, in which we pick one Euro city a year to host joint visits, artistic events, royal ballet show, talks arranged by the British Council, pictures from the national gallery sort of thing, sweetened with a bung of say £1m. In return we'd get one city a year smothered in Union flags to which we can introduce the wonders of Gregg's sausage rolls. 

Gela preparing for 2033 - the speckly flags will arrive later

No cheap food or goods from Brexit? WTO deal revealed ...

I'll post the memorandum images below as I have them today from the European Commission. I'll leave it to those wiser than I in these things for definitive comments, but from my first reading it seems:-

• We'll keep our separate 1995 membership of the WTO
• On Brexit, we'll apportion EU import goods tariffs and quotas - so the end result for the 27 + 1 is as now for the 28
• Same for agricultural subsidies

Does this mean that all the talk of Brexit freeing us from EU restrictive import barriers and enabling cheaper food and goods is just twaddle? And how long will we keep in lockstep with the Empire?   

Postscript
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Ah, pretty much as thought - Guardian has the detail
Guardian's take is that we & the EU have played a flanker in preventing the US dumping its unwanted ag surpluses on us both - but that it's not yet a done deal. I guess there's a difference between choosing to raise quotas and being dumped upon.

EU regional policy - yet another grievous error

The EU set up the Committee of the Regions in 1994 with a huge lie. Its real purpose was to establish direct governance links between Brussels and European local government whilst bypassing those pesky democratic national governments and states. Sometime over the last ten or fifteen years, the EU decided either that this regional policy was a huge error or that, following the Treaty of Lisbon, that it was no longer needed. Today the Committee of the Regions is a poorly-funded embarrassment in Brussels, with an unknown President (the fourth or fifth EU President?), currently Karl-Heinz Lambert, and the third-smallest budget in the EU, largely spent on itself. The EU will never abolish it, of course, but it will just be gradually pushed further and further to the margins, absent from news releases, ignored, underfunded and unfashionable. Its Presidents and members feature on no ballot papers, and I'll bet there's not more than half a dozen people in the UK who know more than one of our 24 members. Shortly to go.

Yet during its lifetime, it has wasted more money and fomented more conflict than pretty much any other EU cabal. Ambitious regions, in conflict with their national governments, have even established 'embassies' in Brussels, in the most egregious display of snouts-in-the-trough misuse of tax money. Catalunya is one consequence, one that the EU now bitterly regrets.

It is quite possible that Catalonia will gain independence, but not from this referendum, at least not with any legitimacy. It will take a proper referendum, sanctioned by the Spanish government, overseen by observers, absent threat or coercion. 

What a bloody mess. What utter stupidity - Spain's and the EU's. Forgive me, but everything the EU touches turns to shit. This could all have been avoided if skill and experience rather than zealotry and purblind anti-democracy had driven these fools.