HOW DID IT COME TO THIS?

Britain under the thumb of the EU

Britain has now become so subservient to to the EU we are no longer allowed to deal with a crisis or problems without the EU first.  

As the banking crisis continues to hit the globe, we in the UK can no longer deal with this problem in the way we see fit, or to our own benefit, our Prime Minister is forced to trot off to the EU to make his suggestions there and hope he gets consent to take action, as we have just seen with Gordon Brown going to what was described as a "Big four" European crisis summit on Saturday October 4th, where he met up with Presidents Sarkozy, Merkel and Italy's PM Berlusconi.

Also at these talks were the Head of the European Central Bank, Jean Claude Trichet and Jean Claude Juncker the Chairman of the eurozone.  Gordon Brown wanted to propose a £12 billion  small business fund to enable small businesses to get their hands on money they may need.

Christopher Booker, writing in the Sunday Telegraph the following day, pointed out how the EU had made the crisis worse due to its inflexible legislation.  He points out changes made last year to banking regulations, enshrined in a directive which he explained could take months, if not a year or more, to unpick.

He wrote: "In 2004, partly in response to the Enron debacle, the worlds leading economic powers made an agreement known as Basel2.  It proposed a drastic tightening of the so-called "fair value" or "mark-to-market" rules, whereby banks and other financial institutions define whether they are solvent and fit to continue trading.  Brussels, which is fast taking over regulation of our financial services, embodied this in two directives, 2006/48 and 2006/49, known as the Capital Adequacy Directive.

Much of this lays down a complex "Risk Assessment Model", under which a bank at the end of the each day's trading must produce a statement of its assets to show whether or not it is solvent.  If not, the bank must declare this to the regulatory authorities, such as Britain's Financial Service Authority (FSA), and cease trading.

As informed observers pointed out at the time, this might not cause problems when property and share values were rising but when markets fell the banks would be put in a critical position.  Writing down their assets to the value they would fetch in a "fire sale". without allowing for underlying value or future recovery, their asset base might be so severely undervalued that it would be difficult for them to lend or borrow, freezing those deals which are the banking systems lifeblood.  At worse, though technically solvent, they would have to close their doors.  Since the credit crunch last year this is precisely what has happened."

When it comes to dealing with such problems we are no longer permitted to tackle these matters in a way that would help British based banks or British industry and commerce.  Which makes you ask, how ever did such a great and influential, global trading country such as Britain, ever let it come to this?