The political and economic disaster which is the Euro has reached new depths – as David Cameron noted in Ottawa yesterday “the problems in the eurozone are now so big that they have begun to threaten the stability of the world economy”.

Traditionally, the only place where logic, democracy and facts have never been able to penetrate when it comes to the glaring failure of the Euro has been the European Commission. It’s rare that they ever come clean about the EU’s dubious tactics and unheard of for them to even admit there’s a serious problem.

This morning, though,  a European Commission official called Michele Calandrino was speaking at London’s City Hall as part of an EU Committee of the Regions Open Day, addressing an audience of local authorities and regional apparatchiks. My source tells me that first he confessed that:

European funding is an incentive for Member States to play the game at the European level

Which was a surprisingly frank statement in itself, given the long history of pretending that funding is allocated to target problems rather than to provide political incentives to “play the game”, ie hand over more and more sovereignty to Brussels. A confession of their dodgy dealing from the horse’s mouth.

The really fascinating bit came next, on the Eurozone crisis. The problems were so serious, said Mr Calandrino, that:

we are worried about the future of the Social Fund because of the need for fiscal consolidation to save the Euro

To translate the jargon, the European Social Fund is the main tranche of the EU budget targeted at creating jobs and providing skills training to the unemployed and disadvantaged. As well as being a large amount of money, it’s one of the EU’s posterchildren for how great Brussels is.

If the Commission thinks it may have to scrap the ESF “to save the Euro”, then they are evidently more concerned for the Euro’s future than they have previously let on. As far as I’m aware, the Commission has never previously confessed that the current crisis threatens the currency’s very existence. It’s a measure of how bad things have got that even they appear to be abandoning the pretence that the Euro will inevitably survive.

This confession is also very revealing about the EU Commission’s priorities – they would rather withdraw funding from the unemployed and poverty-stricken than abandon their disastrous vanity project. What a message to send.

Tags: Brussels, City Hall, Committee of the Regions, Economics, EU, EU Commission, Euro, European Social Fund, Europhiles, Eurosceptics, Eurozone, Exclusives, Michele Calandrino, opinion, Politics, Westminster

Categories: Economics, Exclusives, Opinion, Politics

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