The Real Straight Banana

[dArKeR]

There is a group of men and women which seeks to make life as difficult as possible for the progressives who support the European Union. They are members not of the UK Independence Party or the French National Front, but of the European Commission. Whenever we try to persuade our countrymen that the EU helps to raise our quality of life, defend human rights, protect the environment and ward off the market fundamentalism of the United States, they find some means of proving us wrong.


No one has wrongfooted us as deftly as a Dutchman called Frits Bolkestein. Until November, he was the EU’s internal market commissioner. In January last year, he produced a directive which claimed to be harmonising rules across the Union, in order to make it easier to trade in everything from hairdressing to hospitals.(1)


The Services Directive was promoted, as all such measures are, as a means of creating “millions” of jobs, and it is certainly possible that it could help stimulate the European economy. But it also appears to impose on member states a compulsory commercialisation of their public services, while destroying their ability to defend their people from corporate exploitation. It is – or was – due to have been approved by the end of this year.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/03/08/the-real-straight-banana/