Shock! Horror! A benefit of the European Union

What joy. On the same day that 114 Tory MPs criticise their own government’s Queen’s Speech for not promising to leave the EU (well, force the government of whatever hue in the next parliament to grant a referendum – it’s the same thing in their addled minds), the European Commission intervene to protect British consumers from alleged price-rigging by oil companies. Understandably, the EU doing a good thing has been soft-pedalled by the right-wing press, hiding it with a brief sentence in plain sight. This is after a British inquiry gave the oil companies a clean bill of health – an inquiry described by Robert Halfon, Conservative MP for Harlow (who replaced Labour’s Bill Rammell – remember him? – in 2010) as ‘lettuce leaf’-like. Though he has form in campaigning for lower prices at the petrol pump, Halfon may not be as instinctively anti-continental European as his swivel-eyed Tory counterparts, given that he took the National Union of Students to the European Court of Human Rights (a body that right-wing Tories detest because it decrees human rights judgements, interfering with these being trampled underfoot by tabloid populism) for making its membership at university compulsory – his case was thrown out as manifestly ill-founded.


If those Tories who wish to leave the EU and hang the consequences think we can be as isolated and irrelevant as Norway, they should think again. Norwegian company Statoil also had its offices raided by EC investigators. In an intrinsically interdependent world, there is no true thing as national independence.