In the real world yesterday, Bloomberg was headlining: “Europe Unemployment Rate Rises to Highest Since 1999“. As MEPs and those hoping to replace them were singing the praises of the EU, potential voters learned that a shocking 9.2 per cent of the euro zone workforce is now without a job.
And we are supposed to vote for the people who brought us this? The failure of our European leaders is truly staggering. Remember the Lisbon Agenda? Nine years ago, it declared it would “Make Europe, by 2010, the most competitive and the most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world”. But where did YouTube and Twitter come from? Should we be surprised to learn that 400,000 European science and technology graduates are now working in the United States?
But at least they got a good education before they left. Although they must have studied in the UK because there’s not one continental European college in the world’s top 25 as ranked by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
When one points out the scale of Europe’s failure to its politicians or their Brussels-based media sycophants, the stock response it that Finland’s schools are the best in the world, and this is usually followed by the mantra that 47 million US citizens do not have health insurance.
The irony of these people invoking the US is made clear when you compare the reporting of last year’s US presidential election (in which most Europeans can’t vote) and the reporting of the European Parliament election (in which most Europeans don’t vote). One was covered round the clock; the other is treated in a desultory fashion. And that’s because one was mesmerizing and the other is unexciting. The news industry knows that its readers, viewers and hearers can take only so much monotony and it knows that the public knows the outcome of the election already.
The new European parliament will be a copy of the old one and the Commission and the national governments will continue to wield real power. No change, in other words. Not much hope, either.
Some will opt for the ballot box during the coming days; many more, however, will choose the bar, the bottle and the beach. And who can blame them?
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An interesting, provocative post.
Are you arguing that unemployment is now going up because of the EU?
We are in a global recession. There are few economies that will get through completely unscathed. Surely that must be having some impact on unemployment figures?