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Originally Posted by SMHarman
However the partially privatised EU has then allowed still nationalised institutions to take advantage of these privatised entities and become european champions with the protection that they themselves cannot be taken over. Electricitie de France EdF, being a prime case, buying generation capacity throughout europe, but, for example AES a big American Generator being unable to buy them, or buy significant generating capacity in France (in the way they bought Drax, the largest power station in the UK). This actually means that the UK is now dependant on EdF and the undersea transmission cable to mainland europe for power generation. Get into a war with France and they could switch our power off!
Thankfully it has also ensured the failiure of some entities such as Sabina, which the indolent national government would have carried on propping up.
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It is this whole sphere of open markets where the EU ought to do best. The problem for me has always been that they choose to define their remit so widely and with such a swathe of regulation. The curvature of bananas is a trivial example, but really, is there a need for anyone, at national or EU level, to make up such rules? If a market trader or supermarket sells manky bananas, the average shopper has the nous to simply not buy them. A free and open market would function best regulated only by laws and directives designed to enforce openness. Once everything is open and transparent, the market can regulate itself. But of course, the single European market is not an open market, it is a tightly controlled one and designed, in large measure, to keep inefficient French peasant farmers in clover thanks to the CAP.
Some smart-ar$e professor writing in the Independent earlier in the week attempted to repudiate the usual Eurosceptic claim that 'we only voted for a Common Market' by pointing out that what we actually voted in favour of was signing up to the Treaty of Rome - the document that contains that nebulous phrase, 'ever-closer union'. I don't buy that. That might have been the technical result of a 'yes' vote, but Europe was clearly sold to the people as a Common Market and nothing else, and in that case we have a pretty good claim that we are victims of the biggest mis-selling scandal of all time.