Statement by Herman VAN ROMPUY, President of the European Council, on the conclusions of the Informal European Council that took place on 30 January in Brussels: extract on a new separate treaty.
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Extract on the recent EFSF downgrade by Herman VAN ROMPUY, President of the European Council, during the press conference that followed his meeting with Mariano RAJOY, Prime Minister of Spain, on 17 January in Madrid.
It's D-Day for the euro, with intense talks among EU leaders in Brussels suffering its first setback. Britain and Hungary refused to accept EU-wide treaty changes, leaving the rest of the club to work out their own currency-saving solutions. The UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage believes, that Eurozone countries are now trapped inside economic prison called euro.
Extract on the euro currency, from the speech by Herman VAN ROMPUY, President of the European Council, at the 1st Conference of EU Heads of Delegation, EUSR and Chargés d’Affaires, Brussels.
Speaker: Nigel Farage MEP, UKIP, Co-President of the EFD Group in the European Parliament (Europe of Freedom and Democracy)
Transcript:
"Here we are on the edge of a financial and social disaster and in the room today we have the four men who are supposed to be responsible. And yet we have listened to the dullest most, technocratic speeches I've ever heard.
You are all in denial. By any objective measure the euro is a failure. And who exactly is responsible, who is in charge out of all you lot? The answer is none of you because none of you have been elected; none of you have any democratic legitimacy for the roles you currently hold within this crisis.
And into this vacuum, albeit reluctantly, has stepped Angela Merkel. And we are now living in a German-dominated Europe - something that the European project was actually supposed to stop. Something that those who went before us actually paid a heavy price in blood to prevent. I don't want to live in a German-dominated Europe and nor do the citizens of Europe.
But you guys have played a role, because when Mr Papandreou got up and used the word 'referendum' - or Mr Rehn, you described it as 'a breach of confidence', and your friends here got together like a pack of hyenas, rounded on Papandreou, had him removed and replaced by a puppet Government. What an absolutely disgusting spectacle that was.
And not satisfied with that, you decided that Berlesconi had to go. So he was removed and replaced by Mr Monti, a former European Commissioner, a fellow architect of this Euro disaster and a man who wasn't even a member of parliament.
It's getting like an Agatha Christie novel, where we're trying to work out who is the next person that's going to be bumped off. The difference is, we know who the villains are. You should all be held accountable for what you've done. You should all be fired.
And I have to say, Mr Van Rompuy. 18 months ago when we first met, I was wrong about you. I said you would be the quiet assassin of nation states' democracy, but not anymore, you are rather noisy about it aren't you. You, an unelected man, went to Italy and said, 'This is not the time for elections but the time for actions'. What in God's name gives you the right to say that to the Italian people.
