The Luxembourger (Jean-Claude Juncker, Head of the EU) announces that the EU needs an army. He says that NATO doesn’t cater for all the EU countries.

In fact there are 28 countries in the EU and 28 in NATO. Five EU members are not in NATO (Cyprus, Finland, Ireland, Malta and Sweden). Five NATO members are not in the EU (Canada, Iceland, Norway, Turkey and the USA).

One would have thought that NATO is far stronger, and far better equipped to look after the tout ensemble than the hitherto non-existent EU army. 

Except for one thing: the EU is building up a huge waiting list of candidates for EU membership (Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Turkey), and potential candidates (Bosnia and Herzegovina). NATO simply states that like-minded European countries are welcome to apply for membership and offers help to those who do so.

So it could be said that if the EU grows and grows like Jack’s beanstalk it might one day become too unwieldy to work with NATO. Could that be why the EU is expanding in all directions at a rate which quite sensible judges condemn as irrational and irresponsible? Perhaps it wants to outgrow NATO for sinister reasons of its own? What sort of game is the Luxembourger playing?

Whatever the truth, here are a few questions about British participation in this putative EU war-machine: Has anybody consulted the Queen? Or the Chief of the Imperial General Staff? Or the rank and file of the finest army in the world? And is the wretched Cameron proposing (if BREXIT doesn’t stop his gallop)…. is he proposing to hand over the cream of Britain’s finest to the Luxembourger and his cronies?  Have the British forces not got enough on their plate with their NATO commitment? Is this why Cameron has failed to take the British public into his confidence on this one?

There are many things that need to be discussed, but the voters’ first priority is to get the Referendum done and dusted, and then to give the disgraceful Cameron the heave-ho. Then we can reconsider everything, including Europe, without the fatal involvement of a prime minister whose determination to win an argument takes precedence over any concern for the longterm future of his country.  One good thing about his desperate behaviour: he has revealed beyond the shadow of a doubt what a miserable specimen of a man he is.