Irish No vote provides pause for thought
Published: 15 Jun 2008
The EU should work to deliver a Common Environment Policy and forget about attempting to impose centralised bureaucracy and concentration of power in political terms, say South West Greens. The EU needs to fundamentally shift from its business and market focused priorities and allow localism to flourish in those areas. It should put the environmental issues which affect people all across the EU at the core of its agenda.
The Irish vote shows that people want the right to control their own lives, but Greens also believe that people will accept that the responsibility to look after our common environment means we need to co-operate on these issues at a Europe wide level.
Cllr Ricky Knight, SW Greens’ lead European Election candidate, said:
'Europe should not be about controlling what we call Elderflower Champagne or whether French apple growers should be allowed unrestricted access to our markets. Nor should it be concerned with whether either grandparents of second generation English citizens or plumbers from Eastern Europe should be allowed right of entry to the UK - these are all local questions that we should determine for ourselves.
'Europe should be about controlling whether we are producing and consuming fossil fuels responsibly, about sharing our water and natural energy resources to balance availability and demand across the continent, and about ensuring that our pollution is not causing problems in another country (for example our Cumbrian plutonium pollution causing cancer clusters on the Irish seaboard) and these are controls that we should accept.
'In the South West we would benefit from a Europe which stands firm against current unsustainable government policies such as promoting the use of nuclear energy. Sensible European intervention could ensure that the vast sums of money the government are investing in unsustainable energy sources could be ring-fenced instead for renewable energy projects, such as harnessing the tidal power of the Severn Estuary and encouraging investment in wind power.
'South West Greens applaud the Irish people for their stand against creeping centralisation and bureaucratisation in inappropriate areas, and welcome the opportunity to redirect and re-energise the European project away from its market based roots into more useful areas requiring international cooperation.
'This should be the closing of a chapter of European history - Europe is dead, long live Europe.'