Parallels

As anyone who has followed the England football team for quite sometime knows, yesterday's result and performance was - well - typical. Yes there was lots of pre-match hype, and occasionally they surprise us by living up to that hype, but we know how it works really most of the time. Lots of talk and optimism, but in the end it's always the same result - a lackluster display and a 'why the hell can't they play like they do for their own clubs?' The rhetoric never matches the substance.

And Rooney despite his 'half-hearted-don't-really-mean-it' apology lets us know what England players really think of their long suffering supporters.

This leads me onto the EU. As highlighted in a previous post any elected UK government, whether it's Tory or Labour, follows the same script. Rather like England it's talk tough - the best for Britain etc - then it begins to fall apart. We give in.

So for all the tough 'referendum lock' talk pre-election, and claiming the first victory in Europe for Tory eurosceptics as predicted, there's a problem:

However, the truce over budget "surveillance" is likely to end within a fortnight when the Commission moves to "fast track" its proposals and bring forward legislation on the plan by September.

One Commission official said: "We are still determined to push for the reforms that are needed. We will take into account the summit today, but we are speeding up the proposals we have set out."

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, insisted the "economic governance" agenda would continue.

"Nothing has been decided definitively," Mr Sarkozy said. "This is only the very beginning. Things are moving ahead."

And from England Expects:

FROM across the Channel we learn that the EU Commission is absolutely determined to secure the passage of two important new laws that hugely affect our prosperity and sovereignty for the worse.

And from Mary Ellen Synon:

Cameron is new in town, so he doesn't know that's not the way it works. The British have now conceded the principle that other nations have a right to interfere in the United Kingdom's budget procedures. Now Sarkozy and his allies wait for the next European Council in October. There will no doubt be another crisis going on then; if not, Sarkozy and Angela Merkel can declare Spain or Portugal or Greece or Ireland a crisis at the time. Then insist the solution is -- as it always is -- 'more Europe.' Which means, more European control of national economies. That is when the real pressures on Cameron to get going with the EU economic government will start.

The first job of any EU power grab is to convince the world -- or at least the British -- that an EU power grab does not exist.

So copious amounts of bluster and promises, but we end up where we always do. The truth is the system is in place with vested corporate intests - the FA decided to build Wembley rather than concentrate on youth development - we're impotent until someones stands up and says hold on, this is not right. Until then it's the same tedious script.