The blame game continues in Europe over who is responsible for the high-level split over a new EU fiscal agreement. UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage believes it is time for the British to decide whether they want to stay in the EU.
The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, who slapped a firm "no" on the deal, said it lacked sufficient financial safeguards for the UK.However European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso, called the decision “unfortunate” and said Britain itself had made compromise impossible by making demands that threatened the entire single market.“The United Kingdom in exchange for giving its agreement asked for a specific protocol on financial services which as presented were a risk to the integrity of the internal market. This made compromise impossible,” he told European lawmakers in Strasbourg on Tuesday.He also remarked that most countries tried hard to reach an accord of all 27 EU states.Back in Brussels, Cameron came up with what he thought were reasonable and practical demands so that the UK, which has a very big financial services industry, could get some protection. But instead he was confronted by a “snarling, aggressive” French President Sarkozy, who ruled out any compromise and insisted on the financial transaction tax, remarks UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage.“That would have meant a new tax, 80 per cent of which would have been paid by the UK. If Cameron had signed up to that and gone back to the House of Commons, it would have literally brought down the British government,” Farage told RT.The myth that the UK can be in Europe but not run by Europe has died after the Friday vote over the fiscal deal, he claimed.“We now find ourselves in a position where we are outvoted by 26 to 1. We are in a hopeless minority and yet we still have 75 per cent of our laws that run the United Kingdom made in these institutions,” said the politician. “Cameron’s not wishing to do this has now opened up the real debate in the UK about our European future.”Farage warns the UK against an “economic prison” similar to the one now faced by the Greek people, whose lives are now falling under the control of their creditors: the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank.“The biggest threat we face now in Europe is to keep countries like Greece, Portugal, Ireland – even Spain and Italy – trapped inside an economic prison, stripped of their democracy. The governments of Italy and Greece were removed by these bully-boys in Brussels. The bigger threat for them is to stay and die a long economic death,” said Farage.