Is a Tobin Tax the death knell for Europe’s Impossible Dream?

By tomtom

As fill your boots at shareholder’s expense becomes an Anathema.

And Executive pay comes under scrutiny from a government enquiry, the focus falls on what can be done about it. Public disapprobation will win the day as executives across the world are overtaken by a ‘Financial Accountability Spring’ . Will the government in present circumstance, be prepared to act? The simple answer I have to advise: is little or nothing.

  There will of course be an outcry about transparency and limiting the extent, to which an Investment Banker can fill his boots, at the expense of shareholder. But quite simply, the people most intimately affected by any legislation in this respect, will point out that most major companies and banks included; have remuneration committees. Then, since income to the Treasury relies in the major part on this source, for a huge tranche of government income, it will be swept under the carpet for another day.

  Though whether these remuneration committees are just a bunch of old-boy back-slappers or really hog-tied to reality – is open to speculation. That they should be exposed to all by legislation, is no doubt the ultimate desirable outcome. Will it happen? Highly doubtful and the dilemma as to how you achieve this most desirable outcome, will rumble on. The excuse peddled on behalf of these hi-flyers will be that if they are not paid what they presume to be the going rate, they flee to other more desirable destinations.

  But like the proposed Tobin Financial Tax on transactions favoured by the cash strapped Eurocrats of Brussels, aimed at neutering the primacy of the ‘City of London’ as the ‘Financial Epicentre of World Trade, in Finance, Commodity Trading and Currency Exchange’, this is nothing more than the opening shots of a takeover bid by these faceless, unelected, technocrats of Europe, for control over  the ‘City of London Corporation’.

  This essentially faceless entity, the ‘City of London Corporation’, bestrides the Global Financial Stage like a Colossus, with control of all the fundamental levers of Global Finance. So such manoeuvring by the European Commission can do nothing more than bring about secession of the United Kingdom from this putative effort, to become the overall dictator of the 27 Nation States it comprises.

  This fetid attempt to prove who will be ‘King of the entire Continent of Europe’ is destined to become a ‘Bonfire of all the Vanities’, if they persist in following this foolish path to oblivion. A matter highlighted, as far back as the days of Lord Palmerston, followed by Jean Monnet and the UK’s Peter Thorneycroft. Who all said, what amounts in these days of yore, to the death knell for ‘Europe’s Impossible Dream’.

  Lord Palmerston:- 1784 -1865 said:-  “Only three men in Europe understand the Schleswig Holstein question,” (aka – the West Lothian question – courtesy of Sir Thomas Dalyell Loch, 11th Baronet – ‘Tam Dalyell’MP) “and of these,  Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s Consort is dead, a Danish Statesman unnamed is in an asylum and I myself,”  confessed Lord Palmerston, “have forgotten.”

  Jean Monnet:- 1888 – 1979 said:-  “All Europe’s nations should be guided towards a super-state, without people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.”

  Peter Thorneycroft MP:- 1909 – 1994 said:- “No government dependent upon a democratic vote could possibly agree in advance to the sacrifices an adequate European Plan must involve. The people must be led slowly and unconsciously, into the abandonment of their traditional economic defences. Not asked,” he said, “for it involves changes, which they may not at first be capable of recognising the advantages of -  themselves.”

  As and until these facts sink in to the detriment of those who would conceal them from the Public at Large and this putative bid to create a Federal Superstate fades into insignificance or descends into ignominy, they will fight on till the inevitable is staring them in the face.

Watch this space, I’ll be back!

Tom.