EU Fishing Leads to Africans' Flight
by Christopher Booker

The BBC last week excitably reported that nine EU countries have offered ships and planes to Spain, to help stem the flood of West Africans prepared to risk their lives crossing in fragile wooden boats to the Canary Islands.

Some 9,000 have already made it this year, while at least 1,500 have died in the attempt. EU governments are concerned because, once the Africans have reached Spanish soil, they are free after 40 days to settle anywhere in the EU, including Britain.

What the BBC predictably failed to explain was the major cause of this human disaster, one of the real scandals of our time. This is the devastation being wreaked along the west coast of Africa by hundreds of large foreign trawlers, which are destroying the livelihoods and often the lives of local fishermen.

Conspicuous among these are Spanish and Portuguese boats, allowed into these waters under the so-called "Third World fisheries agreements" negotiated by the EU, for which EU taxpayers have shelled out more than £2 billion (some £250 million contributed by Britain) to the governments of countries such as Mali, Senegal and Mauritania. Most of this money, as has been well documented, goes to a small ruling class of politicians and officials.

The African fishermen cannot compete. Thousands have died, simply because their tiny craft are run down by the foreign trawlers pillaging the same fishing grounds - hence their desperation to escape to Europe.

Czechs and Balances
by Christopher Booker

Last week, in the beautiful city of Prague, I had a remarkable experience. In front of several hundred people, I sat next to the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, at a seminar to launch a Czech edition of The Great Deception: Can The European Union Survive?, the 600-page history of "the European project" which Dr Richard North and I published last year, and which, thanks to President Klaus, has now been translated into Czech.

The other speakers were the rector of Brno University and a Czech MEP, interspersed with penetrating and humorous comments from the president himself, who is now alone among all the EU's leaders as a trenchantly outspoken Eurosceptic.

As an academic economist and an admirer of Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher, Professor Klaus founded the Civic Democrat party (ODS) which, in advance of yesterday's elections, was being tipped to form the new Czech government. Prof Klaus was prime minister from 1993 to 1997, and in 2003 he succeeded Vaclav Havel as president.

Looking out on that crowded hall, I wondered what other European head of state would hold twice-monthly public seminars, at which anyone is free to join in serious discussion of political issues.

As I told the audience, it represented a genuine spirit of democracy that could not be more alien to the statist "European project", or to most of that political class which is only too happy to keep it in being. The Czechs escaped such a system 16 years ago, which is why they are not too keen to see it re-established.
The Sunday Telegraph, 4th June 2006

Further Resources
Fed up with the EU and want to know the real alternative?

The Real Face of the European Union by Phillip Day, video documentary (PAL format only)
Ten Minutes to Midnight by Phillip Day

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