Britain to loose Security Council Seat (eventually)

I’m surprised that more colleagues haven’t picked up on today’s Times story which advised that;

‘Britain’s seat at the UN Security Council will eventually be handed to the European Union, Lord Malloch Brown, the Foreign Office Minister, has suggested.

The former diplomat was brought in by Gordon Brown to help to overhaul foreign policy was already under fire for suggesting that Britain and America would no longer be “joined at the hip”.

He faces fresh controversy after it emerged that last October, when he was Deputy General Secretary of the UN, he spoke approvingly of growing EU representation on a visit to Brussels last October.

According to a report by the EU Observer, he told Brussels diplomats that the EU was heading toward one single seat within the UN institutions. He said: “I think it will go in stages. We are going to see a growing spread of it institution by institution. It is not going to happen with a flash and a bang.” He added that he hoped that it would happen “as quickly as possible. I’m a huge fan of it.”

I wonder what the reaction would be in France if there was a suggestion that they also gave up theirs?

I’m not going to go into a swivel eyed Euro rant, but wouldn’t this effectively be the end of our ability to make independent foreign policy decisions or at best create monumental confusion. Could there be a situation where we in alliance with the US and others proposed to undertake an action somewhere in the world and Russia and China abstained but the EU vetoed. Unlikely I know but what then?

What would have happen if the Argentine invaded the Falklands now under this scenario and an EU resolution was tabled that said we shouldn’t recover our own sovereign territory and should reach a negotiated settlement?

But the killer is that it is a now member of Her Majesty’s Government that made these comments, not a functionary of the ‘Empire’.

GORDON has already broken HIS party’s commitment to a referendum on the ‘tidying up exercise’ citing the benefits of the arrangement and bleating on about the (frankly mutable) Red Lines - but surely the ability for this Country to determine it’s own foreign policy and to independently represent its own interests in the world should be the thickest and reddest line of them all. And yet one of HIS ministers has suggested that we loose some or all of that ability.

I’m sure that there are many more implications that I am frankly too impatient to sit down and think through, so I leave you to ponder for a little while and then possibly get rather cross.