The image to the right, which is used to promote the EU's African aid policies, was brought to my attention this week by a colleague who had stumbled across it whilst doing research into aid spending.
As well as being immensely patronising, and betraying the EU's love of exactly the kind of imperialism that its supporters so love to claim it counterbalances, the image is one of staggering hypocrisy. Whilst the European Union does distribute aid money, its far more notable impact on Africa is one of huge economic damage.
The Common Agricultural Policy, and the trade barriers that make it possible, do untold harm to millions of farmers who would dearly love to sell their produce to European consumers. It is sickening that while British and other European people are hit by spiralling food prices, a continent of farmers who could provide cheaper goods are effectively barred by massive tariffs from doing so.
This is one area where eurosceptics must take the EU on, and could do so to great effect. Morally, fighting against the protectionism and dumping of subidised produce into African markets that kills large numbers of people and impoverishes millions more is clearly the right thing to do. Strategically it has benefits, too.
There is a lot of manufactured tension between euroscepticism as a supposedly old-fashioned view and the new ideas of a rebranded Conservative Party. When David Cameron urged people not to “bang on about Europe”, he did so on the basis that rejecting eurosceptic politics would cast him as a moderniser.
Continue reading "New and old: to really help Africa, we must be Eurosceptic" »
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