Telling it like it us

As flagged up in an earlier Blog, our government – i.e., the European Council in Brussels - has gone ahead and adopted the Hague programme.

This is an initiative aimed at taking "a more effective, joint approach to cross-border problems such as terrorism, organised crime, irregular migratory flows and smuggling of human beings as well as the prevention thereof…".

On 23 October, we wrote that this is "serious federalism, naked in tooth and claw", yet its significance has scarcely been understood and reporting has been overshadowed by the controversy over the government's intentions to permit QMV on asylum and immigration policy.

But, even as the BBC is silent, the Chinese news agency Xinhuanet has given the game away, announcing the move this evening with the headline: "EU launches new program to promote integration".

"The European Union," he reports, "has launched a new five-year program to further promote integration by strengthening co-operation in areas of freedom, security and justice."

Ironic isn't it that it takes the report from the news agency on a totalitarian, Communist state to tell us like it is. But then, since the Peoples' Republic of China supports and endorses European integration (see earlier Blog), its agency perhaps does not understand the significance of revealing what is going on.

Thus, such a headline will never appear in a British newspaper. That really would be telling it like it is, and that would never do.