Dave's random mumblings…

Liverpool are not having a good year and tonight they were knocked out of the Champions League. It’s the first time since Benitez arrived in 2004 that the team has failed to make the knock out stages.

Liverpool were in a position where they needed other teams results to start going their way. They had to win and Fiorentina needed to drop points to Lyon. Liverpool beat Debrecen 1-0 in Budapest, however the Italian club beat Lyon by the same score.

The board has given him a vote of confidence and like the players, publicly state are fully behind the manager.

Saturday they play away at Everton in the first of the Liverpool derbys this year, while it’s not a must win game, they are 13 points behind the leaders and 6 points away from a place in the Champions League next year.

They need to start winning, clearly the Premier League is beyond them once again. I find it staggering that it’s been almost 20 years since the mighty reds last won the title. They were the team to beat in the 70’s and 80’s and at their height under Bob Paisley were possibly the best club side Europe has ever seen.

Real Madrid with Puskas or Liverpool with Dalglesh, two teams that were technically superior to anyone else. It would have been something to see.

As with every other failure in European Football there are significant financial implications. Making it into the first round of the knock out phase was worth maybe $4 Million, going al the way to the final was worth an estimated $70-80 to Barcelona last year. Again the sums money being thrown around is just staggering.

My father has talked about British sovereignty being given to Brussels over the last 35 years, and to some degree he’s correct. A series of treaties that have built upon each other, together these have given the European Parliament some significant powers in limited areas.

The next stepping stone was the Treaty of Lisbon, it created two posts that would be the EU equivalent of President and Foreign Secretary. These two appointments were in part designed to give the EU more of a “face” and give foreign diplomats and ministers someone to call instead of being forced into the maze of EU departments.

The appointment of two rather minor figures to these posts says an awful lot of how the 27 members of the EU see the role of the parliament and council.

These roles were being sold at one point as big posts with real power, have been filled by the Belgium center-right Prime minister and a Labour Party stalwart with zero experience running foreign affairs.

Not exactly figures that will be giving other heads of state sleepless nights. It is not just that the national leaders do not want a high profile rival, as Tony Blair would have been had he got the job. It also shows that the EU is far from a coherent political entity and to be fair it seems that some members do not want it to be.

The Union has accomplished many good things. It has tied everyone to each other and ended conflict in Europe, it has certainly led to growth and prosperity. It runs a single market, eliminated border controls and keeps playing fields between members level. However it seems its members are not quite ready to stand back while Brussels and Strasbourg based diplomats took over running the community.

The appointments show that the members were not ready to make Lisbon another step towards a United States of Europe. It is a small shuffle forward, but no more than that.

Incidentally the new president of Europe once said “Turkey is not a part of Europe and will never be part of Europe”. “The universal values which are in force in Europe, and which are fundamental values of Christianity, will lose vigour with the entry of a large Islamic country such as Turkey.”

After the ratification of the Lisbon treaty by the Czech Republic Europe has taken another step towards a United States of Europe by adopting the first EU constitution.

The upshot of this is it’s time for the first so called “European President” to be appointed as the EU becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

I find it rather ironic that it’s the Czechs that were holding up the ratification of the treaty that gives more power to central government, after all it all worked so well when Chamberlin secured peace in our time in 1938 by giving precisely the same country to Germany to stop any further aggression.

The Czech president was looking for guarantees from the rest of the EU that there would be no flood of claims on Czech property from ethnic Germans who were expelled from the former Czech Republic in the aftermath of the Second World War

But I digress, the front runner to become president of this collection of squabbling states with little more than geography and a couple of world wars in common is Tony Blair.

After such impressive performances in his last two jobs as Prime Minister and then as Middle East peace envoy (who visited the Middle East once in two years) his Tonyness seems an interesting choice. The endorsement of a potential President Blair by Gordon Brown (just an incompetent PM or the most incompetent PM?) and Silvio Berlusconi (a man who has also endorsed fraud, immunity from prosecution and heavy hints at tax evasion) really only adds to the growing farce around Blair’s candidacy.

Tony promised the electorate in the UK votes on the Euro and integration, neither of which he delivered.

My favorite quote is from David Miliband who said the EU president needs “Star power” and a “candidate who can stop the traffic in Beijing and Moscow”. No, Europe needs a political leader with ethics, respect and an ability to bring people together. Star power and ego have nothing to do with it.

The Tories have of course been scoring political points like it’s going out of style, but that’s not been difficult recently with Gordon Brown unable to keep his party in line. European spokesman Paul Francois said  “The British people do not like the Lisbon treaty and if it was used to impose Tony Blair as European president without the British people having a say, it would only underline the treaty’s complete lack of democratic legitimacy,”

After the Tory government of the late 80′s and most of the 90′s it would be difficult for the UK to become less pro-European. After all Labour were pro-EU (at least compared to Thatcher), but somehow Blair and Brown have managed it through ignoring both the electorate and the rest of Europe.