Nigel Farage: The EU is Increasingly About War

Nigel Farage: "I do not want the United Kingdom to be part of a militaristic warlike European Union, and that is the speech that I have heard from you, president Hollande and from most people in this chamber today."

European Parliament, Strasbourg, 5 February 2013.

(video at the bottom of transcript)

transcript:

President Hollande, despite your own views you're doing rather a lot for the Eurosceptic debate in France.

The decision to reduce the retirement age, to increase the minimum wage, but above all, of course, the hate tax to make sure all your successful entrepreneurs and now footballers are fleeing France, means that the competitiveness gap between France and Germany is getting wider.

That is now being reflected in the flight of capital from French banks and people are beginning to notice that actually, ultimately, the euro is not just doomed in the Mediterranean, but it is going to be impossible for France and Germany to stay together inside the same economic and monetary union.

So on the basis that your employment minister says the country is bankrupt what do you do? Well, the old trick - launch a foreign military intervention.

So your troops go off to Mali, and yes, it is very good to see the smiling faces in Timbuktu for the moment.

But you have done this on behalf of the European Union. It is now an EU Mission.

Just two days ago, Tony Blair said 'the EU is not about peace, the European Union is about power'.

I think what he meant is the European Union increasingly will be about war.
Because the response to Mali, the response to it being an EU mission - we have heard it all around the chamber today, the Liberals urging us to intervene militarily in Syria, support from left and right in this house that the EU should intervene militarily.

I have to say this, if you really think that taking on fundamentalist, radical Islam in battle is something that we can somehow succeed in, I suspect we shall launch ourselves, in the same way as we have in Afghanistan, on a decade of unending, un-winnable misery.

I do not want the United Kingdom to be part of a militaristic warlike European Union, and that is the speech that I have heard from you, president Hollande and from most people in this chamber today.