After Brexit, U.K. Residents Google ‘What Is The EU?’

[Rob L 3,811]

Tax rises and spending cuts needed

https://www.google.co.jp/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=12&ved=0ahUKEwihpsL048rNAhVL1oMKHdFBD4QQFghSMAs&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fuk-politics-eu-referendum-36647006&usg=AFQjCNHjnrzuD2R4hqvD94OGhSzzvDhl_A&sig2=XhezzLFUD38LQJaX0oVukg

• The UK has lost its top AAA credit rating from ratings agency S&P and rival agency Fitch also lowered its rating

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36644934

[OriZ 3,157]

If any individual represents the “old Europe” and the wheeling and dealing that led to the flawed euro and the EU constitution it is Jean-Claude Juncker, who is one of the last believers in a federal Europe.

Mr Juncker, 59, was until last December the prime minister of Luxembourg and the EU’s longest serving leader until he was forced to resign last year in a bizarre scandal involving illegal phone tapping by the Grand Duchy’s secret service.

Luxembourg’s fiscal policy and tax agreements with hundreds of multinational firms transformed his country from an economy based on industry to one based on finance.

Ironically he got his job as Luxembourg’s leader after Britain vetoed Jean-Luc Dehaene, the Belgian PM, for the job of European Commission President in 1994.

After the veto Jacques Santer, the prime minister of Luxembourg, took the post, and his keenly ambitious employment minister Mr Juncker took the helm of the tiny country, running it as a fiefdom until December 2013.

Mr Santer’s commission, which oversaw the construction of the euro, collapsed in ignominy amid scandals over endemic corruption in March 1999.

The longest serving veteran of Brussels deal-making, until last year Jean-Claude Juncker headed the powerful Eurogroup meetings of eurozone finance ministers firefighting the crisis in the EU’s single currency - an institution he had helped create, warts and all, in the Nineties.

"We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back," he said of the euro's introduction.

At the height of the eurozone crisis, Mr Juncker was described as the “master of lies” for organising a meeting of finance ministers to talk about whether Greece could remain in the single currency and then trying to deny it was taking place.

Germany's Suddeutsche Zeitung accused Mr Juncker of “taking the lead on the deception” and warned he had managed “to fritter away the last remaining trust the people of Europe still have”.

Mr Juncker has never hidden his view that the compromises and deals being worked out in EU meetings or leaders or ministers need be protected from public scrutiny, by lies if necessary.

"When it becomes serious, you have to lie," he said.

In May 2011, he told a meeting of the federalist European Movement that he often “had to lie” and that eurozone monetary policy should be discussed in “secret, dark debates”.

He also sparked controversy by suggesting that the eurozone economic policy was incompatible with democracy.

“We all know what to do, we just don't know how to get re-elected after we've done it,” Mr Juncker cynically quipped last year.

Mr Juncker was also closely linked to the EU constitution, before the French referendum on it in 2005 he predicted, correctly, that Europe would ignore any popular rejections.

“If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue’,” he said.

Following the No votes in France and the Netherlands, Mr Juncker claimed that in reality voters had actually supported deeper European integration, triggering accusations that the European elite was in denial over public hostility to the EU.

“If we were to add up all the votes of the people who wanted "more Europe" as a yes , then I think we would have had a yes vote,” he said.

Mr Juncker went on to play a leading role in the resurrection of the EU constitution in the form of the Lisbon Treaty and advised Gordon Brown, then Prime Minister, to mislead the British public over "transfers of sovereignty”.

“Of course there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?,” he said of Mr Brown and British calls for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Raised in a working-class family in Luxembourg's rust-belt industrial south, Mr Juncker joined the centre-right Christian Social party the year he finished school, in 1974.

He got his first ministerial job in 1982 and describes himself as having a “red streak” that makes him acceptable to many European socialists.

He was married in 1979 to Christiane Frising.

As a smoker, Mr Juncker has suffered as EU meeting rooms have become smoke free following the introduction of smoking bans and at the height of the eurozone crisis he could sometimes be spotted outside buildings grabbing a quick cigarette.

At the beginning of this year, Mr Juncker was forced to deny that he had an alcohol problem after Jeroen Dijssebloem, the Dutch finance minister, described him as a "heavy drinker".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10874230/Jean-Claude-Juncker-profile-When-it-becomes-serious-you-have-to-lie.html

[Jacque67 7,328]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3666800/Harrow-educated-hedge-fund-manager-won-110MILLION-betting-Britain-vote-Brexit-pound-tumble.html

Were his winnings in sterling???