I have joined the team of commenters and MPs and others over at Dale & Co, Iain Dale’s new current affairs mega blog, providing some of the best political, media, social and sports commentary on the net.

Here’s my first contribution, about (what else?) the Eurozone:

The point, of course, is that further EU federalization enforces further un-democratization. So what if national parliaments in the countries which perforce form the new so-called Vanguard step out into the bright light and vote to strip themselves of power? The ensuing Vanguard-level structures thereby might be proclaimed as legitimate. But they’ll enjoy at best only a trite, fleeting, formal legitimacy; they can have no intrinsic, sustainable, substantive legitimacy.

The net result? A transfer of substantive power and sovereignty to an EU uber-elite of unelected and for all practical purposes unaccountable politico-technocratic autocracy, many of whom will be former Marxist friends of Joschka Fischer. Many of us might see that as a bug. For the Fischers of this world it’s the main feature…

… As the Fischer piece helpfully makes clear at the start, the Vanguard vision builds on three explicit principles: (a) greater (sic) stability, brought about by (b) financial transfers which (c) are done in the name of mutual solidarity.

The whole project therefore rests on the final one: mutual solidarity. And this is where Fischer’s youthful extreme Marxist instincts bubble back to the surface.

What he is saying is that the people/regions who create wealth in Europe are nothing but cows to be milked for the benefit of anyone who needs it. Solidarity is a one-way street. Even if the recipients of solidarity don’t deserve it – nay, especially if they don’t deserve it – they get it anyway.

Hmmm. That idea sounds … familiar:

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour … after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! (K Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875)

Important and unfathomable issues affecting the highest principles of governance, democracy and morality as evolved in Europe for the past 400 years or so are coming our way fast

Quick! Get out the microscope, to study where in Whitehall the contingency planning for these momentous upheavals is being done...