Telegraph Date: 07 September 2009

All shopping and petrol station receipts in Britain could in future include the amount of VAT or fuel duty that goes directly to Brussels as an "EU tax", according to Jose Manuel Barroso.

The European Commission President said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph the idea of an EU tax will be discussed in the autumn as part of a major rethink about of how European funding is collected.

EUobserver Date: 25 August 2009

Brussels is finalising fresh proposals on European Union immigration policy, including a potentially controversial system of re-distributing refugees and asylum seekers among the 27 member states to lighten the workload of the bloc's border countries.

Both the re-location policy, which could see the transfer of people who land on the shores of Mediterranean countries to other EU states, and asylum policy reform, which could set quotas on the number of refugees for member states, are to be presented in September, Swedish immigration minister Tobias Billstroem has said, according to Agence France Presse.

In the past few weeks the government has done their utmost to assure a worried public that the Lisbon Treaty would not impinge on Irish corporation tax laws. Their efforts have been greatly hampered of course by the honesty of the French, who said that they planned to push for tax harmonisation without delay, and by the leaking of the now-infamous memo written by a senior Irish civil servant which revealed that the Irish government had asked the EU to hold back on unpopular issues (such as tax harmonisation) until the referendum on Lisbon was safely over.

All this has meant that the government has been most vociferous in insisting that our low corporation tax regime is not in danger. Minister for Social Affairs, Martin Cullen, rubbished the idea on RTÉ’s Questions and Answers telling us that “the Lisbon treaty will not affect our veto on taxation” because, he says, establishing a common taxation policy would have to be a unanimous decision.

The Telegraph Date: 14.07.2009

Federalists have been accused of hijacking the official opening of the new European Parliament session after soldiers raised the EU flag to the tune of Europe's official anthem Ode to Joy.

Critics accused them of using the event to uphold the flag and anthem symbols of European Union statehood that were officially dropped after French and Dutch referendum rejections threw out Europe's Constitution in 2005.

Leading the ceremony in Strasbourg, a detachment of combat troops marched to the overture of The Force of Destiny by Verdi, before raising an EU flag twice the size of the national flags around it to a military bugle call.