Be careful who you choose as your friend.

You can’t choose your parents.  But you can choose your friends.  So do so wisely and carefully.   

Perhaps someone should have whispered that in the ear of Leo Eric Varadkar the Taoiseach.  It seems his new best friend, Jean-Claude Juncker, was in fact, no such thing.   

It now appears that, rather than reward Ireland for having stepped up to the barricades in the EUs attempt to do a lot of damage to the UK for having had the audacity to vote to leave the EU, Mr Varadkar is going to have a great deal of explaining to do with the news that the European Commission is pressing ahead with its plan to abolish national vetoes over a swathe of taxation issues thereby removing one of the last major hurdles towards an EU super state with an EU-wide tax policy.   

Given the Irish economy is built on having a competitive corporation tax rate, it is going to be in trouble.  Big trouble.   

Their adventurous taxation system is the bed rock on which its recent success has been built.    

Of course, the EUs goal isn’t to make every EU state competitive.  Quite the opposite.  We know the EU hates competition.  Which is why they are so keen to ham string the whole of the EU with their long term “project”, their word, not mine, of having a single system of taxation system for the whole of the EU.   

That is 500m people and all EU businesses having their taxes set, (and collected too), not by an elected chancellor of the exchequer whose government you can vote out of office but by un-elected EU civil servants.  

Ireland will be wondering why they were so stupid.   

And yet our own Remainers that don’t accept the democratic mandate given by the people wish us to be driven further down the road to the United States of Europe.  They are not stupid.  They are the extremists.