Our friends the EU ????

Eurocrats blame the euro crisis on Britain and America – obviously

Who is to blame for the eurozone crisis? The governments that ran up the debts? The officials who fudged the criteria so that Italy and Greece could join? The dolts who dreamed up the single currency in the first place? Nope: it's those wicked Anglo-Saxons again.

In Die Welt, the EPP's Elmar Brok claims that the US has launched an economic war against Europe. For those who can't read German, here is a rough summary of his argument. The US ratings agencies, he says, had no conceivable reason to downgrade nine eurozone states last week. What this is really about is a political project aimed at advancing 'Anglo-Saxon interests' in Europe. Americans have been becoming increasingly anti-European, as Mitt Romney's campaign shows. (I know, but that's what he says.) Then again, it's not really their fault, since they've been fed lies by Anglo-Saxon media moguls for decades.

It's tempting to dismiss Elmar as a buffoon, but he is a senior MEP who, among other things, chairs the EU-US interparliamentary group. More to the point, his views are widely shared. The President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, regularly lashes out at the American agencies, and plans to create an EU one instead (as if anyone would believe a word it wrote). Earlier today, the European Commission threatened the agencies with greater regulation including censorship, prompting my colleague Ashley Fox to remark, 'You don't get better weather by turning down the forecast'.

The agencies were far too optimistic in the run-up to the 2008 crash because they trusted the assessments of the EU governments; they can't afford to repeat that mistake. But what's alarming here is not the EU's hostility to the English-speaking peoples, nor yet its distrust of free markets: we're used to both those things. No, what's truly terrifying is the extent to which the Brussels elites have switched off the real world and taken to screaming at the bearers of bad news. When leaders announce that they intend, not to tackle a problem, but to regulate the way it is reported, you sense that the end is near.

Want to bet Obama agrees with them.