Juncker on a power trip

The Guardian has exciting news about Jean-Claude Juncker's vision for the EU as a global power.

Juncker calls on EU to seize chance to become major sovereign power

European commission president sets out vision of how to expand EU’s ‘clout’ on world stage

Fair enough I’d say, it's his job to do the vision thing but how about a plan to get there? 

Firstly he needs a substantial high-level Commission body to sort out what needs to be done and the size, structure and funding of the group must reflect EU ambitions in the global power arena. A series of seminars, discussion papers and conferences should kick the thing off nicely.

A few suggestions though, beginning with global powerhouse universities. The Times has a handy list of the top twenty five universities in the world and of course the EU is represented by Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London, UCL and the LSE. That's a grand start -

- oh hang on - none of those will be EU universities after Brexit will they? In which case Mr Juncker you should probably forget universities for now – as you probably have already.

Here’s another suggestion though. Why not invite Amazon, Google, Alibaba, Apple and Facebook to become EU businesses? The attraction could be a tight and secure regulatory environment with intermediate access to the EU Commission and mostly unfettered access to the very best EU universities global powerhouse experts.

Now for technology. Obviously the EU buys in quite a bit of that from the Far East but how about building some EU powerhouse technology centres to focus on cutting-edge research. Another series of seminars, discussion papers and conferences should kick the thing off nicely - 

- although I must admit here that this global EU powerhouse malarkey is turning out to be more difficult than I thought. Maybe Mrs May should think about leaving.