Category Archives: Elections

A quick guide to the British voting system for the EU elections

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The really short version? It’s utterly rubbish. But this is how it works, courtesy of a short film by the Green Party:

Note: This is not an endorsement of the Green Party. But their logic for preventing BNP leader Nick Griffin from getting a seat does have its merits. I’d prefer it if you researched the parties and their candidates and cast your vote based on who tallies most with your views, but if you must protest vote, with a likely low turnout at the upcoming elections we’re in a situation where votes for the Greens and UKIP are more likely to be the clinchers that will help prevent the fascists from getting a seat than ones for the Tories, Labour or the Lib Dems. (Yes, I think UKIP are more or less a joke party with ill-thought-out policies and some unpleasant undertones to much of their rhetoric, but at least they aren’t Nazis.)

Why voting for a eurosceptic party is a good thing for the EU

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I’ve done a lot of UKIP bashing on this blog over the last six years. I’ve ridiculed and attempted to debunk numerous eurosceptic claims. After all, I think that the idea of European Union (in its broadest possible sense) is a good thing, and I firmly believe that as long as some form of European economic/political organisation exists it is in Britain’s (and every European country’s) best interest to be a part of it. I also hope that, down the line, such international/supranational cooperation can be expanded far beyond Europe’s borders. Nationalism is, for me, an outmoded way of doing business, and detrimental to the best interests of the people of all nations – just as are all exclusionary ideologies, be they racist, sexist, homophobic or whatever. I am an internationalist and a humanist – again, both in their broadest possible sense – and so cannot support what I see as the parochialism of the nationalist/”patriotic” parties of right or left.

However, despite my dislike of UKIP, the BNP and other withdrawalist/anti-EU parties (of which these are the principle two in the UK), anti-EU and eurosceptic voices have a vital role to play.

The makeup of the European Parliament during the last five years has been sorely unrepresentative. Its racial makeup is nowhere close to mirroring that of Europe as a whole, with groups with sizable minorities left with nothing like the percentages of MEPs that one would expect, were the EP to mirror European society. Women are, as in most democratic societies, still hugely under-represented at EU level; there are few openly gay MEPs; few Muslims; only one Roma MEP despite this group being one of the largest and most persecuted of Europe’s minorities.

Eurosceptics – using the term in its broadest sense – are also sorely under-represented. The no votes in France, the Netherlands and Ireland are proof that there is a groundswell of discontent with the present EU system, and this discontent sorely needs to be aired more frequently in the European Parliament. Do a trawl of the blogs and you’ll soon see that even the most pro-EU bloggers will often violently criticise all kinds of aspects of the way the EU currently runs, from the obvious travesties – like the Common Agricultural and Common Fisheries Policies – through to issues of democratic representation (it takes 800,000 Germans to elect one MEP as opposed to just 80,000 Maltese, for example). With the EU still seriously under-reported in almost every member state, and with so few sceptical voices around to form an opposition – one of the most essential elements of any healthy democratic system – little wonder that there is so much public frustration. The worries of the people are not, in the eyes of the people, being addressed.

The EU is currently in a period of crisis. The failure of the 2001 Treaty of Nice to resolve the transition to a union of 25 rather than 15 was followed by the failure of the Constitution and Lisbon Treaty to mop up the mess, yet now the Union is of 27, with yet more queueing up to join. The EU is now a Union of half a billion people, one of the largest and most powerful economic blocs in the world, and yet is working on mechanisms designed for a much, much smaller organisation. Resentment has been building for years – not just among the people, but also among the governments that head up the member states. The Treaty of Nice, the Constitution, the Lisbon Treaty – these were all meant to resolve these tensions, and all have failed.

Even if the Lisbon Treaty does end up coming into force, still countless problems remain unsolved. There are still some member states that long for closer political union, while others desire little more than a trading bloc based on the Common Market; the current system of budget contributions still sees relatively wealthy western European member states receive far more funding than the struggling post-communist newcomers of the East. France, one of the richest member states, still receives a hugely disproportionate chunk of Common Agricultural Policy money, while farmers in Romania struggle by on little more than a subsistence level. And all the while, there remains no consensus on where the EU is heading – on what the EU is actually for.

Over the next five years – Lisbon Treaty or no Lisbon Treaty – these problems are all going to have to be addressed, and it is the MEPs who we are meant to be electing in a couple of weeks’ time who are going to have to scrutinise the plans and proposals that are put forward to resolve them. If the European Parliament is made up of a majority of unthinking europhiles, of fervent internationalists, then this scrutiny is not going to be intensive enough. Imagine a House of Commons made up of 80% Labour or Conservative MPs. That would not be healthy for democracy, but more importantly it would not be the kind of check that is necessary to prevent bad legislation and bad constitutional reforms from being passed. But with the lack of eurosceptic voices in the European Parliament, that is effectively the situation we have at the moment.

We sorely need more critical voices if the EU is ever going to become the kind of genuinely positive force that it could – and should – be. We need more MEPs like Danish eurosceptic Jens-Peter Bonde (now sadly retired, though still active in the field of EU politics), and even like UKIP leader Nigel Farage – intelligent, sharp critics of the project who can home in on flaws and highlight things that the EU is doing wrong. Yes, they may have a tendency to over-egg the pudding, to play to the gallery, and to blow things out of all proportion to make petty political points – but they also highlight genuine concerns and, often, genuine problems.

If we don’t know the problems – and if these problems are not brought into the light – then abuses and mistakes will simply continue unnoticed. Until, that is – as British MPs have found during the last few weeks of the expenses scandal – something happens that shows just how bad the problem has got, and brings the entire system to the brink of collapse.

If you don’t listen to criticism, you deserve to fail. So though I may not agree with the anti-EU brigade, and though I will continue to mock them when they make mistakes and call them when they make unjustifiable claims, they have an essential part to play. They are the EU’s opposition, and in any respectable political system a vocal opposition is something to be encouraged, not suppressed. Even if they are wrong.

UKIP’s “Britain paying the EU £40 million a day” claim vs the REAL costs of UK EU membership

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This has been on various UKIP election leaflets, so it’s evidently a claim they’re proud of – but does it stand up?

Simple maths tells us that Britain paying £40 million a day to the EU would mean an annual contribution of £14.6 billion. However, the most recent Treasury Report on the UK’s EU budget contributions (PDF) shows the following GROSS figures:

2005 – £12.5 billion
2006 – £12.4 billion
2007 – £12.5 billion
2008 – £13.7 billion (estimated)

£13.7 billion divided by 365 = £37.5 million, so UKIP are, at the very least, rounding up by £2.5 million a day. Not much to round up by? That works out as £912,500,000 a year – I hope UKIP won’t be that out with their sums if they ever get near power…

But what about the rebate? What about the EU funds that are paid back to the UK in the form of things like the European Regional Development Fund, European Social Fund and the like? What’s the NET contribution? (Again from the most recent Treasury report)

2005 – £3.6 billion
2006 – £3.9 billion
2007 – £4.6 billion
2008 – £3.6 billion (estimate)

UKIP deliberately using gross rather than net to make the situation seem worse is to be expected, of course, but still – let’s be generous and take the highest figure of £4.6 billion – that’s still a lot of money, right? It may only work out as £12.6 million a day, but that’s still a lot of money.

Well, yes. But big figures are nothing without context, so let’s see how much the UK government spends on other things:UK government expenditure breakdown, shamelessly leeched from Wikipedia

Would you look at that? The UK may be forking out a net figure of around £4 billion a year for EU membership, but at the same time we’re having to pay £31 billion a year merely to service the INTEREST on our debt. That’s not *pay off* our debt – just keep up with the interest. Christ!

In other words, the EU costs us 7.75 times LESS than it does to keep the international bailiffs from the door. (And that £31 billion was BEFORE the most recent round of government borrowing, and before the collapse of sterling, both of which will have hugely escalated the figure for this year, as and when it’s released.)

So, £31 billion in interest payments, for which we see no return whatsoever, versus £4 billion in payments to the EU, from which even its harshest critics must admit that we get *some* benefits – even if they will only admit to cheaper mobile phone charges or ease of travel. I don’t know about you, but I’d say that’s not too bad a deal, in comparison.

Update, October 2010:

If you’re interested in this post, you may also be interested in:

- What are the economic costs of the EU?
- What percentage of laws come from the EU?
- Why legislating and regulating at EU level is almost always a good thing
- The dishonesty of the EU debate

MP expenses, political corruption and the European elections

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Corruption starts here by Flickr user IntangibleArts (CC)(Alternate post title: Westminster MPs: Not as corrupt as UKIP MEPs…)

The last few days of revelations about Westminster MPs’ taking advantage of lax expenses rules – many of the allegations decidedly sexed-up, a number of them mistaken, but nonetheless indicative of a long-running problem with the way politics is conducted in the UK and elsewhere – have unsurprisingly been hitting the opinion polls hard.

As such, old predictions of UK voting intentions at the European Parliamentary elections, now just three weeks away, should now be entirely discounted. The latest polls shows both Tories and Labour taking a -4% hit (and that was conducted a few days ago – since when a whole bunch of new stories have appeared about alleged Conservative abuses).

The only likely impact of this constant stream of stories about Westminster MPs seemingly being on the make – especially coming as it does so soon before an election – is a major boost for the smaller parties, both through reduced turnout with a public now even more disillusioned with politics than they were before, and through misguided protest votes. Hell, even old Tory grandee (and bogeyman of the British left) Norman Tebbit has explicitly warned right-wingers not to vote for his party at the European elections to register their disgust.

This is, of course, entirely missing the point that if you want to punish the actual transgressors in this expenses scandal then to vote out MEPs is rather like spanking your niece because your nephew stole your wallet. “Ha! I’m punishing someone who’s got nothing to do with the wrong that’s been committed! THAT’ll learn them!”

Most likely beneficiaries of all this? Well, disgruntled Labour voters are likely to shunt either to the BNP or to the Greens, while disgruntled Tories are more likely to head to the other major centre-right eurosceptic party – often a leech on Tory votes in European polls in any case – UKIP. A party its hard not to see the strongly anti-EU Tebbit having a great deal of sympathy for in any case, and which was – until this little furore – likely to lose a good number of MEPs at the upcoming elections thanks to a combination of David Cameron (largely at the behest of Shadow Foreign Secretary and ex-Tory leader William Hague) taking the Tories in a more eurosceptic direction again and the loss of the Kilroy-Silk factor, which so boosted their media coverage and vote in the 2004 elections.

Ashley Mote and Tom WiseBut, lest we forget, UKIP is a party with only one competent elected politician – its articulately populist, platitude-spouting leader Nigel Farrage. It also has a tendency to pick candidates, like MEPs Ashley “convicted benefit fraudster” Mote and Tom “charged with money laundering and false accounting” Wise, who put even the worst Westminster politicians to shame. (And that’s not to mention the on-going infighting that has plagued the party since its inception, including ongoing allegations of seemingly institutional corruption.)

Yep, UKIP’s pound symbol logo does seem rather appropriate…

Then again, to be fair, a vote for the Tories in the European elections is a wasted one anyway. Having pulled out of the EPP, the largest centre-right group in the European Parliament, in order to have any influence at all in Brussels and Strasbourg they need to join another political group (as without EP group membership, securing the all-important committee places where all the real work goes on, Tory MEPs will be effectively powerless). The only other viable existing centre-right EP group? Independence/Democracy – leader? One Nigel Farrage… Which means the Tories won’t be able to join it, which means they’re stuck on the fringes with other outcasts like the former members of the right-wing Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty Group – such charmers as Jean-Marie Le Pen, Alessandra Mussolini and assorted other fascists.

The simple solution? Check out Votematch.co.uk to get an idea of which parties have policies you might like (as these are often rather different at European level), then check your local candidates for the European Parliament, visit the invaluable Votewatch.eu to check the performance of your local sitting MEPs, and cast your vote based on the character, policies and dedication the of candidates the parties are putting up.

No, you can’t vote for an individual candidate in the European elections (an horrific flaw in the system that needs rapid alteration), but you can make a moderately informed choice about the likely value those on offer are going to provide to their constituents. Have a poor attendance record, like UKIP MEPs Godfrey Bloom, Trevor Coleman and John Whittaker, the Lib Dems’ Baroness Nicholson, the Tories’ Jonathan Evans and Caroline Jackson or Labour’s Eluned Morgan? Think hard about whether they’re worth your vote.

Me? As ever, I’m not endorsing any party. In fact I’m still sorely tempted not to vote at all, thanks purely to the British electoral system for EP elections preventing me from endorsing an individual candidate whose jib I like the cut of. But that way, thanks again to the awfulness of the party list proportional representation system that the UK uses for these things, lies more seats for the likes of UKIP and even (possibly) the BNP. With the Tories out of the EPP, to vote for some sensible MEPs to represent the UK is essential lest the country become a laughing stock. The question now is how to play the system. And for that, the greater the turnout, the less the chance of the smaller, more extremist parties getting representation. I may not like the bigger parties either, but at least they’re (usually) not as mad.

In short: No matter what your political outlook, your vote is important. But your vote is for the next five years, not the last five days. Don’t let short-term disgust with an unpleasant scandal affect which box you tick when that vote is for members of an institution who have nothing to do with the scandal in question. Base your vote instead on the performance of those politicians and what you want to see happen at that institution – because the European Parliament, no matter how much national politicians like to use it as proof of their domestic support, is a very different beast to that in Westminster. Want to punish corrupt Westminster MPs? There’s a general election less than a year away. You’ll have your chance then. That’s the way democracy works.

/stating what should be the obvious…

On the upcoming EU elections

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Interest in and turnout for elections is in pretty much direct proportion to how important and likely to have an impact the public perceive them to be. So European election campaigners should be discussing why the elections matter – and come up with some convincing arguments along those lines, because I haven’t heard any yet.

The majority of people don’t know what MEPs actually do, or what influence they can actually have. For most people, the answer to the latter (and probably the former, thanks to all those stories about MEPs turning up to sign the register and then buggering off again) is “very little”.

In return, EU citizens should be demanding that the EP has more power to influence legislation – and to propose it.

In any case, let’s face it, the shape of the next Commission is going to have a far larger impact on the way the EU is going to work over the next few years… Once the machinations around those appointments start kicking off, then I start getting interested again. (Unless it’s Barroso again, in which case I start screaming in frustration…)

My complaint’s primarily with the process and institutions. I don’t feel that the European Parliament has enough influence, but my major gripe is the UK’s system for electing MEPs (multi-member constituencies on a party list system, meaning you can only vote for a party, not a candidate).

To be honest, because of that I couldn’t care less about the policies of the various parties/groups. Their policies don’t matter – they’re only MEPs. The real decisions are taken by the national governments in Council and elsewhere, and the real policies drawn up by the civil servants of national governments before being passed to the Commission.

The EP has only a small part to play in the way the EU impacts on our lives – a more important one than many believe, but still not important enough to get overly excited about, as far as I’m concerned.

I’m quite happy to be convinced otherwise, if anyone wants to try.

This post is made up of parts of a comment I left at the bottom of this post, if it seems familiar…

On party politics

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Originally posted as a comment to a post at the Local Democracy blog, a brief summary of my dislike of the British system of government/elections. The prime reason why I am still not sure if I’m going to bother to vote in the upcoming EU elections is precisely for the reasons stated below – I don’t like any UK political party. At general and local elections it’s easy – I vote for a candidate. The way EU elections work in the UK, I won’t get that choice when voting for an MEP – I only get to vote for a party.

Anyway, here’s my brief summary of what I don’t like about party politics:

I continue to hate party politics with a passion. Even ignoring the distortions that have come about thanks to whipping and politicians’ reliance on party funds, Labour and Conservatives alike (and arguably the Lib Dems too) really aren’t parties in the old sense any more anyway. There’s no real unifying ideology, just vast coalitions with hugely disparate, often contradictory beliefs, brought together merely by the pursuit of power. What we need is not party politics, but a return to factionalism – lots more smaller, focussed groupings based on clearly-stated beliefs, aims and policy positions. That would give voters a broader, clearer choice, and give a far better indication of just what it is the public is voting for at elections.

But, of course, with first past the post such a system will never come about. It needs a decent system of proportional representation – something hard enough to sell at the best of times, let alone the day after an Israeli general election…

And for proportional representation knockers, my preferred method is something like the single transferable vote system. It’s got a few problems, for sure, but fewer than FPTP in my books. Plus it’s got a good track record.

(For more on electoral reform – including a handy explanation of why Israel’s system of proportional representation is not *ahem* representative of PR as a whole, for when you see Israeli election chaos used in anti-PR arguments – check out the long-running and rather good Make My Vote Count blog.)

EU blogs and EU elections

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Just like busses, you wait ages for some promising new EU-focussed bloggers, and then 81 turn up at once… (And, judging from their photos, they aren’t all youngsters, as I was expecting, and there are even some GIRLS! Shocking! Though once again there appears to be a definite under-representation of non-white faces among their number, which is a shame…)

At any rate, there certainly seems to be a fair amount of enthusiasm for this year’s EU elections on the interweb (see also the promising-looking EU Debate 2009 blog from Cafe Babel) – but will there be any in the real world? And what are these elections going to be all about anyway? Will the economy be on the mend by the summer? It’s doubtful. And in tough economic times, aspirations of working with people in other countries generally take a back seat to knee-jerk protectionism, as is currently being witnessed in the UK with the Lindsay Oil Refinery dispute (after all, there wasn’t so much outrage over the influx of Polish builders at the height of the property boom a couple of years back, was there?).

Convincing sceptical voters of the benefits of European co-operation can be tough even in the good times, so ready do people seem to be to believe the worst. In the bad?

European elections: UK voting intentions

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From the invaluable UK Polling Report, we have the first UK voting intention figures for the 2009 European elections, released in today’s Sunday Telegraph.

The results, plus changes from the 2004 EU elections, are as follows:

Conservatives 35% (+8)
Labour 29% (+6)
Liberal Democrats 15% (+/-0)
UKIP 7% (-9)
Green 5% (-1)
British National Party 4% (-1)
Scottish National Party / Plaid Cwmru 4%

As UK Polling Report notes, “this would lead to the Conservatives winning 30 seats (up 3), Labour 24 (up 5), the Liberal Democrats 9 (down 2), the SNP and PC one each and UKIP 4 (down 8). The Greens would lose both their seats, while the BNP would fail to secure one.”

Polling stationPlease note that the poll was carried out (between the 6th and 8th January) by a web-based polling organisation (YouGov) founded by a former Tory pollster, commissioned by the Tory eurosceptic campaign group Global Vision in partnership with the Tory-linked “small government” campaign group the Taxpayers’ Alliance – and the results were first published in the staunchly eurosceptic, Tory-leaning Telegraph. Whether this means that the questions were loaded and the results skewed is hard to tell, as I haven’t seen the full results or the questions asked. The sample was made up of 2,157 adults.

It is also unclear whether a vote for newly launched pan-EU political party Libertas was an option – or how many people said that they would not be voting at all. Considering turn-out for EU elections in the UK has averaged about 30% in the last two, if the figures above are only based on those who will definitely be voting, the final sample size could be as few as 650 people (30% of 2,157) – statisticians will be able to tell you if that’s statistically significant for a UK population of 61 million. Either way, only 1% is unaccounted for in the above figures, and I very much doubt we’ll see a 99% turnout.

The dramatic drop in UKIP support (with further drops for fellow eurosceptic parties the Greens and the BNP) is one of the biggest points of interest. How to account for it? A pro-Tory bias in the questions from two Conservative-leading organisations conducting the poll, or a general collapse in UKIP support thanks to the party being, well, a bit rubbish? As Polling Report notes,

Back in 2004 YouGov included minor parties like UKIP in the main question prompt and, as a result, ended up over-stating the level of UKIP support – it will be interesting to see exactly how this question was prompted. Either way, how well UKIP will do is a hard one to predict. At the moment they get practically zero publicity in the mainstream media, so a huge drop in support is not a particular surprise. At the last European elections they received a lot of publicity because of Robert Kilroy-Silk, something that won’t be a factor this time… Accorded to the Sunday Telegraph report 10% of those who say they would vote Tory in a general election would vote UKIP in a European election, which implies that straight voting intention questions were also asked.

There were also some more general questions asked about the UK’s relationship with the EU which, as reported in the Telegraph, reveal the following:

16 per cent of voters want Britain simply to withdraw from the EU, while 48 per cent would like to see a much looser relationship, with the government taking back powers from Brussels and ending the supremacy of the European Court of Justice over British law.

Added together this makes 64 per cent in favour of weakening Britain’s ties with the EU, compared with just 22 per cent in favour of keeping the UK’s current full membership including the Lisbon Treaty, which was passed by parliament without a referendum.

Much worth noting there. The mention of “taking back powers from Brussels” (a key Tory promise under David Cameron, though it’s unclear quite how he could achieve this) would suggest a pro-Tory bias to the questioning. The mention of the European Court of Justice is also odd – this is an institution rarely explicitly brought up in the UK EU debate (in fact, it’s more often the non-EU European Court of Human Rights that is bandied about by press and politicians alike), though “the supremacy of European [law]” is a favourite buzz phrase of the eurosceptic right. Please also note the final part of that second paragraph: if “passed by parliament without a referendum” was included in the poll’s own questioning, that’s almost certainly going to result in some pretty hefty result-skewing, as by all accounts the British public was overwhelmingly in favour of a Lisbon Treaty referendum, while remaining overwhelmingly ignorant of its contents.

One final statistic of interest, from the Telegraph:

Some 45 per cent of voters, meanwhile, believe none of the three main political parties adequately reflects their views on Britain’s future relations with the EU

That sounds about right – and you can count me in among that 45%. As EU elections in the UK are based on a party list form of proportional representation, I will not have the option of voting for an individual candidate come June – which is what I usually base my vote on. Given the option of ONLY voting for a party, I find myself genuinely stumped. Indeed, it’s increasingly looking like the upcoming European elections will well be the first elections of any kind for which I have been eligible to vote at which I will reluctantly find myself abstaining.

Yes, you read that right: Despite being one of the most engaged and aware people in the British Isles when it comes to the EU – and arguably one of the most prominent and persistent online advocates for the UK’s continued involvement with the European integration – I may not bother to vote in the EU elections. That’s just about as damning an indictment of the way the EU currently works as you can get.

Libertas launches

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So, hot on the heels of its success getting a “No” in the Irish Lisbon Treaty referendum, Libertas has today relaunched as a pan-European political party. Look – it’s got a shiny new website and Twitter, Facebook and Flickr accounts and everything!

“If people want a strong and healthy Europe that is democratic and answerable to them, they should vote for a Libertas candidate”

All very well and good. Democracy, eh? Yep – I could go for that. Strength? Health? All sounds good. Because they’re platitudinous truisms. The same rubbish could be spouted by any and all parties.

So, what about the details of the new party’s policies and attitudes? What sort of people will be standing as candidates?

“A detailed policy document will be published in the coming months, and candidates’ names will be unveiled over a similar time frame.”

Ah… So, erm… This is a party with no policies and no candidates. Now seems a good time to repeat my comments about Libertas to a wider audience:

1) We don’t yet know how many candidates (if any) Libertas will be running, or where
2) We don’t know what their campaign is going to focus on
3) We don’t know what impact (if any) the shift from Republican to Democrat will have on them considering the allegations of their close ties to the current US administration

A genuinely pan-European pro-reform (but not anti-EU) political party could be exactly what’s needed. But there remain far too many unknowns about both Ganley and his organisation to be able to make any sensible judgements about it just yet. What is known of Ganley and his business dealings hardly makes me overly optimistic that his motives are entirely altruistic.

Having said that, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Libertas’ pro-democracy, pro-reform, pro-integration rhetoric is actually belief (the rumoured involvement of Jens-Peter Bonde is a promising sign, for example) – though I remain sceptical about the group’s motives, largely due to a combination of the secrecy that still surrounds its funding, the fact that its arguments against the Lisbon Treaty in the Irish referendum campaign largely consisted of nationalistic ones about Ireland losing influence, and thanks to most other “pro-reform” organisations in the past having turned out instead to be anti-EU. A reformist party I could get behind. Another anti-EU one in disguise? No thanks.

The clincher will be where Libertas decides to run. If it avoids putting candidates up against existing anti-EU/eurosceptic parties like UKIP or Denmark’s June Movement, that’ll be a good indication that the “reform” rhetoric is just fluff. If it DOES run against anti-EU parties, expect their share of the vote to go down. Which could, short-term, reduce the number of eurosceptics in the European Parliament – but which would, longer-term, simply lead to the current resentment continuing to grow, so that by the NEXT EP elections we might be ready for some serious changes.

I may be being unfair. The new party’s Facts page does, after all, tick most of my boxes:

“Libertas is not a Eurosceptic organisation… Our vision is of a united Europe, which recognises and respects the right of citizens and nations to choose their own destinies, but which encourages all Europeans to reach across the borders of nationality, language, and culture to participate in and invigorate a Union which equips us to meet the challenges of this next phase of European History.”

I hope I’m being unfair in doubting them. If Libertas is what it professes to be, it could be just the medicine that the EU needs to fix the ongoing stagnation and rot. But when it comes to EU reform organisations, far too many have turned out to be little more than anti-EU talking shops in disguise for me to accept this as face value just yet.

Euro elections 09: “Bring it on”?

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Really? Are you really sure, when talking about anti-EU mobilisation for next year’s elections, that you want to borrow the words of President Bush, speaking about Iraqi militants attacking US troops way back in 2003? You don’t think that might be, erm… tempting fate just a little? Just a tad unfortunate, perhaps?

And so my hopes for these elections continue to diminish. I’ve yet to hear any senior UK party figures (bar the single-issue UKIP and racist maniacs in the BNP) make any mention of the things. And the likelihood of these being the first elections in which I have been entitled to vote in which I decide not to bother rises by the day.

Then again, a surge in the anti-EU / eurosceptic vote could actually be a good thing. It may just – if it is sufficiently EU-wide, and not just among the usual suspects of the UK, Denmark, and so on – finally make these idiots we’ve got running things realise that, erm… the EU needs something rather more than half-hearted publicity drives to boost turnout and more shoddy compromise treaties. It might just, if we’re lucky, make them realise that the organisation’s in the midst of a serious identity crisis – one that will take some genuinely radical changes in attitude and approach to sort out.

I doubt it, but live in hope, eh?

The failures of EU democracy

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So, will the European Citizens’ Consultation forum, launched yesterday in a variety of EU languages, actually prove a success?

Based on past attempts, I don’t hold out much hope – these things are usually either ignored (remember Timothy Garton-Ash’s European Story initiative? No? Precisely…), or quickly swamped by foaming-at-the-mouth British eurosceptics making “witty” comments and generally making their fellow countrymen look like a bunch of rude idiots (read the comments at Margot Wallstrom’s blog or on the Debate Europe forum recently?)

So, which is it going to be – ignored or hijacked by the anti-EU brigade?

Pessimist? Moi? Well, after five years of vague attempts to encourage constructive online discussion of the EU (albeit with precisely zero resources), and having witnessed the EU-focussed blogosphere expand by only a tiny fraction during that time despite several concerted efforts, I have good reason to be.

The EU, you see, is very, very dull and very, very complicated. Dull and complicated things are not the most attractive at the best of times. (And yes, I have indeed noted this before. Many, many times.)

How to make people want to discuss the EU more? Simple: give them some indication that their input is valuable. At the moment, there is none: “Come vote for an MEP (usually on a party list system) of whom you’ve never heard to go to Brussels and Strasbourg to vote on things over which they have little control (being proposed by the Commission and easily vetoed by the Council) and about which you’ll never hear (unless they make the tabloids)!” – Hardly the most rousing call to increased democratic engagement, is it? Yet that’s all the peoples of Europe have currently got.

Little wonder that European elections – and referendums – always end up so parochial. And little wonder that the EU itself continues to inspire so little interest among the people it supposedly exists to benefit.

Lessons from Scotland

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On 25th July 1603 King James VI of Scotland was crowned King James I of England, sparking many of the ongoing resentments about Scottish power in England and English power in Scotland that are continuing to this day.

On 25th July 2008, Labour lost to the Scottish Nationalist Party in the Glasgow East by-election, giving the Scottish independence movement a handy boost.

1603, resentment of influential Scots; 2008, resentment of influential Scots.

405 years with the same rulers – and 301 years since the Act of Union brought the two countries together as one – and yet Scottish/English national identity is as strong as ever. The only difference? We no longer invade and kill each other when we get miffed.

Lesson learned? Political union is great.

Labour’s dismal electoral strategy

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(Originally published on The Sharpener)

So Labour have lost the Crewe and Natwich election, the Tories winning their first by-election in 26 years. Huzzah.

At last Labour seem to be getting the kind of kicking they’ve long deserved – a kicking I’m hoping might finally shake them out of the complacency that’s seen a supposedly left-wing, pro-EU government with no viable opposition and a massive majority in the Commons (that could have seen it pass pretty much any legislation it wanted during the last decade from joining the Euro to scrapping the idiocy of taxing state pensions and benefits, raising the rate of the tax-free allowance to renationalising the railways) sit back on its fat, hairy arse and do bugger all significant for its last two terms in office.

I’m also very much hoping this is the end to the pathetic Labour “we hate posh people, you hate posh people – come on, vote based on outmoded class antagonisms, petty misplaced jealousies and negatives, negatives, negatives, never positives” electoral strategy. They tried it in London with Boris, and it failed dismally; they’ve tried it in Crewe and it’s failed even more. Serves them right – replace “posh people” with “darkies” and all they’re doing is repackaging the BNP’s electoral strategy from the 70s/80s. Deeply unpleasant – I agree with David Cameron 100% on that one. (Not a phrase you’ll often find me using…)

And yes, yes I do say this in part because by Labour’s standards I’d count as posh. They’re effectively saying “piss off, chum – we don’t want your vote”, and rather neglecting to realise that in the process they’re saying the same thing to all the New Labour-voting middle classes that switched en masse from blue to red in 97, giving them a decade in Number 10. The fucking idiots.

Like it or not, parties are dependant on the middle classes to gain power – part of the reason why both main parties are so blandly indistinguishable these days, because us middle classes all shop equally in Habitat and Ikea and aspire to the same blandly inoffensive faux-original, entirely interchangeable approach from our politicians as we do from our flat-pack interior design. To stick two fingers up to the middle classes ahead of an election is going to do about as much good to your chances as being televised at a children’s party naked and smothered in jelly while raping a teddy bear.

(It’s also perhaps worth reminding press/blog pundits that this was a local election. To ascribe the defeat entirely to either the apparent growing disillusionment with Brown/Labour or the jitters in the economy (as everyone everywhere seems to be doing) is unfair – it ignores the central problem that the local Labour candidate was an arse. Based on every bit of footage I’ve seen of her, and every interview on the radio and in the papers, Dunwoody Jr isn’t even close to being a shadow of her late mum, and repeatedly came across as a lary, unpleasant cow throughout the whole process. If you want to win elections, pick people who are actually worth voting for to fight them for you – not just someone who happens to have the right surname. It’s simple.)