Category Archives: Misc

The EU’s new “president” and “foreign minister”

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So, it’s looking like it’s lightweight, little-known Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy for the President of the European Council, and lightweight, little-known Baroness Ashton (current UK European Commissioner, Peter Mandelson’s almost invisible replacement) for the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

Two no-marks, for two jobs that many have claimed are among the most powerful in the world.

Does anyone seriously believe that Van Rompuy has what it takes to impose his will over the likes of Sarkozy, Merkel and Berlusconi in Council meetings?

Does anyone seriously believe that *anyone* is going to take Baroness Ashton seriously, a woman who’s been at the Commission for only a year, and was unqualified even for that? (See also…)

The Presidency of the European Council has been described by many as “President of the EU”, with many imagining that because of this its holder will have powers akin to that of the US President.

The High Representative for Foreign Affairs has likewise been talked up as “EU Foreign Minister”, meaning many take it to be akin to the US Secretary of State.

But where America gets Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, we get Andy Pandy and Looby Loo.

Yet more proof of where the real power lies in the EU: Not in EU institutions or the corridors of Brussels, but with the governments of the member states. For it is the heads of the member state governments who have agreed this pair of no-marks – and the only explanation I can think of is that the governments of the member states want these two new roles to be as powerless and unimportant as possible, so as to maintain their own power.

So much for the Lisbon Treaty ushering in the end of national sovereignty and the dawn of an EU superstate. With these two appointments, the EU has been effectively neutered as a state-like world power. Eurosceptics can rest easy in their beds.

Update: See also initial reactions from Julien Frisch (“a massive disgrace”) and Jon Worth (“I am astounded”)

This blog is six years old

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And I missed its birthday thanks to, well, being in a bit of a blogging lull at the moment.

Anyway, 5th March 2003: that’s when I started this place – on a basic Blogspot account with a standard template, long before such wonders as WordPress existed and handy tools like RSS feeds and trackbacks had become widespread, and at a time when I wasn’t aware of a single other political blog (though I must have been aware that they existed, as I remember feeling that 2003 was far too late to get into this blogging game to hope to have any kind of impact).

The first post (with most of the links now broken, as that was in the days when few sites gave their articles permanent URLs) can be found here. The first paragraph ever written on this blog – surprisingly – still largely stands:

This blog will contain the musings of a one-time Eurosceptic turned pro-European. Turned largely by the inanity of the innumerable Eurosceptic rantings. However, there will be few cases of rampant Europhilia – the zeal of the convert has not overwhelmed me. The arguments will be mostly balanced, and stupid claims from both sides will be equally vilified.

And now for the next six years – hopefully full of the long-promised increase of articles providing historical context to current debates, as well as some of the same old stuff.

The trouble is, you see, that the EU hasn’t progressed AT ALL in the six years I’ve been writing about it. I’ve been over all the arguments countless times, and they’re all still the same. Take this post from November 2004, for example. It covers all the bases: the EU’s identity crisis post-Cold War and enlargement and Europe’s role in the world, eurosceptics sniping from the sidelines, the fall-out from the Iraq war’s impact on EU-US relations, Britain’s relationship with both, the EU Constitution (that (d)evolved into the Lisbon Treaty) and the need for major EU reform. Go through the archives, there’s scores of similar posts, many of which could have been written last week – or at any point in the last decade, so little has the EU progressed since the run-up to the Treaty of Nice back in the late 1990s.

Little wonder, then, that I’m finding it hard to drum up much enthusiasm at the moment – but genuine wonder that I’ve managed to stick it out for so long. After all, as I’ve repeatedly noted over the years, if the EU could be summed up with one handy phrase it would be this: incomprehensible and boring as hell.

“A week is a long time in politics”, they say. Not when it comes to the EU, it’s not. Hell, the last decade has seen so little progress, ten years may as well have been a week.

Dear “Raivo Pommer”

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FUCK OFF ALREADY.

Seriously. This is getting really annoying. I’ve already blacklisted several IP addresses from you but you somehow keep getting through. I don’t know what you’re trying to say, nor do I care. No comments you leave on this site will stay in place for more than an hour or two anyway, so what’s the point?

Grrr…

Dear everyone else – apologies. Annoying German spam problems… (At least, I assume it’s spam – I don’t read German. Bloody annoying, at any rate.)

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.7 Beta 2

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If you spot anything weird, let me know – I’ve been long overdue an update on this place, as I was running it on WordPress 1.3 up to now (WordPress 2 used to break some of the fancier bits of this theme). As it’s been so long, I’ve almost certainly broken something…

The EU in 2008

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A little something from me over at Our Kingdom. Looking at the possible impact of the US and Russian presidential elections on the EU and UK in 2008.

Oh, and while I’m checking in, yay for John McCain! I like John McCain. He may be wrong on a number of issues, but I like him nonetheless. Plus his name’s very similar to that of one of the all-time great movie action heroes, which can’t be a bad thing.

Again, apologies for lack of posting. This should all change next week, I hope. Along with a fresh install of the blog and a design overhaul, necessitated by those bastard spammers having compromised everything. (A shame, as I rather like the current design, but still…)

State-sanctioned mob justice, don’t you just love it?

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Pensioner, 83, notches up ASBO:

“Police said Mr Hughes, of Vane Lane, Coggeshall, Essex, had not been convicted of any child sex offence. But magistrates had decided to use civil anti-social behaviour laws after police received a number of complaints about him.”

Welcome to Britain in the 21st century. To be branded a paedophile, and to have both your name and the street on which you live broadcast across the newswires, all you need is for your neighbours not to like you very much. No kiddie-fiddling required – but torch-wielding lynchmobs almost guaranteed.

And here we all are complaining about the insanity of the Sudanese courts…

So, are the Tories going to have the guts to offer up a policy overturning the glorious summary “justice” of ASBOs and, you know, perhaps going back to the traditions of innocent until proven guilty and the rule of law that used to be taken for granted prior to the Blair years? We’ve had some promising rhetoric from Cameron on ID Cards (though not so much, that I’m aware of, on the database state) – what are they going to do about the other Labour-introduced injustices of modern Britain? Or are they doing too well in the polls to care any more?

25 million benefit records lost? Roll on ID cards!

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What more can you say? That’s a cock up involving almost half the UK population’s confidential financial details. The names, children’s names, addresses, national insurance numbers and bank details of 25 million people not just compromised, but lost without a trace.

Christ alive… That takes some kind of genuine, extra-special genius.

Just how crap is this country? Can’t we do anything competently any more?

Update: On a related note, I forgot, from earlier -

GPs’ fears over medical records database: “Six out of 10 family doctors are reluctant to upload patients’ medical records on to a national electronic database… GPs said they feared medical records would not remain confidential if they were put on to the database”

MoD system: ‘unmitigated disaster’: “It’s behind schedule; there are claims that much of it doesn’t work and there are questions too over whether the tax-payer is getting value for money”

And, most entertainingly considering the government’s latest cock-up – GPs to face £5,000 fine if laptop stolen: “GPs face the prospect of being fined up to £5,000 if their laptops containing confidential patient care records are stolen from their vehicles… Leaving laptops with patient data in their cars was tantamount to breaking data protection principles and should attract criminal punishment, an influential parliamentary body was told”

Brown’s only error:

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Not ruling out an election sooner.

This insane hyperbole (“humiliating retreat”? “cling to office”? “extraordinary indecision and extraordinary weakness”? You what?) shows just how worried the Tories still are. Yes, Cameron made a storming speech at the conference the other day, and yes they’ve had a big boost in the polls over the last week or so.

But the one question the advocates of an autumn general election have singularly failed to answer is: “why?”

There are two reasons to have a general election: 1) The government is coming to the end of its legally-limited five year term in office, and 2) The government no longer has a sufficient majority to see legislation through the House of Commons. That’s it.

Brown has a large Commons majority and a good two and a half years left before he legally has to call an election. So why the hell should he? Because the party leader, and therefore Prime Minister, has changed mid-term? So why no elections in 1990, 1976, 1963, 1957, 1955, 1940, etc. etc. etc.? It’s a nonsense.

Yes, Brown could have called an election to get a re-affirmed mandate for his government. But the time to do that was the moment he took over from Blair. Calling one three months later – after riding high in the polls all summer following a series of moderately well-handled crises and a succession of Tory cock-ups – would smack of dangerous opportunism. For what’s to stop any government from repeatedly calling snap elections when they’re temporarily doing well once that precedent’s set?

Brown should have said more forcefully on taking over that he was going to serve the full term (but you can understand why he didn’t – after all, Labour were elected on the promise that Blair was soon to be going). That he didn’t is most likely because he didn’t think the Tories were so desperate as to keep up the election calls all summer, because – excluding the last two weeks of Tory bounceback – an election at any point in the last four months would have seen yet another Labour landslide.

And as for the electorate? Less than two-thirds bothered to show for the election two years ago – what makes anyone think they could be bothered now?

It’s too soon after Brown’s takeover to see just how similar or different he is from Blair, and I doubt if anyone could tell you what David Cameron stands for. (Hell, I’m more than averagely politically aware, and I genuinely haven’t got a clue about either of them… In fact, I’m not even sure where my constituency’s boundary lies any more, since the re-jig a year or so back…) We all need at least another year of Brown in charge to see the real him, preferably two. And Cameron, lest we forget, is still so new that Brown had already been Chancellor for four years by the time young Dave entered parliament…

A snap, three week election campaign would merely ensure that the public is even more uncertain about which of these two slightly mysterious, little-known figures would be best to lead the country. And uncertainty in politics breeds both apathy and resentment far more than does a Prime Minister deciding not to bow to pressure from the opposition and launch an expensive and unnecessary mid-term election.

Dog bites man Wednesday

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Having not finished the long-winded, political theory-heavy (and therefore excruciatingly dull) post I started this morning, I thought I’d have a hunt round the BBC News site to find something worthy of a brief musing.

But no, it was not to be. Pity the poor news teams – and I speak from some experience here – every single story is either blindingly obvious or days, weeks, months, even years old:

Bob Crowe is the worst advert for trade unionism in decades

Politician bitter at being sidelined by his party slags off the guy who beat him to the top job

Political party’s policy direction not 100% supported by every member of said party

Institutional incompetence (and again) and the weather is more scary than pathetically incompetent wannabe terrorists

Zimbabwe is screwed

So’s the global economy (most likely)

Everyone in the UK forgot about the 10th anniversary of Mother Theresa’s death

Products made in sweatshops are often a bit crap

Nothing constructive is being done about the situation in Darfur. Still.

The UK government pretends it isn’t planning on doing something we all know it wants to do because of a bit of a negative press reaction

Military dictators don’t like opposition parties (even if the dictator in question is an ally in The War Against Terror)

Apple is launching yet another vaguely pretty overpriced gizmo that I have no desire to own

*sigh*

No news may be good news, but it really is boring. How many more months have we got to put up with 2007? It’s been one of the most tedious news years in, well, years… The only excitement has been the long-overdue retirement of a politician who announced that he was going two years ago, and a bunch of floods that overstayed their welcome in much the same manner. (Though with rather less loss of life and property damage than Blair caused in Iraq – boom boom! – see what I did there?)

Something interesting from me soon, I hope – but the world’s really not giving me much to play with here…

90 years ago today

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Ahhhh… Those were the days… And it all led to this:

“our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Since the days of Halaka your city and your lands have been subject to the tyranny of strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunk in desolation, and your forefathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in distant places.

Since the days of Midhat, the Turks have talked of reforms, yet do not the ruins and wastes of today testify the vanity of those promises?

It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past, when your lands were fertile, when your ancestors gave to the world literature, science, and art, and when Baghdad city was one of the wonders of the world.

Don’t you just love over-simplified historical parallels that make the current situation in Iraq look like even more of a mismanaged disaster?

(And now we return to our regular, Iraq-free broadcasts…)

A weekend EU constitution roundup

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It’s all kicking off. Again… Ever more people are starting to come to the opinion that 2007 is going to be one of the EU’s most important years. I’m not one of them…

One of the driving forces increasingly seems to be Italy’s Romano Prodi, former President of the European Commission – who’s currently wating to see if he’s had a stay of execution following his resignation on Wednesday, with Italy’s President today asking him to stay in the job (as long as he can pass a vote of no confidence…)

First up, just over a week ago, nine member states (Italy along with Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Spain, France, Greece, Hungary and Luxembourg) made a joint declaration calling for a “social Europe”, alongside any revival of the constitution. No one knows precisely what a “social Europe” might be, but they all seem to think it sounds nice.

Then, back on Tuesday, Italy and Spain made a joint statement: “We are going to unite the efforts of two countries that have ratified the EU constitutional treaty with Germany so that this semester will be a time in which we move from thought to action, from stagnancy to initiatives”. We’ve heard all this before, of course, but they actually seem to have got a bit of momentum up this time…

At the same time, the two countries voiced their fears that Tony Blair’s exit from British politics could screw the whole project. Because – despite the fact he’s done little to prove it in recent years – Blair is the most europhile Prime Minister Britain’s had since Heath, and whoever follows him in to Number 10, it’s highly unlikely that they’re going to be as willing as Blair has been to bend over backwards to try and get the EU to work (remember Blair’s efforts to reform the Common Agricultural Policy by offering to give up Britain’s rebate? Brave stuff…)

Also on Tuesday, EU Regional Aid Commissioner Danuta Hubner (no, I’d never heard of her either) came out with a schoolmistressy warning to all 27 member states about how the EU could collapse without progress on the constituion. Possibly true – but if that’s the case, you’d think that they’d all realise that now’s the time for compromise to ensure that the most sceptical member states are happy, rather than to push ahead with the existing text in the vague hope that a sizable chunk of the continent (including Britain, France and the Netherlands) will change their minds about the thing. Ho hum…

Then, despite the surprise news about Prodi on Wednesday, on Thursday the Czech Republic (which cancelled its referendum after the Franch and Dutch votes) decided to push ahead ahyway, calling for an easier to understand version of the existing constitutional treaty. A kind of “EU Constitution for Dummies”, if you will – another lovely demonstration of one strand of thought amongst the EU’s political elites: French and Dutch voters rejected the thing because they were too stupid to understand it. (Which may be true, to be fair – the thing was so long and convoluted I doubt even the people who drafted the thing fully understood it all…) What the Czechs don’t seem to be doing (and I really wish someone would) is proposing the sensible alternative: a constitution based on that of the United States. Short, sweet and to the point.

Naturally enough, though, it can’t all run smoothly – especially with France in the middle of an election campaign that’s looking increasingly tight and unpredictable, with candidates desperate for any stick to beat their opponents with. As such, early in the week a spat about sovereignty emerged – swiftly followed by presidential hopeful Nicholas Sarkozy calling for an abridged version of the constitution. Just as some have argued that the French people used the constitutional referendum to express annoyance with their national leaders, rather than with the constitution itself, the presidential election could well see France’s next president commit to a course of action on the constitution purely to gain votes. Which is hardly ideal, but still. Such is democracy.

Next week this is all likely to continue – especially if Prodi survives and Italy gets back in the fight. This coming Wednesday ministers from Spain and Luxembourg are visiting the European Parliament’s constitutional affairs committee, discussing ways to get the remaining 9 member states (France, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Ireland, Portugal and the UK) to ratify the existing treaty. Which simply isn’t going to happen.

Meanwhile, various people are proposing alternatives – from former Convention on the Future of Europe member Hubert Haenel, French Green MEP Gerard Onesta, Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema, Italian Minister of the Interior Giuliano Amato, former French Prime minister Laurent Fabius, and countless others.

Many of the suggestions aren’t up to much, failing the fundamental test of “would every single member state be happy with this?” But at least they acknowledge that the existing text is no longer an option.

Even so, somewhere out there is a workable solution. The only question is, will the people with the power to adopt it ever be able to find the thing? There’s lot of activity at the moment, with various countries running around looking for ways to press ahead and convince others of their position. But with Britain currently stuck ostrich-like, seemingly paying no attention whatsoever to the constitutional debate on the continent, with France embroiled in tight elections for at least another couple of months, and Italy’s pro-EU Prime Minister currently blanacing on a knife edge, the chances of any meaningful agreement during the German EU Presidency of the first half of this year looks increasingly unlikely, no matter how hard some of the more enthusiastic countries to have adopted the existing text might be trying to get one. the whole thing is looking increasingly unlikely to end.

If we can’t even agree on something as fleeting and trivial as how best to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, how the hell are we going to be able to agree on something as complex and important as the blueprint for the running of the EU for the next 50 years? So, 2007 as one of the EU’s most important years? Not for any positive reasons. It could well be the year when the differences become so fundamental that the EU splits into two tiers – but even that is (sadly) unlikely. By far the most probable outcome of all these little manourverings to push forward with reform is failure and further stagnation. I can’t see any room for hope as long as Britain remains on the sidelines – and especially while the EU’s single biggest problem, the Common Agricultural Policy and its impact on the budget, remains undiscussed.

A question for free trade lovers

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In what way is the hope that unfettered [tag]free trade[/tag] will enable the market naturally to come to provide all that is necessary in any way more likely to work than the [tag]communist[/tag] [tag]utopia[/tag], so frequently dismissed as being “against human nature”?

(Sorry – it’s because another film I saw the other day was this, which has made me all confused and anti-capitalist for a bit. Largely because I’m highly envious of the vast amounts of cash all these business types seem to be able to build up, the bastards…)