Your Freedom and Ours

Random discussions and utter rudeness

2012-01-27T23:43:00.003Z

There are times I despair even of the House of Lords and that, in my opinion, is the only remaining part of the British constitution (oh yes, we do have one) that is even remotely functional. But this kind of random rambling and unutterable rudeness on the part of the despicable Lord Kinnock who, naturally, does not declare his interest of a very handsome EU pension, does make one thrown one's hands up in horror.

Admittedly, the subject is one HMG would rather not discuss, as the signs of a possible EU break-up in the next few years have been noted, as Lord Pearson of Rannoch says, by both Chancellor Merkel and Commission President Van Rompuy, and we need to be prepared for it, which, one suspects Whitehall is not. But what possessed other noble peers to come up with those comments and questions. (I don't mean the Welsh windbag. The only time I might be surprised by his behaviour is if it stays within the bounds of decency.)

In other words, we are not telling

2012-01-27T23:27:00.000Z

As we know (or ought to know) the final decision on legislation, particularly the more important kind, rests with the Council of Ministers and, occasionally, the European Council. That does not apply to treaties, which is a completely separate problem though the Boy-King and his acolytes seem unable to grasp this.

In the Council we are told, the elected and accountable (stop laughing at the back) UK Minister can prevent legislation that is harmful or might be harmful to this country from taking shape. Of course, there is the small matter of Qualified Majority Voting, which used to be easy to compute but has become so complicated that Fibonacci would give up, but whose purpose is to ensure that measures cannot be blocked.

Theoretically, though, some measures might be stopped but, as there are no reports of those meetings we really do not know what happens and whether our Ministers or the UK Permanent Representatives do actually fight hard for British interests as they always tell us they do. (Oddly enough, the one time I had a chance to find out what really happened, over the inspection of slaughter houses and the destruction of small and medium sized ones, I was told on very good authority that those who assured us they had fought doggedly had been somewhat economical with the truth.)

In the circumstances it is not unreasonable of Lord Stoddart of Swindon to ask

Her Majesty's Government on how many occasions the United Kingdom has been successful in achieving blocking majorities in the European Council or Council of Ministers; and what are the details of those occasions.

We would, actually like to know the answer. After all, we are told that we can do this: block legislation that does not suit us. Sadly, we are not going to find out. Lord Howell of Guildford resorted to the time-honoured formula:

The UK does not hold this information centrally.

If I had a fiver for every time that formula was used not to reveal information, I would actually be able to afford to travel on London transport. But I digress.Lord Howell, or whoever wrote the answer, then added:However, under the Lisbon treaty, some information on formal votes in the Council of Ministers on co-decision dossiers is available on the following European Union website.

This information constitutes separate documents, available for download, on each formal co-decision vote since 2006, listing the issue and the voting positions of member states.

The Government recommends that the noble Lord treats this information with caution. In general, proposals only progress to a formal vote after member states have gone through a substantial period of negotiation. During that period, the UK and other member states seek to block, amend or remove proposals which do not meet their objectives. The UK would normally aim to prevent proposals to which we cannot agree ever reaching a formal vote. It is also possible that some negotiation might go to a formal vote more than once, with different outcomes. For both these reasons, a simple collation of voting numbers would be misleading.

Moreover, the information can only show whether or not the UK participated in a blocking minority; not whether the UK was itself successful in achieving said blocking minority. All these points apply equally to blocking minorities.

Or, in other words, we are not going to tell you because we do not know and do not want to find out.

Troubles with that fiscal compact treaty

2012-01-27T00:36:00.000Z

Poland is being troublesome again. (Not that it ever lasts too long but while they grumble people listen.)

Donald Tusk, Poland's prime minister, is threatening to keep his country out of the nearly-finalised treaty on greater economic discipline, in a dispute over the right to attend eurozone summits.

Poland is insisting that it should be allowed to attend eurozone summits even though it is not expected to adopt the euro for several years. Tusk told Polish radio on Tuesday (24 January): “If Poland does not win an appropriate status of participant in the eurozone meetings, which would give us a feeling that we take part in the decision-making process, ...we will find it difficult to sign the fiscal pact.”

While it is not unreasonable for the Polish Prime Minister to demand those rights but he is not going to get them. Poland is not in the eurozone and that is the way the colleagues will regard the matter. Mr Tusk should have foreseen this problem when he first agreed to the proposed "treaty", which, as we know is not a treaty because that was "vetoed" by the Boy-King.

He has been lecturing the colleagues on something or other at Davos but even now he will not do the right thing and that is demand a full IGC and a completely new treaty. As CNN reports

Hungary, Sweden and the Czech Republic also expressed reservations about treaty change -- but left the door open, pending parliamentary debate.

Whether anything comes of those reservations is a moot point but it is good to know that somebody will have parliamentary debates about the new proposals.

Orban does the totally expected thing

2012-01-27T00:03:00.002Z

It may have been noted by readers of this blog that just as the media has decided that Hungary is still a far off country of which we know next to nothing but it also seems to be having events that might affect the rest of us, interest in those events dried up here. Well, not quite. A long posting on the subject is in the works.

In the meantime, it is sufficient to say that the Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, seems to be bowing to the inevitable.

The Hungarian government is expected to propose changes to its central banking legislation in the coming weeks, in order to secure a credit line from the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The changes will be a response to the European Commission's legal challenge to Hungary's new legislation. The Commission claims that the law restricts the independence of the central bank, and must be revised before Hungary is allowed to start negotiations on a credit facility.

Of course, he may yet go back on that as well and the whole charade might start for the third (or is it the fourth time).

It is not unreasonable to call this a response to unconscionable bullying on the part of the EU on whom no less a person than Frank Furedi called to stop but there is also the fact that Hungary needs that credit line and it is, therefore, not unreasonable to expect her government to behave in a slightly less petulant and childish manner.

The real problem stems, I suspect, from those promises that were made to all former Communist countries when they were part bullied, part bribed into joining the European Union. Money was going to pour there and every problem would be sorted out. Sadly, yet again, those of us who warned that it will all end in tears, seem to have turned out to be right. Just call me Cassandra.

Just in case you were wondering

2012-01-25T15:25:00.001Z

Any powers that might be transferred to EU institutions through the EU Education, Youth, Culture and Sport Council, General Affairs Council or Transport Council will not require "parliamentary approval under the European Union Act 2011 or any other Act". So says HMG in the person of Baroness Garden of Frognal.

Good question

2012-01-25T15:22:00.000Z

Lord Stoddart of Swindon asked:

Her Majesty's Government whether, in the interests of fairness and equality, all the nations of the United Kingdom should be asked, through simultaneous referendums, whether they wish to secede from the Union.

And why not? Perhaps we should all be asked whether we want other parts to secede. After all, anything that affects the United Kingdom, affects us all, regardless of what the SNP or the EU wonks might say.The answer, as one would expect, was not very helpful though it did give the information eventually.

The Scottish National Party won an overall majority in the elections to the Scottish Parliament last year on a platform that promised a referendum on the future of Scotland's place in the United Kingdom. The Scottish Parliament does not have the legal power to deliver a referendum on independence. It is for this reason that the Government have published a consultation document that will allow a legal, fair and decisive referendum to take place in Scotland.The Government have no plans to hold referendums elsewhere.

Until the Government thinks of some other preposterous idea it wants to fiddle with instead of getting on with whatever it was elected to do. Oh hang on, this government was not elected.

The new head of SPIV

2012-01-25T14:48:00.000Z

That stands for Special Purpose Investment Vehicle and its task will be to raise funds for the EU's new bail-out fund. The name is entirely apt, one would say and so is the name of the man who has been appointed to head it. Step forward Jacques Santer,

a former Luxembourg prime minister, Jacques Santer gained notoriety for presiding over a weak commission, which resigned en masse in 1999 amid allegations of corruption.

They could not have picked a better person.

Is there anything this man cannot do?

2012-01-25T00:08:00.000Z

Not content with riding bare-chested, appearing at wrestling matches (though he is not going to do that again any time soon) and diving for carefully placed amphorae, the once and future President, now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has decided to display his credentials as the world's (well, Russia's) leading literary critic. In fact, he intends to be the leading literary critic.

RFE/RL reports that the Prime Minister is taking his presidential campaign seriously. He has published all sorts of policies about dealing with immigrants (presumably from other parts of the former Soviet Union) but he is also giving attention to what being "an insider" in Russia might consist of. Well, somebody has to and there are no other Russian writers, thinkers or philosophers out there. The man has to see to everything himself. Shocking.

His latest idea is to create "a cultural canon of 100 books to serve as required reading for all students in Russia's schools". Well, all right, he can't do everything himself so he has called on the ~~elves in his grotto~~ "leading cultural authorities" to create such a list, asserting on no evidence whatsoever that other countries not only have such lists but actually abide by them.

As the article on RFE/RL points out, there already are such lists in existence but, apparently, the one Mr Putin has in mind is wider than just literary works (and, one assumes, he will not include And Quiet Flows the Don but one can never tell).

It remains to be seen, however, whether Putin will favor the inclusion of foreign authors, as many Western book lists do -- and as many Russian readers would seemingly prefer. An informal reader poll on the website 100bestbooks.ru ranks British writer Arthur Conan Doyle and France's Antoine de Saint-Exupery higher than native sons Pushkin or Tolstoy. To be fair, Mikhail Bulgakov and his beloved "Master and Margarita" still occupies the top spot.

I am not surprised about Conan Doyle and Saint-Exupery being so high on people's chosen book lists. I have written before about foreign literature being seen as something that is part of one's own in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe. In fact the list is a very fine mixture of Russian and foreign books but I am delighted to see that not only Crime and Punishment but the wonderful Soviet satire The Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov have attained high position.

I have an odd suspicion that Ilf and Petrov's satire will not be passed by the eagle-eyed censor-in-chief, though it is undoubtedly a classic. Conan Doyle? Well, who knows? Perhaps he will feel nostalgic about his childhood. But will George Orwell make the mark, as one Moscow wit has asked.

One writer who will not be on that list though he is highly regarded by Russians and non-Russians is Boris Akunin, whose real name is Grigory Chkhartishvili. He wrote his first detective stories about the nineteenth century investigator Erast Fandorin under the pseudonym B. Akunin (get it?) but then expanded it to Boris Akunin. He has written a very large number of complicated and very literary novels, including one called F.M., which I have not yet managed to get through, though I was given a copy soon after it came out.

As far as Mr Putin is concerned, however, the most notable fact about Boris Akunin is not his stupendous literary output but that he joined those who protested against the Duma elections of last December. It could only be because he is of Georgian origin, opined the great literary critic. Akunin responded in an interview

I'm not taking this seriously. That is how he was trained in his special [KGB] school. It is his normal method of smearing an opponent. I don't feel smeared. OK, I'm Georgian, so what? There are people of many ethnicities in our country. Actually, he was hinting that since I'm an ethnic Georgian, it means I'm an enemy of Russia. That is what he meant....

Not taking the once and future President's opinions seriously? Dear me.

Here's a thought

2012-01-24T00:39:00.000Z

If Scotland votes to leave the UK (not that it will but let us suppose) they will, presumably, have to apply for EU membership, which is what Alex Salmond longs for. However, the country they will leave behind will be very different from the one that became member of the then European Economic Community, which gradually transmogrified into just the European Community and, after the Maastricht Treaty, into the European Union. Will the remaining parts, England, Wales and Northern Ireland have to reapply? That could be interesting.

It's the Year of the Dragon

2012-01-23T22:25:00.000Z

And it is supposed to be lucky, though I am not sure for whom.

The wrong question

2012-01-23T18:43:00.002Z

Earlier today I was interviewed on the BBC Russian Service (it still exists but only just) about the curious story of the Palace of Westminster ~~falling down~~ sinking. Well, at least, the Clock Tower, which houses Big Ben, is falling down. Or something.

The story was amusing enough to crop up in a number of outlets so I shall link to the Londonist blog, which sums it all up. What with being built so near the river and having an underground car park as well as the Jubilee line extension constructed, the poor old(ish) building has cracks in it and the Tower is definitely leaning, though not as much as the one in Pisa. The Daily Wail seems to have excelled itself in idiocy by coming up with random figures as to how much it will cost to prop it all up, how much the site is worth and a quote from an unnamed insider that there is talk of selling it all to some Russian oligarch or Chinese party apparatchik who happens to be a billionaire. After that, presumably the journalists finished drinking and went home, having first filed the story.

Let's be rational, as I tried to explain to the Russians. The Palace of Westminster is a Royal Palace and, as such, cannot really be sold to anybody. The notion that MPs will simply up and depart to another building and get away with that is laughable. Nor is the news really news. Ever since the building has existed (which, in its latest manifestation is only about 170-odd years) there have been problems with it and these were, indeed, exacerbated by the two major constructions: the car park and the Jubilee line. The fact that the subject has now become important enough to discuss in a committee does not alter the fact that there is practically no time when some kind of refurbishment is not going on inside or outside the Palace. As soon as the two Houses rise, the builders and decorators move in; at any given time one can find scaffolding on some part of the outside. The chances are that the decision will be that there needs to be an investigation as to how the Tower and various other bits and pieces can be propped up at the lowest possible cost.

That, however, is the wrong question. The right question would be what exactly is the purpose of the building and all that goes on inside it.

There are several excellent libraries there, to be used largely by the members of the two Houses. Whether they are used is another matter. Finding information about legislation, both domestic and European, has become easier with the internet but there are certain advantages to being able to go to the Printed Paper Office in the Lords to ask about events, committees and reports. Furthermore, the main building (not the one that looks like a crematorium) is very fine, full of interesting rooms, corridors, statues, portraits and some of the worst paintings in the world.

The truths is, however, that Parliament no longer legislates in this country and holds the Executive to account only intermittently in the Lords and never in the Commons. The House of Lords is no longer the highest court in the land any more than Parliament is the ultimate legislator. So, do we actually need it? Or do we need it to be quite as big as it is now?

Why not reduce the numbers in proportion to the amount of work they have given away to the EU or various quangos, send the few remaining MPs to some purpose-built glass building and turn the whole place into a Museum to Democracy with actors performing some of the more stirring events of the last nine centuries? In no time at all the refurbishment would pay for itself.

Were this to be proposed seriously we might actually see Parliamentarians concentrating on what matters and that is an exit from the EU and a restoration of the British constitutional structure.

Not a resounding vote in favour

2012-01-22T21:19:00.002Z

But it is, undoubtedly a vote in favour. Croatia has voted to join the EU. Whether the EU would want Croatia to join is a separate issue but not one that is likely to be asked, at least not of the various peoples. Another question is how on earth can we afford another poor country with a very fragile political system. That will not be asked either.

Croatia's state referendum commission said that with nearly 100 percent of the ballot calculated, about 68 percent of those who took part in the referendum answered ``yes'' to the question: ``Do you support the membership of the Republic of Croatia in the European Union?''

About 31 percent were against, while the rest of the ballots were invalid. About 42 percent of eligible voters were estimated to have taken part in the referendum, illustrating voters' apathy toward the EU.

``The people are obviously tired,'' Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said. ``It would have been better that the turnout was larger, but that's reality.''

It was among the lowest turnouts in any of the EU states that have held accession referendums before they joined. About 45 percent took part in the vote in Hungary, while more than 90 percent voted in Malta.

Hungary, as I recall, was supposed to have a turn-out of at least 50 per cent according to the constitutional rules of the day but that was conveniently ignored. The chickens in that country are coming home to roost.

As for those Croatians who did not bother to turn out to vote against joining the EU if they did not feel that they were in favour, they will, no doubt complain vociferously when things go wrong.

ADDENDUM: A "young right-wing Croatian intellectual" has sent me a link to his posting on the subject. (Actually, it may be her posting and if that is so, I apologize.)

YET MORE ADDENDUM: Both EUReferendum and Witterings from Witney write about the way the Croatian referendum was rigged though I wouldn't call it fixed. Undoubtedly, they are both right: this will happen here if we have an IN/OUT referendum. In a way, there will not be any need for it as the electorate will probably behave largely the way the Croatian did: many if not most will not bother to turn up and the others will hope that the politicians are not lying too much.

Enough already with the edginess

2012-01-21T02:11:00.000Z

The only film in which I saw Ralph Fiennes was The Reader, which was not particularly good and after which I dismissed his thespian abilities as being mediocre to poor. Staring broodingly into the middle distance is no substitute for acting.

When I heard that he was going to direct and star in a film of Coriolanus, one of Shakespeare's most difficult plays, my heart sank. It sank even further when I saw the poster of Ralph Fiennes in army fatigues, covered in blood and .... staring broodingly into the middle distance.

The film is out and Michael Billington's review (oh how one misses Alexander Walker) tells us that it is full of relevance and "prescient lessons to us all". Does that mean that Shakespeare's plays are not full of relevance and prescient lessons unless somebody decides to update them to some modern war that, in this case, is rapidly becoming even less well known than many others? (To be fair to Mr Billington, he indicates some doubt about the need to update this Roman play and about the "slightly filleted and adapted text".)

In the same newspaper there is a comment about dramatized versions of Great Expectations (no, not the great David Lean film). I did not see the TV version with Douglas Booth, which, according to Londoner's Diary, "garnered much praise over the festive season" but the people I spoke to were considerably less complimentary. There is also a film due in which Jeremy Irvine, he of War Horse, will play Pip (and Ralph Fiennes will play Magwitch). His comment about the two productions was priceless in its self-satisfied fatuity.

"You can't compare the two [the film and the TV serial]. That was for a British audience, this is aiming for worldwide success. It's not a typical British period drama. It's edgy."

Oh goody. Another "edgy" adaptation of a literary classic. Can actors be that stupid? Can directors? The answers are yes and yes.

In the first place, if it is worldwide success you want then British period drama is your pigeon. It remains hugely successful as long as the period costumes are beautiful and the acting is good, which may be questionable if reviews of War Horse are to be believed.

Secondly, Dickens is enormously popular all over the world. His works have been translated in many languages and are devoured by people in many countries. He does not need "edgy" updating or tinkering with.

Thirdly, neither Dickens nor Shakespeare needs some pipsqueak of an actor or director to make them relevant, edgy or prescient. The reason, dear thespians, we keep reading their works, discussing them, analyzing them and, yes, dramatizing them is because they dealt with difficult subjects in a complicated and, often, ambiguous ways.

Let me make a prediction: Shakespeare's plays will be watched and Dickens's novels will be read and they will all be filmed again and again long after the edgy productions of today have been consigned to the dust heap of history. If only we could do that right now.

If you think politicians have short memories ...

2012-01-19T21:01:00.000Z

... what about the electorate? We hear a great deal about the need for politicians to listen to the people, about the importance of elections and elected officials just about everywhere and about the short-termism of politicians (that, actually, cancels out the other two as the short-termism consists of concentrating on the next election). But what of the short memories that the electors have?

The Evening Standard (not, one must admit, the most reliable of newspapers) had an article by Joe Murphy, their political editor, which said that, according to a recent poll, Ken Livingstone is leading in the mayoral race, of which, thankfully, only three months are left.

To be fair, the lead is so small as to be of no significance, once we remember the error margin and the fact that only about 30 - 35 per cent usually turns out to vote in the London elections. (And, to be even more fair, the comments on the article, by and large, sound horrified at this information.)

This, however, stunned me:

"It amounts to 100,000 Labour voters switching back from Boris to Ken. It looks as though Ken Livingstone's promise to cut fares on buses and the Tube has made an impact."

Mr Johnson remains far more popular than his party among voters and beats Mr Livingstone for charisma.

But the survey reveals a drop in the number of Labour voters who are willing to vote for the Conservative incumbent. Last June almost a quarter of Labour voters said they would choose him - but the "Labour for Boris" brigade has halved to 12 per cent.

Another change is that the number who see Mr Livingstone as "in touch with the concerns of ordinary people" has risen from 37 to 40 per cent; the number who think Mr Johnson is "in touch" has fallen from 20 per cent to 13.

Moreover, the three issues that Londoners regard as most important are those that Mr Livingstone has campaigned hardest on: tackling crime (picked by 42 per cent), improving transport (41 per cent) and easing the cost of living (33 per cent). Only four per cent think promoting London abroad, a regular Boris theme, is a priority.

As it happens, promoting London abroad was a boringly constant theme with Livingstone as well and, as I recall, he even opened a number of highly expensive London offices in various countries, one of which was Venezuela. Have people forgotten that?

Did crime go down, transport improve or cost of living go down under Livingstone? Did it, heck. The amount we paid in taxes for the GLA went up by leaps and bounds every year, apart from 2007. Strange, isn't it? Anything to do with the fact that the mayoral election was coming in 2008? Surely not.

As for the promise to cut fares on tubes and buses, we have been here before, as the Boris Backer site shows. There may be a bias in the site's attitudes but the facts are incontrovertible.

I cannot believe that so many people have forgotten already. (Well, actually, I can.)

Are we prepared?

2012-01-18T15:35:00.000Z

Who can tell? When Lord Barnett asked HMG on Tuesday

whether HM Treasury is developing contingency plans for use in the event of a Eurozone collapse.

the answer was not altogether reassuring.

My Lords, as my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer made clear in the Autumn Statement, the Government, including of course the Treasury, are undertaking extensive contingency planning to deal with all potential outcomes of the euro crisis.

I can't help feeling that Lord Barnett was a mite ironic when he thanked Lord Sassoon for his "very informative reply". In fact, the exchange between the two peers about that answer makes me think that not only it was ironic but that the Minister realized it. Of the various questions and reassuring, not to say palliative answers, Lord Lawson's was the hardest hitting:

My Lords, there is only one thing as worrying as the collapse of the eurozone, and that is the continuation of the eurozone. It has been demonstrated to be fundamentally flawed and is the cause of all these problems. Is the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, not right that at the heart of the thing that we need to address is the risk of a banking meltdown? Will the Minister give an undertaking that should it prove necessary for the United Kingdom Government to rescue any British banks, they will do so on much tougher terms than the ludicrously soft terms on which the previous Administration went in to save banks?

Lord Sassoon's reply was not reassuring:

My Lords, we have a lot to learn about the softness with which the previous Administration went about a lot of things. One of the key lessons for this crisis is that we must stick to a deficit reduction programme that is firm and fair, and keep this country isolated from the worst of the problems that are all around us.

I ask again: are we prepared for an even bigger catastrophe than any we have faced so far?

About Baroness Cox's Bill

2012-01-18T00:38:00.002Z

I have not written much about the Arbitration and Mediation Bill, introduced in the House of Lords by Baroness Cox, which had its First Reading on June 7, though I have referred to it here and here. Once the date of the Second Reading is announced I shall write more about the Bill itself and its purpose.

In the meantime, here are two links, one to an article in the Harrow Observer and one to a posting on Harry's Place, a left-leaning blog with which I often find myself in agreement. (Shum mishtake shurely.)

The article focuses on the work of a lady I admire greatly, Tehmina Kazi, who is Director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy. (Yes, indeed, I do know her.) She has, as the newspaper points out, been advising Baroness Cox and campaigning to make the Bill better understood in the Muslim community.

Ms Kazi claims the controversial bill, which has been opposed by some parts of the Muslim community, would give Muslim women greater clarification on their rights.

Ms Kazi, a law graduate of the London School of Economics, said: “There is a gap in the system for Muslim women due to the prevalence of Sharia councils.

“They don’t have any legal power and are completely informal so very hard to regulate and they rule on things such as divorce in Muslim communities. We want to educate women so they know what their rights are.”

The campaigner said she is concerned about the number of women who don’t have marriages registered under civil law as some Muslims have the religious ceremony of Nikah, which is not valid as a legal marriage under UK law, therefore don’t have the same legal rights if the couple decides to separate.

At the heart of the Bill is the need to make it legally clear that Arbitration Tribunals are not law courts, that there is only one legal system in this country and that an alternative system, which discriminates against women must not be allowed to exist, let alone flourish.

Harry's Place has an interesting and coldly angry discussion of what sort of people run Sharia courts in real life. No point in quoting because the whole of it is important and worth reading. It is not very long. At the end it, too, refers to the Bill and Tehmina Kazi's work. The author of the posting was very quick off the mark after the article in the Harrow Observer.

Readers will be shocked to know ...

2012-01-17T23:59:00.002Z

... that I agree with Ian Hislop. He told the Leveson Inquiry (yes, it is still going on and no, I don't know whether the Grauniad has explained where it got dubious information from) that there is no need for further regulation of the media because

Practices such as phone hacking, paying police officers and being in contempt of court contravene existing laws, Mr Hislop told the Leveson Inquiry.

He said the inquiry should examine why the laws were not rigorously enforced.

Meanwhile, News International chief executive Tom Mockridge told the inquiry its editors had been instructed not to use private investigators.

Well! You could have knocked me down with quill.

Not be left out of the fun ...

2012-01-17T00:57:00.000Z

... Romanians have been rioting. Today, according to Reuters, was to be the fifth day of protests that had already erupted into serious violence on both sides this week-end.

The country's worst unrest for more than a decade has seen riot police using tear gas against protesters throwing bricks, smashing windows and setting fire to newspaper stands and rubbish bins in central Bucharest since it began on Thursday.

Thousands of demonstrators gathered peacefully in central Bucharest and other cities on Monday afternoon, demanding Prime Minister Emil Boc and his close political ally President Traian Basescu resign.

The numbers were expected to rise in the evening and analysts predicted more protests but did not see them affecting the austerity measures passed by the ruling coalition's small but stable parliamentary majority.

These riots will not, apparently, affect Romania's standing with the markets, and you can take that as you will. I was somewhat amused by the following:

"Five years of European Union membership did not bring anything good, on the contrary, poverty, frozen pensions," Ioan Mendea, a 73-year old former jurist, who ekes out a living from a 900 lei ($260) monthly state pension, told Reuters.

"This government, prime minister, president must go."

For a jurist he seems very poorly informed about what the resignation of a government might achieve. I believe the word is nimicz but if any reader knows otherwise I shall stand corrected. The Economist has more, describing the beginnings of the protests, though they have now gone beyond the enforced resignation of one particular not very important minister.

And, inevitably, Prime Minister Emile Boc has called for a dialogue.

To be continued.

From Taki's Magazine

2012-01-16T15:52:00.000Z

A slightly unusual topic for me but an important one.

Not sure how I feel about this: support for the views I express in the piece comes from a very unlikely source: Eurobarometer.

James Taranto again

2012-01-14T17:02:00.001Z

What should newspapers be about? Well, how many hours do we have for a discussion of that kind? Let me concentrate on just one issue and that is the distinction between reporting and opinion pieces. It has always been understood, if not always adhered to, that while editorials, columns and other opinion pieces are free to say what the author thinks, news reports, whether of a war in the Middle East or a planning decision that affects a few hundred people, should be more or less objective. At the very least, the various sides and opinions should be quoted or referred to without any epithets.

As we know that rule has, for some time now, more honoured in the breach than the observance. (I call my readers' attention to such interesting episodes as the Man with the Green Helmet or the second flare, all much covered on EUReferendum. And there are many more.)

As far as most readers are concerned, however, that distinction remains valid and its erosion has contributed to the downfall of newspapers. The BBC is an even bigger problem, as it is a tax-funded operation and has a Charter that specifically forbids it to display political bias. But that discussion, too, would involve many hours.

Not all people agree with this or understand this and on this issue I have found a serious divergence between people who are roughly speaking on the right of the political spectrum and those on the left. People who read the Daily Telegraph, by and large, know that its opinions are biased and often complain that they are not biased enough. They want to read a newspaper with whose opinions they agree though they would prefer the news coverage to be more or less accurate.

Readers of other right-wing newspapers, such as the Daily Mail or, most of the time, the Sun, take the same attitude, though when it comes to the Daily Wail, one wonders how their reporting can be taken seriously. When it comes to the readers of the Grauniad, for instance, or the Independent, not to mention those whose opinions are formed entirely by the BBC, the picture is very different. It is not that they want a newspaper they agree with - nothing wrong with that - it is that they do not understand that what their newspaper says is an opinion, necessarily slanted by its political stance. That, they insist, is the objective truth, not just in the reporting but in the editorials. Indeed, any reporting that does not agree with the editorial stance, must be wrong, biased, unobjective, and downright dishonest.

Over on the other side of the Pond they have the same problem and this, at last, brings me to James Taranto's piece in the Wall Street Journal about yet another row in the New York Times. (Yes, of course, he is gleeful about it.) It seems that

Hilarity ensued yesterday after Arthur Brisbane, "public editor" of the New York Times, posted a blog entry titled "Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante?" He was compelled to publish a follow-up post hours later to reply to his "large majority of respondents" who answered his question "with, yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth."

The rest of the piece details the extraordinary convolutions the Old Grey Lady and its "public editor" have been going through to try to explain that when they talk about being "truth vigilante" they do not mean checking facts or actually being objective and factual in their reports (nobody expects them to be objective in opinion pieces). Then again, what do they mean?

Nine countries?

2012-01-14T00:54:00.000Z

Here is a conundrum: if everybody's credit ratings are cut then what do credit ratings signify? Well, we shall soon find out. France, as we know, has had her AAA credit rating cut, as has Austria. This is very bad news for President Sarkozy who has vowed to preserve that cherished AAA and is starting the presidential election campaign by losing it.

The downgrade of France in particularly is evidence of the divergence taking hold between those European countries that still enjoy rock-solid faith on international markets and those whose economic and financial path is more questionable.

As Reuters details:

S&P cut the ratings of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Cyprus by two notches and the standings of France, Austria, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia by one notch each.

The move puts highly indebted Italy on the same BBB+ level as Kazakhstan and pushes Portugal into junk status.It put 14 euro zone states on negative outlook for a possible further downgrade, including France, Austria, and still triple-A rated Finland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

Germany was the only country to emerge totally unscathed with its triple-A rating and a stable outlook.

This may not be the disaster gleefully predicted by many(a disaster, incidentally, that will affect this country) but it is bad news. However, credit rating is really just that: information that needs to be taken into account when a country tries to borrow money. So one has to ask again: when this many countries are losing their rating, will markets go on paying attention or will they simply metaphorically shrug their shoulders?

Let us not forget that the USA lost its AAA rating last August and the world did not collapse.

And even more meanwhile

2012-01-13T17:24:00.002Z

Daniel Hannan is fulminating that if the new text of the Fiscal Union treaty is agreed by the 26 member states, then the famous Cameron veto was for nothing. I am shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Meanwhile ..

2012-01-13T17:21:00.000Z

... things are dragging on in Greece towards the inevitable but much-postponed catastrophe. According to the BBC

Talks between Greece and its private sector lenders over a possible 50% write-off of its debts have stalled.Reaching a deal is a pre-condition for Athens receiving the next chunk of bailout cash from the International Monetary Fund and European Union.Without that money, the Greek government could run out of cash and be forced to leave the euro.

Which is what they should do, of course.

Is this important?

2012-01-13T17:02:00.001Z

According to Sky News

Standard & Poor's is about to downgrade France's credit rating, sources including the French news agency AFP are reporting.

They quote Reuters correspondent Peter Thal Larsen:

Reuters columnist Peter Thal Larsen told Sky News: "If we're talking about expectations then clearly France is what we would consider to be most vulnerable to a potential downgrade."

Mr Larsen went on to explain that a French downgrade would be significant due to the country's role as one of the AAA guarantors of the eurozone's rescue fund, the EFSF, which would in turn also need to be downgraded.

This would make it more difficult to raise funds to bail out weaker countries, like Italy and Spain, if the need arose.

Nobody quite knows what to do with the credit rating agencies. Their track record prior to the financial crisis is lamentable and their intervention, always very long-drawn out, tends to have negative effects on the market. At one point there was a proposal to silence them, which would not have the desired effect. The question is, will anybody go on listening to them as they downgrade one country after another?

The two great Russian questions

2012-01-12T14:53:00.002Z

They are: Who is at fault and What is to be done.

Кто виноват? is a novel by Alexander Herzen. Based on various personal experiences, it is his only foray into the writing of fiction (one has to assume that his various autobiographical volumes are more or less accurate) and not his best work. However, it is considerably better than Что делать? by Nikolay Chernyshevsky, a most appallingly boring novel with no fewer than four dreams by the heroine Vera Pavlovna and one that Dostyevsky mocked and attacked mercilessly. Astonishingly enough, given that it was written and read at a period when Russian literature produced one genius after another, this long and hectoring work was taken up and eagerly adopted as a secular bible by the Russian radical intelligentsia, particularly its younger members. This perverseness may well account for why things went so badly wrong in Russia.

The title was subsequently adopted by V. I. Lenin (the anniversary of whose death is coming soon) and the best one can say for his tract of the need for a revolutionary party to lead the populace to where they do not want to go is that it is shorter than Chernyshevsky's novel.

Both these questions were asked yesterday after a talk given by Luke Harding, the Guardian journalist who has had the distinction of being the first hack to be expelled from post-Soviet Russia for writing things that the authorities were not happy about, in London's Pushkin House. As it happens, he had no answer. Why Russia has gone the way it has in the last twenty years is a question that needs many hours of cogitation and discussion. Many people are at fault and by now it has become quite difficult to work out what can be done to start remedying the situation.

Mr Harding's talk was interesting and centred on his personal experience from which he drew a number of obvious conclusions about Russia and its governing elite. He also mentioned his predecessors as Guardian correspondents in the Soviet Union, Arthur Ransome and Malcolm Muggeridge. He did not go into details but, had he done so, he might have noted that while the first one of those swallowed the Bolshevik line completely, to the point of becoming an agent of the Cheka while the second one (and he did refer to this) famously went as a convinced supporter, became disillusioned and was one of the first writers to tell the truth about Stalin's monstrous regime.

Mr Harding, however, did not mention any journalists who had, like him, been expelled from Russia or the Soviet Union. It is, therefore, worth pointing out that the first of those was D. D. Braham of the Times, who was expelled in 1903 for writing unfavourably about the pogroms and the subversion of the Finnish constitution.

Somebody is scared of this man

2012-01-11T01:06:00.000Z

Alexei Navalny, briefly mentioned on this blog before but written about at some length even by our media (and yours truly on Taki's Magazine) is not an anti-Putin candidate. He is a blogger and a political activist who has become the face and voice of the opposition to the corruption and political authoritarianism of the Putin-Medvedev regime. (Remember the old joke of Medvedev being Putin's мишка, that is, teddy bear? Non-Russian speakers need to know that medved or медведь means bear.)

It seems that Mr Navalny is beginning to bother the Putin brigade. They have decided to smear him with the obvious accusation that he has been associating with Snowball, errm, I mean the ex-patriate oligarch Berezovsky, who is wanted on all sorts of charges in Russia but whom the British courts refuse to hand over on the reasonable assumption that he is unlikely to receive a fair trial (or, possibly, a trial at all). Berezovsky and the unspecified oligarchs have been blamed for everything that has been going wrong in Russia, particularly for all opposition to the Putin regime in the time-honoured Soviet way. Shall we see people being tried for left-wing Berezovskyite deviationism?

Anyway, the picture of Navalny and Berezovsky appeared in a hand-out newspaper (not a fake as some of the Putinites have been shouting), called Argumenti if Fakti of the Urals ["Аргументы и Факты. Урал"]. According to this blog, 80,000 copies were handed out in Ekaterinburg (definitely in the Urals) by pro-Putin youngsters. In it [scroll down] was the infamous photo of Navalny and ~~Snowball~~ Berezovsky with a headline that says: "Alexei Navalny has never bothered to conceal that he was given money for his struggle with Putin by the oligarch Boris Berezovsky". Cute, eh?

Sadly, the picture is a photoshopped one. How this takes one back to the Soviet shenanigans with photographs, so fascinatingly documented by David King. Sometimes people were added as in the infamous picture of Stalin allegedly sitting next to Lenin in the latter's last years in Gori; sometimes they were taken away when they became unpersons.

Enough of this reminiscing. Let us turn to the present. Navalny has managed to produce the original of the photograph in which he is with another oligarch but not one so well known, Mikhail Prokhorov. He then decided to help the other side out. Why not make a few suggestions of various other people he could be getting finance from, such as Stalin, Lord Voldemort, Napoleon or Putin himself. If your follow the link above and scroll down you will see the pictures and the Russian text is minimal.

The story has gone world-wide and was picked up by the BBC, the Telegraph, the Guardian and many others with the appropriate semi-literate pro-Putin trolls making their appearance here and there.

Someone asked me whether these people really thought anyone would believe them. Probably not (and, strictly speaking, we still don't know who took that idiotic decision) but they worked on the principle of "mud sticks" and when it comes to Russia and opponents of Putin, too many people, especially in the West are ready to believe the worst, particularly if they see the dreaded word "oligarchs". Those are the people who do not seem to realize that oligarchs are alive and well in Russia but these days they are all Friends of Vladimir. All the same, one can't help wondering why the Putinites should be so scared of a man who is, after all, merely an anti-corruption blogger.

Who could ask for anything more?

2012-01-10T13:49:00.002Z

Eric Cantona has announced that he will be running for the French Presidency. He has a way to go as he needs "the backing of 500 elected officials by the end of February to run". His intention is to highlight the housing crisis in France, which, presumably means that he is hoping to take votes from the Socialists. On the other hand, he is something of a celebrity and can compete with Mme Sarkozy though he has not given birth recently to anything.

UPDATE: Doubt is being cast on the story by a sports news website:

But the newspaper's [Liberation] deputy editor Paul Quinio told a French TV channel that it was all a move to publicise the French housing crisis, which affects 10 million people in the country."He isn't looking for signatures to be a candidate for the presidency, but to pass on the message of the Abbé Pierre foundation in support of better housing policy, and to make housing, which is a priority for French people, a priority for the presidential candidates," said Quinio.

Oh I do hope not. The idea of Cantona as a presidential hopeful in France is too delightful to abandon.

Stick, end, wrong - Cameron

2012-01-10T13:05:00.000Z

The Boy-King is all set to take on crony capitalism. Well, sort of. Because to take it on properly he would need to get rid of a great deal of legislation and regulation that he neither can nor will change. As the Wall Street Journal says in its trenchant article on the subject: A Phony War on Crony Capitalism:

Increased regulation of the market for corporate control, especially of these takeovers, has helped entrench mediocre managers who have been able to increase their own pay without suffering the consequences. For now, the main obstacles to throwing the corporate bums out are rules governing tender offers, limits on the quantity of shares that activist investors can accumulate before announcing a formal bid, and drawn-out regulatory approvals for consummating a takeover.

As we know, most of the regulation comes from the EU and is implemented here as a legal requirement. Does Mr Cameron know that? Hard to tell. What he does know is that knocking high salaries and strutting around as the supposed defender of the little man is good PR. The rest is of little consequence to him.

City AM, unusually, backs Cameron. Here is Allister Heath in yesterday's column noting approvingly that Cameron is right to back shareholders. Today, he is providing useful data about boards, cross-over, pay and cronyism. That approval of Cameron did not last long or not fully. Power to the shareholders is still seen as a very good idea.

More trouble for the Baroness

2012-01-10T00:58:00.001Z

Or is it more trouble from the Baroness? No sooner do we hear about extended criticisms of her abilities and achievements and of her inadequate responses than we find out that the lady is going back on her ~~cast iron guarantee~~ promise of a "budget-neutral" European diplomatic service.

Lady Ashton, the best paid female politician in the Western world, angered national governments with a poor performance as Europe's foreign minister.

Her demands for an extra £22 million in funding for this year fuels criticism as it breaches her promise to set up a "budget neutral" European diplomatic service.

In a new move that has infuriated Britain, which has made deep cuts to the foreign office, a report published yesterday, by Lady Ashton, has now completely ditched the pledge of funding her European External Action Service (EEAS) from existing EU budgets without making new spending demands.

Mind you, I am not sure what Mr Waterfield means by that ridiculous phrase "infuriated Britain". Which part of Britain? The FCO? I hardly think so, given their attitude to the project. The rest of the country? Don't suppose they even know about it. The Conservative Party? They are still bleating like blessed baa-lambs about their hero vetoing that treaty.

Good grief, he is back

2012-01-10T00:06:00.000Z

Declan Ganley. Now there's a name I did not think I'd hear again. Libertas? Anyone remember that? I mentioned it briefly here and wrote a lot more at the time on my erstwhile home, EUReferendum. (here and here) At the time I made it clear that Mr Ganley was not a eurosceptic of any stripe but a man who wanted to improve the European project, "restore" its democratic credibility and generally make everybody's voices heard through being elected into the European Parliament as part of the only pan-European party. This is what I wrote after the launch of Libertas in the UK:

I asked Mr Matthews whether his aim was to campaign to restore power to national parliaments or to reform the EU, whose structure would not change even if the Lisbon Treaty failed, and if the latter, how was he intending to go about it. His reply did not fill me with confidence.

The first thing, he said, was to take stock and to ensure that there is a vote on Lisbon (preferably, one assumes a No); whether people are prepared to sanction this enormous transfer of power to the European elite. Then we can move on and, in due course, Libertas will publish its policies. I suspect this means that they have not thought beyond the first step.

Back when I cut my eurosceptic teeth, the days of Maastricht and the battle for that referendum, it made a certain amount of sense to say that we should concentrate on this treaty that had qualitatively changed the process of integration.

The European issue was new to most people as the project had been apparently (though not in reality) quiescent for many years; it was necessary to introduce all the many aspects of it into public discourse and to suggest withdrawal appeared to be politically suicidal. Luckily Jacques Delors on the one hand and the people of Denmark on the other helped us to make "Europe" familiar to many.

We have moved a long way from there, though not as long as we would have done had some people concentrated more on what really matters - politics and policies. To return to the same point and argue that we must not frighten the horses and let's discuss the Lisbon Treaty, which is so horrific that it makes one faint with horror, before we, possibly, move on to other issues is pointless at a time when people are seriously discussing the possibilities of British withdrawal or even the complete collapse of the EU.

But then, that is precisely what Mr Ganley is afraid of: that those wicked eurosceptics will have their way and the great European project, which, in his opinion, would be absolutely wonderful if only it acquired popular support, will collapse. That is why we say that Libertas is not fighting on our side - they want to strengthen the EU, we want to destroy it in order to start creating genuinely democratic structures in European countries and alliances between them and outwith Europe.

Given that, I am not exactly clear as to why people find it surprising that he now wants to start a group in Ireland that will fight for the United States of Europe. It's what he always wanted. He just thought and, no doubt, thinks that somehow by some magical wand-waving he will be able to create a United States of Europe that is somehow democratic and accountable to .... well to whom?

A great piece from James Taranto

2012-01-06T13:00:00.001Z

As Taranto's column has one link for several stories, I have to reproduce the whole of A Pogo Progressives here:

"We used to be able to blame the Bush administration for Guantánamo," writes The Nation's David Cole in the hard-left magazine. No kidding! In case you've forgotten--we hear a lot less about the place these days--Guantanamo is a U.S. naval base in Cuba where the Pentagon set up a detention facility for terrorists not long after the 9/11 attacks. As Cole notes, the anti-antiterror left loved to vilify George W. Bush for his detention policies.

But Bush left office just under three years ago, and the Guantanamo detention facility was to have been shuttered a year later. Somehow that didn't happen. So whom are we to blame now?

The obvious answer would be whoever replaced Bush as president. But to hear Cole tell it, that office is now vacant: "Although the executive, legislative and judicial branches are all deeply implicated in the ongoing injustice, we can't really lay the blame on the government. Guantánamo is our problem as citizens." David Cole is a Pogo progressive: He has met the enemy, and it is us.

Meanwhile, The Washington Monthly, another left-leaning magazine, has an exciting special issue surveying the Republican presidential field and "imagining the consequences of a GOP victory." An introduction carrying the byline "the Editors" explains that "we asked a distinguished group of reporters and scholars to think through the hitherto unthinkable: What if one of these people actually wins?"

If an electoral victory by one of the country's major political parties was "unthinkable" until just now, that must mean America has recently undergone a transition to democracy, like Eastern European countries did after 1989 or North African lands are attempting in the wake of the Arab Spring. Who knows, maybe the power vacuum left by George W. Bush's departure will end up producing a change for the better.

There is something utterly insane about the left.

Not her fault

2012-01-05T15:03:00.000Z

Baroness Ashton was put into the position of the High Panjandrum for the Common Foreign Policy because she was seen to be incompetent enough not to cause any trouble to anybody. She has fulfilled that role admirably while presiding over a huge increase in the personnel of the European External Action Service (EEAS), which has existed for some time but became a separate official body under the Lisbon Treaty and has since grown enormously with 140 EU delegations in various countries.

It seems that the lady can't win. She has been criticized "in a confidential discussion paper signed by the 12 foreign ministers and sent to Ashton last month", to which she has replied in a report on the first year of her ever increasing empire:

Ashton acknowledges problems in the division of roles between the EEAS, launched one year ago this week, and the European Commission. She concedes that there have been serious transitional and structural problems with the EU's 140 delegations abroad. She notes the need to improve policy formulation and delivery, but provides no details as to how she will do so.

Whether her self-defence will satisfy her critics remains to be seen. My suspicion is no and they will have to make a decision on whether they will just put up with expensive incompetence or get somebody who will spend as much money if not more (not that the colleagues care about that) and become rather a nuisance to the various foreign ministers.This is quite interesting, however:

The foreign ministers – including Alain Juppé of France, Guido Westerwelle of Germany, Radoslaw Sikorski of Poland and Carl Bildt of Sweden – said they had “a major interest in a strong and efficient EEAS” and wanted “to help it develop its full potential”. William Hague, Britain's foreign secretary, did not endorse the paper and its implicit criticism of Ashton.

It seems that Radoslaw Sikorski is not quite as eurosceptic as he sometimes tries to make out. Also one would like to know why our own Foreign Secretary refrained from signing the paper. Was it that he did not want to criticize la Ashton; was it that he did not agree with the sentiments expressed in it; or was it that he simply was not aware that this criticism was being put together?

But I thought Cameron vetoed it

2012-01-05T14:44:00.001Z

In this case I am talking about the Financial Transaction Tax, unpopularly known as the Robin Hood Tax (though taking money from wealth creators to enrich a bureaucracy is not quite what the men of Sherwood Forest were about). Once again, we have news from European Voice and the Daily Telegraph that the tax is on the agenda and that Merkel and Sarkozy (particularly the latter) are determined to push it through despite opposition from Britain and Sweden as well as possible others. The one thing neither article bothers to explain is how precisely it will be brought in. At present I am assuming that it will come in under Single Market rules and that means Qualified Majority Voting. But they might think of some other way. In the past it was established that a new tax needs primary legislation by Parliament. We shall see how many of those eurosceptics will dare to put their heads against the parapet. Of course, numerous questions in the House of Lords in the past established that if a tax is imposed by the EU and Parliament votes against it, the UK will be taken to the ECJ. That will give the Boy-King something to veto, surely.

Spanish economy in free-fall

2012-01-05T13:01:00.002Z

This does not come as a surprise to anyone but here are some interesting graphs about the Spanish economy, published by The Atlantic.

To sum up: The overall unemployment rate is in the mid-20s, industrial production and services activity have both cratered, construction indicators like cement consumption have been devastated after doubling between 1998 and 2007, retail is in a free fall, and exports (most of which go to Europe) are falling. [Word of warning: None of these graphs have the same Y-axis range, so beware direct comparisons.]

In the next year, Spain is meant to cut spending to show the bond market that Madrid can stabilize its all-important ratio of debt to GDP. But what Spain really needs today is what it had 10 years ago: Lots of money flowing into the country! Spanish leaders know the intricacies of Spanish economics far better than I ... but I do know something about ratios, and if your GDP isn't growing, it's rather impossible to increase your GDP faster than your debt.

Spain has avoided an even worse recession, if you can believe it, by growing exports in every year since the housing crash. But even here, trouble lurks. As you can see (bottom-right graph in the collection above), export growth is slowing down as the nation's largest trade partners -- in order: France, Germany, Portugal, Italy, and the UK, which account for more than half of Spanish exports -- all face austerity regimes of their own, which is likely to make businesses and consumers cut back on Spanish goods. In a word: Yikes.

I have noticed that there are more Spanish youngsters working in various low-skill jobs in London than there had been for years. They are competing with the Poles and, personally, I think the Poles are more efficient, friendlier and better at learning English. However, that is, undoubtedly, a sign of the times.

They are all eurosceptics now

2012-01-04T17:10:00.001Z

Everybody seems to be a eurosceptic these days. Or so they say. The latest one to come out with that odd self-identification was Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. According to the Wall Street Journal,:

“I’m not a euro-enthusiast of the sort that has eyes only on the yellow stars on the blue background, forgetting the white-and-red flag,” he said Saturday, referring to flags of the EU and Poland. “I’m a common-sense euroskeptic, without any unhealthy fascinations.”

It's a little hard to tell what he means by that. After all, we have enough trouble trying to disentangle what our own Tory eurosceptics mean in reality. But, as far as I can tell, he means that as things are not very good in the eurozone at the moment, he does not think Poland should join any time soon but, of course, there is no need to suppose that the eurozone will fall apart and some time in the future, if the conditions are right and there is a good deal of money coming to Poland we shall try again.

Just as in Britain, however, the mention of the word seems to send everyon scurrying for journalistic phrases. A completely uninteresting and meaningless little statement is being described as a "significant about-face". What would happen, I ask myself, if a politician did decide, on the basis of facts to change his or her mind and come out seriously against the whole project.

If UKIP wanted my advice ...

2012-01-04T15:33:00.004Z

But there, it is not interested in my advice though I do have something useful to suggest. As I said before, it is preposterous that they should not be able to beat the ridiculous Lib-Dims even though the EU, the euro and all the attendant problems have been front page news for months. At the time of the Feltham by-election I blamed UKIP's reluctance to challenge the Boy-King over his phantom veto. Other people talked of their lack of strategic thinking that manifested itself, not for the first time, in an inadequate candidate. If UKIP wants to do better now and in the next general election, it will have to start thinking a little more strategically. Hint: making pubs full of smoke again is not a very popular policy.

Let me start with real politics that we are seeing on the other side of the Pond, where the presidential election has kicked off in real earnest with the Republica caucus in Iowa yesterday. (Yes, I know President Obama has been campaigning for months but the real fight starts now.) As we know, the outcome was odd: Mitt Romney, as expected, came first by only eight votes, ahead of Rick Santorum. Despite hysterical screaming from his supporters, Ron Paul came third. Oddly enough, having been told that this caucus is of supreme importance (something I never really believed) we are now being told by the same people that it is of no significance whatsoever.

Be that as it may, I was interested to read this analysis of how the votes went and who voted for whom. Without going into all the details, of interest only to some voters in the US, I can confirm that the Paul supporters (or Paulbots, if that is the way you are inclined) tended to insist that what the blogger calls paleolibertarianism was of no importance and we should pay no attention to those pesky newsletters, Paul's weird foreign policy stance or his links to some unsavoury groups in the United States. While his views on matters fiscal and the US Constitution are very attractive, it is, in my opinion, very dangerous to assume that a politician speaks the truth only when he voices opinions you happen to agree with,

An interesting point about the way voters behaved that comes out of this posting and from other sources is that close to a third of them did not make up their minds until the last day. While some comments I have seen suggest that this might say something about Americans or, at least, Iowans, I suspect that this is more common than politicians and campaigners would like to admit. Indeed, there must be quite a number of people who do not make up their minds until they are in their respective voting booths. Only then do they decide that they rather like the way X does her hair or they prefer Y's opinions on some issue or other to Z's.

It seems to me that this should finally be accepted and factored into the strategy and UKIP, as the party that has most to gain from some strategic rethinking, should turn their attention to it. At the next election, be it local, London mayoral or a by-election, they should consider doing some different exit polls from the usual ones. Instead of asking people as they leave the voting station for whom they had voted, ask them why they voted for X (no need to name that person), when did they make their decision to vote for X and what was the reason for that decision. I suspect that some very useful and interesting data would emerge. But then, UKIP is unlikely to listen to me.

So where do we stand on the British Council?

2012-01-04T01:18:00.000Z

The website of this august and somewhat expensive quango tells us that their most popular pages are to do with learning English, teaching English and various other things to do with education and English. That is right and proper. On the other hand, it is not easy to discover exactly what the purpose of the organization is. There are a lot of trendy words and concepts but what is it for (apart from providing various members of the Kinnock family with jobs from time to time)?

Wikipedia in a surprisingly sober language tells us

The British Council is a United Kingdom-based organisation specialising in international educational and cultural opportunities. It is registered as a charity both in England and Wales, and in Scotland. Founded in 1934 as the British Committee for Relations with Other Countries, and granted a royal charter by King George VI in 1940, the British Council was inspired by Sir Reginald (Rex) Leeper's recognition of the importance of "cultural propaganda" in promoting British interests. Its "sponsoring department" within the United Kingdom Government is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, although it has day-to-day operational independence. Martin Davidson is its chief executive, appointed in April 2007.

So, it is there to promote British interests. Right. Got that. Let us, however, go on the Brussels office's page. What do we find? Well, one thing we do not find and that is the word "British". There is a meaningless introductory paragraph:

We are the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations with other countries. Our approach to cultural relations is a broad one. It covers governance and human rights as well as the arts, science, education and inter-cultural dialogue - and we set out deliberately to break down the boundaries between them.

The rest of the text is no better. Sir Rex Leeper would have been horrified by the waffle. Still, one or two things can be learnt. For instance:

The Brussels Office serves as the British Council hub for Europe. Brussels is the capital city of one of the UK's closest neighbours, the location of many of Europe's key institutions, and the centre of intense discussions - and decisions - about issues that affect every European citizen. Our main purpose in being here is to engage in those discussions, to contribute fresh thinking and ideas, and to enable those whose voices may not otherwise be heard to take part. By working with partners from Belgium, the rest of Europe and beyond, we hope that creative and innovative thinkers from the UK will influence, and at the same time be influenced by, creative and innovative thinkers in the rest of Europe.

Well, well. Is that promoting British interest, the British culture and the English language, which, to be fair, does not need all that much promoting these days. Apparently, that is not important enough to talk about. This, however, is:

We play an important role in keeping our colleagues throughout the British Council's global network informed about EU developments: in science, education, the arts, development and governance. This alerting our colleagues to opportunities for EU-funded projects and helping them to win EU support for projects in their countries.

I am willing to bet that they all get very handsome salaries and expenses in the British Council's Brussels office for the work of promoting EU propaganda.

ADDENDUM: A reader kindly sent me this link to the relevant accounts but my laptop refuses to open it and keeps telling me that the file is damaged and cannot be repaired. I shall look into it when I am back on my larger computer. In the meantime, here is the quote the same reader found:

Restricted Activity includes £49 million (2010: £53 million) of income and expenditure relating to projects carried out on behalf of the European Commission.

Time for a few more questions, methinks.

Another one we can close down

2012-01-02T00:10:00.000Z

The Daily ~~Wail~~ Mail reports that Gisela Stuart, one of the few sensible MPs around apart from her incomprehensible desire for an IN/OUT referendum, has protested about the British Counmcil promoting "more Europe" using the money they receive for the promotion of Britain, British culture and the English language. Admittedly, £20,000 out of £200 million is not much but it might be worth somebody's while to have a good look at what the British Council's Brussels office is doing anyway. And then we can close the whole organization down.

I'll leave you with this thought

2011-12-31T19:09:00.001Z

Thanks to a reader from Scandinavia and to The English Blog but, of course, in the first place, thanks to Patrick Blower of the Daily Telegraph. It will take a little while and the mess left behind will be great though not as great as the mess North Korea is facing. Happy New Year and all good wishes for 2012.

Sounds familiar

2011-12-31T01:32:00.001Z

Here is an interesting quote from a long article that analyzes the problems of the eurozone and insists that it was founded on a lie and that politicians do not understand or will not admit what is happening:

Nevertheless, not one of the currency union's founding fathers will admit that it was poorly designed. The currency union brought together countries that weren't compatible economically simply because it was opportune politically. It replaced the currency exchange rate, the standard mechanism for balancing out differences between national economies, with the principle of hope. Now, the common currency was supposed to make the economies align themselves with each other, practically automatically.

In reality, however, the differences between the economies of the euro-zone countries became larger rather than smaller. The so-called "Club Med" countries benefited from the low common interest rate. They lived beyond their means and they consumed more than they could afford -- to the detriment of their already weak ability to compete.

A country with a flagging economy normally devalues its currency. Doing so makes its goods cheaper on the global market, allowing it to increase exports and cut back on its deficit. But, in a currency union, there isn't an exchange rate that can serve as a compensatory mechanism. If a country doesn't have a sound economy, the tensions only increase.

Yes, and your point is? I hear readers ask. Well the point is that the article appeared in Der Spiegel. Worth reading.

Never did I think ....

2011-12-30T22:40:00.001Z

... that I would have to say this but the Boss at EUReferendum is showing signs of being far too charitable and to no less a person than Daniel Hannan, clogger extraordinaire and the man who thinks he can run with the hares and hunt with the hounds indefiinitely.

In a very measured piece, which is for some reason dated with tomorrow's date (they must be in a different time-zone in Bradford) the Boss takes apart young Hannan's latest piece. It is, indeed, full of mistakes and misjudgements none of which I need to point out as it has been done already.

What is so interesting is the growing realization among the various dead-tree media chatterati that, perhaps, not all is well with that phantom veto of a non-existent treaty. It seems that The Sun is uneasy on the subject as well. Of course, none of this is news to those of us who have been following events slightly more closely than the average hack but the development is interesting.

One of Hungary's controversial new laws is to be passed today

2011-12-30T15:27:00.002Z

Reuters reports that the Hungarian Parliament, where FIDESZ has a two-thirds majority is set to pass one of the controversial laws that have been exciting commentators and politicians: the one that appears to impose political control on the central bank.

Undoubtedly, some of this blog's readers will approve of it either because they approve of politicians controlling monetary policy for their own purposes (the EU springs to mind) or because they like the idea of gallant little Hungary defying the big bad wolves of the IMF and the EU. There is a great deal to be said for the latter if it was accompanied by a more or less sane economic policy and if money were not badly needed from those sources.

It is uncertain whether negotiations with the lenders will start at all in January, after the IMF said on Wednesday the government should work with it on policy issues such as the central bank law if it wants talks to progress.

Hungary needs a new financing deal to back up investors' confidence and help retain its access to market funding next year when it has to refinance 4.8 billion euros worth of foreign currency debt, including repayments of a 2008 IMF/EU bailout.

Parliament, where the ruling Fidesz party has a two-thirds majority, is expected to pass the central bank bill smoothly. That could add to pressure on the forint, which fell to a one-month low on Thursday, hit by a scrapped bond auction.

Fidesz has amended the law to address most complaints from the European Central Bank, but has not backed down on a planned boost in the number of rate-setters and vice governors that critics say the government could use to influence monetary policy.

Other proposed laws are listed by The Contrarian Hungarian [scroll down].

Who knew ....

2011-12-30T15:14:00.003Z

.... that there were functioning tax offices in Greece? I didn't for one. Apparently, they exist because they have just closed as the officials have walked out on a strike. Now, there is something we could learn from the Greeks.

Up to a point, Lord Copper

2011-12-29T16:59:00.001Z

It cheers one's heart to read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Britain needing to return to its rightful place in the world, that is the Anglosphere, though in the first place, the authors talk of Britain's future being with America not Europe. As a short-hand it will do, particularly as the article itself talks of Canada and Australia and the Anglospheric countries in general. I suspect the hand of a sub-editor in the choice of the title.

Perhaps, I had better start with declaring my interests: not only am I a confirmed Anglospherist but the two authors, Iain Murray and James C. Bennett are good friends of mine with whom I have conducted many discussions in cyberspace and face to face. In fact, when I raised one or two objections to the article, I got helpful responses from the authors, which told me something that did not surprise me: the original draft was a little less complimentary to our Prime Minister.

I consider the authors' account of what Britain lost in joining the EEC and of the problems the eurozone and with it the EU is facing completely accurate. Naturally enough, I agree with their main thesis: this country should not belong to the sclerotic, bureaucratic, protectionist would-be European state that is not and cannot be expected to be based the Anglospheric political, constitutional and judicial ideas.

There are a few problems, though. In the first place, there are mistakes in this:

The European Economic Community (EEC) for which the British signed up in a 1975 referendum—a community of free trade and cooperation, not supranational bureaucracy—is long gone. Worse, even today's less-palatable EU will soon no longer be on offer.

There is the basic mistake of assuming that Britain signed up to the EEC in a referendum. As we all know, the 1975 referendum was called after two years of membership and some cosmetic "renegotiation", the gist of which nobody can recall. The question was not about whether anybody wanted to go into the EEC but whether they wanted to stay in.

Nor is it true to say that the EEC was ever a community of free trade and cooperation. At best it was a customs union with the Preamble to the Treaty of Rome speaking frankly of an ever-closer union of the peoples of Europe. The fact that so many voters preferred not to find out what they were voting about does not make the myth true.

More importantly, the article perpetuates the myth of David Cameron standing up for Britain, splitting the EU, creating a new role for Britain and so on, though there is a clear indication that he mucked up the negotiations. Readers of this blog cannot remain unaware of reiterated comments about what really happened at those negotiations. In case anyone has forgotten, here is a reminder. In brief: there was no treaty, no veto and no assurance that Britain may have gained anything. The chance to repatriate powers was given away as that cannot happen without a full IGC and a new treaty.

Still, one cannot argue with an article that ends with these words:

Up to now, however, the U.S. has pursued a policy of propping up the euro while discouraging British independence from Brussels. This is incredibly short-sighted. Using the vehicles of the Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund to try to fill the gaping hole in Europe's finances will get everybody nowhere. Instead, British, American and Canadian policy makers (along with their Nafta partners in Mexico) should be taking the long view and preparing for a future in which the unsustainable euro zone inevitably collapses. Welcoming Britain back into the North Atlantic economic community would be a win-win for all involved.

It is unlikely to happen for a while since Britain is not free to join anything while she remains in the EU and that has not changed, despite the post European Council grandstanding.

We lost the propaganda war

2011-12-29T16:23:00.002Z

The title refers to the Cold War, on which I have been meditating recently, what with the death of Vaclav Havel and the release of the new, completely inadequate version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. While militarily and politically the West won, in the more insiduous field of propaganda, it lost. We can see that in the neurotic anti-Americanism that makes people support some of the most oppressive regimes and ideologies in the world, in the continuing support for the once and future President, now Prime Minister Putin because he appears to be anti-Western, and, above all, in the refusal to face up to the truth about Communism. If you have any doubts about this, have a look at this interview the BBC conducted about the events of 2011 with their historian of choice: the life-long Communist and Stalinist (as long as it was the party line) and denial of Communist crimes, Eric Hobsbawm. I suggest you keep a sick-bucket somewhere close to hand.

The night before Christmas

2011-12-24T19:08:00.001Z

It fast approaches. Let me just say that the demo outside the Russian Embassy went well. Between 60 and 100 people attended. There were a few speeches, some slogans shouted for fair elections and a new year without Putin (some hope); as it was largely a Russian event, somebody brought a guitar and there was much singing.

In Russia, tens of thousands turned out across the country. It seems the weather is relatively mild - General December is not on the side of the Kremlin. Reuters has photos.

I shall be signing off soon but I do want to wish all the blog's readers a very merry Christmas. Thank you for reading it, for commenting and for arguing with me. Thanks to the odd troll for providing us all with entertainment. Normal service will resume in a couple of days.

More about Hungary

2011-12-24T01:17:00.004Z

I do apologize if the fate of this small and far-off country is beginning to bore readers. I promise to get on to some other EU member soon. However, if things go seriously belly-up in another one of the member states (and this time we shall see no resignations) that will have an effect on the EU, which, in turn, will have an effect on Britain. So, we had better be prepared.

At the time of the negotiations with the former Communist states of Eastern Europe, one of the things I wrote against it was that their political structures are quite fragile and economic problems that will almost inevitably follow their accession to the EU may well unbalance them. Is this what is happening in Hungary? The omens, as I said before, are not good.

Walter Russell Mead, not a man who can be accused of leftward leanings has an even stronger piece on his blog in which he wonders whether Europe is not approaching the situation of the thirties. Well, actually, no, as the situation today cannot be what it was in the thirties but the constant ratcheting of EU powers at the expense of any accountable national government together with severe economic problems is producing the result many of us predicted but one that was not supposed to happen under the benign gaze of Brussels: the growth of a more extreme and unpleasant form of nationalism.

Both Radio Free Europe and the BBC report arrests of opposition MPs who were protesting against the passage of constitutionally important laws in haste on the last day before Christmas. (A favourite ploy in many countries, one may add.)

Support for Russian protesters

2011-12-23T13:36:00.001Z

Christmas Eve is the worst possible time for demonstrations but it is different in Russia, where they keep Christmas according to the Julian calendar. So there will be people out again, demonstrating and demanding fair elections (though, really, what they need is regime change).

We, in the West, must try to support them. So, anyone in London on Saturday, who can spare an hour or so, please come to the demonstration outside the Russian Embassy at 12 or soon after. In fact, the demonstration will be in Bayswater Road as the Embassy is in Kensington Palace Gardens, which is private property. Nearest tube stations are Queensway and Notting Hill Gate and there are various buses that go along Bayswater Road.

Words have meanings

2011-12-22T21:18:00.000Z

The Boss over on EUReferendum has been waging a valiant fight against what he calls "fantasy politics" as have numerous other bloggers. This blog has been doing its poor best to bring some sanity into the debate and, to be fair, a number of journalists out in the big bad MSM have been doing the same. For the time being we are overwhelmed by people who accept the Boy-King's notion that, like Humpty-Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass, he can make a word he uses mean what he wants it to mean.

The word I am talking about is, as readers would have realized, veto. There is a strange belief out there that the Boy-King has vetoed a treaty and all is well with the world. Setting aside the truth that we are still in the EU and subject to its ever more insane laws and regulations, there is a problem with the word. To quote The Princess Bride (ha, didn't expect that, did you): "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." To be fair, I have no idea what the Boy-King, his supporters, the ToryBoy blog or the so-called eurosceptics who are still whooping with joy think the word "veto" means. But I do not think it means whatever it is they think it means.

So, back to basics. The word comes from the Latin veto, vetare (first conjugation if memory serves), which means to forbid. Not to stay away from the discussions and the signature but to forbid.

In the sixth century BC the Roman Republic introduced the concept of the veto, the intercessio that could be used by the People's Tribunes (such as the Gracchi) and, possibly, one or both of the Consuls in order to control and moderate the Senate. When vetoed, a bill was denied the force of law, that is, its use was prevented.

With me so far? Good. Let us carry on.

According to the New Oxford Dictionary of English, a volume I tend to trust, though like Lady Bracknell with "the Court Guides of the period", I have known strange errors in that publication. However, the definitions of veto (noun and verb) seem correct.

Veto (n.): - a constitutional right to reject a decision or proposal made by a law-making body
- such a rejection
- a prohibition

For example, the President of the United States has the veto over legislation sent to him by Congress. He does, of course, need to have the legislation first and, once he has exercised his veto, it does not enter the law. Or, to give another example, a committee or board may have a veto over an appointment. There has to be a position and a person who has been appointed for the veto to apply and when it has been applied, the person does not get the job or position.

Veto (v.): - exercise a veto against a decision or proposal by a law-making body
- refuse to accept or allow

Again, one needs something that one can refuse or allow in order to veto it and, once that has been vetoed, it is stopped from proceeding. Is that quite clear? Good.

The question is on what did Mr Cameron, the man who, by some freak of historical development, appears to be the Prime Minister of this country, exercise his veto on. He does have a veto on certain decisions, none of which had been made during the European Council that he graced with his presence, if rumour is to be believed, and on treaties that are produced by the Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC). There had been no Conference so there was no treaty which he could have vetoed. QED.

Moving right along, we have to acknowledge that whatever is vetoed cannot happen. That is the whole point of a veto: it stops a certain event, piece of legislation or, in the case of the EU, treaty from going ahead. Well, what's this? Scotch mist? As it happens, this is the agreement (carefully not called a treaty but it is in all but name) that the Boy-King was supposed to have vetoed. It is called: DRAFTINTERNATIONAL AGREEMENT ON A REINFORCED ECONOMIC UNION and it has all the various measures that were supposed to have been vetoed.

The idea that the agreement when it is signed in March will have no effect on this country is moonshine. If nothing else this will make it easier for legislation to be passed under QMV, which is how all Single Market legislation and, as it happens, all those directives aimed at the City, which Mr Cameron was intent on saving, passed. (He might consider trying to save it from his own Chancellor but that would be like asking him to equip a fleet of porcine aircraft.)

So, we have Humpty-Dumpty Cameron telling us that the word veto and the word treaty mean exactly what he says they mean, which is a huffy exit and a wave of the hand to let the others get on with whatever it is they wanted to do. And we have a very large number of people, including all Tory MPs, the entire Conservative party and many others outside it in the media and among so-called political activists who believe it. Alice did better than that. She argued with Humpty-Dumpty, who then had a great fall.

Instead of a vetoed treaty that has been stopped in its tracks, we have an agreement that is going ahead, will undoubtedly be signed, will, if implemented, indubitably affect this country. The one thing we do not have is Cameron's right to veto it. That's right. He has actually given up his right to veto the next agreement because he was so anxious "not to bring a treaty back to Parliament". And while other countries will debate the resultant agreement, look for some kind of a desperate political alliance to implement it (in Austria, for instance, they will need two-thirds of the vote) and, quite possibly, be forced to have a referendum (as it is being discussed in Ireland, Denmark and Sweden already) we shall be sitting back, waiting for the decision to happen or not to happen.

That is not quite the way the veto was envisaged in the Roman Republic. But then, what did those Romans do for us?

What exactly will the "reformed" House of Lords be doing?

2011-12-22T16:30:00.000Z

For some time we have known that in the new session, which, outrageously, will not open till the spring of 2012, there will be a Bill to reform the House of Lords. Those people who were so outraged by Nick Clegg's recent idiotic pronouncements about the present Chamber being an affront to democracy will do well to bear in mind that on this issue (as on so many others) he and the Prime Minister are at one. In fact, they are at one with the previous two Prime Ministers.

The need to "reform" the House of Lords is not immediately obvious and was not so even in 1997 when Tony Blair decided to use that and the ban on hunting as a sop to this disgruntled left-wingers. (Much good did it do him.) The Upper House does its business considerably better than the Lower one and, though its members are paid merely expenses when they sit in the Chamber, they spend a great deal more time and energy on their work as legislators and revisers of legislation than our highly paid Commons. I have written about this too often to be able to link to any specific post but as the Bill starts making its way through Parliament (and, maybe, even before) I shall return to the subject.

How people get there is, after all, less important than what they do when they are there. After all, our real government is in Brussels, in any case, and that is not about to change.

The real reason for the proposed reform is the need felt by this and previous governments and by the political parties to control the Chamber that is likely to oppose and revise whatever legislation they try to bulldoze through. It has been hinted that the reason Mr Cameron has appointed more peers than even Mr Blair did in his first year was to ensure that there was a large cohort of people grateful to him for when the "reform" is to be pushed through. That may be a miscalculation. For the time being, even appointed peers are not dependent on those who had appointed them and may well vote according to their consciences. They may even turn up for the debates, something many of Blair's appointees did not once they realized that a great deal of work and very little pay were involved.

That this "reform" will not be any better thought through than the previous one was, is indicated by the response given to Lord Kakkar's Starred Question on Wednesday.

To ask Her Majesty's Government why the draft Bill on House of Lords Reform makes no provision for defining the powers of an elected second chamber.

A fair question. After all, once the make-up of the House of Lords changes, its role and duties will change, too. The notion that the Upper Chamber is secondary to the Lower rests entirely on the assumption that the former is unelected. That will, logically, change once they are both elected and we have something resembling a Senate. Also, the elected members will expect to be paid and paid as handsomely as their colleagues are in the Lower House. In other words, everything will be different. Lord Strathclyde (for it is he, again) does not think so. At least, the people who wrote his reply do not think so.

My Lords, the draft House of Lords Reform Bill specifically provides that nothing in the provisions affects the status, powers or jurisdiction of either House of Parliament. We therefore do not believe that it is necessary to define the powers of this House in primary legislation.

The rest of the short debate, which is well worth reading, consists of peers attempting to point out to the noble Minister that the provisions of the Parliament Act applied to one elected and one unelected Chamber and, therefore, cannot apply in the same way to two elected ones, with the said Minister refusing to acknowledge that black is black and white is white. I quite liked Lord Howe of Aberavon's contribution (yes, yes, Geoffrey Howe):

My Lords, is it not possible that including such provisions in the Bill would make lucid and clear the increased risk of conflict between the two Houses and the disastrous consequences of the creation of a new structure? Will my noble friend tell the House whether that is the explanation, and is it the consequence of idle carelessness or deliberate deceit?

Dear me, what a suspicious nature some people have.

What is free speech?

2011-12-22T00:44:00.001Z

Free speech is an expression that is much used by people who have absolutely no idea what it means. I have no time for people who say "I believe in free speech but ..." because that usually means they do not believe in it. On the other hand, I do not limit anyone's free speech by either not listening to them, not replying to them or banning them from my blog (not that I have had to resort to that yet but it may happen). My blog is my property and I do not have to put up with people's comments on it if I do not feel like it.

On the subject of private property and free speech, here is an article by George Reisman on the Ludwig von Mises Institute site: Free Speech and Occupy Wall Street.

Nevertheless, by the logic of the prevailing view of freedom of speech, protesters in the future will be able to storm into lecture halls and/or seize radio and television stations in order to deliver their message and then claim that their freedom of speech is violated when the police come to eject them, even though the police in such cases would in fact be acting precisely in order to uphold the freedom of speech. Indeed, since the days of the so-called Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, back in the 1960s, disruptions of speeches delivered by invited guests have occurred repeatedly on college campuses, in the name of the alleged freedom of speech of the disrupters. No attention has been paid to the actual violation of the freedom of speech of the invited speakers.

The prevailing view of freedom of speech is a major threat to freedom of speech. Not only does it provide justification for actual violations of freedom of speech of the kinds just mentioned, but it also makes freedom of speech appear to be a fundamental enemy of rational communication. Speakers cannot address audiences, professors cannot lecture to students if disrupters are permitted to drown them out and then hide behind the claim that they do so in the name of freedom of speech. If the prevailing view of freedom of speech were correct, the ability of speakers to speak and professors to lecture would require accepting the principle of the need to violate freedom of speech.

Read the whole piece. I don't often recommend this site but, for once, its publication is spot on while approaching the subject from an unusual angle.

The Bill goes through to the Commons

2011-12-21T16:38:00.000Z

Today saw the Third Reading of Lord Pearson's Bill, which seems to have been something of a non-event [scroll to Column 1784]. As to how it got to this stage so quickly, this is what I wrote but decided not to publish a few days ago:

The Committee stage debate of Lord Pearson's Bill did not take place as there were no amendments. Lord Pearson moved as the rules say:

My Lords, I understand that no amendments have been set down to the Bill and that no noble Lord has indicated a wish to move a manuscript amendment or to speak in Committee. Unless any noble Lord objects, therefore, I beg to move.

There were no objections and the motion was agreed to.

What next? According to the House of Lords Companion to the Standing Orders:

8.94 If no amendments have been set down to a bill and it appears that no member wishes to move a manuscript amendment or to speak to any clause or Schedule, the Lord in charge of the bill may move that the order of commitment (or recommitment) be discharged.[310] This motion may be moved only on the day the committee stage is set down for and notice must be given on the order paper.

8.95 The Lord in charge of the bill says:

"My Lords,

I understand that no amendments have been set down to this bill, and that no noble Lord has indicated a wish to move a manuscript amendment or to speak in Committee.

Unless, therefore, any noble Lord objects, I beg to move that the order of commitment [or recommitment] be discharged."

8.96 The Question is then put "That the order of commitment [or recommitment] be discharged." If this Question is agreed to, the next stage of the bill is third reading.

There can be amendments at the Third Reading, which is scheduled for December 21 and the Government and Opposition Front Benches may well decide to defeat the Bill. We shall see. It is entirely possible that nobody wanted this debate now just in case the truth about the non-veto of the phantom treaty might come out.

It seems, there were no amendments. So the Bill is, perhaps unexpectedly, through the House of Lords and goes to the Commons in the new year. The First Reading, not yet scheduled, will be, as ever a formality. But, unlike in the Lords, the Commons divide at Second Reading as well as later on. We shall see what those much-praised, much-vaunted Tory eurosceptics will do. HMG is unhappy with the idea of a establishing "a Committee of Inquiry into the economic implications for the United Kingdom of membership of the European Union". Who will rebel and say that it is, in fact, a very good idea, indeed?

In the meantime, I cannot help being somewhat surprised by the carefully phrased rudeness exhibited by the Lord Strathclyde, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster [just above the Third Reading].

As a number of Orders to do with mayoral referendums in various cities were referred to the Grand Committee, Lord Pearson asked:

My Lords, why are the Government so keen on all these referendums on the comparatively minor matter of who becomes the mayor in these cities while they refuse a referendum on the far greater issue of whether we stay in the clutches of the corrupt octopus in Brussels or leave them?

Well, as far as I can see, as readers of this blog know, a referendum of that kind would be a disaster as people, who were easily bamboozled by the Boy-King's phony veto of a non-existent treaty would undoubtedly vote to stay in but reform the unreformable. However, that cannot be HMG's argument. So what did Lord Strathclyde reply, having disposed of another objection:

As for the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, in the spirit of Christmas, it is always good to hear him. I hope he has a very quiet and restful time over the next two or three weeks, and if he wishes to have an even longer restful and quiet time, I am sure that would be appreciated by most of us, particularly those who work on European business.

A period of silence, eh? So we can get on with our business of handing over whatever remains of this country's sovereignty.

The answer to our problems with Greece

2011-12-21T01:09:00.002Z

This link was sent to me by a reader of this blog who is highly knowledgeable about Greek affairs. The article was published in Forbes Magazine as long ago as July but its relevance has not dimmed.

It must be dawning on all but the most obtuse member of the banking elite that they can’t possibly steal enough money from German taxpayers to save the Greek government from default. Put it off, maybe, but collapse is inevitable.

Once this happens, what is the purpose of casting Greece into some selective temporary financial purgatory where the irrelevant Greek economy can continue embarrassing anyone foolish enough to lend their dysfunctional government a dime? Why not go all the way and give the country what many of its people have been violently demanding for almost a century?

Let them have Communism.

Hard as it is for young people to believe, Communism was once a major historical force holding billions of people in thrall. Outside the halls of elite universities, who still takes it seriously? Sure we have Cuba, where the Castro deathwatch is the last thing standing between that benighted penal colony and an inevitable makeover by Club Med. Then there is Venezuela, though hope is fading that Hugo Chavez will carry the Bolivarian banner much longer now that he’s busy sucking down FOLFOX cocktails while checking for signs that his hair is falling out. And frankly, a psychopathic family dynasty ruling a nation of stunted zombies hardly makes North Korea a proper Communist exemplar.

What the world needs, lest we forget, is a contemporary example of Communism in action. What better candidate than Greece? They’ve been pining for it for years, exhibiting a level of anti-capitalist vitriol unmatched in any developed country. They are temperamentally attuned to it, having driven all hard working Greeks abroad in search of opportunity. They pose no military threat to their neighbors, unless you quake at the sight of soldiers marching around in white skirts. And they have all the trappings of a modern Western nation, making them an uncompromised test bed for Marxist theories. Just toss them out of the European Union, cut off the flow of free Euros, and hand them back the printing plates for their old drachmas. Then stand back for a generation and watch.

The land that invented democracy used it to perfect the art of living at the expense of others, an example all Western democracies appear intent on emulating. Being the first to run out of other people’s money makes Greece truly ripe to take the next logical step beyond socialism.

Read the whole piece. It's hilarious and not exactly untrue.

Media misses big story

2011-12-21T00:42:00.000Z

Well, OK, that headline comes close to dog bites man or supermodel takes drugs but it is instructive to find this sort of goings on across the Pond as well. Walter Russell Meade points out that the biggest story in Asian politics in the last few days was not, as it happens, the death of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il but something far more important.

The real news in Asian politics yesterday, the kind of thing that will likely show up in the history books, was a quiet meeting announced by the State Department. If you missed it, it’s because people didn’t cover it much, but for the first time ever, India, Japan, and the US held a round of trilateral talks on the future of Asia and the strategic picture. The session, reads a State Department media release, “mark[s] the beginning of a series of consultations among our three governments, who share common values and interests across the Asia-Pacific and the globe”. These three powers aren’t an alliance; the US and Japan have a treaty of alliance, but India remains non-aligned — and has no plans to change. This is an entente, not an alliance. It is a community that rests on common concerns and common views about important developments — but ententes are important. This one in particular (which besides the Big Three also includes important regional presences like Australia, Vietnam, Singapore and others) may play a bigger role in US foreign policy than NATO as time moves on.

That last comment ought to make the story important to us as well.

Worrying developments in Hungary

2011-12-20T20:22:00.001Z

It is always difficult to disentangle truth from average left-wing hysteria in accounts of what happens in European countries, especially in Central Europe, when right-wing parties win elections. There have been all sorts of alarums and excursions about the Hungarian government, which last April won the two-thirds majority that the first post-Communist constitution specifically tried to prevent. (here and here)

This article in Der Spiegel is, as usual, muddled on the subject, assuming as a starting point that anything left-leaning is better than anything right-leaning. As before it lumps FIDESZ and Jobbik (the extreme right-wing party) together, though there is a throw-away comment on the second page that indicated Orban's efforts to distance himself and his party from the latter.

There is a mention of the growing popularity of Jobbik but no real indication of figures. Maybe it is worrying and maybe it is not; maybe they are just idiots who like marching around in made-up uniforms with torches in their hands.

However, I cannot dismiss the subject completely, as a good deal of the information is true, as I found out when I was in the country last month. The New Theatre has, indeed, acquired a new director who is an unashamed anti-Semite and who, together with his ultra-nationalist friend and colleague, Csurka, talks openly about rescuing Hungarian culture from the present rotten, liberal and foreign control. Anyone who knows twentieth century history can decipher the code there.

The plan to move Attila József's statue from the square outside Parliament is real enough and when I was there a twenty-four hour demonstration or occupation was going on of people who were reciting the great poet's works. As I was told one reason was his politics (though he was not actually a Communist) but the other was Viktor Orbán's apparent desire to restore the square to its early twentieth century appearance. It seems in keeping with the pronounced desire to "return" to the Hungary of pre-Trianon.

The iniquities of the Treaty of Trianon are part of the politicians' discourse and there are various plans to get the Hungarians in other countries to vote in Hungarian elections. Given how many of them there are (those iniquities were real enough) there could one day arise a situation in which the government of Hungary is decided by people who do not live in the country. (Of course, its real government is in Brussels, so one could argue that this is all a minor problem.) Unfortunately or fortunately, at present, the various groups in various countries seem to be unable to come to any agreement, as a political programme I watched on TV explained.

When I tried to find out whether people really cared about what happened almost a century ago, given how many other things happened afterwards, I could get no adequate reply but certainly I heard no conversations on streets, on trams, in shops about the Trianon. The price of goods, yes; the nasty foggy weather, yes; Trianon, no.

I did hear some complaints from people who thought developments of this kind were would not be possible in the EU, which is why they supported Hungary's membership (not such a stupid notion when you look at the country's history). What, I asked reasonably, did you think the EU would do? Answer came there none.

At present these are possibly worrying developments, which may not go very far either because the next elections will bring an end to the FIDESZ control or because Orbán will decide that this is not a good idea, just as he decided after much swaggering around, that the IMF was a better bet than China or Saudi Arabia, though that is once again in suspension.

Though our media tends to relegate Hungary's woes, there can be no question about it, the country remains another difficult problem, both economically and politically for the European Union.

Things I missed while trying to have a life

2011-12-20T00:57:00.000Z

One piece of good news this week-end was the death of the Dear Leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Kim Jong-il. Or, at least, it was announced this week-end that he died on Saturday. One can never tell with those People's Organizations or Republics. It's good news because he, truly, was evil. That word is bandied around a good deal but in this case and in the case of the rest of his friends and family, it is entirely accurate.

Of course, the horror of North Korea is not over; if the succession is peaceful the same will continue, if it is not, there will be a nasty civil war that may spill over into South Korea, where there is a distinct nervousness.

The sad news was the death of Vaclav Havel, who, to be fair, was more of a symbol and a talking head to be produced at many well-meaning international congresses, conferences and meetings. Still, he did remind us all of the heroic days of the dissident opposition to Communism.

There are so many obituaries of Havel around that I shall link to three only, one on the Cato site and two on ChicagoBoyz (here and here). Not unexpectedly, I shall try to eschew the sentimentality that surrounded the man and still continues. On the whole, he was more popular in the West than in his own land, despite the outpourings of emotion now, because the West saw the symbol and not the real politician who was far more controversial (as what politician is not).

To start with, he was a Central European intellectual, a form of animal life that is unknown in Britain or anywhere in the Anglosphere (and how lucky they all are). He was a playwright, who, even before 1968 wrote plays that were a somewhat daring departure from the required socialist realism. Neither those plays nor the later dissident ones about Ferdinand Vanek were particularly good. I saw several, so I can attest that abandoning the theatre and going on to the political stage was a very good decision to take.

Havel, I have always felt, would have been very happy with Communism with a Human Face, an impossible notion that was supposedly Alexander Dubcek's aim in 1968. The Soviets rightly decided that, left to itself, it would mean the dissolution of Communism, leaving it with no face at all, and put the Prague Spring down quite brutally but not as badly as some other rebellions. The country was plunged into gloom with most people averting their eyes from the public sphere.

There were a few exceptions, the signatories of Charter 77, various other dissidents, the rock group Plastic Peoples of the Universe and so on. As these people were deprived of their jobs in universities, research institutes, theatres, schools, and other suchlike institutions, they had to become workers in factories, window cleaners, truck drivers and, sometimes, worse. This is what Havel wrote about in the Vanek plays.

Gradually, his name became synonymous with the low-key stubborn opposition to Communism in Eastern Europe, particularly Czechoslovakia and it was not surprising that during the Velvet Revolution, the demonstrators demanded that he should be in the Castle, that is become President. He was not so much the leader of the Velvet Revolution as its single public face.

Subsequent events proved that a man who made the perfect dissident was not necessarily a good politician. Indeed, many post-Communist societies found that. Havel, despite himself, presided over the inevitable split of the country's two parts, resigned because of it but was re-elected as President of the Czech Republic. There were, inevitably, various problems and a few scandals of political and financial nature. All this will have been detailed in the various obituaries.

In the late nineties we nearly said good-bye to Havel as he was diagnosed, twice, with lung cancer. But he survived and, given the length of time, was, presumably, cured. His wife, Olga, did die of cancer and he swiftly married again to a few raised eyebrows but then there had always been rumours about his private life. Of no real importance to a true Central European intellectual.

After his presidency, Havel travelled, wrote, spoke and, generally, became one of the great members of the international political intelligentsia, slightly left of centre as he would happily admit, very much in favour of various well-meaning transnational organizations. His intellect did not have the hard-edged ruthlessness of his great rival, Vaclav Klaus.

His death brings sadness. He was, in most ways, honourable and courageous; a man who who perceived the evil of Communism and was not afraid to fight it; a symbol of that struggle. Requiescat in pace.

ADDENDUM: It has been pointed out to me that there is a serious gap in my description of Havel's activity after he was President. He, unlike most of the Europeans he was associating with, opposed the bloody and oppressive Cuban regime without any caveats. Of course, he understood it better.

Well, it could be the answer

2011-12-19T23:33:00.001Z

Forget the EU and the ill-fated euro, says the Progressive Party in Iceland. Why should we not adopt the Canadian dollar (the loonie?). Why not go the whole hog, say I, and join NAFTA? After all, they are in the North Atlantic. Or, even better, why not unite EFTA and NAFTA?

More on Russia

2011-12-19T21:19:00.000Z

I have an article on Taki's Magazine about the role of the internet, the blogosphere and the social media in the growing rebellion against the once and future President, now Prime Minister Putin. The comments are of interest. They have little to do with the arguments or the analysis. In fact, they presumably come from the same stable that comments on any article on Russia come from. If only the Russian government spent less time, energy and resources trolling Western sites and a little more of all of that on improving the situation in the country, we might .... well, who knows where we might be.

How long will this last?

2011-12-19T21:11:00.000Z

I stay away from the blog for two days and all sorts of things happen, not least with Blogger, but that's another story. There seems to be a treaty but it is not an EU treaty, so we shall not be debating it and certainly not voting on it. And now for the big news:

European finance ministers looked unlikely to reach a target of boosting IMF resources by 200 billion euros to ward off the debt crisis on Monday, after Britain said it would not take part in a plan aimed specifically at helping the euro zone.

In a three-hour conference call, ministers also assessed plans for tighter euro zone fiscal rules - a new 'fiscal compact' - that policymakers hope will insulate the 17-country currency zone against a repeat of the two-year debt crisis.

Treasury sources said Britain had made it clear on the call it would not participate in the plan to increase IMF resources by up to 200 billion euros, with 150 billion of coming from euro zone central banks.

"We were clear that we would not be making a contribution," one treasury source said, while another added that there was "no agreement on the 200 billion" euro funding boost.

A Treasury official says? Well, then it must be true.

ADDENDUM: Rowena Mason and Tim Ross in the Telegraph tell us that Britain is not the only country that is gibbing at the thought of more money being sunk into the euro:

However, many members of the IMF, including Britain and the US, are refusing to put in extra contributions to save the currency.

And, as one reads on, one finds the following ominous words:

Officials last night admitted Britain could still give up to £10 billion to the IMF for a new global bail-out fund, just not one specifically aimed at saving the euro.

Not everything is as it is first reported. In fact, nothing is.

As ever, their problems are greater

2011-12-17T01:31:00.003Z

BBC Russian Service reports [in Russian by Mr Google will translate if you ask nicely] that the latest census shows a severe decrease in the Russian population, despite a slight increase in the birth rate and standards of living in the last few years.

Between 1989 (the last Soviet census) and 2002 (the first Russian one) the population decreased by 1.8 million; by 2010 (the last census) another decrease was registered, this time of 2.3 million. The problems are manifold: low birth rate, ever lower life expectancy and the number of young people who leave the country (not mentioned in the story). In fact, the problem would have been even worse if there had not been an influx of Russians from the various former Soviet republics. The closest estimate is that about 7 or 8 million "immigrated" into Russia. What with various problems to do with housing and infrastructure they are not always welcome.

This is very sad

2011-12-16T11:56:00.002Z

Christopher Hitchens, one of the world's best journalists and authors, a unique voice who listened to no-one and went along only with his own ideas, has died. There will be many obituaries, tributes and attacks (just as he would have liked since nobody relished a good fight more than Hitchens). Here is the one in Vanity Fair, his long-time home.

Feltham by-election

2011-12-16T01:50:00.002Z

The results, out earlier than expected because there were so few votes to be counted, confirm much of what this blog and EURef, as well as others, have been saying. Labour held the seat, as was expected. Turn-out was 28.8 per cent, the lowest in 11 years. That is not a good sign for anything.

Results as listed by the Guardian:

Seema Malhotra, a former adviser to Harriet Harman, retained the seat for Labour after a swing of 8.56% points from the Tories.

Malhotra increased Labour's majority from 4,658 to 6,203 when she won with 12,639 votes. Mark Bowen, the Conservative candidate, came second with 6,436 votes. Roger Crouch, the Liberal Democrat, fought off a challenge from the UK Independence Party to hold third place with 1,364 votes. UKIP won 1,276 votes.

Labour majority is 6,203, which is, weirdly, higher than the 4658 it was in 2010. On the other hand, the low turn-out does not exactly show that the voters of Feltham and Heston are enamoured of the Labour Party, though Ed Miliband remains safe for the time being.

Certainly, we have seen no sign of the voters being so very pleased with Cameron's performance in Brussels but, I suppose, it is possible that they have heard nothing about it in Feltham. The only party that must be reasonably happy are the Lib-Dims as they stayed in third place, if only just.

Conversely, the most disappointed party must be UKIP who were set to beat the Lib-Dims as recently as last week. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that UKIP has done badly for one reason only: their astonishing inability to confront the Boy-King of the Conservative Party over the non-veto of the phantom treaty. Accepting the man's word and semi-supporting him was a ridiculous idea. I wonder who thought of it.

You mean he didn't veto this?

2011-12-15T21:02:00.002Z

Troubling news for all those who are rejoicing about the Boy-King vetoing treaties, getting us out of the euro (when were we in?), putting us on the same footing as Switzerland and generally restoring Britain's pride in herself: it seems that there is a fair chance that Britain will have to cough up another £30 billion in the form of loans to the IMF (loans?) that will be used to shore up the eurozone, which is not, incidentally what the IMF is supposed to be doing.

The fund revealed in its official Survey Magazine that non-euro countries would put up a quarter of all new money under the EU summit deal.

“European leaders agreed to make bilateral loans to the IMF of as much as €200bn —with €150bn contributed by eurozone members and €50bn from other members of the EU,” it said.

The report relied on a briefing by IMF chief Christine Lagarde, who was in the room with EU leaders during last Friday’s summit talks. Britain is the EU’s only large economy outside the euro.

The EU statement contained no reference to the €50bn figure for non-eurozone states. “If Britain has really agreed to this, it is a huge deal,” said Julian Callow at Barclays Capital.

David Cameron gave no hint of such an obligation in his statement to the Commons on Monday. “Alongside non-European G20 countries, we are ready to look positively at strengthening the IMF’s capacity to help countries in difficulty across the world,” the Prime Minister said. “But IMF resources are for countries not currencies, and can’t be used specifically to support the euro.”

What else might have happened at that meeting about which we have not been told?

Convicted?

2011-12-15T14:24:00.002Z

They convicted Jacques Chirac of embezzling public funds? Really? Actually found him guilty? My goodness me. What is the world coming to? You mean a French politician cannot simply use taxpayers' money for his own political purposes? I find that hard to deal with. (Washington Post and Telegraph accounts. Two links will do.)

Are we to understand ...

2011-12-15T00:37:00.001Z

... that while the Europeans (elite and non-elite) have been prancing around self-righteously condemning American states who execute murderers, some European firms have been supplying the necessary drug?

Lord Pearson's Bill

2011-12-14T15:03:00.002Z

Committee stage of Lord Pearson's Bill will follow Starred questions. As the House sat at 3 pm today, this will most probably not be till about 3.45. You can, if your computer is up to it, watch it here.

On The New Culture Forum

2011-12-13T16:07:00.001Z

I discuss whether state sponsorship of the arts actually corrodes the mind. Have to admit that I did not think of that brilliant headline. Must have been Peter Whittle, the Director of NCF.

Nothing has changed - Part 2

2011-12-13T14:30:00.002Z

Let us continue with our survey of were we stand within the European Union. Here is an interesting comment from the Second Reading of Lord Pearson's Bill in the House of Lords on November 25, which you will find if you scroll down to the very end Column 1239, where Lord Kakkar is speaking:

I will concentrate on two areas: the European working time regulation and its impact on the training of young doctors and other healthcare professionals in our country; and the impact of the clinical trials and data protection directives on our ability to conduct high-quality clinical research. On the European working time regulation, there has been extensive review and discussion about its potential implications. Its purpose is well recognised, but the unintended consequences with regard to the practice of medicine are not always so well recognised.

If the working time regulation had provided demonstrable evidence of an improvement in clinical quality, the safety of patients and the training of our young doctors and other healthcare professionals, it would be a very reasonable regulation to adopt and apply to the practice of medicine in our country. However, there is little evidence that the regulation restricting hours of work to 48 per week and applying to medical practitioners in training has achieved those objectives.

Clearly there are differences between different disciplines in medicine. The craft disciplines of surgical practice such as my own require a high level of exposure to large numbers of cases in order to develop technical skills, and also a broad ongoing continuity of management of patients to develop the judgment necessary for ultimate independent consultant practice.

The Royal College of Surgeons has taken a keen interest in the potential impacts of the working time regulation on surgical training in our country. In 2010 it produced a report that looked at the potential cost implications of the application of the working time regulation with regard to surgical training. In the two years prior to the introduction of the working time regulation, it collected data using freedom of information requests that were responded to by 96 acute NHS trusts, and extrapolated the findings to the 160 acute trusts where surgical training takes place. It concluded that in the year of introduction of the working time regulation, expenditure on locum costs to cover rotas as a result of the regulation increased from some £540 million a year to £750 million-an increase of more than £200 million.

That was across the board. When the royal college looked at surgical locums, it concluded that costs increased from £170 million a year to £230 million-an extra £60 million spent on locums as a result of the application of the working time regulation restricting surgical trainees to working 48 hours a week. It also tried to determine the number of surgical hours lost per month as a result of the restriction to a 48-hour working week and concluded that some 400,000 surgical hours a month were lost as a result of the restriction. If we were paying this price for achieving an improvement in clinical care or in training, it might be completely justifiable. However, the Royal College of Surgeons and the Association of Surgeons in Training concluded that that was not the case.

The second area is the impact of European directives and regulations on the conduct of clinical research in our country. Twelve per cent of the global citations in clinical and healthcare research are of publications from United Kingdom institutions and nearly one-quarter of the 100 leading medicines in the world have been developed in our country. Biomedical research is therefore hugely important to our economy and in terms of what we can do for our own people as well as for others around the world. In January a working group at the Academy of Medical Sciences chaired by Sir Michael Rawlins published a report, entitled A new Pathway for the Regulation and Governance of Health Research,which looked at ways of ensuring that we remain competitive. It concluded that the European clinical research directive has had a detrimental impact on the conduct of clinical research in our country. The directive was introduced for good reasons-to improve ethical standards and to ensure consistency of data and, ultimately, to ensure that patients are strongly protected in all clinical research-but there have been unintended consequences which have made the approval of clinical trials much slower and the conduct of clinical trials less effective. It has also increased the cost of doing clinical trials, so much so that, in 2000, 6 per cent of all patients going into clinical trials globally came from our country while, by 2006, the number had fallen to only 2 per cent of patients going into clinical trials. That has a very serious impact on our ability to function in that area.

These conclusions were also confirmed by your Lordships' Science and Technology Committee in its second report for Session 2008-09, on genomic medicine, chaired by my noble friend Lord Patel. It also concluded that it would be important for Her Majesty's Government to review the working of the clinical trial directive and the data protection directive, which were having a detrimental impact on the conduct of clinical research in our country. I know that the Government are keenly aware of these important issues and that they are trying to address them. If a committee were established to look at the benefits and costs of our membership of European Union, consideration of the impact of European regulation on the conduct of research and the training of our doctors are important topics that should be considered.

I quoted most of Lord Kakkar's speech because it is about important matters that do not get aired frequently enough in public and because what he says shows our impotence in the face of EU regulation, whether it comes in the form of Directives or Regulations.

In his reply Lord Sassoon skated over the problems raised [half-way down Column 1256]:

The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, referred to another area of great strength for the UK: our world-beating excellence in clinical research. He made some telling points but, on the broad point about working time regulations, I stress that the Government are committed to the view that working people should decide the hours that they work, and we will continue to make that abundantly clear to the European Commission.

Very nice, too, but how is this world-beating excellence to be preserved and developed with the insane regulations that are destroying it?

Lord Pearson said in his final summary [towards the end of Column 1258]:

I think the Minister agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, about the working time directive and other European legislation that is damaging our National Health Service. He said that he would continue to press the Commission on this point. My final question to the Minister is: what is the point of the United Kingdom continuing to press the Commission on these and other burdens that come from Brussels? With 8 per cent of the votes in the Council, there is nothing that we can do to reverse them and we will not do so.

Quite so. Has that changed at all in the last few days? I think not.

Where does the money go?

2011-12-13T00:47:00.002Z

Taking time out of the two big stories: Russia where they do not believe politicians and Britain's obsessive need to do so, I have returned to a question I have often asked myself and anyone who did not manage to move out of my vicinity fast enough: just where does the money go? Britain is a fairly rich country and the people in it are, on the whole, well off. Yet there is never any money for what matters.

Businesses are not expanding, not hiring, not investing; charities are short of funds; arts and think-tanks cannot raise enough and don't even ask about research institutions. When asked, we all blame the amount we hand over in taxes here and there yet our public services, whether it be education, transport, police or anything else you care to name, are among the worst in the Western world. So where does the money go?

Here are two stories to be pondered over.

One comes from the Daily Wail but is backed by others, such as the Independent and the Telegraph; even the Grauniad who was responsible for the story in the first place is getting a little tetchy. It seems that Glenn Mulcaire, who was actually arrested in connection with the phone hacking enquiry, could not have been party to the biggest scandal of all, the deletion of Milly Dowler's messages, action that had given the family false hope.

Surrey police is, according to the story in the Indy, desperately looking for yet another NoW journalist who might have been responsible. Or, perhaps not. As the Daily Wail says:

Scotland Yard yesterday said it has absolutely ‘no evidence’ that News of the World journalists deleted Milly Dowler’s voicemail messages.

The police force’s barrister made a dramatic intervention at the Leveson inquiry into press standards.

Neil Garnham QC said the ‘most likely explanation’ for the disappearance of the messages is that they automatically ‘dropped off’ the network after 72 hours.

It seems that the police may have wanted to tell the family this but were not allowed to do so by the family lawyer. Perhaps.

What does seem to be the case is that this huge enquiry, investigation and scandal may have been started on largely false pretences (most of the rest of the "evidence" remains unsupported tales by celebs looking for publicity) and has resulted in the closing down of a newspaper (no, I never read it but that is not the point), the loss of 400 or so jobs and a threat of strict control over the media. Not to mention what looks like a wrongful arrest. Behind it all looms the question that one cannot help asking: given the loud complaints about the police not paying enough attention to crime, not solving more than a tiny proportion, not being able to control looters in the street, why exactly do they spend so much time, money and energy on cases that involve celebrities? (Or travelling to Barcelona to enquire into vague rumours to do with the McCann story?)

Story number two, in the Evening Standard, comes from my neck of the woods, the Borough of Hammersmith of Fulham, whose council, as it happens, is one of the more efficient ones in the country, the White City estate and the Westfield shopping centre, which has been a huge commercial and social success.

Stephen Greenhalgh, who has led Hammersmith and Fulham council for five years and is close to Boris Johnson, wants to help channel Whitehall and local authority funds to the White City Estate in Shepherd's Bush.

He said: "White City has been a huge disappointment over a long period of time in terms of money that has been spent. For example, Westfield opened in the area with 8,000 new jobs and very few of them went locally.

"Nearly £70 million of taxpayers' funds - or £17,000 per household - is spent in this area every year. Despite this, unemployment is twice the borough average, the area has high levels of overcrowding, relatively low educational attainment and relatively high levels of crime." Commentators said the move could lead to similar projects being set up around London.

I recall that when Westfield opened they announced their commitment to local jobs. I also recall that when the snow came most of the shops had to close because the staff could not get in, which would indicate that by then the jobs were not local or that the local talent could not be bothered to walk down the road to the place.

Nevertheless, this is a pertinent question. Just exactly why have only a few of the Westfield jobs gone locally in a high unemployment area? And, even more to the point: what on earth does the £70 million a year go? If Stephen Greenhalgh can find that out he is a better man than most. I await his report with interest. He will report, will he not?

Nothing has changed - Part 1

2011-12-12T15:17:00.002Z

In the light of the stupendous and misguided hysteria about the Boy-King's "fantastic achievements" in the recent European Council, which just confirms my view that an IN/OUT referendum would be a disaster, I have decided to start a series of the various ways in which Britain's position has not changed one iota. For those who are thinking along the lines of the UK being like Switzerland, I can say one thing: there is a difference between being outside the EU and signing bilateral agreements and being inside it and having to obey all the laws that flood towards us and will continue to flood.

First up: levels of immigration. I rarely get involved in that debate as I think it is almost entirely misguided. The problems are to do with our welfare and education systems not with immigration. Nevertheless, it is interesting to hear what HMG has to say on the subject.

On December 7 Lord Roberts of Conwy asked: "what steps they are taking to reduce net immigration".

HMG's response was the usual waffle and not entirely unexpected:

My Lords, we are committed to reducing net migration to tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, by the end of this Parliament. We have already introduced an annual limit on the number of non-EU workers, overhauled the student visa route and increased enforcement activity. Our next steps are to break the link between temporary and permanent migration by restricting settlement rights and to reform family migration.

The relevant part of the discussion comes some way down when Lord Willoughby de Broke asks:

My Lords, if the aim is to reduce net immigration, will the noble Lord say whether he is going to repatriate the power over immigration from the EU? It would surely help to reduce net immigration if we controlled immigration from the EU.

The answer?

My Lords, there are no plans to do so.

Of course not. We cannot do anything about it as we have no right to change EU rules.

Was this not one of those matters on which repatriation of powers was discussed in the dim and distant past (last week or so)? Yes, but you see, you can only change structures and repatriate powers by having a new treaty and that is something the Boy-King will not have.

Protests in Russia

2011-12-11T01:13:00.005Z

The wave of protests passed off reasonably peacefully, as far as one can understand with the militia behaving well even when they arrested people. In Moscow, estimates vary from 20,000 by the police, to 40,000 by Reuters [in Russian] and 100,000 by the organizers. I think I shall assume that Reuters is the most accurate of them all. The picture above from the Reuters site shows the thousands going to the meeting.

The BBC Russian Service has more photos.

I shall write more about events in Russia tomorrow. In the meantime, let us remember that there is this to be said for Russians: they do not believe their politicians. How different from another country I can think of that has had a good deal more experience with them.

Back to reality

2011-12-10T11:44:00.003Z

Huge meetings are expected across Russia to protest the fraudulent election, which still gave United Russia less than 50 per cent of the vote. Rank incompetence. 30,000 have signified that they will turn out in Moscow and the Deputy Mayor gave permission to hold the meeting on Bolotnaya Ploschad', just across the river from the Kremlin. Here is a video of people arriving. The text is in Russian but the numbers can be seen. Meetings are expected in St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and other cities. Will Putin be able to bring this discontent under control by the time of the presidential election in March, the traditional month of uprisings?

Game, set and match ... to them

2011-12-10T01:13:00.005Z

It is a long time since I have seen this amount of bilge written about the EU and what the British PM has achieved, probably not since John Major's "game, set and match" at Maastricht. How unfortunate then, that so many of the people who sneered at those of us for opposing that great achievement at the time should now rather sheepishly admit that we were right: it was a disaster. Do we have to wait for another twenty years to hear that admission about what is happening now? I would like a life, thank you.

Right. Into battle. Luckily, I do not have to go through any details as the Boss over at EURef (who has been thoroughly fed up with me grousing and practically ordered me to write this blog just to get me off his back) has done so very effectively. Three cheers for the Boss.

In the meantime I have been having quite surreal arguments with people who have accused me of not knowing my facts (always a favourite one with those who believe any old bilge dealt out by politicians and the media); even more surreal ones with supposed eurosceptics who are over the moon with Cameron being so tough; and absolutely out of this world ones with people who actually think that Cameron's behaviour has put us on the same sort of footing as Switzerland.

Let's deal with the last of those first. Switzerland, as every schoolchild should know but as many an adult who feels that they need to comment on political matters does not, is not even in the EEA, let alone the EU. How does anything Cameron does or says short of getting us out of the European project put us on the same footing? Answers on a postcard, please.

Next: how can I be so nasty about Cameron who has done the right thing for once by vetoing the treaty. Ahem, what treaty? The Boss has written about it here. Has anyone seen this treaty? Of course not, because it does not exist. There is no treaty without an IGC and we have not had one of those. So far as anyone can tell, there is no draft treaty even, as Gisela Stuart says in the Evening Standard, but, in any case you cannot veto a draft treaty.

Mind you, this is not the first time the Boy-King has come up with comments about a European Council that seemed to be at odds with communications from that Council. Then, as now, hacks and politicos refused to find out anything. We shall see what the Council communique will say when it is published but I do not think it will say anything about a treaty being vetoed because the Council is not the body that decides or even discusses treaties. Someone should tell Cameron so he should give his fantasies some sort of a reasonable grounding. Then again, given how easy it is to fool a large number of people, why should he bother?

So, the Boy-King has not vetoed any treaty. What has he done? He has allowed Merkozy and the others to go ahead with far greater speed than they even dared to hope with a complete reconstruction of the eurozone, that aims to create a fiscally integrated bloc at the heart of the EU, which will be able to pass any legislation through QMV that it might want to.

So far from repatriating powers, which can be done only through a new treaty that the Boy-King has rejected (not vetoed, just rejected) he has lost any possibility of vetoing whatever speedy conclusions will come out of the forthcoming negotiations for a new agreement.

The assumption was that a full IGC will not be convened till 2013. Agreement, let alone subsequent implementation would be very difficult and Cameron would have the right to veto whatever treaty is agreed on. Or, he could bring it back and let Parliament throw it out; or he could activate the referendum lock and then veto it as we would most probably win a referendum on a new treaty.

Instead we shall have a hastily cobbled agreement that will incorporate everything Merkozy and Rumpy-Pumpy want and that will be passed early next year if the eurozone survives that long. The notion that a new agreement will be any more effective in imposing fiscal discipline on the likes of Greece, Italy or France than any of the previous ones is laughable. What it will do, as Allister Heath wrote on Thursday, is to create a bloc that will be able to force any legislation they want through. That famous financial transaction tax from which Cameron is supposed to have saved the City? It will go through when the eurozone will want to destroy anything outside itself to save its own stagnating economy.

In fact, having got what they wanted from Cameron, Merkozy will almost certainly try to force through the few remaining bits of legislation that will destroy the City. Let's face it, this government does not care about the City and does not want to upset the colleagues in Brussels. Allister Heath again:

Of course, a revolution was required in the City after the mad bubble. Many of the reforms since 2008 have been good, including getting banks to hold more capital, be more liquid and cut their leverage. Some have even been excellent. The move to introduce resolution schemes and living wills to allow even the biggest banks to fail in a controlled way – more advanced in the UK than elsewhere – will help banish bailouts for ever.

But there have also been lots of job-destroying, stupid and unnecessary policies, punitive taxes and a relentless stirring up of anti-City sentiment. The British government has also tolerated or even embraced a tidal wave of EU rules, nearly of them flawed or disastrous. Hedge funds, private equity, insurers and now accountancy firms have all been hammered; new pan-EU regulators have been created. The coalition’s original aim was to shrink the City; then to shrink it as a share of GDP; now, with manufacturing in recession again, it has suddenly realised that it must find growth and jobs wherever they are created. Fine – but it shouldn’t pretend that it has always been the City’s best friend.

The outcome of the last two days' shindig in Brussels does not alter any of that.

So what could or should Cameron have done? It is actually, very easy. He should have said that the European Council is not the proper body to discuss such matters; the proper body is the IGC - even if it consists of the same people, it is a different body, summoned differently with a different mandate and accountability. He should have insisted on a full IGC and a completely new treaty as the changes that are being introduced require one. That would have taken a longish time, as I said above; would have required a good deal of negotiation and discussion in the various countries, including Britain; would then have required unanimity (chance for a veto); and would have had to go through all the stages of implementation. The colleagues would not have liked it; they did not want it; and they managed to avoid it. They will now have their agreement, which will not be called a new treaty and Britain will be sent a copy but it and whatever legislation comes out of it will still be binding. Will there even have to be Parliamentary legislation as there was with every previous treaty? Certainly the referendum lock will not be activated.

Game, set and match to them, I think.

Just one more thing: the markets will re-open on Monday and they, too, will have a say and will go on having a say, unlike Mr Cameron.

Double plus not good

2011-12-08T10:58:00.003Z

In Oregon a US District Judge has decided that a blogger who reports seriously and, it appears, accurately about investment firms does not have the same protections as a designated journalist who might be "affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system". This is not about her content but about her standing as a person who can refuse to name her source as a "bona fide" journalist would be allowed. In fact, it is just about her standing.

So, a new treaty or not?

2011-12-08T00:49:00.003Z

Here is the text of that letter from Merkozy, as the twain are now known, to Rumpy-Pumpy, as the Council President is now known. What they propose require a new treaty, which requires an IGC, though HMG is at pains to tell us that it is not so. But then, even changing a Protocol, requires a new treaty, which requires and IGC and unanimous agreement and implementation in all member states. I feel slight dizzy. Must be all that going round in circles.

And to follow up ...

2011-12-07T17:57:00.002Z

... what are the facts about that Social Chapter? You know the one, the Party Formerly Known As Conservative keeps promising to do away with. Well, it will not be easy to do so as it no longer exists. It has, in fact been integrated into the Treaties as separate Articles and a complete change is needed in order to get rid of them. The change that we are not, apparently, going to have.

According to the official Glossary on the Europa website

The Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights of Workers was adopted in 1989 by all Member States except the United Kingdom. The objectives of the Charter have been included in the Treaty of Amsterdam since the integration of the provisions of the Maastricht social protocol in the Treaty. The Lisbon Treaty makes reference to it in title X on social policy (Article 151 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union).

I seem to recall arguing this for some time with a number of people who "knew better".

It so happens that the subject came up in two Written Questions in the House of Commons:

Mr Douglas Alexander: To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills what recent assessment he has made of the costs and benefits of proposals to withdraw from the European Social Chapter; and if he will place any such assessment in the Library.

Mr Davey: None. There is no distinct “European Social Chapter”; the EU's provisions for social and related matters are integrated into the treaties.

Mr Douglas Alexander: To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills what representations he has received since May 2010 calling for the UK to withdraw from the European Social Chapter; and if he will place a copy of any such representations in the Library.

Mr Davey: There is no distinct “European Social Chapter”; the EU's provisions for social and related matters are integrated into the treaties. This Department regularly receives representations from stakeholders on matters concerning aspects of European employment law. It would not be practical to deposit all such representations in the Libraries of the House.

Can we now stop talking about it as something we shall repatriate just as soon as that commission starts working on what it is we want to repatriate and how we should go about it?

Where are we on that repatriation of powers?

2011-12-07T17:38:00.006Z

Attentive followers of the Boy-King's pronouncements on how he will fight in Britain's corner for Britain's interests will recall mentions of the Social Chapter and the Working Time Directive that we shall get rid of, repatriate, exterminate or whatever.

The subject came up again in the House of Lords during a debate on December 6 that followed Lord Grenfell's Starred Question:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they have agreed a list of powers to be repatriated from the European Union, and, if so, when they expect to launch negotiations with the United Kingdom's European partners.

Lord Wallace of Saltaire, a committed europhiliac, responded in a suitably vague fashion:

My Lords, the Government are committed under the coalition agreement to examining the balance of competences between Britain and the EU. We have made no commitment to a particular outcome of this review. Work on the review has begun and is in its early stages.

Lord Grenfell followed up in a somewhat breathless fashion:

My Lords, I am relieved to read that the Prime Minister has recognised that Friday's negotiations on a fiscal compact are not the occasion to try to repatriate any powers. That is good news, and it should at least save the Prime Minister from having another ASBO slapped on him by the President of France. The Prime Minister says that he wants to be constructive at these negotiations but that he will have some modest demands to make. Does the Minister agree that the chance to participate constructively in the negotiations being held among the 27 does depend on them being among the 27, because that gives him a seat and a voice, whereas if negotiations were confined to the 17 eurozone members he would have neither? If the Prime Minister arrives in Brussels with a list of concessions which he wants granted as a price for his co-operation, there is a serious risk that the 17, tired of Britain's repeated requests for special treatment, will simply close the door on the 10 outsiders and negotiate without them. What influence will he then have on the outcome?

Since HMG has not the slightest intention of repatriating powers there really is not the slightest need to rejoice in the fact that they will not be using this occasion to do so. Then again, if this is not a good time to start those famous repatriations and renegotiations, when is?

After a certain amount of the same we get a reasonable question from Lord Hannay of Chiswick:

My Lords, what would the Government's response be if, in the intergovernmental conference about to meet, a member state other than Britain were to introduce a proposal for the repatriation of some portion of the single market?

To which the response is:

My Lords, I am happy to say that that is extremely unlikely. We are some way off an intergovernmental conference. The German Government believe that we can have a very short IGC next March and hope that ratification of limited treaty change can then take place by the end of 2012. The position of Her Majesty's Government is that treaty change is not necessary, as we argued when ratifying the Lisbon treaty and again on the EU Bill. The Lisbon treaty has an enormous amount of headroom under which powers can be taken, and we think advantage should be taken of that, rather than getting into the messy, unavoidably uncertain and long process of treaty change.

Hmm. That is not quite the way this whole process has been presented to the media.

After a lot of other smug assertions about how wonderfully well everything would go if only those nasty eurosceptics would go away and ~~stop being right~~ not display a nasty carping spirit, we have Lord Pearson of Rannoch:

My Lords, given the requirement for unanimity among 27 nation states before a single comma can be retrieved from the treaties of Rome, is not all talk of repatriation a convenient red herring?

Oh pshaw!

No. There is constant negotiation. The working time directive is currently under review, as the noble Lord will be aware. Sixteen member states, including Britain, currently have opt-outs. Twenty-three member states, not including Britain, are currently under contravention for not implementing the working time directive. There is therefore room for reconsideration.

That's it then?

Makes sense to the BBC

2011-12-07T15:49:00.003Z

In BBC-speak people who consider that they and others should look after themselves and their families whenever possible and help other people in their own way with their own money, if necessary, are absolutely selfish. Being unselfish is wanting to pay higher taxes (or wanting other people to pay higher taxes) that can then be used and abused by highly paid but seriously victimized officials to make people do what is good for them in the eyes of those officials. Makes some kind of a logical sense and can be the only explanation why the BBC should misrepresent the National Social Survey as Philip Booth explains. Read the whole posting.

Will this be a new treaty?

2011-12-07T14:08:00.004Z

City AM reports with some shock in its tone that

MOST countries will not get a vote on tighter fiscal integration, allowing Germany to force through new financial controls across the Eurozone, European Council president Herman Van Rompuy said yesterday in a report sent to EU leaders ahead of tomorrow’s two-day summit.

I have already seen comments that this is a denial of democracy. Actually it is not, given that the EU structures are not exactly democratic. This may well be a denial by the EU of its own rules, which would not be the first time. (Here, here and here)

The question is will this be a new treaty or merely the old one tinkered with. Rumpy-Pumpy says it will not be a new treaty but tightening up of rules, which were supposed to be tight enough already (no, he didn't say that last bit).

By changing only protocol 12 of the EU treaty, which relates to “excessive deficits,” Van Rompuy believes the proposed changes “do not require ratification at national level”.

This means “rapid and significant changes” can be introduced to stop any repeat of the current debt crisis.

“It is crucial to enhance the credibility of our budgetary rules and to ensure compliance,” said Van Rompuy, which will help “restore market confidence in the Eurozone.”

The report also outlined plans to keep national debts below 60 per cent of GDP, and followed German plans for a “golden rule” on balanced budgets.

Well, now, will our valiant Prime Minister go along with that?

Just what does that mean?

2011-12-07T13:43:00.003Z

Lord Pearson of Rannoch asked HMG in a Written Question:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord McNally on 15 November (WA 140), whether the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Nick Clegg, is eligible to receive a pension from the European Commission; if so, when that pension will become payable; what will be its annual amount; and whether the terms of that pension constrain his actions.

HMG's response was a little odd:

The Deputy Prime Minister is no longer eligible to receive a pension from the European Commission.

No longer? What does that mean? Was he at any time and why is he not so any longer?

Big deal!

2011-12-07T12:22:00.002Z

The BBC reports that

Parliament will be asked to vote on any new treaty relating to the European Union, Downing Street has said.

No 10 said any treaty signed by the UK "will need to go through Parliament", although it did not say whether this would require new legislation.

Goodness me! Not really! I have news for Downing Street and the BBC: all the treaties have gone through Parliament and the legislation was passed as an Amendment to the European Communities Act 1972. That's it? Those are the great Conservative concessions to democracy?

Meanwhile Mr Clarke spoke the inconvenient truth:

Mr Clarke, the most pro-European Conservative cabinet minister, told the Financial Times he did not expect any repatriation of powers as a result of this week's summit: "No, we're not going to renegotiate any transfers of powers, in my opinion."

He said Britain should focus on "how to maintain the financial stability of the western world", adding it would be a distraction to try to open up discussions about the "wider structures of the union".

He is not wrong about those famous renegotiations. Even Cameron is not saying they will happen, merely that he will demand safeguards. And who defines what are adequate safeguards? Why, Mr Cameron, of course. Neat, eh?

Interestingly, the FT carries a slightly different headline from the BBC's anodyne one: "Clarke rejects call for EU power grab". One wonders who chose those words "power grab", Mr Clarke, the interviewer or some sub-editor. After all, the implications are that power rightfully belongs to the EU and HMG is somehow thinking of grabbing some of it away from them. That couldn't be what they meant, could it?

Otherwise the interview trots out all the bromides: now is not the time, eurozone stability and financial rectitude are more important, Britain should play a positive and constructive role. Blah, blah, blah.

On EUObserver

2011-12-07T11:21:00.000Z

The Boy-King, that referendum lock and other matters.

Seventy years ago

2011-12-07T11:19:00.003Z

USS Arizona burning after the attack by the Japanese Air Force on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941

Who is right, HMG or the Commissioner?

2011-12-06T21:58:00.003Z

There seems to be some problem about those powers to scrutinize member states' budgets that the Commission is claiming despite, as Lord Pearson of Rannoch pointed out yet again and to some murmured agreement in the House:

My Lords, is it not grotesque that an organisation that has not had its accounts signed off by its own internal auditors for 17 years-there being no external auditor-should be handed these powers, given that if it had been a private company in this country the directors would have been in prison every year for the past 17 years?

And yet there are noble peers like Lord Davies of Stamford who can come up with questions such as this:

My Lords, a few years ago was there not a proposal that the Commission be given a duty of auditing the national accounts of member states? That proposal was turned down at the time by the Council. Is it not the case that if it had not been turned down and had been accepted, we would have had an earlier insight into the problems of Greece, the Greeks would have been unable to falsify their accounts, and the grave problems we all now face might have been significantly reduced?

Is an organization who has not had its own accounts (or budget as it is grandly named) signed off by the Court of Auditors really a competent judge of what is and what is not adequate auditing?

All this was part of a short debate on Lord Willoughby de Broke's Starred Question last week:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what is their assessment of the proposal by the European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs that the European Commission should have the power to scrutinise member states' budgets and impose such financial penalties as the Commission deems fit.

As ever Lord Sassoon waffled in response though appeared to agree with the idea that national budgets should be subject to discipline from the Commission whose own budget ... etc etc.

My Lords, the Government strongly support the recently agreed economic governance legislation to strengthen the stability and growth pact. This provides for stronger and more responsible economic governance across the European Union. Under the new legislation, a range of financial sanctions can be imposed by Council within the euro area where member states are deemed not to have taken adequate action. Sanctions are set out under Article 136, which applies to the euro area only.

Lord Willoughby then came back:

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. However, the statement by Commissioner Olli Rehn applies not just to the eurozone but to the whole of the EU, including this country. Therefore, will the Minister confirm that today's Autumn Statement by the Chancellor is nothing more than an aspiration-a wish list? Will he confirm to the House that this will have to be ticked off and agreed by the European Commission before it can take any effect?

The response was somewhat mystifying though the noble Minister did admit that Britain is not entirely free from the various eurozone-related rules:

My Lords, this country has always been party to the stability and growth pact, but as I am sure the noble Lord knows, under Protocol 15 the UK has an opt-out, which means that we have to endeavour to avoid excessive deficits but are not subject to any sanctions such as members of the euro area are. Furthermore, the UK secured particular treatment that ensures-has ensured and will ensure-that Parliament will always be allowed to scrutinise the UK's budget ahead of the European Commission.

It is, of course, reassuring to know that the House of Commons who had, in days gone by, fought for the right to control the finances of this country, will, for the time being, be allowed to scrutinise the UK's budget ahead of the European Commission. Allowed? By whom? As if I didn't know.

There is, however, a problem with the noble Minister's answer that he so blithely insisted on. Not so long ago, Commissioner Olli Rehn, he who is responsible for the EU's Economic and Financial Affairs, published an article in the Daily Telegraph, in which he reiterated his statement on the matter of the six new pieces of regulation that had been nodded through in order to "stabilize the eurozone" or some such strange notion. In this he made it clear that more than just the eurozone is intended.

When this legislation enters into force later this year, the EU will have in place a much stronger framework for preventing the economic mistakes that have cast a shadow over the recent past.

We will be able to scrutinise the Member States' public finances, in particular the level of debt, much more carefully and pre-emptively than ever before. This will include co-ordinated examination of economic policies and budgets in the first half of each year before their adoption by national parliaments in a process known as the European Semester. And budgets will have to be designed and presented according to a common framework, in line with best international standards, so that budget-making is more transparent both for citizens and policy-makers.

No mention of the UK's opt-out there or in this statement of November 8.

This is first and foremost about safeguarding financial stability in the euro area and in the EU by exerting preventive and effective surveillance, according to the rules we have democratically given ourselves.

Let me be very blunt on this: It's either the EU institutions, according to our own rules, procedures and democratic accountability, or the market forces that will do the job. For me, as a committed European and a committed democrat, the choices are clear.

So who is right? The Minister or the Commissioner?

More on Russia

2011-12-06T20:40:00.001Z

My article on some of the background to Sunday's Duma election is up on Taki's Magazine. Remember, every hit counts.

Is this true?

2011-12-05T19:27:00.003Z

Der Spiegel reports rather huffily that Britain has been obstructing the building up of a common EU foreign policy. Generally speaking one needs to take these complaints with a large dose of salt. Common statements are not as important as all that and, if needs be, France will deviate from them as well. What matters is the slow building up of the structures and that proceeds apace.

During the Second Reading debate of Lord Pearson's Bill, Lord Stevens of Ludgate said [scroll down to Column 1248]:

I do not propose to spend much time on discussing where all the EU money goes, suffice it to say that a prime example of what appears to me as a layman to be gross duplication and waste is the new foreign service. Its budget is 20 times the cost of the UK's Foreign Office and includes among other items £33 million for 150 bomb-proof limousines for all EU ambassadors. The number of staff employed by its quangos and committees alone has tripled during the past five years, amounting to a total cost of more than £2 billion in 2011. It has just opened a new £25 million office in London, and our Foreign Secretary has claimed that the UK Government have brought the EU budget under control. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, could confirm in his reply that the UK has no liability for any losses incurred by the ECB, another potential burden on this country.

While there is a foreign service it will find work for itself despite the notorious incompetence of Lady Ashton (her official page on the EU website is here). Whoever was putting a spoke into those plans it was not our Cathy Ashton as this article in the Telegraph makes clear.

What is so odd about the Spiegel story is that the paper has, inevitably, running detailed accounts of the eurozone mess. And yet they can seriously announce that yet another "common policy" is something to strive for.

Mr Putin seems a tad less popular

2011-12-05T17:26:00.001Z

Earlier this morning, the New York Times wrote:

With 95 percent of the votes processed, United Russia led with a shade under 50 percent, trailed by the Communists with 19 percent, Just Russia with 13 percent and the Liberal Democrats with nearly 12 percent, according to the Central Election Commission. In 2007, United Russia won more than 64 percent of the vote, while the Communist Party was a distant second with 11.5 percent.

Results turned out to be worse for Mr Putin's United Russia than expected. According to the BBC Russian Service, out of the 450 places in the Duma, United Russia got 238, down from 315, the Communists got 92, up from 57, the self-described Social-Democrat "Just Russia" got 64, up from 38 and Mr Zhirinovsky's Liberal-Democrats got 56, up from 40. United Russia still has a majority but it is not so overwhelming as to make life easy for them, though on crucial matters they will probably be able to rely on some of the other votes.

Reuters calls the opposition parties left-wing, which, I suppose, they are though how one distinguishes right from left in Russian politics is something of a mystery. Can they possibly think of United Russia as "right-wing"? On what basis? They are, however, worried that

A weaker showing by Russia's party of power in Sunday's general election and gains for left-wing opposition parties increase the risk Vladimir Putin may hike spending yet further as he seeks to regain the presidency next March.

The prime minister, president from 2000-08, may be tempted to open the fiscal spigots even wider to minimize risks of a credible challenger emerging after his United Russia party's lower-house majority was cut to just 13 seats, economists said.

The chances are that those fiscal spigots will be opened if there is anything to come out of them.

The Economist gives a good analysis of what is going on, what has been going on and what might happen next.

YESTERDAY'S parliamentary poll in Russia was always going to be more a referendum on Vladimir Putin and the ruling United Russia party than a real election. The genuine opposition was barred from taking part long before polling day; television, which remains the main source of news and views for most of the country, has been working at full propaganda throttle; and governors and mayors across Russia were given specific targets for United Russia's voting figures and told to meet them.

Yet United Russia won just under 50% of the vote, down from 64% in 2007. It will enjoy a simple majority in parliament but no longer the two-thirds it needs to alter the constitution. Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president, who was placed at the top of United Russia’s electoral list, tried to put a brave face on the result. Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of parliament and United Russia's chairman, argued that the party put in a strong performance compared with other European ruling parties.

That smacked of desperation, given that Russia’s voting procedure bears little resemblance to genuine elections. Most analysts say that the real lesson of yesterday's poll is that Mr Putin's regime is starting to lose legitimacy among its core voters, particularly in large cities.

This explains the Kremlin’s hysterical behaviour towards election monitors. The most important of these, Golos (Voice, or Vote), was harassed and smeared by one of Russia's main television channels after Mr Putin likened its observers, who receive foreign grants, to Judas. What irritated the authorities most, however, was an interactive map created by Golos that allowed people across Russia to report election abuses. On Saturday this earned Golos a $1,000 fine from a Moscow court.

Indeed, there have been many complaints about electoral fraud, intimidation, voters being carted round electoral stations in order to vote early, late and often, and even of opposition websites being attacked and brought down. The complaints, as we can see from the two links, come both from Western observers and Russians.

Other signs of possible falsification were the Soviet-style 99 percent result in Chechnya backing United Russia and a screenshot from state-run Rossia-24 news channel — that quickly went viral on the Internet — showing results in Rostov-on-Don totaling a whopping 146 percent.

All the parties apart from United Russia said that they are mulling over the possibility of going to law because of electoral irregularities and President Medvedev (yes he still is the president) has issued not-so-veiled threats to governors of regions where United Russia did particularly poorly.

This evening there was a demonstration in the centre of Moscow, organized by the group Solidarnost, that demanded the setting aside of the fraudulent election. As a matter of fact, all accounts speak of thousands, the police saying a couple of thousand, whereas others talk of seven thousand.

As is normal for Russia, the demonstration was attacked by the police but by Russian standards the violence of the arrests was mild. Around 300 people were detained and another 100 in St Petersburg. Among others arrested was the anti-corruption blogger Andrei Navalny who at one point disappeared and there were worries about his welfare. It seems that he is alive and well though there seems to be some problem about letting him be seen by a lawyer. (There was a live stream of the crowd outside the prison with demands to let a lawyer through but the battery died on the chap who was filming it all. Oh no, he is back or as back as he can be. Apparently, he has told people that he is off to get some shut-eye.)

What lessons, if any, will the once and future President, now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin draw from it all? Perhaps that elections are rather chancy and it is better to do without them?

Told you so

2011-12-05T16:29:00.002Z

So, the proposed new powers that might come in if Germany and France have their way (or some of their way or one of their ways) will not need a referendum because "it did not meet the test for a vote, which required a major transfer of powers to Brussels". Now, there's a surprise. Doubts about that were expressed on this blog here, here, here and here. Apparently, a lot of people are disappointed. Well, as Michelle Malkin would say, boo-freakin-hoo.

Respectable? Moi?

2011-12-05T13:51:00.004Z

I missed the fact that no less a person than Gavyn Davies said in the Financial Times

It has suddenly become respectable to ask the question: what would happen if the euro broke up?

Dear me. Does this mean we are all becoming respectable? Not sure how I feel about that.

Duma elections tomorrow

2011-12-03T19:32:00.002Z

Some time ago I was warned by a Russian friend who goes back and forth (quite legitimately) that the Duma elections may well be very interesting. Until then I had not paid any attention to them, arguing that as the only opposition to United Russia that is allowed are the Communists, little good will come out of the Duma elections. However, this was someone whose opinion was worth paying attention to, so I did. Sure enough, rumours are coming out of the country that neither Putin nor United Russia are as popular as they were (and they never were all that popular but there were quite literally no alternatives).

Here is an interesting analysis from the Washington Times.

The hardening of the public’s attitude about Mr. Putin was on display at a sports event in Moscow in mid-November, when at least one section of the crowd appeared to boo him.

Alexei Navalny, an anti-graft activist and widely read blogger, said the jeers and catcalls signal “the end of an era.” He is a highly influential figure in an increasingly politicized Russian Internet community, and coined United Russia’s popular, unofficial nickname: “the party of swindlers and thieves.”

Dissent has been growing about a number of issues, such as suspected mass corruption by United Russia officials and the prospect of two more terms in the Kremlin for Mr. Putin, who will seek a third presidential election next year after being constitutionally bound to step down as president in 2008.

Opposition leader Grigory Yavlinsky, head of the liberal Yabloko party, has suggested that the sudden spark of opposition to Mr. Putin’s rule represents a “deep historical shift” in the nation’s mindset.

Others agree. “People are fed up with Putin,” senior Yabloko official Galina Mikhaleva told The Washington Times. “State-run TV earlier zombified the people, but the Internet has played a huge role in waking them up.

With Putin being already appointed to be President, it is only through the Duma elections that people can express their feelings of antagonism, if these are strong enough. The results should be interesting.

A problem we face in our discussions

2011-11-30T16:57:00.004Z

An exchange towards the end of the Second Reading of Lord Pearson's Bill demonstrates clearly one of the problems we face when we discuss even the purely economic aspect of our membership of the EU (not our relationship with Europe, please).

If you scroll down to Lord Sassoon's reply on behalf of HMG you will find the following words:

While we are on this topic, I would say to the noble Lords, Lord Pearson of Rannoch and Lord Willoughby de Broke, that I do not recognise the numbers that they were quoting. The net contribution of the UK to the EU in 2010-11 is estimated at £7.6 billion, up from £4.7 billion in 2009-10, but of course the reason for that increase is because of the give-away that the last Government gave on the UK's abatement. Having stepped up very significantly to the new level, the OBR's figures are that the numbers now remain broadly level over the next few years.

Lord Pearson intervened with the following:

For clarity's sake I should say, following on from what the Minister has just said about our gross and net contributions, that he is talking about the Treasury figures. The figures that we gave are from the pink book and include all our contributions to the European venture, whether they go through the Treasury or not, such as the DfID budget. So I am afraid that our figures are the correct figures.

From which we can assume that HMG does not use the figures published in the Pink Book.

Lord Sassoon added another complication to that discussion:

My Lords, I was quoting the figures of the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, not the Treasury's own figures, but let us turn to the more important issue: that Europe must pursue an ambitious agenda for growth. In the single market, I believe that we have one of the most powerful tools to ensure strong, sustainable and balanced growth not only across the EU but for the UK. The noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, quoted all the figures that Ministers would customarily quote, so I am very grateful to him for helping me out. I will simply emphasise that this is a market worth €12 trillion and home to 500 million consumers.

Setting aside the last sentence of that paragraph, which is irrelevant as the market and the consumers will not disappear with our departure from the EU and, in any case, we do better in other markets, there remains the problem of figures: exactly which ones are accurate?

And now for a rant

2011-11-30T10:54:00.004Z

There are times when the state of this country is in exasperate even me and I tend to think that things have been much worse fairly frequently in the past.

Item 1: today's public sector strike. Without going into all the details, it is sufficient to say that the public sector was the growth industry in this country throughout the Labour years with unemployment being kept low by the public rather than the private sector hiring and money going on various projects that kept young people especially off the unemployment register. As for pensions, let us not forget the repeated raids on the private pension funds in order to raise money for the public sector.

We can no longer afford this and the screws are slowly, far too slowly, being tightened. So we get strikes about pensions that are above what most people in the private sector can afford. The rest of us have to work and manage as best we can.

Yet the moment this is said one gets people (not many but some) who shriek about the public sector workers saving lives and being poor. Nurses and dinner ladies are favourite examples. Just how many in the public sector save lives? And how many of them get paid as badly as dinner ladies? How many, on the other hand, have very nice, safe (less so these days but still safer than in the private sector) well paid jobs which consist of creating ever more forms to fill in and making life difficult for the rest of us? Oh, and let's not forget those nice safe pensions at the end.

Then there are the teachers and class assistants. Apparently I have to feel for them because they work so hard for so little money. Are these the same people who while pocketing a not inconsiderable salary fail to teach our children to read and write, as well as other subjects?

Item 2: the strange hysteria surrounding some unpleasant and probably unwell woman who produced a truly disgusting racist rant on the Croydon tram. These things do happen: rants and rows are not uncommon on public transport and the woman should have been asked to get off as she was a nuisance. Instead, we got what Brendan O'Neill has called a twenty-first century Twitch Hunt, started by some self-righteous little ... oh never mind ... who decided to film the event and put it on YouTube. The rest can be read here.

Rather than showing that ‘racism in Britain is as rife as ever’, as one person tweeted, the #MyTramExperience Twitch Hunt actually reveals the rise of a different backward trend: the tendency for herds of intolerant Twitterers to act like coppers’ narks, to make a massive deal out of their own shallow moralistic indignation, and to be utterly contemptuous of the idea that the public is more than capable of dealing with isolated incidents of racist abuse when they arise. The hounding of this woman was not a great act of anti-racist activism – it was the virtual equivalent of children chasing the local crazy lady through the streets and shouting ‘Nutter!’ or ‘Cow!’.

Of course, one could argue that this is the curse of the social media, which has many good aspects as well. People seem to lose all sense of proportion in their comments and reactions because it is done from a computer or some other electronic application.

ADDENDUM: The Taxpayers' Alliance has published a helpful guide to public sector pay and pensions. Read it if you have time.

Time for a picture of Mahalia

2011-11-30T10:07:00.002Z

Among the greenery

Iceland refuses to do as it is told

2011-11-29T23:46:00.002Z

Not being absolutely sure about Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's information and analysis I checked this one out with my friend Hjörtur J. Guðmundsson, a leading Icelandic eurosceptic and author of the blog Iceland and the European Union. He said that as far as he knew this was true. So here goes.

The OECD has come very close to predicting a depression for Europe unless EU leaders conjure up a lender-of-last resort very quickly, and somehow manage to make the world believe that the EFSF bail-out fund really exists.

Even if disaster is avoided, the eurozone growth forecast is dreadful. Italy, Portugal, Greece will all contract through 2012, while Spain, France, Netherlands, and Germany will bounce along the bottom.

Unemployment will reach 18.5pc in Greece, 22.9pc in Spain, 14.1pc in Ireland, 13.8pc in Portugal.

Yet Iceland stands out, with 2.4pc growth and unemployment tumbling to 6.1. Well, well.

As the man said: well, well.

In fact, Iceland seems cocky enough to reject a Chinese businessman's offer to buy a 115 square mile tourist farm in the north-east of the country, citing security concerns. So why the Icelandic Parliament should use the country's obviously strong position to be the first Western country to recognize the Palestinian state "within the 1967 borders" when there was no Palestine and Gaza belonged to Egypt while the West Bank to Jordan, is a mystery. Perhaps, they are just cocking a snook at everyone.

I have news for UKIP Cornwall

2011-11-29T19:46:00.002Z

No, the Government will not "finally have to talk about what the UK get out of the EU and how much it is costing us to belong". Yes, we had the Second Reading of Lord Pearson's Bill on Friday and no, this will not actually force HMG to do anything. Had Ms Clarke of UKIP Cornwall actually read Hansard she would have seen the following words in Lord Pearson's opening speech:

This is not the first time that your Lordships have debated this or a similar Bill at Second Reading. We did so last some four and a half years ago, on 8 June 2007, and we had similar debates on 11 February 2004, 27 June 2003 and 17 March 2000. The series would not be complete without mentioning 31 January 1997, when your Lordships' House voted at Second Reading for a Bill that would have taken us out of the European Union altogether.

Don't get me wrong: the fact that this is not the first time Lord Pearson of Rannoch introduced a Bill in the House of Lords or the first time it got to Second Reading (in fact, there was one occasion when we got to Committee stage) does not negate his achievements then or now. But it would be very useful if eurosceptics started the process of finding out what has happened in the past and what has not. A good many disappointments would be avoided.

PS: I do intend to blog about the debate as there were many interesting comments made by various peers but I thought I would get a splenetic posting in first.

Quite so

2011-11-28T20:31:00.002Z

This afternoon I wandered through the Private Eye exhibition at the V&A that should have been entitled "How the Establishment Encloses its Critics" and found this cover that says it all.

Looking forward

2011-11-27T15:15:00.001Z

The BBC put up the following about what is to happen in the House of Lords on Tuesday:

Over in the Lords (from 2.30pm), peers have their first day of detailed committee stage debate on the Protection of Freedoms Bill. But watch out, too, for a question to ministers from Ukip's Lord Willoughby de Broke, on the suggestion that the EU Commission should have the power to scrutinise the budgets of member states, and penalise them if they go astray.

Should be an interesting if brief debate.

While I am working on a longish post ...

2011-11-26T00:11:00.002Z

... here is something to keep everyone, especially those who are under their cats' thumbs, entertained.

Springs come, springs go ...

2011-11-25T17:54:00.002Z

... but the UN and its institutions do not change. Daily do we read of appalling crimes perpetrated by the Assad regime on Syria's people and what else do we find?

UNESCO’s executive board, which includes the US, France, the UK and other Western democracies, unanimously elected Syria to a pair of committees – one dealing directly with human rights issues – even as the Bashar al-Assad regime maintains its campaign of violence against its own citizens.

The Arab group at UNESCO nominated Syria for the spots, and though the 58-member board approved the pick by consensus on Nov. 11, the agency has not yet posted the results on its website.

Syria’s election came just a day before the League of Arab States moved to suspend Syrian membership of that body.

I wonder when they will post the result on the website. What are they waiting for?

Your Freedom and Ours

More problems with that pact

Random discussions and utter rudeness

In other words, we are not telling

Troubles with that fiscal compact treaty

Orban does the totally expected thing

Just in case you were wondering

Good question

The new head of SPIV

Is there anything this man cannot do?

Here's a thought

It's the Year of the Dragon

The wrong question

Not a resounding vote in favour

Enough already with the edginess

If you think politicians have short memories ...

Are we prepared?

About Baroness Cox's Bill

Readers will be shocked to know ...

Not be left out of the fun ...

From Taki's Magazine

James Taranto again

Nine countries?

And even more meanwhile

Meanwhile ..

Is this important?

The two great Russian questions

Somebody is scared of this man

Who could ask for anything more?

Stick, end, wrong - Cameron

More trouble for the Baroness

Good grief, he is back

A great piece from James Taranto

Not her fault

But I thought Cameron vetoed it

Spanish economy in free-fall

They are all eurosceptics now

If UKIP wanted my advice ...

So where do we stand on the British Council?

Another one we can close down

I'll leave you with this thought

Sounds familiar

Never did I think ....

One of Hungary's controversial new laws is to be passed today

Who knew ....

Up to a point, Lord Copper

We lost the propaganda war

The night before Christmas

More about Hungary

Support for Russian protesters

Words have meanings

What exactly will the "reformed" House of Lords be doing?

What is free speech?

The Bill goes through to the Commons

The answer to our problems with Greece

Media misses big story

Worrying developments in Hungary

Things I missed while trying to have a life

Well, it could be the answer

More on Russia

How long will this last?

As ever, their problems are greater

This is very sad

Feltham by-election

You mean he didn't veto this?

Convicted?

Are we to understand ...

Lord Pearson's Bill

On The New Culture Forum

Nothing has changed - Part 2

Where does the money go?

Nothing has changed - Part 1

Protests in Russia

Back to reality

Game, set and match ... to them

Double plus not good

So, a new treaty or not?

And to follow up ...

Where are we on that repatriation of powers?

Makes sense to the BBC