Latvians show reluctance to join the euro

The Wall Street Journal thinks this reflects "Ambiguity Over Euro":

Political parties in Latvia skeptical of joining the euro zone next year took the bulk of the votes in the capital in local elections Saturday, heightening the view that many here still don't support joining the bloc.

I'd say it reflects some reluctance on the part of the people of Riga (likely to be the most pro-euro part of the contry) to join a problematic currency union. Never mind, says the article.

Still, the elections, held to select members of 119 municipal councils across Latvia—including the 60 members of Riga's city council—aren't expected to derail Latvia's planned adoption of the euro in January. The European Commission is expected this week to green light the small Baltic nation's entry into the euro zone.

Quite so. Why should votes and elections matter?

Ten years

The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating selection of photographs from the ten years since the start of the second Iraqi war.

Stick, end, wrong - Cameron

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.

A great piece from James Taranto

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.

Up to a point, Lord Copper

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.