Good luck with that

It seems that Mr Cameron who sometimes masquerades as the Prime Minister of this country has told a BBC interview that he wants to remove the words "ever closer union" from the Preamble of the Consolidated European Union Treaty. Here are those words on p. 10:

RESOLVED to continue the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity,

They have been there in the Preamble and ignored by British negotiators, civil servants, politicians and sundry members of the commentariat ever since the Treaty of Rome, signed by the six in 1957 and certainly given scant attention since 1972.

Though I am pleasantly surprised to hear that there  is a Prime Minister and, indeed, a leader of a main party in this country who has noted this item and has expressed a desire to get rid of it, I cannot help wondering exactly how he thinks he will go about achieving this.

Austrian coalition re-elected but feels the chill blast of unpopularity

It would appear that the general dissatisfaction with politicians and, in more general terms, the post Second World War settlement, is permeating Austria as well, though not for the first time. The grand coalition that has governed the country more or less continuously in the last five decades has been re-elected but with a combined vote of just 50.9 per cent of the vote, their worst result since the setting up of the Austrian republic after the war.

Meanwhile, populist anti-EU parties have grown to a combined 27 percent in a country where people can vote from the age of 16 and stand as candidates once they are 18.

The anti-euro, anti-immigrant Freedom Party (FPO) scored its best result since 1999, with 21.4 percent of the vote, under the leadership of 44-year old Heinz-Christian Strache, whom supporters call "HC."

Other small parties have done reasonably well.

But a new populist party led by 81-year old businessman Frank Stronach managed to enter with 5.8 percent of the vote. "Team Stronach" campaigned on splitting the euro along national lines, "because a German or Austrian euro is worth more than a Greek one" and having the death penalty reintroduced for "professional hit men."

Another newcomer to the Austrian parliament is the liberal Neos party, which scored 4.8 percent of the vote - over the four-percent threshold to make it into the legislature. The Greens are also represented in the parliament, having garnered 11.5 percent of the vote.

EurActiv reports:

Chancellor Werner Faymann's Social Democrats (SPO) offered talks with their conservative People's Party (OVP) allies to ensure that the two parties that have dominated post-war politics stay in power.

But conservative leader Michael Spindelegger was keeping his options open after both parties emerged bruised from their worst electoral showings since World War Two, together winning just 50.9% of the vote. Both men said there could be no return to business as usual in the face of dwindling support that left the Eurosceptic and anti-Islam Freedom Party (FPO) breathing down their necks.

The victory, albeit slim, bucks a trend of EU voters throwing out governments over unpopular austerity steps imposed to calm investors since the financial crisis erupted in 2008. The coalition parties in Vienna have so far avoided major structural reforms in favour of minor policy adjustments, eager not to stall the export-driven economy.

But the two big parties, already at loggerheads over tax, education and other important policy issues, need to bridge fundamental differences if they want to present a new agenda that will convince voters Austria is moving confidently ahead.

The next few months could be interesting in Austrian politics.

And they're back

Collapsing Italian government are back. Reuters reports that

Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta will call a confidence vote in parliament after a showdown with center-right partners in his fragile coalition scuppered a vital package of budget measures on Friday and took his government to the brink of collapse.

Letta flew back from a visit to New York with coalition unity already in tatters after a threat by center-right lawmakers to walk out over former premier Silvio Berlusconi's battle against a conviction for tax fraud.

"Efficient government action is obviously incompatible with the mass resignation of a parliamentary group which should support the government," Letta said in a statement after a cabinet meeting on Friday.

"Either there is a new start and the interests of the country and its citizens are put first or this experience is at an end," he said.

Regional Affairs Minister Graziano Delrio said Letta, who met President Giorgio Napolitano on Friday, would go before parliament in the next few days to seek backing to continue.

Let's face it, collapsing Italian governments and brinkmanship in politics are all part of those European values we keep hearing about.

"Our Campaign and our Country owe him a debt of gratitude."

Tuesday morning I went to Professor Kenneth Minogue's memorial at the very fine St Bride's Church behind Fleet Street. It was a splendid occasion with good many representatives of the British, American and Australian right, two fine addresses and several equally fine readings together with three of my favourite hymns: John Bunyan's To be a Pilgrim, Jerusalem and the great Battle Hymn of the Republic, which I last sang at the memorial to Baroness Park. It is always a pleasure to leave a memorial service not only full of thoughts about the subject of it but also full of fighting spirit. There could have been no other way of remembering Ken Minogue.

On Monday, however, I heard the sad news of another death of a man who was not as well known as Ken Minogue but who, in his own way, did a great deal for the cause of euroscepticism. When and, I am afraid, if British independence will be regained Sir Robin Williams (1928 - 2013), quondam chairman of the Anti-Common Market League and for many years, through good ones and bad, the Honorary Secretary of the Campaign for an Independent Britain will be remembered as one of the heroes of the fight. (Given that Sir Robin Williams was the Hon. Sec. of that organization from 1969 to 2008, I should have expected the CIB to have something about him on the website but I cannot find anything.)

The first time I met Sir Robin was in 1992 at the first CIB meeting I attended. I went as a guest from the Anti-Federalist League to tell them, just as I had told the Freedom Association that morning that we had published the Maastricht Treaty, which the government was holding back for reasons that it never managed to explain adequately. It was an illuminating day and I met a number of people whom I was to know well in the succeeding years. One of them was a slim gentleman of slightly military bearing who tended to bark questions and instructions. He was, as I learned then, the Secretary of the CIB and a man who tended to know all the members and what they were up to.

As I became more involved in the eurosceptic movement I started meeting Sir Robin and Wendy, his wife who would grin cheerfully at people her husband was haranguing, at various events and he began to ask me when I was going to join the CIB. Eventually, realizing that I had a rooted objection to joining any organization, he solved the problem by asking my daughter and me to lunch at their Highgate home. After the lunch we went for a walk and on returning he called me into his den, where the CIB's business was transacted and where its telephone stood, put an application form in front of me and stood over me while I filled it in and signed it. I tell the story with amusement to demonstrate Robin's determination to win as many members to his organization as he could, especially those who might then be put to work.

For to work I was put and became the CIB's press officer for some years. That was the heyday of many eurosceptic organizations, who suddenly found that their cause, which had languished for years, became once again important and well-known during and after the Maastricht debates.

Though I have seen them rarely in the last few years, I became friends with both Robin and Wendy, who gave talks at the Victoria and Albert Museum to which I went several times and from which I carried away a good deal of interesting knowledge that I can still recall after some years. No lecturer could ask for more.

It could be said that Sir Robin Williams sacrificed what must have been a promising political career to his beliefs and his opposition to Britain's entry into the Common Market. His father, the first Baronet, was a Conservative MP with an unusual background for that party. Sir Herbert Williams of Cilgeraint  (1884 - 1954) received a degree in Science and Engineering at the University of Liverpool and in 1911 became secretary and manager of the Machine Tools Trade Association. He also served on Wimbledon Borough Council. From 1924 to 1929 he was Conservative MP for Reading and a member of the first Court of the University of Reading when it received its Royal Charter in 1926. This is not the career of a nostalgically minded Tory.

Sir Herbert became MP for Croydon South in a by-election in 1932 and remained that until the Labour landslide of 1945. Despite the fact that it was his close colleague, the Conservative MP for Croydon North who proposed the Beveridge Report in the House of Commons in 1944, Sir Herbert vehemently opposed it. I cannot help feeling that with that career, Robin's father would have been a supporter of Mrs Thatcher.

Interestingly, opposing government and party leadership policy did not, in those days, mean the end of your career. Sir Herbert may have lost his seat in 1945 but was re-elected in one of the reorganized Croydon seats in 1950, remaining there till his death in 1954, having been made a baronet (something his son was rightly proud of) in 1953.

There is also a curious irony to the story: Sir Herbert's daughter Rosemary married another Baronet, Sir Ian Mactaggart, a millionaire Glasgow property developer and well-known eurosceptic; their daughter and Robin Williams's niece is Fiona Mactaggart a Labour MP of extreme left-wing views and questionable veracity in statements.

Times have changed. Sir Robin Williams was set for a political career as well and as Chairman of the Bow Group in 1954 - 55 (Geoffrey Howe's predecessor) he would have become a Conservative MP at some point if it had not been for his unfortunate tendency to speak his mind, that being quite clearly a family trait. His vehement opposition to Britain's entry into the EEC meant that he had to abandon any ideas of standing for Parliament. Instead he continued at Lloyd's and devoted his political and organizational talents to the anti-EEC/EC/EU movement.

As mentioned above, he became Chairman of the Anti-Common Market League (now called Get Britain Out) when it was formed in 1969 and remained in that position till 1984. The League was a founding constituent member of the National Referendum Campaign, a cross-party organization formed to fight for a referendum and also against Britain's entry into the Common Market. Sir Robin also became the Secretary of the Campaign for an Independent Britain that grew out of that early movement and is a continuing umbrella organization for a number of eurosceptic groups of long standing. He remained that through lean years and fat ones, when the media ignored it and when it wanted to know all about it. One look at the constituent groups would indicate the difficulty any Secretary would have in keeping them all on board, all more or less at peace with each other and all supporting the umbrella organization. It is no wonder that Robin would occasionally lose his temper in committee meetings and AGMs though he usually recovered his equanimity fairly quickly.

Let me add that his support for my activities as Press Officer for the CIB and the Anti-Maastricht Alliance as well as the organizer of the Red Lion Talks (of which I really must write some time) was unstinted.

Age was beginning to tell on Robin in the last few years though he still turned up for many meetings of the Bruges Group and other events. He was there at the May AGM of the CIB but, not being a member any longer, I went to the afternoon conference, specifically to hear the Boss on the subject of Article 50 and its consequences. Robin had left. People who had been there for the AGM have told me that he was looking very frail. In a way, I am glad I did not see him though sorry that I missed that last possible occasion to exchange a few words.

As another labourer in the same vineyard wrote to me about Sir Robin Williams: Our Campaign and our Country owe him a debt of gratitude.

ADDENDUM: The Campaign for an Independent Britain have now put up an obituary, which gives a more detailed summary of his education and career.

Merkel wins again

Not that there were any serious doubts about that but it does not look like the CDU-CSU will achieve that coveted absolute majority that would have been the first time since 1957 when it did happen under Konrad Adenauer (who, incidentally, won four elections).

Results are a little strange or so it looks at the moment. The CDU-CSU seems to be on 42 per cent, the bloc's best result since German reunification, the SDP on 25.5 per cent and the rest are in a disarray:

There was bitter disappointment for Merkel's allies in the outgoing government, the market-friendly Free Democrats (FDP), who suffered a humiliating exit from the Bundestag, the first time they will be absent from the chamber in the post-war era.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD), a new eurosceptic party that had threatened to spoil Merkel's victory by breaking into parliament for the first time, appeared to have come up just short of the 5 percent threshold required to win seats.

The young movement's hostility to euro zone bailouts and call to cut weaker southern members loose from the currency area resonated with many crisis-weary voters and may act as a brake on Merkel's conduct of European policy.

The radical Left party was set to be the third biggest force with about 8.5 percent, just ahead of the environmentalist Greens, who shed votes to finish near 8 percent.

Final allocation of seats will not be known till tomorrow. The AfD have done very well but it is sad not to see them in the Bundestag.

As a number of media outlets point out (for instance Deutsche Welle) the CDU-CSU could try to govern alone and not in a coalition but their majority would be extremely narrow and legislation very difficult.

The next stage in Russian politics

While we await the final results in the German Federal election and watch with horror the developments in Nairobi (and remember what happened earlier in Peshawar) we can sigh wearily over Russian politics.

The September 8 local and regional elections in that country brought in several results that were not, perhaps, to President Putin's liking, which is probably why he decided to tangle with President Obama: a victory even though it was only notional was more certain.

Western media, understandably, concentrated on Moscow, the very low turn-out (which was true across the country) and the achievement of Alexey Navalny but a few people noticed that elsewhere there was a victory for the oppositionist Yevgeny Roizman in Yekaterinburg, where he is now mayor.

He seems to be making a nuisance of himself.

During the 10th annual Valdai Forum in Moscow on Monday, Yekaterinburg Mayor Yevgeny Roizman and Sverdlovsk Governor Yevgeny Kuyvashev discussed issues of decentralizing the Russian government.

Roizman and Kuyvashev met during a session on regional diversity as part of the Kremlin-sponsored Valdai Forum. Roizman, an outspoken critic of Putin and his regime, told Kuyvashev, a governor selected by Putin to oversee the Urals, during the opening remarks of the Valdai Forum that he wished to “reset” the hostile political situation in the Urals, The Moscow Times reports.

In Yaroslavl an even nastier thing happened to the President: one of the people he dislikes most (the list is not all that short, as it happens) Boris Nemtsov, was elected to the regional assembly at the head of his party, Republican Party of Russia – People's Freedom Party (Russian: Республиканская партия России — Партия народной свободы, Respublikanskaya partiya Rossii - Partiya narodnoy svobody), RPR-PARNAS (Russian: РПР-ПАРНАС.

This happened despite every precaution being taken as Vladimir Kara-Murza explains:

The recent legislative election in the Yaroslavl Region, where Nemtsov headed the list of the Republican Party of Russia–People’s Freedom Party, was organized in the customary manner, with censorship on local television (even paid ads were not accepted) during the campaign and numerous violations—including “carousel voting” and vote-buying—on the September 8th election day itself. But the plan did not fully work. Official figures across the region ranged from 17 percent for Nemtsov’s party and 24 percent for Putin’s United Russia in central Yaroslavl, where independent monitors were present at polling places, to an incredible 0.5 percent and 60 percent, respectively, in the Tutaev rural district, where no such monitoring was conducted. The overall result, however, put the People’s Freedom Party above the 5 percent threshold required for entering the regional Parliament.

Does Mr Nemtsov's electoral success really matter? Apparently yes.

One would think that, although irritating, the presence of Boris Nemtsov in one of Russia’s regional legislatures would not be considered too big of a problem for the Kremlin. But it appears the authorities think otherwise. Russia’s Investigative Committee, headed by close Putin confidant Alexander Bastrykin, initiated two criminal cases against the newly elected lawmaker. One is on the charge of “battery” under Article 116 of the Russian Penal Code, which carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison; the other is on the charge of “public calls to extremist activity” under Article 280.2, which carries up to five years in prison. Both charges, if brought to conviction, would mean that Nemtsov’s Duma seat will be taken away. The second charge would additionally deprive him of the right to run in any future Russian elections, as “extremism” is considered a grave offence.

The Russian news agency RIANovosti reports only the second of the charges, the one about extremism and even they sound a little doubtful. Mr Kara-Murza explains:

The “battery” charge stems from an incident on September 5th, when a provocateur from the pro-Kremlin Stal (Steel) movement approached Nemtsov at a campaign rally and threw two raw eggs at him, which drew a response from the opposition leader. Puzzlingly, the “victim” only went to the hospital to complain of “injuries” after the election.

The “extremism” charge, meanwhile, was leveled at Nemtsov’s speech at the same September 5th campaign rally. The precise sentence that attracted the interest of prosecutors was: “the liberation of Russia from the crooks and thieves must start from Yaroslavl.” An official spokesman for the Investigative Committee accused Nemtsov of “making a public statement that contained calls for a forceful change of the foundations of the constitutional order and territorial integrity of the Russian Federation.” “With this charge, they have admitted that it is crooks and thieves who are in power, and that opposing them constitutes extremist activity,” Nemtsov observed in response to the news.

One wonders whether the Investigative Committee has noticed that virtual admission. One also wonders whether there are charges being prepared against the Mayor of Yekaterinburg.

Bloomin' 'eck!

I was absolutely determined not to blog about any of the party conferences, they being of no importance whatsoever. Thus I ignored Nigel Farage's speech that managed to steer clear of important matters such as how we get out of the EU and came up with some ridiculous predictions. (Governments often lose in the euro elections and that does not constitute a political earthquake.Get real, Nigel.)

This, however, cannot be ignored. I went out for dinner (Brasserie Zédel, since you ask) and on returning find that the oafish Bloom has actually upset even his only remaining fan, the party's Dear Leader, Nigel Farage and has been suspended pending investigation. Can't imagine what there is to investigate but I suppose they have to go through the motions. I predict he will be back.

The Boss sums up trenchantly as ever.