Europe
New Open Europe study: The EU's 170,000-strong army of bureaucrats
A new report from Open Europe has found that 170,000 people are needed to run the EU, as opposed to the 32,000 that the EU Commission claims. Open Europe analyst Nick Cosgrove was quoted by the Telegraph, Mail and De Telegraaf as saying, "The Commission desperately tries to play down just how many people are now working for the EU. They are extremely secretive about the number of people who are working to churn out regulations". He added: "These people are not elected, and cannot be held accountable by ordinary citizens."
Speaking on the BBC Today programme, Open Europe's Neil O'Brien explained the difference between the EU's and Open Europe's figures, pointing out that, "the EU seems to use the narrowest possible definition they can think of". He went on to say that, "It's not a very transparent system... This huge figure [170,000] is commensurate with the huge influence that Brussels now has over everything in our daily lives".
Open Europe's figures include participants in every part of the EU, from the Commission to the EU's policy-making committees. The Telegraph quotes a Commission spokesman dismissing Open Europe's findings, reiterating that "The figure cited by the Commission is simply the figure representing permanent European Civil servants working in the European Commission."
In a separate development on Friday, EUobserver reports that an EU transparency campaign, Alter-EU, sent a letter to members of the Commission requesting greater transparency and stricter membership criteria for the committee groups. Alter-EU is concerned with the over-representation of business interests in a number of groups and is "deeply concerned about the lack of progress so far" in adjusting this imbalance. The Open Europe report puts the figure for people involved in these committees at 52,550.
EUobserver Telegraph Daily Mail Politics.co.uk Dan Hannan's blog BBC Today De Telegraaf RTL Open Europe press release
Denmark backs away from planned referendums on opt-outs
Bruno Waterfield reported on his Telegraph blog on Friday that the Danish government plans to scrap public votes on its current EU opt-outs. He suggests the government is likely to pursue the process through Parliament, aware that it would lose any referendum. According to Waterfield, "a moment has arrived when the political classes and establishments across Europe are unable take voters with them. This seems to be a genuine European trend".
Kerrigan: "Screw your No vote" is the latest plan for the Irish
Gene Kerrigan reports on plans to pass parts of the Lisbon Treaty using "fancy legal footwork" and also responds to a Stephan Collins article in the Irish Times, which argued that the post-Lisbon "dilemma" is so serious that the government should disregard the referendum result.
Kerrigan suggests that the ideas floated by Collins, such as using legal mechanisms to sidestep the 'No' vote, are likely to have already been examined by the government with many ministers probably too fearful of the public backlash to proceed. According to Kerrigan, "it's not a democratic deficit in the EU elite, it's an anti-democratic culture", and this is a culture which is washing back into Irish national politics.
Neil O'Brien was quoted in the Mail on Saturday, responding to proposals for the merging of the UK and Irish EU Commissioner positions: "The Irish don't want to have Peter Mandelson as their commissioner any more than most people in Britain do."
Russia pushing for regime change in Georgia
Yesterday at the UN, Zalid Khalilzad, the US ambassador to the UN, asked his Russian counterpart Vitali Churkin: "Is the goal of the Russian Federation to change the leadership of Georgia?" Churkin replied: "There are leaders who become an obstacle. Sometimes those leaders need to contemplate how useful they have become to their people."
Jonathan Steele argues in the Guardian that Berlin and Paris' arguments against Georgian NATO membership have been strengthened, and that this will represent a huge defeat for Georgian President Saakashvili - with repercussions for his own domestic position. The Foreign Policy blog argues that ever since stability in Georgia was made a precondition for joining NATO the Russians have had a clear incentive to destabilise Georgia in order to thwart the country's membership. Trevor Kavanagh argues in the Sun: "The Russian Bear is not swayed by hand-wringing or threats. And what threats could we deploy? The EU is a flabby alliance of mostly timid nations with little in common except an optimistic dream of mutual prosperity. While Brussels lectures the world about human rights and the environment, Russia - and China - show how real power works."
Guardian Guardian Steele Independent Anderson Independent Leader Economist Certain Ideas of Europe blog EU Referendum EU Referendum 2 Iain Dale's blog
FT Rachman Irish Times EUobserver Deutsche Welle Spiegel FT FT 2 FT 3 IHT
Booker: EU energy policy will increase dependency on Russian gas
Christopher Booker, in his Sunday Telegraph column, looked at the UK's looming electricity supply crunch. "Between now and 2015 we shall lose 40 per cent of the generating capacity we currently require to meet maximum demand (still rising), due to the phasing out of almost all our obsolescent nuclear reactors and the closure of nine of our major coal- and oil-fired power stations under an EU "anti-pollution" directive... The only short-term remedy will be to build yet more gas-fired stations, at a time when we are fast running out of our own gas supplies and when gas prices are shooting through the roof, reducing us to dependence on countries such as Mr Putin's Russia or Qatar, both of which have recently announced caps on future exports."
He added, "With this colossal crisis fast approaching, our ministers are still lost in the cloudcuckooland of Mr Brown's £100 billion 'green energy' plan, to meet our EU target of generating a third of our electricity from renewables by 2020. Not an energy expert in the country says this is remotely feasible. Our present 2,000 wind turbines supply just 1.5 per cent of our power, and even if Mr Brown's 7,000 additional turbines could in practice be built, we would still be more than 200 per cent short of our EU target."
An ECB for EU carbon markets?
Mark Bell argues in the Guardian that the EU Emissions Trading Scheme will always suffer "a structural problem" whilst it is vulnerable to political influence - acting as a deterrent to long-term low carbon investment. He therefore argues that an EU carbon market authority should be set up, along the lines of a central bank. He notes, "The European Central Bank removed governments' ability to set interest rates, and therefore to pursue short term political gains at the cost of inflation. The running of Europe's carbon market should be similarly depoliticised. A central bank-type institution could provide both the political independence and the institutional credibility to reassure investors that a high carbon price will be sustained."
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