The European Court of Justice has come up with a delicious ruling that rather throws into confusion the EU commission's plans to reduce Gradually, the British media is absorbing the implications of the McChrystal assessment, and the political ramifications surrounding it, and we are beginning to see some in-depth reports. The Irish Times is carrying a report headed: "French minister urges EU defence budget." referring to the European affairs, Pierre Lellouche, who has proposed setting up an EU defence budget similar to the Common Agricultural Policy. Lord Tebbit – always a reservoir of good sense – writes today that the calls for Baroness Scotland to resign are misconceived. She did as much as any reasonable person could be expected to do to check whether her housekeeper was here legally. It was very nearly a year ago, with the first phase of the financial crisis in full flow that I observed: "If, by the end of this crisis – if it ever ends – the EU is not a smouldering wreck, it will emerge stronger, more powerful and more arrogant than before. It will destroy the City of London and what remains of our prosperity with it. It will regulate it to death."Carbon chaos - by Richard... Friday, September 25, 2009
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carbon dioxide emissions pollution through its Emissions Trading Scheme.
Under the scheme set out in Directive 2003/87/EC (as amended), individual member states were required to set quotas for their national emissions. However, so loose were the rules that some member states, Poland and Estonia amongst them, were rather more generous with their quotas than the commission thought fit – entirely defeating the object of the exercise, which was to force industry to reduce its CO2 output.
Fortified by righteous indignation, the commission thus issued a direction to the errant member states, in the form of a Commission Decision on 26 March 2007, instructing them to cut back their quotas. Although they reluctantly complied, Poland and Estonia, supported by Hungary, Lithuania and the Slovak Republic, lodged an appeal with the ECJ against their enforced 27 and 48 percent cuts.
This was, of course, defended by the commission, and – at some great cost to its long-suffering taxpayers – the goody two-shoes United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And to the dismay of both, on Wednesday the court found in favour of Poland and Estonia, annulling the commission decision – in its entirety.
Interestingly, Poland's complaint had been that data on which it had based its calculations to determine its allowances had been rejected by the commission, which had then replaced it with its own in order to come up with a lower allowance. This the court ruled, the commission was not entitled to do, and had exceeded its powers. It was only entitled to review the calculations to ensure that they had been drawn up in accordance with the directive.
Despite that, the news has had the BBC twittering, with its environment correspondent lamenting that the court ruling is another setback for the EU carbon markets. It certainly does not bode well for the EU's effort to persuade the US into a global carbon market, he says.
Fearful that the carbon market will now be swamped by excess allowances issued by the Poles and Estonians, driving down the price still further – and with appeals pending from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania - the commission has decided on a rearguard action.
Plucking from the judgement something which, on first sight does not appear to be there, environment commissioner Stavros Dimas claims that the court ruling requires the commission to re-evaluate its decision on Poland and Estonia. That it was going to do and, in the meantime, he declared, "those countries are not allowed to issue any additional allowances beyond those created in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme."
On the basis that the commission is never wrong even when it is wrong, Dimas is suggesting that its re-evaluation was unlikely to lead to any major change in the quotas already imposed for 2008. Nonetheless, there are four more disputed years, up to 2012, so the game is far from over.
And, just to add further entertainment, Berlusconi has sent a letter to Barroso seeking to renegotiate Italy's quotas. With the commission considering whether to appeal against the current ECJ judgement, he is likely to get short-shrift, but this cannot but help add to the "carbon chaos" which is dragging the EU's attempts to save the planet down into the mire.
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The Times for instance, is running a six-part series on Afghanistan, the latestdealing with the battle for "hearts and minds" on the home front, picking up on a theme it rehearsed in July.
The biggest challenge for the government, says this paper, is not how to beat the Taleban but how to keep the public at home onside. People tend to support the Armed Forces whatever they do but if there is any perception that British troops are dying in Afghanistan for no good reason the tide of opinion will turn.
Keeping people "onside" requires, at its most basis, a government which is able to offer a clear strategic direction and an indication that progress is being made, at an acceptable cost, with some prospect of an end in sight.
Defence secretary Bob Ainsworth, agrees that the government has to make clear the real reason why we need to be in Afghanistan. First and foremost, he then says, we must get security right so that we can prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a haven for terrorism.
Only then does he moves on to tell us that building the Afghan state - its education and health services, alternative livelihoods to drugs and a strong legal system - will give the people a better future than the one offered by the Taleban.
The problem with that is that Ainsworth does not make a clear causal link between his assertions. A "secure" Afghanistan, he asserts, is necessary to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a haven for terrorists. He then asserts that building the Afghan state will give people a "better future" than the one offered by the Taleban, but he does not tell us that this condition is necessary to defeat the Taleban. We are left to assume that, as indeed we have to assume that achieving this desirable condition is conditional on achieving security.
The sequential relationship between establishing security and then building the Afghan state, however, seems to have lodged as the prevailing paradigm, with the greater problem that we appear to be stuck in stage one, as yet unable to establish the security on which everything else depends.
However, it is now readily acknowledged that defeating the insurgent – in this case the Taleban – and thus achieving security, depends entirely on gaining the support of the people. Yet, to gain the support of the people, it is necessary to give people a "better future" which, under the prevailing paradigm, demands that security is first achieved.
Expressed thus, this is something of a self-defeating task, unless overwhelming force can be brought to bear over a very short period of time, thus to secure an area and allow rapid improvements to be implemented, all with the aim of convincing Afghans that there is a prospect of a "better future".
This, presumably – and, in fact, almost certainly – is what McChrystal aims to achieve through his assessment. And, while he has not yet formally asked for more troops, we learn from The Washington Post that he is about to do so. That request, though, will be made to the Department of Defense, which has indicated that it will not immediately forward it to the White House, pending the current strategic review which is being conducted by the president.
Here, one can understand the dilemma in the White House. There is absolutely no guarantee that the McChrystal plan – such that it is – will actually work, or indeed any indication that it has any chance of working. Based on the Iraqi "surge" concept, there is in fact every chance that it will not.
Thus, one can see the attractions of trimming back the ambitions, turning away from a counterinsurgency strategy, where the focus is on the people, to a counterterrorism strategy where the focus is on killing the enemy – in this case al Qaeda. Unfortunately, as Captain's Journal makes abundantly clear, that strategy is unlikely to work either.
Torn between two equally unattractive prospects, therefore, the response of the White House has been delay. Since late August when McChrystal delivered his report to the president, there has been no progress. No decisions have been made and there is no indication that one is forthcoming. A dangerous strategic vacuum is building up, where troops on the ground are marking time, waiting for a decision – and action – that they believe will enable them to make progress.
That delay is the worst of all possible worlds, and it is being noticed. Richard Norton-Taylor ofThe Guardian writes that Gordon Brown and, "less characteristically" (his words, not mine), Barack Obama appear irresponsibly indecisive. US and UK military chiefs are tearing their hair out at the inability of their political masters and civil agencies to get a grip on the Afghan conflict.
If the home front needs signs of direction, firm leadership and progress, this indecision simply reinforces the sense of drift. As casualties mount – as they doubtless will – the frustration and uncertainty may yet spill over into outright hostility to the war, culminating in demands for complete withdrawal.
We are, in effect, on the road to nowhere and while, generally – in road safety terms – we are told that "speed kills", on this particular road the greater danger might be delay. But if the wrong decision is also likely to have fatal consequences, there is a problem building up of alarming proportions. An immediate decision might rebuild public confidence in the short-term but the longer-term cost might be strategic failure, with catastrophic effects on public sentiment.
Perhaps the real problem is, in fact, the focus on strategy without due consideration for tactics. We will have a look at this in the next post.
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One can immediately see why the Irish press finds this interesting enough to publish. EU defence ambitions are an issue in the forthcoming referendum, where the charge is that the militarisation of the EU through the constitutional Lisbon treaty will affect Ireland's neutrality.
However, one might have thought that a French minister making such alarming proposals would excite a wider interest. The man is, after all, suggesting that defence spending should be dealt with like spending on other EU priorities such as agriculture, technology or the environment.
Lellouche holds that there is little point in creating the external action force envisaged in theconstitutional Lisbon treaty if "Europe" as an entity was not prepared to pay for its own defence.
Paris, the Irish Times reminds us, has set the goal of building EU common defence as one of its strategic priorities for the union. And, although there is no legal base in existing treaties or in theconstitutional Lisbon treaty for the EU budget to be used for defence or military spending, there is the mid-term review of the EU budget looming. This could be an opportunity to open discussions on the issue.
In fact, the chances of anything firm emerging are slight, as any proposal to use the EU budget for defence spending would require unanimous approval from all member states. Ireland and Austria would most certainly oppose any such move.
However, as with the European Defence Agency, there is nothing to stop an inner group setting up their own fund, on an "intergovernmental" basis, and asking the EU to administer it. By these means do we see the steady encroachment of the EU into areas formerly reserved for member states.
Our problem is that these statements by obscure continental politicians so often have a habit of coming to pass, so we ignore them at our peril. By the time we actually take notice, it is often too late. The antidote is to scream loudly and early, before such proposals have a chance to take root. But that presupposes the media is on the ball. And, Irish Times apart, it is clear that it is not.
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The charge against the Baroness should not be that she wrongfully employed an illegal immigrant, but that she shares responsibility for designing the web of legislation that snares respectable citizens, and for the failure of the government to protect the country against illegal immigration.
A similar point is made by Dr Butler of the Adam Smith Institute and reflects exactly the line we were taking yesterday.
Tebbit and Butler though are surely missing the point. The media is part of the entertainment industry, the game here being to notch up another ministerial resignation. Both these writers seem to be under the impression that it is interested in the issues.
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The crisis is not over – just in temporary abeyance - with rumours of a currency crisis building ... and hotly denied.
But, if the financial system is weaker, the EU is not a smouldering wreck (yet) and has thus emerged stronger, taking advantage of the beneficial crisis by launching a major new tranche offinancial regulation.
This it did yesterday, to no great fanfare, and with media coverage confined to the financial pages, thus lacking any serious political input that would draw attention to yet another – and very major – EU power grab. On the table is what even the EU commission calls an "important package" of draft legislation, which it tells us "significantly strengthen the supervision of the financial sector in Europe."
The legislation will create a raft new EU institutions, comprising a European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB), which will "detect risks to the financial system as a whole with a critical function to issue early risk warnings to be rapidly acted on", a European System of Financial Supervisors (ESFS), composed of national supervisors, and three new European Supervisory Authorities for the banking, securities and insurance and occupational pensions sectors.
At this stage no one can even begin to assess the long-term effect of these institutions on our financial sector, but what is very clear is that they do involve a substantial transfer of power from national authorities to the EU – the results of which, as history tells us, are bound to be malign.
The system is based on the Larosière report, about which we wrote earlier this year, but so technical and arcane are the provisions that few people will understand their significance and they will thus pass into our legislative system with little comment and no political controversy. And when they do, the UK government will have lost that much more power and will be weaker as a result.
The "colleagues", of course, are gift-wrapping this and giving us a good spiel, with Barroso telling us the aim of the benevolent commission is "to protect European taxpayers from a repeat of the dark days of autumn 2008, when governments had to pour billions of euros into the banks."
Furthermore, says Barroso, this European system "can also inspire a global one and we will argue for that in Pittsburgh". Global governance is about to take another lurch into our lives.
Nothing can disguise the nature of this power-grab, but then the "colleagues" do not need to. The deed has already been agreed in principle by the European Council in June when we reportedthat, in the couloirs of Brussels and beyond, one of our most important wealth generating activities had been "stitched-up, kippered and delivered to the enemy."
We then forecast that as the EU exerted its malign grip, its depredations would not be reported and that which escaped into the public domain would not be understood. The only thing certain, we said, is that we will pay, directly and indirectly, and keep on paying ... until such time as we are forced to leave the EU or go bankrupt.
Nothing has changed. We are just that bit closer to the final outcome – whatever it might be.
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