Today's the day - by Richard... Friday, October 02, 2009 eureferendum.blogspot.com

Today's the day - by Richard... Friday, October 02, 2009 eureferendum.blogspot.com

Actually, the voting on the outlying islands started two days ago. And, according to The Times, the very first vote was cast in Barry Edgar Pilcher's living room in Raven Cottage on Inishfree - it went to the "no" campaign.

Mr Pilcher, 66, a London-born artist and musician, serenaded locals on his saxophone as they voted. "I voted 'no' because I think we shouldn't give our power away," Mr Pilcher said. Turnout was high, with five of Inishfree's seven eligible voters casting a ballot. Patsy Dan Rodgers, the "king" of neighbouring Tory Island, said most of the 150 islanders would vote "no" – rather appropriate for the "Tories". 

With the vote expected to favour the "yes" camp, however, God – or, at least, the Vatican, which is not quite the same thing – has made an unexpected intervention, warning that the European Union threatens Ireland's "identity, traditions and history". 

This is Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, who spoke during the Pope's visit to the Czech Republic, noting that: "Individual European countries have their own identity. The EU prescribes its laws or views to them and they do not have to fit with their traditions and history. Some countries are logically resisting this – for example, Ireland." 

Anodyne though this might be, it has been seized upon by the "no" camp in what is regarded as an increasingly acrimonious campaign, with prime minister Brian Cowen still lying through his teeth, claiming that he had secured "legal guarantees" from the EU on Irish concerns about the treaty.

Whatever the "yessies" might say about their level of support, Dr John O'Brennan, European politics lecturer at NUI Maynooth, is warning that the level of anger among Irish voters towards an unpopular government should not be under-estimated.

"If you talk to people all around the country," he says, "a level of anger is very, very high. Are people rational enough to put that aside and think of the interests of the country in the longer term? I'm not so sure." That is obviously from a Europhile and he may not have picked up another factor – more than a few Irish are a tad annoyed with being made to vote again, their first vote having been ignored by their political classes.

Results are not due until Saturday, and it will be mid-morning before we get an idea of which way the sentiment is going, but there is still some hope that the "piss off" factor will prevail and the Irish will have the sense to give the "colleagues" in Brussels a bloody nose.

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Let us stop and think - by Helen...

Today the people of Ireland go to the polls to vote in the second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Its previous reincarnation as the Constitutional Treaty was thrown out by the people of France and Netherlands after which there was, as you may recall, a period of discussion and dialogue. Dialogue of the deaf since the creators of the new treaty discussed matters only with organizations they had themselves created as part of a controlled civil society. All other opinions such as “no, we do not want a constitution for Europe” were ignored.

Then they came back with a new version, which has fewer pages because the print was smaller but more words and which had dropped references to a flag and an anthem, thus making it, or so we were told, completely different from a constitution.

As it happens the United States Constitution has no references to anthems or flags (neither was in existence at the time) but it is still a constitution. So there was the Lisbon Treaty, which still proposed the creation of a President and announced that the supremacy of European law, hitherto decided on by Parliament, would now be based on the Constitution Lisbon Treaty.

There is an uncharacteristically calm and detailed discussion of the situation on Your Freedom and Ours (even though I say so myself).

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Pearls of wisdom - by Richard... Thursday, October 01, 2009

General McChrystal, addressing the IISS in London today, regales us with his wisdom and understanding of the situation in Afghanistan. 

"With a completely altruistic effort of building a well," he says, "you can create divisiveness, you can give the impression that you, from the outside, don't know what is going on, you can give the impression that you have sided with one element or another ... and all you tried to do is give water."

McChrystal is confronting one of the fundamental truths of life - don't interfere in things you don't understand. And the point is, we will never understand. We have neither the time, the resources, the capabilities nor the structures which will allow us to understand. So don't interfere.

We cannot rebuild the Afghan society. We can act as enablers, rebuilding the physical infrastructure which then permits the Afghans to repair their own society. But we are not doing this. We are interfering in the minutia of Afghan society and we are not addressing the physical infrastructure.

Yet, still, McChrystal talks about "winning the battle of perception". If he doesn't understand how the society works, how can he begin to know how Afghan society perceives the coalition effort? And, if he doesn't understand the complexity of that society, how can he effectively target the actions of his forces to alter that perception?

However, he acknowledges that "security comes from the people". We must redefine the fight, he says. We must protect the people, he says. We came and said we would protect them, and we didn't. And now we must. 

But we must protect them from our own actions. The understanding must be that we respect the people. We must as a force change our mindset. We have a conventional warfare mindset - we're going to have to do things dramatically different. Yea ... right.

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Well, what do you know? - by Helen...

Bloomberg has an article about a meeting at our own Institute of Economic Affairs that discussed the possible, nay probable, effects of more EU regulation of the financial markets. It was off the record but a few participants agreed to be quoted. What use an off the record meeting about financial regulations might be to anybody is not clear but the IEA loves to seem important.

Things are not going well. The financial regulations may affect the City adversely. Or so opines Ruth Lea, director at Arbuthnot Banking Group Plc and, as our readers may recall, director of the now moribund but formally still living Global Vision.

We have written about this group before (here and here for example) and we did not think highly of it. There seemed to be a great deal of retreading of old ground (people will listen if we tell them about the economics, yaddda-yadda) and their proposed aim seemed completely irrational.

Global Vision's view was that Britain should renegotiate a different relationship with the EU and its member states. I shall not weary our readers with a rehash of all the arguments why that can be described in technical terms as utter tosh. They are there in the postings I have linked to.

It would appear that Ruth Lea has inched away from that position.

"I am extremely worried about the City of London," said Ruth Lea, a director at Arbuthnot Banking Group Plc, who agreed after the Sept. 24 meeting at the Institute of Economic Affairs for her comments to be published. "Britain may be able to influence EU regulation, but we won't be calling the shots. Britain should consider the nuclear option of leaving the EU."

Mind you, this is something she said to the journalist. Did she say it in so many words at the meeting? This is not clear.

Other contributors made it clear either with approval or disapproval that what is at issue is not economic development or fear of financial crises; it is the "Anglo-Saxon" way of doing things that the EU is out to destroy.

Let us not at this stage go into what "Anglo-Saxon" might mean or whether it is really in evidence in Britain. What the financial regulations intend to do, according to all those quoted in the article is to undermine or destroy the City of London, the only really big international financial centre in the EU. The fact that these regulations will not help anyone else particularly seems to be irrelevant.

Read the whole piece on Bloomberg. But before you do, let me note one more interesting comment:

"It's good to avoid mentioning London in every single sentence and start looking at this from a European point of view," said Mats Persson, research director at Open Europe, a London lobby group that's critical of EU integration. Persson also spoke at the IEA. "I am Swedish, and I have sympathy for this kind of thinking."

What kind of thinking? More European control of the financial markets because the City is dispensable? Is this quite what we want to hear from our premier glasnost think-tank?