Sunday, 9 May 2010


07 May 2010 3:07 PM

Tory sell-out alert

Cameron headshot
Just in case David Cameron managed to slip it past you this afternoon when he made his amorous advances to the Lib Dems: he said a Conservative-led government would allow no further transfer of power to Brussels.

Note he did not say he or anyone in his party leadership wanted to claw back, or had an intention of trying to claw back, any of the vast powers already signed over to the European Union by Lisbon and earlier treaties.

Looks like, as ever, evil is going to triumph because good men choose to do nothing

Though I've doubted for a long time that Cameron and the Tory leadership have the equipment to be described as 'good men.'

US Republicans: we don't want to sign the Club Med bail-out cheques

Congressman rodgersMike_Pence_111th

This could be the most influential two-some to hit the Greek crisis since Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy.

I give you Rep Mike Pence, chairman of the US House of Representatives Republican Conference, and Rep Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the vice-chairman. According to The Hill, a Washington political website, they have just sent a letter to Vice President Joseph Biden (the vice president is ex-officio president of the House) urging him to oppose a potential bailout of Spain, which like much of the rest of the eurozone Club Med countries is heading for financial crisis.

What have Washington Republicans got to do with EU bail-outs? Plenty. Just remember that when Brussels talks about a eurozone-IMF bailout, the American taxpayers are by far the biggest contributors to IMF funds. Not that Brussels much mentions that: they prefer to concentrate on the fact that the managing director of the fund is a Frenchman, Dominque Strauss Kahn. But it isn't DSK who finds the funds.

So these two Republican leaders have warned Biden that: 'Should Spain request a bailout from the IMF, we urge you to make it clear that the US will oppose such a bailout, and do all in its power as the IMF's leading contributor to reject putting American money further at risk. The US did not implement the policies that have caused Spain's debt issue and the US taxpayer should not be put at risk to bail them out.'

The two Republicans had already sent a letter to President Obama's treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, calling on him to oppose the IMF's bailout of Greece -- and any other European bailout that might be suggested.

Biden and the other Democrats will have a hard time ignoring them. The mid-term elections are coming up in November, and Hill Democrats are scared. Giving the Republicans one more damaging election slogan -- 'The Democrats are sending our tax dollars to those profligate Europeans' -- would not be a wise political move.

Rather a yawn, really

Monkey yawn

You'd be hard put to find anyone in the euro-village who really cares whether Britain ends up with David Cameron as prime minister, or with whomever knifes Gordon Brown as prime minister.

Even if the new prime minister forms a coalition government with Nick Clegg, the Brussels Manchurian Candidate, neither a Tory nor a Labour prime minister is going to make the Lib Dem leader foreign secretary. That job would make ex-eurocrat, ex-Euro MP Clegg the British point man for relations with the EU -- you have to think (hope? pray?) that neither the Tories nor even Labour would be that reckless.

As for a Mandelson-influenced Labour coaltion government pushing to take Britain into the euro, after the recent chaos in the single currency, that idea is dead for years to come (if the euro still exists in years to come).

So the result of the election will make no difference to business as usual in Brussels: despite what eurocrats may say about the 'eurosceptic' Tories, the Tories alas just aren't.Occasionally the party leadership tries to talk tough, but just remember how quickly -- eagerly, even -- both Cameron and Hague gave up the fight over Lisbon. If the two of them were running EU policy in a minority government, they'd capitulate every time, rather than risk seeing their government fall.

So the result of the election matters little here.

Anyway, we have more exciting things to think about in Brussels: the coming default of eurozone Greece, the coming constitutional lawsuit in Germany that might scupper Germany's contribution to the bail-out, the ludicrous attempts by Sarkozy and Merkel to blame the markets and the ratings agencies for the fact that Greece has lied and cheated its way into insolvency, the coming crashes all across the eurozone's Club Med countries, the looming breakup of the single currency.

Can't think when I've enjoyed Brussels so much.

01 May 2010 3:15 PM

Check the moral values: tin the tuna, eleven souls are lostDeepwater

In among the pictures of manatees and blue-fin tuna -- all doomed, we are told, because of the oil slick heading for Louisiana after the explosion at the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig -- you may just have seen one line: 11 workers died when the rig exploded on April 20th.

Or maybe you didn't see the line at all. The environmentalists and their Democrat friends in Washington are so concerned about shrimp dying that the loss of 11 husbands, brothers and sons seems hardly worth mentioning. Certainly a confused seabird covered in oil touches more Green hearts than a picture of a grieving blue-collar widow outside a Gulf coast bungalow.

Yes, of course, the explosion is an enormous financial disaster -- just ask any pension fund with a holding in BP -- and a disaster for the wildlife, and for the people who must make their livings along the coast. But I would be willing to kill every gannet from Galveston to Pensacola if it could restore those 11 men to their families. There is worse heartbreak in this than just the loss of animal life and loss of share price.

One ought to remember, too, the heartbreak of the men who designed the rig. Usually I would only mourn the loss of a great church or an historic house by fire. But this rig was magnificent. For it to explode into an inferno -- the flames were visible 35 miles away -- list and sink, is a technological tragedy.

Deepwater Horizon was no mere platform of the kind we were used to in the North Sea. It was a floating rig. It had no anchors, it was not moored, yet it could operate in depths of 10,000 ft. What was described to me as a 'triply-redundant computer system' used satellite positioning to control powerful thrusters to keep it within a few feet of its correct location at all times.

All-in cost to BP of running it for just one day? Close to $1m -- that's £650,000. Everything about it was of the latest, most sophisticated technology. Yet somehow oil and gas got into the well-bore. Despite blowout preventers, dead-man systems, panic buttons, none of these safety mechanisms was activated. The blowout was just that fast.

Tomorrow morning, oil rig workers all over the world will wake up knowing all that -- that there are some blowouts, some infernos from which technology can never save them. Yet they will still get up and start their work on the rigs. Technology is brilliant. But courage is even better.