Britannia Radio

17 December 2010 3:55 PM

Cameron at the European Council: so who's the silly monkey, then?

Just before David Cameron's press conference today following the European summit, the prime minister was being mocked by some of the foreign press corps with sniggers of 'Look at the silly monkey! Look at the shiny keys.'

It was a sarcastic reference to the game parents play when they want to distract a toddler's attention from something that would otherwise make him howl -- Mummy slipping out the door, or the doctor approaching with an injection. Up goes the stuffed monkey toy, clink-clink go the keys: 'Look this way, no, no don't look that way.'

And they were dead right. At his press conference, Cameron wanted Britain to look away from the really horrible part of what had just happened.

The real issue at the council ('No, don't look that way') was the decision to amend the EU treaties to establish a permanent bail-out system for the eurozone. When Cameron went into this summit, he was insisting that, if he were going to support that, then Article 122 of the Lisbon Treaty had to be amended at the same time. This is the article which the ECB and the other euro-fanatics used to sweep aside the 'no bailouts' clause of earlier treaties when peripheral members of the eurozone such as Greece went over the debt cliff.

Article 122 just says that if a member state is 'seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control,' the EU can give it financial assistance.

Now, when the treaty was presented to the public, they were led to believe this meant helping a member state hit with earthquakes or tsunamis or infectious epidemics. Interpreting 'natural disasters' to mean a pack of spendthrift liars taking over the Greek government for a lot of years was not mentioned as a possibility.

But the Article has been interpreted just that way, and it is that interpretation which has led to the United Kingdom being sucked into the bailouts for the eurozone -- now and until at least 2013.

And by the way, you will remember that when the Lisbon Treaty was finally ratified, Cameron and Hague wriggled out of their commitment to give the the British a referendum, on the grounds a referendum would only be granted if other, further powers were given beyond what were already handed over in the Lisbon Treaty.

Well, at that time Cameron and Hague -- and all the British people - were oblivious to the fact that this unexploded bomb of a power way lying in Article 122. Once the eurozone fanatics set it off, Cameron should have called for a referendum, on the grounds that this extraordinary interpretation of Article 122 amounted to shifting new powers (and more to the point, new billions) from Westminster to Brussels.

But of course he didn't. Now it is too late.

So instead he limped to Brussels saying that if he were to agree to the setting up of this permanent eurozone bailout structure (which would exclude the UK) he wanted Article 122 to be amended at the same time so that Britain could not be dragged into other, future bailouts through the same interpretation of the article.

Of course, Cameron failed. The eurozone gets its mechanism, and Article 122 remains unamended. Some fine words were spoken by other leaders about how that interpretation wouldn't happen again, but anybody who believes that what a Frenchmen says tonight he is still going to mean in the morning really shouldn't be let out in Brussels alone.

Which all explains Cameron's absurd press conference. He did his masterful stride to the podium, and immediately launched into yet another pronouncement on how successful Britain's resistance to the increase in the EU annual budget had been.

For those with you who have other, better things to remember, here is what has happened: Cameron had said he wanted zero increase, the European Council outvoted him and said a 2.9 percent increase would be fine, and the European Parliament wanted six percent increase. In the end, the increase was 2.9 percent. Cameron bragged today about how the council hadn't done the usual thing and split the difference with the parliament, and this was a victory.

Yet in other words, Cameron didn't get what he wanted on the budget, but he was so desperate to find some sort of 'triumph' in Brussels today to distract from the eurozone bailout disaster, that he was clinging to this budget nonsense: 'Look at the silly monkey! Look at the shiny keys!'

However, when he was tried to demonstrated this was a victory for his kind of thinking, he made the mistake of going back over it, saying how in every member state nearly every kind of spending had been cut, so the EU budget had to take that into account.

Well, if the EU were to take that into account, the budget should have been cut, not held at the zero percent increase Cameron wanted. It most certainly should not have gone up to 2.9 percent. And as for not splitting the difference -- Cameron wanted zero, the parliament wanted 6 percent increase, and now the increase is just a sliver below 3 percent. That looks like splitting the difference to me.

Cheapskates! Give him 'the rank he was proud to honour at the time of his death'

All those guns, all that training, all that provocation: you do sometimes have to admire the discipline of the British soldiers in not swarming over Whitehall to shoot up the bureaucrats.

What brings this thought to mind is a petition that has just dropped onto my desk on 'the rank and pension of soldiers killed on active service.' It seems the bureaucrats are operating policy that is somewhere between insulting and immoral. The policy is this: unless a member of the armed forces had held his rank for at least a year before he was killed in action, the Ministry of Defence will only pay the pension linked to his former, lower rank.

So www.soldiers-pensions.co.uk have organised a petition for an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons to get this policy changed, 'and considers that the family of Sergeant Matthew Telford of Grimsby, promoted to the rank in June 2009 but killed by an assassin in Afghanistan in November of that year, along with Guardsman Jimmy Major of Cleethorpes and three other soldiers, should be paid the full pension appropriate to the rank he was proud to honour at the time of his death.'

How the hell is David Cameron allowing this to happen? And I just don't want to hear from some Tory that 'we can't control the details.' Or is the excuse from the Tories going to be that the LibDems don't want to let the Government look after the families of soldiers killed in action? This is no detail. It demands fixing.

I have my suspicions how this is happening. A generation back in Whitehall, a huge number of leading civil servants had war experience. Now you have some academic whizz kids from Oxford and Cambridge whoe interests are far removed from soldiering. They have reduced all kinds of back-up for the troops because they do not understand-- or, may they burn in Hell, do not care -- what the troops need.

Go to the website and sign the petition: maybe that will let Cameron know that at least the British people, if not their highly-paid bureaucrats, know what the troops are due. Protection for their grieving families, for a start.

www.soldiers-pensions.co.uk

Belgian politics get exciting (yes, really)

Bart De Wever, the Flemish nationalist leader and head of the party which won the largest number of seats after the Belgian elections in June, yesterday called Belgium a failed state: 'It is a nation that has failed. Ultimately the Belgian state has no future.'

De Wever was talking to the German magazine Der Spiegel and AFP has translated some of the interview. The Flemish leader called Belgium the 'sick man of Europe' and compared the dependency of the French-speaking minority on tax money generated by the Flemish majority to the dependency of a drug addict.

What is really fun about all this is that De Wever and the other six parties elected in June are supposed to be in negotiations to form a new government. Calling the French-speaking Walloons a bunch of fiscal crack addicts probably can't pass for a political charm offensive, not even in blunt Belgium.

What it can do is push the negotiations further towards boiling point -- and that might suit the Flemings very well. Last year De Wever said he hoped the Belgian state would 'simply evaporate.' What some Flemish nationalists want is more autonomy over their own homeland and their own money. Other Flemish nationalists want a complete break with this thing called Belgium. They want to establish a republic of Flanders.

Not that Albert II, the King of the Belgians, wants to hear talk of any kind of republic. The king, who is a lot more politically-involved than Britain's own HM is allowed to be, has been naming a series of 'mediators' to try to broker a deal to form a coalition government between Walloons and Flemings. However, it is like mediators in the United Kingdom trying to form a coaltion between the Liberal Democrats and UKIP: common ground is near nothing.

De Wever also took a swipe at the king, who is considered by many 'Belgicists' -- those who want to continue with the forced marriage between Walloons and Flemings -- to be the glue that holds the whole thing together. In a way, that is true. The Belgian monarchy, created when the British put one of the German Saxe-Coburg family (he was Victoria's Uncle Leopold) on the new throne in 1832, could be argued to be the only significant purely-Belgian institution in the country.

But De Wever said yesterday: 'The problem is that the king still plays a political role. For us Flemings, this poses a problem because the king does not think like us. For Walloons, it is an advantage because they are allied with him.'

Which is true. The Walloons see the king as a means to keep themselves hitched to the revenue-generating Flemish. Lose the king and the Walloons would lose the Flemish ATM machine. So, although Walloon politics are dominated by rust-belt industrial trade union culture and other socialists, boy, do they love their king.

Meanwhile, the failed state still doesn't have anything but a caretaker government, while the country's borrowing costs rise. The head of the central bank is getting quite frustrated: 'It is difficult to understand overseas how a country can remain without a government for over six months and still continue to function.'

But it does. LIfe here in Belgium goes on. Maybe the lesson to draw from all of this is that in many cases governments do more harm than good and the best thing is just to keep party leaders kicking their heels in a waiting room: 'We'll call you when we need you.'

Watch out, van Rompuy: here comes the real president of Europe

My congratulations to the Institute for Human Dignity for persuading His Imperial Highness Otto von Habsburg to become their patron. Don't worry too much about the institute -- it's a Continental conservative Catholic outfit with my favourite Italian politician, the brave Prof Rocco Buttiglione, vice-president of the Italian parliament, as the other patron.

The point is that the appointment shows that the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the last great Catholic imperial monarchy, is still active at the age of 98. That is Otto at the left, with his parents King Charles and Queen Zita at their coronation in Budapest in 1916. At that point, Otto was Crown Prince of Austria, Hungary and Bohemia.

The archduke has been pretender to what seems like every throne in middle Europe since 1922, in particular, he would be Emperor of Austria.

I interviewed him in 1981 at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. He was a member of the parliament -- yes, alas, the emperor is rather a pan-European, but you can understand why: apparently he is a citizen of Austria, Hungary, Germany and Croatia, and could be king of Bohemia.

At that time, the parliament had no power but a great deal more style. Alongside the would-be emperor in the parliamentary 'hemicycle' was a Bismarck and also the heir to the Duke of Wellington. The blood had all thinned a bit by then, of course.

And what was the archduke like? Charming, simple, with gentle humility and graceful manners.

But maybe sometimes the humility went further than it had to. One day a fellow journalist came up to me at the parliament building in Strasbourg, quite shaken. He said he had just seen the archduke queuing in the cafeteria with a string of little Habsburg princes in lederhosen, 'all of them holding trays of Coca-Cola. It wasn't supposed to end like this!'

I can (almost) forgive the archduke for his support of pan-Europeanism -- though a unified Europe without Turkey, the old Catholic emperor insists on that -- because he also supports the Austrian school of economics. That means the free-market brilliance of Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

So, all in all, if you look at Otto von Habsburg's CV, I'd say he is a far more obvious candidate for the post of president of Europe than this jumped-up-from-nowhere Belgian, Herman von Rompuy.

Of course, you could say, 'Who elected Habsburg archduke?' The answer is, nobody. But then if you ask, 'Who elected von Rompuy president?' the answer is the same.