Britannia Radio

12 March 2011 12:14 PM

Eurocrats confuse Ireland with Titanic. Understandable, really

Oh, dear. Just when it was going so well. First Enda Kenny, the new Irish prime minister, had his little I-have-friends-in-high-places triumph at the European Council (see previous post). Then, whoops, came his little humiliation.

After the European Council meeting on Libya, journalists had to hang around for another seven hours, waiting for a meeting of eurozone leaders to finish. So journalists were just bored enough to look at the list of runners and riders the European Council prints for each summit: a four-page full colour list of national flags next to country, photograph, name and office of each head of state or government in the EU.

This thing is generally left around the press room so that any of us can, if need be, identify the Bulgarian prime minister in a hurry.

Then some of us noticed that the picture of the new Irish prime minister didn't seem quite

right. But it did seem very familiar. A couple of wiki searches later, and the press corps were whooping: the European Council couldn't tell the difference between the head of government of a member state of the EU (above) and Victor Garber (right), a Canadian actor who plays Jack Briston in the television series Alias and played Thomas Andrews the shipbuilder in the film Titanic.

Though perhaps the switch was deliberate. What we may have in Enda Kenny is the first international leader to employ a security body-double since Saddam Hussein.

Enda Kenny lets Europe know he has friends in high places: Obama rings Irish leader at European Council

Enda Kenny, the new Irish prime minister, has only been in office for two days, but he has already been dropped into the special meeting today of the heads of state and government of the EU to discuss the crisis in Libya.

Since Kenny could easily be confused with Chance the Gardener, some of us reckoned the best we could hope for -- after all, we wish him well, more or less -- that he get through this first meeting without knocking over the water bottles. Or indeed mentioning that Ireland doesn't even belong to Nato, much less have an air force, so talk about bombing Libyan air defences and enforcing a no-fly zone is above an Irish prime minister's pay grade.

But Kenny managed to impress. As the meeting -- meant to end around 3 pm -- dragged

on to 4 o'clock, the new boy had to stand up and explain to Merkel, Sarkozy, Cameron and the rest that he just had to leave for a moment to take a call from the White House: Barack Obama was on the line for him.

What a way to go.

The call had been arranged earlier, to give President Obama the chance to congratulate Kenny on his election, and to invite him to visit the White House on St Patrick's Day on March 17.

Follow that, Chancellor.

Pay attention, Baroness Ashton: 'Why fewer and fewer Americans take Europe seriously'

I'd say with foreign policy this stupid, Baroness Ashton is going to need more than her extra

new £8.5m budget for public relations to smarten up her image.

Or maybe she and the rest of the Brussels foreign policy eurocrats thought the most powerful nation in the world wouldn't notice what they were up to.

In 2009 (yes, before Ashton was parachuted into her unelected post, but she has done nothing to repudiate this policy) the EU gave $3.6m (£2.2m) to lobby groups in America who are campaigning against the death penalty.

The Daily Telegraph had the story a couple of days ago, which didn't seem to bother Brussels. But there is this thing called the internet...so the Wall Street Journal, one of America's only national newspapers and about which Brussels would do well to care, has picked up the story today. The Journal is raging: 'Europe can't find the money to pay for its fair share of NATO but it can spare a dime to hector its main defense benefactor on criminal law.'

'This is why fewer and fewer Americans take Europe seriously.'

The Journal mocked Europe: 'European countries may need bailing out, but you'll be pleased to know that the European Union has enough money to promote human rights and democracy -- in America. Don't laugh.'

'This concern for convicted American murderers is touching, given that its normal recipients are civil-society groups in the likes of Sudan and Zimbabwe. Somehow North Korea and Cuba didn't make the EU's list, perhaps because they execute people without a trial.'

'American states are free to decide their own penal codes, which vary widely and change as facts and public values evolve. Europe won't allow such a debate at home but feels the moral afflatus to tax its own citizens to promote one side of the argument in America.'

Not only won't Europe allow such a debate, it is even worse than the Journal realises: the Lisbon Treaty, in Article 54 of the so-called Charter of Fundamental Rights, ensures that protection of the right to freedom of speech is denied to anyone campaigning to bring back the death penalty.

European Parliament to give German MEP Elmar Brok immunity from prosecution for tax evasion

Elmar Brok, here he is, plump and fabulously well-paid as only a German politician at the top of the European Parliament can be. You know how these people live, so I don't have to go into the details again: the pay, the expenses, the ever-increasing allowances for staff, the free travel, the free spa treatments, the pensions, the entertainment allowances, the special low rate of income tax.

But here is a new perk. The committee on legal affairs at the European Parliament has just decided that politicians such as Brok must have immunity from prosecution for tax evasion if the revenue authorities in their home country catch them trousering undeclared thousands.

I have it here, a report written for the committee by the Italian MEP Francesco Enrico Speroni (why am I not surprised that a right wing Italian politician -- Speroni's party is allied with Berlusconi -- thinks politicians shouldn't be hassled about income tax evasion?)

What makes this story doubly interesting for us is that Brok is the Euro-fanatic, the centralised-European-government ideologue, who was in and out of Number 10 during the last Government, reportedly helping Blair-Brown find a slippery way around giving the British people a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

The German authorities last September requested the European Parliament to waive the immunity from legal proceedings enjoyed by Brok and all other MEPs. The Public Prosecutor of Bielefeld wants to bring a criminal action against Brok for failure to report a €5,000 (£4,300) fee paid to him for giving a speech (one speech? Five k for 30 minutes? It was paid to him by HypoVereinsbank Group, a large Munich-based bank now owned by Italy's Unicredit. There may be another story in there, but I'll stick to the one about the tax for the moment).

The Public Prosecutor said in a letter to the committee that 'it is not possible at this stage to exclude the possibility that he [Brok] has received additional income form similar sources of which the relevant tax authorities are as yet unaware.'

What was the committee's response to that? Speroni declared the attempt at prosecution was 'a clear case of fumus persecutionis.' That means it showed signs of persecution for political reasons.

And the evidence of such persecution is what, exactly? That since the prosecutor hadn't told Brok of all the evidence they had against him and the story had run in news reports, 'It is therefore plain that the case is one of fumus persecutionis in that is appears the proceedings were brought with the sole aim of damaging the reputation of the Member concerned.'

So, the European Parliament will not lift Brok's immunity from prosecution.

But did Brok take thousands from that Munich bank and fail to declare it on his income tax or did he not?

Err, he did. But according the the ever-forgiving Italian politician writing the report, yes, Brok did, but since Speroni maintains Brok only did it -- this assertion hasn't actually been tested in court, but Speroni is presenting it as fact -- as an accidental omission and since the money was 'a comparatively minor sum' -- again, in the world of the MEPs, €5,000/£4,300 is a minor sum, loose change so very easily overlooked -- then it doesn't warrant a prosecution. At least, not according to the moral measures of a politician allied with Berlusconi.

The parliamentary committee voted 15-0 in favour of the report. Of course they did.

The curse of the euro: EU and Mrs Merkel humiliate new Irish prime minister Enda Kenny

This is my column from today's Irish Daily Mail.

Yes, I will be in Brussels on Friday when Enda Kenny attends his first eurozone meeting as our new Taoiseach. I will be there, trailing along through security behind Mr Kenny, showing my press badge and saying, ‘Yes, I’m with him, the irrelevant one.’

Because that is what he is. It was confirmed by Mr Kenny’s embarrassing trip to Helsinki last week, where he attended a meeting of the EU heads of state and government who belong to the European People’s Party, the EPP. This is the grouping which aligns with the Continental centre-right. That means Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy and a number of other heavies who control eurozone policy.

You may remember that during the campaign Fine Gael made a lot of the fact that Mr Kenny is vice-president of this group. We were supposed to imagine this meant the European centre-right must think a lot of him, that he had unusually good access to Mrs Merkel and the rest.

Well, read the fine print. The EPP has 14 vice-presidents, ten elected and four ex-officio. In European terms, Mr Kenny is as irrelevant as an EPP vice-president as he is as prime minister of Ireland, which is to say, not relevant at all. The way Mrs Merkel brushed aside both his desire for a meeting with her in Helsinki and his pleas for better bail-out terms showed exactly where we stand in the EU: at the door, holding the coats.

Note, Mr Kenny showed no rage at his – and our – treatment by these people. This is important and for more reasons than just that it means our bail-out terms are not going to be changed. It is important because it is now clear Mr Kenny is not going to stand his ground when Mrs Merkel and Mr Sarkozy and other EU bosses dismiss a Taoiseach in this way.

During the campaign, Fine Gael talked about hair-cuts for bank bond holders. By the time the Helsinki embarrassment was over, Mr Kenny was already backing off that one and talking about ‘other ways’ being found to stop more bank debt being landed on taxpayers.

‘Other ways?’ If Mr Kenny can find any way to stop Irish private bank debt being shifted into public debt without default – call it hair-cuts or call it renegotiation, it all comes down to default – then he will be on the short list for the 2011 Nobel Prize in economics.

The guff Mr Kenny is supposed to accept from Mrs Merkel and the rest of the eurozone bosses is that as long as Ireland takes the austerity medicine prescribed by the EU it can grow its way out of the debt and not default. Tripe. At our depth of debt, history shows there is no way Ireland can grow its way out.

If you want to know why, go over to the latest work by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth

Rogoff, two leading American economists. They’ve just written a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Alas for civilians like myself, it is password protected, but Constantin Gurdgiev, the Trinity College economist, has excerpts from it on his trueeconomics.blogspot.com.

One of the things Reinhart-Rogoff highlight is ‘the extraordinary external debt levels of Ireland and Iceland compared to all historical norms in our data base.’ That emphasis is the economists’ own. It is a shocking fact that the bank debt build-ups in Ireland (and Iceland) prior to the present crisis are ‘without parallel in the long history of financial crises.’ With academic understatement they add: ‘Seldom do countries “grow” their way out of debts.’

In the present crisis, ‘Ireland experienced an increase in Government debt of circa 220 percent.’ In historical terms, the Reinhart-Rogoff research shows that an 86 percent debt level increase would classify us as being seriously bust. But 220 percent would, as Dr Gurdgiev puts it, classify us ‘as having been financially vaporised.’

We have been financially vaporised because the out-going Finance Minister was obedient to Jean Claude Trichet, the head of the European Central Bank. Mr Trichet told the Minister to guarantee all the bank debt and the Minister obeyed. This debt was in great billions owed to German banks. Some to the French banks, too, but spectacularly to the German.

You must know all this by now. We have been financially vaporised so that Angela Merkel’s under-capitalised, badly-performing German state banks get back all the money they so stupidly lent to Sean FitzPatrick and the rest. That is why the Chancellor dismissed Mr Kenny at Helsinki, and why she will do so again on Friday in Brussels. If it is a choice between the truth coming out about her own country’s banking crisis, and drowning the Irish taxpayer in debt – well, as far as Mrs Merkel is concerned, just drown the Irish. Glug, glug, glug.

What is the attitude of the incoming Taoiseach to this outrage? Meekness. Eagerness to please. Backing off from the policies his party sold to the electorate. Compliance.

Surely you cannot be surprised. Enda Kenny has been the Dail longer than any other

deputy. Can you recall one moment in which he showed any flash of rebellion, any determination to stand alone for some principle – any principle at all? He has been in the Dail since 1975. I will remind you how long ago 1975 is: in Britain Harold Wilson was prime minister, in America Gerald Ford was president, and in the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev still had another seven years to go as communist dictator. Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces less than six months before Mr Kenny entered the Dail.

In the long stretch of history since then, can you remember any moment at which you thought, if you are old enough to have had political thoughts as long ago as 1975: ‘That Kenny man really has guts, really has spine.’ Answer, No, you can’t. The leadership election against Richard Bruton doesn’t count because fighting the jam-making Mr Bruton is hardly moral warfare.

So now, at exactly the moment this country must have leadership which will fight against the demands of the EU powers, we have a man who has been demonstrably without a spine for more than 35 years. Biological fact: he isn’t going to grow one now.

Don’t expect the new coalition Government to give him any backbone. Just look at whom these choreographed ‘negotiations’ between Fine Gael and Labour have brought into power again -- Pat Rabbitte, Ruari Quinn, Michael Noonan, and on goes the list. You have to ask yourself the same question about them that you have to ask about Mr Kenny: when in all their decades in Leinster House have these politicians ever shown the kind of independent, radical thinking this country needs now? Never. Party hacks the lot of them.

Every one of them has stuck by the Fine Gael and Labour party lines and ignored the threats to our sovereignty posed by the ever-closer-union – which is to say, ever stronger occupation – by Brussels. Indeed, every member of the new Government has collaborated with this relentless surrender of national sovereignty.

It is this surrender which has brought Ireland to the crisis it now faces. In Government, these men will collude – you can count on it – on the EU piling debt upon our debt with overpriced loans which profit the Germans.

The result will be more anger among the electorate. This last election was about expressing anger towards Fianna Fail. The next one will be about throwing out all these stale old professional political hacks who are now getting back into Government. What is most serious is what will happen then.

There will be a further lurch to the left, as the electorate realise than none of the ‘respectable’ parties will save them from the demands of the EU and the Germans. The left will say the fault lies in ‘capitalism’ and ‘the markets.’ Yet, alas, there has been little capitalism and no market in any of this crisis: capitalism would never have joined the euro and free market principles would have left bond holders with nothing but equity in bust banks. It was EU corporatist governance that has brought us where we are.

But that is what the left will tell the voters, and the voters will go for it. Then the voters will replace the Fine Gael-Labour Government with the kind of high-tax, hard-left political system that was in vogue all those years ago when Enda Kenny first entered the Dail.

Hello again, Comrade Brezhnev. Seems like old times.

02 March 2011 7:44 PM

Clegg, Brussels and Libya: part deux

Well, that was enlightening, in ways the deputy prime minister never intended.

Nick Clegg gave his speech this evening at the British Permanent Representation to the EU. Since the deputy prime minister was due to talk about what should be the European response to events in Libya, I thought the room would be mostly journalists, diplomats and whoever was travelling with Clegg.

Nope. At ten minutes to showtime, the room filled up with Continentals in suits and ties: it seems Clegg's Brussels fan base is made up of EU think-tank types.

So I was across from the director of the Egmont, the think-tank of the (Belgian) Royal Institute for International Relations, which is a long title for something that could be covered as: 80 percent funding from the Belgian foreign ministry to push for ever closer union (in the EU, not Belgium, of course. Belgian doesn't have ever-closer anything, since it hasn't had a government since last summer. A situation of which I thoroughly approve, but that is for another post.)

I was behind a couple of suits from the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), which gets its funding from -- now, wait you're going to love this. The CEPS website announces that it 'obtains its funding from a variety of sources, which helps to guarantee its independence.' And right next to that is a pie chart showing 31 percent of its money comes from running projects funded by the European Commission. There are another couple of slices from other EU institutions. That's what passes for 'independent' in this town.

Also sitting in front of me was Hans Martens, chief executive of another think tank, the European Policy Centre (EPS), which also proclaims its independence...right above the admission it gets money from the EU.

Which explains what followed Clegg's speech. (If you want to know what he said, it was along the lines of 'I would like to very warmly welcome President Barroso's call this morning for a pact for democracy and shared prosperity' and the need for 'a bold new European offer.' So, boilerplate.)

Here comes the enlightening part. As soon Clegg finished his speech, the diplomat with the mic said there would be just 15 minutes for questions, and then immediately handed the mic to Hans Martens, the man from the 'independent' EPS. Martens hadn't even had his hand up. I smelt a rat.

Here is how Think-Tank Martens began: 'I have a question for the UK Deputy Prime Minister, formerly Nick.' At which all the think-tank types around me gave knowing little Continental chuckles, because of course, 'Nick' is One Of Them.

This was the Manchurian Candidate come back to visit his mates at his Old School for the day. Remember: after Clegg worked his five years as a eurocrat in the commission, and after he had his five gold-plated years as a member of the European Parliament, Clegg had a job doing research for -- right, the EPS, whose boss was given the favour of asking the first question.

Later the same boss asked me if I thought the way he had asked the question -- the 'Nick' opening -- had been all right. I assured him I thought it was perfect....and it was, in so many ways.

Barroso, Ashton, Clegg: what Libya really, really doesn't need now

I'm just back from listening to a statement by commission president José Manuel Barroso, on what the European Commission is doing about the crisis in LIbya. The statement was windbaggery, mostly: 'The events unfolding in our southern neighbourhood' -- yes, they really talk like that at the Berlaymont -- 'are a rendezvous with history. Europe will rise to this challenge and support the transformation process.'

Actually, all that seems to have come out yet is a punch-up between Italy's interior minister, Roberto Maroni, and the commissioner for home affairs, Cecilia Malmstrom. Maroni announced this week that the commission would be giving €25m in emergency funds to help Italy deal with the wave of immigrants from North Africa; then Malmstrom let it be known that €25m was the total emergency fund for all the EU member states dealing with the immigrants -- or rather, in the jargon, 'the envelope' of emergency funds.

A lot of excited Italian journalists at the midday commission press briefing wanted to know if Maroni was right, or Malmstrom was right. The spokesman, in three languages, said there had been a misunderstanding. Which meant, the Italian government was suddenly minus the guts of €25m. Before the spokeman had finished his line, a pack of Italians in the press room were on their iPhones ringing Milan or Rome. ('So excitable,' a German reporter next to me said as he nodded at the Italians. 'Just look at them.' Actually, I find national stereotypes living up to what one expects very satisfying.) Let's wait and see if Maroni roars back.

Anyway, back to Barroso. After the windbaggery, he assured us -- though I think 'assured' is the wrong word -- that 'Cathy Ashton,' as the man who insists on being called 'the President' calls the Labour baroness, had briefed the commissioners on Libya. Why did that statement bring to mind only the thought: God help the Libyans.

At 5 pm today, I'll be at a briefing with 'Cathy' and the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, then at 6 o'clock, over to the British permanent representation to the EU for a talk'n'canapés thing for Clegg.

Good grief. Barroso (ex-Maoist), Ashton (ex-CND) and Clegg (current euro-fanatic), all inside eight hours. I get my money the old fashioned way: I earn it.