Saturday 25 June 2011


Fear is turning to anger, but the EU bureaucrats will still screw us writes Charles Moore, adding that, as an outsider, Britain has little chance to alter this crisis which "now threatens political order". So, he observes, the question of what Britain should want in all of this is a difficult one.

But, are we alone in thinking that the great man's tone is softening. In this piece, the self-proclaimed eurosceptic says that the way the euro was conceived, written and performed has been dreadful, "but it does not automatically follow that we should wish for its collapse".

Then, for a man who has consistently opposed the euro, he tells us that, "There is some logic in the existence of a common currency for large parts of mostly northern Europe", adding: "There is misery if it all falls apart".

Now look was he was writing almost exactly a year ago (18 June 2010, to be precise), when Cameron was also at the European Council in Brussels. "The euro's inevitable failure will be horrendous for all of us", he told us, the single currency is a disaster, but the cost of its life support will devastate Europe's economies.

"Again and again in politics, great schemes don't work – Soviet Communism, for example, and now the euro". But bad political schemes are usually given up "only when they have been tested literally to destruction". It would be much better for Europe if the euro had never happened, and I long for it somehow to fade away, but the process of destruction will be horrendous, and it is only just beginning, he concluded.

Now wander back to 20 October 2007 and we are told: "Brussels dictatorship will face day of reckoning". The European project, he wrote, now resembles the state of the eastern European Communists after 1968, when party members gave up believing in their doctrine and just settled for comfortable jobs. They shored up their power and ignored their unpopularity.

After 20 years, it all collapsed, because people started to take down the Berlin Wall, and no one quite dared stop them, he reminded us, venturing that the EU is not such a sharp oppression as was Soviet Communism, but it is similar in this respect - it tries wherever possible to avoid the democratic judgment of the people it rules. When that judgment does come, therefore, it will be merciless.

And so to 4 June 2005 when Moore writes about the German magazine Stern advising readers to check their euro banknotes. The notes issued in Germany, it explained, begin their serial numbers with "X"; those issued in Italy begin with "S". Hold on to the former, was the suggestion, and get rid of the latter while you can.

Stern's X-factor advice was based on the idea that the euro zone might break up, wrote Moore, now adding: "I do not know whether the euro zone will break up (though I wouldn't mind taking a small bet that it has less than 18 months to go in its present form), but Stern's advice interests me for the same reason as the results of the Dutch and French referendums".

They are, he said, "all symptoms of that exciting moment in politics when reality starts to intrude upon the lives of statesmen". This is part of the fun of following politics: the relation to reality is generally delayed, but is always there in the end.

Unreal schemes often appear and even dominate for a time - fascism, Communism, the League of Nations are examples. But the truth eventually finds them out. He then concludes:
One expects most of the European political leaders to go on pretending that everything will be all right. They have lived for years on the metaphor that the EU is like a bicycle that must not stop moving, and now they may die by it, peddling ever more frantically and absurdly to avoid falling off, like a troupe of circus clowns. They may even succeed for a surprisingly long time.
In that last observation, he is absolutely right. Six years ago, we were talking about the demise of the euro, with Moore putting its end by December 2007. But here we are, still talking about the demise of the euro.

Then, as now, we willed it to happen, as one way of seeing the end of the "Brussels dictatorship". But, now the collapse is nearly upon us, Moore tells us "it does not automatically follow that we should wish for its collapse". Has he changed his stance and, if so, is this reality biting, as he confronts the enormity of the potential consequences?

Or is there something else going on here, that I have missed?

COMMENT THREAD


The poor little darling Cameron, in Brussels, is reported to be "appalled" on seeing a glossy 16-page brochure advertising Herman Van Rompuy's new £280 million HQ.

The Guardian steps up to the plate to tell us that the Darling Boy seized on an opportunity to voice "immense frustration" at the lavish spending of the Brussels élite after being handed a glossy brochure promoting the European council's soon to be finished €300m (£270m) headquarters.

The brochure was distributed to EU leaders as they sat down to dinner at a Brussels summit on Thursday evening, with Europe facing one of the gravest crises in memory amid predictions of the breakdown of Greece and the potential death of the euro single currency.

Well, you can imagine our "immense frustration", as we ran the story on 19 September 2009 (pictured above - with a rather appropriate headline), on the back of a story by Bruno Waterfield. If Cameron had been on top of his game, he would have known about it years ago, rather than being "appalled" now, when it is far too late to do anything.

What this does, though, is demonstrate yet again how ignorant our masters really are. I've remarked before on how we tend to think of them as "all-knowing", but the fact of the matter is that, on a whole raft of issues, they know considerably less than you could possibly imagine.

But it is only thus imbued with the most profound ignorance that anyone could possibly be in favour of Britain's continued membership of the EU ... which tells you a great deal about this ignorant boy.

COMMENT THREAD


The Boy may be enjoying the media spotlight in Brussels today, but behind the scenes – according to Hürriyet Daily News, all is not well with the press corps. Brussels is falling out of fashion and the number of foreign journalists in the city has declined by 25 percent in just one year, from 1,200 to about 900.

There are two reasons given for this "escape from Brussels" - the diminishing role of the EU in international politics, as reflected in the recent Arab spring, and the debt crisis that continues to ravage the eurozone, forcing many European media companies to cut costs.

"Most mainstream media organizations do not have foreign correspondents in Brussels anymore", said Marc Gruger, the director of European Federation of Journalists. Media institutions in Germany, France and the Netherlands have already cut the number of reporters in Brussels significantly, in part deterred by the costs.

Employers have to pay monthly nearly €4,000 per reporter, in addition to renting an apartment in central Brussels. The local tax system obliged companies based abroad to pay Belgium for their reporters does not help, either. This tax is around half of the €4,000 euros.

However, it is Demir Murat Seyrek, a managing partner of Brussels-based Global Communications, who put his finger on an interesting trend which has become all too evident. "Copy-paste journalism has paved the way for the press corps to leave the city, he says, adding that: "Many foreign reporters rely on press releases from EU institutions, with not much added value in terms of journalism".

So there is the guilty secret – not that it is much of a secret, but it is one that allows TM News, a major Italian news agency, to employ only one journalist instead of the previous four in Brussels.

The survivor, Lorenzo Consoli, also a former president of the International Press Association, says that many editors think there is "no use in being in Brussels anymore. The EU seems weak and slow in decision-making most of the time". Consoli cites the Libya crisis, charging that Brussels was "completely non-existent", except for humanitarian support.

"Journalists have given up [on Brussels] due to fruitless long discussions and meetings. The lack of leadership and hesitations … has resulted in a decline in interest toward the EU - not only among journalists, but for everyone", Consoli concludes.

Jean Lemaitre, director of the Brussels-based Institut des Hautes Etudes des Communications Sociales, reminds us that many reporters from Eastern Europe came to Brussels to cover what was going on in the EU after enlargement in 2004.

"People in those countries were full of hope after accession. Nowadays, after the economic crisis, a kind of disenchantment has replaced euphoria. This disenchantment was clearly visible when many Brussels-based journalists went back home", he said.

That, of course, leaves them with the situation with which we are increasingly familiar, where we have long been used to a London-centric, self-obsessed media, concerned mainly with trivia, personalities and the doings of the slebs, while our supreme government continues to run our affairs unchallenged.

COMMENT THREAD