Tuesday 22 May 2012 Tuesday 22 May 2012 Tuesday 22 May 2012 Monday 21 May 2012 Monday 21 May 2012 Monday 21 May 2012 Monday 21 May 2012 Sunday 20 May 2012 Sunday 20 May 2012
The curse of the occupied field
In its usual self-important way, the Failygraph ponderously announces that "a document leaked toThe Daily Telegraph shows that three proposals in the controversial Beecroft report were removed after being submitted to No10 before it was sent to the Business Department".
The report, "it can be revealed", called for the Government to delay plans to introduce flexible working for parents, to abandon proposals to allow all workers to request flexible working, and to remove regulations surrounding the employment of children.
Well, in this exclusive report we can reveal that the europa.eu website has not leaked to EUReferendum.com the contents of Council Directive 2010/18/EU (above). Despite this, we can now reveal from looking at the website that it was approved in principle by the Council on 2 December 2009 (top) - Mr Brown's administration, I believe.
Under the above directive, we can also reveal that, not only is the UK is obliged to implement new arrangements for parental leave this year, it cannot make any changes to national law on such matters without the express approval of the EU commission.
Similarly, we can exclusively report that the employment of children is also an occupied field, and has been since the promulgation of Directive 94/33/EC of 22 June 1994. Again, we can reveal that this means no changes can be made to national law without the express approval of the EU commission.
As we revealed yesterday, Cameron is therefore severely limited as to what changes he can make to employment law. He is reduced to finding marginal issues, where he can cut back some of the excess, then making a big deal of what he has done, spinning it for all that it is worth.
But, on these issues, he has quite evidently been caught out. Rather than admit he has no power to make changes, we see the clumsy attempt to remove recommendations which might reveal this embarrassing fact.
However, why Cameron (or his staff) should be so concerned remains a mystery. Not anywhere in theFailygraph is there a single mention of the European Union, nor even the slightest hint of where the problem lies.
Richard North 22/05/2012 Getting to the heart of things
Europhile Wolfgang Schäuble seems to hate it, snorting that, "Either he (Sarrazin) writes screaming nonsense out of conviction or his work is an act of contemptible calculation". This is an extremely good start, and you can understand the wrath when you see the thesis.
Sarrazin asserts that the eurozone is holding Germany to ransom over its past aggression, blackmailing it into agreeing to euro bonds or mutualised debt. Germans "are driven by that very German reflex, that we can only finally atone for the Holocaust and World War Two when we have put all our interests and money into European hands", he writes.
What is surprising, though, is that this is at all surprising – as if we were not already aware that "war guilt" is a powerful driver of European political integration. Sarrazin would thus have it that the process of European integration is a piece of "pure ideology" which derives from the fact that Germany started the war.
It is, however, more subtle than simple blackmail. Essentially, the supporters of European integration use the Holocaust in particular and the World War Two in general to illustrate what can happen if Germany is allowed to develop without restraints. Only when Germany is locked in the embrace of "Europe" can the other nations of Europe feel safe.
While this is nothing new, apparently there is a taboo on admitting it openly in Germany. German politicians hate the message and because Sarrazin has broken the taboo they are lining up to condemn him.
It is true that Germans have in the recent past benefited from a weak euro – which has been a boon to exports. But they are now realising that the price of that is to bail out the rest of Europe. War guilt is now the only glue holding the EU together, but it will only go so far. There is a new generation of Germans emerging that has no direct links with the war.
German (europhile) politicians can huff and puff all they like, but the fact remains that the people of Germany are being held to ransom for the sins of their fathers. With Sarrazin coming out into the open and saying so, it cannot be long now before that bubble bursts. And when that happens, the game will be over.
Richard North 22/05/2012 Euro-politics re-emerge
The favoured nostrum at the moment is "Eurobonds", debt issued jointly by eurozone countries, and jointly underwritten by them all – which means, in effect, Germany.
The issue was, according to Reuters raised at the G8 summit by Hollande, and has gathered the support of Italy, Spain, and other Med countries. The EU commission is also very supportive of the idea, as this amounts to a further level of economic integration but, unsurprisingly, Germany is wholly opposed to picking up the tab for the rest of the eurozone.
Ambrose, in typical Failygraph style, turns this into a punch-up, telling us that the eurozone's "Latin Bloc" is in full revolt, calling the shots with Germany isolated.
Merkel's life is not made any easier with Jörg Asmussen - former deputy German finance minister and now German board member at the ECB – calling for a politically integrated eurozone that would split the EU of 27 in two, with the hard core joined in a "banking union, fiscal union, and political union".
In the inner core, this becomes a full political union, financed by a special fund taken from the EU budget and a financial transaction or Tobin tax levied in the eurozone,
Greece, meanwhile, with caretaker premier Panagiotis Pikrammenos at the helm, is looking for waysto square the circle – staying in the eurozone while finding a formula that will encourage growth.
What comes over more generally, though, is that there is no consensus as to the line to take and, far from being top dog, Berlin is under siege from indigent southerners, and very far from being in control.
As this develops, what we are seeing is the 1989 Delors report revisited, a document that puts the commission firmly in the driving seat. The 42 pages are essential reading for any student of this crisis, so much of it relevant to the current situation and being offered as if it was something new.
But, as the struggle for a solution continues, some commentators are going to have to re-write their personal narratives, downgrading their German rhetoric. The will have to demote the federation to the status of yet another victim of a crisis in which nobody is in control and no-one has the first idea of how to resolve.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 22/05/2012 The new global power
One has to be a little careful taking the headlines at face value, but before even reading the piece I was prepared to disagree with his thesis, based as it was on the lurid header which had Merkel dressed up like a character from Wagner's Ring cycle. Ferguson, we were told, asserted that the currency will survive and the euro-crisis will leave Berlin heading a federal Europe.
Before ripping into this, one has to say that some of Ferguson's analysis is spot on. "I think it's worth considering", he says, that the architects of monetary union knew all along it would lead to a crisis and the crisis would lead to a federal solution".
"I'm not sure how far that was articulated, but I think it was implicit", he adds. "In fact you could say it was actually designed to create a crisis".
The thesis, however, is hardly new, expounding as it does the concept of the "beneficial crisis", the term for which I like to think Booker and I coined in our book The Great Deception.
The intention to pursue monetary union was described in a 1969 report as having been set out in Chapter VIII (Monetary policy) of the "Memorandum of the Commission on the Action Programme of the Community for the Second Stage", of 24 October 1962, and in the Commission's publication "Initiative 1964" of 30 September 1964.While it is true that monetary union, if it is to last, needs to be soundly based on economies evolving on compatible lines, with convergent economic policies, it is equally true that closer monetary solidarity enhances the prospects for both such compatibility and such convergence. The interaction of the economic and monetary sides is a powerful factor for greater Community cohesion.
With that, the template was then set up by the Werner Report of 1970, which became the definitive plan for introducing the single currency.
Moreover, current international developments suggest that to delay overlong in giving the Community this greater monetary cohesion might eventually mean that the whole idea of monetary unification lost its point, economic unification was rendered largely irrelevant, and even the Community work already completed might be seriously undermined.
It was exploring the reason why there had been such little progress towards EMU since 1969. In so doing, the group came to the conclusion that there had been three principle causes: unfavourable events, a lack of political will, and insufficient understanding in the past of the meaning of an EMU and the conditions which must be fulfilled if it was to see the light of day.
The unfavourable events had been the international monetary crisis which had shaken the western world since the end of the Sixties, together with the financial crisis brought about by the sharp rise in oil prices in 1973 (triggered by the Yom Kippur War).
Then came the "money quote", which we marked down as an early exhortation to use what was to become a major tool of the project:Like all crises, they could have been the occasion of progress, by provoking a crystallization of latent wills. Great things are almost always done in crises. Those of recent years could have been the occasion for a leap forward.
Being such a Great Historian, Ferguson can't be expected to read the work of grovelling minions like ourselves. Nor can he be expected to refer to original Commission documents which define the very phenomenon about which he is called upon to comment, especially as last year, the Failygraph'sPeter Oborne managed to identify it without such aids.
But what Oborne and the Great Historian have in common is their willingness to put German in pole position. Oborne in July last year told us "the euro crisis will give Germany the empire it's always dreamed of", and now we have Ferguson telling is that the crisis will leave Berlin heading a federal Europe.
These are two peas in a pod, two men with but a single thought. And they are both wrong.
Digressing one moment, we have recently seen a meeting of the G8, with the members photographed sitting round a table with Obama, who was hosting the meeting. Even the numerically challenged might be able to do a quick count and discover that there are ten people sitting round the table. The G8 has become ten.
The two extra figures at the feast – with their backs to the camera - are, of course, José Manuel Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy, respectively presidents of the EU commission and council, there representing the government of the European Union, the organisation with ambitions to become the United States of Europe.
The symbolism should be obvious. The EU has acquired an identity of its own – a seat at the most powerful tables in the world. It is not a vassal of Germany. It is a power in its own right.
Now, if we return to Ferguson, we find him talking about "the architects of monetary union". These are the ones who knew all along that EMU "would lead to a crisis and the crisis would lead to a federal solution". But who does Ferguson think were the architects?
If we follow the Peston narrative, we are led to believe that, after initial failures, the single currency was dreamed up by Köhl and Mitterand, in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the latter demanding it as a price for German reunification.
But what is missing from this narrative are two vitally important names: Alterio Spinelli and Jacques Delors. It was Spinelli, as an MEP, who in 1983 commenced work on a "Draft Treaty Establishing a European Union", completing it in 1984, long before the fall of the Wall. And Article 52 of his draft declared: "The Union shall have concurrent competence for the progressive achievement of full monetary union".
Spinelli's work was to comprise one treaty, but it was Mitterand's advisors who suggested it was split, the first part becoming the Single European Act and the second the Maastricht Treaty. And far from making its first appearance in Maastricht, EMU starred in the Single European Act, which embodied a commitment to the "progressive realisation of economic and monetary union", building on the Hague agreement of 1969.
That it was kept in place was the work of Jacques Delors, who was later to describe the commitment as a "signpost". "It's like the story of Tom Thumb lost in the forest who left white stones so he could be found", he said. "I put in white stones so we could find monetary union again".
The drive for monetary union was then formally re-launched at the Hanover Council in June 1988 and examined further in Madrid in June 1989, informed by the Delors Report, which was published in April if that year. "Economic and monetary union would represent the final result of the process of progressive economic integration in Europe", the Delors committee declared.
As to the architect of the single currency, this is the European Union itself, as a collective. The driver back in the mid-late 1980s was Jacques Delors, the president of the commission, aided and abetted by a former commission official and then MEP, Alterio Spinelli. Not for nothing is the largest office block in Europe - the main building of the EU parliament in Brussels - named after him.
Many people are blinded to this by their focus on the Germans, and their mistaken belief that the integration process is controlled by them.
And that tells you why the EU is working so hard to keep Greece in the euro. Left to themselves, the Germans would be happy to see the Greeks out of it, but finance minister Schäuble is not playing the German game. He is batting for Europe, and the pursuit of a single currency that has been a formal policy objective, unbroken, since 1969.
Fortified by this single currency, which brought the EU a major step closer to full integration - one which was slated to replace the dollar as a reserve currency - the Commission, and with it the Council under the tutelage of Van Rompuy, represent a new global power.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 21/05/2012 Thinking of a better place
That, and the Observer story on the referendum, is being dragged into the daylight, with Cameron – according to the paywalled FT - having already rejected the idea. Actually, it doesn't really matter as no-one would believe him if he did promise a referendum. The man's word is tarnished beyond redemption.
Nevertheless, the rising hostility to the EU is real, which might be why Clegg has rushed into battle inDer Spiegel, trying to defend his precious construct. And in what could well be a co-ordinated counter-attack, we also have Kenneth Clarke in the Failygraph attacking "nationalist" eurosceptic Tories.
Mere plebs don't register on this man's radar though, so he is having a go at MPs who want a referendum on membership of the European Union. These are "right-wing nationalists" who would bring "disaster" to Britain, he says.
However, there may be more than an element of gaming here. Mandelson, hardly a "right wing" creature, wants a referendum. Ian McKenzie, director of the people's pledge also wants one. He believes that the "European cause" would win and "sceptics would lose all purchase on British politics for a generation".
On that basis, Clarke has every reason to welcome a referendum, although if he did, even hard-core eurosceptics might smell a rat. He is more useful opposing the idea, keeping the issue alive and sucking more advocates into the ring. To have Clarke as opposition, in this context, is an asset.
Most likely though, this talk of a referendum is a red herring. At the current speed of events, by the time a decision has been made, the EU will be a very different place. Our part in it may have been decided for us. We would be better off thinking about what sort of place that should become.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 21/05/2012 Quite the best of enemies
One can quite believe that this would be the case, because the interview reveals something of Nick Clegg's mind – not a lot, but enough for us to realise that this is a place we don't want to be.
One starts by having to suffer a "discussion" about whether the UK is going to leave the EU. The idea to Clegg is "ludicrous". We can't return to the 19th century, draw up our drawbridges and say, we don't have anything to do with each other, Germany will not work with the Netherlands, the UK will not work with France.
"We are condemned to work with each other", Clegg says. "Isolation is not the solution".
This is classic europhile – the idea that we can work with our neighbours only through the European Union. Anything else is barbarism – back to the 19th Century. One wonders, therefore, what the Nato summit in Chicago is all about. But Clegg doesn't wonder. To him it is a matter of inevitability, the great mantra of the euroslime - EU or nothing.
But one can see immediately what worries Clegg – the great sins of "populism" and "nationalism". If the eurozone doesn't come up with "a comprehensive vision of its own future", you'll have "a whole range of nationalist, xenophobic and extreme movements increasing across the European Union".
"Frankly", says Clegg, "questions about the British debate on EU membership will just be a small sideshow compared to the rise of political populism".
Go no further. The alternative to the EU is "the rise of political populism". And when you are locked into that mindset there is nowhere else to go. The Failygraph has a bash at trying to translate it, but misses the point – as you would expect.
The Germans have done a better job, revealing for us a two-dimensional creature – one that can only think in stark terms of "EU or else". He can't join the debate because, in his terms, there is no alternative to his way of thinking. Never for one moment does he countenance that the EU is the cause of our current problems. He is not capable of so doing.
For us, therefore, the relationship with Clegg needs to be better defined than the title. To get closer, we need delete: "quite the best of". It is a pity we can't simply delete the thing they call Clegg.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 21/05/2012 Into line with "Europe"
At first sight, this is simply a re-run of proposals announced last November and, on closer inspection, that does seem to be the case.
However, that did not stop the Telegraph talking up the role of Adrian Beecroft, a venture capitalist. To great fanfare, we are told that he has produced a far-reaching report "which calls for a bonfire of regulations that employers say are stifling job creation". This though, is a slender 15-page document, and was drawn up by Beecroft after he was given access to government lawyers.
Somewhat at odds with the claim of being "far-reaching", it only has twenty proposals – not an awful lot when you look at the mountain of legislation covering "employment rights and work organisation". But then, as you will see from the link, that "mountain" of legislation is EU law, which leaves very little room for Beecroft to act, especially after he has been consulting government lawyers.
And when you look as the proposals, you see the games that they have been playing.. The lawyers have been going carefully through the law books comparing UK and EU law and, where the British law is more demanding, they have dropped it back to match the EU requirements.
Thus we see Beecroft recommending an end to a mandatory 90-day consultation period when a company is considering redundancy programmes. Can he do that? Well, the EU law requires only 30 days, so yes he can. And guess what, Mr Beecroft "recommends a 30-day period" – lifting it from November proposals.
Similarly, there is to be a recommendation to end provisions in the Equality Act which make employers liable for claims from employees for "third party harassment" — for example, customers making “sexist” comments to staff in a restaurant. That is not a problem because such a provision is absent from the EU’s otherwise highly damaging equality directive.
Employment law, as we know, is an EU "competence" and, since there is a considerable body of European law, this is an "occupied field", where no changes to national legislation may be made, without the approval of the EU commission.
At its very best, therefore, this little exercise can do nothing more than bring British law closer into line with EU law, where such differences exist. One must give the lawyers credit for finding twenty such, but that does make for a "radical" plan, or anything like a significant reform.
But that is all that is now left to Cameron – finding marginal issues, where he can cut back some of the excess, then making a big deal of hat he has done, spinning it for all that it is worth.
Needless to say, you will not find any reference to the European Union in the newspaper report. To mention it would give the game away, revealing that once again Cameron is trying to con the British people into thinking he is still in control. And so do the papers conspire with the establishment to keep their readers in the dark.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 21/05/2012 Leaving the European Union
It would be useful to know the identity of the author of this piece, so that we could mock him (I assume) by name for a commentary that displays the most extraordinary ignorance of the ways of the European Union. Says this anonymous writer: "Europe can get through this as long as it sees the (eurozone) crisis as an opportunity".
But that sets the tone of the piece, and reminds us of how little we owe to the legacy media for expanding our knowledge of the EU. No serious student is unaware of the doctrine of the "beneficial crisis" and the fact that the "colleagues" devised the euro with this in mind, relying on a crisis to happen along in order to give the political impetus for economic governance.
Dipping into the piece, one sees such golden words of wisdom as: "To make the euro work, Europe needs to think beyond mere monetary union", a statement so staggeringly banal that one struggles to believe that a supposedly respected broadsheet could offer it in a leader.
The slightest research tells you that "Europe" has always thought beyond monetary union – that, as we point out, the single currency has always been a precursor to political union, and an excuse for it. Yet this paper seriously wants us to accept an implied proposition that "Europe" is not already thinking in this terms?
What is really worrying though is the naïvety of this leader writer. A United States of Europe, he so glibly says, would mean Britain: "accepting even more than now, a permanent role in the EU's outer tier. We cannot envisage ever wanting to be part of the euro but there is no reason why we should not continue to enjoy the trade benefits of EU membership".
There, I really start to struggle. For the EU to convert itself into the United States of Europe that has always been its ambition, it would need a new treaty – one that goes far beyond anything on the table, or so far proposed. We are back in European Constitution and the Lisbon treaty territory, revisiting the difficulty the "colleagues" had in getting the treaty through.
Any new treaty of this scale would require an IGC and the active participation of all members. One could not see the option of an intergovernmental treaty here, as the very core of the EU would be under the knife, being surgically remastered.
Thus, we are talking about the full Monte, with Britain equipped with a final veto and a choice of multiple opt-outs. And would it be only Britain in the awkward squad. In such circumstances, does anyone really see the "colleagues" taking the time out from their crisis to undertake the prolonged and tortuous negotiating process?
What the paper is suggesting, therefore, is unrealistic to the point of being impossible. This is not the way to go. Others, with a better understanding of EU dynamics, suggest that the outcome needs to be a smaller EU comprising only those members of the eurozone which manage to survive the coming Armageddon.
For the rest, including the UK, membership of the EEA, alongside Norway and Iceland, would give exactly the same trade benefits that go with EU membership. We do not need to be a member of the EU if that is our only requirement.
What The Sunday Times in effect is saying is that Britain should leave the EU – must leave the EU. That is indeed what would have to happen, even if one suspects the leader-writer did not intend to say as much.
What is encouraging though, it that this is the logical outcome. One very small problem remains though. On what grounds does the paper believe that the peoples of the countries currently in the eurozone actually want to be in a United States of Europe? Has anyone asked them?
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 20/05/2012 Danger time
This may have something to do with the story run by The Independent on Sunday , telling us: "Cameron hit by big rise in hostility to Europe". It suggests that "almost one in three people who voted Conservative at the last election are ready to back the UK Independence Party, or have switched already".
This is according to a ComRes/IoS poll, which reveals "deep dissatisfaction with the mainstream parties", with 37 percent of their supporters seriously considering switching to smaller parties.
These newspapers really can't help themselves, this one resorting to the usual "mainstream" cliché, failing to note that the established political parties are now the minority. But that this is the paper that is reporting that the G8 "world leaders" have issued a "strong" message calling for stimulus to encourage growth.
Be that as it may, The Observer is telling us that the Miliban is stressing that an EU referendum would not in any way amount to a watering down of their commitment to the EU. On the contrary, they say, "it would be an opportunity to argue the positive case for membership during a national campaign – one that would also help the party build alliances with pro-EU elements of the business community".
So there we have it – the Labour Taliban (aka Miliban) see in the EU issue a Tory weakness and are thereby playing with the idea of a referendum, as a means of exploiting it. If the momentum builds, we end up with an in/out referendum, where all three of the establishment parties campaign for our continued membership, backed by groupescules such as Open Europe, and the bulk of the corporate business community.
Looking at the people's furniture polish campaign, this is exactly what they want – an in/out referendum where the "outers" lose, setting back the euroscepctic cause for a generation. The EU will collapse before there is another opportunity for a plebiscite.
Earlier, we remarked that to fight on the ground chosen by your enemies is tactical suicide, yet we continue to cede that ground, underwriting the eurosceptic tendency to pick a losing strategy and stick with it.
Interestingly, though, Merkel's suggestion that the Greeks should hold a referendum on the euro seem to have backfired, driving wavering voters back into the arms of the anti-bailout Syriza party. Perhaps there is an instinctive understanding that the only time the euro-élites support a referendum is when they believe it will come out in their favour, or they can manipulate the result (or both).
Meanwhile, the preposterous Osborne peeps from behind the Sunday Times paywall to tell us that Britain faces "enormous risks" from chaos in the eurozone, while admitting that his administration is preparing from the crisis to deepen. Osborne, we are told, has issued an urgent plea to the leaders of France and Germany to find an answer. "We need the eurozone to solve its problems", he says.
If this statement of the bleedin' obvious is the best he can offer, then we look set to have the Miliban in office after the next general election, in part bolstered by a referendum promise which catches the Tories on the back foot.
This is danger time – madness is taking over.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 20/05/2012
Tuesday, 22 May 2012
Cameron seems to be getting himself in an awful mess over the "controversial" Beecroft report, withaccusations flying that he is suppressing key recommendations warning that the "coalition's family-friendly policies would undermine Britain's economic recovery".
We can also exclusively reveal that we have looked at lots and lots of websites and, from documents seen by EUReferendum.com on those websites, we can reveal that employment law is an EU competence. Furthermore, we can reveal that, with this directive, parental leave (which includes provisions for flexible working) becomes an occupied field.
These dim little hacks simply can't do "Europe". Their poor little brains can't cope with the idea that their darling boy-child is no longer in charge. The embarrassment is of our national press, which is no longer capable of reporting the news or telling us what is going on.
"Controversial" is a label in which former German central banker Thilo Sarrazin rejoices. He does extremely well out of it selling books – and he has another, launched today called "Europe doesn't need the euro".
For instance, Peer Steinbrück, former Social Democrat finance minister, accuses him of overlooking the many advantages that the euro had brought to Germany. He dismisses the Holocaust claims as "historical amnesia", and the book as a piece of "banal economic analysis". "Sarrazin can make up all the bullshit he likes", he declares.
With the "informal" Spring European Council scheduled for this week – a meeting when, traditionally, economic affairs are discussed – the euro is entering sharply political territory, while the "colleagues" are struggling to put a lid on a crisis which is spiralling out of control.
The Six formally agreed at a conference in The Hague on 2 December 1969 to the creation of an Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The use of monetary "solidarity" to secure "convergence" with economic policies (and thus political integration), was set out in a Commission Memorandum of 4 March 1970. It stated:
The need to use the "beneficial crisis" dynamic, however, came later, but it was explicitly stated as a requirement to advance the project. We identified it in our book (p.225), citing the so-called Marjolin Report of March 1975, produced by a group formally entitled the "Study Group on Economic and Monetary Union 1980".
These profound disturbances, said the Marjolin Group, had not been foreseen when the decision to create a. European EMU had been taken. They had not been foreseeable, at least as regards the form which they had taken and the moment at which they had occurred.
Putting the timeline together, the Berlin Wall was not first breached until 9 November, by which time the plans for the Single Currency were already in place. The Peston scenario is fiction. German reunification became simply another beneficial crisis to help the single currency on its way.
This architect is the EU that has the ambition to become the United States of Europe. If it achieves its ambition, it will be headed not by Germany but the European Commission, currently the embryonic federal government.
For sure, the German state is the most powerful within the EU, and has a great deal of influence. But it does not run the EU. It does not run the single currency. Neither does France. The two countries together are the "motor of integration" but the beneficiary of their work is the increasingly powerful Commission, now teamed with a co-operative Council.
But with the currency under pressure, they, not Germany, are the ones fighting for survival, and they are the ones to watch. If it survives, the "one nation" called the United States of Europe will be run from Brussels, not Berlin.
In an edition, adopting for its title a subtle play on words based on the French film title Quite the best of friends, Der Spiegel today interviews Nick Clegg – presumably because no one else can be bothered.
David Cameron is to back a radical plan to rip up employment red tape to help deliver growth, we were informed yesterday, the story making the front-page lead of one of the Sunday newspapers.
The Westminster bubble continues to play with the idea of an EU referendum, witness The Observerspeculating that the Miliban might be tempted to consider one if it wins the next election.
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