Stand in line – Spain will have to take its turn in the sympathy stakes Monday 28 May 2012  Bad though the news is, I think Spain is going to have to stand in line in the sympathy stakes. In fact, it is going to struggle to find any. From a lot of different inputs, it is evident that politics – in this country and elsewhere – is going AWOL. People have had enough and they are switching off in droves. It's not that people don't care - they do. Nor is it the combination of frustration and helplessness that prevents people reacting. Reality is a hard place to be and it gets harder by the day. So people retreat. They have to. You can understand why people do it. It is not an irrational choice. But it is still a dangerous thing to do. You don't win by retreating. Richard North 28/05/2012 |
Dominic finally gets it - but it's a beneficial crisis, not benign. Sunday 27 May 2012 I've been hammering the theme of European history of late, and in particular the story of political integration. My reason, as always, is that the European Union is a creature of its history. Without a grasp of where it has come from, it is near impossible to understand where it is going.  We are somewhat helped in that task today by Dominic Lawson writing in the paywalled Sunday Times, who recalls the words of daddy written in the same newspaper on 22 November 1970, in the wake of the Werner Report. Nigel Lawson wrote:A national currency lies at the very heart of national sovereignty. A common currency is something that can only properly follow political union: it cannot precede it. It is significant that whereas the Zollvereign, or customs union, paved the way to the German federation a century ago, it was only after Prussia and Bismarck had achieved a political union, with blood and iron, that a common German currency could be born.In 1989 he was chancellor in Thatcher's government and on 25 January was addressing the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London about another report on monetary union, the Delors report. Said our Nige this time: With a single European monetary policy there would need to be central control over the size of budget deficits and, particularly, over their financing. New European institutions would be required, to determine overall Community fiscal policy and agree the distribution of deficits between individual Member States.These are not technical issues, he said: The setting up of a European Central Bank or a new European institution to determine Community fiscal policies go to the very heart of nationhood. What organisation would really be the government? It is clear that Economic and Monetary Union implies nothing less than European government - albeit a federal one - and political union: the United States of Europe. That is simply not on the agenda now, nor will it be for the foreseeable future.All that is fair enough, but it was on the agenda, coming up in the Maastricht treaty negotiations, from which John Major was to secure an opt-out. Son Dominic takes up the story. He writes: Delors, a highly intelligent man, understood the logic. But, like the other Francophone architects of a European superstate, he knew the peoples of the would-be subsidiary territories would not vote for such a wholesale dissolution of national sovereignty.Dominic continues: So the amazingly risky push towards monetary union, defying both history and economics, had two points in its favour as far as its supporters were concerned. First, the existence of European legal tender would make people feel more "European" and therefore softened up for the real objective; second, if the profound internal contradictions of a currency with neither a government nor a fiscal union because manifest, then the only "solution" would be a move towards the United States of Europe, with Brussels as Washington DC.So there we have it, the archetypal "beneficial crisis" – and the point at which Dominic loses touch with reality. "This is what Delors meant when he spoke of 'benign crisis'", he adds. Of course, Delors never spoke of a "benign crisis". This is a Lawson invention. Delors would never have said that, and if he had ever been minded to, he would not have used that phrase. In fact, until it was used by Edmund Conway in the Failygraph on 1 March 2010 – twenty years after the Delors report - it barely existed. Its next significant outing was the following year, used by one of young Lawson's financial services mates, Anthony Harrington of Qfinance. On his website, we writes: At the birth of the euro it was plain to all the major players that while there was sufficient will and agreement among the European Community to move to a single currency, there was no such good will or agreement for any move to a single, pan-European government. Individual politicians might dream the dream, but there was no way that any of them were going to get the majority of their countrymen to vote France or Germany or, indeed, any other member state out of existence in favour of a new pan-European government.But Ambrose Evans-Pritchard had been there long before him, in 2004 and again in 2008, both times referring to the "beneficial crisis". In the latter piece he writes: We forget now that the euro was launched for entirely political reasons by Mitterrand, Kohl, and Delors against fierce objections from the German Bundesbank and the European Commission's own economists. The experts warned that the eurozone was not an "optimal currency area" (OCA), and would necessarily become deformed over time. The politicians refused to listen.Then on 1 November 2011, under the heading "Revenge of the Sovereign Nation", Ambrose tells another version of the story: Certain architects of EMU calculated that the single currency would itself become the catalyst for a quantum leap in integration that could not be achieved otherwise.So, typically of the "above-the-liner", the Great Dominic gets to use the wrong phraseology - a sort of financial "LOL". He can't even begin to acknowledge that the phenomenon he is so ineptly trying to describe has been properly labelled for years. And he should have known. He was editor on The Sunday Telegraph when Booker and I were beginning to understand what was going on, coining the phrase as early as 2001 – the first time you will find a reference to it in Google. But, having had it explained to him so early, and so many times, the Great Dominic finally gets the point - although not well enough to avoid sticking the wrong label on it. "Well, now the eurozone has been impaled on the predictable and predicted crisis caused by the different national economies within a single currency", he writes. Clever boy Dominic. Its taken you more than ten years, but well done anyway. But next time, try to get it right and call it a "beneficial crisis". You will find it in the paper you used to edit. Richard North 27/05/2012 |
So it unravels - the death trains will keep rolling Sunday 27 May 2012  Green campaigners are also spitting with rage at what they see as subsidies for nuclear power in the proposed energy bill, the government's support for the industry amounting to another kick in the teeth for the greens. Now, another Holy Grail seems to be in the process of being ditched overboard - the much-touted carbon capture and storage (CCS), otherwise known as the back-door plan to ban coal-fired electricity generation. Activists are complaining that energy secretary Ed Davey's energy bill has left a "whopping loophole" in the CCS plan, which will permit coal-fired power stations to be built without permanent curbs on emissions, as long as they provide a trial CCS system. Within the bill, there is an Emissions Performance Standard (EPS) for new plants, known as the "carbon cap", but the Department of Energy and Climate Change has now admitted that it won't apply to new coal-fired power stations fitted for CCS. Thus, if the largely untested and expensive CCS technology is tried and fails, the power stations can continue operating. Joss Garman, a senior campaigner for the anti-nuclear Greenpeace, is not a happy bunny. Ending the era of "dirty coal" had been a "flagship pledge" from both parties in the coalition, he claims, and his now demanding that Cameron and Clegg step in and "put right this mess of a policy". Mess it is, and the idea that electricity suppliers should have to pay a sort of Dangeld in the form of buying up a dummy plant to appease the Great God Gaia would be thought utterly bizarre in saner times. But as long as DECC can keep repeating the mantras, that it is "confident CCS will work" and "in the long run could remove a significant amount of the UK's CO2 emissions created by energy generation", the dummies provide a sufficient alibi for the death trains to keep rolling and the lights (some of them) switched on. Reality is at last intruding into energy policy, even if the price is unnecessarily high. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 27/05/2012 |
G8-plus-two: eight becomes ten Sunday 27 May 2012  Readers of the print version of the Sunday Telegraph (unlike the website, and corrected here - above) will be treated to the wrong photograph – one of those bizarre editorial decisions, for which there is no rational explanation. However, the picture with the main item in Booker's column this week is more than usually important. This was of the dinner hosted by President Obama for the leaders of the G8. It is not so much illustrating the article as inspiring it. When it appeared in EU Referendum, Booker thought it the most haunting picture of the week, reminiscent of the atmospheric "Nighthawks" painting by Edward Hopper. The sight of what were supposedly the world’s most powerful men (and woman) sitting round that table as forlornly as the customers in Hopper's bar inevitably prompted the thought, why were there not eight but 10 of them? The additional two spectres at the feast, of course, were presidents Jose Manuel Barroso and Herman van Rompuy, those two unelected senior offificials of the EU. In a sense, says Booker, this was appropriate, because the item topping the G8 agenda was the need to sort out the shambles of the euro – and there was nothing these great men, and woman, could do to solve this crisis. The only certain thing that can be said about it is that it is insoluble. The EU cannot afford to allow bankrupt Greece to leave a project that was designed as the supreme symbol of the EU's true agenda, the welding of Europe into a single state. And yet, not all the money in Europe will prevent Greece being forced out of the euro, for reasons predicted long before the currency was launched. At that point, the entire mess will unravel still further, threatening a financial and political storm far greater than anything we have seen so far. This poignant scene does remind us, however, that the EU is already a government in its own right – as was also made clear last week by a rather more parochial drama unfolding here at home. This was the excitement which erupted over the supposed emasculation, by Downing Street, of a report on reforms to our employment law by Adrian Beecroft. When it was revealed that three of his recommendations – on parental leave, flexible working hours and the employment of children – had been removed, this set off hysteria. Ed Miliband claimed that it again showed the Tories to be "the nasty party". Beecroft called Vince Cable "a socialist". Tory MPs protested that this showed David Cameron once again kow-towing to Nick Clegg. But what got completely missed from all this froth was the real reason for the excisions from the report. This was that employment law is no longer something that can be decided by the British Government, because it is a "competence" of our real government in Brussels. Rules relating to parental leave and flexible working hours are governed by EU law, including directive 2010/18/EU, while the power to make law on employment of children was taken over by directive 94/33/EC as long ago as 1994. Employment law, like so much else, is now part of the Brussels "occupied field", meaning that the British government is powerless to do anything except in accord with the laws of our higher level of government. How long will it be before we grasp the real nature of how our country is now governed? It is 20 years since John Major launched his flagship "deregulation" policy (partly in response to articles I had written about the proliferation of damaging regulations largely arising from EU directives). Only at the end of the passage of his pitiful little Deregulation Bill through Parliament did a minister lamely admit that the reason for its inadequacy was that it had not been able to address any regulations originating from Brussels. Year after year since then, we have seen the British Chambers of Commerce and others listing all the new regulations that are most costly and damaging to British businesses – on working time, data protection and heaven knows what else. Because almost all of these emanate from the EU, we are powerless to change them. The extent to which we are ruled by our collective "super-government" in Brussels may be immensely boring and complicated to grasp. It may be much more entertaining to cover British politics as if it was still just a soap-opera ding-dong between our politicians here at home. But don't we often wonder why our politicians these days seem so sadly diminished, and why voters are walking away from the electoral process because it seems so irrelevant? It is, Booker concludes, because our real government is sitting elsewhere, as around that dinner table in Washington – incapable of sorting out a catastrophic crisis which their megalomaniac project has, with a terrible inevitability, brought on itself. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 27/05/2012 |
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