Sunday 10 June 2012 Sunday 10 June 2012 Sunday 10 June 2012 Saturday 9 June 2012 Saturday 9 June 2012
The polls: no escape for Cameron
The gap between Labour and the Conservatives is now wider than at any time since December 2002 when former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith faced the on-going popularity of a pre-Gulf war Tony Blair, a claim that is elsewhere dismissed as "delusional".
That apart, some 44 percent of those polled wanted an EU Referendum Bill to be introduced in this parliament, exactly double the number opposed (22 percent), with 34 percent don't knows.
In this poll, UKIP is taking nine percent, on par with the Lib-Dims and, if this is tied in with the eurocrisis and the next move seems obvious. An EU referendum is perhaps one of the most certain and swift ways the Tories could recover lost ground – so we must expect a move in that direction.
However, such a move is easily countered by Labour, which can simply make its own promise – replicating the situation as it was in 1997 with both parties promising a referendum on the euro.
The other problem is the speed of events. The "colleagues" are caught in a death spiral and since "more Europe" is now their only play, they will be wanting to push ahead with further integration at flank speed.
If the UK as a result suddenly finds itself relegated to the "second division", in a fundamentally altered European Union, the pressure for a referendum will be irresistible. It does not seem possible that either party will be able to hold out until after the general election.
Wittering from Witney has been looking at the issues here, but as the pace quickens, the calculus changes with it. Increasingly, "Europe" is coming to dominate the political agenda, and there is no escape for Cameron.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 10/06/2012 Euro: an existential crisis
The man is anxious to tell us that "we will not prop up Europe's banks" but the statement is disingenuous. If the support for European banks calls on the IMF, as indeed will the current bailout of the Spanish system with a starting figure of €100 billion, then UK money will be involved.
Osborne also tells us that further "pooling of sovereignty" must be limited to the countries of the eurozone and even here he manages to offend. One does not "pool" sovereignty, any more than one pools virginity. One surrenders it.
Nevertheless, he acknowledges that "we are approaching a moment of truth for the eurozone", which the paper's leader considers an understatement. The "moment of truth", it says, is actually a very profound existential crisis.
You would not get that impression from Welt though. Its first four items deal not with the euro, but the "Euros", a tedious football series that is doing the rounds, currently serving as the duty distraction and playing havoc with Google searches. Germany has gone football mad.
As a measure of the longevity of the real crisis, the paper has taken to referring to it as the "Euro-crash" without further explanation.
But the focus is not Spain and the bailout-in-progress, but Greece. German industry, it appears, is spending a fortune on lawyers and consultants in preparation for the Greek euro-exit, which is now taken as a given, following the elections on 17 June.
German companies are also clearing out of Greece, and are seeking to minimise their risks in Spain and Italy. It is high time that Maximilian thinks of Rome, a partner at Gleiss Lutz says, as surplus cash is pulled from these countries.
All of this is perhaps more significant than all the talk and the market hyperventilation. The politicians and financiers have lost control. Industry is voting with its feet, creating a death spiral from which there can be no recovery. It really is now only a matter of time.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 10/06/2012 Booker: the cloud that darkened the reign
Then, in the wake of my piece, Booker notes an omission amid the endless repetitions of how the celebrations made us "proud to be British", and how "we still do pageantry better than anyone else", and how much we admire everything the Queen has stood for.
This omission was almost entirely was any reference to the most far-reaching of all the changes to the UK's status in the world during her reign – everything that has followed from that day in 1973 when we became part of the new political entity then taking shape in Europe.
Even today, Booker says, most people are still only dimly aware of just how fateful was that watershed moment in our nation's history. Because it was so carefully hidden from us, the British never really took on board the importance of that condition of our entry into Europe that we must turn our back on the Commonwealth.
As we lustily sang last weekend those words in the second verse of the national anthem "may she defend our laws", not a few will have wryly mused on how those laws are no longer made "by the Queen in Parliament" but by that vast, amorphous, bureaucratic behemoth centred in Brussels, presided over by those two dim little nonentities, Presidents Barroso and Van Rompuy.
In fact, all this might bring home to us one of the cleverest of the strategems by which the "European project" has been gradually assembled over the decades: the deliberate way in which each of the once-proud independent nations making it up has been allowed to retain all those institutions which once symbolised its national identity.
Each country still has its head of state living in a grand building, its parliament, its law courts, its armed forces in national uniforms. The outward signs and symbols of nationhood are still in place. But the power that gave rise to them has been hollowed out from within, so all that is left is a reassuring facade, to deceive people into thinking that not so much has changed after all.
The reality of that great spectacle last weekend is that it was just an outward show, a Potemkin village, giving us the illusion that we are still a proud and historic nation, still able to hold our heads up high with an unqualified sense of patriotism, still able to govern ourselves under a splendid and dignified monarch. Indeed, the Queen may deserve admiration for the way she has carried herself for 60 years. But under the Treaty of Maastricht, she became, like the rest of her subjects, just another "citizen of the European Union".
And so says Booker, as news from the eurozone daily reminds us, when Edward Heath and our Parliament took that solemn decision 40 years ago, they allowed us, not to be absorbed into a genuinely living, loved and inspiring entity, but to be shackled to what is becoming, ever more obviously, no more than a decaying corpse.
Richard North 10/06/2012 Taliban kill French troops on eve of poll
Given the Taliban capabilities and media awareness, it would be unwise to assume that this attack was a coincidence. With the French parliamentary election tomorrow, this could well be a message delivered to Hollande and the French people.
That is certainly the view of L'Express, which reported earlier that the bombing "sounds like a warning to France". The timing of this new suicide bombing on the eve of the first round of legislative elections in France, it said, puts pressure on Paris.
On his visit to Afghanistan last month, the new French president announced plans to recall French combat troops by the end of 2012, a year earlier than initially planned, and two years before NATO allies. Then Hollande explained: "It's a sovereign decision. Only France can decide what France does".
Now there can be turning back. On the eve of the poll, where six ministers are not certain to retain their posts, Hollande has made a television statement stating: "What happened does not change, does not accelerate nor slow the intention to withdraw".
Whether this will affect the outcome of tomorrow's election is impossible to say, but a weaker Hollande, in hock to the Left, will be a different president to one who holds a majority of his own MPs in parliament.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 09/06/2012 Charles Moore: a slow learner on the euro
To that extent, Charles Moore in today's Failygraph is a small part of the story and has to be dealt with, not for the perspicacity of his analysis but because, as a member of the Tory establishment, he both reflects its opinion and shapes it.
Mr Moore tells us that, in the course of last year, he noticed for the first time that ministers, speaking privately, began to say that the euro was – their exact word – "doomed".
This, he says, is now the dominant view in government – a small piece of intelligence that is worth knowing, even if it is of very little importance. Ministers who form part of Mr Moore's circle of acquaintances do not make the weather.
Most ministers do not mind, we are told. Some even rejoice. So the logic, since Britain is outside the zone, is to do what we can (which is not very much) to help the life of the euro draw peacefully to its close.
Despite this, Mr Moore tells us that ministers do not dare do this. They are fearful of that dreadful moment, probably starting with Spain, when deposits flee the banks, and the knock-on effects cripple France and wound Germany and ourselves. Thus, they clamour for an emergency rescue.
Charles, though, hardly does his readers a favour when he extrapolates from this, claiming the "strange spectacle" of British ministers saying almost opposite things, sometimes on the very same day.
An example, he asserts, is Cameron last Thursday declaring that the idea of European political union is "nonsense" while urging Germany to lead the eurozone into a fiscal union and a banking union, which would be a political union in all but name.
Actually, Cameron didn't do this – Moore has misread it, no doubt misled by the lurid headlines in hisown newspaper. The Boy's "nonsense" comment was made during a press conference after the meeting with the German chancellor and was confined to Mrs Merkel's suggestion that the political union she is endorsing should have Europe-wide political parties (and an elected president).
"The idea we're going to have genuinely European-wide parties when countries have so many institutions, traditions and thoughts is unrealistic," he said. "If you think you can just establish a European Parliament and a flag and everyone will be loyal to it, that's nonsense".
Because of this misperception, Moore goes on further to assert that "our leaders demand that others do what they proudly boast we would not dream of doing", adding: "No wonder Angela Merkel looks a bit sour".
This over-interpretation of Merkel's expressions (and the misuse of photographs to support claims of mood or attitude) is becoming a background theme of the English media. The truth is, though, that relations between Merkel and Cameron last week appeared cordial, and the body language on both sides was positive.
Angela said that the eurozone (and in particular Germany) needed to progress to full fiscal and political union, and would do so even if all members of the EU were not enthusiastic about joining – thus creating a "two-speed" Europe. Young David then said that was quite alright. He understood perfectly, and didn't want to join anyway. He would stay on the outside.
From thereon, one loses patience with Mr Charles, especially as he believes the best recent analysis comes from a great believer in the European project, "the Henry Kissinger of the money markets", George Soros.
We are thus regaled with the views of the "great believer" and there will be some readers who hang onto his every world – and even some of his ministerial friends will be nodding sagely as they read them. For the rest of humanity, though, Soros is an irrelevance, and seen as such in les couloirs. He is yesterday's parasite.
Fortunately, this brings us near to the completion of Moore's dissertation – one which has a certain resonance and will be welcomed widely. In response to the efforts to save the euro, he writes, we can insist that this is a parting of the ways.
The most likely eventual result, Moore believes, is some sort of euro in a much smaller, fiscally united zone, centred on Germany, with France agonising about whether it can fit inside. Beyond it will be a wider ring, including ourselves, of non-euro countries no longer agonising at all.
His nostrum is to be "part of a loose association of more than 30 countries called, say, the European Community", but out of any Union. We would, he says, be unconstrained by the institutions and rules – the court, the parliament, the Common Agricultural Policy, the arrest warrant etc – which that Union imposed upon itself.
Whether he realises it or not, Moore is suggesting that we leave the EU to join EFTA and through that to join the EEA. Asking how we could negotiate this, he says the government would have to proceed on the basis of a promise that whatever it ended up with would be put to the British people in a referendum.
That, then, is what it comes down to. Moore is arguing for a referendum of sorts, but can't quite bring himself to call it an in/out contest. And that done, he closes with the obligatory dig at the Germans, citing Soros as warning that the new, creditor-dominated Europe would become a "German empire with the periphery as the hinterland".
This yet another man who cannot come to terms with the growing power of Brussels, or get to grips with nature of the European Union. But then he never could. Instead, to flatter his readers, he asks: "Didn't a certain female politician warn of something along these lines nearly 25 years ago, and wasn't she branded xenophobic for her pains?"
To his unanswered question, his final assertion is that: "An entire generation is being made to pay for our continent's slow learners". If it must be put that way, though, I should put it differently: an entire generation is being made to pay for a generation of slow Tories. Moore is one of them. It has taken him a generation to get to where we have been for decades.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 09/06/2012
Sunday, 10 June 2012
Ed Miliband's party, we are told, now stands 14 points clear of the Tories, putting it on course for an outright majority in a general election.
It was not entirely out of choice that I managed to avoid almost completely the BBC coverage of the Jubilee - I was somewhat busy with the eurocrisis. But, on reading Booker's account of some of the errors, I am sincerely glad that I did.
Four French troops have been killed by a Taliban burqa bomber, with five others wounded in an attack on a convoy of NATO-led troops in eastern Afghanistan. Three of the injured were in a critical condition after the attack in Kapisa province, where most of France's 3,500 soldiers are stationed.
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