Budget crisis: "EU not credible"
Friday 16 November 2012
 This was a compromise draft multi-annual budget, "aiming to mollify Britain which wants spending cuts but risking angering France by reducing farm subsidies". The draft would reduce the roughly 1 trillion euro budget for 2014-2020 proposed by the European Commission by about €80 billion euros, ready for the discussions on 22-23 November. At the time, we were told that the proposal safeguarded the British rebate, which predictable meant that the French would reject it – which it did. Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French prime minister, objected to deep cuts to agriculture spending, and also "expressed displeasure" with proposed reductions in cohesion funds. Ayrault, however, pledged that France would "continue to work in a constructive manner to find an overall accord", a normally meaningless phrase which quickly acquired the meaning: "France to shaft Britain". Soon enough, we heard diverse reports, culminating in the loss-making Guardian telling us that this draft budget also shaved around €1 billion a year off the British rebate and cutting the overall seven-year budget to about €950 billion. Thus, with apparent disarray on the multi-annual front, all word of the 2013 budget crisis has disappeared from sight. As a result, MEP Alain Lamassoure (EPP, France), chairman of the EU Parliament's budget committee, was not amused. He says the EU is "not credible" by starting to negotiate the long-term budget for 2014-2020, before having agreed current payments. He, and he alone, seems to be conscious of the stalemate over the correction budget for 2012, which has crashed the 2013 budget proposals, leading to the bizarre sitation where EU leaders will meet in an attempt to agree the budget for 2014-2020 in absence of an agreement for 2012 and 2013. But when we have Lamassoure saying that the EU is "not credible", that really is something. The whole budget process is descending into chaos, the like of which we have never before seen. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 16/11/2012 |
Police commissioners: not ****ing local!
Thursday 15 November 2012
You can always trust the loss-making Guardian to get it wrong, I wrote in my last piece. But hadn't then accounted for the dismal Failygraph which seems to have made as its mission a determination to lead the entire media pack in the race to the bottom. Thus did it offer yesterday:
They [police commissioners] deserve, to begin with, as robust a mandate as possible, which is why it is of great importance that people get out and vote tomorrow. In doing so, they will begin to make policing once again the local service it is supposed to be.Today it offers its pages to the dubious John Yates, former UK Head of Counter-Terrorism, to pontificate on police commissioners, telling us that "the PCCs are a good idea, but poorly executed and at the wrong time". "In terms of policy", Yates of the Yard dribbles, "the Government are right to allow people a say in how their local area is policed, and to provide someone they can hold to account". Of course, what immediately screams out - where we are to have a police commissioner for the area of West Yorkshire - is that 2.2 million people is not ****ing local. Not in a million years can a police force covering nearly 800 square miles, "serving" over two million people be considered local. There are over 100 countries with populations smaller than West Yorkshire. As for "holding to account", how can one person hold such a system to account, when the structures are so fundamentally flawed, and where the people, as such, have no ability to strike back? But that is the Failygraph for you. This moronic fare is on offer from a paper which, alongside the media in general, tells us they are the guardians of our "democracy". And this is why we need the "freedom of the press"? What we do need is the Harrogate Agenda. UPDATES: Low turnout seems universal. At just gone one o'clock, I was the fifteenth through my local polling station, and I'd only come to spoil my vote.
Another forum member reports 20 when a general election would have been "deep into the hundreds". At 1400hr–ish, a friend in Wales reported being voter 27 out of 981 in a ward that normally does 50 percent-plus.
It seems we have a voters' strike in progress – the only sensible response to such a cockeyed idea. "Surveys suggest that the national turnout could be as low as 15 percent, says the Independent, "a figure that would fuel accusations that the victorious candidates have a minimal democratic mandate". And how many heads will roll, do you think? Richard North 15/11/2012 |
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