24 December 2012 12:19 AM
Christmas joy: Putin's deltoids and pecs leave top eurocrats 'emotional'
Column from Monday's Irish Daily Mail
On Friday my Christmas present came a little early. Which is to say, on Friday I had 45 minutes in the European Council press room with Vladimir Putin.
Okay, it's not what you might want gift-wrapped, but it suited me fine. Talk about Epiphany: I had the chance to sit just four rows from the Russian president, dead in front of him, so I could watch how he would deal with both Hermann Van Rompuy and José Manuel Barroso.
And how did he deal with them? Like a shark swimming circuits in a tank: no killer jaws today, boys, but let’s just remind them who has the muscle here.
And I do mean muscle, the real stuff, as well as the economic stuff – as in oil, minerals, you name it, but especially in natural gas. President Putin has that kind of economic muscle, and we need it.
But it was real muscle he used to such effect on Friday.
You have to picture the scene. A packed press room, like a small theatre with a low ceiling, and a platform with three lecterns lined up at the front. Another is off to the side. That is where a council major-domo stands as he opens and closes the press conferences.
Every row is filled with journalists and cameramen, waiting for the press conference to mark the end of Mr Putin’s first visit to Brussels since his re-election in May. In from the wings walk Mr Barroso, the president of the commission, Mr Van Rompuy, president of the council, and Mr Putin, president of the Russian Federation.
Or put it this way. In walks a Portuguese politician with the physique of a cruise-ship singer gone to fat, a former Belgian prime minister with the physique of a weed, and a muscled-up former KGB thug with black belts in both karate and judo who is now president of the largest country in the world.
The moment I saw the three walk in and take their places at the lecterns, I knew this was going to be holiday cheer. At least for me. But then, I did once spend a very cheering afternoon watching a shark tank in South Africa just because I reckoned you never know what a creature like that might do next.
Which is exactly what I thought about Mr Putin from the moment Mr Van Rompuy started the press conference with his opening statement. The Belgian was reading from his piece of paper, all the boilerplate one hears every time Mr Van Rompuy gets a microphone – ‘strategic relationship…global challenges…partnership for modernisation…domestic economic developments.’
To Mr Van Rompuy’s left, his rival for EU status, Mr Barroso, was looking busy, reading through papers on his plexiglass lectern, jotting in margins.
But to Mr Van Rompuy’s right, Mr Putin stood with his head up. He planted his feet apart, so that his stance was nearly as broad as his shoulders (and they are notably broad). He swept his gaze across the journalists.
Meanwhile the two eurocrats had their eyes on their papers and had their knees and feet together, as though they had been trained by nuns.
Mr Van Rompuy droned. Mr Putin scanned the room with an attitude of tolerant boredom. He stretched his muscled neck slightly from side to side. His deltoids and pectoral muscles appeared to flex inside his jacket. He shifted his weight from one foot to another, like a boxer shifting in his corner before heading into the centre of the ring.
Mr Van Rompuy kept droning, Mr Barroso kept reading papers. Mr Putin looked calm, and in no need to look down or turn away from the gaze of the reporters.
At one point the Russian brushed some imaginary dust from his lectern. He scanned the ceiling.
Then it was Mr Barroso’s turn to read from a paper. Nothing in Mr Putin changed, except he moved a pen up his lectern, then back down it. It was a gesture of superior boredom. He flexed again. Then it was his turn.
A few words from his notes, then Mr Putin spoke without notes. His speech was fluid. The only oddity was that the translator from Russian was female, while the words were coming out pure testosterone: the EU energy legislation was ‘uncivilised.’
He criticised the EU legislation meant to create a single energy market: ‘Of course the EU has the right to take any decision, but as I have mentioned, we are stunned by the fact that this decision is given retroactive force.’
He was stunned because the legislation would cut off Russia’s Gazprom from dominating distribution networks. There were disputes over access to pipelines, and over oil prices and gas prices.
Then it was time for questions from reporters. There were questions on Syria, the chances of visa-free travel between Russia and the EU, and the chances of Russia helping with a Cyprus bailout. But in reply to a question, Mr Barroso went back to Mr Putin’s criticisms of the EU policy on natural gas.
Mr Barroso gave a long-winded and pompous statement -- a lecture, really -- on EU gas supply policy, because, believe me, Mr Barroso is not used to visitors calling one of his policies ‘uncivilised.’
He dismissed Mr Putin’s complaints and insisted that the EU was ‘respecting all international agreements and also the principles of the rule of law.’ Mr Barroso made it clear he had finished his statement, the major-domo announced that was the last question, thanked all the journalists for coming, and said the press conference was over.
Except it wasn’t. The shark swooped in.
As the journalists started to get up to leave, and Mr Barroso and Mr Van Rompuy moved away from their lecterns, Mr Putin did not move. Instead he looked straight out at us, and spoke: ‘Just a second.’
The journalists all sat down again, ears perked: Hello, what’s happening?
The two boss eurocrats looked confused.
Mr Putin leaned across his lectern in a confident, casual way and started speaking to us journalists: ‘My good old friend Mr Barroso is offering his position in such great detail, with such emotion, because he feels he’s wrong. He knows he’s wrong…so please look at our partnership cooperation agreement article 34, the number is 34, article 34, partnership cooperation agreement.’
He then blamed the Netherlands for the link between the oil price and the gas price now in dispute, and pointed out he was in the business of increasing trade between Russia and the EU to $400bn.
A few more slaps towards EU policy, and he was finished: ‘Thank you for your attention.’
Now, and only now, the press conference was over.
But Mr Putin need not have thanked us journalists. The thanks go to him for spilling blood in the water. I could have applauded. Just last week, a senior international EU correspondent told me in despair that ‘what we are doing here isn’t journalism, it’s stenography.’ And it usually is. But with Mr Putin’s performance, the council press room saw a real, unchoreographed dispute, a confrontation between a man who has no reverence for the European ‘project’ and two members of an unelected elite who usually glide through Brussels unchallenged, like Cardinals gliding through the Vatican.
It made my Christmas.
But then to understand how invigorating such a clash is - and how precious it is when one is facing Christmas in this city, and I am - you have to understand this place.
If it’s fun of any kind you’re after, the European quarter of Brussels isn’t where you are likely to find it.
It is more than just the soul-crushing windowless rooms of the council press centre, or the soporific regularity of the midday briefing at the commission, or the relentless orthodoxy of the 'project.'
It is the whole place, the concrete canyons that form the grid of streets from the European Parliament at the Place Luxembourg to the commission and council headquarters at the Rond-Point Schuman, to the headquarters of the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs overlooking a park built with money from the 19th century butcheries and slaveries of Leopold II, King of the Belgians, in his Congo.
The place would make a stone of any heart, so you take what sunshine you can find.
Odd that my ray of light this Christmas should come from a former KGB agent. But there he was: the gift of the Magi, flexing his pecs.
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19 December 2012 12:36 AM
However Salmond negotiates, the deal will mean Scottish submission to Berlin
An article from Wednesday's Scottish Daily Mail
Well, I live in Brussels and I have seen small countries try to negotiate with the elite of this place. All I can say to Mr Salmond is: ‘Good luck with that one.’
The government of an independent Scotland could negotiate all it wants, but there is just one end for any small country in the EU: obedience to the goals of the European project as directed by Germany.
I am an Irish journalist who has covered this project for years. I have seen what the EU has done to Ireland in the name of ‘saving the euro’ and ‘completing the European project.’ The EU has stripped out Ireland’s sovereignty, destroyed its banking system, destroyed its domestic economy and its workforce, compelled its young people to emigrate, taken control of its domestic budgets, and forced £55bn debt onto the shoulders of its citizens which they will never be able to repay.
And through it all, Irish government ministers have been in and out of Brussels to ‘negotiate’ terms with the EU institutions. They might as well have stayed home.
Just last month I waited at the European Council headquarters until 4.30 in the morning for the end of yet another crisis meeting of the eurozone finance ministers. After the meeting broke up, I found the Irish finance minister exhausted and alone in the dark – not an aide, not an advisor, no one with him – outside the VIP entrance to the council.
Some 'VIP'. Nobody had even sent a Merc to fetch him. Despite the dozens of international journalists crowding just a few feet behind us, piling in with microphones and questions for any important minister they could find – the German, the French, or the European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi – no one except me wanted to talk to the Irish minister.
Why should they? He mattered not at all, the negotiating position of his small country mattered not at all. He was not the German, nor the French, nor the ECB.
He was just ‘a peripheral.’
If Mr Salmond negotiates long enough, he will one day join some Irish minister in the pre-dawn Brussels damp, waiting alone and ignored, hoping for a people carrier to turn up eventually to take him to a hotel bed. Meanwhile the European Commissioner for Economics, Monetary Affairs and the Euro will sweep past him in a chauffeur-driven BMW. That is the certain fate of a European Scotland, resource-rich or not.
Which is why I was surprised at the alarm in Scotland when José Manuel Barroso repeated the EU line that Scotland would have to apply for membership if it left the United Kingdom. Scotland would no longer be a member state of the EU once it became independent. Most Scots seemed to see this as a threat. That is what surprised me. It wasn’t a threat. It was an opportunity. Mr Barroso was handing the Scots a Get Out of Jail Free card.
In effect Mr Barroso was saying, though for sure this is not the way he meant it, ‘All Scots have to do to get out of the EU and away from the threat of being forced to join the single currency is to vote for independence.’
The only response in Scotland to that offer ought be, ‘How fast can we get a referendum and how fast can I tick the Independence box on the ballot?’
Yet alas freedom from the EU is not the reason Mr Salmond wants Scotland out of the UK. Quite the opposite. The SNP leader still seems to think that being a member state of the EU would be good for Scotland.
It would not.
It is not up to me to say whether Scotland would be better off inside the British Union or outside it. That is a decision for the Scots alone. But I have the experience to judge whether a small country such as an independent Scotland would be better off inside the European Union or out. It would be better off out, and not least because Scotland in the EU could not in any way be independent. It would merely be out of one union and into another: and if you don’t like being run from Westminster, you really, really aren’t going to like being run from a Berlin-dominated Brussels.
What the EU elite have planned now – at the instigation of the Germans, who say that since they are paying for the national bail-outs, they want to take charge of the national budgets - is to eliminate the last genuine independence of any of the member states.
This has already started with the member states inside the single currency. Many nationalists seem to think it will be up to them to decide whether Scotland will go into the euro or not, so they could resist such moves against national sovereignty.
The fact is, an independent Scotland could not negotiate an opt-out from the euro. The United Kingdom was able to negotiate a permanent opt-out because it had the economic and political muscle only a big country has. Denmark was able to negotiate an opt-out because it acted at the time of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. Danish voters rejected the treaty in a referendum. The only way the European elite could get the voters to say yes in a second vote was if they were promised, among other things, they would never be forced to join the euro. Denmark had leverage.
An independent Scotland would have no such negotiating power as the Danes and 
the British had. I’ve heard Mr Barroso repeat it several times in the last few weeks: ‘The euro is the currency of the European Union.’ If a state wants in, they must commit to joining the euro. There is no room for negotiation on that.
Yet joining the euro would be disastrous for Scots. There is the whole nightmare of pension pots held in sterling, of course, and upheaval to trade with the remainder of the UK, and the loss of control over interest rates and influence over exchange rates, and being strapped into debt and deficit targets, and soon, cuts to social welfare, set by the Germans.
But there is far greater damage the euro can do, and has done, to a small EU member state.
One of the reasons given in Scotland, as in Ireland, for membership of the EU is the money handed over by various European projects. Ireland for a generation deluded itself into thinking that membership of the EU guaranteed it free money.
Then after the crash, and the debts which the EU forced onto the shoulders of the Irish people in order to pay off the German banks and others who held bonds from Irish banks, Colm McCarthy, an economist at University College Dublin, did the sums.
Here is what he found: ‘Over the entire period from 1973 to 2009, Ireland’s net receipts from the EU budget totalled about €41bn [£33bn], of which no more than about €20bn [£16bn] could be classified as in any sense discretionary. It is entirely possible, under the no-bondholder-left-behind policy, that this sum and more is being routed from Irish taxpayers to European private creditors of Irish private banks.’
In short, the small EU country most like Scotland has surrendered its sovereignty and gutted its democracy in return for a net gain of zero.
The only question is: will the Scots learn from that?
Scotland can be independent, or it can be a member of the United Kingdom, or it can be a member of the EU. Choice of one.
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16 December 2012 7:53 PM
Connecticut killings: it's the shooter, not the guns
Here is an edited version of my column from Monday's Irish Daily Mail:
Last Friday 20-year old Adam Lanza murdered his mother then murdered 26 women and children at a school in Connecticut and then killed himself. The first question that ought to come to mind is: what sort of person does that? Was he insane, criminal, or morally void? What sort of person starts with the murder of his mother and then just doesn’t stop killing?
It can’t simply be that Lanza had access to a gun so he used it. As of December 31st last year, the state of Connecticut had issued 165,000 permits for privately-held firearms. One of those holding a permit was Lanza’s mother, Nancy. You can assume that tens of thousands of other Connecticut citizens who hold permits also have sons.
So the next question has to be, why did this son amongst all those tens of thousands of sons take his mother’s firearms illegally – Connecticut has the fourth toughest gun control laws in the US, and any 20-year old is banned from buying or carrying pistols – and turn into a mass murderer?
News reports say he had a history of mental instability. At least one report mentioned ‘mood altering drugs.’ That is likely. The presence of legal drugs, the kind prescribed by psychiatrists, in the blood of the killers has been a feature of mass murders in America.
Both of the Columbine High School killers, Eric Harris (described as ‘a classic psychopath’) and Dylan Klebold, were on psychotropic drugs.
So was 17-year old Jeff Weise, the 2005 Red Lake High School killer in Minnesota who killed nine people then committed suicide.
So was 19-year old Robert Hawkins who murdered eight people then killed himself in Nebraska in 2007.
And on the list goes. What drugs 20-year old Lanza might have used on top of any drugs prescribed by a psychiatrist is something we will only learn from a coroner’s report.
Yet the answer to the question, ‘What kind of person carries out such a crime as this?’ the answer may be as simple as: ‘The kind of young man who would murder his mother would murder just about anyone, and in any quantity.’
Strange facts come to mind when one tries to figure out such a killer. In the biography of Hermann Goering, the Nazi war criminal recalled that his earliest memory was beating his mother’s face with his fists. Hate your mother with enough violence, and maybe there may be no limit to the violence. I don’t know.
I do know this: there is a reason this one young man among the population of 3.6m in Connecticut turned into a killer. That reason can’t be the existence of guns in his home, any more than the existence of drugs in his blood. Among 165,000 permits, there was one mass killer. The state is on the edge of New York, so you can bet there are plenty of drugs, too. Yet the other 164,999 permits to own a gun in Connecticut produced no mass killers.
You would have to – if you were rational – be open to the argument that having access to a gun and killing people are not cause and effect.
And you would be right, despite the emotional surge in Britain, Ireland and other countries that insists that the huge numbers of privately-held guns in American must lead to huge numbers of murders. They don’t.
Check, for example, the Guardian newspaper’s Datablog. Earlier this year it gathered statistics from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and from the Small Arms Survey, an independent research project located at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
Here are the headline facts: ‘The US has the highest gun ownership rate in the world… but the US does not have the worst firearm murder rate – that prize belongs to Honduras, El Salvador and Jamaica. In fact, the US is number 28, with a rate of 2.97 per 100,000 people. Puerto Rico tops the world’s table for firearms murders as a percentage of all homicides – 94.8 percent. It’s followed by Sierra Leone in Africa and Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean.’
More guns don’t mean more crime. In fact, as the BBC reported from America at the weekend, ‘Public support for stricter gun legislation has been on a downward trend in recent years, along with overall levels of violent crime.’
Yet during the same period, gun ownership has increased.
According to the most recent complete figures in the Small Arms Survey, in 2007 American civilians held 270m firearms, a rate of 89 guns per 100 population. However, in a recent footnote the survey added that the ‘ATF [US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] and other sources suggest that the total private ownership in the United States in 2010 was closer to 270m-314m firearms, for an average of 290m firearms or 96 per 100 residents that year.’
What the survey doesn’t mention is one reason for the jump: the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Since his re-election this year, there has been another surge in gun sales. Yet violent crime has continued to fall. What is happening is that millions of Americans are afraid President Obama may have an opportunity in his second term to add leftwing justices to the US Supreme Court who would interfere with their Second Amendment rights. So they are stocking up. They intend to go on being able to defend themselves, their families, their property, and their liberty.
For that has always been the foundation of the Americans’ determination to prevent the Federal government from taking away their Second Amendment right to bear arms. The amendment has always been misunderstood or wilfully misinterpreted abroad (though of course that is true of the entire US Constitution: so in passing I will say yet again that the US Constitution includes no right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, nor does it state that all men are created equal, nor does it say anything about government of the people, by the people for the people. But that is for another column.)
The Second Amendment limits only the powers of the US Congress to interfere with the right to carry weapons. The sovereign states remain free to regulate the possession and carrying of weapons in accordance with their own constitutions. Any state in the union could, for example, legislate for gun control very like the gun control in Britain or Ireland. They just don’t want to.
Even so, the right to bear arms is not absolute. The federal courts have upheld federal laws that limit the sale, possession and transportation of certain kinds of weapons such as machine-guns and sawn-off shotguns.
But it is the states which have the power to limit possession and carrying of firearms, and they do. As I said, Connecticut is rated fourth-toughest in gun control among the 50 states. The three tougher are California, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. The rankings come from a report by the Washington DC anti-gun Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Much less tough degrees of gun control exist in, for example, Vermont, South Dakota and Arizona.
There are as many different regimes of gun control in America as there are states in America, and Americans intend to keep it that way for many reasons. Here is one. The amendment protects the rights of the states to maintain their own militia, or ‘armed citizenry,’ independent of federal forces. This was established as a safeguard against oppression, either domestic or foreign.
If you think this is a peculiar idea of Americans, look at the list of which other countries besides America have citizens who intend to remain armed. Number three on the global list of civilian gun ownership is Switzerland, a country with an historical understanding of the importance of an armed citizenry. The Swiss have 46 firearms per 100 of population. Yet there the rate of homicide by firearm per 100,000 of population is just 0.77 percent.
Fourth on the list is Finland with 45 firearms per 100 population. The rate of homicide by firearm in Finland is 0.45 per 100,000 of population.
Fifth on the list is Cyprus with 36 firearms per 100 of population. Homicide by firearm in Cyprus is 0.46 per 100,000 people. (For contrast, in Venezuela, the homicide by firearm rate is 39 per 100,000 population.)
Number 13 in global terms of private gun ownership is Canada with 31 firearms per hundred people, then Austria, Iceland and Germany with 30 guns per hundred of population. These are all amongst the most safe and orderly countries on earth. The fact that that they also have high concentrations of privately-held guns may be connected.
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