EU politics – a tremendous year?
Monday 31 December 2012
 This is the Union of European Federalists, which is to suggest that the UK should become an "associate member" under plans "which would result in it staying in the EU's single market but being stripped of its commissioner in Brussels, MEPs, and its right of veto in the European Council". Notwithstanding that there is no veto in the European Council, effectively, this gets close to our own position, where Britain leaves the EU but retains membership of the EEA, thus representing a merging of positions where both sides come to the same conclusions as to where the future should lie (for the time being). For the Federalists, however, disappointment awaits, as there is no mechanism in the treaties to eject an EU member, so Britain would have to agree to a voluntary exit, via Article 50. But if the Federalists want this to happen, then the negotiations should be very straightforward. Any such formula would certainly remove any problems about withdrawal being a "disaster for the City", fears of which are being spread by anonymous sources, by the Telegraph. It is interesting here that the sources are anonymous, which must limit their credibility, in an industry which, historically, demonstrates a poor understanding of the ways of the EU. All of this, and more, though, is quite clearly intended to influence Mr Cameron's forthcoming speech, hence the rhetoric from The Observer telling us that "Britain should not be contemplating isolation from Europe". No-one, though (at least, not us) is considering "isolation". EEA membership would ensure full engagement with the EU, while allowing us to be active members of the international community in our own right. But all this may have less impact on Cameron than the recent poll results, indicating that UKIP is "surging" in popularity. Even if this does not translate into seats, the "UKIP effect" could well be strengthened, which puts the party in the position where it can make certain a Conservative defeat at the general election, in circumstances where many pundits already believe the Tories will lose the 2015 election. This makes for a fascinating situation for, if Mr Cameron shares a conviction that his party is going to be defeated at the general, he has nothing to lose by breaking the mould and going all-out for EU withdrawal – on grounds that both sides could approve. It must now be dawning on Cameron that he has to accommodate anti-EU sentiment, and if the current poll is right – giving UKIP 15 percent – then burying the EU issue by going straight for the Article 50 option, while offering a referendum on the outcome of negotiations, could give him a lead in the polls. Possibly, never has so much rested on a single speech, the one that we expect in a few short weeks. And if Farage believes 2012 has been a "tremendous year", Cameron still has the opportunity to make UKIP history. If he does it right, everybody should be happy when the Conservatives also have a tremendous year. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 31/12/2012 |
EU politics: a misjudged piece
Sunday 30 December 2012
 The problem with the piece is that it starts with the premise that a "cautiously enthusiastic Britain joined the Common Market" forty years ago. And, because today few are celebrating, that is somehow a "bad thing". Represented here is the classic myth, that the "Common Market" was a good thing, yet this brave venture into Continental free trade took a "decisive wrong turn" and became something alien, which could not longer be supported. Sadly, the generally sensible Gilligan, confronted with having to write about something of which he clearly knows little, actually uses this phrase, telling us that: … there has been the debacle of the euro, the decisive wrong turn that changed the EU from a broadly successful institution into one that seems to have condemned many of its members to, at best, years of stagnation and misery.Therein lies the delusion. Anyone with any serious knowledge of the "project" is fully aware that the single currency was an integral part of the EEC, as indeed they know that the "Common Market" was simply a disguise for a customs union, the final objective of which was European political integration. Thus, we have a project founded on deception and, what has happened over the years is that more and more people have understood the real agenda and want nothing of it. This makes it utterly ludicrous to cast the progression in terms of "where did it all go wrong?" What went "right" is that people have leaned that they were deceived. To an extent, Gilligan actually acknowledges this, in that he concedes that "the EU's fatal lack of real popular consent may be catching up with it". But, any sensible person, one might think that, once it was realised that there was a lack of popular consent, the only option would be to leave.  Such sense, however, does not trouble Gilligan. Instead, we get this (above): Yet the British impetus for full withdrawal may be dangerous: in the modern world, the very idea of "UK independence", as promoted by the eponymous Eurosceptic party, is surely an illusion. Even if we left, given the amount of trade we do with the EU, we would still have to follow most of its rules – while no longer having any role in setting them.For sure, independence in an interdependent world is something of illusion, but that is no the point. The question is how we manage our international relations. And, while part of that is trading rules – if we chose to make it so, only those companies which exported to the EU would have to obey those rules. What we see in this revealing excerpt, therefore, is blind, ignorant prejudice. Gilligan is a europhile at heart, so he seeks excuses not to leave. But, throughout the piece, he commits an even greater sin. He plays the same game that the europhiles indulged in back in 1973, eliding European "culture" with a political project that has become the European Union. "For all our professed hostility to the EU, we are in some ways far more 'European' than we were", he concludes, offering us a classic non sequitur. Hostility to the system of government called the European Union has nothing to do with us embracing aspects of European culture. Why the Sunday Telegraph thus bothered to publish this drivel is a mystery. There is so much more that could be said, and which could make a real contribution to the debate, that one wonders what this branch of the legacy media is trying to achieve – other than to hasten its own demise. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 30/12/2012 |
Booker: the belief systems wither
Sunday 30 December 2012
Nicely stitched together by Booker this week are disparate themes all bound together by a common phenomenon – the belief system. And, in an optimistic mood, he tells us that they are all beginning to come unstuck.
Booker starts with the glorious headlines in April that greeted a stark warning from the Environment Agency. Fuelled by the predictions of the climate-change-obsessed Met Office (and the official policy, since 2007, of the similarly fixated EU) that we will have "hotter, drier summers" for decades to come, the agency foretold that the drought conditions of the early spring were likely to last "until Christmas and perhaps beyond". Someone up there is seriously enjoying herself, as this prophecy was swiftly followed by the wettest late spring, the wettest summer, the wettest autumn and the wettest Christmas we have ever known – eight months of near-continuous rain and floods amounting to England's wettest year since records began (which actually wasn't that long ago). Another of those belief systems taking a dive is the EU, just short of the 40th anniversary of the day in 1973 when Britain finally junked "1,000 years of history" – in the famous words of Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell – and threw in her lot with the attempt to create an all-powerful super-government over the nations of Europe. It is 20 years since Booker started reporting on the damage that our membership of the European Union (as it was then about to become, under the Maastricht Treaty) was starting to inflict on our national life. In the early days, to question our membership was to be dismissed by all right-thinking people as a crank, a nutter, a xenophobe who could not be taken seriously. And when, at the start of 1992, he first began reporting horror stories about the tidal wave of new regulations hitting so many British businesses with the approach of the Single Market, along with the destruction of our fishing industry and much of our agriculture, we were still locked into that forerunner of the single currency, the ERM (almost unanimously supported, it is salutary to recall, by every political party and right across the media). When we were forced out of the ERM on Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992, it ushered in a period of dramatic economic growth which, six years later, would allow Gordon Brown to announce his hubristic decision to double public spending in 10 years. We are paying the price for that now: this year the Government has had to borrow up to £18 billion a month to cover its ever-widening deficit. Forty years on from our entry into "Europe", as we see "the project" plunge deeper into the misery and chaos it has brought on itself by its even more hubristic desire to give the EU its own currency, British attitudes to our membership have changed beyond recognition. In their desperate efforts to save the euro, we see the EU's inner core driving on towards yet another treaty and "full political union", in a way that will condemn the UK to remain helplessly on the margin, with less influence over Europe's destiny than ever. On all sides we hear plaintive cries that we must negotiate a “looser relationship” with the form of government to which we subordinated ourselves 40 years ago, as if we could defy its most basic rule: that powers once handed over to the centre in Brussels can never be given back. Poll after poll shows that the majority of the British people would now like to see us get out altogether. One way or another – although few seem yet to have any realistic idea of how this could be achieved – we seem to be approaching a turning point in our relations with "Europe", one as fateful as that step Edward Heath led us into so blindly back in 1973. Just as significant this year have been the signs of glimmerings of reality breaking in on the delusions that go with the long-dominant conviction that the world is in the grip of a changing climate that we somehow have the power to reverse, if only we are prepared to subordinate every aspect of national policy to doing so and to change almost every aspect of our lives. It is 10 years since Booker first began reporting on just one of the countless threads in that story – the belief that we could somehow derive most of the electricity on which our computer-dependent economy now relies from "renewable" sources: for instance, by covering vast tracts of our countryside and sea with giant wind turbines. Again, back in 2002, to point out that wind energy was an incredibly damaging illusion was to be dismissed as a crank, a Nimby, a Luddite. But ten years later, the penny is finally dropping that, in practical terms, this is an incredibly foolish and costly mistake. Furthermore, it is only part of a disastrous skewing of our energy policy through an obsession, shared with the EU since 1990, that we must lead the world in fighting a threat which, in the past few years, has increasingly come to be seen as a colossal scare story. Six years ago, with global-warming hysteria still at its height, he first began to suggest that it might be based on scientific evidence that was distorted or fabricated – as in the "hockey stick" graph, or the bizarre adjustments being made to official temperature records. Again, to say this at the time was to be derided as a "climate-change denier", "anti-science", a "flat earther". It is three years since, growing out of researches for his column, he published a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster. It ranks alongside books by Al Gore and James Lovelock as one of the three best-sellers on the subject in the past decade, because it was the first detailed attempt to reconstruct the scientific and political story of the global-warming scare – just before it became clear, at the mammoth Copenhagen conference, that efforts to get a new treaty to combat global warming (and present mankind with the biggest bill in history) had collapsed. As the scientific case for man-made climate change fell apart, in a welter of scandals which showed how ruthlessly the evidence had been fudged and manipulated, the real global warming disaster, as Booker argued, was the political legacy it was leaving us with. No one had promoted this more zealously than the EU and the British government, whose Climate Change Act, approved almost unanimously by MPs, is by far the most costly law ever put through Parliament. At last, in 2012, we have begun to see calls for the repeal of this utterly insane legislation, requiring us to cut "carbon emissions" by four fifths in less than 40 years, which could only be achieved by shutting down virtually the entire British economy. At the same time we have heard influential calls, going right up into the heart of Government, for an end to the insanity of covering Britain's countryside with useless and ludicrously expensive windmills. We have also heard calls for the scrapping of the equally mad "carbon tax". From April, the steadily increasing costs of this will gradually – as this column has long pointed out – make Britain's economy the least competitive in Europe, destroying tens of thousands of jobs as energy-intensive industries are forced to relocate abroad or close altogether, and driving millions more households into "fuel poverty". At the same time, we have the promise of a national debate as to whether Britain should remain part of the maddest political experiment in history as it staggers deeper and deeper into a relentless crisis which threatens eventually to tear it apart, and our joining of which Margaret Thatcher described in her retirement as "a political error of the first magnitude". As 2013 dawns, with the US teetering on the edge of its own "fiscal cliff", in many ways not dissimilar to that left to us by Gordon Brown, we are certainly in for "an interesting time". But at least as the political skies grow darker and Britain gets wetter, there are real signs that we are beginning to wake up from a whole series of collective dreams which turned out to be nightmares. The breaking in of reality on such make-believe must inevitably be painful and bewildering, but Booker uses it as a cue to wish his readers a happy New Year. In truth, the happiness will not fully return until we are finally rid of these belief systems, and there have been many false dawns. However, the façades are cracking and, for that, we can at least be reasonably cheerful. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 30/12/2012 |
UKIP: not up to the job
Saturday 29 December 2012
 One might thus question the judgement of Farage and his press team in allowing such a travesty to be published. It may play well with his fans, but its portrayal of Farage as the "Jack-the-lad" can do nothing to attract voters looking for a serious politician with workable policies. However, even when the message is totally under the control of the party, as in this seasonal message on YouTube, we don't get a much more coherent picture. Farage, for instance, in a public utterance on Article 50, displays little of the tactical acumen than one needs of a successful party leader. The test of this – and the evidence of failure - is in the way that the media, when looking for serious discussion on EU issues, tend to treat Open Europe as the "go-to team". Farage is "good for a larf", and jokes about "Latvian mistresses", but no one in their right mind would ask for his analysis on an EU exit plan. For those of my readers who observe that I have "issues" with Farage should thus note that, in 1999, the objective for UKIP was to acquire a degree of gravitas that was hitherto lacking in the Party. Compare Farage's speeches then, with his most recent "rants" and the difference in strategy immediately becomes apparent. The schism which then developed was entirely the result of differences in strategy. It became clear to some of us that, in order to progress the eurosceptic cause, we would need a structured, fully developed and realistic exit plan. But it was not to be. And now, when we so desperately need clear directions, Farage is interviewed about Latvians and Open Europe is asked about withdrawal options. Sadly, the lesson Farage has never learnt is that it takes more than an affinity for booze, fags and wenches to get us out of the European Union. The British public will need good, hard reasons, and reassurance that withdrawal is feasible without causing irreparable damage to the economy and our international relations. Therein lies the ultimate failure of UKIP. A political party must have a coherent vision and – expressed in modern parlance – a "route map". Furthermore, the vision must be a positive one, ideas that can offer people hope of a better world, in a way that captures the imagination. In these vital respects, UKIP has nothing to offer. UKIP's absence from the field of battle, however, does not remove the need for both exit plan and a vision. But what the Daily Mail has done today is illustrate, unequivocally, that Farage is not up to the job of providing either. That, I suppose, is some small service. Now we must press on without him. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 29/12/2012 |
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