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Douglas Carswell

Douglas Carswell was first elected to Parliament in 2005 by a slender 920 votes. He was returned as MP for Clacton in 2010 with a 12,000 majority. He is the author of The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy and believes that the internet is making the world a vastly better place.

Inside Number 10, the Euro-establishment still holds sway

By  Politics Last updated: June 11th, 2013
You'll feel right at home, Mr Korski
You can learn a lot about a leader by looking at who they surround themselves with.
Ted Heath tended to appoint technocrats. Margaret Thatcher liked to surround herself with radical free marketeers – even if she surprisingly rarely promoted them in government. Gordon Brown’s Downing Street contained an ever diminishing pool of people prepared to put up with his petulance.
What about David Cameron?
We live, it seems to me, in extraordinary, unconventional times. Established orthodoxies are being regularly stood on their head. Given all that, what I find most striking about those in Number 10 is how orthodox and conventional they seem to be.
Take David Cameron’s recent appointment of Daniel Korski as his new special adviser.
“Daniel who?” you ask. Few folk outside the SW1 bubble will have heard of the charming Mr Korski. But his elevation to Number 10 tells us more about the Prime Minister’s own outlook than any speech.
Highly talented, and extremely capable, Daniel is …. how can one put this delicately? …. not really where the rest of the Tory party – or indeed the country – is on matters European. In an era of political insurgency, I suspect that his advice may be pretty establishment.
A former chief of staff to Paddy Ashdown, ex-adviser to EU High Representative Cathy Ashton, with a stint at the US State Department under his belt, his views seem to sit comfortably with those of the ruling mandarinate.
Many colleagues in the Parliamentary party applauded when they saw David Cameron wield the veto at the December 2011 Brussels summit. We cheered as Conservative support rose in the opinion polls that followed.
How telling. The folk I represent in Essex don't see Boudicca as the baddie. They wish those who ran the country today had a little more of the warrior queen spirit about them.
Daniel, like so many of those appointed to advise ministers, might be very in tune with the feelings of the Whitehall machine. But it is those who are in tune with swing voters in marginal seats that need to be listened to.

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Photo: DPA

ECB official: German court could sink euro

Published: 10 Jun 13 15:02 CET | Print version 
A rejection by Germany's highest court of the European Central Bank'scontroversial OMT bond purchase programme would have serious consequences for the eurozone, a top German ECB official warned on Monday.
"I have great respect for the court and will not dole out advice to an independent body," ECB executive board member Jörg Asmussen told the mass-circulation daily Bild in an interview.

"But generally speaking, no institution operates in a vacuum. If the bond purchase programme has to be scrapped, that would have substantial consequences," Asmussen said.

Germany's Constitutional Court is to examine this week whether the ECB's "big bazooka", or Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT), is compatible with the country's Basic Law.

Ever since the ECB unveiled the scheme to buy up the sovereign debt of the euro area's most debt-wracked members last summer, fears of a break-up of the single currency have indeed receded.

Europe's storm-battered financial markets have enjoyed a period of relative calm, without a single OMT ever being carried out.

Nevertheless, like many of the ECB's emergency anti-crisis measures, the OMT has its critics -- both in the pro-euro and anti-euro camps -- who claim it is unconstitutional.

And the Karlsruhe-based court -- which already threw out similar objections to the eurozone's bailout mechanisms -- will now turn its attention to the OMT. During the two-day hearing on Tuesday and Wednesday, both Asmussen and Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann take the stand.

Weidmann has been among the vocal critics of the OMT scheme and so the constitutional court hearing could prove a showdown between the ECB and the Bundesbank, experts say.

AFP/mry