Done it at last - by Helen... Sunday, October 18, 2009

Done it at last - by Helen... Sunday, October 18, 2009

A longish piece on the Geert Wilders's visit, that demo and other matters to do with freedom of speech over on Your Freedom and Ours.

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Nemesis - by Richard...

Sooner than he might have wanted, David Cameron is facing the prospect of having to "fess up" and admit that a referendum on the constitutional Lisbon treaty is no longer on the cards.

His nemesis is likely to come on or about 27 October when the Czech constitutional court clears the way for Vaclav Klaus to sign the ratification instrument, the last of 27 EU member state leaders to do so.

And sign it he will, having indicated to the Czech newspaper Lidove noviny that it would be futile to do otherwise. "The train carrying the treaty is going so fast and it's so far that it can't be stopped or returned, no matter how much some of us would want that," he told the newspaper. 

Although some eurosceptic campaigners have been clinging to the hope that he might delay ratification until the election, thus paving the way for a Cameronian referendum, Klaus made his position very clear by adding: "I cannot and will not wait for British elections, unless they hold them in the next few days or weeks."

Booker, in his column, salutes the man whom he calls "Europe's last democrat". In a melancholy way, he writes, it has been vastly entertaining to see the rage provoked in Brussels and Europe's political class by his continuing dalliance.

Now, though, the game is drawing to a close – a treaty which has taken eight years in the making, built on a foundation of lies, deception and bad faith, rejected by the electorates of France, Holland and Ireland, is shortly to come into force. And Mr Cameron is going to have to tell us what he proposes to do about it.

Philip Davies, the Conservative MP for Shipley, is possibly pointing to a way out for the man who would be prime minister – but in fact will be a satrap of Brussels. He (Davies) says, "If the treaty is fully ratified I have never believed there is any point in having a referendum on it. It would be futile gesture politics." Instead, he wants Cameron to stage a vote on repatriating powers from the EU. 

In purely practical terms, Davies is right – but politics is not always about practicalities. Holding a referendum on the treaty would be enormously symbolic, drawing a line between the Labour administration and the Conservatives, and making a powerful statement to Brussels.

Cameron would not, of course, be obliged then to de-ratify the treaty – and nor could he affect its course. By then it would be in force and it would be virtually impossible to unravel the new treaty provisions specifically for the UK.

But, armed with a substantial vote against the treaty, Cameron would have a strong mandate to demand from the other member states an intergovernmental conference (IGC), to which he could present substantive proposals for a new status for Britain, including the repatriation of powers, of which so much has been made.

An alternative course would be for him to set out detailed proposals for dealing with Brussels in the Conservative Party manifesto, with a promise of a referendum to approve whatever deal he manages to negotiate, in the manner of Wilson's 1975 referendum.

Either line, though, is fraught. It is not within Cameron's gift to promise renegotiations. Any substantive changes will require treaty changes and these can only be secured through the medium of an IGC. This requires the "consensus" of the member states, determined if necessary by a vote on which there must be a simple majority in favour.

That, in itself, is a major hurdle. Once an IGC is declared, it is "open house" for any member state to submit their own proposals – many of which have their own agendas and their own publics to satisfy. Given the bruising experience of the Lisbon process, the last thing the "colleagues" will want to is re-open old wounds, and engage in another round of treaty negotiations.

There will, therefore, be massive pressure to refuse Cameron any negotiations. In the face of a "democratic" vote from the other member states (not the EU, but the member states acting – in theory at least – individually), he has no means of forcing the issue, short of invoking the exit provisions of the treaty and taking the UK out of the EU altogether.

Much is made of the ploy of blocking agreement on the multi-annual budget framework, during the forthcoming negotiations. There, parallels are being drawn with the Thatcher "handbag" ploy on the rebate negotiations. But that is a non-starter. Community law simply does not permit treaty changes without an IGC, so Cameron could not trade what we wanted against approval of a new budget framework.

That leaves Cameron with few options. But, if he is prepared to play the exit card, the "colleagues" may well concede an IGC. Even then, there would be massive hurdles. Any changes will have to be agreed unanimously and, once again, the new treaty will have to be ratified by all 27 member states. That will not necessarily be problem-free.

From start to finish, the process could well take several years and one does not have to be a mind reader to see that, from Cameron's point of view, this would be highly undesirable. The last thing he will want is for his first term to be dominated by bickering – and that it would be – over "Europe".

Given also that Cameron's preferred position is active membership of the EU, his position will almost certainly be to seek a de minimis resolution, which can be concluded as fast as possible. Thus, one possibility is that he will offer largely cosmetic changes, sufficient to convince the electorate that he is "doing something" about "Europe".

He could, as a result, try for something like an "Irish option", extracting from the "colleagues" a number of declarations, which could then be incorporated in one of the accession treaties which may come up.

However, he has also to satisfy the "eurosceptic" wing of his party and keep his europhiles on-side, giving him perilously little room for manoeuvre – even less if public hostility to the EU forces him to make more robust changes than he would prefer.

Ideally, Cameron would like to "park" the whole issue – that has been the default tactic of his leadership to date, but in the face of his oft' repeated mantra that, if the treaty is ratified he "won't let matters rest there", he will shortly be forced to make his position clear(er). Even then, he could simply delay the evil day, promising only to set out his plans in his manifesto.

Tory MP Philip Hollobone, though, states the obvious – of which Cameron will be keenly aware. "Everyone will be expecting clarification of what the Conservative position will be," he says, adding ominously, "the issue of Britain's relationship with Europe is not going to go away."

Moreover, Cameron will not get away with a 1975-style Wilsonian fudge. The EU is far more powerful and visible then it was then, the electorate is that much better informed and, of course, there is the internet. "Europe" most definitely is not going to go away, and the prime minister in-waiting has a real problem on his hands.

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Our money - by Richard... Saturday, October 17, 2009

Plans for Britain's first coal-fired power station equipped with carbon capture technology have been backed by the EU commission. The commission has recommended that a plant in Hatfield, near Doncaster, should receive £164m of EU funding. The sum would be matched by a similar sum from the UK government. 

This is real money, our money – all £164,000,000 of it – twice over. And they are going to spend it burying carbon dioxide in a hole in the ground. Why are we not rising up and shooting them?

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It's like a war zone up here - by Richard...

"We had another inch of snow overnightwhich brings totals at my house to 6 inches. The snow started 10 a.m. Thursday has not stopped since. 

Looking at radar this morning, the next round of snow is hovering very close by and it looks like for folks across central PA, those east of State College could get hit hard by 3-10 inches of snow the next 24 hours while those west of State College get less snow. 

It all depends on how the upper-level low digs into Virginia today and tonight that will dictate the snow amounts in the marginal situation. Given that only an inch of snow overnight caused the trees to sag once again, the snow over the next 24 hours will cause additional power outages and tree damage. It's like a war zone up here...no kidding..."

And that's just Pennsylvania.

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Levers of power - by Richard...

The thing about Matthew Parris is that he does have a brain and he can think. Thus, slowly, he's getting there, but he's still trapped in his bubble and cannot make the final, conceptual links which would enable him to work out what is really going on.

However, he makes a start in his latest piece. There, he tells us that the British electorate have an intuitive grasp of politics, but there's one misunderstanding to which the generality is prone.

Parris suggests that we tend to think that driving a country would be like driving a car. Your eye would be constantly and intelligently on the road ahead; miss the brake, let your foot slip, jerk the wheel, or turn round to argue with the passengers, and you’d crash. 

Then comes the great revelation: "The truth is different," he writes. "As those who acquire power discover to their dismay, the controls are mushy and indirect, and the machine will run on, driverless, for some time. In the harsh light of experience, the illusion that a British Cabinet is in day-to-day control cracks."

Hurrah! He has finally noticed. And there we were in April 2007 writing of a meeting (which actually happened in 1996) with Roger Freeman, then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

Standing in his grand office, overlooking Horse Guards, he likened his position with that of a signalman in an old-fashioned signal box. "I have all these levers," he lamented, "the levers of power". Turning to me he then said, rather sadly, "the trouble is that they are not connected to anything."

Of this, we have written, not once but several times, and now – at last – Parris has also noticed something amiss. 

Unable to escape his bubble, though, he looks through the party political prism and blames the "atrophy" on Brown's government. In Tory doctrine, history begins in 1997. Parris, like the rest of them, cannot begin to appreciate that this phenomenon has been going on a long, long time.

Thus, of course, from the learned discourse to which we are treated, two words are missing: "European Union". The man has discovered that the controls are "mushy and indirect", but he cannot – or dare not – tell us why. Not, of course, that it is just the EU – there are many other influences which have diluted and diminished the power of our own elected officials. 

At least though, if Parris is telling us that the government is no longer in charge, some people might be motivated to ask who does hold the levers of power. That is the next step, but we may have to see Cameron founder in exactly the same way that we have seen with Brown's administration, before the penny finally drops.

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Forgive them Lord ... - by Richard...

Charles Moore writes today that "Attempts to regulate MPs by an external authority will prove an utter disaster, because they set that authority above the people we ourselves choose to make our laws. It therefore replaces parliamentary democracy by the rule of minister, judge or bureaucrat."

Every recent scheme, he argues - from state funding for political parties to control of "second jobs" for MPs, Gordon Brown's invention of an Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority and even the establishment of a Supreme Court separate from the House of Lords - is guilty of the same error. We entrench more and more "scrutiny", but what we are creating is a quango state.

Asking how this has come about, Moore concludes that MPs forgot that their House was esteemed because it genuinely made the laws for the people it represented, and so they transferred much of that right to Europe.

Having handed over their birthright, MPs then focused on their mess of pottage. Individual offices, more paid advisers, bigger pensions, shorter hours, second homes, free ginger-crinkle biscuits! It is not a coincidence that Tony Blair, the first prime minister in our history ever to show consistent contempt for the House of Commons, was also the first to make the hand-outs really gargantuan.

Moore then notes that David Cameron has been specific about "one or two tough things which he wanted to apply in the next Parliament, such as an end to the MPs' pension scandal." But, he adds, the mood in all the leaderships has been that they wanted to "move on". They are avoiding plans for real reform ... they do not want to strengthen Parliament against the executive which they themselves hope to lead.

That is the truth of it. MPs, having themselves conspired in their own emasculation, are allowing the party leaders to finish the job – while the claque applauds their humiliation.

Moore actually wrote about this in May, and we applauded him. We had another go in June, when there were other voices raising the alarm. But they were too few, too late, drowned in the clamour. And now, Le Bon's "crowd" holds sway, actively clamouring for the accelerated destruction of that which holds it safe ... its own parliament.

A startlingly apt utterance comes to mind – from a different age and a different context. But the words have not lost their power or meaning: "Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do."

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World government - by Richard...

"I read that treaty," says Lord Christopher Monckton, as retailed byWatts up with that. "And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word 'government' actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity."

Yea, right! You've finally noticed. But what about the rest of it? The bit Monckton has got wrong is his assertion that a world government is going to be created. It is already there ... in embryonic form ... and the process has been going on for decades. 

It is a "conspiracy in plain sight", just like the EU – which is part of it. Nobody talks about it though – except fringe nutters. If you get serious, you are dismissed as part of the tin hat brigade. Much better to get stuck into Common Purpose, or something nearer home. But at least Monckton has lifted a tiny corner of the rug, and peered at the horrors underneath.

By the time the rest of the world wakes up, it will be too late. It probably already is.