EU politics: AFD creates a dilemma
Tuesday 16 April 2013
 The "euro-rescuers" are in a dilemma, says the paper. They do not know how to stop the advent of euro-critics. They have "no convincing answers" to the issues raised by the new party and see them as "pure populism". Instead of dealing with them, therefore, they are mounting "fierce attacks" on the party. The rhetoric coming from the "rescuers" is eerily familiar. CDU spokesman Steffen Seibert says, "Millions of jobs are secure because we are in this currency as an export country. Whoever endangers that threatens prosperity, jobs and social security". The response to the shortcomings of the eurozone does no justify the exit advocated by AFD, he argues. Rather, they require "solidarity and necessary reforms". Even more robust is Michael Grosse-Broemer, the chief whip of Merkel's parliamentary party. The yearning for a return to the deutschemark is "dangerous nostalgia", he says, then adding, the sentence "Germany does not need the euro" is fundamentally flawed. Grosse-Broemer argues that despite all the difficulties, Germany could reach its full potential only in a united Europe. Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) pours scorn on the AFD, saying that the party is no risk to the government because it had no alternative. "It's a contradiction in itself", he says. It is not offering any real solutions and it is not enough to complain without saying how to do it better". Former foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and a member of the FDP, declares that those in Germany who overtly or covertly work for the end of monetary union "put the great work of unification at risk". He adds: "There is no responsible alternative to Europe". Nevertheless, the FDP's finance expert Frank Schäffler attributes the enthusiasm for the AFD to the wide popular resentment about the euro debt policy in Europe. "The AFD hits the sore spot for middle class voters and has great success with it", he says, adding that the government coalition had "neglected their core voters with their Euro-destruction policy". All this and more sounds so much like the British situation that it is uncanny, the earlier parallelsbeing reinforced each day. Not least is the belief that the AFD is most likely to harm Merkel's centre-right coalition and possibly rob it of its majority, letting in the Socialists. In other respects also, there are uncanny parallels. Like UKIP, the AFP seems to display a certain amount of policy incoherence, being unable to decide whether it wants a complete abolition of the euro, or retrenchment, with the creation of a smaller currency union based on northern European countries. There is also a great fear, expressed by some, that the party could attract Germany's residual "xenophobic flotsam" – the neo-Nazis - which could make them virtually unelectable. And Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank in London, pours cold water on the AFD's ambitions. The party, he says, "is playing to deeply ingrained German fears of inflation and runaway public deficits". But, he says, with inflation at 1.4 percent and Germany's small fiscal surplus, "mobilising these fears is an uphill struggle". Everhard Holtmann, a political science professor and director of research at the Center for Social Research at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, is also dismissive of the party's chances. He thinks it is unlikely that it will gain enough votes to secure representation, unless the euro crisis would worsen dramatically in the summer. "Otherwise it would be difficult for the AFD to succeed as a single-issue, protest party". Holtmann also believes that AFD's attacks on the establishment parties could "lead to expert counter-expertise in the field". A number of prominent economists have publicly expressed the view that there is no alternative to Germany remaining in the euro. Bernd Lucke, of course, remains unrepentant, claiming that the criticism of his party by Merkel and her allies is motivated simply by self-preservation. Merkel has said that, "if the euro fails, then Europe falls". But Lucke believes that this is not the case. "If the euro fails, it’s not Europe that fails, it's Angela Merkel that fails", he counters. Lucke is now sure his party will clear the five percent hurdle necessary for parliamentary representation. He even thinks it realistic to expect ten percent of the vote. But, even if that is the case, it does not guarantee success. The example of the Pirate Party shows that popularity booms can be short-lived in Germany. Support for the Pirates, which campaigns for Internet freedom, reached a peak of eleven percent a year ago. They now fail to reach the five percent threshold in any of the six regular polls. No other party has been tipped to break the five party system dominated by Merkel's bloc, the SPD, the Greens, the FDP and the anti-capitalist Left Party. Merkel & Co must be hoping that the AFD's popularity is similarly short-lived. However, Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at Berlin's Free University, reminds us that the answer to the eurocrisis is political union in Europe. This goes far beyond what we have seen so far, he says. "Merkel wants this union, but the question is if her voters want it too". If they don't, Bernd Lucke could be on a roll. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 16/04/2013 |
UK politics: skewing the EU debate
Monday 15 April 2013
 Thus it comes as no surprise that the latest survey on EU sentiment from this organisation has most UK companies want to stay in "Europe", with some powers brought back home. Conveniently, this finding is in complete accord with the views of BCC's director general, John Longworth. He thus happily declares that, "Companies believe that re-negotiation, rather than further integration or outright withdrawal, is most likely to deliver business and economic benefit to the UK". The survey is dutifully reported by the BBC, which apparently offered five options: full withdrawal from the EU; withdrawal from the EU followed by a trade agreement; remain in the EU with specific powers transferred back from Brussels to Westminster; remain in EU and integrate further with other EU member states; remain in EU with no change to current relationship. Interestingly, nothing on offer even approximates the Article 50 option, which shows how much the structure of a survey can distort the debate. If you put several "risky" choices alongside what looks like a safe option, it should come as no surprise that the 65 percent of respondents favoured the safe choice, with only 18 percent of businesses favouring withdrawal. What would be really interesting would be the results of a survey that put to respondents that renegotiation was not a realistic proposition, and then offered the choices of status quo, EFTA/EEA membership, or "sudden death" withdrawal. What is the betting that EFTA/EEA would come out on top? Despite this, the BCC is locked into its skewed five scenarios and intends to repeat its survey throughout 2013 and 2014 to establish whether businesses' views on the potential economic impacts change over time. However, in the absence of any widespread publicity on more realistic options for withdrawal, those in favour of withdrawal will probably remain a minority. Based on these questions, though, the business view is not worth having. But that will not stop the BCC survey results being rolled out by Mr Cameron and sundry other europhiles, to "prove" that business is not in favour of leaving the EU. Most likely, that was the purpose of the survey in the first place - simply a ploy to neutralise anti-EU sentiment. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 15/04/2013 |
Booker: Andrew Roberts, the "celebrity" historian
Monday 15 April 2013
 One of the minor little mysteries of our time is how Andrew Roberts has somehow managed to win a reputation in the eyes of the world as a competent historian. It is true that when he was young, back in the 1990s he did write one or two not uninteresting books. But since then he has become something very different. Through assiduous self-promotion he has become a "celebrity historian", which means that, although he is given plenty of attention by the media, he no longer has to do his homework or get his facts right but can get away with writing the most amazing tosh. This becomes topical through the huge piece he published yesterday as the lead item in the pull-out supplement on "Margaret Thatcher, by those who knew her best", published by my own newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph. Apart from being, as usual, a relentless piece of self-promotion, this was riddled with errors which might have been understandable from a journalist trying to mug up the subject in a hurry. But from someone who likes to parade before the world as a historian it led one to wonder whether he ever bothers to check his facts at all. Let's start with two little factual howlers, He tells us that Mrs Thatcher was above all appalled and disgusted by the revelation that John Major carried on an affair with Edwina Currie because this was conducted "in Downing Street". Distasteful though it may be even to contemplate such a degrading subject, this sexual dalliance, according to the progenitor of the great salmonella-in-eggs scare, took place between 1984 and 1988. This was two years before Major was anywhere near Downing Street. Roberts goes on to allege that Mrs Thatcher was accused of having been responsible for the deaths of "368" Argentine sailors on the cruiser Belgrano. The generally accepted figure is 323. Much more seriously, however, since Roberts is alleged to be a "historian" and therefore someone who check his facts before rushing into print, he claims that Mrs Thatcher's "strident" "no, no, no" response in the Commons in October 1990 was somehow directed at the proposed "single European currency". Three times no, it wasn't. It was specifically directed, as I wrote yet again in my column in the same newspaper, at the claim by Jacques Delors a few days earlier that, within ten years, Europe would be ruled by a new government in which the European Commission would be the executive, the European Parliament would be the chief legislature and the Council of Ministers would be "the Senate". Three points from Delors. Three "noes" from Mrs Thatcher. No points to historian Roberts, who clearly hasn't got a clue what he was talking about. He then goes on to illustrate his claim that Mrs Thatcher was "always a more complex political operator than she liked to acknowledge" by pointing to the fact that she agreed to the Single European Act in 1986 and to Britain joining the ERM in 1990.
Clearly Roberts hasn't the faintest familiarity with the real story behind these two episodes, as he might have been able to establish had he bothered to read the detailed account given in that invaluable history The Great Deception, co-authored by myself and the proprietor/editor of this blog.
It is already quite well known, except to the great historian Roberts, that the only reason why Mrs Thatcher agreed to Britain joining the ERM was that she was forced to do so, totally against her will and judgement, by the ultimatum given her by her Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, and her Chancellor Nigel Lawson, that, if she didn't agree to it, they would both, as the senior members of her government, resign.
It was hardly an example of how she was a "complex political operator". She was made the target of a shameless act of political blackmail. As for her agreement to the treaty known as the Single European Act, North and I reconstructed in minute detail the story of how she was tricked into this in May 1985, when she was ambushed by her European colleagues at a European Council meeting in Milan. Mrs Thatcher was totally misled, not least by her Foreign Office officials, into thinking that all that was at stake was moves to improve the functioning of the Common Market, something which in no way, in her view, required a new treaty. What she was not told, either by her officials or by her treacherously Europhile Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, was that what the "colleagues" were after, led by Jacques Delors, was a major new step on the road to integration, which would require a new treaty because it involved a further major surrender of powers to Brussels, including the biggest-ever number of "competences" on which national vetoes would be abolished. Mrs T's real mistake, when she realised how badly she had been outmanoeuvred, was to pretend that the new treaty was just about the setting up of a ‘Single Market’, the issue she had thought it was about originally. That was why she whipped and guillotined the treaty through the House of Commons in 1986, with only a handful of MPs voting against, because she couldn't stand the thought of having to explain how the "Single European Act" was not just about the Single Market but was in fact a further massive step forward to creating a "Single Europe", exactly as its title indicated. Once again, Roberts clearly hasn't got the faintest idea what he is talking about, in claiming that Mrs T's agreement to this treaty shows how she was a "complex political operator".
He may in her declining years have sycophantically fooled her into thinking that he was such a "celebrity historian" that he was worthy to replace her as a trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive. But is he a genuine historian, who bothers to check his facts and has anything to add to our understanding of history? The answer to this must, alas, be three times "no".
COMMENT THREAD Christopher Booker 15/04/2013 |
EU politics: Europe stands for "disappointment and alienation"
Monday 15 April 2013
 The opening speech was delivered by Konrad Adam, former member of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung editorial board and for nearly seven years the chief political correspondent for Die Welt. Europe, he said, stood for "disappointment, outrage, and alienation", which drew the "thunderous applause" of the members. What has been gained over many decades, had been lost in just a few months, with the "alleged rescue policy" having "discredited Europe", Adam said. With their policy, the values of the French Revolution, liberty, equality, fraternity, had been "sold out" and the politicians were quite obviously not doing their duty. Instead, he had the impression from them that: "When God gives office, he also makes them crazy". Also speaking was Joachim Starbatty, professor of political economics and the man who has filed repeated complaints with Germany's constitutional court. He told members that, "Europe is tearing itself apart right now". According to Starbatty, "A currency which is supposed to have united a continent is doing precisely the opposite". His "take" on the currency was that it was weak and ailing largely due to the fact that individual members were no longer in the position to be able to sustain it. Therefore, he said, it would be better for non-competitive countries, like Greece, Ireland, Spain, Italy, etc, to leave". An alternative, Starbutty argued, would be for Germany to leave. If possible, Konrad Adam was even more forthright, speaking "clearly from the soul". Greece, he said, was ruled by the troika until further notice: "Loud men who don't get their mandate from the Greek people". He referred to the "great liberal" Ralf Dahrendorf saying that there had never been a functioning democracy beyond the nation state. "But you cannot say such a thing today or the language police intervene", Adam told the meeting. Responding to the slur that they were a "populist" party, Adam told his members that they should consider the accusation as a compliment. "After all", he said, "democracy is a very populist event because the last word is given to the people". When he then declared that the AFD wanted to offer voters an alternative to those who so stubbornly maintain their grip on the established parties", this had members rising to their feet applauding. AFD co-founder, Bernd Lucke, called for an "orderly exit" from the euro. The new party had started, he said, aimed at breaking out of the "straitjacket" of rigid and ancient parties. People, said Lucke, wanted to end the "hopeless rescue policy" - and the "blatant violation of democratic, constitutional and economic principles". If the CDU in the late nineties had told the people the truth, that Germany in the single currency would be liable for hundreds of billions of euros as a result of mismanagement in other countries, nobody would have believed them. But the "liability and debt euro" had now pitted people against each other and had even had southern Europeans making comparisons between Merkel and the Nazi Chancellor. And so it has begun. A new party has been born. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 15/04/2013 |
EU politics: the fatuity of reform
Sunday 14 April 2013
 That is not to say that the death of Margaret Thatcher was not an important event which demanded wide coverage, but the gross excesses of the media and their inability these days to show any restraint or sense of proportion is not a zero-sum game. News which is omitted because editors and journalists fall prey to any and every passing hystérie du jour is largely lost altogether, diminishing publish debate and weakening us as a society. So it is with the idea of EU "reform", that tired and jaded canard let loose this weekend by David Cameron after his meeting en famille with the German chancellor. So much have we heard of "reform" over the years that we joined the EU – whether it be CAP reform, CFP reform, or reform in general – that the very idea has long ago been discredited. Yet vacuous politicians such as David Cameron still trot it out, and the media still give it house room, as if it merited serious consideration. The antidote, of course, is news – and intelligent analysis – news of such issues as the latest EUCourt of Auditors report on EU support to the food-processing industry, published last week. In terms of a news event, this is by any measure, significant. The actual report argues that the bulk of the €5.6 billion spent on grants to the food processing industry over the last multi-annual period has in effect, been wasted, in failing entirely to meet the stated objectives of the fund. One could – and the media should – offer news reports on this, seeking to highlight and explain a complex issue, and put it in context. Take the €5.6 billion, for instance, and link it to the demand for an amendment budget of €11.2 billion, which is set to cause so much political grief in the very near future. Half of that could have been saved by omitting the failed food processing programme. But then we need not stop there. Another Court of Auditors Report looks at one tiny aspect of spending within the €75 billion European Social Fund – the schemes to assist older workers in the workplace. Interestingly, having looked at a limited set of programmes, from a sub-set which involved €1 billion expenditure, the Court found that neither the member states nor the European Commission were in a position to establish how many older workers benefited for the fund. Furthermore, it said, the amounts spent on this kind of action are also unknown. Going back a few more months, we find another report assessing the value of €5 billions-worth of expenditure on "cohesion policy investments in cost-effective energy efficiency". And, in a damning conclusion, the auditors found that "the right conditions in programming and financing had not been set to enable cost-effective energy efficiency investments". Furthermore, that found that money had been paid out on schemes without identifying where energy savings could be achieved, and whether they could be could be cost-effective. In effect, said the Auditors, the chosen measures and their cost could not be justified. Put these three reports together and you have identified just over €11 billion of waste, thereby demonstrating that, with better control of expenditure, the amendment budget would not have been needed. And there comes the reform agenda. If only the system was reformed, say the siren voices, scandals like this could be avoided. But that is where the analysis is needed. Here, we are not talking about corruption and fraud, per se, but simply badly managed programmes. The trouble here is that they are entirely managed by member states who process applications, check proper completion of the funded schemes and pay out the money – then reclaiming it from the EU. The Commission has neither the manpower nor the authority to gainsay the expenditure (although it can reclaim funds retrospectively) and pays out on demand. The heart of the problem, thus, is the very nature of the system. Member states treat the funds as a way of getting money from the EU and use them to subsidise their industries and other enterprises. And, as long as there is no accountability, such a situation will continue. Looking at this analytically, the only way the system could be improved is to give the European Commission far more power, and more staff, so that it could directly approve and supervise these schemes, taking over from the member states. But such an option would be politically untenable (even assuming that the Commission would do the job better), which means that we are doomed to suffer the existing flawed system. Yet, none of these Court of Auditor reports have been publicised by the British media, not even the most recent, where the egregious waste of €5.6 billion is recorded. To its credit, we find reference inDWN, and in specialist websites, but the supposedly eurosceptic British media are silent. Instead, tucked in amid the torrent of Thatcher coverage, we get the likes of this from The Independent. It tells us that, of the meeting between Cameron and Merkel, officials said the two leaders agree that the EU treaties would have to be changed, which Mr Cameron is banking on to renegotiate the UK's position in the EU. However, we are then informed that no agreement was reached on what form the changes would take, or when they would take place. "They both agree that further changes to the treaty will be needed in the future. What and when are issues that are obviously still to be decided", the paper reports. No wonder, on this blog at least, we are tearing our hair out at the vacuity of the debate. Getting to grips with the issues is like trying to paint fog. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 14/04/2013 |
Booker: the lady's for turning
Saturday 13 April 2013
But one soundbite was used again and again to symbolise what seemed to make her such a dominating force of nature in the shifting sands of our politics – her line in 1981: "You turn if you want to, the lady's not for turning".
It was meant to convey the unshakeable conviction and indomitable will that allowed her to push through all those extraordinary changes that transformed Britain from the "sick man of Europe" she inherited in 1979 into the infinitely more confident, competitive and prosperous country it had become when she was ousted from power in 1990. Ironically, however, one thing missing from all the tributes paid to her since last Monday – along with that ludicrous upwelling of hatred so eagerly seized on by the BBC – has been any recognition of how, on two of the most momentous issues with which she became identified, she herself ended up making a massive U-turn. Although in each case it was too late to undo the damage done earlier, before she came to understand the real nature of the problem, she ended up with a view diametrically opposed to that she began with.
The first of these was her entanglement with "Europe". In the 1975 referendum, as the Tories' new leader, she was happy to front the Yes campaign, fondly imagining that "Europe" was no more than an idealistic and prosperity-boosting move towards closer cooperation and freer trade with our neighbours.
As prime minister in 1979, she embarked on a painful learning curve, beginning with the five years she spent wrangling with her new European colleagues over the peculiar deal whereby Britain was about to become the largest single contributor to the Brussels budget. But from 1985, she awakened to what had all along been the real agenda of the "European project": that drive towards full political and economic union based on handing over ever more of the powers of national parliaments to a wholly new supranational system of government.
When she was ambushed into accepting a new treaty, the Single European Act, she tried to pretend that it was about little more than creating a more effective "single market". In fact, as its name indicated, this was another major step towards building "a single Europe".
From now on, she found herself increasingly isolated in her opposition to the relentless integration, as was reflected in her Bruges speech of 1988. In 1989, this became still more obvious as her fellow leaders, driven by Jacques Delors, prepared for the ambitious leap forward to be embodied in the Maastricht Treaty, including that supreme symbol of a "single Europe", a single currency. Knowing she would have a veto, the Europhiles saw her as the last huge obstacle to their ambitions. We recall in October 1990 her impassioned response to Delors's hubristic claim that within ten years Europe would be ruled by a new government, with the Commission as its executive, the European Parliament as its chief lawmaking body and the Council of Ministers as its Senate. To each of his points she famously replied "No, no, no". Both abroad and at home, the Europhiles now knew she had to go. Two weeks later, Geoffrey Howe's poisonous resignation speech, designed to allow his ally Michael Heseltine to challenge for the leadership, had done the trick. It was not the poll tax that brought her down but "Europe". From that time on, her contempt for the "European project" and all it stood for knew no bounds. In 1996, I and my family were with her at a house party in Scotland. She suggested one evening that the teenagers present, including my son Nicholas, should be given a chance to ask her questions. Nick asked her: "Lady Thatcher, do you think we should leave the European Union?" She replied: "There are five reasons why we should leave it". Ticking them off on the fingers of her hand, she spent 20 minutes outlining them. When this flight of oratory ended, Nick said: "Lady Thatcher, you've only given us four reasons. What is the fifth?" "You're quite right", she said, holding up her little finger. "The fifth reason why we should leave" – dramatic pause – "is that THEY STOLE OUR FISH". Six years later, in her last book, Statecraft, she couldn't have put her view more succinctly. She wrote: "…that such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European superstate was ever embarked on will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era. And that Britain, with her traditional strengths and global destiny, should ever have become part of it will appear a political error of the first magnitude". The second momentous issue on which Mrs Thatcher played a far more influential role than is generally realised was global warming. When the scare erupted in 1988, she was the first world leader who not only adopted it as the last great cause of her premiership, but made moves that helped to push it rapidly towards the top of the international agenda. She made passionate speeches to the Royal Society and the United Nations. Even more significantly, she gave full backing to one of the most fervent evangelists for the belief that the world was threatened by human emissions of carbon dioxide, Dr John Houghton, then head of the Met Office. No one played a more crucial role than Houghton in setting up in 1988 the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This was the body that was to become the central driver in promoting the worldwide scare over global warming through a series of mammoth reports, the first three of which Houghton did more to shape than anyone. Without their influence, we would not have had the Rio Earth Summit, the Kyoto Protocol, and all those political responses to the scare that, in the past two decades, have had such a dramatic impact on international energy policy – nowhere more disastrously and at greater cost than in the European Union, with Britain's suicidal Climate Change Act potentially the most damaging consequence of all. The fiasco of that mammoth Copenhagen conference in 2009 may have marked the moment when, politically, the panic over climate change finally began to crumble apart, as it became clear that the fast-growing countries of the developing world, led by China and India, were simply not going to buy into a treaty that would have landed mankind with the biggest bill in history. But seven years before that, again in her last book, Lady Thatcher had already written, under the heading "Hot air and global warming", what amounted to a complete recantation of her earlier views, voicing precisely those fundamental doubts over the warming panic that were later to become familiar. Pouring scorn on what she called "the doomsters", she questioned all the main scientific assumptions that had been used to drive the scare, from the conviction that the main force shaping the world climate is CO2, rather than natural factors such as solar activity, to exaggerated claims about rising sea levels. She mocked Al Gore and the futility of what she recognised as "costly and economically damaging" schemes to reduce CO2 emissions. She cited the 2.5 degree rise in temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period as having had almost entirely beneficial effects. She pointed out that the dangers of a world getting colder are far worse than those of a CO2-enriched world growing warmer. She recognised how distortions of the science had been used to mask an anti-capitalist, Left-wing political agenda that posed a very serious threat to human progress and prosperity. Thus, long before it became fashionable, Lady Thatcher was converted to the view of those who on both scientific and political grounds have become ever more sceptical of the entire climate change ideology. How odd it is that, even today, so few people realise what a key role she played in helping to promote that scare in the first place. But even fewer realise how she eventually came to make as great a U-turn on this issue as any in her life. Many people have noticed how, in trying to assess this force of nature who exploded to the centre of our national life 34 years ago, one so often has to balance the positives and the negatives in all she stood for. The upsides in the end far outweighed the downsides. But the fact that on these two great issues she came so radically to change her mind is yet another measure of the difference that has set her apart from all those political pygmies who have followed. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 13/04/2013 |
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