EU politics: give us some money!
Monday 22 April 2013
 Actually, the party has collected at least €580,000 but the trouble with being a fully-fledged political party is that you need millions to fight a campaign. Bernd Lucke reckons that he needs to raise at least three million euros, and then he has to complete with the SPD and CDU, which have over €20 million each available to them. The main sources of funding from the AFD are donations. However, large donations have not materialised and the highest sum so far contributed has been €5000. Thus, the party must bake small rolls, says FAZ. In a way, I feel quietly vindicated when it comes to the Harrogate Agenda. One can see the attraction of going high profile and hoping the funding catches up, but the risk of failure is high. Better, I think, to set up the systems and the financial base first, and then to start building the campaign. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 22/04/2013 |
Harrogate Agenda: workshops
Sunday 21 April 2013
My apologies for not following through last week, as I had promised, with an account of our workshop plans. The launch of the AFD took precedence, an event not without relevance to us.
What intrigued me more than anything about that launch was that, even with the high powered brains behind this anti-euro party, they still hadn't defined their main objective – whether they should go for the abolition of the single currency or shrink the eurozone to a smaller, northern currency union. A certain lack of direction also seems to apply to the Italian Five Star Movement, where contradictions and tensions seem to be evident and, of course, we have witnessed considerable incoherence with our own UKIP. Yet, an essential preconditions for a successful political movement are clarity of vision and the consistency of the message delivered – the two going hand-in-hand. And it is for lack of these that – most likely – the AFD initiative and others like it will eventually fail. Either that, or they will evolve into something different, and then possibly develop the essentials of success or be absorbed into another movement. With the Harrogate Agenda, though, we feel we have developed a clarity of vision in our six demands, but the delivery of our message cannot be left to chance. Although simple to express in brief, the detail is complex and easily misrepresented, as is the reasoning behind the six demands. Going back through historical examples of successful movements, one of the common attributes is the intensive training programme. Certainly, the Labour movement set great store by education, and other less savoury movements also directed much of their energies to training their supporters. Here, much the same must apply. There is a limit to how much people can absorb through pamphlets, books, web material and even videos. This may be the electronic age, but there is still no substitute for face-to-face contact, and formally structured training sessions. As much to the point, to multiply our capabilities, we need recruits who can learn and spread the message via this medium, so we see the idea of running a series of workshops not only as the best mechanism for teaching people about the Harrogate Agenda, but also as a means of training the teachers. Possible formats encompass half-day, one-day and weekend sessions, with a series of talks, initially comprising an exploration of the background to the Harrogate Agenda, and a detailed examination of the six demands. But we would then move on to sessions on strategy and tactics, teaching people how to take the Agenda forward. Currently, the plan is to trial the first workshop this autumn, and to have a workable product available for roll-out early next year, to local audiences. And once we have a stable format, we will be ready to teach our recruits how to replicate the sessions to their own audiences. This will involve training in public speaking, confidence-building, the use of visual aids such as powerpoint, and pointers on the organisation and marketing of the sessions. With that, we believe workshops will be the best and most effective way of building up a knowledgeable cadre of supporters, going for depth rather than breadth. In the early stages, we would sooner have ten, a hundred and then a thousand trainers with in-depth knowledge of the Agenda, than many thousands with a slight acquaintance of the issues. These will be our advance guard – the multitude will follow. COMMENT: HARROGATE AGENDA THREAD Richard North 21/04/2013 |
UK politics: the opinion poll beckons
Sunday 21 April 2013
 It is no surprise, therefore, that the elections tend to be treated as a large-scale opinion poll, in anticipation of which the Observer has published its own poll. This finds Labour on a mere 35 percent with the Tories "still in the doldrums" on 29 percent. Labour's shrinking lead was the subject of a recent piece in the New Statesman, whence it noted Peter Kellner's observations that no modern opposition had ever won a general election without being at least 20 points ahead at mid-term (below).  By this measure, the Tories should romp home at the general, but New Statesman argues that the right is divided and the Lib-Dem vote is likely to collapse in Tory-Labour marginals. The "right", in this context, is taken to include the bulk of UKIP voters and, with the current poll putting its support at 17 percent, the greater effect of the UKIP vote is expected to drag down the Tory vote and open the way for Labour. With displaced Lib-Dem votes going to Labour in greater numbers, one can therefore expect Labour to do better than the modest poll lead indicates. Another distorting factor is the turnout which, if it follows present trends, should be at an all-time low for the forthcoming local elections, and possibly also for the general. And recent observations suggest that low turnout tends to favour those who are best able to organise the postal vote – most often the incumbent. Despite the uncertainties, though, the media still has difficulty in widening out the elections beyond the two party (plus one) system, thus like The Sunday Times reporting in terms of wins for the establishment parties. This paper thus has details of an analysis carried out Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher of Plymouth University, suggesting that Labour will gain 350 council seats, while the Tories will lose 310 and the Liberal Democrats 130. Nevertheless, they concede that, with UKIP in the field, this is the "most unpredictable local contests for years". The Sunday Telegraph, on the other hand, goes for a more lurid projection, suggesting that the Tories could lose as many as 600 of the two thousand-plus seats up for grabs. It takes the Sunday Mirror to talk up the role of UKIP, retailing fears that many of the Tory votes will go to UKIP, putting the overall losses at 500 seats. A guessing game on the number of seats won or lost, however, seems to be the extent of the media sophistication. One can understand, therefore, why the Italian Five Star Movement is moving towards the idea of direct democracy, restricting the powers of elected representatives. Until something more fundamental such as this is on the agenda, the elections will increasingly become an empty numbers game – and one that attracts less and less interest and excitement. Even the politicians, it seems, are having difficulty drumming up enthusiasm, and if they can't get worked up, it is unlikely that the rest of the population will follow. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 21/04/2013 |
Booker: EU stares bankruptcy in the face
Sunday 21 April 2013
 However, this is the EU we are talking about, and there is always a way round such tiresome limitations. What the Commission does is defer payments through a system called RAL (reste à liquider). This is a process of taking on commitments which, although they will come due eventually, have not legally been translated into payments – i.e., no invoices have been submitted. A commitment, says the Commission, is "only" a pledge to make a money transfer in the future. It only becomes "outstanding" when an invoice is approved for payment. Until then, it doesn't have to be shown in the books. The sum of the commitments reflect policies agreed at EU level, with corresponding amounts "foreseen" in the legal acts of the respective spending programmes, such as the seventh research framework programme, "Lifelong learning", the European regional and social funds, rural development, the European Return Fund, and the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance. By any measure, the sums involved are huge. As it stood at the end of 2011 the RAL amounted to €207 billion and, by the end of 2012, it had grown to €217 billion. Previously, the Commission has squared the circle by bumping the commitments to the end of the multi-annual budgetary period, but payments are now being deferred beyond that, all in expectation of continually increasing payments from member states. However, it was already getting worried by the extent of its commitments in 2011 and when, last year, the member states refused to increase the budget and (so far) have yet to agree to an amendment budget for last year, there is now a very real prospect that the EU will not be able to pay its bills. Technically, it will be insolvent. Thus does Booker ask in this week's column whether this should be making more headlines than it has that, since its astronomic debt is nearly twice as large as its annual income. This, though, is by no means the only problematical area for the EU. Wherever we now look at the EU, Booker writes, its affairs seem to be in an astonishing mess. There is the ongoing slow-motion train crash of the euro. There is rising panic over the policy of unrestricted immigration, which threatens at the year's end to flood richer countries such as Britain with millions of Romanians and Bulgarians. As Europe's economies stagnate or shrink, the EU's environmental policies fall apart, with the growing refusal of many countries, led by Poland and Germany, to accept curbs on fossil fuels. Yet, few people appreciate that all these signs of breakdown have something in common: that the policies giving rise to them all go back to the most widely misunderstood of all the European treaties, the Single European Act (SEA), which Margaret Thatcher was ambushed into accepting in 1985. This was the treaty she said was not necessary, because initially she thought all it was about was making the workings of the original Common Market more effective under the existing rules. What Thatcher didn't realise, because she was not properly briefed by her officials, was that it was always intended to be about very much more than just a "single market". As its name indicated – which Booker and I set out for the first time in detail in our book The Great Deception – SEA was always planned, by Jacques Delors, François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl and the other European leaders who ganged up against her, to be the first of two treaties that would take the old "Community" a further giant step forwards to being a "Single Europe". The other, the Treaty on European Union, was to be agreed at Maastricht five years later. In fact, the SEA and Maastricht were originally intended to be one treaty, as framed by Spinelli, and the split was only made on the advice of Mitterrand. But the SEA was every bit as important as Maastricht, not least because it included the plan to create a single currency (which was why, up to the last minute, Mrs Thatcher considered vetoing it). This treaty also opened the door to unrestricted immigration by turning Europe into "a space without frontiers". It created that Cohesion Fund, and it was the treaty that gave the EU the power to dictate environmental policy, under which, as early as 1991, it drew up its Strategy to Limit Carbon Dioxide Emissions in response to the panic over global warming. It was because Mrs Thatcher was so misled about these wider purposes, Booker argues, that she herself never explained to the British people that it was about so much more than the "Single Market" – although even this was to produce that unprecedented avalanche of directives which, far from boosting Europe's prosperity, has left it the least dynamic economic bloc in the world. Only now can we see the real price being paid for so much that the treaty set in train: the shambles brought about by the euro, the debts run up, which there is scarcely enough money in all Europe to repay; the rising alarm over unrestricted immigration; the chaos into which we are now being plunged by the EU's self-deceiving policies on energy and climate change; the seemingly insoluble mess in which the EU itself has been landed by a Cohesion Fund now threatening it with bankruptcy. Yet even now, under the fond illusion that this treaty was only about the “single market” – and that it was one of Mrs Thatcher's finest achievements – none of our politicians will explain to us where all these disasters stemmed from. The sad truth, Booker concludes, is that scarcely any of them know. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 21/04/2013 |
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