EU politics: tower of Babel now official policy
Thursday 18 April 2013
The long running issue for the NHS over whether doctors and nurses can be required to speak English might just have taken on a new twist.
This arises from the ECJ in Luxembourg which has ruled on a decree passed by the Flemish regional government. The decree requires that all cross-border employment contracts have to be drafted in Dutch, otherwise they are null and void, and the European court has found that this contravenes EU law and, in particular the treaty provisions on freedom of movement. The case arose when a Dutch resident, Anton Las, was hired in 2004 as a Chief Financial Officer by PSA Antwerp, a company established in Antwerp (Belgium) but belonging to a multinational group with a registered office in Singapore. The employment contract was drafted in English and stipulated that Mr Las should carry out his work in Belgium. Then, in 2009, by a letter drafted in English, Mr Las was dismissed by PSA Antwerp, who paid him a severance allowance calculated on the basis of his employment contract. Mr Las brought an action before the Arbeidsrechtbank (Labour Court, Belgium) claiming that the provisions of the employment contract were null and void because they infringed the provisions of the Flemish Decree on Use of Languages. He sought, inter alia, a higher severance allowance, in accordance with Belgian employment law. That ended up with the case going to the ECJ, to determine whether the Flemish Decree infringed freedom of movement for workers within the EU, in that it imposed, when hiring workers for cross-border posts, to draft all documents relating to the employment relationship in Dutch. The Flemish government argued that the law was needed to protect the Dutch language (particularly against the fracophone Walloons, one supposes), but the ECJ was having none of it. It held that EU law precluded measures which might place EU nationals at a disadvantage when they wish to pursue an economic activity in the territory of another Member State. However, parties to a cross-border employment contract do not necessarily have knowledge of Dutch, on which basis, legislation which is liable to have a dissuasive effect on non-Dutch-speaking employees and employers from other Member States, constitutes a restriction on freedom of movement for workers. In such a situation, the establishment of free and informed consent between the parties requires those parties to be able to draft their contract in a language other than the official language of that Member State. Thus is the principle established that the insistence on the use of the official language of an EU Member State, when dealing with employees from other EU countries (as well as EEA countries), cannot be insisted upon. Workers from Poland, for instance – it would appear – could now demand all documents to be available in the Polish language. More to the point, it would seem that insistence on the requirement to speak the official language of a Member State might constitutes a restriction on freedom of movement for workers, in which case we might be back to nurses who can't speak English. However, there is one small get out, in that the ECJ states that restrictions are justified if they pursue objectives in the public interest, are appropriate to ensuring the attainment of that objective, and are strictly proportionate. Possibly, that could permit employers to require that some of their employees speak English although, since that is fast becoming a minority language in some areas, even this cannot be taken for granted. The tower of Babel is now official policy. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 18/04/2013 |
EU politics: the corporate view
Thursday 18 April 2013
 The contrarian is Marjorie Scardino, the first woman chief executive of a FTSE 100 company. She was boss of the Financial Times and Penguin owner, Pearson, for 16 years, leaving in 2012, and yesterday delivered the annual Hugo Young lecture in London. This was sufficiently prestigious for David Cameron in 2009 to deliver the lecture but it has now become so obscure that only the Guardian has mentioned it. Even then, the full speech does not seem to be available online. Nevertheless, the Dame – for she is one - Marjorie Scardino is telling us that she believes the UK business community will ultimately back the European Union in any referendum on Britain's membership. She thinks business leaders were "intelligent enough" to know where their best interests lay, which was in closer European integration – even though her faith in the British business community generally was "at a nadir". "I think they will be for Europe in the end. I think the business community is smart enough to realise that just having a trade union is not enough", she said. "They are smart enough to know they need to be part of a union that has political and financial power". That is the voice of the unreformed europhile, but it also represents a strain of opinion that is probably very prevalent in the amoral world of corporate business. It is one which owes no loyalty but to itself, and goes wherever advantage might lie. Scardino's comments, though, were not part of her speech, but made during a question and answer session after delivering the lecture. In her speech, she said she thought Hugo Young, europhile extraordinaire, and author of a book about Thatcher, entitled One of Us, would "likely have scolded the government for pandering to UKIP". It can't be irrelevant that Scardino was born and raised in Texas – especially as the Guardian thought to mention it. She has only lived in the UK for twenty years and, such is her grasp of European history that she believes the EU is in need of leaders of the stature of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to help it through its current political and financial malaise. Europe, of course, has experience of great leaders, and it was precisely because of that that the peculiar structure of the European Union was devised, demonstrating – as if it was necessary – that her grasp of the projet is slender indeed – usually a necessary precondition for being in favour of it. Only someone imbued with the most profound ignorance could, as she did in her speech, draw comparisons between the EU and the development of the US as a political union over more than two centuries, declaring that "having a single, strong leader was one of the factors that had helped her native country survive numerous political crises that could have torn it apart, including the civil war". Of course, having a constitution which limited the powers of the executive, might have had something to do with it, as well as the makings of a democracy, But, to Scardino, the problem is the "paucity of imagination among politicians and business leaders" responsible for making decisions about the EU's political and financial future. "If you don't have anyone brave enough to say, 'We've got to have something to bind ourselves together,' you are never going to have [a sense of union like the US has]," she added, then asserting: "The politics of Europe is unimaginative and bureaucratic". This is what passed for corporate wisdom these days, following which we are told that, another lesson from the history of the US was that building a union between disparate groups of people takes time, above all else. Scardino tells us that the US grew from 13 British colonies that shared a common language and culture, whereas the EU was trying to forge closer union from countries that in some cases had been in existence for more than 1,000 years, with "very, very long histories and very well-dug-in legacies". "It's not about legislatures being more compromising; it's not about anything other than time. It takes a long time to build democracy, to build freedom", she says. But, since the EU is trying to build neither, this should not be her concern. She should be "intelligent enough" to understand that. Failing that, she should try to understand that political integration is not a choice that should belong to business, or one in which we need lessons from a corporate ex-CEO. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 18/04/2013 |
Thatcher: end of an era
Wednesday 17 April 2013
 But, I also observe, that I was one of the hundreds of thousands who filed past his coffin after he had died, and I watched his funeral. You really did, I wrote, then have a sense that an important moment in history had passed. That same sense pervades with the funeral today of Margaret Thatcher, the passing of an end of an era. I have to say though, with the funeral procession taking the same route as Churchill, comparisons are invidious. By contrast, her send-off was a sorry little thing (below).  In a way, though, that is entirely fitting. Churchill was the last prime minister of Empire, and even in 1965 the United Kingdom enjoyed the remnants of power. Almost exactly twenty years later, defence cuts and a retreat from Empire had reduced the Armed Forces to a rump, that had difficulty assembling a task force to deal with the third rate power in one of our last, far-flung outposts. The Falklands War, however – fortunately a success, but a close-run thing – was the making of Margaret Thatcher, more so even that her contest with Arthur Scargill and his miners. This was a good, "clean" victory, where the bands could play, and the flags could wave, and we could feel good about being British again. But that, probably, was also the last time. The true legacy of Margaret Thatcher, was the Single European Act, which presaged a huge leap forwards in European political integration, Part I of a treaty of the European Union, the second part of which was to follow during John Major's tenure, as the Maastricht Treaty. This was followed in short order by the wave of new EC directives aimed at the "completion of the Single Market", unleashing a torrent of regulation that brought Booker and I together, and had Major turning to Michael Heseltine, the great europhile, to launch a "deregulation" initiative. In the nature of things, the trauma and disruption to so many business, which Booker and I were to record, was attributed to John Major, all within the context of deteriorating relations with what was to become the European Union. The foundations, though, were laid by Margaret Thatcher, with her agreement to the Single European Act. The damage was done then, and continues to this day. By 1988, when Thatcher started to recant, giving her ground-breaking Bruges speech, it was too late – the damage had already been done. And, in any case, December 1988 brought Edwina Curry and the salmonella-in-eggs scare, the first of a series of food scares which dominated the headlines for two years and more. With these, from the administration led by the "free market" Margaret Thatcher, came a torrent of regulation and diktats, the scale of which we had never before seen outside of wartime. These gainsaid any credentials that Mrs Thatcher might have had as a business-friendly prime minister. When the chips were down, she reached for the law book, making her no different from the rest. That, of course, is not to say that she was not a great lady, and she undoubtedly added to the gaiety of life, her achievements real and substantial. But, while the reputation of every great figure ends up blurred by countless myths, it is as well to acknowledge that, even for her friends and admirers, Margaret Thatcher was a mixed blessing. As the memory of today's sad, diminished little procession fades, the greater legacy of Thatcher, for good and bad, will keep us troubled for many more years to come. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 17/04/2013 |
EU politics: backloading to a crisis
Wednesday 17 April 2013
 This all started back last year, when the Commission decided to do something to arrest the decline in the price of the EUAs (carbon credits) which were languishing at about €7 per ton, as opposed to the €30 that they were expected to reach at this stage. In the July, the Commission had floated three options: delaying the auctioning of 400 million, 900 million, or 1.2 billion credits until the end of the 2013-20 period, in order to force up the price, a process known as "backloading". In order to do this, the Commission needed the power to alter the timescale of permit auctions, claiming it was necessary "to ensure an orderly functioning of the market". The proposal to put this into effect was published on 25 July 2012, and it was this which came up for approval in Strasbourg yesterday. By November, serious reservations were being expressed, and already MEPs had been uneasy about the proposals, arguing that the last thing a fragile economic recovery needed additional costs heaped on energy usage. So, when it came to the crunch, the Parliament turned down the Commission's plan – by the slender margin of 19 votes (334 against the proposal and 315 for) - leaving the carbon market "in a coma". The vote was lost partly owing to a rebellion by the UK's Tory MEPs, who defied David Cameron on this, the official British position being to support the attempts to ramp up the carbon price. As a result, from midday yesterday when carbon credits were trading at €3.15, after the vote they plummeted to €2.63, down on the previous all-time low of €2.84 last year. It is not only the Parliament that has opposed the plan. At Council, Poland - heavily reliant on carbon-intensive coal – was against the idea, and Germany has failed to take a formal position because of divisions within its government on the issue. German Economy Minister Philipp Roesler typified the antis, declaring: "Reducing the number of emissions certificates would be an intervention in a functioning market system. It would place an additional burden on our industry and harm the competitiveness of Germany and the whole EU". Sadly, though, Britain does not get the benefit of this market collapse, Mr Osborne having already decided to add to the cost of the carbon credits, with an additional £4.94 in carbon tax. This, while continental industry and electricity consumers will be paying something like £2 per ton of carbon dioxide produced, the British equivalents will be paying about £7. With the UK government committed to driving the carbon price up to £18 in 2018, to £30 in 2020 and to £70 in 2030, using the carbon tax mechanism, we now face the spectre of the EU's carbon market collapsing completely, leaving the UK as the only country in the EU handicapped in this way. There is, however, one good thing to come out the debacle. Yesterday's vote has severely upset Bryony Worthington, founder of the environmental group Sandbag, and author of the Climate Change Act. "The carbon market in Europe has suffered a real blow today", she complains. "The world is watching and the EU must continue to show leadership", she had previously warned. It was, and it did – or, at least, the MEPs did. But not the way our Bryony wanted. We are so sad. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 17/04/2013 |
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