Politics

First the Irish, then the Czechs. José Manuel Barroso is eliminating enemies of the Lisbon Treaty — setting things up for the arrival of President Blair, says Brian M. Carney At first, the European Union’s critics had high hopes for José Manuel Durão Barroso. If Jacques Delors represented Brussels’s unbridled ambition and Romano Prodi its weakness for buffoonery and bumbling incompetence, then this soft-spoken Portuguese lawyer seemed to bring some modesty to the post of president of the European Commission. His appointment, some fancied, showed the institution was finally come of age. And, just maybe, was scaling back its centralising, federalist ambitions. How naive that all seems now. Barroso this

The good news for the Republican party is that it can’t get much worse; the bad news is that it’s pretty bad already. As Rod Dreher points out, a new Washington Post poll finds that just one in five Americans are prepared to identify themselves as Republicans. That’s some achievement in a two-party system. With apologies to Evelyn Waugh, you see, we may class political parties into four grades: Leading Party, First-Rate Party, Good Party and Party. Frankly, Party is pretty bad. Now this may be a rogue poll and the GOP may still do well in next month’s gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. Equally, the conservative base

This chart, pinched from Burning Our Money, shows how much work needs to be done if the Conservatives’ talk of handing power back to local communities is actually likely to amount to anything. As you can see, local government raises more of its own money in almost every other leading country. Only Ireland, Greece and, to my surprise, the Netherlands are more dependent upon central government.(Meanwhile, over on the good side of the chart are our friends in Australia and, especially, New Zealand.) Real Localism – and all the good things that are supposed to flow from it – demands a measure of fiscal responsibility. Without that accountability the rest