Eu

Monday

Katja Hoyer

Hungary, Poland and the EU’s ‘diversity’ problem

It is quite something when the self-proclaimed ‘illiberal’ prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, reminds Brussels of its liberal principles. As part of the ongoing row over a Hungarian law which bans the ‘depiction or promotion’ of homosexuality and gender reassignment, Orbán has argued that: ‘If we want to keep the European Union together, liberals must respect the rights of non-liberals. Unity in diversity.’ ‘Unity in diversity’ has been the official motto of the European Union for over 20 years. The idea that the continent can unite in a common political and economic framework without losing the diversity of its constituent nations underpins the very idea of a democratic union

Wednesday

William Nattrass

The EU is failing to stand up for eastern Europe

Will the EU stand up for eastern Europe? This question is now being asked by Ukraine following the announcement of a deal between Germany and the USA which paves the way for the completion of the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and western Europe. The deal reached by Merkel and Biden may have placated critics in Washington, but it has failed to allay eastern European concerns over the security implications of the project. The state most affected by Nord Stream 2, Ukraine, has now requested urgent consultations with the European Commission and the German government, adding an air of legal weight to its complaints by invoking provisions

Monday

Andrew Tettenborn

The EU’s menacing rule of law power grab

Officially the European Union may be a union of sovereign states. But its Commission increasingly has the air of an imperial chancellery, or perhaps the headquarters of some vast conglomerate giving instructions to the directors of its far-flung subsidiaries. The Commission’s annual Rule of Law report, published last week, is a case in point. It is well worth reading if you want to understand the EU mindset. Nominally a report to the European parliament and a number of central institutions, essentially it is a 30-page memo reminding the EU27 that the rule of law is part of the EU brand — and ordering member states to uphold it without any

Wednesday

Matthew Lynn

Boris’s Brexit deal isn’t worth sacrificing Northern Ireland for

There will be chaos at the borders. Food will run out at the supermarkets. Travellers will face long queues, and companies yet another round of disruption. As the UK lays the groundwork for breaking with the Northern Ireland Protocol, we will hear plenty of scare stories about how it might mean losing the Free Trade Agreement with the European Union. There is an element of truth in that, of course. The EU may well decide that if we are not sticking to the Protocol then the free trade deal has to go as well. But there is a flaw in that argument, and it is not exactly a minor one. In

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Is Starmer’s Labour plotting to reopen the Brexit deal?

Brexit is done and dusted, but when it comes to playing politics on the UK’s departure from the EU, the Labour party is still managing to get itself in a muddle. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, is the latest Labour frontbencher to send confusing messages about Brexit to voters.  Starmer’s party, we are told, wants to come to an arrangement with the European Union on recognition of professional standards, something Boris Johnson’s deal lacks. Labour is also seeking a bespoke veterinary agreement with the EU to overcome problems inherent in the Northern Ireland Protocol as it stands. The party also wants to make it easier for British bands to tour on the continent. Yet

Saturday

Andrew Tettenborn

The EU will regret its legal onslaught against Poland

When European governments openly disobey courts, ears prick up. When two courts simultaneously contradict each other on the same day and descend into an unseemly shouting-match, all bets are off. Welcome to the mad world of Poland’s legal relations with the EU. The ruling Law and Justice Party in Poland, PiS, is cordially detested in Brussels. Its policies, which are quite popular locally, are anathema to the liberal and cosmopolitan Euro-nomenklatura. Back in 2017, PiS introduced technical changes to the terms of appointment of the Polish higher judiciary, including a disciplinary chamber with political connections armed with powers in certain cases to sanction judges.  The measures were aimed at halting corruption. But

Friday

Matthew Lynn

The EU’s Brexit bill doesn’t add up

A dozen hospitals. A hundred million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, and a lot more of the Oxford one. Or even a few trips in one of Jeff Bezos’s new space rockets. Even with inflation, there is still plenty you can buy with an extra three to four billion pounds.  In recent days, it has emerged there is a big gulf between what the European Union insists we owe under the terms of our departure agreement, and what the UK believes is due.  In the EU’s accounts, it put the sum at £40.5 billion. The UK now says it will be £37.3 billion, or £3.2 billion less than the EU reckons.

Gabriel Gavin Gabriel Gavin

The EU’s growing migrant war with Belarus

The EU is building a wall — and they’re going to make Belarus pay for it. This week, the tiny Baltic nation of Lithuania began erecting a barbed-wire border fence on its frontier with its neighbour, Europe’s most notorious autocracy. Meanwhile, Brussels is ramping up economic sanctions against Belarus. Lithuania’s parliament has declared a state of emergency, citing a sharp rise in migrants attempting to illegally cross the border. More than 800 made the journey in the first week of July alone, coming from countries like Iraq, Iran, Syria and the Congo. In response, hundreds of troops have been deployed and construction of a 340-mile barrier is underway. The EU’s newly

Thursday

Steven Barrett

The rule of law is breaking down in the EU

There are 27 member states in the EU. Two have now declared they are not bound by EU law. Based on the law as set out in the treaty each member state signs when it joins the EU, that means both countries are in breach of international law. The first country in breach of international law was Germany. I wrote about this last year. The German court said it wasn’t bound by EU law because the EU had no power to act on the legality of the ECB’s bond-buying programme during the pandemic. The Germans said ‘you can’t answer this question, so we will’. Crucially, the EU disagreed and the

Dalibor Rohac

Why is the EU copying China’s Belt and Road initiative?

Much like Mark Twain’s apocryphal quote about arguing with idiots who ‘drag you down to their level and beat you with experience,’ Europeans should think twice about whether they want to try to compete with China when it comes to the use of economic power in pursuit of geopolitical ends. ‘It’s useless moaning about it,’ the German foreign minister Heiko Maas (correctly) told journalists last week, when discussing Chinese economic power at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels. The EU foreign ministers tasked the European Commission on Monday with preparing a European ‘strategic response’ to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Provisionally dubbed ‘A Globally Connected Europe’ –

Tuesday

Gerri Peev

Meet the punk comic taking on Bulgaria’s elite

Inconclusive election results following a snap election; a politician at the helm who made his name on satirical TV shows; a football fanbase condemned for its racism; and a population that has a polarised attitude to the EU. Bulgaria perhaps has more in common with England than would first appear.  Dissatisfaction spilled over onto ballot papers this weekend during the country’s snap general election. This has culminated in a celebrity-led, anti-elitist party winning the greatest share of the vote by a whisker: 24 per cent compared to the incumbent GERB party’s 23.5 per cent. Slavi Trifonov, who has dabbled in folk-rock, hip-hop and punk music, and starred in his own political sketch shows,

Monday

Ross Clark

A minimum corporation tax is nothing to celebrate

So is this what the new era of global co-operation looks like? The EU has agreed to delay the introduction of its proposed digital levy until the autumn to allow negotiations for a global minimum corporation tax. Biden had demanded that the digital tax be dropped, seeing it as a direct attack on US tech giants. In other words, the EU appears keen to compromise in the face of US pressure — something that it would have been less likely to do under Donald Trump. The move makes it more likely that a global minimum corporation tax of 15 per cent will now become reality. Is that a cause to

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

Why has the EU let German car manufacturers off the hook?

Two billion? Five billion? Perhaps ten billion to make it a nice round number? For colluding on diesel emissions you might think the European Union would hand out a pretty stiff fine to the big German auto-manufacturers. After all, it has hit American tech giants with huge penalties for far lesser transgressions.  Yet in the end, its response was predictable: the EU has largely let them off the hook. The reason? It turns out that protecting German auto manufacturers is what the Commission really cares about – and nothing else matters. According to Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s anti-trust chief, German manufacturers ‘possessed the technology to reduce harmful emissions beyond what was legally required under EU

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Lukashenko’s migrant warfare against the EU

When you have already forced a plane down with spurious claims of a bomb threat, just to arrest one dissident journalist, where do you go from there? For the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, a man looking to punish the European Union after it imposed sanctions on Belarus, it seems that exploiting would-be migrants and asylum seekers is the way forward. Last week, the dictator threatened to send masses of migrants to the EU, in retaliation for the bloc’s sanctions against Belarus. ‘We will not stop anyone’, Lukashenko said, saying migrants would be on their way to a ‘warm and comfortable Europe’ soon. His goal in particular appeared to be to

Andrew Tettenborn

Britain should resist copying the EU’s corporate responsibility law

Big corporations have a lot not to be proud of, and we certainly could do with laws to rein in some of their excesses. But that doesn’t mean that we should necessarily nod those laws through without a careful look.  A case in point is the demand made in recent days for the government to follow an EU initiative and introduce a ‘corporate responsibility’ law. This would require British companies to vet their entire supply chains for, among other things, human rights violations. The EU scheme in question, based on a European parliament vote in March, is what you have to look at to see just what is being asked for. Its demands

Tuesday

Susanne Mundschenk

Should flights be taxed more?

The European Commission is set to propose EU-wide minimum taxes on kerosene, the fuel for planes, as part of their EU energy taxation plans to meet the new eco 2030 targets. However, it remains to be seen if this tax will be agreed by all member states, as taxation issues require unanimity.  A leaked draft from the Commission proposes a minimum tax on flights inside the EU. Freight flights are to be exempted, so as not to give a competitive advantage to non-EU competitors, which could be seen as a muddled approach to satisfy too many objectives at once. And there are alternatives, such as including aviation companies in the

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The UK’s immigration figures are a fantasy

Journalists filing to deadline are apt to dig only so deep when googling for statistics, which in themselves are sometimes derided as worse than damned lies. Thus we’re often suckers for ‘known facts’. Besides, if the UK’s Office for National Statistics doesn’t produce reliable data, where’s a poor scribbler to turn? Nevertheless, the current uptake of Britain’s offer of settlement status to resident EU citizens exposes even this upright organisation’s immigration statistics as, well, worse than damned lies. Far more generous than the begrudging bureaucratic bramble of reciprocal packages on offer to Brits resident on the Continent post-Brexit, the UK’s settlement scheme for resident EU citizens had, by the end

Wolfgang Münchau Wolfgang Münchau

Angela’s ashes: Merkel is leaving the EU in chaos

Perhaps the most absurd thing ever said about Angela Merkel is that she was the de facto leader of the western world. She has certainly been one of Europe’s most successful politicians, if you define success as political survival. But as she comes to the end of her 16 years in office, her luck is deserting her and the mess she has created is becoming horribly apparent. She leaves behind a split EU that is not just unled but might now be unleadable. Humiliating reminders of Merkel’s imploded authority come regularly. Take her latest idea to keep British tourists out of the EU this summer. Germany is imposing a mandatory

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The sausage war ceasefire is a good sign for UK-EU relations

The sausage dispute between the UK and the EU may sound like something out of Yes Minister but it is the canary in the coal mine of UK-EU relations. In a sign of some progress, Maroš Šefčovič, the Commission vice-president, will announce this afternoon that the EU will agree to a UK request to extend the grace period for sausages and other chilled meats going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland for another three months. Both sides will offer their own unilateral declarations on what the extension means. RTE’s Tony Connelly provides a typically thorough run through of what we can expect. Two things are particularly worth noting. First, the

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

French democracy is in trouble – and the EU is to blame

France’s airwaves have been crackling with indignation this week, as politicians wring their hands at the record abstention in the first round of voting in the regional elections. Sixty six per cent of French voters found something else to do last Sunday other than vote, prompting Gabriel Attal, a government spokesman, to proclaim that the ‘abysmal’ turnout ‘imperilled democracy’. ‘French democracy is sick,’ said Emmanuel Rivière of polling institute Kantar Public. It was perhaps unfortunate timing for Monsieur Attal that his remarks were made on Wednesday June 23, five years to the day since the British people voted to leave the European Union. The milestone didn’t pass unnoticed in France, particularly among