Eu

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 March 2014

Home Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour party, promised that, if elected, his administration would hold a referendum on membership of the European Union only if there was a new transfer of power to Brussels, which he called ‘unlikely’. If Scotland votes for independence, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds might have to move their legal homes to London under European Union law, the BBC reported. BBC Three is to be closed as an on-air channel, to go online only. The future of BBC Four is also in question. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, told the Treasury Select Committee that interest rates could reach

David Blackburn

Ed Miliband’s non-policy EU policy

‘You only offer a referendum if you want to ratify your existing policy,’ a Tory veteran told me this morning while discussing Ed Miliband’s recent referendum announcement. The Tory illustrated his point with reference to the Major government’s row over a proposed referendum on the single currency. He said that the pro-European side of the argument ran from a referendum, fearing that the public would say ‘no’ to EMU. His logic was: there isn’t time to change minds during a referendum campaign, so the public backs the status quo. Leaving aside the matter of whether or not this old Tory’s interpretation of those historical events is correct, his logic suggests that Miliband

Allie Renison

Eurosceptics have lost a valuable general – Bob Crow

When Nigel Farage had the temerity to nod at Bob Crow’s euroscepticism while paying his respects to the late RMT leader, some were quick to accuse him of cheap political point-scoring. I suspect that many of them hardly knew Crow because he never missed an opportunity to slam the EU for being ‘a regional engine of corporate globalisation’. And eurosceptics of all political persuasions have reason to be disheartened by the loss of a voice like his to their cause. Bob Crow wasn’t a eurosceptic by convenience nor did he do it simply to pander to rising populist anti-EU sentiment. For years he regularly led union members in protests against

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Will there really be a ‘furious backlash’ to Ed Miliband’s EU referendum stance?

The Tories have been hoping that their pledge for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU would split Labour – it was the rationale behind John Baron’s regular pushes for legislation in this parliament for a referendum in the next, which David Cameron eventually satisfied as far as he could with the Wharton Bill. But so far the only dissenting voices on Ed Miliband’s pledge today for an ‘unlikely’ referendum have been the usual suspects on the backbenches such as Graham Stringer and John Mann. That’s hardly a ‘furious backlash’ and more expected and manageable rage – at present, anyway. It will be interesting to see whether there are

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Ed Miliband adopts a rope-a-dope strategy on Europe

Hopi Sen is not alone. There are many people in this country supremely indifferent to the whole and vexatious question of whether or not there should be a referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union. Yes, yes, they will tell pollsters that if they must they suppose they might fancy having a referendum some day. But they don’t really care. They mumble about a referendum because that seems the done thing to do and because when a pollster asks you if you’d like to have a say on something it sounds better to say Yes than No thanks, I really can’t be bothered. And sure, if pressed, they

Friday

Alex Massie

The clock is ticking for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. He has missed his best chance of victory.

Tick tock. Tick tock. Time is running out in the Ukraine. Time passes and cements the “facts on the ground”. Russia controls the Crimea and, one way or another, we should probably expect the province’s referendum to endorse a return to Moscow Centre. Whether Crimea’s plebiscite can or will be conducted honestly is a different matter but that, in the end, is not the most important issue. Indeed the fate and future of Crimea is, if hardly an irrelevance, a question of secondary importance. It is not the major front in this struggle. Russia’s actions in the Crimea are plainly illegal and unjustified but they were supposed to be the

Thursday

Sebastian Payne

Five things you need to know about the ‘suppressed’ immigration report

With a mere whimper, the government has released its controversial report (pdf) on the effects of immigration on ‘native UK employment’. Following Newsnight’s revelations that the report was being ‘held back’, Labour demanded its release. 24 hours later, it was put online while Theresa May was informing MPs of an inquiry into undercover policing after revelations about the treatment of Stephen Lawrence’s family. Here are the top five things you need to know from the paper: 1. There’s minimal evidence of migrants taking British jobs The Home Office report titled ‘Impacts of migration on UK native employment‘ reveals there is ‘relatively little evidence’ of British workers being displaced — i.e. migrants taking

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Vladimir Putin is losing the battle for Ukraine

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Untitled_2_AAC_audio.mp3″ title=”Anne Applebaum and Matthew Parris debate how far we should let Russia push” startat=81] Listen [/audioplayer]It is always tempting, in the field of foreign affairs, to suppose we are led by dupes and fools while our opponents enjoy – or endure –  leaders of boundless cunning. We are over-matched; they are playing three-dimensional chess. We are weak, they are strong. We are easily distracted, they are single-minded. We compromise, they are implacable. It is easy to over-estimate the opposition while under-estimating our own capabilities. Sometimes this has unfortunate consequences. Saddam Hussein, for instance, had to be hiding something. The Iraqi dictator – notoriously full of dark cunning – would not be

Sebastian Payne

Ukraine polling: EU vs Russian integration and who is the weakest leader?

It’s difficult to figure out exactly what’s going on in Ukraine and what it all means — as Freddy has pointed out there’s a lot of hyperbole at the moment— but where is public opinion on the current situation? There’s some interesting historic polling on where Ukrainians stand on more integration with Europe vs Russia. Ukraine’s ambassador to the European Union Kostyantyn Yeliseyev suggested in 2011 that business tycoons and politicians from the Russian-speaking Eastern regions are just as on board with more EU integration as those from western regions. Yeliseyev noted at the time ‘if any politician today in Ukraine declared himself to be against European integration, he would

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Exclusive: Cameron and Osborne ambush Lib Dems in Cabinet meeting

A dramatic Cabinet this morning as the Tories ambushed the Lib Dems over the contents of the Queen’s Speech. First, Cameron took them by surprise by demanding that a recall bill be included in the speech. This was quite a slap to the Liberal Democrats seeing as just last month they were publicly blaming Cameron and Osborne for the fact that a recall bill was not going to be included in the Queen’s Speech. But this wasn’t the only bit of Tory aggression this morning. For Osborne then took up the baton, pushing for the inclusion of an EU referendum bill in the coalition’s legislative agenda. David Laws and Nick

Ed West Ed West

How many people would lay down their lives for the European Union?

Whatever Russia does in the Ukraine, we know that Britain isn’t going to do much more than say ‘dear, dear’, something that was accidentally revealed when a British official was photographed bringing a document to Downing St stating as much. We’re not going to help for a number of reasons, one of which is that Ukraine is incredibly complicated and historically and psychologically is sort of a part of Russia, or at least the eastern half is. As for the Crimea, Russia certainly has as much right to that province as the Albanians have to Kosovo. Russia is a great power with legitimate claims to that region, and unlike Iraq,

Monday

James Forsyth

If left unchallenged, Putin will attempt to create a new Russian empire

In Ukraine, the West has played—quite disastrously—into Vladimir Putin’s hands. The mistakes go back almost a decade. But the most recent one occurred when protesters took to the streets to oppose the Yanukovych government. The West, by which I mean Nato and the European Union, should have made clear that whatever sympathies they had with the protesters’ aims, the right way to change the government was by the ballot box. The failure to do that has provided Putin with the pretext he needed to have Russian forces seize control of Crimea. Putin’s motivating factor is his desire to avenge, what he sees as, the humiliation of Russia at the end

Friday

Miles Goslett

The millions in EU funding the BBC tried to hide

Over the last three years the BBC has secretly obtained millions of pounds in grants from the European Union. Licence fee payers might assume that the Corporation would have been compelled to disclose the source of this money in its annual reports, but they bear no trace of it specifically. In the latest set of accounts, for example, these funds are simply referred to as ‘other grant income’. Instead of making an open declaration, the BBC’s successful lobbying for this money had to be prised out of it using a Freedom of Information (FoI) request lodged for The Spectator, proving that there was never any danger of the state broadcaster’s bosses volunteering

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 27 February 2014

Home Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo detainee who won substantial compensation after suing the British government, was arrested in Birmingham on suspicion of terrorism offences relating to Syria. John Downey, accused of killing four soldiers in the IRA Hyde Park bombing in 1982, will not be prosecuted, because he was given, in error, a guarantee he would not face trial; an Old Bailey judge ruled it was in the public interest to make state officials keep their promises. Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of the opposition, said she had ‘regrets’ that the Paedophile Information Exchange continued to be affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties during her time as

Molly Guinness

The Spectator – on 400 years of unease between Ukraine and Russia

Ukraine declared independence from the USSR in 1991, but Moscow has made sure it’s remained heavily involved in Kiev’s affairs ever since. That has been relatively simple. Soon before independence, Anne Applebaum described how Russia’s ruthless annexation of its neighbour had left Ukraine without much identity of its own. ‘It took 350 years of Czarist domination, several decades of Stalinist purges, two collectivisation-induced mass famines, two world wars, and the refusal to teach Ukrainian children how to speak Ukrainian, along with the systematic elimination of anyone who might be thought a leader, an intellectual, a capitalist, or even a wealthy peasant. But they did it. The Russians have managed to

Ed West Ed West

Net migration is up, but net migration is a meaningless term

The latest figures showing a big increase in net migration are a blow to the Conservatives, although it obviously reflects on the relative strength of the British economy; at least in relation to the basket cases of southern Europe, from where large numbers have come. It will almost certainly mean more Tory voters joining Nigel Farage’s purple revolution, especially because it illustrates the impossibility of controlling immigration while Britain is inside the EU; the number of EU citizens arriving went up from 149,000 to 209,000 in a year. But that’s part of the curious 80/20 Rule about the immigration debate; Europeans accounted for only a fifth of migration under New

Ed West Ed West

Vladimir Putin is a reactionary autocrat, not a conservative

Apparently the new Muppets film features Russians as the baddies, a sign of the times as we increasingly draw into a new ideological cold war with the old enemy. Or perhaps a hot, ethnic war, if events in Crimea get any worse, events which raise questions about western foreign policy. Why are we getting involved in this country ‘steeped in blood and carpeted with unquiet graves’, as Peter Hitchens calls it? Another paleocon type, the Telegraph’s semi-deprogrammed former leftist Tim Stanley, says that by provoking Russia into a direct confrontation we look foolish and weak. The ideological cold war was the subject of last week’s cover story, in which Owen

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Merkel makes it clear: no special status for Britain in the EU

Angela Merkel’s speech today didn’t close doors on EU reform but nor did it open as many as some close to Cameron had hoped that it would. As the German Chancellor made clear at the start of her speech, she didn’t want to say either that Britain could have what it wanted from the renegotiation or that Britain could have nothing. listen to ‘Angela Merkel: ‘We need to reform the political shape of Europe’’ on Audioboo The German Chancellor talked of the need for a more competitive EU, suggested that she might be open to some changes on freedom of movement and offered the vaguest hint of possible treaty change.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

What’s happened to the Balance of Competences report?

What’s the problem with that Balance of Competences report on Freedom of Movement that still hasn’t been published? Nick Clegg gave his monthly press conference today, and was asked whether he had a problem with the report, which is believed to have been delayed because it painted too positive a picture of immigration. Clegg said: ‘They by and large depict a situation where we get a lot more from this pooling of decision-making in the EU than we somehow lose. My simple rule of thumb is that the exercise has got to be depoliticised, it’s got to be objective, it’s got to be based on facts, and not just on

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

Russia’s restraint over Ukraine thus far has been remarkable

Perhaps it’s premature to say this now that the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, has sounded off about Russian citizens in Ukraine being in danger, but it strikes me that Russia has behaved in the current crisis with a certain commendable restraint. Judging from most pundits in most British papers, there is no redeeming element to the Putin regime – soup to nuts, gay rights to corruption – and if it hasn’t actually sent the tanks in, well, it probably wants to. Yet, reading the statement from its foreign ministry that ‘a forced change of power is underway’, it’s hard to say that it’s not strictly correct. Mr Medvedev wasn’t actually