A great effort from the Americans today but when it came to the final match you knew Europe could rely upon that tough little Ulsterman, Graeme McDowell. Not a chance he was going to let Hunter Mahan get a grip on their match. Great drama, mind you and pleasing too that every member of the side contributed points. Quality stuff all round. Even UKIP voters can like Europe today…
Vince Cable was on best behaviour at the European Parliament yesterday afternoon. The twinkle of opposition was back, and he assured his audience that they would not be receiving one of those dour Hibernian lectures of blesséd memory. He had come, he said, merely to explain the coalition’s government’s European business policy. Europe is a point of contention within the coalition, but one that is exaggerated. The coalition agreement is quite detailed on European policy, particularly on competences. Naturally, economic policy is more fluid, but the government, essentially, seeks further growth in the single market and closer economic co-operation to counter competition from the developing world. Cable danced those
Nick Boles’ Which Way’s Up? is gaining a quiet cult following in Westminster, and John Redwood has unearthed Boles’ radical approach to immigration. Boles dissents from the view that happiness in Sweden’s utopia rests on pay equality; he observes that it is a homogenous society that has controlled mass immigration. He writes: ‘We will not be able to sustain a social contract in which schooling and healthcare are provided to all citizens free of charge and are funded by taxation if we continue to allow, every year, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world to join the queues at A and E and send their children to British
I ration my writing about Sweden. As CoffeeHousers know, I can extol its virtues with room-emptying conviction. But it’s now a few days since its election, and as far as I can tell no English publication has told the extraordinary story of its conservative victory – and the economic turnaround driven by the largest tax cuts in Swedish history. It is now the fastest-growing economy in the West. I tell the story in the political column of this week’s magazine (subscribers, click here), but I will summarise it for CoffeeHousers here. Normally, conservatives are elected in Sweden as a kind of light relief, to punctuate decades of leftist rule. They’re
I’ve obtained this list of Baroness Ashton’s proposed recommendations for the next wave of EU diplomatic appointments. CoffeeHousers’ will notice there are no Brits on it. DELEGATION Nomination proposed Nationality CHINE, Pekin Markus EDERER DEU JAPON, Tokyo Hans Dietmar SCHWEISGUT AUT AFRIQUE DU SUD, Pretoria Roeland VAN DE GEER NLD BRESIL, Brasilia Readvertised ETAS-UNIS (Deputy) Readvertised AFGHANISTAN, Kabul Vygaudas USACKAS LIT ALBANIE, Tirana Ettore SEQUI ITA ARGENTINE, Buenos Aires Alfonso DIEZ TORRES ESP ARYM, Skopje Peter SORENSEN DNK BANGLADESH, Dhaka William HANNA IRL IRAQ, Bagdad Readvertised JORDANIE, Amman Joanna WRONECKA POL OUGANDA, Kampala Roberto RIDOLFI ITA SENEGAL, Dakar Dominique DELLICOUR BEL ANGOLA, Luanda Javier PUYOL PINUELA ESP BOTSWANA, Gaborone Gerard
The Coalition Government’s proposal for a ‘referendum lock’ on future transfers of powers to the EU has already been branded “worthless” by some Tory backbenchers . It’s easy to share their frustration at the Coalition’s lack of interest in EU reform so far. After all, the Government has chosen to opt in to the European Investigation Order; signed up for new EU financial supervisors; and chosen not to challenge the UK’s participation in the eurozone bailout (making British taxpayers potentially liable for up to £8 billion in loans to eurozone governments). However, the referendum lock is still significant. New crises, situations and politicians’ egos will always drive the need for
At least this government is honest. ‘There will be,’ Europe Minister David Lidington says, ‘no referendum on the transfer of competence or power from the UK to the EU during this Parliament’. The government will ensure that there are no more EU power transfer treaties; but, as Douglas Carswell, Tim Montgomerie, and Bill Cash all note, the Lisbon Treaty is self-ratifying. The EU has already picked the coalition’s lock and garnered new powers for itself – notably the extension of the EU arrest warrant. The EU could be an economic superblock with the muscle to influence the globe strategically and culturally. But its current political operation is unnecessary and deplorably
A plain speaking man, Janusz Lewandowksi. This week, the EU Budget Commissioner said, not without a clear note of pleasure, that ‘the rebate for Britain has lost its original justification.’ The EU veers between incompetence and arrogance. Baroness Ashton embodies the former, Lewandowski the latter. His statement encapsulated why a majority of Britons want out of this club into which they have never been allowed to enter. Put simply, it was hectoring and counter-factual. Mrs Thatcher negotiated the rebate to balance Britain’s net contribution, which was excessive owing to Germany and France’s disproportionate profit from the Common Agricultural Policy (the most glorious misnomer). At the time, the EU was run
You’ve got to hand it to Dan Hannan – he knows how to make a splash. His latest initiative is a cross-party campaign for an “in or out” referendum on Britain’s EU membership. You can find details in his article for the Telegraph today or, indeed, on the campaign’s actual website. But the basic argument runs thus: with the AV vote next year, referendums are now hardwired into the political mainstream – so why not give us a vote on one of the biggest questions of national sovereignty that we face today? And if you agree with him on that, you can sign up here. Hannan is, of course, making
Up until today, the Hague-Myers story was confined to scurrilous rumour on Guido’s blog and the occasional cautious article in the Telegraph or the Mail; the rest of the media were uninterested. But, as James notes, Hague’s two extraordinarily frank statements, particularly yesterday’s impassioned denial to ‘set the record straight’, have forced the issue into the mainstream political debate. The personal always becomes political. What of William Hague’s judgement? John Redwood condemns Hague’s ‘poor judgement’ in personal matters before going on to cast aspersions on his policy judgements, particularly those relating to the EU. Iain Martin discusses Hague’s supposedly pro-Arabist sympathies: ‘Is Israel getting a fair hearing?’ he asks. Iain
As Pete wrote this morning, the plan to share aircraft carriers with France is controversial. It seems that concerns over sovereignty, job losses and differing strategic interests reduce to the one issue that no government has addressed: the protectionist system of defence procurement, which hampers the operational effectiveness of our armed forces. Typically forthright, Douglas Carswell identifies the problem: ‘Seems like protectionist defence procurement isn’t quite giving us sovereign capability the way we were promised, eh? Had we ordered much of the new carriers to be built overseas, we could have had them at a fraction of the £5 billion cost. But the asinine logic of the Defence Industrial Strategy
As austerity measures go, the plan to share aircraft carriers with France is totemic stuff. Not only could it save the Exchequer a heap of cash – by reducing the need for two replacement carriers – but it also says a lot about how our government wants to operate in the world: multilaterally, flexibly and, perhaps, with less emphasis on military force. Divvying up one’s navy with another country does not suggest a strident foreign policy. Indeed, future operations would have to be planned and conducted with the aid of phonecalls to Paris. Of course, this will likely be a controversial move. There are issues of national sovereignty at play
That didn’t take long, did it? After only a year in charge of UKIP, Lord Pearson has quit the role even more abruptly than he took it. In his resignation statement, he confesses that he is “not much good” at party politics – and it is hard to disagree. A memorable low was his interview on the Campaign Show in which he was only dimly acquainted with his party’s own policy. But more damaging, to my mind, was the general erosion of UKIP’s identity: Pearson’s policy of campaigning for Eurosceptic candidates from other parties may have been magananimous, but it also made you wonder whether UKIP are more a party
The European Union’s creeping barrage continues. Brussels has appointed the urbane looking Joao Vale de Almeida as ambassador to Washington; Vale de Almeida hopes that Henry Kissinger will call him if the old campaigner wants to talk to Europe. It is perverse that Britain is saving money by closing embassies and downscaling around the globe whilst also paying its share to install Senor Vale de Almeida in the swanky environs of the Beltway. In this era of devolution, cost-cutting decentralisation, the European Union is beginning to behave like a state, and an opulent one at that. In the past fortnight it has once again suggested that it should raise taxes.
The prospect of taxes being levied directly by the European Union is one of those stories that pops up on a fairly regular basis. It is never likely to actually happen as national governments won’t want to cede the power of the purse strings. But the great Hamish McRae makes a very good point about the taxes that the EU wants to levy in his Independent column: ‘The two areas the EU wants to put taxes on, banking and air traffic, would hit the UK particularly hard. Financial services are the UK’s largest export industry, with net exports (ie exports minus imports) of £33bn last year, more if you add
In one sense, yes it is. The Senate may be the world’s most exasperating deliberative body. As with it’s Roman counterpart there’s a growing sense that the Senate has outlived its usefulness, that it can no longer function effectively and that there’s no reason to suppose anything will change for the better. In Washington folk connected to the House of Representatives point out that their enemy is the Senate, not the opposition party. That’s what happens when you have a Republic, not a Democracy. And, as George Packer’s excellent New Yorker article amply demonstrates, the Senate is a ridiculous, infuriating place filled with puffed-up mediocrities unfit to inhabit offices once
The study of history is a subversive calling. All countries make up a story that suits their idea of themselves. Authoritarians stamp out independent historical scholarship; extreme nationalists simply vilify those who try to tell the tale of what really happened. Charles de Gaulle stands at the heart of what France likes to think about itself; Winston Churchill plays a similar role on this side of the Channel. Even a Francophile like me concedes that there is a deal more fiction about the French story than the British. The distinguished historian Robert Gildea has helped to tear the covers of what he has called the ‘redeeming, unifying heroic story’ of
Why is Vince Cable kicking off about immigration? Sure, to cause trouble – this is what he sees as his role. His ego can’t quite fit in that department. But the pledge to have immigration in the “tens of thousands” was not in the coalition agreement. At the time, David Cameron said this was an oversight and that it was still government policy. But as James said in his political column in the magazine, a great divide has emerged between policies in that bald coalition agreement and those mentioned verbally. The policies in the documents are now deemed sacrosanct, and things not in it – like the extraordinary pledge to
David Cameron’s so-called “referendum lock” is supposed to ensure no more powers are handed to the EU. His thinking, bless him, is that if he just keeps a low profile and doesn’t sign any extra treaties then things won’t get worse. This fundamentally mistakes the way the EU works. As we say in the leader for this week’s magazine, ever-greater integration is hardwired into the system. An example we cite is the coming European Investigatory Order, which Theresa May has naively described to other ministers as a tidying up exercise (Jack Straw said the same about the EU constitution). As we put it: “Another power grab is looming. Plans are
Emblazoned across the Times is the headline: ‘Europe warns Obama: this relationship isn’t working.’ The piece is teeming with quotations from diplomats and representatives of major European governments, voicing their concern that post-Cold War America no longer offers Europe a privileged relationship. The goodwill that Europe offered Obama has entirely evaporated. Few diplomatic spats are ever one-sided, and the Americans are deeply frustrated with the European Union. A White House official condemned the EU’s ‘non-existent foreign policy apparatus’, and Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations said: ‘Europe created these posts (EU President and EU Foreign Minister) to speak for the collective as a whole. But from the perspective
