Europe

Why vote for Cameron? The reasons for voting against Gordon Brown are so numerous that the positive pro-Tory reasons for voting are often lost. This week’s Spectator gives you all the ammo you need to win around wavering friends, colleagues and family. We have restricted ourselves to the ten most compelling points. I summarise them below: 1. School reform. In itself, it’s enough reason to vote Tory. Gove has specifically promise that within four years of a Tory government everyone will have an independent school offering to educate their kid for free. This should have been a 1981 Tory proposal, but Keith Joseph lost a battle with the civil service

The Civil Service is readying itself for a new government. The BBC has already reported a discussion of efficiency savings among senior officials. In another part of Whitehall, work is a foot on how to set up a National Security Council should the Tories win. I have in the last few weeks been interviewing ex-ministers and senior officials as research for a RUSI paper, due out soon after the election, on how to improve the government’s security set-up. Traipsing around various departments, a number of interesting conclusions have come to light: – Conservative ideas for an NSC are not the same as the government’s NSID committee, however much ministers say

As I said earlier, today’s PMQs was all about giving the various parties’ campaign messages a walk around the block.  Cameron’s questions reduced down to “They’ve failed – give us a go”.  Clegg pushed the Lib Dem’s Labservative prospectus.  And Brown droned on about “£6bn being taken out of the economy,” as well as about Lord Ashcroft and “securing the recovery”. In which case, it’s striking that Denis MacShane used a question to denounce the Tories’ alliances in Europe.  Indeed, Peter Mandelson did exactly the same in a speech this morning.  Here’s how he put it: “David Cameron chooses to sit alongside the xenophobes and homophobes in the European Parliament.

Euroscepticism is David Cameron and Gene Hunt’s sole shared attribute. But, bequeathed a poisoned chalice at home, the EU is not a future Tory government’s immediate priority. Set-piece battles over rebates, defence procurement and the CAP can be avoided for a time, but skirmishes will be a regular occurrence. And some of these will be bloodbaths. The first test comes in June, when EU finance ministers will consider hedge fund and private-equity firm regulation. There is no more contentious a topic. Recent European regulatory initiatives have impeded British financial services to the extent that even Brown and Miliband have taken note. It may be tempting to perceive a grand conspiracy against Britain, but

A Conservative Party article of faith has been the belief that other Europeans are innately more pro-EU than the British. In the past, this has undoubtedly been the case. Poll after poll has shown that Britons see the EU differently than most other Europeans. But as I have argued before, times are changing on the continent. In an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (not a Europhile newspaper by any stretch), Germany’s new politics is explained. Nikolas Busse argues that the Greek crisis and failure of EU leaders to cobble together a plausible bail-out is the first major manifestation of Germany’s new role in Europe – that of a country

If two things fuelled the rise of the BNP last year, then they were probably the mainstream parties’ reluctance to talk about immigration and a general disillusionment with Westminster politicians in the wake of the expenses scandal.  There are tentative signs that the parties are getting their act together on the first.  And, now, Nick Griffin  may have undermined his own party when it comes to the second. After coming under fire for not being transparent about expenses since becoming an MEP, Griffin has now published a very loose account of them on his website.  The bottom line is that they add up to over £200,000, but here’s some detail

A lot of things, you will agree, have changed since 1983 – even in the world of diplomacy. For one, the EU has moved from a loose federation of states towards a new kind of polity – never a United States of Europe, heaven forbid, but more than just a loose arrangement of member-states. But reading George Walden’s comment about Europe’s putative diplomatic service in the Times I can’t help but feel that he is still living in the age when he left the Foreign Office – when David Cameron was 17. The EU diplomatic service is not the novelty that pro-Lisbon politicians claim. To a large extent, it already

Edward McMillan-Scott fights a lone and determined battle. Timing his defection for maximum destruction, McMillan-Scott characterises the Tory party in the style of Orwell’s Big Brother. He told the LidDem spring conference: “People are controlled within the Conservative party, as I was.” It is a common charge, but, because the Tory leadership currently resembles Channel Four’s Big Brother, it doesn’t stick. Consequently, McMillan-Scott sounds shrill. He accuses David Cameron of ‘propitiating extremism abroad’, a charge usually reserved for Abu-Hamza, and condemns Cameron as being ‘committed to power for its own sake’. You can argue the toss over whether McMillan-Scott is poetic or pompous, personally I think he makes Speaker Bercow