Tabloid Edition

Galileo

As innumerable people have pointed out, this isn't in fact, strictly speaking, legal.

French plans to bail out Europe’s ill-starred satellite navigation project with a €2.1 billion raid on the EU farming budget yesterday provoked outrage in Britain and Germany.

Critics said that France’s attempt to seize spare taxpayers’ cash after private investors pulled out would break every budgetary rule in the book – and set an alarming precedent.

Because, until the Constitution Reform Treaty is passed, space isn't an EU competence, so they can't spend tax cash on it.

EU Diplomacy

This is an interesting way to do it:

Mr Mugabe was banned from visiting EU member states in February 2002. But Mr Michel said this restriction, which also applies to all Zimbabwean cabinet ministers and senior figures in the ruling Zanu-PF party, did not stop them from coming to international meetings.

They're such evil bastards that they can't come to shop but we'd love them to come so we can do business.

Margot's Great Idea

TEBAF Margot has come up with a great idea. No, really.

A lively debate about the future of Europe is always welcome and I understand that the President of France has proposed a “wise men’s group” to provide inspiration and ideas.
Here is my idea: appoint a “smart kid’s group” as a complement. (Or why not an “angry women’s group”…). Engage those that are too often talked about, too seldom with.
Ask how young people want their lives, what education they want, how to live together in a multicultural Europe of rapid change

Yes, why not? In fact, why not ask everyone their views? We could even invent a word for it...something like, ooooh, say, election? Or even referendum?  Ask the citizenry of Europe whether they wish to be ruled by the ex-Swedish Minister for Religion for example.

Errrrrr

Hmm.

Yet to my own surprise, the more I look at the proposed new treaty, the more I find myself in the referendum camp.

Being on the same side of an argument as Jackie Ashley? I'll have to reconsider this very carefully indeed.

Good Grief!

Grr.

The Lancet’s report is a shocker, but what made me tremble was the response from a government that has just declared itself paternalistically so concerned with our nation’s children. Instead of immediately banning the six common E-numbers and the preservative sodium benzoate as other countries including Norway and Sweden already have, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) passed the buck to the European Food Safety Authority, to see whether it wanted to impose a ban.

Sweden hasn't banned them. They did, in the past, but they had to allow them again. And the UK Government has to pass the matter up to the EU. Because this is now an EU competence, not a national government one. This is what being in the EU means: that we can't make our own decisions. Capisce? 

Leaving and Devolution

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard asks:

Would Britain’s exit from the EU set off the disintegration of the United Kingdom, pitting England against Scotland?

Well, we can hope, can't we?

What a Wonderful System

Washington has taken a much more sympathetic line lately to the main Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which for 30 years has campaigned for a democratic, secular state, and more than 100,000 of whose supporters have been killed by the Guards.

After a lengthy investigation, the US authorities found no evidence for placing the largest group in the NCRI, the People's Mujahideen of Iran (PMOI), on its list of terrorist organisations.

All this is in startling contrast to the record of the EU, and our own Government in particular. In 2001, the British Government led the way in proscribing the PMOI (at the bidding of the Teheran regime, as Jack Straw explained last year). When the rest of the EU followed suit, the European Court of Justice last December ruled that it had acted unlawfully.

But in January, at Britain's behest, the EU's Council of Ministers agreed to ignore the judgment. A thousand parliamentarians from all over Europe protested, including more than 100 members of our own Parliament, but the Council of Ministers again agreed, in June, to flout the ECJ's ruling.

Astonishingly, this leaves us not only prohibiting, in flagrant breach of EU law, the chief body that campaigns peacefully for a democratic Iran, but explicitly doing so to appease a regime which itself orchestrates terrorism, supplying the rockets and roadside bombs that are killing British and other allied troops.

So wonderful to know that we're governed by the rule of law, isn't it?

Margot's Back!!

Usual level of thought here:

The first meeting of the Commission dealt with issues like antidumping measures for energy saving light bulbs from China. The Commission recommended to the Member States that ‘anti-dumping‘ duties on energy-saving light bulbs from China be removed in the next year. There was a good discussion on this complex issue. The reason for imposing duties in the first place was to protect European companies from unfair competition so an assessment was needed as to whether they were still needed. On the one hand there are environmental considerations: we should be encouraging the use of energy-saving light bulbs where possible. But anti-dumping duties obviously increase the price to the consumer. One of the key factors was that the EU can only produce about 25% of its demand for energy saving light bulbs through domestic production. In the end the Commission decided to discontinue these measures but to allow a year for companies to adjust to the new situation.

Yes, it's good that they're going to lift the duties, yes, good that they realise that the whole damn point of trade is to get the things that we cannot make ourselves (or not as efficiently).

What does annoy though is this blathering about "European companies". There are only three large makers of CFLs. Osram, GE and Phillips. All have factories around the world: but only one has major production in the EU. What this catfight has been about is not, however absurd the argument is in reality, whether some stalwart Mettelstand company is being crushed by underpaid and exploited Chinese peasants. Rather, should the multinational with a factory in the EU be protected from the two multi-nationals which do not? And, to add to the joy, all three have Far East factories.

Put that way even the one year delay is ludicrous.

Just to add to this nonsense over points of origin. What we're talking about here is only where the things are assembled. All, (yes, all) of the mercury charges that make the things work come from Illinois, for example.

Richard Corbett

Richard Corbett MEP puts forward this argument about the European Constitution Reform Treaty.

The social dimension of the reform treaty

The reform treaty will explicitly commit European governments to defend and strengthen the European social model. It will enshrine the values of social justice, full employment and solidarity in the EU's "mission statement" and commit the EU to "a social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress".

Similarly, the treaty emphasises that the EU must work to "combat social exclusion and discrimination", and will be legally required to promote social justice, gender equality and solidarity between generations. It is values such as these that clearly differentiate the EU from the American model of capitalism that allows private wealth and public squalor.

A new protocol will require the EU to safeguard public services, including the way they are organised and financed in each country. The treaty also requires the EU, in all policy areas, to take account of "the promotion of a high level of employment, the guarantee of adequate social protection, the fight against social exclusion, and a high level of education, training and protection of human health".

The treaty reaffirms the existing obligation on the commission to "promote the consultation of management and labour at Union level", to "facilitate their dialogue by ensuring balanced support for the parties", and to "consult the social partners before submitting proposals on social policy".

An excellent list of reasons to oppose the whole thing, don't you think?

Unfortunately, this dingbat sees them as reasons to support it.

So, what do you think? Mattocks? A gibbet? Sent to bed without any supper?

Interesting Phrasing, Don't You Think?

Here:

Gordon Brown's chances of ending a Labour revolt over the new EU reform treaty have been snuffed out after leading Euro-MPs made clear they would give no further concessions to Britain.

And there I was thinking that the EU is an association of sovereign nations. That is, that we pass up which powers we wish, retaining all others. If Euro MPs are insisting that we shall get no more "concessions" that would appear to mean that the boot is on the other foot: we get to keep those scraps which we are allowed.

So it is an interesting word to use then, one that shows what they think the situation is.

The Chindamo Argument

Ahh, more becomes clear. Perhaps this is why Cameron is all over the Human Rights Act rather than anything that has anything to do with the Chindamo case:

The ruling on the appellant’s right to a family life should, as laid out, calm indignation; it is nuanced, dry-eyed and broadly persuasive that Chindamo’s links with Italy, which he left at the age of 5, are too tenuous to justify deportation. Where this landmark ruling packs a dynamite charge is in the section on the appellant’s rights as an EU citizen under the 2004 Citizens Directive, as incorporated last year into British law.

Only last month Gordon Brown insisted that all foreign criminals “will be deported”. Yet under EU law, the Government has known for three years that it has no such powers. Each case must be considered on merit and, no matter how repugnant the crime, the only permissible grounds for deportation are “a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat” to society’s “fundamental interests” or “imperative grounds of public security”. No one fitting that description would be recommended for release by the Parole Board. As the Home Office solicitor complained at the hearing, so long as the criminal has lived in this country for five years or more � whether or not at Her Majesty’s Pleasure � Britain “could never deport a lifer who had been released from prison and was an EU citizen”. Is that why the Chindamo case was kept secret?

The only way out of this is to leave the EU: absolutely not what the Tories want anyone to be saying. I personally wouldn't argue that bringing back exile or outlawry was a good reason to want to leave the EU but it would indeed be a powerful piece of political rhetoric. Wonder who will use it?

England and Germany

This is all slightly hopeful:

"The role of the tabloid media is the main aspect behind Anglo-German tensions," the Durham University academic said: "The majority of British people today, especially the younger generations, perceive Germany as a partner country, and no longer hold any particular resentment about Germany and its people.

"The obsessive anti-European sentiment expressed by the Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s allowed the British tabloids to use increasingly hostile and often xenophobic language against the UK's continental European partners, particularly France and Germany.

"This legacy has lingered on and becomes particularly bad during football competitions."

In his book, Britain, Germany and the Future of the European Union, Dr Schweiger writes: "Even the negative portrayal of Germany during 18 years of Conservative rule in Britain, or the occasional screaming tabloid reference to the war years could not seriously damage the increasing cultural and political closeness between Britain and Germany."

He's making the same, and incorrect, assumption that so many do about politics. Newspapers don't create the prejudices opinions of their readers, they chase them. Just as you would expect any profit maximising business to do. That millions buy into such bash the Huns rhetoric shows not that they are being manipulated, but that they already think this way.

Of course, being British it's all a little ironic: humming Dambusters and waving blow up Spitfires isn't quite the same as actually hating Germans: we reserve that emotion for the French.

Yes, it is the Same Old Constitution.

Never understimate the ability of a diplomat to lie to you: that's what they're for. But can we please get overthis one about the EU Reform Treaty?

A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokesman said: “Let’s be clear, the Reform Treaty is not the Constitutional Treaty – in form or content. The mandate says so in terms, ‘The constitutional concept, which consisted in repealing all existing Treaties and replacing them by a single text called Constitution, is abandoned’.

Excellent, so there's a line that says this isn't a constitution. It's the next few hundred pages which seem to be exactly th same as the constitution though. Even committed federasts are insisting that it's the same as the older version:

A group of Europe’s “wise men” has pronounced that the European Union treaty agreed by Tony Blair in June is substantially the same as the constitution rejected two years ago.

The elder statesmen’s verdict was seized on yesterday by critics who insisted that Gordon Brown must honour the Government’s promise of a referendum on the document.

The group, led by the former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, and including Lord Patten, the former Conservative minister and European Commissioner, concluded that the new treaty was only symbolically different to the proposed constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005.

The so-called Amato group’s assessment carries weight because the 16 senior politicians include two members of the convention that drew up the constitution – Mr Amato and Jean-Luc Dehaene, the former Belgian prime minister – as well as former leaders of the Netherlands, Finland and Greece.

So, a referendum please, as we were promised.

Explaining the EU

Sums it up nicely, really:

"Gordon Brown's government has said there is no justification for a referendum and the UK should stick to this commitment," said Mr Brok, the European parliament's representative on inter-governmental negotiations on the treaty. "It would be very unfair of the UK if, having more or less got what it wanted in the new treaty, it would then turn round and put this to a popular vote."

Don't let the people have their say: most democratic, don't you think?

Dennis MacShane Again.

This sort of eurofederasty really does annoy me.

Other than cabinet ministers under orders to take their holidays in Britain, millions are now enjoying the pleasures of Europe, from the Galway coastline to the Black Sea. Far from the homogenised Europe controlled by the Brussels bureaucracy so beloved by our Eurosceptic pols and hacks, most will see a wide variety of nations, regions and communities that have managed to share a small part of their common sovereignty to form this thing called the European Union.

Can we stop with this rhetoric already? "Europe" and the "European Union" are two very different things. One is a geographic area. The other is a political system. It's entirely possible for someone like myself to embrace, enjoy, make use of, inhabit and glory in the geographic part, with all its variety and cultures, while still despising the political system that has and is being created. The hills and beaches of the Algarve (where I reside) will still be the same for me to cycle over and past whether we have a bureaucracy in Brussels ruling them or not.   

Oh Dear Mr Aslet

I'm not convinced that you have your analysis correct here:

Prices are rising and this is good news for farmers, if not for     the rest of us (although ultimately it may mean an end to     subsidies).

Subsidies are now decoupled from both prices and production: they are a flat payment based upon acreage. So rising prices and the increased production tey will bring will have no effect on subsidies.

This is happening already and land prices have risen sharply in     the past year.

Indeed they have: because subsidies are now paid on acreage. This is simply an increase in the rent available to the land and thus drives up the capital value.

The thing is, these subsidis are not going to help anyone in the actual business of farming: all it will do is make the land more expensive to buy, which means having to wring more income out of it to pay back those capital costs.

Wasted Water

Hmmm.

Water companies are wasting 3.42 billion litres of water every day through leaking pipes, or the equivalent of two full baths for every household in the country.

Daily water supply is around 15 billion litres (or so I seem to remember) so 20-25% if being wasted. This might be a problem, this might not.

Other vaguely remembered figures are that the water companies have invested some £64 billion (over an unspecified time) into the system. The vast majority of which has gone on upgrading the quality of the water at both ends (both into the pipes and dealing with the sewage), rather than reducing such waste.

If wastage, rather than water quality, was actually the problem, then obviously, our wise Masters in the European Union would have insisted that the investment went to that wastage, not where they did insist, to the water quality.

Alternatively, wastage is a problem but our EU Masters are ignorant fuckwits for insisting that the money be spent where it was.

Your choice.

(Added bonus for those who insist this shows that privatisation was a bad idea. In theory, State ownership allows for the socially optimal amount of investment, not the financially optimal amount. Given that the State invested far less than the private companies have done, this seems not to be true in practice. )

Absolutely the Correct Response

A trio of European councillors who sailed across the English Channel on a homemade raft to deliver a message of goodwill were arrested upon arrival in Britain.

Damn right too.

Twits.

Err...

Quite.

Getting Up Yourself

I agree rather that I was a little cheeky here, asking for free copies of copyrighted standards papers.

However, I've just received this email which I think to be hilarious.

Dear Mr Worstall,

I would like to ask you to please remove from your blog all mention and link to the ASD-STAN website. (in reference with the page http://timworstall.typepad.com/timworstall/2006/04/folks_who_has_t.html which I came across).

I am afraid that you have been misinformed. EN standards are published by CEN, the European Committee for Standardisation, and are afterwards distributed through its Members, the National Standardisation Bodies. ASD-STAN is an industry-led standards development organisation which develops Aerospace standards, prEN and then submits those documents to CEN for transformation into EN standards. ETSI is also involved in this process through a subcontracting agreement with ASD-STAN.

Therefore, you can get copies of EN standards with the CEN Members, (e.g. BSi for the UK) and those documents are restricted of use and rightly protected by copyrights.

I sincerely hope that you will agree to remove our address from your website and that perhaps I have shed more light with the information I just provided to you. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have further questions.

Best Regards,

Elyse Truchon Van Hove

Assistant, ASD-STAN

Phone:  +32 2 775 8126
Fax:  +32 2 775 8131

Avenue de Tervuren, 270, 2nd floor
1150Brussels, Belgium

I must remove their address from my website? I could understand their telling me I'm a naughty boy for trying to get a freebie, but WTF? Remove all mention and link to their website?

How does anyone get that far up themselves to ask for that?

How Absolutely Delightful

No one will actually know what is being negotiated until it's already been signed:

EU leaders are racing against the clock to rush through a new "reform treaty" to replace the constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005.

Officials close to the organisation of negotiations have admitted that documents in all the EU's 23 languages are not expected until December, when a formal ratification text will be signed by Europe's leaders.

"We believe it is a problem but we have a mandate that is tight. There is urgency. Doing all this within six months is unprecedented and there are going to be real limitations to the process," said an official.

Normal EU rules stipulating that documents must at least be in German, French and English have been suspended.

The Conservative MP Roger Gale has asked for, and been refused, a copy of the new treaty in English.

So Mr. Worstall. Here is the contract for your whelk stall. It's in Albanian but don't worry, we'll get you an English copy after we've finished all of the negotiations and the actual one that you sign will of course be in your language. It's just that you won't know what we're negotiating or have negotiated until that moment that you do sign.

We wouldn't do something trivial that way, so why in hell would we try to run a continent that way?

Ignorant Voters

Marcel Berlins is quite correct here when he points out that vast numbers of opinion polls are meaningless: so biased in their questions as to be designed to make the PR point desired.

However, there's a further implication of the ignorance of those polled, that they are so easily swayed by the language employed. There's no evidence at all that they know any more or consider more carefully when voting upon the same issues.

Which leaves us with Bryan Caplan's point: less should be dealt with by way of politics and more by markets, where people are better informed: because the results impact them so directly.

Mid-Life

To be middle-aged sucks – at least physically if you are a woman! Insomnia, mood swings and what have you…

Margot Wallstrom.

Exactly what we're looking for in one of the rulers of a continent, don't you think?

Gentlemen...

A cross-party group of MPs is calling on Gordon Brown to renegotiate urgently the wording of the new European Union treaty because they say it risks relegating national parliaments to mere satellites of Brussels.

You're 35 years too late for that particular worry.

Can we leave yet?

Who's Your Daddy?

Interesting don't you think? An example of where the power actually lies?

Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, agreed yesterday to press the European Union to cut taxes on environmentally-friendly products, such as energy-efficient refrigerators and cars with low or zero emissions.

The political leaders of nominally sovereign nations must go cap in hand to an international bureaucracy in order to vary the rate of purely domestic taxation.

Downing Street said that Mr Brown wanted environmentally friendly products included on a list of products that qualified for the five per cent rate of VAT instead of the 17.5 per cent rate.

The basic principle seems logical enough: lower taxation on those items which have fewer externalities. Fine by me. Except....but.....

Domestic power and electricity are of course very unfriendly environmental goods. Given the age of the UK's housing stock (and the entirely crap quality of the newer part of it) we actually have a very large part of our emissions coming from the housing sector. Without looking it up (so please correct me if I'm wrong) some 20% I think.

So, err, what are domestic power and electricity doing in that 5% VAT band? Why aren't they paying the full whack? There's even the added merit that our Lords and Masters in Brussels allow us to raise (but not to lower) such tax rates without their specific permission. There's only one reason I can think of that we don't (over and above the fact that it was the previous Chancellor who brought in this lower rate):

The current government is simply not serious about climate change.

Driving Licences

Hmmm. I wonder:

New drivers should be forced to take a year to learn and face a zero alcohol limit to cut the number of deaths caused by novice motorists, MPs urge today.
...
The proposals would raise the minimum driving age to 18 - in line with most of Europe - because people could only apply for a provisional licence at 17.

Is this something which is actually being argued from basic principles in the UK (in which case, why don't we harmonise with the Americans, at 16?) or is this something being urged upon us by some EU diktat or another?

Anyone know?

That European Gender Pay Gap

How wonderful, the European Union has decided to get to grips with the gender pay gap across the continent:

  Women are paid less even though they are better educated on average, as almost 60 percent of university graduates are female.

Really? Women are on average better educated? 60% of all graduates are female? I realy never knew both of those facts.

What I did know was that in the younger generation the majority of graduates are female: but that this has not in fact yet spread through the whole society: for women a generation ago were rather less likely to go to university than the men were.

I'm also aware that there is no (or only a tiny) gender pay gap in that younger generation: while there's quite a large one in the older ones.

I do wonder if the two things are connected?

That Constitution Again

Not exactly a surprise:

Gordon brown will have "problems" denying voters a referendum on the new European Union treaty, the architect of the old constitution has confessed.

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing yesterday admitted that differences between the new treaty and the constitution, which was rejected by French and Dutch voters two years ago, "are few and far between and more cosmetic than real".

This is even less of a surprise:

Jean-Luc Dehaene, the former prime minister of Belgium who is now a senior MEP, noted that 95 per cent of the constitution was back. He said it was no surprise that voters were confused.

"We drafted a treaty with a constitutional content and form. Now we have a treaty with a constitutional content without the form. But both are a treaty and neither is a constitution. The ambiguous use of words has led to misunderstandings," he said.

Mr Dehaene also insists the issue is not one for the voters, whether they are British, French or Dutch. "Europe will never go forward by referendum," he said. "Leading is showing the way, not following."

But it also rather begs the question. At this point we're not in fact pondering which direction our leaders should take us: rather, we're wondering whether our leaders should include a fat Belgian or not: something we should indeed have a vote on.

Politics, Politics

So, why not just let the people decide?

Go here for a shufti at the new site.

That EU Constitution Opt Out

Is not worth the paper it is written on:

Senior European Union officials confirmed yesterday that Britain's "red line" opt-out from the European Charter of Fundamental Rights is not worth the paper it is written on.

Margot Wallström, the European Commission Vice-President, insisted that the charter will apply to huge swathes of British law, the 75 per cent or more that is derived from EU legislation.

The logic is that, yes, of course, Britain has this opt out: but it does not apply to EU legislation. As EU originated laws are 75% or so of those passed, that means that the opt out only applies to 25% of the law.

As, of course, we only want the opt out to stop EU law, it is therefore worthless if it doesn't actually apply to EU law.

This Explains a Lot

In fact, it explains an awful lot:

I believe this is irrefutable evidence that the EU brass read, and make policy, based off this blog.

Mobility Scooters

So, a small question:

Mobility scooters for the disabled are likely to increase in price after a change in their tax classification to “leisure vehicles” by Brussels.

The new designation puts the electric vehicles in the same category as golf buggies and racing cars and will mean extra import duty for those made outside the European Union.

Age Concern urged ministers yesterday to fight the move, which is likely to add £200 to the average £2,500 cost of the scooters, as importers pass on the duty charge.

Which European manufacturer of such mobility scooters lobbied for the change and which fuckwit gave in to such an obviously protectionist measure?

Just yet more proof that the European Union is not about free trade, it's a zollverien, a customs union, dedicated to screwing the consumer for the benefit of domestic producers.

Can we leave yet?

Margot and Economics

Truly, this is why we have the whole European Union thing. To provide us all with a good