Why not money for peerages?

Yesterday I was reminded that behind the ongoing scandals of (in ascending order) Prescott’s excruciating behaviour with his female underlings, Patricia Hewitless’s floundering in the morass of the NHS and, by far the worst, Charles Clarke’s inability to work out where various rather unpleasant villains who should have been deported might be or why that should matter, there is still the outstanding and ever more entertaining saga of loans for peerages.

I must confess, I paid little attention to that, as the notion of paying in one form or another for titles, knighthoods, baronetcies and other suchlike baubles, is hardly new. The only thing that surprised me was the word “loans”? Goodness me, I thought, Lloyd George wouldn’t have put up with that, nor would numerous Victorian politicians, Hanoverian princelings and politicians or, for that matter, the Stuarts or the Tudors.

It was money on the table (and not necessarily for the party) or no handle to the name. Think of James VI of Scotland and I of England establishing a completely new title, the baronet, having already extracted large sums of money for peerages, and asking for £1,500 for each. That was some money in those days.

Or think of the “beerages” of Victorian England. (It is best not to enquire too closely into the origins of most of our ducal families or into the cash and politics of the eighteenth century.)

Then there is Lloyd George. The Marconi scandal of 1912 may have degenerated into a nasty anti-semitic campaign on the part of the Chesterton brothers but a parliamentary committee found that Rufus Isaacs, the Attorney-General and Lloyd George had both benefited from insider dealing in the Marconi company. The same committee decided that there was no evidence of corruption. Rufus Isaacs became a Baron in 1914, rising subsequently in the ranks of the peerage. This could have been a reward for his undoubtedly loyal service to the government as a lawyer or it could have been for other reasons.

In the end it was Lloyd George overreaching himself in the Maundy Gregory scandal that brought about the legislation, which specifically forbade the selling of titles for cash to the party. Until 1925 it was a legal and acceptable form of fund-raising. Hence, presumably, the need to take out loans.

The point is that the reward of a title for help to the party, whether financial or organizational, has never been considered wrong. It has become a scandal partly because Blair’s government is seen as sleaze-ridden and partly because our journalists make up by lip-pursing for their reluctance to pursue bigger news.

After all, we have parties and we do not want them financed by the state. So, the money must come from individuals and what precisely is wrong with those individuals getting some sort of a reward in the fullness of time? Why should gongs and titles go to people because they do their jobs well, whether it is dinner ladies getting MBEs (not that I mind) or civil sevants rising through the honours list?

Do we still have honours for something called “services to export”? We certainly did for a long time. What is “sevices to export” but making lots of money by selling goods abroad? Excellent idea, of course, but why does it need a special commendation?

One also has to remember that loans to the Labour Party is only part of the story. There is the saga, still unravelled but eagerly pursued by our wonderful Metropolitan Police Service, fresh from their spectacular achievement of solving 18 per cent of the ever-rising crimes in London, of peerages being offered to those who have contributed to the City Academies.

As Charles Moore pointed out a week ago, this is an excellent scheme, even though it has not produced the miracles expected by those who have no idea just how terrible some of the schools in this country are.

Of course, City Academies are not the whole solution or even half of it. We need a radical reform of the educational system but we are not going to get one. Blair’s much trumpeted reforms never amounted to much and were, in any case, diluted to pander to the nastiness and hatred for ordinary people that most of his backbenchers show.

The Boy-King in his days of Prince-in-Waiting explained quite clearly that he did not think people wanted choice and, really, the best thing they could do is accept that the Conservative leadership knows what’s good for them.

In the circumstances, the concept of private funding going into some schools, is the best we can hope for. I do not find it at all reassuring that these funders “will have no control” over the Academies. That means control will remain completely with the educational bureaucracy that has over the years destroyed a decent(ish) system and continues in its aim to make Britain the least educated country in the world.

So why should these people not be given peerages? They are contributing to a Labour project but then Labour is in power. They are also contributing, possibly successfully, to the community far more than those endless local government officials who are being given all sorts of gongs and titles.

It is not only journalists and those influenced by them who are jumping up and down. It is also MPs. Now, I find it rather touching that rich people are prepared to pay large sums of money either into the political machine or, preferably, into City Academies and ask nothing in return but a title and the membership of the House of Lords. Who knows? Some of them might have turned out to be useful participants in the work of that establishment.

In actual fact, most of Blair’s enormous number of peers have found that being active in the Lords involves a great deal of badly remunerated work. Peers do not get paid and are given expenses only if they turn up in the Chamber. The work they do on Committees is done for free; the preparation they put into speeches is done for free; and any research they need they have to pay for.

How different from our elected legislators who get a sizeable salary, enormous expenses for staff, travel and second home (no wonder they don’t mind pushing up taxes on second homes – they will have theirs paid for by the very same taxpayer), heavily subsidized food and drink in the House, not to mention many lunches, dinners and entertainments by journalists, businessmen, people who need favours. And there is, of course, the tantalizing and usually fulfilled prospect of directorships and seats on boards of quangos.

Ministers have even higher salaries, cars with chauffeurs and, often, grace and favour homes, where they can carry on to their hearts’ content.

Mutatis mutandis, the same is true for local councillors: a high rate of expenses, lots of travel and various jollies and freebies.

Professor Bernard Lewis, the great expert on Islam and the Ottoman Empire, explains in one of his books (I am quoting from memory as I do not have the volume to hand) the difference between corruption in the West and the Middle East.

It exists in both but with some exceptions politicians in the West make their money first and then buy their way into politics; in the Middle East it is the other way round. One becomes a politician in order to make money.

Morally, both are reprehensible, Professor Lewis says, but from the point of view of the body politic, the Western way is preferable in that it makes politics itself less corrupt, less oppressive and more transparent.

It would seem that those who give money in order to receive peerages are in that category, whereas the elected legislators of this country have taken on a more Middle Eastern attitude while managing to retain an astonishing ability to moralize.

COMMENT THREAD

Noises off

It is not possible even to begin summarising the torrent of ZaNuLab's hostile press this morning. One response from a correspondent, though, tells us, "I think we're all weary with talking while everything collapses around us... People want action but there's no leader."

Peter Hitchen in the Mail on Sunday gives us his recipe, with the panel to his column illustrated. Contrary to the leader in his own paper – which wants us to vote Conservative (we would if there was a Conservative Party to vote for) - he wants us to turn out on Thursday and mark our ballot papers "none of the above".

That's all very well, but spoiled votes are not even recorded, so that is largely a futile gesture.

The futility of that gesture, though, it is matched only by the process of casting a vote. As Booker points out in his column, the loathsome Johnny "three shags" (and counting)Prescott has so emasculated the political process with his "code of conduct" and “standards board” that elected councils are no longer able to function as representatives of the people who are foolhardy enough to vote for them.

For some "public servants", however, times are good, witnessed by the Mail on Sunday which records Plod Blair enjoying the extraordinary fortune of living rent-free in a £1 million penthouse bought with taxpayers’ money. This is the man who regards a 16.6 percent crime detection rate as a good news story. Rushing to the polls here, of course, will make all the difference.

But, what comes over, even through the "noise" on the ZaNuLabour creeps is just how useless the Boy King really is. He should be storming the ramparts, yet is struggling to creep a few points ahead in the polls. Both YouGov in The Sunday Times and BPIX in the Mail on Sunday put the Tories at 35 percent, compared with Labour's 32 percent, a staggeringly poor result considering how unpopular Blair's government has become.

Even if these numbers are taken at face value – ignoring the inaccuracies in methodology - and applied to a general election, Labour would still take the majority of seats in Parliament.

While comparisons are being made with the last days of the decaying Major government, The Business sums it up, saying that the Labour government has one big advantage. By the mid-1990s, it says, "the Labour opposition was demonstrably ready for power; a decade later David Cameron's Tories can barely claim to be a functioning opposition."

Mr Blair's "Black Wednesday" (all the scandals came together on 26 April) was the Cameron Tories first major test; they flunked it. Shadow Home Office minister David Davis did a decent job of holding Mr Clarke to account, but Mr Cameron’s performance at Prime Minister's Question Time on Wednesday, when he had Mr Blair on the ropes, was limp-wristed; most other senior Tories have been missing in action. The media is still doing the Tories' job for them in holding Labour to account.

But what is fascinating about the polls is the rise of the minority parties, standing at approximately 15 percent. This includes a significant tranche of BNP support, but again, the Tory response is less than sure-footed. According to Melissa Kite in the Sunday Telegraph, Eric Pickles – formerly the detested Bradford Council leader, now Conservative deputy chairman and local government spokesman – declares:

We are not differentiating between the candidates who stand for the BNP and the people who vote for them. We believe it is a shameful act to vote for the BNP, no matter how badly you feel you have been let down by Labour. These people are motivated by race and it is not an acceptable use of a protest vote to vote for the BNP.

This is as bad as branding UKIP members as "fruitcakes", if not worse. The arrogance of telling voters that their choice of a legitimate political party is "not an acceptable use of a protest vote" almost takes your breath away.

On the other hand, what else have the Tories to offer? Good opposition, says The Sunday Times, means "putting the government on the rack". Labour, it says, "was merciless in making life even more uncomfortable for the Tories a decade ago. Mr Cameron’s Conservatives need to do the same."

But, even as it fails to do precisely that, a commentator, Jack Stone, says on the Conservative Home site, "if you don't like the way the Conservative Party is heading than my advice is simple. Sod Off!!!".

That, amongst a certain faction of the Boy King's acolytes, seems to be the central message to the "non-believers", and is one of the most powerful strains amongst the "noises off". Despite the utter dereliction of ZaNuLabour, an awful lot of people are going to take his advice.

COMMENT THREAD

You have been warned

You have to sympathise with the EU groupies. When it comes to grabbing the headlines, how can they possibly compete with Johnny "two shags" and the NuLab cock-up show?

At least, though, Trevor Kavanagh of the Sun – in his new blog - is warning us not to drop our vigilance, telling us that "the EU is quietly trying to revive the discredited Constitution by the back door."

I think we might have mentioned that once or twice, but it doesn't hurt to have Kavanagh pitching in on the side of the angels, even if he is unlikely to understand the nuances of the process – or even care less.

Nor do we even mind if he tells his readers to "try logging on to Open Europe's excellent website which keeps an eye on every new twist in the saga of an ever-deeper European Union." The more hands to the pumps, the better.

However, Open Europe's contribution amounts to reading the Financial Times which, this week, reported that "EU leaders are planning to extend the 'period of reflection'" on the EU Constitution after failing to agree on how to revive the text. Kavanagh thus cites Open Europe citing the Financial Times citing Ursula Plassnik, Foreign Minister of Austria, who says (or said): "This issue cannot be settled satisfactorily and conclusively for all 25 member states at the present time."

"Formal talks on reviving the Constitution," continues the FT, "might start after French elections in the summer of 2007, continuing into 2008 when the EU starts a review of its budget."

"You have been warned!" crows the vigilant Kavanagh.

Actually, we seem to have been saying, as early as last May – after the French "no" vote – that there could be no serious attempt to reintroduce the EU constitution until after the French presidential elections in 2007, and we have said it several times since.

Moreover, the very fact that this has now been acknowledged by the EU élites represents something of a set of setback for them. As the IHT reported, plans were afoot to try to revive the constitution at the European Council in June, under the aegis of the Austrian presidency.

Thus idea, though, has been abandoned, as has any hope of the increasingly Eurosceptic Finland taking on the issue when it takes up the presidency in the second half of this year. That leaves Germany in the New Year but, by then France will be in the throes of the its presidential campaign and it will be impossible to get any commitments from what will almost certainly an outgoing Chirac.

Then should the socialists steal the crown from Sarkozy – which is looking increasingly possible – so split is the Left on the EU constitution that it would hardly want to re-open old wounds at the outset of its reign. The chances are, therefore, that inconvenient European issues will be put on the back-burner.

That leaves José Manuel Barroso, the EU president who is expected to tell his gifted team that the EU is probably going to have to wait for serious talks until 2008, having conceded that, "The debate in recent months has shown that Europe is not yet ready for a constitutional solution."

All that is left to Barroso is to offer a "three step plan" which will be unveiled on 10 May – the day after "Europe Day" – almost certainly to a completely indifferent world.

Step one, we are told, is "a push for a concrete policy driven agenda and progress on key proposals, such as an EU energy policy or Europe's push for economic growth." Sounds a bit like Lisbon revisited… again. If yawns were euros, the EU would be rolling in money.

Step two is next year's 50th anniversary of the EU's founding 1957 Treaty of Rome. This will be a "convenient and auspicious moment to reassess the EU," say officials. More navel-gazing, it seems.

As to the third step, is the start of the discussion on financing, midway through 2007 to 2013 budgets, and Barroso is suggesting that this might be the time for a new treaty. But there again, it might not. If a week is a long time in politics, two years is an eternity.

By the time 2008 arrives, the whole of the political landscape of Europe could have undergone huge change, making the situation highly unpredictable and any plans extremely tentative. Thus, the big problem for the commission, as we see it, is trying to keep interest going, when the future looks so uncertain.

Our problem will be to keep European Union issues on the national agenda, when there are so many politicians only too keen to exploit the hiatus by letting the debate fade into obscurity. You have been warned.

COMMENT THREAD

Maybe they will listen to him

Vaclav Klaus, Czech President and more or less the only East European politician with real vision and radical ideas, has been trying to explain the facts of EU life to Americans. While, as ever, he sounds a little too pessimistic, to a great extent one can sympathize with him. My colleague and I have also tried, at various times, to explain the truth about this benighted institution to well-meaning Americans.

Klaus may have better luck. He was speaking at the University of Chicago and said, among other things:

“I am afraid that the Americans do not see the EU's accelerating drive towards a social-democratic, more social than democratic, European superstate. That they do not see the EU's protectionism, the EU's legal and regulatory burdens on business, the EU's irrational 'competition policy', the EU's pensions and health care crisis, and the costs of the European single currency.”

Actually, I think he is wrong on that. Many Americans can see all those details. Unfortunately, their solution is similar to that propounded by various politicians and organizations on this side of the Pond: reform the EU.

What is much more difficult to explain is that it is the very fact of the push for integration that is the problem. There is, I have tried to write on American blogs, no such thing as Europe. There can be no European solutions because there are no European problems. The problems exist differently in different countries and the concept of “Europe” is actively preventing those countries from dealing with them.

Klaus’s summary of the difficulties can scarecely be bettered:

“To fight for peace - when war does not threaten - is, however, a wrong excuse for building institutions which tend to restrain freedom, democracy and democratic accountability, not to speak about economic efficiency.”

Don’t know about anybody else, but I intend to use that sentence in future debates and discussions.

COMMENT THREAD

Abstinence is the only option

A robust discussion is developing on our forum on the merits or otherwise of not voting at Thursday's council elections.

Adding fuel to the debate is this morning's leader in The Daily Telegraph. It suggests, in the context of the various crisis affecting the government that, "Labour's shenanigans damage all the parties", arguing that the party’s response reinforces voters' perception that Labour ministers are out of touch, in it for themselves, corrupted by office.

The remedy, we are reminded, is in the polls on Thursday, when a number of us will be voting. "So will we use our ballots to punish this tired, smug regime?" asks The Telegraph. "Up to a point," is its answer. "It is true that Labour is falling in the opinion polls; but the party is, to some extent, dragging the entire political class with it."

Thus, it opines, most voters do not mutter, "bloody Labour", but "bloody politicians". A "fascinating YouGov survey" in The Telegraph asked voters which party they would like to have running their council. No party attracted even one voter in five.

The point, of course, is re-made by the paper, which reminds us – as indeed we have done – that local elections determine next to nothing, because councillors have lost power to Whitehall and to local quangos. It is a pity though, that the paper did not also add "Brussels" which determines major (in cost terms) policy issues like waste disposal.

However, the paper's conclusion is sound. "Logically enough," it says, "voters treat the poll as a way to register their contempt for all the mainstream parties, either by voting for a fringe organisation such as the BNP or the Lib Dems or - more usually - by staying at home. We can't really blame them; but it says nothing good about the state of Britain."

In terms of staying at home, the Telegraph thus provides the rationale. By doing so – in the context that going out to vote does not and cannot change anything – we say "nothing good about the state of Britain". That, in itself, is a political statement.

Other will argue that the "least worst" option should be exercised. But that is highly unsatisfactory, and self-defeating. In that the elections will be treated as a proxy opinion poll, there is no advantage in voting for the natural choice – the Conservative Party - which has a leader with whom I do not agree, do not accept and, of whom I have nothing but the most profound contempt. How in all honesty can I vote for a party led by this man?

The issue is brought to a head by the recent members' panel survey by Conservative Home which finds that 68 percent of members wanted a commitment to returning responsibility for fishing and aid policies to member states "definitely" to be included in the next Tory manifesto, with another 19 percent saying "maybe". This compares with a mere seven percent who said "probably not" and a minuscule four percent who said "definitely not".

The survey result, says the editorial, "reveals a big appetite within the Tory grassroots for practical measures to address the continuing loss of British sovereignty to the EU."

In my own remarks, I add that "fishing" effectively represents the "litmus test" on the EU. The CFP is unreformable, to which effect Michael Howard personally authorised the publication of (a much ignored) opposition green paper on fishing policy, written by Owen Paterson when he was fisheries shadow minister.

That set out a measured alternative to the CFP, on which the Conservative policy of seeking repatriation of the CFP was endorsed - having already been agreed by two of Howard's predecessors, Hague and IDS.

Since the accession of the Boy King, however, we have had no commitment that the repatriation policy is to be continued and there is every indication that it will not. The "green paper" has been buried and the current spokesmen talk vaguely of "reform" - which isn't even on the table at EU level.

It is "small" issues like this, I suggest, that engender much of the suspicion of the Boy King - who does not even have the guts to confront the fishermen (and the nation) outright, and tell them he is considering (if he has not already done so) pulling out of previous Conservative commitments, leaving us in limbo while one of his "reviews" looks at the issue.

Why should the issue be reviewed, when it was subject to one of the most fundamental technical reviews possible by Paterson and his team, the basics of which can hardly have changed since the review was carried out?

Yet, without a firm commitment from the Boy King on fishing, the fact of the matter is that Conservative Party policy is going backwards on the EU, regressing to a more Europhile stance which - as the survey suggests - is contrary to the wishes of its members and supporters. I thus conclude, "Why should we support a man who is prepared, so arbitrarily, to ignore those wishes?"

That remains the issue. In the final analysis, if we are ever to make any breakthrough in redefining our relationship with the EU, then it is going to be achieved via a Conservative government. And if its leader is not even prepared to put the issue on the table – or even entertain discussion on it – then we are nowhere. In my view, therefore, abstinence is the only option.

COMMENT THREAD

Now we are truly European

One of the constant refrains of that lower order of being known as the "Europhile" is that Britain is not sufficiently "European" in its outlook.

No longer is that the case, it would seem. Courtesy of The Times this morning, we learn that the senior immigration inspector in charge of the unit responsible for deporting foreign criminals – which has so spectacularly failed to deliver the goods - was promoted to a new post as the crisis worsened last autumn.

This is Alan Kittle, who was running the criminal casework team, the special division of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) that dealt with foreign nationals in British jails.

For failures to be rewarded is a well-known characteristic of the European Union, not least when the Santer commission was forced to resign in 1999. Barring Edith Cresson, not one of the commissioners was sanctioned, while Jacques Santer was given a cushy job as an MEP and our own Neil Kinnock was promoted to the position of commission vice-president in charge of cleaning up fraud.

Similarly, with the Eurostat fraud in 2003, described as "a vast enterprise of looting", not one of the officials identified was ever disciplined and several were later promoted.

The anonymous Mr Kittle – for whom there seems not to be a published photograph - therefore follows in the honourable tradition of European administration, of which the Europhiles can be justly proud.

COMMENT THREAD

What did the European Parliament find?

The European Parliament, described for some reason, by an Associated Press writer as “EU lawmakers” and “legislators” (which just goes to show that journalists are lazy everywhere) has been trying to find out the truth about the CIA prisons and clandestine flights that allegedly took terror suspects away to be tortured in various unsavoury places (that the EU is normally very friendly with).

To be quite precise, the committee has made up its mind some time ago and is now looking for corroboration rather than evidence. They have run into some trouble.

The committee has been unable to point to any evidence for those prisons, but they are still looking and intend to travel to various countries were supposed to have been situated. The story of the prisons is supposed to the one leaked by Mary McCarthy to Dana Priest of the Washington Post, for which the latter won the Pulitzer Prize.

In the meantime the would-be legislators have released a preliminary report, to which neither the American nor the EU authorities have reacted. The document was written by Giovanni Fava, an Italian socialist MEP.

Its gist was that

“…data gathered from air safety regulators showed that the CIA had flown 1,000 undeclared flights over Europe since 2001, sometimes stopping on the Continent to transport terrorism suspects kidnapped inside the European Union to countries using torture.”

On the one hand the report accuses the CIA of violating the Chicago Treaty

“that requires airlines to declare routes and stopovers for planes with police missions”.

On the other hand Signor Fava acknowledged

“that in some cases it was very unlikely that the European authorities had been unaware of suspects being arrested on their territory”.

The CIA is not denying special renditions, which began, as we now know, under President Clinton:

“The CIA declined to comment on the specifics of the report, but an agency spokesman in Washington defended the practice of renditions. "Renditions are an anti-terror tool that the United States has used for years, consistent with its laws and treaty obligations," said Paul Gimigliano. "The CIA does not condone or tolerate torture, transport individuals to other countries for the purpose of torture, or knowingly receive intelligence obtained by torture."”

The Dutch Green MEP and human rights activist, Kathalijne Buitenweg whom we have quoted before, has once again come up trumps:

“Condoleezza Rice says rendition programs save lives, and we don't accept this.”

Why not, one wonders.

“In Europe, we will seize cocaine if we find it on a plane, but we are turning a blind eye to the transport of human beings to be tortured, and this is unacceptable.”

What a lot of unacceptance. I wonder what the lady would find acceptable? More terrorist attacks? People murdered as Theo van Gogh was? Politicians being permanently guarded, as some of Ms Buitenweg’s colleagues are in the Netherlands, because of threats by Islamists? I don’t believe we have heard Ms Buitenweg’s comments on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and what she has had to put up with.

Still, the answer is there, if you look for it:

“Legislators said the lack of a cohesive EU-wide terrorism policy was undermining counterterrorism cooperation in Europe and allowing abuses.”

No, the International Herald Tribune does not know the truth about the Toy Parliament either. Legislators, indeed.

Still, the proposal is interesting. There is, for example, no suggestion that, apart from the possible odd mistake, the people, supposedly taken away by the CIA were not terrorists or, at least, would-be terrorists.

The logic is that by not having an EU-wide terrorism policy, the Americans have been allowed to pursue their own, with the help of individual governments and, one must assume, security forces. Therefore, we must have that cohesive policy in order to stop the American war on terror.

COMMENT THREAD

The Indy shows its colours

It is not really within our remit to comment on the scandalous paper by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt on the Jewish conspiracy behind American foreign policy. A shortened version was published in the London Review of Books, one of those publications the taxpayer subsidizes through a generous, annual Arts Council grant.

Other and better qualified people have discussed the paper and the so-called theory behind it, pointing out the many factual errors and complete non sequiturs. Curiously enough the paper was criticized even by Noam Chomsky. It has, however, been defended by the usual panoply of left-wing talking heads as well as various political anti-semites and, hilariously, the white supremacist KKK man, David Duke. The authors are very embarrassed by this.

However, it behoves us to point to the disgraceful cover of yesterday’s “special” addition to the Independent (there is one every day, I understand) in which Robert Fisk, the man, who thinks that Starbucks is part of a Zionist plot, discusses with all solemnity this theory.

Harry’s Place, doesn’t just analyze but also reproduces other similar illustrations from history, placing the Indy in true perspective.

COMMENT THREAD

Dead meat

Just when the NuLab experiment is folding, with the distinct air of fin de siècle, was the time when we needed a powerful, credible opposition, with a leader who was totally on top of his brief.

Instead, we have the Boy King – or should we now call him the "Fraud King"? Nailing his colours to the environ-mental mast was always a high-risk strategy, on an issue that takes on quasi-religious tones. To appeal to the "true believers" was always going to require an element of personal commitment, if the "greener than thou" agenda was going to stick.

But the crumbling at the edges was already apparent when the Fraud King chose to fly to Norway for a communion with the "wrong kind of glacier", via an eco-friendly dog sleigh. Instead of a scheduled flight, he chose the luxury and convenience of a ten-seater business jet, dumping 50 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

As if that wasn't enough, then there was the debacle of his choice of a gas-guzzling Lexus, carefully hidden behind a hanger as the Boy posed with "cleaner greener" Noddy cars.

But, throughout this, there has been the iconic routine of the Boy peddling to work on his eco-friendly bicycle, demonstrating his personal commitment to improving the environment. Now this has turned out to be a charade – with his gas-guzzling, chauffeur-driven Lexus following on behind, carrying a clean shirt, a pair of shoes and a briefcase. "Eco-chic” has turned to "bull-chic".

This cannot compare with the cavortings of Johnny "two-shags" Prescott, the serial incompetence of Charles Clarke, or the stunning ineptitude of Patricia Hewitt, but it nevertheless fatally weakens the credibility of the Boy on the ground of his own choosing. It was an entirely unforced error that will rebound with an electorate which dislikes hypocrisy in its politicians.

Above all, its shows that the Fraud King cannot be trusted. If his "flagship policy" is a charade – all spin and no substance – what price any of his other policies? In opting for cheap gestures, he has further diminished the standing of politicians, and added to the general contempt which the breed attracts.

Whenever the Boy now raises his "green" agenda in public, he will be the object of amused derision – fatal to the reputation of any wannabe serious politician. He is dead meat. And that put the anti-EU agenda further down the line than it has been in living memory.

COMMENT THREAD

He's totally bogus

Yesterday, the "cleaner, greener" Boy King was in Bury, near Manchester, campaigning for the local elections next week.

While he was there, he took the opportunity to extol the virtues of public transport, telling us that, "Transport is an issue that affects us all - whether it's getting our children to school, trying to get to work, or simply getting around during the day," adding that "I want us to help people who live in our cities get around quickly and easily.”

While the Tory Toff was quite happy to be photographed alongside such plebeian transport, however, he had far grander ideas about how to "get around quickly and easily." According to BBC's Newsnight, he had flown up from London for the photo-call in a somewhat less than "cleaner and greener" helicopter.

Also, according to the same source, the Daily Mirror reports today that while the "cleaner greener" Boy King makes a very public show of cycling to the House of Commons from his home in Notting Hill each morning, his chauffeur-driven car follows behind with all his papers, his shoes and a clean shirt.

As one of our readers remarks, "He's totally bogus."

COMMENT THREAD

Go to jail

I think that, if I was the Brussels correspondent for any UK media outlet, I'd be thinking about looking for a new job - so lacklustre is the agenda over the water, compared with the British political scene that is just beginning to get interesting.

The Times, however, is trying its best. Of late, it has beaten the BBC by a full day to the EU parliament story and, as far as I can see, it is the only major newspaper to have run the story about the EU demanding prison sentences for counterfeiting - the practice of copying branded goods and passing them off as the real thing.

Even then, the story has been floating around for a few days, having been flagged up by the Financial Times and Reuters on Tuesday.

But, at least, The Times ran it yesterday, telling us that Brussels had "announced the first EU-wide criminal sanction ... requiring every member country to imprison organised counterfeiters for four years and fine them up to €300,000 (£209,000)."

Having a least reported the story, though, it is a pity the paper then got the details almost completely wrong, demonstrating once again the slender grip the MSM really have when it comes to reporting EU matters.

By "Brussels", of course, The Times means the EU commission and, as our readers know, the commission is not in a position to "require" members to pass laws. Strictly, and in effect, this is a proposal, which must be approved by the member states through the Council of Ministers – and also by the EU parliament.

The substantive issue, though, relates to an EU Court of Justice ruling last September, which we reported on in detail and about which The Times made a great fuss, then also getting it wrong.

Continuing its errors in the current piece, it tells us that, "If the legislation is approved, it will mark the first time that a criminal law has been introduced in Britain that has not come from the Houses of Parliament and that Parliament will have no power to block." While the latter is true (in that Parliament will not be able to block it), pedantically, criminal law in the UK does not usually come from Parliament but from the government (the executive).

The greater error, though, is to claim that this is the first time a criminal law has been so introduced. That is emphatically not the case. Most of the EU law imposed on us comes under the criminal code and the Treaties require that criminal sanctions be imposed. By this means, throughout our membership, thousands of new criminal offences have been created, over which Parliament has had no control.

What is different, therefore, is that the commission is explicitly proposing that the member states impose a custodial sentence, setting the level of at least four years - instead of leaving it to member states to decide which penalty to apply.

That does not mean, though – as The Times implies – that this is a minimum sentence. Four years has to be the minimum maximum, if you get my drift. The actual sentences in particular cases will still be decided by the national courts. The intended effect of the proposal is harmonisation - simply to make sure that the member states standardise their penalties, to prevent criminal from taking advantage of lower penalties in different member states in what is very often a cross-border crime.

What makes the whole thing puzzling, though, is that the commission introduced exactly this proposal on 12 July last – the story is over nine months old.

I guess it has been relaunched following the September ECJ judgement because the legal position then was a little uncertain. And, while The Times – and others – got excited about the idea of the EU setting criminal penalties, it has always been the case, since we joined, that if you contravened EU law, you could go to jail.

COMMENT THREAD

How does he define good news?

Plod Blair, one of this blog’s favourite cartoon characters, has told the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) that his annual report is “largely a good news story”. One wonders whether he is on the same planet as the rest of us?

Here are the figures that, according to him constitute that “good news story”:

Total notifiable offences are down 3.1%

BCS comparator crime is down 0.9%

Residential burglary is up 1.7%

Robbery has increased by 16.1%

Motor vehicle crime has increased by 1.2%

Gun enabled crime has increased by 4.2%

Trident gun crime has increased from 201 offences to 266 offences.

Homicides are down from 195 to 175 (despite the fact that there
were 13 homicides in July attributed to the terrorist attacks)

Road fatalities are three up on last year at 145 (April-Nov 2005 vs. April-Nov 2004)

Violent Crime is up by 0.4%

Domestic Violence has fell this year by 3.6%

Racist crime has fallen by 11.7%

Homophobic crime is down by 52 offences, or 3.9%

I expect most of our readers will notice something rather interesting about those figures. Here is the full story on One London.

COMMENT THREAD

A good day to bury bad news?

Rarely, since spin doctor Jo Moore decided that 9/11 was a "good day to bury bad news" has there been such a good opportunity to slide an unwelcome story out into the public domain in the certain knowledge that it would be virtually ignored by the media.

Definitely in that category is the decision by Blair’s government yesterday that it would not attempt to block the bid by the Russian state-owned Gazprom to take over Centrica, the owner of British Gas.

Mind you, when it comes to understanding the issues, the Telegraph business comment seems completely to have lost the plot.

Britain cannot say 'nyet' to embrace of Russian bear, it declares, arguing that the government deserves credit for the consistency of its position. "Our outrage at France's protectionism would look pretty hollow", it says. "if we were to change the rules simply because we didn't like the cut of Gazprom's jib."

But, as we pointed out in our previous post, the situation is a little different. Gazprom is effectively an arm of the Russian state and its policy is determined not by commercial considerations but is dedicated to furthering Russian foreign policy objectives.

Thus, courtesy of Tony Blair, we look forward to having a vital supply industry controlled through a proxy by a foreign state, the interests of which are demonstrably not the same as those of the UK. And all that is happening without any serious comment from the media. Yesterday was a good day to bury bad news.

COMMENT THREAD

Well, they voted it through

As Claudia Rossett, who did not get a Pulitzer Prize, pursues another story about the UN – the disappearance of its enormously valuable stamp collection - we can report that the Security Council actually voted John Bolton’s proposed resolution about Darfur through.

Twelve members of the fifteen-strong Council voted for sanctions against four named Sudanese, who are being accused of genocide. The member nations are being instructed to freezing their assets and blocking their entry. Whether anyone will comply with it remains to be seen but, just possibly, Mr Bolton’s much derided tactics can achieve something.

The four men are:

“Maj. Gen. Gaffar Mohamed Elhassan, a Sudanese Air Force officer accused of helping the government-backed janjaweed militias commit atrocities; Sheik Musa Hilal, chief of an Arab tribe and a janjaweed leader; Adam Yacub Shant, a commander of Sudanese Liberation Army forces that broke a cease-fire to attack government troops; and Gabril Abdul Kareem Badri, the commander of another rebel force, which kidnapped and threatened African Union troops.”

Three countries abstained: Russia and China who are still maintaining that this is unnecessary and counter-productive interference in the peace negotiations, still going on till the end of this week in Abuja, and Quatar, who has not seen any “proof” that justified the sanctions.

COMMENT THREAD

Aren't we being a little bit precious?

According to AFP, via DefenseNews, Sweden's foreign ministry and military officials have announced that Sweden has withdrawn from European military exercises due to be held next month in Italy because of Israel's participation.

These are the "Spring Flag" air exercises due to take part in Sardinia from 8 – 25 May and were to were to consist of nine countries, Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, who were all to train together for future peacekeeping operations.

"The F17 air base in Blekinge, in southern Sweden, was due to represent the Scandinavian country in the exercises but we received orders from military headquarters to pull out," F17 spokesman Kent Loewing told AFP.

The argument, to put it mildly, is a little muddled. Foreign ministry spokesperson Nina Ersman explained that Sweden did not want to take part in the exercise because Israel was and the reason for that is that, "Israel is not currently conducting any peacekeeping operations." What does the silly woman think Israel is doing in its own backyard?

Another ministry spokesperson, Christian Carlsson blundered on: "Our analysis of the situation for the time-being is that an Israeli participation in this kind of peacekeeping effort is unlikely given the political situation in the Middle East."

So, um, what are we talking about? Peacekeeping operations in the Middle East or somewhere else? How many is Sweden taking part in at the moment? In any case, even if Israel is not conducting peacekeeping operations, what's to stop these countries from training together, in case future occasions arise?

More to the point though, the Sweden has not always been so, er.. sqeamish. As early as 1952, four years after the foundation of Israel, the Swedish government sold her 25 surplus F-51D Mustang fighters, in defiance of a Western-sponsored arms embargo.

Furthermore, Sweden has been quite happy to avail itself of Israeli military technology. Between 1995 and 2001, Israel was third biggest arms exporter to Sweden, selling military equipment to the value of about 330 million Swedish crowns.

This included, in 1996, 120mm ammunition for tanks and, in 1997, ground penetrating radar. As late as 2004, the two countries were co-operating on the development of an explosives detection system.

Altogether, one might think, this paragon of Nordic virtue is being just a little bit precious.

This is a joint post, co-written with Helen.

COMMENT THREAD

Leaks and prizes

For a while we thought that we should not bother to write about the sacked CIA officer Mary McCarthy who is alleged to have leaked classified information to friendly journalists, in particular Pulitzer Prize winner Dana Priest of the Washington Post. This was, we thought, a matter of private grief and we should not intrude on it.

However, certain aspects of the story do impinge on our various themes and, indeed, follow on from subjects we have written about before.

In the first place, there is the Pulitzer Prize itself, though this is a minor issue. As we have pointed out before, the New York Times and the Washington Post figured heavily in its lists. Yet the one journalist who has done astonishing work to bring some illumination to a murky subject, the UN’s oil-for-food scandal, Claudia Rossett was not even among the finalists.

As the New York Post puts it

“Instead, the Pulitzer Prize committee has lately preferred the work of reporters who endeavor effectively to undermine the U.S. government's antiterrorism efforts.

Dana Priest of The Washington Post won the "Beat Reporting" award "for her persistent, painstaking reports on secret 'black site' prisons and other controversial features of the government's counterterrorism campaign." Her report led the E.U. to demand that these European nations cease assisting the United States.

James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times won the "National Reporting" award "for their carefully sourced stories on secret domestic eavesdropping that stirred a national debate on the boundary line between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberty." (Ever since, federal officials have reported a dropoff in the terrorist calls they were monitoring.)

Long gone are the days when journalists paid respect to the notion of national security. Now, journalism's most prestigious awards seem to encourage the opposite: undermining national security for the sake of individual self-aggrandizement.

Maybe it's a greater honor that Rosett didn't receive a Pulitzer.”

That is probably right but there are a few other issues here. An important one is that Dana Priest’s “persistent, painstaking reporting” seems to be based on leaked information given to her in cosy conversations with at least one CIA agent and very little else.

Ms Priest herself is saying nothing, though, presumably she may be subpoenaed at some point, possibly not to reveal that there may have been others in the CIA ready to chatter to her in pursuance of their political agenda. The agenda that they are not supposed to have.

The Mary McCarthy story is unfolding with new aspects being revealed almost every hour and I do not propose to go into it. Here is a good summary of it all but there are many others.

She has, incidentally, made a statement through her lawyer that denied being the source of the Priest story. It seems she might be interviewed later on today on TV.

There has already been an unseemly scrabble on the left to defend what, by any country’s laws, is a crime – revelation of classified information by an intelligence officer - and, naturally, comparisons with the Plame case. Apart from the fact that nothing secret was revealed in that affair, if it turns out that the President authorized certain information, that is not a leak. The President, elected by the people to that position, is the ultimate arbiter of what is and what is not classified information.

As today’s Wall Street Journal points out, the McCarthy case is part of the continuing and disgraceful saga of the CIA warring with the elected administration of the United States. They call it an insurgency and that is the right description.

“Leaving partisanship aside, this ought to be deeply troubling to anyone who cares about democratic government. The CIA leakers are arrogating to themselves the right to subvert the policy of a twice-elected Administration. Paul Pillar, another former CIA analyst well known for opposing Mr. Bush while he was at Langley, appears to think this is as it should be. He recently wrote in Foreign Affairs that the intelligence community should be treated like the Federal Reserve and have independent political status. In other words, the intelligence community should be a sort of clerisy accountable to no one.”

This is something we know about – unelected officials and bureaucrats trying to become part of the political game. One of the most egregious examples in this country was the gaggle of Chief Constables lobbying MPs over the 90 day detention clause.

Add to that the spectacle of former generals (none too successful, some of them) calling for the resignation of the Secretary for Defence, appointed by the elected President, according to the constitutional rules of the United States and you begin to get a picture of an attempt by Democrat appointees (for such they are) trying to turn the American government into something that might resemble the managerial governance developing on this side of the Pond.

One of the oddest parts of the McCarthy story is that she was working in a very special part of the CIA most recently (after her spectacular career that may have contributed to the inefficiency of the agency had stymied after 2000), which investigated alleged misdemeanours by agents. In other words, if she were really so worried about certain events and developments, she was in a particularly good position to do something about it legitimately. Instead, she seems to have chosen an illegitimate course of action and, one cannot help feeling, that the reasons for that were purely political.

(Ms McCarthy and her husband are strong Democrat supporters and have contributed reasonable sums to the party and, specifically, to the Kerry campaign. That is their right but it is not her right to let her politics affect her loyalty to the elected administration, which should be taken for granted.)

There is another aspect to the story that affects us. Dana Priest’s “revelations” have put a severe strain on relations between the United States and its supposed European allies. In fact, they were carefully published to coincide Secretary of State Rice’s visit to Europe.

Since then there have been all sorts of stories about the supposed CIA camps and about alleged terrorists being “rendered” from various European airports. If these stories were true then there can be no question that the European governments and European intelligence officials would have known about it all.

But are they true? This is the question we must ask ourselves. (It doesn’t really matter to the Pulitzer Prize judges, as they have awarded that prize wrongfully so often, one more will hardly matter.)

According to this Associated Press report,

“Investigations into reports that US agents shipped prisoners through European airports to secret detention centers have produced no evidence of illegal CIA activities, the European Union's antiterrorism coordinator said yesterday.

The investigations also have not turned up any proof of secret renditions of terror suspects on EU territory, Gijs de Vries told a European Parliament committee investigating the allegations.”

Now this may or may not be correct and there are dark mutterings of absence of evidence not being evidence of absence. But the truth is that at some point absence of evidence does become evidence of absence or judicial systems have to collapse or mutate into something closer to the Soviet one.

The MEPs on the committee are casting doubt on Mr de Vries’s evidence.

“De Vries came under sharp criticism from the EU parliamentarians for refusing to consider earlier testimonies from a German and a Canadian who described to the committee how they were kidnapped and imprisoned by foreign agents, and from a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who alleged that British intelligence services used information obtained under torture.

''There is so much circumstantial evidence, you can't close your eyes from the fact that this is probably happening," Dutch deputy and civil liberties activist Kathalijne Buitenweg said.”

Probably happening is not, I fear, quite good enough. How would the civil liberties activist like it if individuals, whose fate she was interested in were imprisoned on "probable" evidence?

If the German and the Canadian (surely they are merely German or Canadian citizens) have some direct evidence then that should outweigh Mr de Vries’s references to “all kinds of allegations, impressions”. The same applies to that British ambassador. Does he or does he not have evidence or is he merely playing the same game the CIA is: undermining the elected government?

Let us say, the jury is out on that one but if evidence does not appear soon, we shall have to accept that Dana Priest’s story was not altogether accurate. There is a theory that this was a sting engineered by the CIA bosses to find out who was doing the leaking. Possibly, though that sounds a little too complicated.

The Pulitzer Prize will stay with Ms Priest and Ms McCarthy will be elevated to the status of a secular heroine and all on the basis of what? Dubious information, subversion of the state and attempted arrogation of power from the elected administration.

COMMENT THREAD

One shouldn't gloat, but…

With Johnny "two shags" Prescott being dobbed in for having an affair with his secretary, you would have to have a heart of stone not to giggle inanely at the misfortune that has befallen his former boss, ex-leader of the Labour Party Neil Kinnock.

The "Welsh windbag" has been up in court today in Abergavenny, south Wales, to be banned from driving for six months after admitting two speeding offences which brought over the limit on the "totting-up" procedure.

What makes this all the more delicious is that Kinnock is an ex-European transport commissioner, and the man took the opportunity to underline the hypocrisy of his own stance by declaring to reporters after the case, that "speeding is a killer and I have campaigned all my life against speeding," adding, "If you break the speed limit you can expect to be punished."

At the hearing, he was also fined £800 with £43 costs, which should not trouble him much on his £75,000 commissioner’s pension. Asked how he would cope with being banned from driving, he answered: "I'll manage, with difficulty, but I'll manage".

Here, one must have a little sympathy. Forking out for a chauffeur might be a little more costly - although I am sure Glenys can help out from her MEP’s salary. But you have to question Neil's timing. At 64, had he managed to hold off the prosecution until next year, he would have qualified for a free bus pass, which would have saved him a bob or two.

COMMENT THREAD

Off limits

The current furore over the release of more than 1,000 foreign offenders, who should have been considered for deportation, more than adequately illustrates how domestic politics will always completely submerge EU issues.

One wonders, incidentally, whether the home secretary, Charles Clarke, is aware that it is national "real nappy week", given that he is probably in urgent need of considerable quantities of the product at this time.

The problem for this Blog, however, is that while national events (in this case rightly) take centre stage, other developments – some of considerable long term-importance – are consigned to the margins.

Such is the bald pronouncement yesterday by the Boy King, reported today in The Daily Telegraph that Eurosceptic MPs are not welcome in his team.

According to the Telegraph report, Cameron "threw down the gauntlet to Eurosceptic Tory MPs" by declaring that anyone who advocated withdrawal from the European Union would not serve on his front bench.

This came on the eve of the launch by Philip Davies, the Conservative MP for Shipley, of his "Better Off Out" campaign to which he has invited nearly 50 of his party colleagues and two Labour MPs. But, as Tory Diary suggests, many of those MPs who might have been tempted to attend to might be discovering last minute diary clashes.

What the Boy King's intervention effectively means is that critical discussion of EU issues are now effectively banned within the Conservative parliamentary party, other than by "no hopers" who have no ambitions for office or who have already been passed over. In one fell swoop, discussion of the EU has been consigned to the margins.

However, long after the furore over the incompetence of the Home Office has died down, and Clarke has either been forced to resign – or not – the EU will continue to exert its baleful effect on the body politic, and our national life. But the Boy King has now ensured that it will be discussed even less that it is at the moment.

Talking this over with a UKIP spokesman this morning, he expressed some satisfaction at the development. The Boy King had, effectively, declared his support for the EU, which served as a wake-up call for those who believed the Boy might harbour Eurosceptic tendencies. It would also, he felt, drive more Tory activists into the UKIP camp.

Thus, while the Boy is making hay with the current crisis, behind the scenes, he has dealt another blow to political process, declaring a whole tranche of public policy "off limits". In its way, that is as damaging, if less spectacular, than releasing convicted criminals onto the streets.

COMMENT THREAD

Yet another rip-off

However loathsome it was going to the EU parliament in Strasbourg, staying in the city was a different experience altogether. The City authorities were always very accommodating and we always found ourselves very welcome, especially in the fine bars and restaurants.

The Times, however, has come up with a report that suggests that the City’s enthusiasm for the parliament was not entirely altruistic. In fact, it seems, it has been ripping off the parliament for the last 25 years, to the tune of some £105m.

The scam arises through a secret deal where the City has inflated the rent for two of the parliament's buildings - the Winston Churchill and the Salvador de Madriaga - by between 10 per and 40 per cent since 1979, and then overcharged on the sale of the main building (pictured) which was originally purchased by the City authorities and then sold on to the parliament for a price tag of €450 million.

Outraged MEPs have refused to sign off the parliament's budget and have begun an investigation into how much had been overpaid and whether there was fraud involved. There is, according to The Times, an intense row brewing, with MEPs accusing its officials of knowing about the overpayments but doing nothing.

Further resentment is brewing as the City has refused to co-operate with the investigation, denying access to its internal budget documents, which would show how much money it made from the parliament and where it went. In response, the parliament has frozen the €10.5 million annual rent payment and there are suggestions that the police will be called in.

Somehow, though, one gets the feeling that this will go nowhere. Palms will be greased and the issue will slide out of the public domain, unresolved, with the taxpayers of the member states picking up the tab. But then, this is the EU and such is its addiction to fraud and waste (unlike ZaNu Labour of course) that a mere £105 million can easily be forgotten.

COMMENT THREAD

True Finns

"We need to escape from the heart of darkness in Brussels and stop licking the EU's boots." So says Timo Soini, Finland's most outspoken EU sceptic, and former presidential candidate, leader of the populist rural party named True Finns.

Soini recently considered protesting at plans by his government to ratify the European Union's moribund constitution by drop-kicking it down the stairs of Parliament or immersing the 300-page document in a pile of fish. In the end he decided against any such display, on the grounds that it would be too "un-Finnish".

Such delights are brought to us by today’s International Herald Tribune which records that Soini's campaign against the EU has gained him a growing following. In the presidential elections in January, he surprised the political establishment by winning nearly 3.4 percent of the vote - coming in fifth among eight candidates, including the sitting prime minister and president.

His popularity appears to reflect an intensifying backlash against the EU in Finland, the only Nordic country using the euro. "The days when Finns thought the EU could do no wrong are over," said Alexander Stubb, an MEP and one of Finland's most ardent EU proponents.

This is backed by a poll by the Finnish research institute, Eva, which found that the percentage of Finns favouring the EU fell to 33 percent in January 2005, a drop of 11 points from the previous January. Two-thirds of the respondents said the costs of the EU outweighed its benefits.

Another poll, by Eurobarometer, indicated that 51 percent of Finns had negative feelings about the EU, with the difficulty of understanding what the bloc actually does cited among the greatest problems.

Thus, says the IHT, with Finland poised to take over the presidency in July, such scepticism comes at an awkward time. Finland will have the task of reinvigorating the Union during a period of doubt about its expansion and growing economic nationalism on the Continent. This, it says – with a degree of understatement - could prove difficult.

The paper cites "political observers" who say the increasingly frosty attitude toward the EU in Finland is noteworthy because the geographically isolated country is not part of NATO and has traditionally viewed the EU as a vital link to the West and guarantor of its security. "Finland always wants to be the best pupil in the EU class," said Mikko Majander, a Finnish historian. "But Finns are beginning to ask themselves: Why should we go to such efforts, when big countries can't seem to bother?"

Nevertheless, Soini, believes the EU's further expansion has an attractive side: It will make the bloc so unmanageable that it will self-destruct, he says. "It may be good if the EU gets so big that it can no longer function - it will be like a rat with its hypothalamus removed, who keeps eating until it explodes," he adds.

Railing at the Finnish political establishment, he describes it as "blindly pro-European", hence the government's push to ratify the EU's draft constitution in the parliament, even though two of the EU's founding countries had rejected it. "It is like wanting to display a dead elephant at the zoo," he says.

He compares Finland's relationship with the EU to its appeasement of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. "Everyone knew that the communist dictatorship was a harmful system, yet we talked about it bringing peace and prosperity," he said. "Now we use this same double-speak when talking about the EU."

But, we are told, even the pro-European camp in Finland is starting to lose patience. Heidi Hautala, a pro-European parliamentary leader of the Finnish Green party, says support for the EU in Finland is declining because perceptions of the EU have caught up with the reality after expectations were raised too high.

Hautala, who spent eight years in the EU parliament, says that the EU also has lost Finnish confidence by squandering taxpayers' money and passing bizarre and unnecessary legislation. A committed environmentalist, she says that she is nevertheless bemused by EU proposals calling for observers on EU fishing vessels to monitor the accidental killing of porpoises.

And she says Finns are still reeling over EU proposals a few years ago to ban tar, which has been used for protecting boats and roofs in Finland for centuries.

And so does the Great Empire decline… brought down by a ban on tar – and perhaps lead in organ pipes. It’s often the little things that do for you in the end.

COMMENT THREAD

Here we go again

Yes, we probably have used that title before as well. But one does feel some sympathy for the groundhogs.

What brought this on? The news from the UK office of the European Parliament that tomorrow’s

“main debate is on the management of the EU budget in 2004 (it is the end of the so-called annual 'discharge' procedure whereby MEPs have to decide whether to sign off the accounts for that year)”.

Whoop-de-do! Attentive readers, who still find the saga of the European budget of interest, may remember that for the 11th year in a row the Court of Auditors has refused to sign it off, on the grounds that it could not assert that an adequate proportion of it is “free of irregularities”.

So, does that mean that the European Parliament, that voice of the European people, that guardian of democratic righteousness, that stern overseer of the unelected Commission will also balk at signing the budget off? Don’t be silly.

“The European Parliament's rapporteur (spokesman), Dutch Liberal MEP Jan Mulder, argues that the European Commission should not have to pay the price when the problem lies primarily in the Member States themselves. He has said: "Refusing the discharge to the Commission is a nuclear weapon and would mean that the Commission would have to resign...This Commission is cooperating well with the European Parliament to improve the EU's financial management, whereas the Council is resisting."”

Well, of course, it is true that the irregularities are created by the Commission and various member states jointly but to say that we must sign a clearly faulty budget off because the alternative will mean the Commission resigning is a somewhat curious assertion. It seems (shock, horror!) that the so-called democratic part of the EU is more concerned with saving the face of the undemocratic Commission than in guarding the people’s money. And I bet you didn’t know that.

The problem lies with the whole concept of the EU budget and it is once again a matter of no accountability. The Commission creates a budget, based on various “lines” of income and expenditure that are hard to understand. In any case, the budget is not presented to the European Parliament or to the real, national ones. There are no debates and the signing off happens (or not) a year or so after the budget has been spent.

The funds and projects the budget encompasses have no rigour or accountability. And we all know from Marta Andreasen about the abysmal standard of accounting used by the Commission.

Then, year after year the Court of Auditors refuses to sign the budget off and year after year, the Commission, backed by its acolyte the Toy Parliament, promises to reform its methods and blames the member states for any problems.

I say, groundhogs of the world unite!

COMMENT THREAD

Role models

So, Rachel Sylvester thinks – if one may be so bold as to use that word – that the Boy King is "a true-blue Tory". "He is, in fact," opines the fair lady, "the most traditional Tory leader since Alec Douglas-Home."

One really wonders whether the lady fully understands the implications of her comparison, though. Having become leader of the Conservative Party in October 1963, Douglas-Home then went on to lose the general election the following year, after a mere 362 days as prime minister.

The Boy King might, however, take heart from Douglas-Home's most memorable quote. He declared: "There are two problems in my life. The political ones are insoluble and the economic ones are incomprehensible".

Not that the Boy King would ever trouble himself with anything as tedious as real politics or even economics, being more master of the "photo-opportunity" than anything substantial.

It was quite amusing to read in the Spy column, therefore, of how the Boy's communion with glaciers so very nearly came unstuck, and would have done so but for the craven behaviour of a media photographer.

According to Spy, the Boy's contented expression, as he hacked across a Norwegian icefield flanked by huskies, belied a deeper unease. Apparently, during his ride on the sled, one of the husky dogs had to do its business. One of the other dogs trotted over and kicked it up into the air, splattering it all over Boy. He implored the cameraman not to film until he had scrubbed it all off. Unfortunately, the cameraman complied, leaving the event unrecorded for prosperity.

Nevertheless, Spy got a nice punch-line out of it, suggesting that this was more a case of "vote blue, go brown".

Despite this, the Boy continues to live dangerously, yesterday offering himself as a model, test driving Noddy cars on Dunsfold airfield in a bid to further his "green" credentials.

What makes the whole thing a charade is that the Boy's newly-leased £38,000 Lexus saloon - which can manage 155 mph from its 3.5 litre V6 engine - was hidden behind one of the hangars, out of sight of the less than enterprising photographers.

This is enough, it seems, to convince voters that the Boy seems "genuinely to care about the environment more than most politicians". That much comes out of a Populus poll for the BBC television programme The Daily Politics, undertaken on April 19 and 20, cited by Peter Riddell in today’s Times.

This showed that the Boy's credentials were believed by a narrow 47 to 41 percent margin, although Riddell thinks it will take more than huskies and cleaner cars to get voters on-side. By a two-to-one margin (62 to 31 percent) they also think the Boy is probably only talking about the environment "because he thinks it will make people more positive about the Conservative Party, not because he really cares about it".

The question Riddell poses is whether enough voters care about the environment sufficiently to turn the tide. Recent poll evidence would indicate that they do not.

Never mind. Little Rachel tells us that the Boy believes that his role is to take his party back to its moderate, election-winning roots – no doubt using Douglas-Home as a role model. It's a funny thing though… it was the distinctly un-moderate Thatcher who did rather better.

COMMENT THREAD

No thanks, Russia

For a country with an avowed free-market policy that has Electricité de France supplying power to No. 10, allowing the Russian state-owned Gazprom to make a bid for Centrica, the owner of British Gas, seems a natural extension of that policy.

However, as energy analyst David Montagu-Smith told Channel Four News, the Russians are looking to use the security of gas supply as a major tool in getting to the top table and staying there.

Despite Gazprom being described as "an arm of Russian domestic and foreign policy", Montagu-Smith believes European governments should resist the urge to block the company’s expansion plans, amid concerns that, if its merger aspirations are thwarted, it could sour the wider relationship between Russia and the EU.

EU member states – but not Britain – is heavily reliant on Russian gas supplies so it looks as if the UK is thus being called upon to allow a Russian take-over of our premier gas distributor, simply to look after the colleagues' interests.

But there is a more pressing reason why we should not do deals with the Russians. Not only is the state armaments manufacturer supplying hi-tech anti-aircraft missiles to Iran, which could potentially alter the balance of power in the Middle East – to the detriment of the British national interest – we now learn that it is supplying a powerful anti-tank weapon to Hizbollah and through them to terrorist groups in Iraq.

Known as the RPG-29, this weapon has two warheads and is capable of penetrating the thickest of armour as well as defeating protective devices devised to deal with the earlier, more primitive RPG-7s.

Although primarily a threat to US forces, there is every possibility that it could also be used against British troops, who have no effective defence measures against the weapon. So potent is it that the US military has refused to allow the newly formed Iraqi Army to buy them, fearing they will fall into the wrong hands.

Yet, the very same state that wishes to buy up our gas company, and wants to be seen as a "responsible trading partner", is equipping terrorists with deadly weapons that could well result in Union Jack-draped coffins finding their way back to our shores.

Our government should tell the Russians, "thank you, but no thanks", and let the EU colleagues go hang.

COMMENT THREAD

The man makes no sense

As Al-Qaeda (or so it would appear) strikes in Egypt, blowing up hotels packed because of the holiday season, killing and maiming Egyptians and foreigners alike and trying to deprive those who survive of their livelihood, it might be a good idea to have a look at the latest Osama bin Laden offering. These seem to get more and more rum as time goes on.

Curiously enough, the bearded wonder (referred to by sundry MSM outlets as a Saudi dissident) did not mention that his band of merry brothers was about to bomb an Egyptian town. Must have slipped his mind.

Instead he enlarged on the subject of how he was going to fight Westerners because they were clearly waging a war on Islam. (Not half as much as some parts of Islam wage on other parts.)

Equally curiously, he did not mention Iraq much. Now, this is very odd, as has been pointed out by numerous bloggers. After all, bin Laden announced some time ago that Al-Qaeda was diverting most of its resources to the great battle in Iraq. Whatever happened to that? Could it be that they are actually losing? Perish the thought.

So what was it that has been really annoying the new caveman? It seems he is particularly angry because the West is refusing to support the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. By not supporting, he really means, as they all do, handing over large sums of money that can be used (when not stolen) to arm lots more “jihadists”. But surely, by not paying for our own destruction, we in the West are beginning to show a certain amount of nous. Bin Laden ought to respect that.

Mind you, as not giving money to Hamas is one of the main reason why bin Laden is threatening further attacks on westerners (especially those who might possibly be in Dahab), then the British should be safe, after Jack Straw’s comments.

Hamas leadership appears unimpressed by bin Laden’s statements. Perhaps, they recall the fact that until well after 9/11 Palestine was not even mentioned by Al-Qaeda. Nowadays, it seems that bin Laden gets his reaction in to the latest news as soon as he can get it down from those mountain caves.

Hamas is not the only area of grievance. Darfur is another. When I first read that I thought he was complaining about the fact that the West was allowing the humanitarian disaster to continue. A little unfair, I thought, as it was Arab Muslims murdering African Muslims but still, as we have written on this blog a few times, it is a disgrace that the UN, which has arrogated to itself the role of the primary source of international law and humanitarian goodness, has done nothing to stop the genocide.

Possibly, I mused, bin Laden is displaying some anger at the Russian and the Chinese who have prevented even the slightest effort to punish the perpetrators of the many crimes.

But I was wrong. Osama bin Laden was threatening all sorts of dire punishments on Westerners for the “Zionist-inspired” possibility of the UN actually sending in some troops to help bring the massacres to an end.

That is, at least, what is being discussed in a rather desultory way in the UN headquarters in New York and up with this the bearded wonder will not put. Or so he says. How dare the West even try to stop the legitimate activity of one group of Muslims when they are murdering and mutilating another group? All part of the war being waged on Islam.

Meanwhile, a big rally is being planned in Washington DC for April 30 to call attention to the situation in Darfur. No wonder bin Laden is mad with the West.

COMMENT THREAD

A curious suggestion by the Danish Prime Minister

Last Friday the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, made a speech at the Copenhagen University, which was billed as “A Europe of Results”. As readers of this blog know, we are admirers of the Danish Prime Minister for his firm stand on such issues as freedom of speech and the war against terrorism. We were delighted when he won another election last year. But really – a Europe of results! Sigh.

While he talked a bit about the need to go forward in a more sensible way than that dictated by the Constitution, he seems to have concentrated on the problem of the next wave of enlargement.

“We need to consider EU's ability to absorb new members much more critically. This relates to EU's ability to make decisions, create common policies and popular support for the EU project.”

One is not quite sure whether the implication there is that it is the new members that lack popular support for the project or the old ones. What this apparently sensible analysis does not take into account is the need for the European Union to keep expanding in order to survive. There are never any alternative ways of dealing with neighbouring countries. And, of course, there are ever fewer neighbouring countries to deal with.

Mr Rasmussen has come up with a solution of a kind for the remaining states (mostly in the Balkans) that are hoping to get into the EU. At least their leaders want the countries to get in.

“Rasmussen suggested that prospective countries such as Albania, Bosnia, the Ukraine and Belarus could join the common economic market and achieve a degree of political influence.”

He then outlined what he called his vision:

“I envision us moving toward a more pan-European economic area. An area with free trade and economic cooperation between the EU and its neighbouring countries.”

That being so, why cannot the EU in general become “an area with free trade and economic co-operation” and, while we are at it, expand that to include some other countries in the world as well.

The speech was clearly aimed at the very many Danes that are having serious doubts about the whole project. As Søren Espersen, Danish People’s Party’s foreign affairs spokesman said:

“This sounds extremely exciting, and it sounds as if the prime minister is headed in a direction where the EU will be more edible for Danes.” [I expect the word he was looking for was palatable.]

There is a slight problem with this vision. In the past countries were told that they would not be able to have political influence unless they joined and accepted the entire acquis communautaire. Will there not be a certain amount of resentment if that situation changes for some?

COMMENT THREAD

Going backwards

In a sense, it is great fun watching politicians and the increasingly vacuous media correspondents struggle to come to terms with their own unpopularity. For such – as been correctly diagnosed – is the real reason for the apparent surge in popularity of the BNP.

But this is only entertaining in the way that one used to derive pleasure from plucking the wings off flies and seeing them squirm. It is an entirely destructive activity which leads nowhere.

However, given that the political classes are both so inept and detached from the realities of everyday life, it has come to pass that the only meaningful political activity left to ordinary people is to watch politicians squirm. The more one can engineer such situations the better, which makes voting BNP the obvious option. It is equally destructive, but has the same entertainment quotient as dismembering flies.

Eventually, one hopes, dissatisfaction will build up to such an extent that it will turn a quiescent, cowed population into an active, rebellious force, which will re-impose democracy on the political classes, and demand change. But, like many, we are not holding our breath.

What is particularly depressing, at the moment, is that we lack a credible opposition though which our energies can be channelled. A bad government is tolerable, to an extent, if there is prospect of change and there is hope of something better on the horizon.

But when as Lord Onslow points out, we have an opposition which has retreated from its task, and we have a vacuous leader, communing with glaciers, there is little chance of a change of government bringing any relief.

To that extent, our main preoccupation, the battle against the European Union takes on an entirely new dimension. As we have ceaselessly pointed out, our membership continues only with the acquiescence of government and the permission of Parliament and its is through our own domestic legislature that we must seek salvation.

But when we have both government and opposition refusing to engage on the issue, then we are deprived of any “legitimate” mechanism for expressing our dissatisfaction through the democratic system, and no means by which we can secure change. Parliament, therefore, ceases to be an expression of the will of the people, but a barrier to it. And at the front of that barricade is the Boy King.

Thus, in terms of our campaign against the European Union, we are going backwards. No longer is there any mainstream political party which will even address the concerns of a huge proportion of its electorate.

The alternative is a weakened, self-obsessed UKIP, which has long ceased to offer any hope of political relief. That, in every sense, is no alternative - which leaves only the BNP, as the last remaining party which opposes our continued membership of the EU.

One wonders, therefore, if the Boy King, in calling on voters to support any party other than the BNP, really knows what he is doing. At one, he is telling us not to support a party which holds a view which we would support, yet he is offering no alternative.

If we take his injunction at face value, therefore, we have no alternatives at all. Which leaves only one other option – the Boy King must go.

COMMENT THREAD

No wonder we are in such trouble

Danny Kruger is supposed to be one of the brighter writers on The Daily Telegraph staff and today he writes on the theme, "If councils had real power, people wouldn't dream of voting BNP".

That is hardly a novel idea for our readers as we said as much last Friday, with the words:

On the ground, what we see, progressively is the growing inability of government simply to govern, whether at local or national level, combined with a complete take-over by the apparatchik – rule by officials, whether at local, national or supranational level. And, in this process, political parties and politicians seem irrelevant to the extent that it matters not what colour they come in – they are simply not worth voting for.

In effect, therefore, it is the vote that has been debased. No longer is there any direct (or even indirect) relationship between casting a vote in the ballot box and securing change at any level of government.

However, the idea warrants repetition and it is good to see Kruger catching up. But what is not good to see is the following commentary:

Simon Heffer, in these pages on Saturday, pointed out that the local Conservative campaign for "better composting" will hardly send voters rushing to the polling station.

But the fact is that waste disposal is about the only thing in which the council has a free hand. If candidates offered policies on the issues people really care about - more money for schools, say, or more police, or a new hospital, or increases in benefits, or more housing, or the opposite of these policies - they would be lying.

Can this man really mean it when he says: "waste disposal is about the only thing in which the council has a free hand."? Can he really be that ignorant? Has he never heard of the Landfill Directive, or the Waste Framework Directive?

Is he totally unaware that waste disposal policy, whether composting, recycling paper, or whatever, is totally defined by the EU and that local authorities are committed to an expenditure of £10 billion just for the infrastructure requirements of the latest tranche of EU laws?

When you get a Telegraph writer displaying such almost unbelievable ignorance, it seems there is no hope left. No wonder we are in such trouble.

COMMENT THREAD

A Tory peer speaks

The Lord Onslow of Woking is one of the most consistently entertaining and hard-hitting speakers in the House of Lords. It is hard not to know his opinion on many things from scatological poems by ancient authors to the common fisheries policy.

After he was elected to be one of the Conservative peers to remain in the House, he was heard (by me among others) to remark gleefully: “And that is more than Baroness Jay ever was.” She just happened to be wafting along the corridor in the right direction at the time.

In yesterday’s Observer Lord Onslow takes the Boy-King to task. He does not mention glaciers but points out that the Conservative Party, if it is anything, is the party of individual freedom:

“From our beginnings in the Restoration parliament as defenders of church and king, we have seen ancient liberties as the key to the advancement of our fellow citizens.

Throughout the centuries, that Conservative-Tory tradition has been used for the immense benefit of our people. Peel's Tamworth Manifesto stated that so clearly in 1834. That is why we have been the most successful and long-lasting political party in history. From the Stuart kings to the modern, mass-political democracy, our great party has defended our constitution and benefited our country.”

At a time when we have a government that is inexorably eroding liberties (ancient or otherwise) the Conservative Party has not taken much of a stand on these issues

“It was dozy on the Civil Contingencies Act until the excellent Peta Buscombe in our house took it up; this from the party which, since the restoration of Charles II, has been so jealous of our constitution. Have we a guilty secret? Remember Burke saying: 'All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.' Why are we not shouting from the hustings that we will return to the people their ancient liberties?

Why, Mr Cameron, is the Conservative party passing by on the other side while our old liberties fall among thieves?”

Read the whole column. There are also some very funny and seriously ignorant responses. Well, this is the Observer that shares readers with the Guardian.

COMMENT THREAD

Tough

At a conference with OPEC representatives in Doha this weekend, on the ever-increasing price of crude oil - standing at $75 a barrel, some 40 percent higher than it was a year ago - EU energy commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, was heard to complain that the current high oil prices were destroying EU growth.

This is according to Reuters, which recorded that all delegates present agreed that the current record price was a danger to everyone. Needless to say, no solutions were offered on how to bring prices down.

However, as always, nothing is quite what it seems. In inflation-adjusted terms, the price of oil went above $80 a barrel in 1980 and, according to Bill Jamieson in The Business, citing Richard Batty, analyst at Standard Life Bank, the price of oil has been so deflated by the US consumer price index that it "would have to be above $110 a barrel to match the prices seen in the early 1980s".

This raises an interesting issue, which those with longer memories will affirm. In 1973 – the year we joined the "Common Market" - I recall paying 33p a gallon for four-star petrol at the pumps at a time when a comfortable salary for a professional was in the order of £2,000 a year. Now, an equivalent salary is £25-30,000 and the petrol at the pumps is just over £4 per gallon. By my reckoning, the price to earnings ratio is just about at parity.

But there is another factor. Back in those days, I was driving a Hillman Imp, which could produce 30 mpg on a good day. Currently, I can get that out of my 3.5 litre BMW and an equivalent modern small saloon could produce nearly twice that mileage. Therefore, the amount spent on petrol, for equivalent mileage, is considerably lower than it was.

To an extent, the same applies to industry, and even home energy consumption. More efficient equipment in the factories, and things like double glazing, wall insulation and hi-efficiency boilers in the home, have slashed energy costs, making us proportionately better off, despite the current price levels.

And there's the rub. If equivalent energy costs – and especially oil prices - are actually lower than they were 30 years ago, then in the interim period, they have been relatively cheap. It could be argued, therefore that, far from the economies of the EU member states now being excessively burdened, they have been enjoying a "free ride" on the back of oil producers for the best part of three decades.

Having absorbed the relative price drop in providing benefits for their pampered populations, they now find they cannot cope with what, effectively, amounts to a price adjustment, and are bitching about the damage to their economies.

Given that each member state takes a far bigger cut from the retail price in taxation than the producers ever get, however, it is hard to find much sympathy for the egregious Mr Piebalgs and his European colleagues.

COMMENT THREAD

We are not alone

"If I read another word about climate change, I shall go mad," writes Edward Celiz of Bodham Halt, Norfolk in today's Sunday Telegraph letters. in so doing, he echoes precisely our sentiment, expressed in a recent posting, where I declared that, "if the Boy King mentions his 'green revolution', once more, I shall scream."

Edward Celiz's letter is preceded by one of slightly more weight, written as it is by 41 scientists who, according to the heading, "debunk global warming alert". All of them eminent in the climate field, they venture the opinion that "global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise'". They also note that "observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future".

For anyone who cares to explore the subject, there is no end of sources that will confirm that view, the sum of which affirm that, far from being consensus, or the issue being fixed, the arguments over global warming are far from resolved and the issues are, in fact, highly contentious.

But Edward Celiz puts the common sense view. "Of course the climate is changing. That is what climate does, and has done so for billions of years," he writes. "Do these scare-mongering pseudo-scientists really believe that puny man can control the unimaginable forces of nature by sticking a windmill on his roof, throwing away his fridge and planting a few trees?"

The tragedy is that, for want of being able to address the grown-up issues that really affect this nation, like immigration, tax, education, defence, the European Union, and a host of other pressing matters, the children – of all ages – who have hijacked the Conservative party really believe they can sweep to power on a wave of "eco-chic".

St George, whose day we commemorate today, would be turning in his grave.

COMMENT THREAD

Passing off

In one positive development in an otherwise bleak landscape, Booker has been pulled out of semi-obscurity in the inside back page of the Sunday Telegraph, where we was consigned by the erstwhile, unlamented editor Sarah Sands. He has been returned to his former glory by the new editor, Patience Wheatcroft, in what we hope will now be the start of the paper's reversion to a proper newspaper.

In his column, Booker charts the damage John Prescott has done to British democracy, and also points up Defra's latest gaffe – a hilarious reporting error.

He then takes up our evaluation of the Boy King's cosmetic environmentalism, remarking on the "blights on the British landscape" that our new "green" Tories opt to remain silent about.

His obsession with the "environment", writes Booker, seems to be limited to no more than puerile and futile gestures. Nothing better exemplified this, he adds, than his statement last week on the recent epidemic of fly tipping, which has soared by 43 per cent, including dramatic rises in the dumping of vehicles, builders' rubble, asbestos and electrical goods.

Instead of honestly explaining that this has been caused by a swathe of EC directives which make it much more difficult and expensive to dispose legally of rubbish, all the Tory leader can offer is a pledge to spend even more taxpayers' money on hiring even more officials to track down and prosecute the offenders.

Booker concludes with the question, "How green can you get?"

Although we have done the Boy King to death of late (unfortunately, only metaphorically), before leaving him alone in the obscurity he truly deserves, we cannot help but note the story in The Times yesterday, which reported the Boy in trouble over his choice of car.

No sooner was he back from Norway in his gas-guzzling private jet, having communed with his melting glacier, than the Greens were protesting that he had failed to pick the most environmentally-friendly option for his next chauffeur-driven car - to be provided at the taxpayers' expense, on top of the Boy's £125,000 salary.

The Greens wanted him to take a petrol-electric hybrid Toyota Prius but, instead, the Boy opted for a Lexus GS 450h. Currently retailing at between £31,000 and £48,000, it is advertised by its maker as having a "combination of power and luxury that's truly electrifying" and "uncompromising luxury".

Actually, the emissions are lower than some of the other choices he could have made, but who the hell cares? Once you start up on a mindless "greener than thou" crusade, every action you take – from how much water you put in your kettle to the detail of your travel arrangements – is going to be under intense scrutiny, inviting scope for endless ribaldry whenever there is a lapse. The Boy is going to regret he ever opened this can of worms.

However, that has not stopped him prattling away in a vacuous opinion piece in the Sunday Telegraph, the centrepiece of which is his "radical agenda for greener cars" which he is to announce tomorrow.

The Boy wants – or so he tells us – "Britain to be at the forefront of international efforts to build a new generation of motor vehicles that are much less environmentally damaging." Such a programme, he adds, "will include significant incentives to encourage the ownership of newer, greener vehicles."

Unsurprisingly, these "international efforts" are remarkably similar to those set out by the EU last year, which rather proves ours and Booker's point. The Boy has simply bought into the EU "green agenda" and, what is worse, he is now trying to pass it off as an expression of "traditional Conservative values".

COMMENT THREAD

Continuing with the theme

Our readers will be pleased to know that the theme is not the Boy-King. Instead, I am picking up the subject of environment and anniversaries. Today is not only the anniversary of this blog’s beginning (and of Pravda's in 1912) but it is also the birthday of V. I. Lenin, without whom there would have been no Pravda or many other things in the twentieth century.

Then again, it is also Earth Day (I guess, Earth can survive idiotic “days” of that kind). Since 1970, as today’s Wall Street Journal points out, the day has been marked as a reflection on the state of the environment.

As part of that reflection, the article gives some figures:

“Since 1970, carbon monoxide emissions in the U.S. are down 55%, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Particulate emissions are down nearly 80%, and sulfur dioxide emissions have been reduced by half. Lead emissions have declined more than 98%. All of this has been accomplished despite a doubling of the number of cars on the road and a near-tripling of the number of miles driven, according to Steven Hayward of the Pacific Research Institute.”

In various other ways the environment, certainly in the developed countries and even in the more advanced developing ones is getting cleaner. This has been acknowledged by various organizations but the Green lobby, instead of feeling triumphant, is getting more and more hysterical and not a little ridiculous.

“This year, for example, Vanity Fair has inaugurated an "Earth Issue," comprising 246 glossy, non-recycled pages of fashion ads, celebrity worship and environmental apocalypse. Highlights include computer-generated images of New York City underwater and the Washington mall as one big reflecting pool. The magazine also includes a breathless essay by U.S. environmental conscience-in-chief Al Gore. The message is that we are headed for an environmental catastrophe of the first order, and only drastic changes to the way we live can possibly prevent it.”

Al Gore is not a lucky politician, not just for the obvious reason of what happened in 2000 but in his campaigning about environment, fossil fuel and oil companies. There is, for example, the undoubted fact, that for many years both he and his father worked for Armand Hammer, a man responsible for a good deal of fossil fuel production.

Then there was the time when Gore gave a crucial (to him) speech in New York about the dangers of fossil fuel usage and the evilness of oil companies. Alas, he chose a day that turned out to be the coldest for several years and most New Yorkers were all too grateful to the oil companies.

Now he is about to release a shock-horror “documentary”, which tells us in graphic and highly imaginative detail that the dangers of globalization are greater than those posed by terrorism and can be compared only to those posed by Nazism in the thirties.

I have a feeling that he will turn out to be unlucky again. The Greens have a credibility problem.

“But as Mr. Hayward notes in his "Index," the environmental movement as a whole has developed a credibility problem since the first Earth Day 36 years ago. In the 1970s, prominent greens were issuing dire predictions about mass starvation, overpopulation and--of all things--global cooling. Since then, population-growth estimates have come way down, biotechnology advances have found ways to feed more people than the doomsayers believed possible, and the global-cooling crisis has become the global-warming crisis without missing a beat.”

As we know global warming has become a new religion with Kyoto as the Nicene Creed. There have been disgraceful campaigns waged against scientists who have expressed scepticism about this unproven and unargued faith; an attempt to silence all those who are not of the true religion; a refusal to listen to economic arguments from either the developed or the developing countries.

All the same, voices are being heard that say: look at the evidence. Not only the environment is getting cleaner because we can afford to make it so, but it is clear that the best way forward is through private property, private enterprise and better technology.

Global warming is not precisely happening at the rate that was predicted. A rise of 0.7°C in 150 years is not a catastrophe by any standard and is no different from previous climatic changes. Its causation by human activity remains unproven. But none of that is of any importance to the true fanatic.

“Thus the cause of global warming has come at a fortuitous moment for clean-air warriors looking for alarms to ring. It is global in scope, will take decades to come to fruition--or to be revealed as another false alarm--and provides endless opportunities for government intrusion into the economy. It is, if you'll pardon the deliberate reference to a faith-based phenomenon, the green equivalent of manna from heaven. Or would be, if the greens hadn't spent so much time over the last three decades talking up scares that never came to pass.

This credibility deficit, combined with the slow-motion nature of the putative warming, has led to some desperate tactics by the global-warming true believers. To cite just one example, careful expounders of the idea of human-caused global warming used to take pains to distinguish between "climate" and "weather." Thus, snow storms in April or cold snaps in September were merely "weather" and told us nothing about long-term trends.

Then Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and the environmental movement pounced. The image of an American city filled with water proved irresistible to those who have been warning for years about rising sea levels--never mind that the cause was one unusually powerful storm and that New Orleans was built below sea level in the first place. As Mr. Gore puts it, Katrina "may have been the first sip of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us over and over again until we act on the truth we have wished would go away." If that language sounds familiar, that's because Mr. Gore borrowed the image from Winston Churchill, who used it to describe the Nazi menace in Europe in the 1930s.”

The trouble is, most of the rest of us can see through this nonsense and understand it for what it is: another campaign by various governments and, above all, transnational bureaucrats to impose endless regulations on the rest of us “for our own good”.

COMMENT THREAD

Sadly, they noticed

Just like the behaviour of some truly embarrassing member of the family, the antics of the Boy-King of the Conservative Party would, we were hoping, stay within this country. After all, why should anybody else be interested in all this stuff?

Sadly, that was not to be. The American Thinker, for one, has noted the Great Expotition to the Glacier. Describing the British Conservative Party as hapless, the posting refers back to the Daily Mail for the true environmental cost (if you believe in these matters, as the Boy-King appears to do) of the trip was:

“Unfortunately before he jumped on his canine caravan in Norway, Mr Cameron had been driven from London to Farnborough, Hampshire by Government car.

Over the 38-mile journey his Vauxhall Omega spewed out 30lb of carbon dioxide. At Farnborough, he boarded a ten-seater private jet, which flew him and his entourage to Longyearbyen, Svalbard.

That trip, covering 1,909 miles, deposited five tons of CO2 per passenger into the atmosphere.”

And then he saw one glacier that is retreating, without bothering to look at the various others that are advancing. But, never mind. We are told by the co-ordinator, the World Wildlife Fund – UK (I didn’t realize glaciers counted as wild life. You learn something new every day.) that the Conservative Party will have to contribute £200 to some renewable energy projects in order to offset all that carbon dioxide. This whole enterprise becomes madder by the minute.

As Vasko Kohlmayer says on The American Thinker:

“The whole Norwegian episode would be rather funny and amusing had it featured as protagonists the Left’s usual suspects. But these are the British conservatives who have not only lost their bearings, but – it would seem – also their sense of dignity and self-respect.

Teardrop… teardrop… teardrop… boohoo!”

Weep and howl might be even more appropriate.

COMMENT THREAD

Two years old

Alright, the Queen might have a few years on us, and come in a day earlier with her birthday, but today we are two years old.

Starting on 22 April 2004 – on the same day, incidentally, that Pravda, the voice of the Soviet Union Communist Party, started publication, now 94 years ago – we have since weighed in with 3,728 posts (not including this one) and are currently standing at over 750,000 hits, well on our way to our first million.

Together with our attached forum, which boasts nearly 450 members and just short of 18,000 posts, we are part of that new phenomenon in popular publishing, the "blogsphere" and are pleased that we have been able to participate in this exercise in applied democracy.

That said, the rationale for starting this blog was the then expected referendum on the EU constitution, promised by prime minister Tony Blair two days earlier on 20 April 2004. Thus, we declared, we intended to "rehearse and discuss the issues relating to one of the most important political issues of the day - the UK referendum on the EU's constitutional treaty."

With the rejection of the constitution by the French in late May 2005, and the Dutch in early June, however, the hopes of a British referendum evaporated. With it went the expectation of an upsurge of interest in EU affairs, leaving us without an immediate role and a question mark as to whether we should continue.

In the event, with a change to our strap-line, which became: "To discuss issues related to the UK's position in Europe and the world," we have since broadened our scope to cover a wide range of current affairs, domestic and foreign, all loosely related to "our position in the world".

Inevitably, as befits our title – which we retain in the hope that, one day we will be given a referendum on our EU membership – our primary focus is on the European Union, the progress of which we have endeavoured to chart in our own halting and inadequate way.

Apart from its complexity, what partially defeats us is the range of the issues covered by the "project", which would keep a far larger team than us two fully occupied. But the biggest handicap of all is the sheer tedium. For what should be a vibrant, all-absorbing political experiment, the great genius of the "colleagues" is transform issues of great importance and relevance to us all into an exercise in applied boredom.

Many a night, as we have sought to follow the tradition of putting up on overnight posting – which we have come to call our "Horlicks", after the eponymous bed-time drink – we have groaned inwardly at the leaden, inane prose that confronts us, wondering how on earth we can present something, anything, that will entertain and inform our readers.

So far, we have managed, with greater or less success, and we must be pleasing (and, we hope, irritating) some people. For, although the Blog has not produced a spectacular growth in readership, the pattern has been a slow, consistent and entirely unspectacular increase, to the extent that we now routinely record 2,000 "hits" in a day.

By some happy chance, that means we recorded some 250,000 "hits" in our first year and just over 500,000 in our second – doubling our readership. That leaves us with an entirely unreasonable expectation of pulling in a million in our third and a warm but completely unrealistic fantasy that – at the current rate of growth – in ten years hence, we will be taking 500 million "hits" in the year. Such is the power of wishful thinking.

Nevertheless, we believe we have proved that there is an niche market for opinionated, occasionally obnoxious and undoubtedly misinformed (as our critics would aver) commentary on the affairs of the EU, the ubiquitous tranzies and the machinations of the Boy King as he seeks power without in any way recognising where the real power lies in this country.

Melting glaciers notwithstanding, we shall continue to develop that niche for as long as we are able and for as long as our long-suffering and loyal band of readers continues to frequent our site, in anticipation of our third birthday or Armageddon – whichever comes sooner.

COMMENT THREAD

A reality check

As British politicians fall over themselves to demonstrate their "greener than thou" credentials – the Boy King having to burn off 50 tons of fuel in his private jet to Oslo, in order to enunciate them – thousands of small businesses in Scotland are having to come to terms with the reality of the obsession with environmentalism.

These are the businesses which have the misfortune to have their own private water supplies and, as we learn from the Scottish Herald, they are going to have to fork out annually an average of £600 each to test their supplies in accordance with the latest amendment of the EU's Drinking Water Directive, looking for up to 70 different bacteria and chemicals.

Says the Herald, small bed-and-breakfast establishments, coffee shops and other tourist facilities will be affected, and their woes do not stop with the testing fees.

As is so often the case, in amending the Directive – originally promulgated in 1980 as 80/778/EEC - the EU has ramped up the standards, slashing the allowance for lead from 50 µg/l to 10 µg/l, introducing more stringent values for certain pesticides, which must be measured down to 0.03µg/l, reducing copper from 3 to 2 mg/l and phasing in some new standards for "parameters" such as trihalomethanes, trichloroethene, and tetracholoroethenes.

Many of the levels set for existing parameters are based on WHO standards, supposedly on the assessment of a "notional significant risk to the health of a consumer", usually over a lifetime of consumption. However, there is little evidence to support any claims of health risk at the levels set for the majority of so-called contaminants – many of which occur naturally - yet still the levels have been ramped up, imposing considerable extra compliance costs.

An independent economic assessment carried out for the Scottish Executive has estimated these costs are likely to vary from £500 to in excess of £10,000, averaging around £1150 per supply affected. Against this, there are grants of 50 percent available, up to a maximum of £800, from the executive.

Despite the costs, which will affect the supplies of approximately 150,000 people in remote parts of Scotland, and tens of thousands of visitors, there is no evidence whatsoever of any systemic problem or ill-health arising from pre-EU standards, with were imposed on an ad hoc basis by successive public health acts.

In my days in Yorkshire, testing private water supplies, this was very much simpler and cheaper, and funded entirely by local authorities, which did the work in the broader interests of public health - an option which is no longer permitted.

Now, for many of the operations affected, they will be saddled with absurd costs and few have any possibility of obtaining mains supplies. Yet Brussels has decreed that they shall be better protected. And "protected" they shall be, even if, as is feared, a substantial number of small businesses become ex-businesses as a result.

COMMENT THREAD

No direction but down

I do not think any of us could have believed quite how bad the Boy King would turn out but, if the YouGov poll in The Telegraph today is any guide, he has blown it completely.

Following on from the Spring Conference in Manchester, where the DOYK (Don’t Overfill Your Kettle) Party has hardly been out of the headlines, if it was going to capture the hearts and minds of the great unwashed, now was the time. Instead, DOYK has managed to produce a distinctly lacklustre 33 percent, trailing woefully behind ZaNu Labour at 35 percent.

But what perhaps is more indicative is the score for "best prime minister" with Blair topping the poll at 30 (down from 38 percent at the general election) compared with the Boy King’s 21 percent, down from the 25 that Michael Howard scored at the general election.

If that is not dismal enough, the really crucial figure is the "don't knows". These stand at an incredible 40 percent, up from 19 at the general election. This may indicate that voters have yet to make up their minds but the more probable explanation is that they reflect the "none of the above" tendency. Given a choice between a discredited, sleaze-ridden Blair and the Boy King dressed up in a duvet and driving a dog-mobile, voters are turning away in their droves.

Not so the BNP, it seems, which are storming in from nowhere at seven percent – hoovering up UKIP votes on the way - indicating, as Anthony King puts it, "a restless and unpredictable electorate."

That is only one way of putting it. A less generous – but possibly more accurate – way might be to venture that the electorate is mightily sick of the vapid posturing of the political élites and has pronounced a plague on all their houses.

Over the last few weeks, we have read (and listened to) innumerable, laboured commentaries on what the established political parties much do to counter the BNP "threat" but none seem fully to have grasped the nature of the phenomenon confronting them.

On the ground, what we see, progressively is the growing inability of government simply to govern, whether at local or national level, combined with a complete take-over by the apparatchik – rule by officials, whether at local, national or supranational level. And, in this process, political parties and politicians seem irrelevant to the extent that it matters not what colour they come in – they are simply not worth voting for.

In effect, therefore, it is the vote that has been debased. No longer is there any direct (or even indirect) relationship between casting a vote in the ballot box and securing change at any level of government.

Thus, while it seems that the Boy King is seeking to convince the voters that his new-forged DOYK Party represents change – and is using the "environment" to demonstrate that change has occurred, at the coal face, voters are not convinced that his brand of change will make any difference to the way their nation is governed.

Of course, the Boy King could use the "environment" to demonstrate that the UK needs an independent policy, and is no longer going to be slave to the dirigiste rule of Brussels. But, since he has bought into the Brussels-favoured myths on global warming, he has bought into the project anyway, and is simply messing around at the edges.

However, we would be deluding ourselves if we thought that the Boy King could salvage his experiment by taking a robust view on EU legislation. But the very fact that he has avoided taking on this issue at all is something of a touchstone. That he cannot cope with Brussels means also that he is incapable of addressing in any form the growing power of the apparatchik, which also means that he and his DOYK Party is a waste of space.

Given the results of the current round of polls – which we fully expect to see replicated – we now believe that the Boy King has dragged his Party into an irrecoverable position. There is no direction he can go but down.

COMMENT THREAD

This must seem so familiar to the Russians

Assuming that news of the latest Court of Auditors report on the efficacy of the TACIS programme gets any airing in Russia, the people there will shrug their shoulders. This will all seem very familiar to them.

According to a Reuter’s report of the press conference given by Jacek Uczkiewicz, the report’s author:

“The auditors concluded that out of a sample of 29 projects that were completed by the end of 2003 and worth 56 million euros, 12 did not achieve their objectives and eight did so only partially. They judged the results of only five "sustainable."

They highlighted a heating and power project for a city that did not want it and another aimed at harmonising road standards that failed because the EU itself lacked a common standard.”

The only newspaper that seems to have reported the disappearance of billions of euros in that black hole known as the Russian economy is the Times, which, for some reason known to its sub-editors, headlined the article “Gone east: how €7bn EU cash melted away with the Cold War”. Cute but irrelevant. The Cold War had little to do with any of it.

TACIS (Technical Assistance for the Commonwealth of Independent States) is a programme set up by the EU soon after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of the CIS. Its purpose was to help those states in their transition to a market economy, so far with no beneficial result whatsoever. In fact, one could argue that with President Putin gradually bringing the main sources of Russian income – gas and oil producers – under state control the country has actually moved backwards.

By far the biggest proportion of the money (40 per cent) has gone to Russia and this is what the Court of Auditors has been reviewing.

According to its own summary:

“The objective of the Court's audit was to assess whether the TACIS projects managed by the Commission in the Russian Federation had been effective, i.e. whether they had achieved their objectives and created a lasting impact (sustainability). The Court examined a random sample of 29 contracts (projects) implemented mainly in 2002 and 2003, i.e. the most recent projects for which the sustainability could be assessed. The total value of the contracts audited was 56 million euro which is more than half of total expenditure on relevant projects.

Overall the Court concluded that nine of the audited projects (29)achieved their objectives. In eight cases the objectives were partially met and in twelve cases they were not achieved. The results of only five of the audited projects were sustainable. The above audit conclusions show that the effectiveness of the use of TACIS funds in the Russian Federation has been very low. Thus the Court cannot assess the performance of TACIS projects in the Russian Federation positively. On the other hand, the audit revealed that the performance of contractors and monitors met the requirements of their contracts.”

We have had a certain amount of jumping up and down from MEPs, especially Hans-Peter Martin, who has, to be fair to the man, been quite active in highlighting corruption and inefficiency in the Toy Parliament as well. But his comments about nobody caring are not entirely true.

The media seems not to care – another €7 billion gone to waste, what a yawn. But there were questions in the past raised by members of the House of Lords about money going to Russia and what controls were provided either by the EU or by the Russian government. The peers who asked the questions were usually fobbed off by meaningless assurances by the government.

Well, now we know the answer: none. Although Mr Uczkiewicz, quite correctly, points out that it was not in the remit of the Court investigation to look at what the Russian government has been doing or not doing, the implication is quite clear: the money was not controlled in any way.

At the end of the summary, there is a curious and completely bland paragraph:

“During the audit, the Court co-operated with the Russian Supreme Audit Institution, the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation in the question of methodology. The Russian auditors conducted parallel audits on the use of TACIS funds, examining the performance of the Russian authorities. The Accounts Chamber's report was published in February 2006. The Court intends to publish a common communiqué with the Russian SAI on the parallel audits in the near future. The main aim of the communiqué will be to present the broader picture of TACIS funds performance in the Russian Federation.”

That should make interesting reading.

Of course, one could argue that the idea of spending vast amounts of money by the EU, whose idea of a free market is a score board to be ticked off and about a dozen new regulations every day, on large projects in countries, whose people are used to manipulating such funds for their own benefit was always somewhat faulty.

The problem with all the external EU projects is the same and it is in keeping with the whole institution: there is no accountability (in the literal sense of the word) and no fiscal discipline.

TACIS has been going for 15 years. This is the first time any of it has been audited and only in necessarily general terms. The individual projects are never audited. They do not have to comply with market discipline or those ever more stringent and often impossible regulations that the EU itself (and, let us be fair, the US legislature) inflict on private firms.

It is, of course, particularly delightful that this report should see the light of day just as we are getting daily news or President Putin using economic muscle, largely Russia’s enormous natural resources of gas, to bully politically all around him inside and outside the country. TACIS has, indeed, been a success.

COMMENT THREAD

Scream

Echoing the thoughts of millions, I bet, Mick Hume of Spiked online writes for The Times today, declaring. "I will never vote for a leader who makes an ethical spectacle of himself".

The May local "pollszzz", he writes, have been set up as the "ethical elections", in which political leaders seek to show off the virtues of their personal commitment to the environment but, Hume tells us, I would not vote for the Conservatives because their leader rode a bicycle to work, spent thousands on an eco-makeover for his house, or felt the pain of a Norwegian glacier – after a ride on his dog-mobile.

Nor, he adds, would I vote for the Liberal Democrats because their leader has stopped driving his big Jag. Nor would I vote new Labour because its leaders claim to have pioneered the politics of ethical behaviour.

Warming to his theme, Hume decides that "this fashion for ethical politics is a desperate attempt to compensate for the melting away of principles." Politicians who have no distinctive vision of the future are reduced to standing on their personal record of ethical correctness. Instead of a battle between competing worldviews, we are left with a contest to see which party leader has the biggest windmill.

"These 'I'm a good girl, I am!' gestures", he declares, "are designed to demonstrate that one is a decent person. They are the modern equivalent of the affectations of the genteel mode of living in Victorian times."

Actually, Hume is too kind – even genteel. This "environmental correctness" is the last refuge of the intellectually depleted political class who, devoid of any ideas about, or capability to manage, their own affairs, have retreated into puerile fantasies about the way the world should be.

Then, armed with moral rectitude, having convinced themselves that theirs is the only true way, they feel empowered to lecture everybody else on the minutia of the conduct of their lives.

Small wonder that the statist, interventionalist, small-minded dodos of the EU commission find environmentalism so attractive. As a retreat from their own failings, it is very hard to beat. The "fault" must be shared by the whole of humanity.

That said, Hume gets his conclusion right: "there should surely be a moral right to reach for your gun any time a politician tries to play the ethical card," he says.

Short of that, today, I am going to overfill my kettle, turn the central heating up four degrees, leave the lights on all day and go for a completely unnecessary drive in my gas-guzzling 3.5 litre BMW, having thrown my newspapers in the dustbin.

And if the Boy King mentions his "green revolution", once more, I shall scream.

COMMENT THREAD

Off message?

The Boy King may be hugging his (retreating) glacier in Norway today, choosing an eco-friendly dog sleigh as his mode of transport to deliver him to the famous site.

Recently, across the border in Sweden, however, his shadow transport minister, Owen Paterson, chose a more practical, although slightly less eco-friendly form of transport – a 60 ton "super-truck".

Not content with powering it round the Scania test track, Paterson then exuded enthusiasm for this 72 ft long rig, declaring that, "These trucks are far from being anti-environmental". Compounding his felony, he added, "I think the Government has muddled up large volumes with high weight. The way to do it in this country is to think about low-weight, high-volume products; breakfast cereals for example. If you talk about 60-tons no one will listen."

His enthusiasm did not escape the attention of truck enthusiasts on the Big lorry blog who headed a posting: "A politician talking sense about heavy trucks? Shurely Shome mishtake." "A Tory MP in favour of trucks…?" they spluttered, barely able to believe what they were hearing.

Paterson is now calling for limited trials of what are known as LHVs, on the basis that their introduction in the UK could drastically reduce the number of trucks pounding up and down the motorways.

But, as he pounds the Arctic wastes in his dog-mobile, one wonders whether the Boy King knows what his transport spokesman is saying. Perhaps he should be told?

COMMENT THREAD

Perfect timing

Presumably, it was a pure coincidence that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw chose Hitler’s birthday to announce that the UK is prepared to overlook Hamas’s intransigent attitude to Israel. (Well, it is also Harold Lloyd’s birthday, the day on which the Curies isolated radium in 1902 and the Red Army entered Berlin in 1945.)

Travelling round the Middle East Foreign Secretary Straw said that, of course, Britain would prefer it if Hamas recognized Israel’s existence but, really, there was no need to make too much of a fuss about it. Certainly there need not be any kind of announcement or changes in Hamas’s charter.

“Referring to a Hamas recognition of Israel, Straw stressed he did not expect a formal declaration by the group's leaders. According to Straw, Hamas must accept Israel's existence as a fact, but a change in the organization's charter that calls for Israel's destruction is not a necessary condition for negotiations between the two sides.”

Oh that’s nice. Negotiations between whom, precisely? Hamas says Israel must be destroyed and, therefore, there is no point in negotiating; Israel says that it cannot negotiate with an organization, whose aim it is to destroy the country. Something of an impasse, most people would call it.

The point is not in the negotiations but in money. Straw is preparing to hand over British taxpayers’ money to the Hamas-led PA (remember that funds for humanitarian projects had never been cut off, though how much they achieve remains questionable) with the usual proviso:

“Straw suggested that Britain renew fund transfer to the Palestinians, and that international monitors will work to oversee the financial transactions and see to it that the money is not used by terrorists.”

That’s always worked so well in the past. Whatever happened to all those millions that had gone to the late unlamented Chairman Arafat and his friends and relations, not to mention the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade?

The timing is perfect. A couple of days ago we had another major suicide/homicide attack in Tel Aviv. Admittedly, it seems to have been done by an ex-member (very ex after the attack) of Islamic Jihad but Hamas immediately proclaimed its support and, later, demanded an apology from Mahmoud Abbas because the man had actually condemned it.

Meanwhile, another player is making itself heard. If there is one country that is not going to sit back and do nothing when the Israelis pull out from the West Bank, it is Jordan. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, the Jordanians had experienced the joys of PLA (the predecessor of all these different organizations) presence in their country.

It all ended badly – for the Palestinians. In September 1970 after various attempts to assassinate King Hussein and take over large areas of Jordan, martial law was declared and the Jordanian army attacked the PLA headquarters in Amman and swept through various Palestinian camps. When Syria tried to help the PLO, Jordan requested and got American and Israeli help. But most of the fighting was done by the Jordanian army and by September 27, it was all over.

The number of Palestinian casualties were estimated at between 3,000 and 5,000, far greater than any Israel has inflicted at any one time. Though King Hussein and Arafat signed an agreement in Cairo on September 27 that allowed Palestinian groups to operate in Jordan, this was superseded by another agreement on October 31.

This one returned control over Jordan to the King, requiring the dismantlement of Palestinian militant bases and banning their members from carrying unconcealed weapons.

This and subsequent agreements were consistently broken and a war raged between the Palestinians and the Jordanian army until January 1971, when the army regained full control of the country, Fatah and the PLA had to withdraw to Lebanon (with dire results for that country) and Jordan survived. Number of casualties? Probably tens of thousands.

The reason for this historic digression is that Jordan has made an interesting discovery.

“In the latest political headache for Hamas, Jordan has announced that it has uncovered a cache of Hamas weapons in the country and postponed a visit by the Palestinian foreign minister, Mahmoud Zahar, who is also a senior Hamas leader.”

Hamas is denying the accusations, insisting that it does not interfere in the internal affairs of other Arab countries, fighting only Israel. King Abdullah and his government, it seems, beg leave to doubt.

Other Arab countries remain somewhat unhelpful while professing eternal support for Hamas.

“Hamas is calling on Muslim countries to step in and provide additional assistance, but so far the response has been tepid.

Iran and Qatar recently pledged to send $50 million to the Palestinian Authority. However, the Palestinian Authority needs at least $150 million every month just to pay the salaries of government workers and provide basic services, Palestinian officials say.”

So you see, it is absolutely essential that the British taxpayer steps in and provides funds for this peaceful and delightful organization.

COMMENT THREAD

From the Conservative History blog

On April 15, the Conservative History blog celebrated the anniversary of that great Tory Dr Samuel Johnson’s achievement: the first publication of the Dictionary.

It occurred to me that readers of this blog might like to know the verse critique published by Dr Johnson’s friend, David Garrick:

“Talk of war with a Briton, he’ll boldly advance,
That one English soldier will beat ten of France;
Would we alter the boast from the sword to the pen,
Our odds are still greater, still greater our men …
First Shakespeare and Milton, like gods in the fight,
Have put their whole drama and epick to flight …
And Johnson, well arm’d like a hero of yore,
Has beat forty French, and will beat forty more!”

The forty French were, of course, the Academicians, whose number has been that since the founding of the Académie by Cardinal Richelieu in 1535 to this day.

One can only say: they don’t write ‘em like that any more.

COMMENT THREAD

Back in the real world

For those who can tear themselves away from the gripping drama of the Boy King communing with glaciers, out in the real world there are still, fortunately, some grown-ups minding the shop.

This we hear from AFP, via DefenseNews (no link), which tells us that the US is applying pressure on Russia to cancel a contract to deliver SA-15 Gauntlet anti-aircraft missiles to Iran.

As we pointed out earlier, here and here, these missiles would give Iran a quantum improvement in her air defence capability and severely restrict the attack options, should either Israel or the United States chose to neutralise Iran’s nuclear capability by means of air strikes.

AFP cites as its source the Russian Vedomosti daily, which claims that, "Observers say that under pressure from the United States, Russia could cancel this deal and are already saying that it has been suspended." This paper in turn cites "a political analyst close to the Kremlin", Sergei Markov, saying that delivery of the air defence systems had been delayed until the autumn out of consideration for US worries.

However, the paper also referred to "a source close to Russia's arms export agency", Rosoboronexport, saying that the delay in fulfilling the order - originally signed last November - was due to the need to train personnel.

"The deal with Iran could only be broken in the event of the purchaser failing to pay. Cancellation of the contract under pressure from the United States would damage Russia's reputation as an arms exporter," the paper quoted an analyst, Konstantin Makiyenko of the centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, as saying.

Under the contract, signed in November, Iran is to pay more than $700 million for 29 of the sophisticated short-range air defence systems and their delivery, if it happens, will change the strategic balance in the Middle East, for the worse.

One dreams occasionally of the Boy King raising such issues, and even calling on our government to lend support to the US in preventing this development. But, as long as we have a man that seems to be more interested in what we do with our kettles, I suppose that dream will remain filed under the category "fantasy".

COMMENT THREAD

How inconsiderate

Hubris seems to be something of a speciality in the European Union, not least in the child-like glee expressed at the launch of the Airbus A380 "superjumbo".

But it has also been evident in abundance over the EU's Galileo satellite navigation project, matched in equal measure by triumphalism which was very much to the fore at the launch of the test satellite last December.

But even then there were rumours of cash shortages and overspends, which came to the fore in the New Year, only to disappear under the welter of laudatory press reports which crowed about how the "Europeans" had put one over the war-mongering Americans and their "military" GPS.

Now, however, courtesy of the Financial Times, the tales of woe are re-emerging, with unnamed "experts" claiming that the EU could be forced to cut back on the number of satellites because of "financial constraints".

Although the €3.5 billion programme originally planned to deploy 30 satellites – including three back-ups – with a timetable of 2008 for full operation, delays have occurred through difficulties in securing funding. Even now, the financing has been secured only for the first validation phase, involving about four or five satellites.

Now, Philippe Busquin, a former European research commissioner who now oversees Galileo as a member of the European Parliament, is saying that the programme could manage on 24 or 25 satellites, in order to ease budget problems.

However, for a system that claims to be so much better than the US "Navstar" GPS, that shortfall could undermine the quality of the system. Fewer satellites would reduce the coverage and precision of the system, leading one despairing expert to remark that: "Europe wants Galileo to become the post-GPS generation, not a sub-optimal system."

Perversely, the main problem lies in the EU budget agreement last December which, although more generous than we wanted it to be, was not enough to fund the commission’s ambitions for its transport portfolio – from which Galileo is funded. And other potential beneficiaries are fighting their corners, resisting moves to transfer funds to the EU flagship.

All this leaves the fate of the Galileo project very much in the air or – to be more accurate – firmly on the ground, unless the "colleagues" can be persuaded to stump up with some more money. In the meantime, all those projects which were to use Galileo – including the German motorway toll system - will now have to continue relying on, er… the US Navstar system.

It is no wonder the Americans are so unpopular – not only are their satellites up and flying, and working well, they are also supplying the system to the Europeans entirely free of charge. How inconsiderate is that?

COMMENT THREAD

If only Peugeot had been American

If only Peugeot had been American its workers might not face the problems they do. According to research done by Nottingham University and reported in the Edinburgh Evening News

“Workers whose firms are taken over by American multinationals are likely to see a significant rise in their salaries within two years, researchers today claimed.

On average, skilled workers can expect to see their earnings increase by eight per cent, while unskilled workers' pay goes up by 13 per cent.

However, staff at firms taken over by multinationals from continental European Union countries feel no such benefit, figures collected by researchers from Nottingham University suggest.”

Of course, firms might still close down if vast amounts of taxpayers’ money is not flung at them to protect the jobs but in the meantime, a good time is had by one and all - as long as they're working for Americans.

COMMENT THREAD

The Boy King does it again

As he flies off in his ozone-guzzling jet to commune with glaciers in Norway, the Boy King leaves behind him instructions for the plebs on why they should "vote blue" to turn green – all with a distinctly local tinge.

Bemoans the Boy, there are more abandoned and burnt-out cars, with the number of burnt-out cars having soared by a third, from 35,162 across England in 1997 to 46,660 in 2004. Equally, there is more fly-tipping. Since 2001, the Environment Agency has had to deal with an increase of 43 percent. Last year they dealt with some 5,399 cases in total. The illegal dumping of waste during 2002 accounted for 14 percent of all the serious pollution incidents dealt with by the Agency.

Now, it just so happens that much of these ills can be put directly at the door of the EU's ill-considered Landfill Directive, and related environmental legislation. This, we have observed on this Blog, such as here, here and here. Furthermore, the infrastructure costs, alone, of implementing the directive amount to £10 billion, all of which must come from Council Tax.

But, as we know, the Boy King doesn't "do" Europe. So, instead of tackling the problem at source, what do we get from the Boy?

Well, the modern, compassionate Conservatives answer is curiously old-fashioned – and un-Conservative. In page after page of gushing prose, he tells us how conservative councils are going to throw even more public money and employ even more public officials at the problem.

"We have to think globally and act locally," chirps the Boy. Moi? I'd settle for a little bit of thinking. But then, the Boy doesn't "do" that either.

COMMENT THREAD

Statists all hang together

Stephen Pollard has an excellent piece in the Times, reprinted on his blog. In it he manages to take to task Lord Heseltine who appears to have given a particularly idiotic interview to that newspaper, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and assorted European politicians. Not bad for one article.

It seems that

“In his interview with The Times yesterday, he berated his own Conservative Party for talking about the public sector as “a bloated, badly run, inefficient impost on the taxpayers’ back”.”

As Pollard says:

“The elder statesman of the party first managed to accuse it of doing something it doesn’t — but which it should. Then he dismissed as a baseless caricature a view of the public sector that is wholly accurate. Quite a feat.”

The truth is that the public sector is bloated, is badly run and is an “inefficient impost on the taxpayers’ back”. What is a supposed Conservative doing defending it or pretending it ain’t so?

But then,

“About the only firm policy announcement made by David Cameron has been to commit the party to unending support for the NHS. The Conservative Party simply does not refer to the public sector in hostile tones. Would that it did.”

We all would that it did, but then we all would that the Cameroonite modern compassionate Conservative Party did many things, such as displayed the conservative principles of individual freedom, small government, law and order, national independence, strong defence, and constitutional democracy.

Instead we get feudal paternalism masquerading as modern compassion. But I digress.

As Stephen Pollard points out:

“It is no wonder that the leitmotif of Lord Heseltine’s career has been his Eurofanaticism, since his embrace of public sector corporatism is of a piece with his fellow Europhiliacs.”

France may be the worst example of an unreformable economy, completely in hock to its public sector. But we are not far behind.

Read the whole piece.

COMMENT THREAD

When the lights go out

It was only just over a year ago that Peugeot pledged that its plant in Ryton, near Coventry, would play "a key role in the company's manufacturing strategy". It would, said company officials, "become the main European production site for the car for several years to come".

Yesterday, however, union officials were called to a meeting with the firm's chief executive, Jean Martin Folz, where it was disclosed that a detailed study had been carried out at the start of 2006, the results of which showed the Ryton plant to have high production and logistical costs. This meant, said Folz, that the group was unable to justify the investment needed for the production of future vehicles.

Despite the government having offered £14.4 million towards the cost of developing the plant in order for it to deal with more than one model, and having also provided funds towards collaborative R&D; projects involving Peugeot, the plant is to close next year with the loss of the 2,300 jobs of those directly employed. Many others, who rely on the plant, will fall by the wayside.

The production of a new model, it seems, it to go to Slovakia, where wages are said to be one fifth of those paid to British workers, but the key political question being asked is why the British factory, rather than one of the French plants, is being closed down.

Derek Simpson, general secretary of the union Amicus declares that, "it is inconceivable that workers on this scale would be laid off on this scale." Somewhat illogically, he then argues that "weak labour laws are allowing British workers to be sacrificed at the expense of a flexible labour market", unconscious of the fact that the jobs are being exported to a country where labour laws are even weaker.

But it took the economics correspondent of the BBC to point out that this is what happens if you allow foreign – and especially European – ownership of key manufacturing enterprises. Given an unfavourable economic wind, it will always be the plants on the periphery that go first.

This may be an inevitable part of the general process of globalisation – and, in the short-term – is a direct consequence of EU enlargement, for which we are paying so dearly – but the closure has broader implications.

With BAE Systems pulling out of Airbus, what confidence can we have that assurances made about the continued employment of British workers will be honoured? And while the withdrawal of Airbus manufacturing would have profound economic implications, this is only the half of it.

If, as is rumoured, BAE Systems are planning to pull out of missile-maker MBDA, the prospect of strategic defence manufacturing facilities being withdrawn from Britain must surely be on the cards, and any assurances to the contrary must be about as believable as those given to Ryton workers by the Peugeot management last year.

Since we have already seen BAE Systems dismantle Royal Ordnance factories and transfer production offshore, we have no guarantees that what is happening at Ryton will not also happen to the rump of our British-based defence production.

Pledges, as we are finding, are one thing – guarantees are another. And when the last remnant of defence production moves offshore and they switch off the lights in the very last British factory, what will we do then?

COMMENT THREAD

Surely we should be debating this?

I suppose what really irritates about the Boy King and his faux environmentalism is the closeted nature of his thinking. On the one hand, he preaches the internationalist dimension, à la Kyoto, while, on the other, he rejects any discussion of the European Union. Yet, as our readers are fully aware, "environment" is wholly an EU competence and, therefore, UK law is entirely dictated by Brussels.

Effectively, without declaring this openly, the Boy King is buying in to the whole EU charade, despite its manifest absurdities and the enormous costs it imposes on our economy.

There is no better example of this that the EU's Water Framework Directive, which features in yesterday’s Telegraph in a story headed: "Farmland 'must go back to the Middle Ages'".

This is based on a report from Professor Roger Sylvester-Bradley, who is responsible for fertiliser research at the Agricultural Development and Advisory Service (ADAS). He has concluded that it will be impossible to maintain any significant degree of arable farming in East Anglia and, at the same time, comply with the directive's expected criteria on water quality, specifically in terms of nitrate levels.

Continuation of arable cultivation, he warns, will put the UK in breach of the directive, risking huge fines in the European Union Court of Justice, the only alternatives being to revert to the practices of the Middle Ages, turning the land back to grass or forestry – or possibly energy crops grown with little fertiliser.

This crisis has arisen, the Prof says, because intensive cultivation has given rise to an upward trend in "diffuse" pollution from nitrates and phosphates which is proving difficult to reverse. The EU has set a legislative timetable under the Directive for returning all drinking water supplies and water in rivers, ponds and lakes to "good" water quality by 2015 and, at present 95 percent of all water bodies in England and Wales would fail the standard.

There is, apparently, no explicit standard for nitrates, but experts say it is inconceivable that "good" water quality will be less stringent than the 50 milligrams per litre set out in the existing nitrates directive.

That standard, incidentally, is of those arbitrary figures that bears no relation to any real threat, and has been cobbled from the usual junk science which the EU commission so loves. Largely, the standard is predicated on the risk of "blue baby syndrome", which has been totally discredited.

However, on the basis of this, we look to see a major and traumatic change in the economic base of East Anglia, which will undoubtedly have a significant effect on the economy as a whole, and it will come sooner rather than later. The EU is demanding that water management problems are identified by next year, with plans to tackle them to be in place by 2009 and working by 2012.

Thus, come the most significant comments from Professor Sylvester-Bradley. He believes that EU regulators will eventually have to recognise that it is unrealistic for agriculture not to have an effect on water supplies in heavily populated northern Europe and thus says, "Having good ecological status in our waters will present us with an enormous cost. Surely we should be debating this?"

Indeed, we should be debating this, and much, much more. We should be debating whether the regulatory approach to recycling, with the heavy, inefficient and expensive public sector involvement, is the most effective way of conducting our affairs.

We should be considering whether the obsession with wind turbines is a sensible way to meet some of our energy demands, we should be considering whether we really want to build a network of massive refuse incinerators, to satisfy the commission's paranoia about landfill.

All these things we should be debating, on top of which there should be a structured and honest debate about whether it is really a sane policy to bankrupt our economy in order to deal with global warming.

But none of these debates will be led by the Boy King, or any of his acolytes. They have bought into the "green revolution" – a 60s concept if ever there was one – and we must all change our ways (and not over-fill our kettles) to satisfy his mad evangelism. Therein lies the measure of the disaster that has fallen upon the Conservative Party, and the nation.

COMMENT THREAD

Just in case something was done

One of the Pulitzer Prizes has gone to Nicolas Kristoff of the New York Times for his reporting from Darfur and making the horrors of the place known to the American public. Very admirable, but as the American Thinker asks, will the NYT, a virulent opponent of John Boton’s give the latter credit for actually trying to do something about the situation.

Mr Bolton has called for UN sanctions against four named Sudanese officials accused of genocide and various slightly lesser crimes. This would send out a signal, if nothing else, that the UN was prepared to tackle the worst humanitarian disaster at the moment and to deal with the individuals responsible for it.

It will not happen. Russia and China have already announced that they would oppose any sanction against anybody in Sudan, speciously expaining that the situation with regard to the African Union negotiations was delicate and this was no time to start imposing sanctions.

As Radio Netherlands puts it on its English language website:

“The Chinese have said they don't want to interrupt the peace talks currently underway in Abuja in Nigeria, and Russia too has called the situation 'fragile'. However, some observers have pointed to the fact that both China and Russia are Sudan's largest arms suppliers. Peter Mosynski is a contributor to the UK-based Sudan Update. He believes there's another motive too:

"Sudan is very crucial right now to Beijing's search for additional sources of oil for its rapidly industrialising economy and both Russia and China are rather against the idea of countries being indicted for their human rights records. Neither has too clean a record themselves."

The deadline for the completion of the AU negotiations is April 30. One wonders if the UN will bother to impose sanctions then.

COMMENT THREAD

Why does the BBC give this prominence?

The headline on the BBC website is a model of the Corporation’s objectivity: Greenpeace rejects Chernobyl toll. A little out of date, I thought to myself, but they get there in the end.

In fact, the real story was last October when the UN-led Chernobyl Forum came up with considerably lower figures of probable deaths as a result of Chernobyl. The report said between 4,000 and 9,000 (quite a large difference) and explained that there had been difficulties in calculating casualties.

“In the report, the World Health Organization dramatically lowered the estimated Chernobyl death toll, suggesting confusion had been caused over the accident's impact.

Many emergency and recovery workers, the report suggested, had died since 1986 from natural causes which could not be attributed to radiation exposure.”

Up with this Greeenpeace will not put. Having, so far as anyone can work out, done next to no research on the subject, it has, nevertheless produced a report that gave as its considered estimate that

“… there will be 270,000 cases of cancer alone attributable to Chernobyl fallout, and that 93,000 of these will probably be fatal.”

And the BBC solemnly reported this, interviewing Blake Lee-Harwood, campaigns director at Greenpeace, who explained on the Today programme:

“We're also looking at intestinal problems, heart and circulation problems, respiratory problems, endocrine problems, and particularly effects on the immune system.”

Maybe and maybe not. As Greenpeace campaigner Jan van de Putte told Reuter’s (another organization that seems to think this is worth reporting):

“Our problem is that there is no accepted methodology to calculate the numbers of people who might have died from such diseases.”

So you can make up any figure you like, in the certain knowledge that the word nuclear will send shivers down the spine of certain parts of the media. Here are the comparative figures as presented by the UN and Greenpeace reports:

Acute Radiation Sickness (ARS) deaths in 1986: 28

ARS patients who died later: 19 (some from other causes)

Others who died during explosion: 2

Child thyroid cancer deaths (1992-2002): 15 (UN figure)

Predicted extra cancer deaths: from 4,000 (UN) to 93,000 (Greenpeace)

Estimated deaths from non-cancer causes 1990-2004: 107,000 (Greenpeace)

Dozens killed in accidents building sarcophagus (according to an engineer)

The discrepancy seems so great as to be laughable. Let us remember that neither the UN nor the WHO are known for underplaying disasters or numbers of deaths caused by human agency. In fact the original report had suggested a probable death toll of 600,000 but for some years there was a tendency in the region to attribute everything to Chernobyl.

One possible explanation for the discrepancy is given by WHO spokesman, Gregory Hartl:

“The Greenpeace report is looking at all of Europe, whereas our report looks at only the most affected areas of the three most affected countries.”

If they really are looking at all of Europe, calculations of what may or may not have been caused by Chernobyl become even more random.

Reports of effects, twenty years on, of the biggest nuclear catastrophe in the world have varied, some citing immunological weakness in those who were in the area as babies and children, others pointing to the remarkable lusciousness of what has in effect become a natural resort around what was Chernobyl. Both positive and negative reports need to be read with an understanding of the effect on people and nature other Soviet and immediate post-Soviet policies may have had.

Mr Lee-Hartwood alleges dark plottings on the part of the nuclear industry, which was, according to him, severely embarrassed by Chernobyl. That, of course, is as untrue as the rest of the Greenpeace spiel. WHO is unlikely to be in hock to the nuclear industry – quite the opposite, in fact. And said industry was not nearly so embarrassed as the left was, who had excoriated nuclear energy but only in the West, assuming that the benign Soviet government would ultimately look after its people.

Chernobyl showed up the political corruption and sheer mind-boggling inefficiency of the Soviet system. That is why it was the biggest nuclear disaster in history. (Though the suppressed Urals one may well run a close second.) But Greenpeace is not about to admit such inconvenient truths. The question is why anyone should take their blathering seriously.

COMMENT THREAD

Vote blue – go green

I reckon the headline to Rachel Sylvester's piece in the Telegraph today is spot on. "Voting for the BNP is about rage rather than race," it proclaims, a notion which entirely accords with my experience.

Sylvester then spoils it all by writing the piece underneath, positing that the motivation is "fear of change". This, she writes, "remains a powerful force". But then she did not write the headline.

The central theme though, is correct. Generally, people neither know nor care about the details of BNP policies, and certainly have no expectations of the party sweeping to power. Voting for them is simply an opportunity to put two fingers up to the political classes, reciprocating the contempt that they so obviously have for us all.

More to the point, it is a way of telling the Boy King what to do with his own, newly emergent BNP – the Be Nice Party – and where to stuff his "green revolution".

And there could be no better illustration of how firmly the Boy King has imbedded his head up his own backside with a slogan that is almost magnificent in its utter vacuity - "vote blue, go green".

Courtesy of the BBC, we also see how this brainless Tory Toff speaks to the "people" whom he so earnestly wishes to lead.

Prior to helping distribute recycling boxes to residents (i.e. posing for a photo-call holding a plastic box), he told reporters in Brentwood, Essex, that he wanted to see what he called "green growth" - a combination of economic growth and a sustainable environment.

"Some of the green lobby and a lot of the media tend to look at the environment and climate change as, look you've got a binary choice, you can either have economic growth or you can have a sustainable environment, and the truth is we've got to have both. We've got to have green growth," he says.

The trouble is chuck, we've got a "binary choice" when it comes to a vote. And you ain't it.

COMMENT THREAD

The groundhogs are gathering

When even the Financial Times starts making comments about groundhogs, you just know that something is badly amiss. But there it goes, with it columnist Alan Beattie suggesting that, If Bill Murray wanted to make a sequel to Groundhog Day, he could do worse than set it in the Doha round.

Barring a miraculous acceleration in the discussions, the end-April target for agreeing numbers for farm subsidies and goods tariffs will join the lengthy list of missed deadlines since the talks began in 2001, Beattie writes.

And ain't that the truth.

We need not trouble you with all the details. With the EU, the USofA, the Cairns Group, the G8, the G20 – which includes some but not all of the Cairns Group, but not all of the time – and the less developed nations, plus the bundle of NGOs, China, Russia, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all... with the permutations, combinations, coalitions, alignments, alliances and non-alliances – with all their different agendas, trade-offs and offset deals, to say nothing of the compromises and sacrifices...

You get my drift.

Alan Beattie compares it with one of those logic puzzles which involve getting a fox, a hen and a bag of corn from one side of the river to the other without the fox eating the hen or the hen the corn. A solution remains elusive, he says.

Elusive? Down right impossible, I would say. We're going to see a lot more groundhogs.

COMMENT THREAD

The UN does it again

The response to the MEPs who are junketing in the Middle East and who were convinced that they can create some kind of diplomacy that would sort out the Palestinian question has been swift, as has the reaction to funds being offered to the Palestinian Authority by Iran and Russia. A suicide/homicide bomber killed himself and eight other people and injured 49 in Tel Aviv.

Responsibility is variously being claimed by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ brigade (the “militant wing” of Fatah, which is rather unhappy at the turn of political events in the Palestinian Authority) and by Islamic Jihad. Hamas, of course, keeps telling us and this is repeated by somewhat naïve Western commentators, that they have agreed to a cease-fire and are keeping to it.

That does not mean, in their opinion, that they should in any way constrict the activity of Islamic Jihad who has not agreed to anything like a cease-fire, has consistently fired rockets into Israel and has now, possibly, sent a suicide/homicide bomber into Tel Aviv.

Nor has Fatah ever bothered to control or disarm Al-Aqsa. Speaking of the bombing, Hamas representatives all repeated the same line: this was legitimate activity in the face of Israeli aggression, by which they seem to mean the withholding of tax money until Hamas agrees to recognize Israel’s right to existence and definitely eschews terrorist activity. Also, it was self-defence.

It is important to emphasise that the bomb went off in Tel Aviv, not in the supposedly disputed territory. But, as one has to keep repeating, all Israeli territory is disputed by Hamas and their latest, though somewhat inadequate, paymaster, Iranian President Ahmadinejad.

In the meantime, the American Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) has published a report, which says that

“Iran has expanded its uranium-conversion facilities in Isfahan and reinforced its Natanz underground uranium-enrichment plant”.

There is, as we know, growing speculation about possible American military action and, even, some discussion of Israeli action. Ahmadinejad, having at various times told the IAEA to stop bothering him, the Israelis that he intended to wipe them off the map and the Americans that they were courting disaster if they attacked him, has also said that an attack on the Iranian nuclear plants would be answered by scores of terrorist attacks by suicide bombers.

Naturally, we have to take threats like that seriously. But it is worth pointing out that there have been no Iranian suicide bomber attacks anywhere. Ahmadinejad’s calls for a jihad against the infidel and, in particular, Zionism have always made it clear that this was to be conducted by the Palestinians.

Unsurprisingly

“U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan also warned that U.S. military intervention in Iran was not the best solution to resolve the nuclear standoff”.

It is not clear what his alternative proposal is. After all, Iran is a highly valued member of the United Nations. Last Tuesday, on the day, Ahmadinejad boasted about Iran powering ahead (if one may use such an expression) with its nuclear reactors (nobody seems to be mentioning any more that they are there for peaceful purposes only), the United Nations Commission on Disarmament elected Iran as the deputy for Asian nations. This is in the supposedly reformed United Nations. Personally, I cannot wait to see who is chosen to be on the new Human Rights Council.

And while we are on the subject of the United Nations, one cannot help wondering why Claudia Rossett was not awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her patient unravelling of the far-reaching and deep-seated corruption in the UN. Instead, the awards, apart from the probably well-deserved ones to various regional and local newspapers, went to journalists on the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Again.

COMMENT THREAD

Couldn't have put it better ourselves

Some, if not necessarily all, of our readers would have followed the growing self-censorship over Islam and Mohammed in North America as well as in Europe. (I was hoping to hear less about “Eurabia” as a result of it, but clearly that is not to be. When it comes to self-righteousness it is pretty evenly spread across the two continents.)

In the wake of Comedy Central censoring its episode of South Park that was to depict Mohammed and the Borders chain of bookstores refusing to carry copies of a magazine that reprinted the Danish cartoons, the blogosphere has been up in arms. (Well, at least, they do have a strong and politically active blogosphere.)

This is how TigerHawk puts it:

“So I don't blame Comedy Central, or Border's Books, or the world's media organizations, for refusing to depict Mohammed out of fear of retaliation. Their job is not to defend freedom of speech, but to earn profits for their stockholders. Acting as a fiduciary, I would make the same decision. But let us not tolerate these same organizations claiming that they also support freedom of speech. They are lying when they say they do, because in order to defend freedom of speech, you have to be willing to protect speech against the inevitable threat of violence.”

He is slightly wrong about the world’s media organizations. Quite a few in Europe, even in Asia and the Middle East and one or two in North America did stand up for freedom of speech. Sadly, no part of the MSM in Britain and hardly any in the United States.

All the same, TigerHawk is right: it is not unreasonable to be afraid but it is entirely not reasonable to pretend to care for free speech and to run away without firing a shot as soon as the enemy appears on the horizon.

Read the whole piece.

COMMENT THREAD

Opting out

My tongue-in-cheek posting about Polish trains takes on a sharper focus with the news this morning in The Daily Telegraph that the EU budget agreed by Tony Blair last December is £20 billion more than admitted at the time, for which hard-pressed British taxpayers will have to find another £2 billion.

That puts the total spending for the EU in the financial period 2007-13 in excess of £600 billion. The extra sums, as David Rennie helpfully explains will go on "outside instruments".

These include the European Development Fund, a € 22.7 billion slush fund to "help" former European (i.e., French) colonies, the EU Solidarity Fund, an emergency fund to help member states and applicant nations who suffer major disasters, such as floods – as long as the floods are not in Britain – and the Emergency Aid reserve - a fund for humanitarian emergencies, such as earthquakes, worth a total of €1.547 billion.

There is also the "flexibility instrument", intended to redirect surpluses from other budgets to special areas of need, and limited to €200 million and the Globalisation Adjustment Fund, to compensate (Italian) workers who lose jobs to globalisation. This will cost €3.5 billion over seven years.

All this invokes a pained leader, headed "Impoverished by the EU", in which the Telegraph notes that with, "a billion here, a billion there", this "pretty soon it starts to add up to real money!"

To put the sums in perspective, the paper notes that the additional amount conceded by Blair last December, £7 billion, is equivalent to the total police budget for England and Wales. The United Kingdom's annual gross contribution to Brussels, £12 billion, is equivalent to the combined revenue raised by inheritance tax, capital gains tax and stamp duty. We are, in short, it says, paying in an awesome amount of money.

"And what are we getting in return?" the paper asks, somewhat rhetorically. Well, apart from reconditioned Polish trains (which the Telegraph forebears to mention), we are told that our Parliament is hobbled, our countryside ruined, our fishing grounds plundered, and our businesses are asphyxiated with regulation.

Small wonder that, as The Business reported yesterday, the only real expansion in the British economy – which is otherwise growing at a meagre two percent or so a year – is in the underground or "black" economy.

In 1979, Sir William Pile, then chairman of the British Revenue Board, produced the first modern estimate of tax evasion and found that "it was not implausible" that untaxed earnings equalled 7.5 percent of UK GDP, while the American economist Edgar Feige thought the true figure was closer to 15 percent. Another analysis, produced in 1997 by Deloitte, estimated that the underground economy was worth 12 percent of UK GDP and reduced income tax revenues by one-third, while a review published two years ago in the Economic Journal found estimates ranging from 5.5 to 13.2 percent.

However, Friedrich Schneider, of the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, one of the world's top experts on the subject, believes that the shadow economy as a percent of the "official" 2002-03 GDP in Britain was 12.2 percent.

That 12.2 percent, effectively, puts the amount of legal activities underreported in 2005 at about £141.5bn, contrasting with the US at a mere 8.4 percent, with France at 14.5 and in Germany 16.8 percent.

This does not include criminal activities and only concerns market-based legal production of goods and services that are deliberately concealed from public authorities to avoid paying income, value added or other taxes or national insurance contributions; to avoid having to meet certain legal labour market standards, such as minimum wages, maximum working hours, safety standards; and to avoid the other kinds of red tape with which the official economy is burdened, such as legal requirements to fill in statistical questionnaires.

"An increased burden of taxation and social security contributions, combined with labour market regulation are the driving forces of the shadow economy," Schneider argues. Other variables include the population's attitude to the morality or otherwise of paying tax.

Therein lies the true response of the British people – no demonstrations, no revolutions but simply a quiet, progressive opting out of the state system, wherever the opportunity affords itself. An increasing number of people no longer believe that paying tax is a moral obligation, and take whatever measures are necessary to avoid contributing to the system.

There is some synergy here with Daniel Hannan’s op-ed in the Telegraph where, against the background of the Italian election, he argues that people are progressively taking the view that elections don't affect the things that truly matter, and may therefore be treated as an enjoyable public spectacle.

"If your vote won't change anything, you might as well give it to the most entertaining candidate: the one who calls his opponents 'bollocks' and compares himself to Jesus, for example," he writes. "When we politicians can no longer effect meaningful change, we become parasites. Ceasing to be authoritative, we become contemptible."

One final straw in a wind that is set to reach hurricane force is a piece in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday, which records that, in 2004, 145 people were killed in 23,714 hit-and-run incidents while, in 1997, there were 119 deaths in 18,357 such crashes. This is a 22 per cent increase in deaths and a 30 per cent rise in the number of hit-and-run crashes.

Furthermore, there are as many as 700,000 cars on the roads illegally because they are not properly registered with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency database, with more than a million uninsured drivers on the roads, and many more are using cars without a driving licence.

This is simply a different side of the same coin. As the laws get more and more draconian, and compliance becomes more expensive, larger numbers of people simply opt out of the system completely and take their chances. More than ever before, we are seeing a fragmentation of the nation, where those who can – or have least to lose – are taking one look at the society we have created, and are deciding that it is not for them.

And, when we see the waste, the profligacy, the injustice, the corruption, and then Blair's incredible generosity – with our money – who in their right mind can blame them?

Meanwhile, the Boy King is looking at glaciers in Norway.

COMMENT THREAD

Getting in a cat flap

Man the barricades! "The public wants us to seal our external EU borders to this evil trade. We have to take action."

So says Conservative MEP Struan Stevenson, who wants to see a total ban on the imports of cat and dog fur, after the British-based Care for the Wild International (CWI) has found that the growth of anonymous online shopping had led to a sharp increase in the availability of fur from Asia on the internet.

This comes by way of Forbes, which quotes CWI chief executive Barbara Maas on the trade. She says her charity had found household pet skins available online, with a dog pelt costing less than £10 and, horror of horrors, domestic cat skins for £2.60. "Our research," she says, "shows how even the skins of domestic animals can be easily and cheaply bought and delivered directly to your doorstep."

Do not worry though. Struan is coming to the rescue. "After six years of campaigning resulting in unilateral bans on cat and dog fur in five EU countries and Switzerland, the majority of MEPs are determined to see an EU-wide ban put in place by the end of this year," he says.

Chinese cats and dogs will be able to sleep peacefully in their beds, courtesy of the modern and compassionate EU.

Perhaps, though, if we weren't so damn squeamish in this country the trade would not have arisen at all. Some thirty years ago, I visited a huge plant in East London, at which were collected the carcases of thousands of cats and dogs put down by vets, and by the RSPCA and PDSA.

I recall seeing thousands of cat pelts on hangers, in huge curing sheds, which were then used for trimming cheap slippers, and ladies dressing gowns, and the like – this sort of fur trimming being all the vogue then.

To my recollection, there was never much of a market for dog pelts, so I am rather surprised to see them fetching £10, or thereabouts. But, to my eternal amusement, I learnt that dog fat was much prized by cosmetics firms, for its smooth consistency and low melting point. It also contains three times as much calcium as other kinds of fat.

Under a variety of ingredient names, it was widely used in high quality face creams by a number of household name manufacturers and, to this day, I revel in the idea that generations of women, unwittingly, were smearing the remnants of Fido on their faces each morning.

Dog fat is still widely marketed in Asia and cosmetics containing it will undoubtedly find their way into this country – even if we do not produce the fat here any more.

Since our Struan doesn't seem to have latched on to this, perhaps the little doggies are not so safe after all.

COMMENT THREAD

The real civil war

While the journalists and various pundits examine every tea leaf and every coffee granule in between contemplating chickens’ entrails about that elusive concept the Iraqi civil war, a completely different area is gradually sliding from anarchy into full scale war.

According to a report in Friday’s Washington Times

“Militant squatters loyal to rivals Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are turning open lots in the Gaza Strip into ad hoc military bases, a development that some fear will lead to open warfare between rival Palestinian factions.”

Nominally, these military bases and camps are supposed to be training boys from the age of 16 onwards to fight Israel and the “Israeli occupation” (that is all the land between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean). That, in itself is unlikely to create a stable situation, but, in fact, the creation of rivalling militias is likely to exacerbate the existing tensions that involve Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad and various local chieftains.

“"Everyone is showing their strength under the umbrella of the resistance," said Tawfik Abu Khoussa, a former spokesman of the Palestinian Interior Ministry. "If there is a little problem between the factions, maybe they will start a civil war."”

As the various militia leaders point out, Gaza has remained uncontolled and lawless, with no economic life to speak of and the various destroyed (by agreement) Israeli settlements were clearly there to be taken by any armed group that happened to be passing.

“Highlighting the tension between Hamas and Fatah, Palestinian gunmen from Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades militia briefly took over the Palestinian Cabinet building in the West Bank city of Ramallah yesterday. The gunmen were protesting the Hamas government's refusal to meet their demands for perks and new promotions, the Associated Press reported.”

In the meantime, the police in Gaza, many of whom belong to Fatah, staged a violent protest and stormed a government building, demanding to be paid, which they have not been for two weeks.

As the BBC puts it:

“Hamas claims it inherited an administration with more than $1.3bn (£740m) in government debt.”

The Palestinian Finance Minister, Omar Abdel-Razek, blamed the financial crisis on the cessation of direct aid to the Palestinian Authority from the EU, US and Canada. Aid is still going through NGOs for humanitarian and social projects but that does not pay the various gunmen and officials that Mahmoud Abbas had hired just before the election he lost, thus using up all the not incosiderable amount of money he had been given before.

The direct funding has been withheld because Hamas has refused to recognize Israel’s right to existence and to give up terrorist activity. There seems to be some ambivalence about the latter. On the one hand, Said Siam, the Interior Minister has announced that nobody is above the law (though who is to enforce it, remains unclear), on the other hand he has also announced that members of militant groups would not be imprisoned because they were clearly the outcome of the “Israeli occupation” and a response to it.

The trouble with that argument is, as Mr Siam is beginning to find out, that once you have armed militant groups who know that nothing will happen to them, they are unlikely to submit to any kind of control.

Then, of course, there is the problem of those continuous rocket attacks into Israel, one (unusually, a Katyusha) fired during the Israeli elections. These are fired by Islamic Jihad and the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority has promised to control them, though has done nothing about it.

Through it all runs the same theme: Hamas will not negotiate with Israel because they do not recognize that country’s right to existence. It is not a question of the pre-1967 borders but the whole territory that had been set up by the United Nations in 1948 (and attacked immediately by the neighbours).

A curious, self-defeating double argument has been advanced by various people and organizations as to why Western countries should continue to give aid to the Palestinian Authority. It is, after all, the chorus of voices, led by Hamas itself, maintains the democratic choice of the Palestinian people.

On the other hand, many of the same people say, the Palestinian people should not be punished for the fact that Hamas is not behaving particularly well.

This, as we have pointed out before, is an infantilization of the Palestinian people. They did, indeed, choose democratically Hamas. One could argue that in the circumstances they have lived, circumstances created largely by the late unlamented Chairman Arafat and his cohorts as well as various other Arab countries, it was difficult for them to act in a mature political way.
They did, however, choose Hamas and there are certain consequences to that. One is that the direct payment of moneys to the PA has dried up.

Needless to say, a delegation of MEPs has already proclaimed tearfully that not handing over large amounts of dosh to the Palestinian Authority and its various militant branches “risks turning the crisis into a catastrophe”.

One cannot help feeling that these parliamentarians are a tad naïve:

“"Hamas representatives told us clearly that they are prepared to recognize 1967 borders and the PLO as legitimate Representative of Palestinian People, which implies recognition of Israel," said Luisa Morgantini as Chair of the MEPs delegation, in a statement.

"They have respected the cease-fire for more than 18 months and they are ready to continue, which amounts to non-violence, they also say enough of bloodshed."

"In the same time they ask for reciprocity; Israel has to do the same. Our diplomacy can bridge the gap."”

It is hard to know what sort of reciprocity is being discussed here. The Israelis have said that terrorist attacks will be treated as such and will be punished. That seems like reciprocity but, one assumes, that is not what Luisa Morgantini meant.

Furthermore, implying “recognition of Israel” is not quite the same as saying it. So far, every pronouncement on the subject by Hamas officials has either denied it or skirted the issue.

Danny Rubinstein in Ha’aretz sums up:

“The Hamas leadership is in a panic. Just two weeks have elapsed since the government headed by Ismail Haniyeh was sworn in and it appears helpless. The immediate problem is paying last month's salaries. The coffers are empty, and the previous government left debts estimated at $1.25 billion.

Embittered cops rampaged yesterday through the streets of Khan Yunis, commandeered parliament offices and blocked traffic. The policemen, like all 150,000 Palestinian Authority workers, demanded to be paid.

The problem is that American and European aid has stopped, while Israel is withholding tax receipts collected for the PA. Following American and European warnings, Arab and foreign banks are hesitant about extending PA credit. "The Arabs owe us $200 million they promised and didn't pay," said Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar before leaving on a rescue mission to Arab countries.

As one commentator put it in a television interview with a Persian Gulf channel, "We have returned to being a public of needy refugees and beggars like we were in 1948."”

The economic situation is not helped by there being no serious economic activity in either Gaza or the West Bank. Before the second intifada, launched by the late unlamented Chairman Arafat in 2000, many Palestinians were employed in Israel. That ceased to be a possibility.

Taking over existing assets in the Gaza proved to be impossible, despite the generosity of various Western organizations. According to a report on WorldNetDaily, brought to the blogosphere by Little Green Footballs, it was the Bill and Melinda Gates charity foundation that was responsible for much of the money that made it possible for the famous greenhouses of Gush Katif to be handed over to the Palestinians in full working order.

“The hothouses, worth several hundred million dollars, were passed to the Palestinians in September in a $14 million deal brokered by former World Bank President James Wolfenson. According to reports, Wolfenson personally contributed $500,000 of his own money and the rest was ponied up mostly by American Jews, including billionaires Mortimer Zuckerman and Leonard Stern.

But an article in Forbes Magazine stated the $29 billion Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's biggest charity, provided most of the money – $10 million – to purchase the greenhouses.

The magazine pointed out the donation falls outside the main focus of the foundation: global health. Gates is not known to involve himself in Mideast diplomacy or charities associated with Israel or the Palestinian territories.”

Unfortunately, the well-meant gesture reaped little reward:

“But Gates may not have got his money's worth. According to reports, the geenhouses were looted by gunmen following Israel's withdrawal. Computer equipment and, in some cases, entire greenhouses were stolen. The theft has put out of action about 70 acres of the roughly 1,000 acres left by the Jewish communities, according to [Ahmed] Al-Masri [current manager of the Gaza greenhouses].

"The looters took their time to dismantle the greenhouses and to uproot entire greenhouses and carry them away," Amid al-Masri previously told reporters.

Another round of looting struck the greenhouses in February when Fatah gunmen hired to protect the greenhouses abandoned their posts because they had not been paid. Witnesses reported some of the security guards themselves participated in the looting.

As WND reported, Palestinian farmers have had trouble reproducing the bug-free
produce previously generated by the Jewish owners. The Palestinian owners reportedly asked the U.S. governmental development group USAID to hire former Jewish Gaza greenhouse owners as consultants for their declining vegetable businesses.”

Mr al-Masri then insisted that everything had been recovered and the greenhouses were functioning at full capacity. As WND put it wryly, there had been no possibility of independent verification of the claim.

Mahmoud Abbas’s associates predict that the Hamas government will fall within weeks but by then Gaza, at least, might be in a full-scale civil war.

There are, of course, other sources of finances. As Ha’aretz puts it:

“Hamas leaders have resorted to a new tack: threatening Arab regimes and tightening bonds with Iran. Haniyeh announced that if the U.S. and Europe persisted in the economic siege, their interests in the Arab and Muslim world would be harmed. In other words, Haniyeh is trying to enlist sympathetic masses in Arab and Muslim countries against the West, and indirectly also against the Arab regimes.”

Hamas leaders did, indeed, have a meeting with Iranian President Ahmadinejad, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Kahmanei during which the President proclaimed that the Zionist regime, which was a permanent threat to Islam, was “heading for annihilation”.

Since then Iran has announced that it will donate $50 million (£28 million) to the Palestinian Authority to make up for the deficit left by the withdrawal of Western funds.

This is unlikely to be enough, though the actual extent of the debt seems to alter from interview to interview

“Mr [Khaled] Meshaal [top Hamas official], at a fundraising event in the Iranian capital, Tehran, said the Palestinian administration was $1.7bn in debt.

He said a further $170m a month was needed to run the administration, out of which $115m went to paying salaries.”

Russia, too, has said that money for the Hamas-led PA will be forthcoming but, so far, the Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has not made it clear how much that will consist of and what the conditions will be. Russia has already stated that Hamas should recognize Israel.

COMMENT THREAD

Hostage to fortune

The UK may be about to lose the remaining vestiges of control over another huge tranche of its defence industry, leaving us even more reliant on European companies.

That will be the outcome if, as The Business reports today, BAE Systems is about to sell its €1.5 billion share in European missile company, MBDA.

Following out on the heels of the planned sale of its 20 percent Airbus stake , this will mark a further retreat from Europe, as BAE Systems seeks to reinvent itself as an American company, primarily serving the US defence market.

Currently MBDA is jointly owned by EADS and BAE Systems, each holding a 37.5 percent share, with the Italian aerospace company Finmeccanica holding the remaining 25 percent. EADS is expected to buy up the BAE Systems shares and it is also believed to be interested in buying up Finmeccanica's 25 percent.

Crucially for the UK, MBDA supplies vital weapons systems to the UK, including the Meteor air-to-air missiles which will equip the Eurofighter (pictured above), the SCALP ED/Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missile, the Brimstone "fire and forget" anti-tank missile and the Aster missiles that will equip the Type 45 Destroyers.

Although BAE Systems had little control over the design of these missiles (one of the reasons why it is losing interest in working in multi-national conglomerates) and the UK less so – with the design authority of key components vested in German and French companies – the withdrawal of British share ownership would place total control in the hands of European-owned firms, with much of the manufacturing carried out offshore.

Following on from my publication, The Wrong Side of the Hill, we now seem to be moving to the end game where the MoD, and thus the UK, is totally reliant on European suppliers for the bulk of its high-tech weaponry and thus, inevitably, hostages to the Europeans, should we ever wish to use them.

Meanwhile, the Boy King is looking at glaciers in Norway.

COMMENT THREAD

After Dave

I hope readers will forgive my wry smile every time John Blundell writes on the evils of the European Union, which he does not infrequently now, most often in The Business. As director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), he heads the think-tank credited with much of the pioneering work that led to the Thatcher revolution yet, for the many years that I have known Blundell, he has kept silent on the EU.

Now that he has "come out", I suppose we should be grateful, but one cannot avoid commenting on the irony of his latest piece, headed "Cameron's deafening EU silence".

Despite this, Blundell does make some good points, noting that Socrates observed that a man's silences can say as much about him as those topics upon which he is loud – there's a classical education for you.

David Cameron, he writes, says nothing about the European Commission. His shadow cabinet is silent too. Oliver Letwin, "his genial and clever lieutenant" (Really?), explains this baffling elusiveness as "concentrating on mainline issues". The whips warn backbenchers that to discuss the topic is "unhelpful". But the imperious ambitions of the EU could not be more "mainline". Cameron is making a mistake. He is missing a huge opportunity.

Blundell sees a public critique of the EU as an excellent vote-seeking practice and argues that Cameron's "political antennae" should tell him that the "settled and preponderant view of the opinion polls is hostile to the EU". He adds, with not a little chutzpah, that the problem is our political élites will not discuss it.

The problem, actually, is that our "political élites" will not discuss all manner of things, not least immigration, the results of which The Sunday Telegraph records on its front page, noting that white working-class families are increasingly tempted to vote for the BNP, reflecting the lack of interest displayed by the Labour Party in their plight.

As far as Boy King goes, however, I am increasingly convinced that his main problem is no more or less than stupidity. It is only that, combined with the sort of arrogance that is so common in this type of "Tory toff", and the detachment from the real world than comes from his cliquish isolation, that could explain his total lack of political acumen.

As our own (if we may call her that) Christina Speight puts so aptly in the Telegraph letter column:

David Cameron repeatedly insists that the Tory party needs to change without indicating any specific changes. His achievements, so far, include installing a wind turbine on his roof to power three light bulbs and going to Norway to watch a glacier melt.

Booker also has a tilt at the Boy King in his column, relaying the views of Tory activists, MPs and councillors, that that the party "has been hijacked by a gang of spoiled children who appear to have no contact with the realities with which the rest of us live."

Thus it is that we have a curious political vacuum that allows a discredited, sleaze-ridden Labour Party to run neck-and-neck in the polls with a Conservative Party which should, at this stage in the electoral cycle, be sweeping all before it.

Talking of problems, therefore, "the real problem," as one dismayed senior Tory told Booker (and a very senior one at that), "is that it is going to take two more years before this disaster can be undone. Labour walks the next election, and then we're going to have to start all over again."

But that may not be an option open to the Tories. As one of our own readers pointed out to me, if the BNP suddenly 'does a UKIP' into double figures (at the local elections) then we may yet end up with a position where it's easier to fix the BNP and take that forward than to fix the Tories... "I thought that about UKIP - once," he writes, "but BNP is more structured, more professional, and more disciplined. I'm a lot more inclined to see a future for BNP now than even 12 months ago - and that was BD - Before Dave!"

That may be the Boy King's true legacy… in the years AD (After Dave), British politics may never be the same again.

COMMENT THREAD

I may be gone some time

You really do have to wonder about MSM headline-writers, to say nothing of some of the journalists that fill up the rest of the space.

Take, for instance, one of the headlines in this morning’s Sunday Times which proclaims, "Prodi plan to leave Britain out in EU cold".

According to journalist John Follain, Prodi "has unveiled a plan to speed up the integration of a core group of European Union countries", only rather than leaving Britain "in the cold", this would leave her "on the sidelines".

His priority, says Prodi, is to forge an alliance of what he called "the countries most determined to push for a common European policy", declaring that, "We need a strong relationship not just with France and Germany but also with the so-called group of six, countries like Belgium and Luxembourg — but not the Netherlands."

Prodi has called for more harmonisation of economic policies with the eurozone given "a stronger political dimension", the immediate appointment of an EU foreign minister and the abolition of the right of national vetoes on foreign policy decisions taken by the European Council.

He also believes that the EU should relaunch talks on the EU constitution after next year's French elections, aiming for a much more simplified constitution which focuses on the big principles. It should then be put to voters across the EU in a referendum at the same time as the European elections in 2009.

All this is so much fluff, much as you would expect from an ex-commission president, but Prodi should know that, since Italy does not hold the EU presidency until 2014, it will not be able to set the agenda.

But, even if the man's agenda could hold sway, by what measure should not being included in a group of countries determined to commit collective suicide be considered as being "left out in the cold" or even "sidelined"?

A closer parallel with Prodi might actually that of Captain Oates who, as a member of Scott's ill-fated Antarctic expedition, left the relative safety of the hut in which they were holed up, saying, "I may be gone some time". Considering that neither he nor the rest of the expedition survived, the parallel is, perhaps, uncomfortably close.

COMMENT THREAD

Happy Easter, suckers!

Thank EU, British taxpayers, thank you very much, and all you other suckers in the EU member states who have paid into our coffers.

It was really very kind of you to modernise our railway carriages, 81 of them so far, used by PKP Regional Railways - and at a mere €18.3 million, it was an absolute bargain… for us.

Our workers in the FPS H. Cegielski plant are also very pleased too, as they got the refurbishment work, after the contract was signed in December 2005 and especially happy are the residents who live along the Kraków - Kołobrzeg route, who will benefit from the replacement of the whole interior design, the imporved thermal and acoustic isolation, the new windows and new modular toilet cabins.

We also like the anti-graffiti protection layer and the money to turn 24 of 81 cars into non-compartment cars adapted for the disabled.

Most of all, though, we are all so happy that the money is to keep flowing. Two other contracts have been signed so far, one in June 2005 for a consortium of three rolling stock manufacturers - ZNTK Mińsk Mazowiecki, PESA Bydgoszcz Holding and NEWAG Nowy Sącz – to modernise another 75 trainsets, at a lovely cost of €41.6 million – for which we will not have to pay a single cent.

These will serve the Warsaw - Łódź route and are scheduled to be delivered by November 2007.

All of that lovely money that has made it all possible has come from that lovely European regional development funding, to which you lively people so willingly contribute – which was why we were so keen to join that lovely EU in the first place.

So long suckers… Happy Easter!

COMMENT THREAD

Nobody listened to us

One of the singular statistics to come out the conflict in Iraq is that the cost of wear and tear on US military equipment – quite separate from the enormous costs of maintaining the US presence – so far amounts to $9 billion.

This sum alone gainsays those absurd conspiracy theorists who hold that US sought to occupy Iraq simply to gain control of the oil supplies. Given what the war is costing, the United States could have bought up the whole supply of oil for decades to come and still have change.

That apart, whatever opinion one might have of the US intervention in Iraq, no one can be under any illusions that there is nothing better that the Bush administration would like than to be able to pull its troops out of the country, leaving behind it peace, democracy and stability.

And, when push comes to shove, there is only one thing stopping that – groups of evil men intent on murder and mayhem, directed at furthering their own partisan causes. Make no bones about it – no one forces these men to murder. If the murdering stopped, peace and reconstruction would follow.

The same can be said of Palestine and the Gaza situation – which is rapidly deteriorating into a (largely unreported) civil war – where, if half the energies devoted to plotting, murder and mayhem, were turned to peaceful activities, the plight of the ordinary Palestinian would be alleviated. There would then be less need for the Palestinian Authority to pass round the begging bowl in an attempt to fill the municipal coffers, soaking up more funds from the international community.

But what is most damning about these situations is not their sheer cost – in wealth and blood – but the thing that economists like to call the opportunity cost. Taking just the $9 billion the Americans have spent on "wear and tear" in Iraq, this represents an enormous waste of wealth which could, in a tortured world, most certainly have been put to more deserving causes.

That much is evident from the deteriorating situation in Darfur and Chad where, if the world (i.e. the left-wing media) were not so obsessed with appeasing the evil men in the Middle East, attention might turn to resolving a problem which, in comparison, requires relatively modest intervention. The mere 20,000 troops estimated to be required to bring stability to the region, for instance, is but a small fraction of the resource devoted to the Middle East.

Such is the way of the world, however, that the situation in the Darfur region has been festering for over three years and, according to knowledgeable commentators in the region, the current developments were entirely predictable.

Thus, as Chad's president Déby closed his country's borders with Sudan, after Thursday's abortive "invasion", he found it necessary to declare, "Nobody listened to us", criticising the international community for being slow to react.

Such international reaction, if anything, unhelpful, not least the action of the World Bank which is insisting that Chad's oil revenues are devoted entirely to "alleviate poverty". This has prevented Déby financing his own military in a nation that is, after, all, under attack from outside agencies. When Déby, invoking national sovereignty, decided to use some of the money to improve his army, the World Bank suspended support to his government.

In response, Chad is threatening to halt its 160,000-170,000 barrels per day (bpd) oil output unless the World Bank agrees to a new deal, which would leave the country bereft of its main external income.

Yet, all we get from the United States is pious statements, urging "Chad, Sudan and other African countries to try to halt the violence", while France – the former colonial power – and Kofi Annan are merely condemning any attempt to overthrow Déby by force. Yet, all this while Chad is expected to house and sustain the 200,000 Sudanese who have taken refuge in the country.

France itself, has a 1,200-strong military contingent in Chad, and some aircraft, and is sending a further 150 troops, which is hardly sufficient to prevent what the International Crisis Group believes is the threat of a new humanitarian catastrophe on both sides of the border.

Given how highly "Africa" has featured on Tony Blair's agenda, and the recent grandstanding by Gordon Brown, offering £8.5 billion for primary education in Africa, one cannot help but feel that a little less talk and slightly more action would not go amiss.

In this context, the greatest humanitarian need in this part of Africa is a body of disciplined men with guns and orders to shoot to kill, the cost of which could hardly begin to approach the amount Brown has pledged. However, as long as the US is effectively neutralised by the Middle East, and by "world" opinion which would only condemn American intervention, the only credible force available must come from Europe.

That will not happen, since "Europe" has neutralised itself. It is incapable of finding the political will for muscular intervention, which means that hundreds of thousands more Africans must die. The tragedy is that, not only is the slaughter now virtually pre-ordained, much of it will be unreported while the "world" continues with its obsessive condemnation of the US as it tries to stop the slaughter in the Middle East.

Perhaps, on the graves of the countless thousands who have died and will die should be inscribed the words, "Nobody listened to us".

Meanwhile, the Boy King is looking at glaciers in Norway.

COMMENT THREAD

Hear, hear

It is not often that we entitle a posting with those words but we must give a cheer for an article on the National Review website.

Resisting Intimidation is a piece by Paul Marshall, who is senior fellow at Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom and the editor of, most recently, Radical Islam's Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Shari'a Law. In other words, he is a man who does not view Islamism through rosy spectacles and, also, knows what he is talking about.

His theme is very simple. There are courageous Muslims both in the West and in the Islamic world who oppose totalitarian Islamists. They and their families are under threat and we must give them all the support we can.

Instead, the West, led, though very willingly, by the various tranzis, goes out of its way to appease the most oppressive and most violent of the Muslim groups, betraying not only its own people and supposed values but also the very brave souls who have joined battle within the Islamic world.

“Jihadists have taken heart from the many confused and appeasing government responses to the violence over the Danish cartoons and are escalating their offensive. Groups such as "Supporters of God's Messenger" now aim to silence any prominent Muslim who dares to criticize their actions and beliefs and suggest a modern interpretation of Islam.

Appeasement of such groups will not work. If cartoonists rein in their satire, if pundits and politicians carefully guard their language, violent Islamists will accept their victory and move on to demand the next part of their agenda — the silencing or death of those who reject or criticize their program, including, especially, Muslims.”

Read the whole article. It is well worth it.

COMMENT THREAD

What on earth is happening in West Africa?

As the situation in Chad hangs on a knife-edge, it is quite remarkable that, while world-wide protest at US involvement in the Middle East continues apace, the complaint from West Africans seems to be exactly the reverse – why is the US not getting more involved?

That is the thrust of a very long piece from the Sudan Tribune today, which picks up from an editorial in the Washington Post which itself asks, "Is [the Bush administration] only weak and incompetent, or is it two-faced [in its Darfur policy]?"

The editorial complains of "a lack of meaningful US policy for Darfur and eastern Chad, with the bleak diplomatic prospect that US leadership will be lacking as the Darfur region enters its period of greatest and most remorseless human destruction."

It tears into the "various posturing comments" by Bush about a significant NATO role in Darfur, which contrast with statements from senior NATO officials in Brussels that indicate that the role of the Alliance will in fact be highly limited. The Bush administration, it says, has not invested the political and diplomatic capital necessary to sway the Alliance, which moves by notoriously slow consensus.

To a certain extent, this misses not one but several points, not least of which is that Africa is largely regarded as Europe's domain, when it comes to intervention, and the former European colonial powers – and especially France – are not minded to look for or accept US leadership.

Thus, more relevant are the comments by the Tribune on the European members of NATO, their response to the Darfur crisis being described as "feckless and shameful". France, Germany, Italy, the Benelux countries, Spain, and the countries of Eastern Europe have all been essentially useless in crafting a meaningful Darfur policy. Even the Blair government in the UK, it says, has done little more than exhibit the occasional spasm of moral indignation.

Venom is also directed at the European Union, which "seems to believe that its partial funding of the African Union mission in Darfur exhausts obligations in the face of genocide."

The Tribune reminds us that the EU parliament voted by a margin of 566 to 6 in September 2004 to declare that the realities of Darfur are "tantamount of genocide", a disingenuous turn of phrase evidently meant to avoid the explicit judgement of "genocide," evidently freeing the many signatories to the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide from their various contractual obligations, pre-eminently to "prevent" genocide (Article 1).

Nonetheless, it adds, European acquiescence before genocide (or realities "tantamount to genocide") in Africa remains conspicuous.

It says a great deal for the expectations of the Europeans and the EU that the Tribune thus focuses on the Bush administration and its ongoing failure to respond seriously to Darfur. It holds as one of the consequences of this US failure that Khartoum's genocidal ambitions have "bled into neighbouring Chad" and that Khartoum’s unconstrained support for Chadian rebels has brought the tenuous government of president Idriss Déby to the very brink of collapse.

Though Chadian officials claim that the rebels are being defeated, says the paper, the rebel attack on N'Djamena and the possibility of large-scale army desertions ensure that the military situation is far from resolved. Certainly Khartoum's National Islamic Front (NIF) has a strong interest in seeing the rebels succeed in toppling Deby’s government, and in bringing to power a new government that will be beholden to Khartoum, as Déby himself was when he came to power in a 1990 coup.

The Tribune then offers a detailed account of events that I have not seen bettered elsewhere, pointing out that the recent rebel invasion of Chad clearly has the backing of Khartoum and that attacks by Khartoum’s murderous Arab militia allies, the Janjaweed, "appear to be co-ordinated with those of the Chadian rebels".

While recognising that Déby is a far from satisfactory leader, given the extreme security crisis in West Darfur state, instability in Chad poses the real prospect of a massive escalation of the humanitarian crisis already affecting this troubled region, with thousands of refugees – who are these only to escape the murderous attentions of the rebels, once again prey to their vicious attacks. Under attack from the rebels, Déby is redeploying his military resources in a bid to retain power, leaving the refugees unprotected, with potentially disastrous consequences.

To supplement the wholly ineffective African Union force in the region, it is estimated that a serious peacekeeping force would require 20,000 or so troops would be needed, and the Tribune is looking to the Bush for such a deployment, rather than the token force of "several hundred" NATO advisers so far proposed.

It is, however, recognised that, short of sending its own troops, the US would struggle to persuade allies to commit so many troops and a NATO officials has said that military planners were looking at dozens rather than hundreds of NATO experts to support the African Union. "This is how Europe would respond to the urgent security needs of civilians in Darfur and eastern Chad, as well as the humanitarians providing a critical but highly tenuous lifeline," the Tribune notes bitterly.

As for the United Nations, its pitiful efforts are dismissed as a reflection of the "broader international cowardice", where the "other actors within the international community are also abjectly failing Darfur". Efforts to stop atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region are unraveling, "with a new peacekeeping force uncertain, relief aid under attack and UN sanctions stymied", while Kofi Annan's special representative for Sudan, Jan Pronk, "continues to demonstrate a foolishness and perversity of instinct that has consistently undermined UN policy on Darfur".

Here, Pronk's malign influence is summed up from a series of Reuters reports, recording that Pronk has warned that any mention of NATO was a red flag to Muslims. Presumably, the Tribune adds:

Pronk doesn't mean here the Muslims being slaughtered in Darfur because of their ethnicity. They have made abundantly clear in a host of ways that they would eagerly welcome NATO or other international troops to protect them, their families, and the possibility of their resuming meaningful lives. Pronk himself has recently called for a force of 20,000 troops: where does he propose that they come from? And does he imagine that countries other than those within NATO can provide the kind of sophisticated military presence, transport capacity, intelligence, and tactical air support that Secretary-General Annan has explicitly called for? It is Pronk who is the fool, a status he has confirmed repeatedly over the past two years.

It was Pronk who was responsible for negotiating away in August 2004 the only meaningful UN Security Council "demand" that has yet been made of Khartoum, viz. that the regime disarm the Janjaweed and bring its leaders to justice. In place of this singularly important "demand" Pronk negotiated instead (also in August 2004) a plan for "safe areas" in Darfur, one that proved as ill-conceived as the "safe areas" plan for Bosnia (it was quietly abandoned by the UN shortly afterwards when it became clear that "the plan" did nothing but offer Khartoum diplomatic cover for its expanding military offensive along the Tawilla/Gereida corridor).

Pronk has also at various points perversely refused to accept the overwhelming evidence that Khartoum has recruited, supplied, and consistently militarily coordinated with the Janjaweed---evidence that was most authoritatively assembled by Human Rights Watch in December 2005 ("Entrenching Impunity: Government Responsibility for International Crimes in Darfur"). And it is Pronk who has also proved adept at angering many within the UN community working in Sudan by insisting on assuming responsibilities that are neither his nor within his competence (an excellent example is Pronk's highly unjustified insistence on taking a leading role for himself in the critical Assessment and Evaluation Commission for the north/south peace agreement; see International Crisis Group, "Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement: The Long Road Ahead," page 27).

In speaking so foolishly and in such cowardly fashion about the need for robust humanitarian intervention, including use of NATO forces - precisely what has been called for by the UN Secretary-General - Pronk ensures only that the chances of deploying any force, even of the sort he himself has vaguely called for, are increasingly remote.

And so it goes on in what the Tribune calls "a perfect storm of human destruction", predicting that, in addition to Darfur, "Eastern Chad is also poised to become a nightmare of human destruction and deprivation." Unless something dramatic is done, and done soon, whatever is done will make no difference to the people of Darfur and eastern Chad.

The paper thus lays the ultimate responsibility on the Bush administration and that, in itself, is the ultimate condemnation of the European Union. For all its protestations of a global reach and its prating about the ascendancy of "soft power", when the chips are down, its utter uselessness is so evident that even that does not warrant comment.

A Continent that fielded millions of men for its own armed conflicts – and roped-in millions more from its then colonies – is now reduced to bickering over the deployment of 1,000 men for an "over the horizon force" in the DRC, and cannot even contemplate fielding a mere 20,000 to prevent a certain humanitarian disaster.

Whatever the ultimate responsibility of the US, those who so easily and proudly call themselves "Europeans" should be thoroughly ashamed.

Meanwhile, the Boy King is looking at glaciers in Norway.

COMMENT THREAD

An Easter Rebellion

Not a few newspapers are taking the opportunity of Easter to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the Easter Rebellion, the armed uprising of Irish nationalists against the rule of Great Britain in Ireland.

After centuries of discontent, the uprising occurred on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, centred mainly in Dublin. The chief objectives were the attainment of political freedom and the establishment of an Irish republic.

It takes an editorial in The Irish Examiner, though, to make the obvious point.

As we approach the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising, it says, the Taoiseach appears rather hypocritical in celebrating Irish independence while his Government supports the EU constitution which would virtually annul the powers of the Oireachtas.

Instead, the leader declares, we would be governed by the EU commission, which is "anti-democratic, bureaucratic, unaccountable and endemically corrupt." It continues:

Anyone who dares oppose an EU treaty in Ireland is branded anti-European whereas the real anti-Europeans are people like Jose Manuel Barroso who seek to create a federalist superstate built on US-style free trade policies which increase Third World poverty and the militarisation of the continent for the resource wars of the 21st century.

The voters in France and Holland have bought time for the sovereignty of European states, but one must fear that this constitution will eventually be ratified with or without the support of the citizens the EU is supposed to represent.

The paper could have made the point that, with or without the constitution, the Irish government – in common with ours – has already surrendered much of its powers to the "anti-democratic, bureaucratic, unaccountable and endemically corrupt" EU commission.

Perhaps it is time for another Easter Rebellion. Next year would be fine, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome.

COMMENT THREAD

The next Italian Justice Minister inherits a headache

While the outcome of the Italian election continues to be disputed (we might hear a little less about the American presidential election of 2000 in future), the probably outgoing Justice Minister is leaving a headache to his successor.

“Justice Minister Roberto Castelli informed Milan's chief prosecutor that he would not submit a request to the Bush administration for the extradition of the 22, who are accused in a 477-page arrest warrant of carrying out the kidnapping three years ago. He gave no reason for denying the politically sensitive request made by the Milan judiciary five months ago.”

However, Armando Spataro, the Milan prosecutor, who heads the investigation into the case of the alleged abduction and delivery to the Egyptian authorities in 2003 of Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr also known as Abu Omar, is not giving up.

If Romano Prodi becomes Prime Minister after his less than glorious victory, still, as noted above under challenge, then there is a better chance of a request for extradition. Not that it will lead to anything. The American authorities have already announced that they would not extradite the named individuals.

Spataro intends to prosecute and try the 22 present and former agents in absentia, possibly this coming autumn, whether the Italian government puts in a request for extradition or not. Should be an interesting trial.

COMMENT THREAD

They know not what they do

One of life's difficult choices is working out which I hate more – the EU or speed cameras.

The latter feature particularly highly in my life at the moment, not only because I have just paid off Mrs EU Referendum's speeding fine but because I am teaching EU Referendum Junior how to drive.

This has meant frequenting camera-infested streets which I usually avoid, while insisting that Junior at all times obeys the speed limits – a classic case of "do as I say, not what I do".

What has been particularly striking about this experience is discovering how difficult is to know what the speed limit is at all times. Firstly, it is impossible to gauge from the type of road what the limit might be. You get four lane carriageways, with generous grass verges and no housing in sight, the limit inexplicably set at 30 mph, while some narrow urban roads, lined with parked cars, can have a forty limit.

Secondly, one notes how poor the signing is – and how few signs there are. Many are in disrepair – one I spotted was so old, the red ring round the number had completely faded – and many are concealed by foliage or other obstructions. I have commented, rather sourly, that if the authorities spent a fraction of the money they spent on cameras on improved signing, then compliance rates would shoot up.

One other thing I have found is that Junior, having taking multiple lessons with a professional driving instructor, is so imbued with the necessity to keep to the speed limits, that he will quite happily bowl down roads nicely on the 30 mph limit, feeling pleased with his performance, when the particular circumstances demand a maximum of 15 mph or less.

Anyhow, at least one problem is about to be resolved. In its consultation document issued this week, on its CARS 21 Report, (Competitive Automotive Regulatory System for the 21st Century) the EU commission has signalled its intention to take a much greater role in road safety. It intends to include in its roadmap, "measures to improve the enforcement of bans on drink-driving, the enforcement of speed limits and the promotion and enforcement of seat-belt use and motorcycle helmet use."

As with the morons which masquerade as road safety campaigners in this country, the EU is obsessed with the mantra "speed kills", promoting the falsehood that speed is a factor in about one-third of fatal and serious accidents, when it is actually about seven percent. Furthermore, the bulk of speed-related accidents occur at speeds within the posted speed limit, so that it is "inappropriate speed" rather than speed, per se, that kills.

Thus, the EU will bring no improvement to road safety and, as it takes its greater role in projecting road safety myths, and progressively assumes responsibility for speed enforcement standards, we can transfer our detestation from the imbeciles who are at present destroying road safety, and direct it at the EU.

From their perspective, the "colleagues" may think it is a good idea to take over road safety but with that will come the unpopularity currently reserved for the likes of camera partnerships. Clearly, they know not what they do.

COMMENT THREAD

Another stitch-up in the making?

Trying to chart a way through the defence procurement maze - attempting to read the runes in this vital area of public policy – has been one of the harder tasks taken on by this Blog. Although intimately linked with foreign policy decisions, the subject also combines state secrecy and commercial confidentiality with political sleight-of-hand and a large dose of technical detail – all overlaid with industrial and commercial politics which have their own separate rules.

The central issue for this Blog, of course, is the evident Europeanisation of procurement policy, with decisions in this sphere potentially having a decisive effect on future operational options, to the extent that a British Army, furnished with equipment built to European standards will be unable to function effectively alongside United States forces or their allies which use US-procured equipment.

In this context, one of the most important programmes under way is the British Army's Future Rapid Effects System (FRES), the nature of which amounts to a revolution not only in equipment but in operational procedures, the nature of which we have likened to the transition from the horse to the tank.

This is a issue which we have covered extensively on this Blog, but is one which has been almost entirely ignored by the MSM – to its eternal shame – and has been dealt with by the government on a somewhat less than transparent basis.

As we left it, the government had issued development contracts with the Swedish firm Hägglunds for the SEP armoured vehicle platform, indicating that this could well form the basis of the British Army's new equipment – the first time in our history that we have procured mainstream armoured vehicles from European sources.

However, there have been further developments which suggest that FRES project could be widening out into a much larger European enterprise, involving not only Hagglünds but the French, state owned GIAT Industries and the German Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW) armoured vehicle manufacturer.

GIAT already produces armoured vehicles for the French Army, under the AMX label, while KMW produces, amongst others, the Leopard 2 for the German Army.

Now, according to DefenseNews, these two firms are to collaborate in building a medium-size Multirole Armored Fighting Vehicle (MSMRAV), with plans for a system demonstrator to be ready by 2010, and production vehicles rolling off the lines by 2015.

This is in a market already over-subscribed by vehicles of this class, with the European Defence Agency complaining that there are already 23 types in production or planned by European manufacturers. The fact that GIAT and KMW are to collaborate, therefore, is taken as a sign that consolidation in European "land systems" enterprises is on the stocks, much as we have seen with aerospace companies.

KMW is certainly agreeing that, "The vehicle co-operation is a European answer to a European requirement," and a senior German defence official confirmed that the tie-up could be "an approach to satisfy the growing demand to harmonise requirements as envisioned by the European Defense Agency."

But what makes this particularly relevant to us is the comment by DefenseNews that the new vehicle could be a European market answer to the UK Future Rapid Effects System, a prospect affirmed by both companies which have said, in a joint statement that they are aiming to "develop a vehicle that meets current European requirements, but also goes beyond them." They add: "We are sure to create with this step a momentum that has been requested already from many institutions, such as the European Defence Agency."

The companies are using the next ten years to find technology for this "next-generation platform", preparing for requests for bids from the European Defence Agency - which fits in neatly with the British procurement timetable. Significantly, the companies also state that the project would satisfy requirements of Germany, France, Italy, Sweden and Spain, who have "signalled a need in a so-called letter of intent".

That is especially interesting as the British and Swedish governments are co-operating on the development of the SEP platform and, if the Swedish government is looking to tie up with the GIAT/KMW combine, then this could point the way towards a pan-European project in which the UK may be a participant.

Already, through BAE systems, the British government is working with GIAT Industries on the development of gun and turret systems for FRES platforms, while GIAR also produce the AMX 10P (pictured above) for the French Army, which would provides an industrial base for the production of FRES-platforms.

KMW, on the other hand, have been working with the arms combine Rheinmetall in producing the Puma (pictured right), advanced infantry combat vehicle for the German Army. Product "synergies", therefore, abound and British participation would make industrial, if not political, sense.

All this is, of course, speculation and there has been no word on the development from either the British government or the MSM. However, given the lack of transparency which has surrounded the whole FRES project so far, this is definitely one to watch. There could be yet another stitch-up in the making.

COMMENT THREAD

A climate of fear

As the Boy King trogs off to look at a melting glacier in Norway, the Wall Street Journal (Opinion Journal) yesterday offered an intriguing piece under the title "Climate of Fear", written by Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.

His thesis is that global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence, who in turn are bolstering junk science to support alarmist claims about global warming. But, worst of all, writes Lindzen, scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libelled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.

Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, Lindzen concludes, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.

The worrying thing, of course, is that this phenomenon has been prevalent for some considerable time, and now covers a vast range of scientific activity.

I, myself, had personal experience of it when I was researching for my own PhD, carrying out a study of the quality of public-sector investigation of salmonella food poisoning.

My thesis was that, since huge tranches of public policy were based on the findings of public-sector investigators, the effectiveness of the policy depended, to a very great extent, on the accuracy of the conclusions drawn from investigations. It was, therefore, of some interest to measure that accuracy.

I chose as my focus, the enormous number of what were known as "egg-associated" food-poisoning outbreaks, re-investigating sixty of those which had been definitively reported by the authorities as having been "caused" by salmonella-infected eggs.

Using rigorous scientific criteria, I concluded that in only three of the sixty outbreaks was there sufficient evidence to support the assertion that the source had been infected eggs. In a considerable number, there was good evidence to suggest that the source of infection had been something else.

Not least, I seem to have discovered a new type of salmonella, one which – from data supplied in official records – was capable of causing illness before it had been consumed. This arose from five of my re-investigated outbreaks, where illness had occurred in the cohort before the eggs, which were subsequently attributed as the cause of the outbreak, had been consumed. In one case, illness had been detected three days before the eggs had even been delivered to the restaurant which became the focus of infection.

My general finding was that investigators tended in each case to formulate an a priori causal hypothesis, and then directed their investigations to supporting those hypotheses, discarding any information which refuted them. Much public money could be saved, I suggested, if they did not bother carrying out any investigations at all, but simply published their hypotheses as fact, the moment outbreaks were discovered.

However, the specific issue, relating to Lindzen's assertions, is that I had picked up on this theme as part of my general work and then sought to do a structured study within a university environment, as part of a PhD research project. Yet, when I approached a number of universities to take me on, intrigued as they were by my hypothesis, none would touch it. It was far too "risky" and contentious.

Eventually, one courageous department head did take me on (albeit, as long as I found my own funding), and became my supervisor. But it nearly cost him his department where most of the research work was financially supported by the then Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF).

On day, out of the blue, he was summonsed to London to attend what he thought was a review meeting with MAFF, to find himself ushered into a room packed with officials whose only interest was my research. My supervisor was told that it was "incompatible" with the other work being done in the department and either mine would have to go elsewhere, or funding would be withdrawn.

Eventually, a "deal" was stitched up, where it was agreed that I should be "quarantined" within the department and have no access to any MAFF-funded research – and nor would the department publicly support my work. It was a close run thing as, had funding been withdrawn, the department would have had to have closed down.

That experience, as Lindzen is indicating, is now the norm. Academia, far from being the repository of independent research, has been bought and paid-for by the political establishment, prey to lobby groups, its task to reinforce policy decisions and keep out dissident thought.

Behind all that is the EU, which controls much of the science funding in European universities, and has an almost total grip on political research, through its Monnet programme and its "framework" funding system. That is also true of climate science, which is in the grip of what Lindzen calls the "iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers", bolstered by an ignorant and indifferent media which is interested only in the cheap, alarmist headline.

The idea of "independent" science, therefore, has become a hollow joke. As Lindzen rightly points out, it has been replaced by a "climate of fear". And it is that which, as he gazes at his melting glacier, the Boy King has bought into.

COMMENT THREAD

Another loss of nerve

If there were any doubts, a further indication of the weakness of the EU commission has been reported, this one by Lloyds List (no link) which says the commission is holding out against pressure from MEPs for the controversial EU "manning directive" to be resurrected.

This is the directive that was introduced 1998, to prevent shipping companies operating in EU member state waters from changing flags in order to employ cheaper crews. The proposal was withdrawn in 2004 because the commission could not muster the required majority in the Council and Jacques "Wheel" Barrot has now confirmed that there will be no second attempt in the foreseeable future.

Amazingly, we have heard words from the commission, the like of which we never would have expected and which would have had Jean Monnet turning in his grave. In response to a parliamentary question by French MEP Henri Weber, the commissioner said his services would do "everything short of legislate".

Despite recent high-profile cases where Irish Ferries and Louis Dreyfus Armateurs switched flags in order to cut staffing costs, Barrot admitted he was not prepared to risk another legislative failure, despite, as he told the MEP, "The commission is conscious of the extent of the phenomenon of the substitution of Community crews by other seafarers at lower cost and notably of the risk of considerable job losses for Community seafarers and as a consequence of maritime know-how."

Thus, while the march of integration continues onwards, many of the directives coming into force have been going through the process for years. Currently, though, the commission seems to be suffering from a loss of nerve when it comes to framing contentious new legislation.

COMMENT THREAD

It is not a European problem

One of the more infuriating aspects of MSM reporting of European matters (apart from the frequently displayed ignorance) is the tendency to talk of Europe when they mean individual countries.

It may seem to David Rennie that “paralysis is now Europe’s default setting” but what he is writing about are two different countries with different problems. Italy is facing one of its not unusual electoral stalemates with many weeks of negotiations for a left-wing coalition that will be unable to do anything about the various economic problems. Yes, these have been exacerbated by EU rules and membership of the euro but they are basically Italian problems.

France, as we know, is sui generis when it comes to problems. Having suffered from riots by teenagers and young people who cannot find jobs and promised to do something about it, the government then found itself confronted by rioting teenagers and young people who think they will be getting jobs, no matter what, and do not want those to be jeopardized by any kind of flexibility.

Result: one government climb-down, one prime-ministerial career ruined and any idea of economic reform shelved. But it is a French crisis caused by the French. It is not a European crisis. Nor does it indicate anything about the rest of Europe. In fact, if it lets France sink or swim the EU might actually find itself in an advantageous position, not that we would wish that to happen.

The update on the youth employment law in France is that a heavily modified version has been passed by the National Assembly and has gone to the Senate.

Among other things it makes provisions for

“… state support for employers hiring young people facing "the most difficulties in gaining access to the labour market".”

That, I think, is where we came in after the riots in the banlieus last autumn.

Meanwhile, the students have decided that demos and the odd riot is much more fun than all those boring lectures and, anyway, if they go home, who knows what the government might do. Possibly even legislate, having been elected to do so.

“On Tuesday, only half of France's 62 universities that were not closed for holidays were functioning normally, the education ministry said.

Demonstrations drew at least 2,500 people onto the streets of Toulouse on Tuesday, reports said. Smaller demonstrations took place in Grenoble, Marseille, Paris and Rennes.”

One wonders how many of these spoilt little brats expect cushy, state-sponsored jobs when they finally manage to get their degrees. Ah well, those who have the jobs now did exactly the same in 1968, when Prime Minister Pompidou paid heavy dues to the unions. Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même.

COMMENT THREAD

The brick that will not fly

I do not suppose there are many people who either knew or cared that the finance ministers of the EU member states met over the weekend in Vienna. For those who can bear to contemplate the eternally dull goings-on, however, they should know that, according to media reports, Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister called for all twenty-five member states to adopt a common corporate tax base.

This is something of a hardy perennial and is about as likely to fly as your average house brick, even though the EU commission is scheduled to make a proposal by the end of 2008. What gets interesting, therefore, is Steinbrück's "second-best solution", what he calls, "moving ahead with a smaller group of countries willing to give up autonomy on taxation".

This is our old friend, "enhanced co-operation", with Germany and France in the frame as the "pioneers", set to overcome the rooted resistance of Britain, Ireland, Slovakia, the three Baltic countries and Malta, all of which are opposing tax harmonisation.

This opposition was explored in the Irish Times yesterday (no link), where it was pointed out that Ireland was “implacably opposed” to harmonisation, despite the current tax commissioner Laszlo Kovacs waxing lyrical about the "significantly reduced compliance costs for firms calculating their tax burden."

From this article, it appears that there are now anywhere up to ten member states opposing the plan and strenuous attempts are being made to kill it off. Leading the fray was Irish finance minister, Brian Cowen, who damned Kovacs's baby with faint praise, describing it as "a very interesting academic exercise". Adding that it would only serve to undermine national sovereignty, he then suggested that Kovacs should work on more pressing tax matters.

Three defenders of the plan are France, Germany and Austria, which leaves Kovacs thinking about "playing a trump card", the so-called "enhanced co-operation". However, that still requires eight countries to give their assent, and there are no indications yet that enough will come out of the woodwork.

Nevertheless, as we all know, the commission never gives up, and the issue is again to be debated by finance ministers in June. Without re-writing the laws of aerodynamics, however, Kokavs has little chance of it flying then.

COMMENT THREAD

Playing to the gallery?

It is all very well for Ahmadinejad to announce that his scientists have been able to produce enriched uranium but, as the Americans point out, we have no means of knowing whether this is true, or merely bluff and bluster, calculated either to improve Iran’s international negotiating position, or for domestic consumption – or a bit of both.

As US state department spokesman Sean McCormack said, "At this point, I can't confirm any of the technical details. There is a lot that goes into a technical assessment of where the Iranians might be in their capability in operating a centrifuge cascade, whether it be a small one or a large one ... I couldn't offer an assessment for you as to where they stand in that process."

If indeed Iran has succeeded with the enrichment process, at 3.5 percent, this is a long way from producing weapons-grade material in sufficient quantities to make a nuclear bomb and, as we have pointed out before, there is a massive leap in technology required to turn this into a bomb. There is then yet another leap before a reliable delivery mechanism can be produced.

Either way, in his prancing and preening, Ahmadinejad is playing a dangerous game and, despite the BBC's attempt to turn this into an US versus Iran conflict, with the peace-loving EU member states mediating, the fact is that the US – short of Israel for the time being – is the only nation with the means to mount effective military action against Iran, should Ahmadinejad go completely off the rails. Therefore, we can be thankful that the US is clearly developing contingency plans – it would be irresponsible of it not to do so.

Needless to say, left-wing columnists – like the increasingly mad Simon Jenkins - blame "western provocation" for Iran's actions, while others point to the sinister role of Russia and Saudi.

Remarkably, no-one seems to be mentioning the role of Russia in arming Iran and the possibility of an independent Israeli response is not being discussed either, although it must still be on the cards.

Altogether though, it is fair to say that no-one really knows what is going on in this troubled region, and we take little comfort that our ignorance is matched by that of the state department. The one thing of which we can be sure, however, is that cannot serve the interests of stability and world peace for Ahmadinejad to be playing to the gallery.

COMMENT THREAD

Beginnings of the Union Flag

Today marks the 400th aniversary of the decree issued by King James I of England and VI of Scotland that united the Cross of St George (red on a white background) and that of St Andrew (diagonal white on a blue background) in the first version of the Union Flag.

The Cross Saltire of St Patrick (diagonal red cross on a white background) was added after the Act of Union and the Union Flag as we know it now was first flown on January 1, 1801.

Why no Welsh Dragon? Simple really. Wales, a Principality, had, by 1606, been a part of England for several centuries.

One thing that has always puzzled me is how do people know when the Union Flag (or Union Jack) is flown upside down, which a sign of distress. As far as I can make out after careful scrutiny it is completely symetrical. It seems, that I had better go on scrutinizing it a bit more. According to the Buckingham Palace press office:

“The Union Flag is flown correctly when the cross of St Andrew is abovethat of St Patrick at the hoist (as the earlier of the two to be placed on the flag, the cross of St Andrew is entitled to the higher position) and below it at the fly; in other words, at the end next to the pole the broad white stripe goes on top.”

Why is it sometimes called the Union Flag and sometimes the Union Jack? On the whole, we accept that it is the Flag on land and Jack on the seas. But there seems to be some doubt as to the origin of the words Union Jack.

“The term Union Jack possibly dates from Queen Anne's time (reigned 1702-14), but its origin is uncertain. It may come from the 'jack-et' of the English or Scottish soldiers; or from the name of James I who originated the first union in 1603, in either its Latin or French form Jacobus or Jacques; or, as 'jack' once meant small, the name may be derived from a royal proclamation issued by Charles II that the Union Flag should be flown only by ships of the Royal Navy as a jack, a small flag at the bowsprit.”

The British are not, on the whole, a flag-flying nation, having not felt the need for it in the past. Indeed, one of the most telling episodes in Kipling’s “Stalky and Co” is that describing a visit to the school by a politician who talks much of the flag and even produces one from his breast pocket. The boys, staunch patriots every one, feel besmirched by his flag-waving.

There are times when flags are in order. One of those was the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations in the Mall, that was a sea of flags: Union Flags, English flags, Scottish and Welsh flags, Canadian, Australian and various African flags, even one solitary and very stylish Isle of Man flag.

After 7/7 I noticed that the Union Flag was flown more frequently than is usual, it being controlled by carefully laid down rules. In time of trouble, the flag was being used as a symbol of defiance.

COMMENT THREAD

Killing with incompetence

There is a fair crop of letters in today's Telegraph, taking little Gordie to task over his grandstanding on Africa.

"Is there a better indicator of what Gordon Brown sees as value for money than our having to pay £8.5 billion for a photo call with Nelson Mandela?", James Sproule of London SW1 asks, a photograph that must go down as one of the most expensive in history.

How much more effective, cheaper and humane it would have been if Brown and his fellow travellers had focused on vital issues like addressing the problem of malaria, which other bloggers have also highlighted, to say nothing of dealing with the growing burden of EU red-tape which is costing the African economies twice what the EU ploughs back in aid.

How much more useful it would have been if the Boy King's acolytes had focused on this issue at Manchester over the weekend instead of prating about overfilled kettles and how much better the Boy King might have looked if he had talked about these issues from the platform, giving his obsession with cosmetic environmentalism a rest.

But all of that would presuppose we have adult, honest and well-briefed politicians, instead of the babies-in-office that we are dealing with, chasing after shadows, while wasting our time and money.

Bad government, we can deal with, but that and an inept opposition is something which even the most hardy spirits find daunting. The tragedy is, though, that the combination is not only destructive to our nation, it is killing the people of Africa. But never mind… I am sure the Boy King will enjoy his holiday in Norway - at the taxpayer's expense.

COMMENT THREAD

The sin of national discrimination

We have no shortage of things from the EU, about which we can justly complain. But it is useful to remind ourselves that we in the UK are not the only ones who find the grip of Brussels increasingly unpleasant and irrational.

Latest in the long list of complainants is the Cyprus government which, according to Reuters has attracted the ire of the EU commission for taxing imported second-hand cars, but not applying the same tax to second-hand cars sold on the island – which were taxed when imported new.

The reason for this discrepancy is quite simple, and sensible. New cars are heavily taxed when imported and this is reflected in their second-hand price. If they were then taxed again on resale, this would effectively amount to double-taxation.

If, on the other hand, imported second-hand cars were not taxed, this would undercut the domestic price, and/or encourage the purchase of imported second-hand cars, which the government is keen to avoid in order to take advantage of the improving emission standards of new vehicles.

Thus do the second-hand imports attract a relatively swingeing tax, ranging from £5,000 for a nine-month-old family runabout imported from the UK, to an eye-watering £23,000 for a six-year-old 2½ litre German saloon.

But such sense is not for the EU commission. Locked into its mantras, it sees the dreaded sin of "national discrimination" and is about to send a letter to the Cypriot government demanding equal treatment between domestic products and those from other EU states – on threat of legal proceedings.

However, the views of Cyprus transport minister, Haris Thrasou, have not yet been recorded. "We will wait to receive the letter and will then look into the matter before making a comment," he says. Oh, to be a fly on the wall.

COMMENT THREAD

Democracy denied

Despite the opposition of most of the police forces involved, their police authorities, the public-at-large (where they have been consulted), all the opposition parties and many back-bench MPs on the government side; despite there being no merit to the plan and good evidence that it will have an adverse effect on policing standards; despite the costs; despite the government neither having asked for nor obtained an electoral mandate for so doing; and despite Tony Blair himself saying that they would not be forced on police forces, the home secretary Charles Clarke has today announced that the government is to forge ahead with police force mergers

According to the report on The Guardian website and elsewhere, new "superforces" will be created in East Anglia, the Midlands, the south east and Yorkshire and Humber.

Since none of the forces have agreed to the merger, the home secretary must now undertake a period of "consultation", which ends on 11 August. Needless to say, the results are a foregone conclusion as Clarke has said he expects to begin merger procedures in the autumn with the new forces coming into operation on 1 April 2008.

This is one of the most egregious examples of a doctrinaire government flying in the face of public and professional opinion, for absolutely no good reason. The issues have been explored fully in a report written by Owen Paterson MP, with a little help from his friends, and I commend you to it (32 pages - .pdf format).

Because the mergers bring the police forces closer to the regional structures favoured by this government – alongside the ambulance and fire services – this is being seen by some as part of a hidden EU agenda. However, while regionalisation, as such, is in accordance with EU ambitions, there is no good evidence that this current move is being dictated in any way by the EU – nor indeed are the police structures that will result to be found in any other EU member state.

What is certainly the case, though, is that this government is an intellectual companion of the EU in its denial of democracy and its authoritarian behaviour, illustrating once again that, when it comes to dealing with the governance of this country, the EU is only one part of the problem.

The more immediate problem, however, is that many police forces are already too large and detached from their community roots, with no real accountability. These "mergers" are going to make a bad situation inestimably worse, with results that are only too predictable. Today, is a very, very bad day for democracy.

COMMENT THREAD

So ... errm .... freedom of speech is accepted after all

As readers of this blog know, we believe in freedom of speech and have argued that even such an unattractive specimen of humanity as David Irving should be allowed to tell his lies unmolested by the law. As should Professor Eric Hobsbawm. Oh woops, he is allowed and is highly regarded for them.

We also think that both Germany and Austria have now gained their spurs as democratic countries and, therefore, denial of the Holocaust should not only not be made a crime in other countries but should actually be decriminalized in these as well.

Still, that is up to the Germans and the Austrians. One would, however, like to see some consistency in the matter. Who is the most prominent Holocaust denier at the moment? Step forward Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And who, according to the German media, will be a very welcome official guest during the forthcoming Football World Cup in Germany? Errm, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Of course, he cannot be tried for statements not made in Germany but one might expect the German authorities not to fall over themselves welcoming this rather repulsive specimen of humanity, who has, among many other achievement, ordered the public hanging of two teenage boys for alleged homosexual activity.

COMMENT THREAD

Faster, wider, deeper

For long enough, it has been the golden rule of politics that, when you are in a hole – stop digging. Yet, while the Boy King is telling his party that he wants it to change, "faster, wider and deeper", it seems that the injunction applies more to hole-digging. His new credo is, when you're in a hole – hire a JCB.

That much is evident from the Boy King's private office, in response to pained letters and e-mails from UKIP members – and many Conservative supporters – complaining at his "racist" attack on the Party. Far from apologising, his correspondence secretary, Alice Sheffield, is crying in aid one Ashok Viswanathan of "Operation Black Vote" (OBV).

Says the egregious Sheffield, quoting Viswanathan:

There's no doubt that when you talk about the UKIP they're wolves in sheeps clothing... We know that a number of candidates who have stood for UKIP have BNP links - there's no question there are links'. He suggested UKIP had been spreading 'hate and bigotry', adding: 'It's not just about anti-Europe. It's anti-black, it's anti-minority, anti-migrants, anti-asylum seekers. And we should be very clear about that when we vote on June 10th' (Black Information Link 9 June 2004).

One wonders if the Boy King's correspondence secretary has taken the time to look into this organisation before so enthusiastically quoting it for, if she had, she would have found it had some very interesting friends.

Not least, it has been funded to the tune of £10,000 from the European Social Fund, topped up from the EU parliament office with £6,670 with a further £2,000 from Charter 88 and nearly £6,000 from Livingstone's "London Government". It also received an additional £30,000 funding from European Social Fund via the 1990 Trust, which paid the salary of other OBV members of staff. It includes amongst its sponsors, the Transport and General Workers Union and Unison.

By any definition, OBV is a "racist" organisation, actively discriminating in favour of ethnic (i.e., non-white) communities. With heavy backing from EU institutions and their fellow-travellers, it can hardly be relied upon as a non-partisan source for comment about UKIP.

But then the fair Alice is far from being non-partisan about the EU. "We want Britain to be a positive participant in the EU, championing liberal values", she writes:

Britain has an enormous amount to gain through co-operation and free trade in Europe. The EU does much that is worthwhile. It allows people and goods to move freely across Europe. Just as importantly it has brought stability and has helped to entrench democracy in newly free countries.

Coincidentally, in yesterday’s The Times, under the heading, "Silence on Europe will not be good enough", William Rees-Mogg wrote that, if the Conservatives are to regain the trust of moderate Eurosceptics, who are among their own voters, they will have to define their European policy in frank terms.

Well, Alice Sheffield has done the job for them, and cries in aid overtly racist groups to support the line taken against the Boy King's own core vote. Keep digging, Alice... faster, wider, deeper.

COMMENT THREAD

EU-less

Following on from the shambles of the .eu domain registration saga, we have received the following e-mail from our own registrar:

Dear Customer,

This e-mail concerns your recent application for the domain name:

eureferendum.eu

Unfortunately, we have been unable to register this domain for you.

This is most likely to have been caused by incorrect availability information being passed to us by EURid - the official EU registry. The massive rush of registrations caused EURid's systems to be regularly unavailable.

The other possibility is that another customer successfully registered the domain between your provisional search and completion of the order (over 700,000 .eu domains were registered on Friday alone).

Yours sincerely.

Having checked "whois", it now seems that a Dutch company claims to have ownership of the domain, but since that same company claims also to own eureferendum.com – which we currently own – we take this with a pinch of salt. We will not, therefore, be shelling out our hard-earned readies.

On balance, we feel it is preferable to remain EU-less.

COMMENT THREAD

Rum lot

Political groupings who claim victory, that is. No sooner do we see the French student rioters cum trade union strikers claiming victory that will mean no attempts even to deal with the high youth unemployment, than we look to Italy to see an even odder phenomenon.

By all predictions Romano Prodi should have walked into the job of Prime Minister. Berlusconi was described as a “buffoon”, his premiership “controversial” (though, actually, he got there by winning elections); the economy is in a horrible mess, Berlusconi’s own business dealings have fallen a long way short of anything that can be described as transparent. And yet, and yet.

The latest results for the Lower House are: 49.8 per cent for the Centre Left coalition and 49.7 per cent for the Centre Right, that is Berlusconi’s coalition. The Senate remains undecided.

Any normal person would consider this to be a serious failure for Prodi. Not so, Prodi himself and his followers. According to Deutsche Welle:

“The result automatically gave Prodi's group a majority of at least 340 of the 630 seats in the lower house, leading the man known to Italians as "the professor" to claim victory.

"Today, we have turned a page," Prodi told an ecstatic crowd from a stage outside the headquarters of his Union coalition in central Rome.

"We will always be united. We will govern for five years," he said.”

When he says “we will always be united” he, presumably, means for the next week or so. But a new page? Ecstatic crowds? As I said, a rum lot.

COMMENT THREAD

Is there no limit to their messes?

While the world waits for news of the outcome of the Italian election (to say nothing of the Hungarian contest), it is worthwhile to take a moment to consider that other momentous event, the launch last Friday of open access to the .eu domain.

Once again, it seems, the hubris of the European Union players is not matched by their performance, with the EURid.eu registry site crashing under the burden of applications.

But what has since emerged is that the EU couldn't even get the so-called "landrush sale" right. From Bob Parsons, CEO of the web hosting company GoDaddy.com – summarised by Betanews - comes a report of how EURid allowed the domain sale to be turned into a huge scam involving hundreds of fake registrars.

The issue here is that, potentially, domain names are valuable property – some attracting price tags of many thousands of pounds - but the EU gives accredited registration companies (registrars) first bite at the cherry, allowing them – on a first come first served basis – to buy domain names at a fixed fee of $12.50 each. The registrars can then sell them on to clients, auctioning off the more valuable sites to make a considerable profit.

The way the sale was organised was that registrars had to join the queue and could then only buy one domain name, before dropping back to the end of the queue, to start all over again. That, at least, gave everybody a fair chance - in theory, except that the process was hijacked.

Although EURid required registrars to make a deposit of €10,000, it also seems to have been extraordinarily lax in checking their credentials and thus allowed an estimated 600 "phantom" registrars to sign up, owned by one (unnamed) company, backed by mega-millionaires in the United States.

That enabled the company to stake multiple positions in the queue and thus grab an unfair share of the market, potentially making a fortune out of the subsequent resales.

Parsons says his company tied to warn EURID of the potential for abuse, but its cries "fell on deaf ears." He adds that so many complaints have been filed EURid has simply stopped responding to them. Now, he believes EURid should freeze all registrations and make sure they are genuine. Those that are not should be deleted and a second landrush period held for those domains.

He is not optimistic. Unless some authority in the European Community steps up and forces EURid to do this, they will do nothing, he says.

Can't these people get anything right?

COMMENT THREAD

Bye, Bye Silvio?

Early reports, based on exit polls released this afternoon, indicate that former EU commission president has beaten the incumbent Silvio Berlusconi in the Italian general election.

Speigel online says that the exit poll, taken by Nexus for public broadcaster RAI and private broadcaster Mediaset, shows Prodi's alliance gaining between 50 and 54 percent of the votes in both houses of parliament, compared to only 45 to 49 percent for Berlusconi.

Prodi's coalition is slated to gain between 159 and 170 seats in the Senate, compared to 139 and 150 for the center-right, although there is no information yet on the lower Chamber of Deputies. A separate poll taken by Piepoli for Sky Italia television, however, showed Prodi winning 52 percent of the vote in the lower house.

This will be the first time ever that a former EU commission president has moved on to become a prime minister in his own country. However, for Prodi – to say nothing of the Italians – this is likely to be a mixed blessing. While a more "European" stance might be expected, The Times, amongst others, suggests he is likely to lead a "motley" coalition that is unlikely to last.

The coalition embraces social democrats, centrists, Catholics, Greens and Communists, and much will depend on the final spread of votes in what is, by all accounts, a highly complex proportional representation voting system.

COMMENT THREAD

Brains turned to mush

The robust good sense in the Telegraph leader today rightly mocks Brown’s gesture politics. The soon to be erstwhile chancellor (he hopes) has promised £8.5 billion of our money over the next ten years on a plan "to provide every child in the world with a primary school place by 2015".

Why not promise to end disease, while he's about it, says the Telegraph leader, or to do away with poverty? Gordon Brown's pledge to give all Africans primary education by spending British taxpayers' money is particularly silly, even by the standards of the millenarian language we expect from this ministry.

At least he will not have to fund the children of Zimbabwe as their mothers, according to a chilling story in the Sunday Times last week, seems to suggest they are finding their own macabre solutions.

This is recounted by council workers in Harare, the national capital, who are finding at least 20 corpses of newborn babies each week, thrown away or even flushed down the lavatories of the capital.

The dumping of babies, along with what doctors describe as a "dramatic" increase in malnourished children in city hospitals, is the most shocking illustration of the economic collapse of a country that was once the breadbasket of southern Africa.

Some of the corpses are the result of unwanted pregnancies in a country experiencing a rise in sexual abuse and prostitution. But others are newborns dumped by desperate mothers unable to support another child. Inflation has reached 1,000 percent and the government's seizure of 95 percent of commercial farms has seen food production plummet.

The "dead gutter babies", reports The Sunday Times, are the most pitiful victims of a government that believes it can starve its people into compliance, or death, turning Zimbabwe into the only country in the region with a shrinking population.

And it is this that makes such a huge contrast between the "feel good" rhetoric of our dismal politicians and the reality of the situation on the ground. That reality has children dying by the hundreds of thousands in Dafur, in the Democratic Republic of Congo and, of course, in Kenya and elsewhere from the real but unfashionable scourge of Malaria.

Elsewhere in the Telegraph we get another article, this one on Malawi which notes, amongst other things, that today, 35 million Africans - including 4.8 million Malawians - rely on the World Food Programme.

But, it says, drought does not explain why the prospect of Africa achieving self-sufficiency is so remote. Instead, Aids, land degradation and rising populations condemn millions to dependency. "Lack of rainfall is not the main problem," said Sylvester Kalonge, a Malawian food security expert from the aid agency, Care. "There are many households in Malawi who would not be able to feed themselves even if the rains were good."

Yellowing stalks of wilting maize around Kumatipa tell the real story. Intensive farming has ruined the soil. Malawi's population doubles every 25 years, so more people scratch a living from the same expanse of land. The option of leaving fields to lie fallow does not exist.

Moreover, no one has legal title to their land. Every field is handed out by village headmen such as Chief Kumatipa. And what the chief can give, the chief can take away.

So there is no incentive to develop or improve the land and every last inch must be used in case one day it is lost. And, without title, no one can use the land as collateral to raise funds for compost or fertiliser, so the soils are steadily ruined.

That latter issue is so central to the problems of Africa that the idea of providing African children with primary school places, as a palliative, is simply a cruel, hollow joke in the worst possible taste.

But it all fits in with the theme of modern politics, where everything is for presentation and everyone must be a touchy-feely liberal. But the damage this ethos does is untold, witnessed by another article in the Sunday Times. This one is on education in the UK, where Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal writes under the title, "How wet white liberals became the ultimate black joke”, with the strap, "Politically correct do-gooders do more harm than they know".

Some time ago, I was asked on a radio interview how I would solve Zimbabwe's problems, the question being posed in the context of European politics. I answered that we could sack all our MEPs and use the money saved to send the 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment to depose Mugabe, and reinstate the rule of law.

Maybe it would take more than a battalion, but not much more, and it is this sort of robust response that one yearns for from our politicians instead of the garbage we now get from them all. There had been hopes that the Boy King, for instance, would offer a statement on Darfur in Manchester this weekend, but it was not to be. Instead, we got a homily about not over-filling kettles.

All our politicians, its seems, have had their brains turned to mush. Is it any wonder that we hold them in such contempt?

COMMENT THREAD

The rioters have it

L’Escroc Chirac has announced that the new law (so new that it has not even been unpacked) to deal with youth unemployment (the CPE) is to be scrapped and other measures to tackle the problem will be introduced.

Various conclusions are to be drawn from this. The first and most obvious one is that Chirac has decided to throw de Villepin to the wolves though at this stage it is not entirely clear whether the man will resign or not.

Secondly, to the question of who runs France the answer is undoubtedly whoever torched the cars last night. If the spoilt denizens of the Sorbonne can get away with it (supported by the trade unions, to be fair, as ever intent on their own selfish interests) then why shouldn’t the unemployed of the banlieus, both French and immigrant, have another go?

Thirdly, the question of whether France is ready to enter the twenty-first century, to use that rather hackneyed phrase, has been answered by a resounding NON. Whatever it is they are against it.

That would not matter but for the baneful influence France has on all developments in Europe, partly through her refusal to let go of the sclerotic structure of the EU and partly by presenting herself as the country that speaks for the rest of us.

If the French want to wreck their economy, continue with a corrupt political system and support every dictator and terrorist in the world, provided they are anti-American, that is fine. What does it have to do with us or, indeed, any other European country?

COMMENT THREAD

Sloppy journalism

The Times today runs story on how undertakers are "to lead protest as Brussels seeks chemicals ban", telling us that the ancient traditions of the Irish wake and funeral are under threat from Brussels.

This is according to the Republic’s governing Fianna Fail party, which has said that "final farewells to the deceased as they lie in open coffins could be ended by Stavros Dimas, the European Union environment commissioner, who wants chemicals used by embalmers withdrawn under a new biocides directive."

As far as it goes, this is old news in the sense that it was run in the Irish papers last month, and picked up by blogger Slugger O’Toole on 30 March.

Throughout, though, it has been treated as an amusing curiosity and an Irish cultural issue, with very little technical elaboration of the issues involved.

At the heart of the problem is the EU’s Biocidal Products Directive 98/8/EC, which appears to be creating problems with the use of formaldehyde. It is the intention of the directive, we are told, to withdraw agents, such as formaldehyde, without which it is not possible to carry out embalming.

However, the directive does not specifically mention formaldehyde and the mechanism by which it will be withdrawn is uncertain. No more information is available from the newspaper – which has basically copied out the story from the Irish press.

That aside, there is much more to the Biocide Directive, which is causing havoc in no end of industries, creating considerable increases in costs. The industry, for instance, estimates that it will cost at least €5 million to register a new product under the directive, and that is before the costs associated with funding extensive R&D; programs and investing in new plants and processes are considered.

Furthermore, of the estimated 1500 known biocidal active agents currently in use, such is the expense of registering products that only some 370 have been notified under the directive and many perfectly good products will fall by the wayside. For others, the concentrations at which they can be used are so low that they cease to be effective.

Altogether, therefore, there is much more to this than a simple "tee-hee" space-filler about Irish undertakers, about which we are being told nothing in the popular press. But then, what else does one expect from the MSM, other than sloppy journalism.

COMMENT THREAD

Intellectual property

Tucked away in Booker's column today is a story that could (and should) easily have made the main news section of any quality newspaper, and thence precipitated a right royal political row.

Headed, rather lamely, "Sonar lost us £300m", this picks up on a story we did last month about the development of the world-beating sonar 2087 for the Royal Navy. Writes Booker:

When history comes to give its verdict on the Blair Government, high on the charge sheet will be the wholesale selling out of our Armed Forces and our defence industry to the cause of European integration.

UK taxpayers, he tells us, put more than £300 million into the procurement of the equipment (in fact, £389 million) from Thales UK, and the Navy has recently taken delivery of eight sets for its Type 23 frigates, at £9 million each. By that reckoning the development cost amounts to a cool £317 million. This latter sum is effectively the "intellectual property", representing the knowledge cost of building the system from scratch.

When we contacted the MoD, we learned that the intellectual property of defence contracts is always left with the contractor and were referred to its policy statement on intellectual property which states, inter alia, that MoD funded work "should be fully exploited not only for defence purposes but also for the benefit of the wider UK economy".

To protect the taxpayer, a levy is applied to any sales to third parties, at a standard rate of 7.5 percent of the price charged – up to £15 million – or on a profit sharing basis for more valuable contracts.

Thus, ownership of the intellectual property relating to sonar 2087 now resides with Thales UK. This is all very well and good, except for the fact that the company is not British, but wholly French-owned. Furthermore, that compnay has decided to lift the designs to produce the sonar for the French Navy which it can sell at a knock-down price as the British taxpayer has funded the development – any levy or profit-sharing hardly compensating for the huge initial sum.

In other words, writes Booker, "the UK taxpayers have made a free gift to Thales of more than £300 million." He adds, "No doubt our French friends are very grateful for our generosity. But in business terms, one has to ask what on earth the MoD thinks it was up to."

This, incidentally, makes a stark contrast with the MoD’s recent decision to cut war widows' pensions if they sue over their husbands' deaths and successfully gain compensation. No doubt, they will fully appreciate our generosity to the French.

COMMENT THREAD

The only alternative is violence

This week, I put a cheque in the post, to the sum of £100, made out to Her Majesty's Court "Service" (although it has long ceased to have anything to do with Her Majesty) in payment of a speeding fine.

Not, I hasten to say, my speeding, but for Mrs EU Referendum, who in a moment of distraction, became one of the millions of motorists who fell foul of those evil yellow boxes which litter our roadside and make driving a nightmare.

With the cheque, however, I enclosed a cutting from the local newspaper detailing an episode in which a local toe-rag, having killed an elderly resident in his car, had been disqualified but had escaped prison.

He had then been caught driving while disqualified, having sought to evade the police by driving at up to 80 mph through built-up areas, zoned at 30 mph, and had only been "awarded" community service which – from past form – he would most certainly fail to complete.

It is with some interest, therefore - to put it mildly - that I read the Focus piece in The Sunday Times headed "One law for them, one law for us" by Richard Woods. This spells out at some length the thesis presented by a new book which says that "while petty crime is being rigorously prosecuted, serious offenders are not."

The piece chooses for its illustration the fate of David Langton, "a law-abiding citizen" who keeps getting into trouble. His crimes, says The Sunday Times, are to drive, to park, to be an ordinary person who makes occasional mistakes. In the past year he has had his car towed away from outside his home when the parking bay was suspended; he has been caught by two "safety" cameras when driving a few miles an hour over the speed limit; and he has twice been fined for forgetting about the London congestion charge.

The contrast is then made with some egregious offenders who, despite committing shocking crimes, have effectively "got away with it", thus proving the thesis that author, David Fraser, makes in his book, A Land Fit For Criminals.

Now, I can already hear the bleating of those who say that "if you didn't break the law, you wouldn't have a problem", which matches the moronic litany of those who blather, "the law is the law and must be obeyed".

In my reasoned way, let me counter with a simple illustration. Food hygiene regulations – which I used to enforce – require wash basins to be provided in commercial food premises, equipped with various facilities like soap and towel.

Totting up the various technical requirements, I once calculated that is possible to commit no less than 20 technical breaches of the law in respect of each and every basin in a food premises, to the extent that it is virtually impossible for any busy premises to be in full compliance.

By that measure, it is relatively easy for the trained observer to walk into any commercial food premises and pick up at least 100 technical "offences", each one of which in a court of law could attract a penalty of £5000.

To avoid such a ridiculous outcome – where the owner of every food shop in the land was forever in the courts – it is necessary for enforcement officers to use their judgement. They should prosecute only where there are serious breaches, and where the object of the regulations (improving hygiene) is best served. More often, the threat of prosecution is a more powerful weapon, and a case never comes to court.

In other words, there are two parts to the "law", the written code and the enforcement code. For a law to be just and workable, the two must work together and in harmony. The written law itself is not a mandate to prosecute every offender, however petty – therein lies tyranny.

Interposed in this process used to be elected councillors, who sat on committees and made decisions as to whether there should be prosecutions. Gradually, however, these decisions have been delegated to officers, from which have arisen some ludicrous prosecutions that should never have been taken, and could never have been supported by local councillors who, after all, need to be re-elected.

But, as elected councillors have become more detached from the administration of their councils – as Booker adequately testifies in his column today - we get "rule by officer" in the increasingly managerial style of governance, about which my colleague has written so lucidly.

And, as the officials take over, elected politicians – whether they be councillors, MPs or even MEPs - have less and less relevance, and are seen merely as ciphers, rubber-stamping the decisions of their officers (or unable to bring them to account).

Thus do people retreat from the political process and democracy takes a slide, bring the current calls for state funding of political parties, which Simon Jenkins today so thoroughly condemns. "Not a penny more of public money" should be directed at them, he writes. "Let them sweat."

Interestingly, he goes on to write that, "since taxpayers are not privy to this conspiracy against the exchequer the only redress may yet be rioting in the streets," a somewhat whimsical thought but one which increasing numbers of people are wishing would happen – to the extent that, as Patrick Stewart might have said, they intend to "make it so".

Certainly, as I wrote my cheque this week, I had murder in my heart. One increasingly feels empathy with those poor souls who turn up in the news having sprayed their fellow men with bullets in an orgy of mindless killing. That really is a shocking admission but, when democracy goes out the window, the only alternative is violence.

That is where we are heading.

COMMENT THREAD

The DIY Conservative Party

I know that writing about the Boy-King’s Manchester speech (will this be his equivalent of the Sheffield rally?) is akin to shooting fish in the barrel but there is one more thing to be added.

Thanks to the Conservative Home blog we know that as delegates were leaving the hall, they were handed a Wave Network leaflet (motto: Because politics is too important to be left to politicians), entitled “Be the change”. Despite rather lame efforts to defend the leaflet by its author on the blog, there is no pdf available.

However, we cannot do any worse or better than copy the ten commandments to the party faithful and, no doubt, conservatives everywhere:

Take the bus when you can

Get to know your neighbours better

Pick up one piece of litter from the street everyday

Re-use your plastic bags when you go to the shops

Switch to energy efficiency light bulbs at home

Reduce your thermostat by 2 degrees

Support your local shopkeepers

Don't overfill your kettle

Fill out a donor card

Give blood

I cannot even be bothered to analyze or discuss any of that nonsense, particularly as the forum on Conservative Home has done the job for me. (Though none of them mention the case of the chap who collected all the rubbish in his village into a plastic bag, put it by the side of the road to be collected and was done for fly-tipping. Was it the neighbours?)

One comment explains the origins of Wave Network:

“Wave Network, is the successor to CChange and is the sister organisation of Policy Exchange - both founded by Francis Maude. Similarly the party website advertises Women2Win - another pressure group.”

Make of it what you will. I suspect this is Francis Maude's attempt to reproduce the right-wing network built up over the years by the Republicans in the United States. There is just one problem: most of those organizations had something to say beyond "don't overfill up your kettle".

I am off to read about Edmund Burke.

COMMENT THREAD

Happy birthday Isambard

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, unquestionably one of the greatest Britons. The son of a French immigrant, himself a notable engineer and designer, Brunel was part-educated in France but created his railways, tunnels, bridges and Paddington Station in England.

There are celebrations in Bristol, Rotherhithe and other places. And there is a more detailed posting on the Conservative History blog.

COMMENT THREAD

I wonder why

Get together a hundred Imams from around Europe and bring them to a meeting in Vienna under the aegis of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia this weekend. Then tell them that prejudice against Muslims is dangerously high in Europe and can lead to a vicious circle of isolation and radicalisation of immigrant youths.

That was the brilliant idea Beate Winkler, head of the Centre, as recorded by Reuters, who went on to declare that "Muslims have a dangerous feeling of hopelessness and withdrawal from the wider community, which in turn leads to alienation, especially among young Muslims of immigrant descent."

Needless to say, Winkler gave no statistical evidence for this startling conclusion, but said her agency would soon publish two reports on Islamophobia in Europe.

Then it was the turn of the Imams, who agreed that public attitudes towards Islam, now the second-largest religion in most European countries, had hardened since the September 11 attacks in New York, bombings in Madrid, and London and the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

Now, I wonder why that could be.

COMMENT THREAD

Sir Roy Denman

"A wit, raconteur, bon vivant and unflinching believer in a united Europe, had a remarkable career in the largely anti-European - if not anti-foreign - postwar British civil service." So starts the review of Roy Denman's book, The Mandarin's Tale in the unashamedly Europhile European Affairs.

Others have been less laudatory as Denman, who died on 4 April, is one of those men for whom Eurosceptics have reserved a particular detestation, a man who, while a civil service member of Edward Heath's team, was heavily involved in negotiating Britain's entry to the EEC and then who went on to join the commission, rising to become head of the commission delegation in Washington in the 1980s.

The obituary today, in The Telegraph, therefore, has to steer a course between giving homage to the deceased and conveying in neutral terms the career of a man who is widely reviled.

By and large, it succeeds, describing Denman as having the reputation "of an extremely able, hard-working, colourful and idiosyncratic negotiator", and author of Missed Chances: Britain and Europe in the twentieth century (1996), in which he reviewed the history of Britain and the Continent in the 20th century. The Telegraph describes him thus:

For Denman, Britain's posture towards Europe post-1945 created a catalogue of missed opportunities. The nation suffered from delusions of grandeur, a failure to recognise "the greatest secular decline in power and influence in Europe since that of seventeenth century Spain".

There was also a failure to find bureaucrats who could, or would, operate within the new European language of compromise and administrative decision. "Brussels," Denman believed, "must be made as attractive to those seeking public service as India and the Sudan once were."

Britain's approach, he thought, only damaged the nation's influence and interests. Those who drafted the Treaty of Rome had explicitly anticipated "fiscal, social, monetary and ultimately political union", and Denman considered that this was something that British politicians had never fully understood. For his own part, he was prepared to sacrifice a certain measure of independence for a more influential role in Europe.

In 2003 he said: "We are happy with a trading arrangement, a common market. But we will not count until we make a political commitment. We have never faced up to the fact that we would have to trade power for power."

In this book, Denman perpetuates the myth that Britain walked out of the early negotiations to form the EEC, on which he bases much of his subsequent "missed chances" thesis, one which is neither accurate nor borne out by the historical record.

Yet, to support his colourful description of this, in his terms, tragic occurrence, Denman cites events that never happened and contradict the accounts of people who did observe the early negotiations which led to the Treaty of Rome.

For a European Union which takes great delight in pointing up "Euro-myths" which misrepresent its actions, Denman, therefore, was the perpetrator of one of the most fanciful Euro-myths of them all, one of the many on which the fictional account of the EU's history is based.

Nevertheless, Denman maintained his support for the EU to the end, writing frequently to newspapers and taking part in programmes and debates in support of the construct which, in the latter part of his career, had provided him with a good living.

His reputation as a debater, however, was much overrated – as my colleague can attest – and he never really moved on from the old paradigms on which the EU was originally based, living, like the organisation he supported, in the past.

It is not uncommon to say of people recently deceased, that "they don't make them like that now", and this is probably true of Denman, to which one can only add: thank goodness.

COMMENT THREAD

So do the children play

One cannot but help enjoy Simon Heffer's robust defence of UKIP in the Telegraph today but only in the sense that he points up the utter fatuity of the Boy King's hijack of the Conservative Party. Says Heffer of the Cameron "bratpack":

They are repositioning their party in much the same fashion as Senator Ted Kennedy used to reposition cars after a night's boozing. It's all very well abusing your core vote, provided you can find others to vote for you instead: but the UKIP blunder has simply served to remind everyone of Dave's inexperience, stupidity and shallowness, and that is hardly going to help drum up support.

That shallowness was much in evidence at the Conservatives’ spring conference in Manchester, when "shallow Dave" – whom I half expected to be wearing a windmill on his head – sought to position his metropolitan obsession with the "environment" at centre stage. Said the Boy King,

We must become the party that offers young families a vision of a cleaner, greener, brighter environment. For our generation, the environment isn't an issue on the fringes of politics.

The problem for little Dave is that – as we have remarked before - "environment" is on the fringes of politics. All he is doing, by parading his "green credentials", is showing how utterly out of touch he is with public sentiment.

This was demonstrated, perhaps unwittingly, by Nigel Farage who turned up at Manchester, as promised, in UKIP's pretend "tank", the Saracen armoured personnel carrier. For the eco-zealots who have hissy fits about "Chelsea tractors", Farage's chariot would have them swooning in horror. With its 5,675cc, straight 8 cylinder, 160 bhp petrol engine, on a good day, it can just about manage a fuel consumption of 5 miles per gallon.

But away from the foetid, claustrophobic obsessions of party politics, the real world beckons, with the Airbus story given ample mileage in The Telegraph.

This comes with a poignant piece by Roland Gribben who notes that BAE Systems' sale of its Airbus share marks the final retreat of Britain from civil aircraft manufacture. "The industry in the UK," he writes, "in terms of British ownership, has now been consigned to the history books".

This has already been preceded by our retreat from military aviation, which was effectively announced by John Reid in December, and the progressive transfer of military manufacturing to European firms.

This, undoubtedly, has contributed to the state of the economy where, yesterday, we learnt that manufacturing output dropped in February to its lowest level since before Labour came to power in 1997. This is in stark, if sombre contrast with the news that the number of people working in the public sector has risen to almost six million – the highest number on record.

As useless mouths proliferate, Farage in his Saracen outside the Manchester Tory conference hall, was also making another unwitting statement. He was riding in a British-built armoured vehicle, powered by a Rolls Royce engine. If he wanted to repeat the exercise in, perhaps thirty years time – as the forthcoming generation of British army vehicles becomes obsolete – he would be riding in a Swedish-built vehicle, with a French gun and turret, powered by a German diesel.

Inside that conference hall today, however, they are oblivious to such issues. All we get is that crass, vapid, babyish Cameron bleating that he wants "a green revolution". And so do the children play.

COMMENT THREAD

In your face

Once again, one must take exception to a headline, this one from Reuters, which proclaimes: "Europeans rush to register .eu domain names".

Yesterday was the first day that ordinary mortals – as opposed to companies – could apply for an .eu internet domain suffix and, according to Reuters, "hundreds of thousands of Europeans rushed to sign up".

Actually, I was one of them, and I don't remember rushing particularly. Nor in any sense of the work that Reuters seeks to convey, am I a "European". The reason for the purchase, of course, is to protect the name "Eureferendum", preventing a rival or copycat launching a spoiler – the reason why many people and especially companies will have taken the plunge.

Many more will have been bought by "cybersquatters" in the hope of selling them on to the original name owners and, I suppose, some will have been bought for the sheer novelty value.

Whatever, it is certainly not the case, as the commissioner for information and society, Viviane Reding, asserts, that "the demand of European citizens and companies will show whether they believe in Europe."

It is this that sort of blithe assumption that really does hack you off. These ghastly people just can’t resist being "in your face", crowing about their "Europe" at every available opportunity, so much so that they have thoroughly debased the word, inviting hostility at its very mention.

The same goes for their hubris, as conveyed by the Expatica site, which reports, "EU launches .eu domain in hope to rival .com". Why they can't just launch the thing and be done with it, heaven knows. Like children in a playground, they've always got to "rival" something, or be better than someone – usually the United States.

Anyhow, it looks like the British politicos have been caught short by the domain launch, or so says the BBC. Neither Labour, the Conservatives nor Liberal Democrats have yet grabbed a .eu suffix to match their party name. The Europhile Lib-Dims do not even have plans even to try. That is because they are "focussed on politics in the UK", Mark Pack from the campaigns office says, in a display overwhelming stupidity – or dishonesty.

And, to cap it all, tonyblair.eu has been snapped up by Big House Services, a web-site hosting company, the owners of which, no doubt, will be happy to swap it for a peerage. At least, though, Blair has done better than the Boy King. Up to press, there have been no bids for davidcameron.eu.

COMMENT THREAD

My brain hurts

I looked at this this morning and it didn’t make sense, so I saved it for later, when I could read it more carefully.

Now I have read it carefully, together with this and this, it still doesn’t make sense.

It is not the words. They do make sense. What doesn't make sense is that we are told that three appeal court judges ruled yesterday that two Dutch citizens who were not actively looking for work were entitled to council homes.

That seems straightforward enough, if more than slightly objectionable, but then the plot thickens. Current rules mean EU nationals can freely come to live in the UK if they are working or self-sufficient and, if they stay to work, they are not entitled to council housing. With me so far?

Now, if they do not have money or are not looking for work, they are not entitled to stay in the UK and "become subject to immigration controls" – which means they can be deported. At that point, however, our learned judges have ruled, they fall into the "economically inactive" category and become entitled to be considered for a council house.

This was from Lord Justice Buxton and his colleagues ruled, dismissing an appeal by the London borough of Barnet against an earlier decision in favour of two Dutch nationals on income support.

These were not just any old Dutch nationals though. They were Hassan Ismail, a widower and sole carer for his two young children, and Nimco Abdi, a mother of three daughters who fled war-torn Somalia and been granted Dutch nationality. They then moved to Britain, when they claim they have been unable to work since arriving in Britain because of their "childcare responsibilities", and demanded council housing on top of the income support they were claiming.

They (with a little help, I suspect) persuaded the Court of Appeal that they were "persons subject to immigration control". And under regulations made by the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, a person subject to immigration control who receives income support is thereby eligible for assistance from a local housing authority under the Housing Act 1966.

Interestingly, people not subject to immigration control may claim housing assistance only if they have a right to live in the British Isles. Anyone who is a national of a state within the European Economic Area is entitled to be admitted to Britain, the judge said, but that did not give them an automatic right to remain here.

Under section 13(2) of the Asylum and Immigration Act 1996, a person who requires leave to remain in Britain (and therefore can be removed) is subject to immigration control. That provision means "what its words say", Lord Justice Buxton concluded. Lord Justices Lloyd and Richards agreed.

The Mail puts all this a little more starkly. "Thousands of unemployed asylum seekers granted sanctuary elsewhere in the EU can move to Britain and claim free council housing," it says. "A court ruling yesterday opened the door to any poor EU immigrant to travel here and demand a home." Incredibly, it adds, of the "asylum seekers", if they get jobs, they lose the right to a free house.

A spokesman for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister now says: "We are very disappointed with the judgement and intend to change the regulations as soon as possible." But officials were unable to say when this would happen or whether it would need Parliamentary approval.

In case I have missed something, the text of the judgement is here.

COMMENT THREAD

Another election

What a lot of things will be happening on April 9. Palm Sunday, of course, and the anniversary of the toppling of that statue in Baghdad. Then there is the Italian election, after a campaign conducted with an astonishing amount of mud slinging and histrionics.

So what else is new? Well, the state of the Italian economy, for one. As Christopher Fildes writes in today’s Evening Standard (not on line)

“The question for the next government, whoever forms it, is whether Italy will struggle to keep up with the euro, or quit, or be forced out. If it had to start again, Italy’s national debt – more than its total output of goods and services – would burst the rules wide open.

They have now been elasticised to fit the candidates, but Italy’s economy is going nowhere. It lags behind France and Germany. Last year it hardly grew at all. In the past 10 years, its share of world trade has almost halved.”

Being part of the euro does not help but, despite Prime Minister Berlusconi’s outburst against “Prodi’s euro” the fault lies within Italy itself. The single currency was never going to solve all these different countries’ economic problems; but the notion of a “European reform” that would somehow do that is equally fatuous.

Lorenzo Codogno at Bank of America

“prescribes a massive dose of reform: privatisation, deregulation, cutting the size of the state”.

Very little of it can be achieved while Italy stays in the euro or, for that matter, the EU but if it is to be done it has to be done by an Italian government. Neither of the main candidates seems anxious to deal with the problem.

In the meantime, we get news that

“The secretary general of Italy's largest Muslim organisation, the Union of Islamic Communities in Italy (UCOII), has called on Italian Muslims to vote for the Party of Italian Communists at the general election.”

It would seem that UCOI has already taken on Communist nomenclatura. This is the first time I have heard of a secretary general of a Muslim organization.

Comrade Hamza Piccardo explained that

“the party's leader Oliviero Diliberto had been sensitive to the needs of Muslim inmates when he was justice minister in the late 1990s and this constituted a sound reason to vote for him on 9-10 April. This was the first time that a leading member of Italy's Muslim community publicly supported a party on the eve of an election.”

Hmm. That’s as may be. But one cannot help wondering whether fresh questions ought not to be asked about the organization of those massive anti-war and anti-American demonstrations.

COMMENT THREAD

The UN again

There are times when I feel that it is time Godzilla met the UN or, failing that, Abbott and Costello. Still, here is one book I would like to read: “The U.N. Exposed : How the United Nations Sabotages America's Security and Fails the World” by Eric Shawn, “senior correspondent and anchor for the Fox News Channel. He has covered stories everywhere from the Persian Gulf to Somalia to the White House to the O. J. Simpson trial.”

It sounds a jolly read:

“The U.N. Exposed will give you a rare insider's tour of the United Nations, focusing on many disturbing aspects that have been ignored by the mainstream media. You will learn, for instance:

- how U.N.-supervised funds were diverted into weapons used against American troops

- how terrorists and rogue states seeking nuclear weapons flout toothless U.N. resolutions

- how our allies' selfish economic interests drive U.N.-backed challenges to America's sovereignty

- how kickbacks, bribes, and corruption have pervaded the highest echelons of the U.N.

- how U.N. ambassadors and staff enjoy luxurious and tax-free Manhattan lifestyles and other perks

- how U.N. workers have repeatedly turned children into their sexual prey”

Item 3 sounds particularly interesting. I wonder (says she disingenuously) whether among those “allies” there is anything about various European countries.

In the meantime the State Department has announced that the United States would not be a candidate in the first election for the new(ish) Human Rights Council, which is meant to replace the old Human Rights Commission. The Council that, supposedly, will avoid having really gruesome violators of human rights on it, was voted in overwhelmingly last month. (See item 3 in that list above.)

For some reason, various, usually sensible Democrat and Republican Representatives and Senators are dissatisfied with this decision.

“The U.S. announcement on Thursday was unexpected since American officials last month approved the budgeting of the council and pledged to support it. In addition, many congressmen, including some of the United Nations' harshest Republican critics, had joined rights groups in lobbying the Bush administration to make the United States a candidate.

"This is a major retrenchment in America's long struggle to advance the cause of human rights around the world, and it is a profound signal of U.S. isolation at a time when we need to work cooperatively with our Security Council partners," said Representative Tom Lantos, the leading Democrat on the International Relations Committee and a co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.

He said that the failure to push for the 96 votes needed for acceptance "projects a picture of profound weakness in U.S. diplomacy".

…

Among the Republican critics who had counseled joining the panel despite its acknowledged flaws were Senators Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Richard Lugar of Indiana, the foreign relations committee chairman, and Representatives Christopher Smith of New Jersey and Henry Hyde of Illinois, who is chairman of the House international relations committee.”

There is some suggestion that the US was afraid that it would not muster the required 96 votes because of “revelations of abuses of detainees in Iraq and of clandestine prisons abroad”. That may well be true, though I have no doubt that countries such as Cuba or Iran, both standing, will have no trouble in being voted onto the Council.

The talk about this being a failure of John Bolton’s diplomacy is fatuous. There is no possible way the United States can get its way on a Council of this kind. As we have pointed out before, some egregious problems may have been ironed out but the basic fact of there not being enough members with acceptable human rights record and, in some regions, there being none at all, remains.

In any case, one needs to know what it is Mr Bolton trying to achieve. Possibly, given that he could not push through the necessary reforms (he was not supported by those famous allies), he might be content with showing up the UN for the organization that it really is: corrupt, feckless and in thrall to bloody, kleptomaniac dictators.

It is, perhaps, unfortunate, that “American officials last month approved the budgeting of the council and pledged to support it” but it may not have been politic not to do so, in view of the vote that brought the new body into existence.

It is worth remembering that, although, countries will not be elected by their regions, the representation on the Council will have to be divided up according to them. Elections are on May 9 (Soviet Victory Day). We are waiting with bated breath.

COMMENT THREAD

A tough call

Hungary is about to have its parliamentary elections, in two stages as always. First round is due this Sunday, with second round on April 23. The pattern since the collapse of communism has been very clear: no party managed more than one term.

The socialists, in power now but not particularly popular, would like to break that pattern and be re-elected. They have had some comfort from the bookies, specifically the online betting agency, www.sportingbet.hu today. According to Reuter’s

“The agency cut the odds on a Socialist victory to 1.75-1, from 2-1 two months ago, while it lengthened the odds for a victory by the right of centre opposition Fidesz to 1.9-1 from 1.66-1.”

I think rejoicing in the socialist headquarters is somewhat premature.

COMMENT THREAD

Spot the difference

UKIP, according to the BBC has said it would also be parking a "Saracen armoured car" outside the Conservative spring conference in Manchester on Saturday, in a publicity stunt designed to show "that UKIP's tanks are firmly parked on David Cameron's lawn".

Leaving aside the singular fact that a Saracen (pictured above) is not a tank, one wonders if the UKIP spokesman realises that a Saracen is not an armoured car either – it is an armoured personnel carrier.

For those of you who might think the difference is somewhat academic, the actual armoured car of the series is the Saladin (pictured right). The difference is, in fact, rather obvious and, if UKIP cannot tell them apart, then no wonder the party is not able to engender much in the way of credibility.

COMMENT THREAD

A plague on your houses

All of a sudden – well, not sudden, really – one tires of the Boy King, of UKIP and of the whole damn lot of them.

Alright, Francis Maude has said that the Conservatives may not win the general election, and then come back defending his action, having another tilt at UKIP. And UKIP is having another go at the Tories, and so on.

In the meantime, Tony is having a go at Gordon, or not as the case may be, and the media continues to follow the soap opera with gay abandon, obsessed by every move in this long drawn-out drama. And somewhere, in all that are the Lib-Dims… and who the hell cares? Not just Lib-Dims - the lot of them.

Then, to my horror, I receive an e-mail from NuLab, signed by starship Captain Jean-Luc Picard, aka Patrick Stewart, defender of the Galaxy and scourge of the Borg. He tells me that he has been a life-long Labour supporter. Not only that, he is patron of the Labour Supporters Network. Never again will I watch Star-Trek, the next generation.

The point, though, is that they've become self-obsessed. Whether it is Conservative Home, UKIP Forum or the many other political sites, they are all indulging in the equivalent of the child screaming, "Me! Me! Me!", oblivious to the fact that people are only interested in political parties to the extent that they are interested in issues that concern them.

And if political parties are only interested in themselves, pretty quickly they become mutual admiration societies, talking to themselves.

Take one small f'rinstance… this morning on the radio I heard the Boy King blathering about how Tory councils had the best record for recycling. Well, not here in bloody Bradford they haven't, and we have a Tory council.

For paper recycling, they've issued us with wheely bins, identical to the dustbins but for the dark grey colour instead of green, collected monthly instead of weekly.

About half the residents use them as ordinary dustbins, whereupon the rotting contents remain uncollected, the bins sporting "contaminated" stickers applied by diligent council workers. For the rest, well... they remain uncollected. Last time because they forgot and this time because the workers were on strike for better pensions. So we end up transferring the soggy contents to the ordinary bins in order to get rid of them.

But not from the Boy King will we hear that the ridiculous system is EU-inspired and, until the Brussels empire interfered, we had a perfectly effective means of recycling paper, which incidentally funded the local Scout movement. No, for the Boy King, this is an opportunity to preen, to tell us that the Tories are better than Labour, are better than the Lib-Dims, are better than…

A pox on your party, Mr Cameroon, and a pox on Mr Patrick Stewart and his Labour Supporters Network. A plague on all your houses.

COMMENT THREAD

Let us not forget

Today is the anniversary (12 years, not a round one) of the start of the civil war in Rwanda. Well, one might call it a civil war or one might call it a frenzied massacre.

The previous day the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi had been killed in a mysterious plane crash. This was supposed to trigger off uncontrollable feelings but one is always a little suspicious of such quick reactions to unexplained events.

Let us not forget a couple of things about the whole mess. One is the French involvement, largely behind the scenes, on the side of the francophone Hutus (who, incidentally, slaughtered many of their own people as well as Tutsis).

The other is the much rehearsed craven and stupid behaviour of the UN, that transnational body that is claiming some rights to being the arbiter of international legality. Under Kofi Annan (now SecGen but then only a relatively humble head of operations) the UN refused to supply help when it was requested by desperate officers on the ground.

Subsequently, the UN played a part again in setting up badly organized refugee camps in which the Hutu militias regrouped, terrorized everyone else and continued with their bloody mission.

So far we have had two films made about Rwanda. I am sure they are quite good and, certainly, well meant, even if one gets slightly nauseous at the pontification by various actors and directors. I have no doubt there will be many films about Darfur as well.

COMMENT THREAD

Bailing out?

Bearing in mind that the only source of this story is the BBC, one has to be a little bit cautious. But if it is really true that BAE systems is to sell its 20 percent share in Airbus, this is pretty sensational news.

Mind you, the possibility has been rumoured several times of late, most recently last month when it was suggested that BAE Systems was about to sell its stake to fund a bid for U.S. defence firm L-3 Communications Holdings Inc, but this is out of the blue.

The BBC says that the stake is expected to be bought by EADS, which is only to be expected, the consequence of which will be that there will no longer be any British ownership of the huge manufacturing sites at Broughton in North Wales and Filton near Bristol.

Either way, the news seems to have caught the unions by surprise. According to the Channel 4 website, urgent talks are being sought by the unions representing the 13,000 British Airbus workers. Possibly, also, the news has caught Airbus by surprise, as one of its spokesmen at its Toulouse, France, headquarters has said: "We have no information about this."

The implications of this move, however, go far wider than just the employment consequences. One wonders whether it will affect the RAF's air tanker contract and whether the proposed purchase of the military airlifter, the A400M, will be affected. Then there is the question of all those billions of subsidies that the UK taxpayer has put in to Airbus.

Most of all, one wonders whether, after our previous post on the woes of Airbus, BAE Systems are choosing this moment to bail out in the expectation that things can only get worse.

That idea can only be reinforced by a piece yesterday on the North Wales Daily Post webiste, which has Steven Udvar-Hazy, chief executive of International Lease Finance Corporation, calling on Airbus to scrap its plan for the A350, the rival to Boeing's hot-selling 787 Dreamliner.

According to Flight International Udvar-Hazy sees the A350 as a response by Airbus to being "stunned" and "caught a little bit behind the power curve" after Boeing shifted gears from the Sonic Cruiser plan to developing a new family of aircraft with the 787. It now risks being left behind, despite a projected €4.35 billion development cost.

Boeing has so far won 343 firm orders for the 787, while Airbus has a mere 91 for the A350, suggesting that the another European dream is running into the sands.

COMMENT THREAD

A beautiful page?

Oh for the happy days of July last, those "Europeans" must be thinking, when the aerospace giant, EADS, was riding high, having raised its profit growth target to 18 percent, on the back of its main subsidiary Airbus, which was doing particularly well, doubling its net profit to €816 million.

Now, following the hubris of the A380 “super jumbo” launch in January last year, things are not looking quite so bright.

Shares of Airbus parent EADS have, in the last few days, tumbled on reports of serious technical problems with the A380, and new that core investors are jumping ship, having decided to slash their holdings in the Franco-German aerospace giant.

These are France's media group Lagardère and Germany's DaimlerChrysler, and each are to divest themselves of 7.5 percent of EADS shares.

Initially, this move was linked with reported delays in the delivery schedule for its biggest customer, Emirates Airlines, owing to late engine deliveries, but this was denied by Airbus.

Now, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, at the Telegraph has come up with an altogether more plausible – and serious - reason why key shareholders have been so keen to divest some of their stocks.

It seems that the Franco-German pair signalled long ago that they would dispose of EADS stock, but this was not until the new A380 super-jumbo had been delivered to its launch customer, Singapore Airlines in December. But what Ambrose adds is that, six weeks ago, an A380 wing failed a stress test, having ruptured at 1.45 times the maximum design load, when the certification requirement is for it to be able to sustain a 1.50 load factor.

The wings are British-built, made from aluminium alloy and carbon composite panels baked in Broughton, North Wales - a novel and unproven technology in big jets and, it seems, the problem has yet to be resolved. The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the US Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) are both watching the situation.

While EADS is downplaying the failure, EASA is saying, "The fixed rule is 1.50 until otherwise specified, and we have not specified otherwise." The FAA in Washington is more adamant. "The standard is 1.50, and has to be met," says a spokesman.

This is seriously bad news for Airbus as the aircraft has suffered serious weight problems and the structure has since been lightened to meet weight targets. However, the test was done on the earlier, heavier structure and, if the wing has to be strengthened and this entails extra weight - or possibly a lower passenger load – this could trigger costly penalty clauses in sales contracts and reduce the desirability of the aircraft.

Nor is this the first time there have been safety fears about the A380. In October last there was a disturbing report about how contractors were taking short-cuts on key components, vital to the aircraft's safety.

Another report indicates other products are in trouble, especially the A340 long- range four-engine jetliner. Orders are down to almost nothing in relative terms - only 15 were ordered last year – while Dubai has informed Airbus that its flagship airline, Emirates, is postponing indefinitely an order for 20 A340-600 aircraft to wait for an improved version of the A340, which is more fuel-efficient. Yet, no decision is has been made to produce this version, while the Boeing competitor, its new twin-jet 777-200LR, which now holds the world non-stop distance record, is 24 percent more fuel-efficient.

The big problem, however, remains the A380. Already there are reports that the aircraft is set to make losses in excess of £4 billion over its commercial life and, as a result, Airbus will never repay the £2 billion-plus state aid paid to help launch it.

Noel Forgeard, Airbus chief executive, must be regretting the comment he made when the A380 was launched: "Under the name Airbus, Europe has written one of its most beautiful pages of its history," he said.

Quite.

COMMENT THREAD

Scum for our money

One really must take exception to the Financial Times headline on the budget "deal" in the EU parliament announced yesterday. "MEPs win further €2bn for budget deal" it proclaims, as if somehow this was a lottery or some manna from heaven.

For what amounts to expropriation from the unwilling taxpayer, the text of the report is not much better, stating as it does that the EU parliament has "squeezed" an additional €2bn out of member states.

Needless to say, while many of the massively expensive parasites (aka MEPs) hailed this increase as a "victory", some complained that it was not enough, having originally demanded an extra €10bn on top of that already agreed by the member states.

The "agreement" now means that the outline budget for the EU financial period 2007-13 is now €864bn, of which British taxpayers will have to find an extra £208 million. I am sure all those grannies waiting for their hip operations will be delighted. As before, the bulk of the funding has been pencilled in for the traditional areas of expenditure, farm subsidies and regional aid. Some €371bn is earmarked for rural subsidies, accounting for 43 percent of all spending, while €307bn will be spent on regional support, making up 35.5 percent of the total.

Nevertheless, Dalia Grybauskaite, EU budget commissioner, thinks the final outcome has made the spending package "a bit more modern", as if increased public spending can ever be more "modern". But then, I suppose, the spectre of these scum holding their hands out for ever-increasing amounts of our money is one of the dominant themes of this modern age.

COMMENT THREAD

Do they have a conscience?

Despite the EU's reservations, which have engendered delays of several years, Uganda has decided that it will proceed with the use of the pesticide DDT to control malaria.

Yet, even now, with the disease killing between 70,000-110,000 children annually in Uganda alone and causing massive economic losses, the EU is still havering over pesticide residues in the country’s agricultural exports, and threatening that they could be excluded from EU countries.

According to the Nairobi newspaper East African the head of the Economic, Trade and Social sectors desk at the EU delegation to Uganda, Tom Vens, has warned the government against the use of DDT.

This is an issue which we have covered before (here and here and represents one of the darker sides of EU interference in Africa, effectively condemning to death hundreds of thousands of Africans.

Finally, though, Uganda's Health Minister, Jim Muhwezi, has had enough of the slaughter. He has declared that his country is going ahead with DDT usage regardless. "What we plan to do is within the agreed framework of the World Health Organisation and there is nothing new in this," he says. "We shall use Indoors Residual Spraying and this means it will not come into contact with the exports."

This was what was originally planned and despite good evidence that it would have no effects on crop residues, it has still met with EU resistance. However, Muhwezi is fortified by a study released in November 2005 which found no link between DDT and conditions such as impotence, infertility, neurological damage, congenital abnormalities and cancer – despite assertions to the contrary from EU officials.

Uganda can no longer afford to allow the EU view to prevail. Malaria kills more people than any other disease in Uganda each year. It is responsible for 21 percent of hospital deaths and 40 percent of illness in the country's health facilities.

Nonetheless, there remains some nervousness about the EU reaction. Uganda's agricultural sector contributes about 36 percent of the gross domestic product, and Europe is an important export destination for fish, coffee, fresh flowers, bananas and cotton.

It comes to something, however, that Uganda has been confronted with the choice between mass deaths and economic disaster and it is a reflection of how serious the situation has become that it has taken the brave move to reintroduce DDT.

Without EU threats, that decision would have been taken years ago, which puts the responsibility for the rising toll of deaths directly at the door of EU officials. One wonders if they have a conscience.

COMMENT THREAD

Yes, I mean no

Javier Solana may yet crack down on whoever was President Chirac’s emissary to the new Hamas-led Palestinian government. For the moment he is content with making statements to the European Parliament that can be interpreted in many different ways.

According to Reuter’s, possibly the fullest account, the Common Foreign Policy High Panjandrum said that on the one hand, Hamas as it is now cannot be regarded “as an appropriate speaking partner”. It had to change.

“Hamas can't change its past, but it can and should change its future.”

In other words, it should eschew terrorism and recognize Israel’s right to exist, something the Hamas leadership has already refused to do.

Nothing daunted, Señor Solana told MEPs that Hamas had to be given the chance to change but he did not precisely explain whether the organization was likely to take that chance and what would happen if it did not. He did, however, add:

“We have to give them (Hamas) the opportunity, but we have to be very tough until the moment they change. We have to create the conditions.”

On the other hand, the European Union did not want the new Palestinian government to fail. Some would argue that its inability to impose any kind of order in Gaza, prevent Qassam (and one Katyusha) attacks on Israel, as well as a complete inability to think of ways of ever earning any money except by endless aid that is to be given out in salaries to PA employees, would indicate a certain tendency to failure. But we must look to the future.

The statement about not wanting the Palestinian government to fail (reasonable enough) was picked up by the Islamic Republic News Agency of Iran, which, unaccountably forgot to mention that Solana had also called on Hamas to change.

It did remember to tell its readers that the EU, according to Solana, did not want to see unilateral decisions on the part of Israel, though it did think that Israel should withdraw to its pre-1967 borders. It appears to be bad form to refer to the events that had led to Israel expanding beyond those borders. Something to do with a war and a joint attack mounted by Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, as I recall.

The problem is that Hamas does not want Israel to go back to its pre-1967 borders. It wants Israel to disappear and a Palestinian state (one that has never existed in history, incidentally) established “from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean”.

As envisaged by Hamas, all people in that state Muslims, Jews (those who survive) and Christians (already seriously persecuted) will live under Sharia law. Nothing else will do and they are not prepared to negotiate for anything else.

The big question is, therefore, whether Israel will be prepared to wait for that glacial change that Solana is pleading for or will it decide to create settled borders unilaterally. Not having them acknowledged by the “international community” is unlikely to frighten the Israelis. They know what they can expect from the “international community”.

COMMENT THREAD

A last hurrah?

Rather like British motorists, who are being fined for offences at a rate of one in two each year, the commission yesterday took the almost unprecedented action of nominating no less than seventeen member states as candidates for legal action over the state of their energy markets.

This, according to the Telegraph, includes the UK which has been caught up in the flurry of infringement, even though, last November, the commission praised British, Dutch and Danish efforts to implement EU energy market "liberalisation" rules.

Although this is a "technical" offence, concerning the setting up of an electricity "interconnector" between Britain and Northern Ireland, more fundamental infringement proceedings are being targeted at Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Estonia, Spain, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Sweden and Slovakia.

EU energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs says the action had been launched because member states had to implement EU gas and electricity liberalisation rules "in full, not only in form but in substance".

The Times tells us that the commission has actually launched 28 cases against the seventeen member states, reminding us that this is the commission's answer to the French policy of "economic patriotism", blocking foreign takeovers.

The move has not gone down well in France, with one diplomat saying: "We don't understand. The Commission has chosen the path of formalising the conflict. It’s an extra ratchet."

Interestingly, as well as the energy sector, the commission also initiated action against several countries for restricting foreign competition in gambling, and for failing to apply EU telecoms rules properly.

Then, separately today, the commission has announced it is to begin legal action against Belgium and Hungary over their laws on the importation of biocides and pesticides, and against Spain for failing to allow herbal products to be marketed fairly. It is also taking infringement proceedings against Italy and Cyprus in relation to EU transport laws.

Clearly, the commission is seeking to reassert its authority over its fractious member states, "formalising the conflict", as the French put it. It is a high risk strategy which may work but, given the bloody-minded mood prevailing in some states, it could also be the last hurrah.

COMMENT THREAD

This is what the hike in the London precept goes on

It seems to me that our readers, particularly those who have just been on the receiving end of that eye-watering hike in the London precept part of their local council tax bill (13 per cent), would like to know what some of that money is going on.

Over on One London the latest posting deals with the plans to add cultural events to the great disaster of 2012 and, needless to say, appoint lots of co-ordinators for same. There is a certain similarity between these plans and those laid on the occasion of every British presidency of the EU.

COMMENT THREAD

Before or after?

As fruitcake recipes are suddenly in vogue in certain offices in Brussels, the unsavoury joke doing the rounds at the moment, following the Boy King's incredible UKIP gaffe yesterday, is that the next election-winning stunt planned by the Tories is to recruit a cadre of experienced suicide bombers to blow up central office.

That at least would give tangible form to what effectively amounts to the slow electoral suicide being committed by the party as it insults the very voters it needs if it is to win at the next contest.

That the Boy King's experiment in "modern compassionate conservatism" is failing is borne out by the latest Times Populus survey, taken over the weekend. It suggests that despite the Labour Party being in almost complete meltdown, its support is holding up in the polls, up one point since early March to 36 percent, while the not-the-conservative-party is down one point at 34 percent.

When even the Telegraph turns against Cameron, you know he is in trouble. Its leader is headed, "UKIP deserves better", declaring that "if the Conservatives have a strategy to denigrate UKIP, in the hope of halting the erosion of their own vote, they should remember Michael Howard's blunder before the 2004 European elections."

It was then that he called UKIP leaders "cranks and gadflies", whence their vote climbed appreciably. Given the commendable cussedness of the British, Mr Cameron's suggestion that party members are "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists" will almost certainly have the same effect.

Commenting on the sincerely-held beliefs of UKIP supporters, the leader then concludes that "it is precisely this sneering indifference to people's passionate concerns that makes them so fed up with politics," adding that "the Tory leader should apologise."

Of course, the Boy King will not apologise. What he said yesterday he holds to be self-evidently true and, if he runs to form, his view will be that, once again, the people – and the Telegraph – have failed to recognise this truth. That is their fault, not his.

It is not so much, the "sneering indifference" that is the Boy King's problem, therefore. It is that he inhabits so different a planet from the rest of us that he cannot even begin to understand that he has made a mistake.

Such is his mindset that there should be a good job waiting for him in the EU commission, when his despairing colleagues finally throw him out. The only question now is whether that will be before or after the Conservatives lose the general election.

COMMENT THREAD

Not even elective

We're teetering on the brink of an elective dictatorship, complains Simon Heffer in The Telegraph today, his ire focused mainly on Labour plans for the House of Lords.

Heffer argues that, if the changes go through, it would mean that the point of a House of Lords, or indeed any second chamber, would be at an end. The Commons could inflict any legislation it liked on the country and, however much the House of Lords might like to protest, that would be that. Lord Hailsham's elective dictatorship, of which that distinguished predecessor of Charlie's warned 40 years ago, would be here.

However, Heffer does concede that, "to some of you, this might not seem too much of a departure from current practice", and indeed that is the case. Barring a few – very few – headline issues of relatively little importance in the grand scheme of things, the "Commons" – or, to be more precise – the government, can already, and does, inflict any legislation it likes. With its in-built majority, it can railroad any law through the system, so effectively it does not even bother to offer a debate before the law takes effect.

But Heffer also picks on "possibly the nastiest Bill to go before Parliament since the Six Acts of 1819", the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. This, he says, would increase the already great ability of ministers to bypass Parliament in enacting, repealing or amending (according to Clause 2 of the Bill) "any legislation". Horror of horrors, the Bill would especially be used, if enacted, to import EU law into our own without any parliamentary scrutiny, but could be used for even worse things besides, says Heffer.

Boy, have we got news for him. By far the bulk of EU legislation already goes through the system in the form of Statutory Instruments, which often come into force on the day they are promulgated, without approval from Parliament. They pass into law automatically unless MPs "pray" against them but, even if they do, the in-built government majority will simply nod them through a vote, most times without even bothering to argue the case for them.

Furthermore, a significant amount of Community law now takes the form of EU (rather than domestic) Regulations. These take effect the moment they are "done in Brussels", and do not even have to be transposed into British law. They go nowhere near Parliament. And, if existing British law conflicts with them, there is the doctrine of "implied repeal", which means that previous, democratically-passed law ceases to have any effect. The government does not need the powers in the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, and its presence on the statute book would only codify a situation that already exists.

Nevertheless, Heffer is still raising the alarm, inviting Parliament and the British public to demand a straight answer to a straight and vital question: "What is so wrong with our democracy that Labour wishes so ruthlessly to end it?" He is a little late, and his fears of an elective dictatorship are misplaced. We already have, in many ways, a dictatorship, and it is not even elective.

COMMENT THREAD

The wages of sin?

I seem to remember a certain amount of outrage last November at the news that the Pentagon had contracted the Lincoln Group, an American public relations firm, to pay Iraqi news outlets to print positive articles while hiding their source.

Now, according to the International Herald Tribune, the EU parliament has gone one better, and is actually paying journalists to come to Strasbourg to cover its proceedings.

Furthermore, this is a programme that dates back to the 1980s, in which journalists from across the EU member states have been receiving generous travel and entertainment subsidies from the parliament, which can include payment of for first-class train or economy-class plane tickets to Strasbourg from any of the 25 EU member states and a daily stipend of €100 to cover hotel, food and entertainment over two days.

It seems that about 60 journalists from member states are invited to Strasbourg each month under the programme, with beneficiaries including RTBF of Belgium, RTE of Ireland, ERT of Greece and ORF of Austria. Understandably, these organisations have been reluctant to comment about their funding arrangements.

Nor does the generosity stop there. The Parliament also provides television journalists with unlimited use of free state-of-the-art television studios, free sound and camera equipment, and free two-person camera crews that can be borrowed for the day.

And, while the funding does not necessarily ensure full coverage of what are described as "stultifyingly dull" sessions, one journalist – who, surprisingly enough, wanted to remain anonymous – admitted that the perks had prompted him and his colleagues to refuse requests by editors to write stories on MEPs' privileges and travel expenses. "How can I expose such perks when I myself am benefiting from them?" the journalist asked.

Far from being ashamed, however, some MEPs from smaller countries like Portugal and Greece have been lobbying to have the subsidies for journalists expanded in order to ensure that the members receive coverage back home.

Nor, of course, is this by any means the whole extent of jornalistic bribary. Brussels's 1,550 journalists, one of the world's largest press corps outside Washington, benefit from a host of perks and privileges from EU institutions, including free meals and unlimited free phone calls during EU summit meetings and free television studios at the European Commission.

Furthermore, at the beginning of every six-month EU presidency, the presiding country invites journalists to a free junket in the capital. In February, Austria, the current holder of the EU's presidency, invited 62 Brussels-based journalists to Vienna, paying for their lodgings in a lavish Hilton hotel and hosting a complimentary dinner in an 18th-century baroque castle where a soprano sang Strauss operettas - all on the tab of the Austrian government. Media organs had the option of paying for the trip. Only eight opted to do so, according the Austrian representation to Brussels.

And all these goodies go to the wonderful, impartial MSM which are sooooooo superior to us bloggers.

Schmucks.

COMMENT THREAD

Is this UKIP's new press officer?

Quite smart of UKIP to hire the Boy-King of the Conservative Party as their new media officer. He has done more for them in publicity in one day than the previous bods had managed in a year.

Let’s see: UKIP has been on the front page of the BBC website, mentioned in the Independent and the Reuter’s. On top of which, party chairman David Campbell-Bannerman was given right of reply on LBC. And the story is likely to continue.

It all began a couple of days ago, when Campbell-Bannerman warned the Tories that UKIP would use the Freedom of Information Act to get a list of their big donors and lenders. Incidentally, it is remarkable how little benefit the Conservatives have managed to gain from the series of rather unsavoury financial scandals that have hit the government recently.

All Cameron has done is to create an impression of shiftiness with regards to his own pet donors and to show himself to be a managerial politician in his eagerness to discuss with Blair the possibility of state funding for parties.

Memo to Conservatives: the role of the Opposition is to oppose. Do it now, before it is too late.

During an interview on LBC Radio Cameron was asked what he thought of that move. He replied that UKIP was just trying to make mischief, which is undeniably true.

He then, rather unwisely, went on to describe UKIP as a bunch of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists mostly”. It may have got Cameron publicity as the BBC, which has finally found a Conservative leader it likes (i.e. he is not really a Conservative) gleefully pointed out, but it got UKIP much more.

Nigel Farage immediately went into an attack mode, challenging Mr Cameron to prove his accusations and reminding him a little unkindly that UKIP polled 2.7 million votes in the last election. These are votes the Conservatives would very much like. The Boy-King seems to think he can get them and others by insulting everybody in sight.

In response, the Boy-King refused to change his words and added that he did not think a party like UKIP had anything to say to people in the twenty-first century. Extraordinary how many people, usually of the kind, who cannot find their way out of a paper bag, seem to know exactly what is and what is not right for a century that has only just begun.

If he means that opposition to the European Union is somehow unthinkable in the twenty-first century, then the Boy-King shows himself to be remarkably stupid and unobservant. Stupid because no historical development is forever and unobservant because he has not noticed that this particular one has run its course.

Nor is it entirely clear why he thinks that UKIP’s other recently enunciated policies of lower and simpler taxation and choice in health and education, controlled immigration and some solution to the famous East Lothian riddle should not be relevant to the twenty-first century. They are problems that are crying out for solutions and we cannot really afford to wait until the twenty-second century.

So what are we to make of this unwise, not to mention inane, contribution to the political debate by the Boy-King? The most obvious comment to make is that he is a very bad tactician. Having not had much difficulty in his political career until now (a mirror image of Blair in 1997) Cameron has, presumably, not had to think much beyond the immediate statement. Had he done so, he might have realized that the best thing to do with small parties that are nibbling away at your support is to ignore them and hope the media will do the same. The worst thing to do is to give them “the oxygen of publicity”.

Cameron has also opened up himself and his own party to similar accusations – loons, fruitcakes and, even, closet racists tending to be fairly evenly spread across all the parties. Of course, it could be argued that this was yet another carefully calculated attack on the right wing of the Conservative Party, in the hopes that it will finally rebel and go away.

There is a problem here. In the first place, the Boy-King seems unaware of the extent of what he, in his metropolitan hide-out, thinks of as the right. In the second place, another large split in the party and a civil war may not be quite what the doctor ordered for the Tories at the moment.

Above all, Cameron’s statements and most comments on the Conservative Home blog show that the party is still in denial. They are refusing to examine in any detail what UKIP stands for and why it is attracting voters while the Tories continue to be incapable of doing so.

The Boy-King may well know somewhere deep down beneath that fatuous mask of the caring modern conservative that too close an examination of what makes up UKIP and its voters will entail a genuine analysis of what his own party should be based on.

In so far as conservatism means anything, apart from winning elections, it has something to do with small government, individual rights and responsibilities, national independence and constitutional democracy. The Boy-King has conspicuously failed to address any of these issues.

Occasionally he has touched on them briefly, only to explain with a kindly smile that the caring modern conservative did not believe in any of this. But very many conservatives in the country do and they are not in the mood to go on giving him the benefit of the doubt.

These are not the people who ever voted Lib-Dim, the Boy-King’s favourite target. In fact, very few of those will ever vote Tory. These are the people who stayed at home in the last three elections or voted UKIP, Veritas, occasionally even BNP. They did so, not because they are fruitcakes or racists but because they do not think that any of the big parties represents their views or has policies that are, in their opinion, best for the country. David Cameron, the Boy-King of the Conservative Party, insults them at his peril.

COMMENT THREAD

One small step for the EU…

If there was ever any doubt that most journalists rely excessively on press releases when they report on EU affairs, it should be dispelled by the treatment of yesterday’s announcement by the commission on the "defence equipment market".

The press release itself declares that the commission has opened consultation on "creating a single market for EU defence industry", arguing that the circulation of defence-related products in the internal market is restricted by varying national administrative procedures in the Member-States.

From this, we can take it that the beneficent commission wants to reduce these obstacles to intra-community trade in defence products, in order "to make European defence industries economically more efficient and technologically more competitive." This will enable member states, it says, to meet military needs under proper security conditions and at lower cost.

We then get commission vice-president Günter Verheugen, who is responsible for enterprise and industry policy, saying: "Opening the internal market for defence products would boost our economy and increase the competitiveness the European defence-producing companies."

This was picked up by EU politix, with the headline: "EU to speed up defence market liberalisation", reporting that "Brussels has taken a new step towards opening up EU defence markets by announcing a public consultation aimed at defining a European approach to the armament industry."

Euractiv does a similar job, with "Commission seeks opening of defence market" and the Financial Times offers "Brussels moves to cut barriers to arms trade".

Of the MSM, however, only The Telegraph seems at all interested in the story – which makes a change – but its offering takes the headline "EC seeks power to regulate arms sales".

Correspondent David Rennie then tells us that the EU commission has suggested that it should be given sweeping powers to regulate arms sales within the European Union as well as exports of arms outside the bloc. He also tells us that “the proposal was greeted with shock by EU diplomats as it would strip control of European arms sales from national governments.”

Rennie then elaborates on the story on his own blog. He writes:

At the risk of special pleading, there are a few reasons why reporting European Union news can be rather hard. One of them struck home as I wrote up a report for today's print edition about a European Commission power-grab for control of exports and intra-EU sales in the defence sector.

The problem is this. In general, when pitching a story to editors in London about some new plan or project, you are expected to say whether it has a good chance of ever coming to fruition. It's a not unreasonable question. Some new plan can be as dramatic as it likes, but in the real world, the fact that it is doomed, and will never happen, does diminish its importance. …

This single market in defence looks like just such a plan. Technically speaking, it is not even a plan at all, but the mildest sort of suggestion, being floated under the noses of member states by the Commission, in the form of a consultation paper.

It all came as a total surprise to the diplomats I spoke to yesterday - "this is out of a clear blue sky", in the words of one of them.

However, why it should have come as a surprise to these "diplomats" - or Rennie for that matter – is entirely a mystery. This latest move is simply a continuation of a long process where the commission has been seeking, largely successfully, to whittle away the Article 296 "national security" exemption on arms production, with the aim of encouraging the creation of a European arms industry.

It is also entirely in keeping with UK policy and stems from the 2000 Framework Agreement and the creation of the European Defence Agency.

And, had Rennie actually read the consultation paper, he would have noted the core rationale offered by the commission. "Achieving the objectives of the European Union’s European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP)", it says:

…depends, among other things, on the ability of Member States to meet military needs under proper security conditions and at an appropriate cost. This implies giving the defence industry a European dimension, thus increasing the competitiveness of the technological and industrial base of European defence and in particular of European defence companies. This industrial objective requires that the transfer of defence-related products be simplified at Community level.

This is the bit ignored by Rennie and all the other reporters and goes to the heart of the matter – a policy issue which the UK government wholeheartedly endorses. I would not, therefore, be at all sanguine about the enterprise being "doomed".

Nevertheless, Rennie does offer reasons why it should fail, writing:

There is already a grave crisis of confidence between the EU and the United States. Congress, in particular, fears that Europe is so leaky that if you're selling defence secrets to EU clients, you might as well save everyone the effort, and post a second copy straight to Beijing.

Gerald Howarth MP, shadow defence procurement minister for the British Conservatives, told me the idea of EU export controls would send "shockwaves" through Washington.

"Britain is the second largest defence exporter after the United States, and we probably have the toughest export controls in the world. We need to be deeply suspicious of any moves to Europeanise defence," he said.

He noted the current fight between Britain and the US Congress over the Joint Strike Fighter. US politicians argue that they cannot give us the "source codes" at the heart of the plane's most whizz-bang systems, because we have to share our defence secrets with the French, and the French give all theirs to China.

The US position is a caricature, of course, but Atlanticists like Mr Howarth fear any move by Brussels to make things worse.

The consultation period is to last three months, whence we can, in the fullness of time, expect another statement from the commission. The chances are then that it will not get all that it wants but, as we have seen so many time, it is quite content to take things a small step at a time. When you add up the cumulative effect of all these small steps, the progress has been quite remarkable – and dangerous.

Thus, while the outcome of this current round of consultation could only be one small step for the EU, it might also represent a giant leap for defence integration.

COMMENT THREAD

Told you so

Water restrictions are still very much in the news today, with a piece in the main Telegraph edition headlining: "Hosepipe bans 'just a publicity stunt'".

As always, though, it is in the business section that you find most sense, this time in an article written by Stephen Seawright which asks, "Where are our liquid assets going?"

"Half a dozen water companies have surprised customers in the past few weeks by bringing hosepipe bans in the South East of England forward to the spring," says Seawright. "The restrictions come despite the industry investing £17.3 billion from 2000 to 2005 with a similar amount planned for up to 2010."

He notes that "high capital expenditure has been used to justify sharp rises in water bills of 12 percent in 2005 with another 5.5 percent climb this year. Yet despite all the investment, 0.8 billion gallons of water leaks from the distribution system every day."

And the reason? "The water industry has already had years of high investment since privatisation in the early 1990s. But much of the money already invested by the water industry has not gone to increasing capacity but towards meeting new regulations from the government and Brussels to improve the quality of water and sewage treatment."

The head of one private water company is cited, saying: "There have been a raft of standards surrounding drinking water quality. Now most of these are on the waste water side of the business."

Water companies say the five-year spending programme approved by Ofwat for the period up to 2010 has allowed for more infrastructure spending to help increase capacity. But even then, just under a third of the approved £16.8 billion of investment is earmarked for further improvements of water quality and sewerage treatment.

As a result, Ofwat claims hosepipe bans are preferable because the scale of investment required to end them would push bills to unsustainable levels.

The only argument I have with this is the claim that the money has been spent "meeting new regulations from the government and Brussels". Water quality is entirely an EU competence and it is, therefore, solely to Brussels that we must look for the distortion in spending priorities.

As we pointed out in our earlier piece, it is about time that the blame for the current situation was put fairly and squarely where it belongs.

COMMENT THREAD

France negotiates on "our" behalf

A few days before the Israeli election the German Middle East expert, Günter Meyer, expressed fears that Europe’s influence in the Middle East was waning. Specifically, he thought, Israel was not in the mood to listen to the soothing tones of Europe.

Post-election Israeli politics is likely to confirm this trend. Whatever coalition Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will put together, one thing is clear: the new government wants to create stable borders for Israel by negotiation if possible, unilaterally, if not.

Negotiation is not possible with someone who does not even acknowledge your right to exist.

Negotiation, as it happens, was not possible with the late unlamented Chairman Arafat, who suddenly pulled out of the talks in 2000 and launched the second intifada, allegedly because he could not get the last 3 per cent of his demands but, in reality, to preserve his own power over the unfortunate Palestinian people.

Herr Meyer seems unable to recognize any of this and his interview demonstrates reasonably clearly why Europe’s influence might, indeed, be waning.

There might be another reason for this sad development. After a great deal of huffing and puffing about Hamas and not recognizing the government it forms, unless it agrees to give up on terrorism and acknowledges Israel’s right to exist, it appears that France has started secret negotiations with the new Palestinian Authority “on behalf of the European Union”.

This was confirmed by a Hamas official, according to the Jerusalem Post and not much denied by the French ambassador.

The EU has continued to fund the Palestinian Authority and various other organizations in order “not to punish the Palestinian people”. One wonders at this miracle of infantilization, so widely spread across the entire international community.

It is as if the Palestinians were all two-year old children, who were not really responsible for what was happening in their country. Thus, the fact that they elected an extreme terrorist organization to be their government was not really their fault and they must not be punished for it.

And now, various countries are holding talks with them, with France negotiating on “our” behalf. High on the agenda, no doubt, will be financial arrangements.

COMMENT THREAD

The Marshall Plan

Today, 58 years ago, President Truman signed into law the European Recovery Programme, better known as the Marshall Plan. It had been approved the previous day by the House of Representatives with a massive 329-74 majority, which authorised the first tranche of aid to Europe, amounting to $5.3 billion. The total sum paid over the following four years amounted to $13 billion in economic and technical assistance — equivalent to around $130 billion in 2006 figures.

Although described by Winston Churchill the "most unsordid act of history," to which is attributed the post-war recovery of Europe, this was, in fact, the first attempt to create a united Europe. The following, taken from The Great Deception, describes the background and motivation to the plan.

The trigger for this act was primarily its fear of Communist take-overs in Italy, and France, where the Communists briefly became the largest single party in the Assembly. At its root was the economic dislocation caused by the unusually severe winter of 1946-7, which undermined that initial post-war optimism about the potential for recovery of western Europe's economies. Washington began to sense serious concern over Communist ambitions in Europe.

Ironically, however, the first country to run into real economic crisis was Britain: over-stretched by her still enormous military commitments and by the efforts her people had made through six years of war, much of it financed by huge American loans under the wartime "Lend-Lease" programme which had cost the USA $48.5 billion.

No sooner had the Japanese war come to an end in August 1945 than the US government abruptly terminated Lend-Lease. The impact on Britain's economy was compared by John Maynard Keynes to that of "a financial Dunkirk". Keynes himself, then the most respected economist in the western world, was dispatched to America to negotiate a replacement. In December 1945, he managed to secure loans of $3.75 billion from the US and a further $1.25 billion from Canada. But the terms were harsh, demanding that sterling be made freely convertible with the dollar, thus seriously undermining Britain’s special trading relationships with her colonies and Commonwealth.

In the first year after the war, Britain's adverse trade balance soared to a then-enormous £298 million (the following year it was to rise still further, to £443 million). So grave did the situation become that, over that freezing winter of 1946-7, the Labour government was forced to export coal to reduce the balance of payment crisis. Yet fuel stocks in England were so low that power stations had to cut back drastically on generating hours or shut down altogether. Factories producing goods for export had to stop work or curtail production. For the ordinary citizen, the austerities of everyday life were now even more exacting than they had been during the war, the drastic rationing of clothing and food now being extended even to bread.

Already, as this financial crisis mounted, a government committee had reported in July 1946 that the cost of supporting the British zone of Germany in the year 1946-7 would be over £80 million, a sum Britain could not afford. The only remedy was economic integration of the occupation zones. The British and US authorities had already begun the rebuilding of German self-government centred on the Länder, the regional divisions of Germany dating back to the Weimar Republic. They now agreed that the British and American zones should be fused, creating the so-called "bizone" from 1 January 1947, with the US paying for three-quarters of its financing.

Further burdened by the costs of her military and political responsibilities in the Eastern Mediterranean, Britain then informed Washington on 21 February 1947 that she could no longer continue providing financial aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey (in addition to her substantial military commitment to Palestine, where the British mandate was now coming under severe strain from the campaign by Jewish nationalists and terrorist groups to set up a state of Israel).

This precipitated crisis meetings between members of Congress and State Department officials. Their outcome was a statement by Truman's Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson propounding what would later become known as the "domino theory". Facing the possibility of a Communist take-over in both Greece and Turkey, he declared that more was at stake than just those countries. It they fell, Communism might spread south to Iran and even perhaps to India.

A support package was hastily devised and, addressing a joint session of Congress on 12 March 1947, Truman asked for approval for $400 million in military and economic assistance for Greece and Turkey. "It must be the policy of the United States" he declared, "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures". He thus established what became known as the "Truman Doctrine", which was to guide US diplomacy for the next forty years.

This also marked the beginning of America's cold war foreign policy, at a time when the fragile détente between the Western allies and the Soviet Union was visibly crumbling. The events of 1947 were to mark a decisive turning point in the relations between Communist "East" and non-Communist "West". As local Communist parties registered significant gains in elections in Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, it had become clear that Stalin had every intention of turning the countries of central Europe into a Soviet empire. In October a Warsaw conference was to set up the "Cominform" (Communist Information Bureau), to co-ordinate the activities of all Europe's Communist parties. The so-called "Big Three" negotiations between America, the Soviet Union and Britain on the future of Germany were getting nowhere, and in December 1947 the talks were to collapse irrevocably, over Soviet demands that Germany should pay massive reparations.

It was against this background of a Europe rapidly polarising between Communist and Western camps that the US Secretary of State George Marshall early in 1947 organised a team of officials, led by one of his most senior advisers, George Kennan. His task was to map out an ambitious new strategy for Europe’s economic support. Three of the key figures in putting together this study were members of the Council of Foreign Relations, Dean Acheson, Will Clayton, and George Kennan. In particular Kennan and Clayton had extensive consultations with the man now in charge of France’s economy, their wartime Washington friend Jean Monnet. From their combined efforts came the European Recovery Programme, better known as the ‘Marshall Plan’. This was announced by Marshall on 5 June 1947, in a speech at Harvard University. Crucially, to avoid any appearance of the US dictating European policy, Marshall couched the offer of help in these terms:

It is already evident that, before the United States government can proceed much further in its efforts to alleviate the situation and help start the European world on the way to recovery, there must be some agreement among the countries of Europe as to the requirements of the situation and the part those countries themselves will take in order to give proper effect to whatever action might be undertaken by this government. It would be neither fitting nor proper for this government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a programme designed to place Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European programme and the later support of such a programme so far as it may be practical for us to do so. The programme should be a joint one, agreed by a number, if not all of the European nations.

In response to Marshall's declaration, sixteen European nations agreed to attend a conference in Paris on 12 July 1947, to form a group known as the Committee for European Economic Co-operation (CEEC). The CEEC's chairman was a British civil servant, Oliver Franks. But its key figure was his vice-chairman Jean Monnet, aided by his deputy Robert Marjolin and his former Washington lawyer George Ball, who had come to Paris in August to work for Monnet, advising how the CEEC case for economic aid could most effectively be presented to Washington. The result of their work was a report on 12 December that, to cover the period 1948-51, the sixteen nations would need $19.1 billion. Seven days later, on 19 December, after making provision for emergency aid to France, Italy and Austria, President Truman submitted to Congress his "European Recovery Bill", requesting $17 billion over four years.

The Marshall Plan has generally been viewed as an altruistic gesture by the USA to help its impoverished Western allies in their hour of need. However, also underlying it were strong commercial interests. Europe represented for America ‘an enormous market, of several hundred million persons’ which she could not afford to lose. Economic support for Europe thus represented an opportunity for US manufacturers and suppliers desperate to find outlets for their production after orders for war materiel had dried up. As with the earlier Truman package for Greece and Turkey, the proffered aid was by no means solely financial. It included grain, machinery and vehicles produced in America.

Additionally, US corporations had recognised that there was an opportunity to buy up valuable European assets at knock-down prices: a form of intervention at which de Gaulle expressed particular alarm. Europe's economic weakness might also enable the US government to exert pressure on European governments to adopt more "liberal" trading rules, thus easing the path for American exports.

An even more significant element in the Marshall Plan, however, was that, from the outset, it included a major political component. Despite its apparent "hands off" approach, the conditions imposed on recipient countries were deliberately designed to promote a federal Europe, the creation of which had for the State Department now become a Holy Grail. At one bound, thanks not least to effective lobbying by the CEEC's vice-chairman Monnet, the most enthusiastic integrationist power in post-war Europe had become the United States.

No sooner had the Marshall Plan been announced than it was greeted with particular excitement by many groups which, since Churchill's Zurich speech in September 1946, had been evangelising for the cause of European political and economic unity. In Britain itself, on 14 May 1947, Churchill had launched at the Albert Hall his all-party United Europe Movement, with his son-in-law, Duncan Sandys MP, as its president, and a committee which included two members of the Labour Cabinet and several future Conservative Cabinet ministers, among them Macmillan. Churchill repeated his call for a "United States of Europe", of which the USA, the Soviet Union and Britain could be sponsors, and advocated the re-integration of Germany into the Western world.

Similar associations had been formed in France and Germany. A European Union of Federalists had been set up, under the chairmanship of a leading Dutch Socialist and pacifist, Dr. Henri Brugmans. Its objective was to bring together groups in Britain, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland, under the aegis of a new committee, the International Co-ordination of Movements for the Unification of Europe Committee.

When Marshall announced his Plan in June, support for it was quickly orchestrated across western Europe. Among those most active in this operation were several figures who had been enthusiasts for the integrationist cause since they were wartime exiles in London. These included Paul van Zeeland, more than once Belgium’s prime minister, and Joseph Retinger, a Polish émigré, who early in 1947 had formed an Independent League for Economic Co-operation (ELEC). In March 1947, ELEC’s leaders, headed by Van Zeeland, had already met in New York to discuss closer links with the United States, and they were now recruited to promote the Marshall Plan. A memorandum supporting the Plan was approved by ELEC on 30 June 1947 in Paris and sent to all European governments.

Another prominent advocate for the Plan was Brugmans, who, addressing a conference of his Union in August 1947, said, after referring to the Marshall Plan:

More than ever we are convinced that we are right in proclaiming the necessity for complete European Union. But… it is a disgrace that Europe had to work for a word of command from the other side of the Atlantic before she realised where her own duty and interest lay.

Within months Brugmans' speech was being widely circulated among "European federalists", updated with a reference to the three events of 1947 which had "determined international life": the Marshall Plan, the breakdown of the Conference of the Big Three and the setting up of "Cominform".

Citing Proudhon's plea of 1866 that "to end the irreparable abuse of sovereignty" what was needed above all was "the dismemberment of sovereignty", Brugmans called for the setting up of "supranational" authorities. They would administer hydro-electric power from the Alps, the European railway system and "the first nucleus of autonomous European administration of coal and heavy industry". This call was echoed in a foreword to the British edition of Brugman's speech by Arthur Salter's friend Lord Layton, who wrote that "the whole of Western Europe can in fact be regarded as a single, highly interdependent industrial unit" crying out for supranational control.

Despite this orchestrated support from Europe and intense lobbying in Washington, the US Congress remained hostile to Marshall's proposal. Again it was pressure from events elsewhere which turned the tide. In February 1948, the "Prague coup" established complete Communist control over Czechoslovakia. This event had profound repercussions throughout the Western world, lending substance to Acheson's "domino theory". Congressional resistance to the Marshall Plan collapsed. On 13 March, it was supported by the Senate and on 2 April it was approved by the House of Representatives with a massive 329-74 majority. Nevertheless, Congress refused to write a blank cheque. Aid was limited to $5.3 billion for one year, at the end of which approval had to be sought for continued funding.

For pro-integrationist lobbyists on both sides of the Atlantic, an important lesson had been learned: rhetoric on protecting Western Europe from the threat of Communism was likely to be the most effective shaping American opinion. John McCloy, soon to become US High Commissioner for Germany (and later chairman of the CFR, from 1953 to 1970), admitted: "one way to assure that a viewpoint gets noticed is to cast it in terms of resisting the spread of Communism". The French also found the Communist threat highly advantageous. Mendès-France commented: "The Communists are rendering us a great service. Because we have a 'Communist danger", the Americans are making a tremendous effort to help us. We must keep up this indispensable Communist scare".

The chief instrument chosen by Washington to promote its new policy of European integration was a new organisation, formed on 16 April 1948, to administer the distribution of Marshall Plan funding. This was the Organisation of European Economic Co-operation (OEEC). The French government, heavily influenced by Monnet, pushed for the new body to be given an executive council with supranational powers and a permanent secretariat. The committed integrationist Paul Henri-Spaak, now once again Belgium's prime minister, was appointed its director general. This was vociferously opposed by the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, supported by Sweden and Switzerland, who also had serious reservations about the "political" components of the plan.

Through their efforts, the OEEC remained strictly intergovernmental, controlled by a "Council of Ministers" making decisions on the basis of unanimity. Monnet's verdict could not have been more withering: "the OEEC's nothing: it's only a watered-down British approach to Europe – talk, consultation, action only by unanimity. That's no way to make Europe".

Thus passed the first serious attempt to set up a large-scale supranational European organisation. Its failure, however, was simply to spur on the integrationalists to further efforts.

COMMENT THREAD

Chicken and egg

State funding widens the gap between government and governed writes Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph today, in a cogent piece that argues that taxpayers’ cash will guarantee more party sleaze.

To develop his thesis, he points to experience in Europe, where state funding is the norm and has neither bridged the divide between the ruling classes and the people nor cleaned up what Hannan rates as "the dirtiest political systems".

Good as his piece is, however, what Hannan doesn't do is suggest an alternative to state funding, or even offer an analysis of why the political parties in this country have got themselves in such a mess over financing their activities.

Arguably, though, the way out is the more important issue for, if the voters rebel at the thought of doshing out their hard-earned cash to keep the political classes in the luxury they palpably do not deserve, then alternative means of funding have to be found.

Oddly enough, the answer is already there, in the Conservatives' own supposed manifesto, in which they laud the merits of localism. If they look to their own past, they will see that the formidable strength of the Tory electoral fighting machine was in its local constituency associations, which could collect money and turn out the troops to bring in the votes.

But, as with politics in general, over the years we have seen massive centralisation in political parties, with elections and fund-raising being managed from central office, with the local associations being relegated to a bit-part role and the views and skills of local campaigners being largely ignored.

To a very great extent, "Europe" – as they insist on calling the European Union – has played a great part in this. The constituencies are largely Eurosceptic, at odds with their own party hierarchy, to the extent that there are two Conservative parties, inhabiting entirely different planets.

To rely on the constituencies and their funding means getting in touch with your grass roots, asking what people think, listening to them and then acting on what they say. In other words, the political classes have to respond to their own local parties, instead of running their own agendas.

And it is this that the central office control freaks find so difficult to do. For them who want to dictate rather then respond, such reliance is an anathema. It is much easier, therefore, to tap up a few rich men and corporate sources, to enable them to run their own campaigns, sucking up to the Westminster media village (who are just as out of touch as the politicos) and laying down the law to the locals.

Combine that with the inherent and almost insufferable arrogance of that group of people collectively known as "Tory boys", who labour (if I can use that word) under the impression that they have any value to society at all, and who insulate themselves so successfully from the real world that they feel the need to talk only to themselves, and you have a self-referential society that has lost the art of listening and responding.

Thus, although we can take it from Hannan that state funding would widen the gap between government and governed, the real problem is that that gap already exists – it has already been created by the party machines and the current funding crisis is a symptom rather than a cause of the problem.

Within that framework, all state funding would actually do is cement in the evils that already exist – the chicken that was there long before the egg. If the parties do seriously want to narrow the gap, then they have to revert to their own local associations, and rely on ordinary party activists to take up the slack.

But, as that means listening to people and responding to them, that is unlikely to happen.

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A wonderful quotation to start the day with

To be candid I was looking for a quotation for the Conservative History blog. Naturally, I looked up the man who was possibly the greatest of the conservative historians: Lord Acton. Having gone through all the permutations of “power corrupts” or “tends to corrupt”, I found one that suits the theme of this blog admirably:

“The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.”

How could one disagree?

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Blame where blame is due

At a time when millions of households in England and Wales are facing the second year in a row of inflation-busting water price increases, after Ofwat has agreed that average bills should rise between 2005 and 2010 by 18 percent above inflation, it is a bit rich that some water companies should now be enforcing hosepipe bans.

This is especially galling when these self-same companies have consistently failed to meet their target on water leakage, collectively losing about 200 million gallons a day through burst pipes.

Thus it is that there is more than a little hostility to the current attempts to save water, with even the GMB union pitching in, saying the bans could have been avoided if new reservoirs had been built. Only a fraction of the total rainfall was used by the public, the unions says, ranging from seven percent in the South East to just 0.24 per cent in Scotland.

Meanwhile, the gardening industry reacted with adversely to the ban, with Horticultural Trades Association spokesman David Gilchrist declaring that the industry was "angry" that it was being forced to pick up the tab for a hosepipe ban that disproportionately hit gardeners.

But while the water companies are taking the flak, the one organisation which is most responsible for the spiralling costs of water, and the distortion investment of priorities away from the supply of water and dealing with leakage, seems to be escaping Scot-free.

That organisation is, of course, the European Union, which has imposed costs of billions on the water industry, demanding often unrealistic and arbitrary standards of purity for drinking water and sewage effluent. And, not content with that, the latest Water Framework Directive is set to cost a further £16 billion, all of which has to be met from customer charges.

With water pricing being such a sensitive political issue, it is unsurprising that the water companies have sought to cut back on investment in new mains and new reservoirs, but it is about time that the blame for the current situation was put fairly and squarely where it belongs.

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Not to be outdone

The French strikes are turning into spectacular riots but there is trouble over the border as well. German unions are usually consulted as legislation is formulated and, therefore, there tend to be far fewer strikes. Their view is that strikes are part of the French way of life but are a comparative rarity in their own country.

This may be about to change. 20,000 doctors are on strike to protest working conditions.

“Doctors across Germany went on strike after the state tariff association, which represents university hospital employers, sought to increase the official working week to 42 hours from 38.5. But the physicians' union, the Marburger Bund, argued this would mean a pay decrease in real terms. They demanded a 30 percent wage increase in turn.”

There is the usual problem with perception and reality or, perhaps, perception by different people. The German public, with some justification, thinks that doctors earn well. This, the medical profession maintains, is not entirely true. Hospital doctors are on low incomes.

“Indeed, a 2004 study by UK economic research group NERA showed German hospital physicians at the rock bottom of a list of 11 western countries in terms of compensation, earning between 35,000 and 65,000 euros ($41,000 to $77,000) per year. A similar OECD study showed German physicians earning 15 percent less than their counterparts in the UK, and 40 percent less than US doctors.”

Meanwhile, the public sector has been on strike in a number of states for six weeks, closing down kindergardens, some hospital services and rubbish collections. Stuttgart, normally one of the cleanest cities in the world, is swimming in garbage. (And nobody who lives in London can gloat over that.)

The issue is once again working hours, with the employers wanting to extend the working week to 40 hours from 38.5 without any increas in pay.

“They say they need to ease up pressure on state coffers -- personnel costs consume almost one-half of state budgets -- and argue that many other civil servants, not to mention the private sector, already work 40-hour weeks. Employers argue that they are asking public-sector employees to only add 18 minutes to each working day.”

There is talk of outside arbitrators being brought in to try to settle the dispute.

The doctors and the public servants have been joined by metal workers, who have gone on strike, protesting possible increase in working hours without increase in pay.

All the unions in question insist that the public is completely behind them, principally because their case is good and, anyway, they strike so rarely. There is, however, some indication that the public is getting to be rather fed up with the strikes. Uncollected rubbish and interrupted medical and child-care services are not the most popular of developments in any country.

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A despatch from the bunker

Things have come to a pretty pass when I actually agree with Simon Jenkins, but his piece today in the Sunday Times, headed "Desperate dispatches from the banana republic of Great Britain" is right on the button.

He starts by recording the disastrous collapse of the single farm payment scheme, leaving England's 120,000 farmers begging for their subsidies. He then notes that although Margaret Beckett, Defra’s secretary of state had declared: "I take full responsibility," all she actually meant was that she had just sacked one of her officials, Johnston McNeill, so as to save the skin of her farm minister, an obscure Tony crony called Lord Bach. The latter had spent six months deriding critics of his scheme as "shoddy" and creating "unfounded alarm and uncertainty".

The shambles at Defra, writes Jenkins, might win more publicity were a similar litany of woe not rising from every corner of Whitehall. He then goes on to record but a mere fraction of them which put together, speak of a nation, the administration of which is falling apart at the seams.

Booker picks up on the single farm payments shambles, in the limited space afforded him, calling it "easily the worst administrative fiasco the government has created in farming since the foot and mouth epidemic in 2001", and notes that it is in part due to "the unique complexities of the system devised for England by Margaret Beckett, and the collapse of the computer system devised by Accenture (the same company that is responsible for the chaos engulfing a £6 billion computer system for the NHS)."

He also notes that, while Johnston McNeill, as head of the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) has been suspended, he continues to draw his £160,000 a year salary.

Failure, it seems, is no bar to prosperity when you are in Blair’s public service. Jenkins notes that part of the trouble with the NHS is Hewitt’s extraordinary decision to proceed with Accenture’s £6 billion “choose-and-book” computer. This is an unnecessary machine, he writes, for which no health professional ever asked and which was sold to her predecessors by the smooth-talking salesmen now beating a path to the softest touch in global computer procurement, the British taxpayer. A leaked report in February suggested that the NHS computer may end up costing a mind-numbing £ 50 billion.

The Sunday Times business section cites one public procurement expert saying the scheme had been "cretinously and ineptly procured… the reality is that the original deal was hammered through with very little real understanding of the consequences on either side. Some of the participants had no idea what they were taking on."

Yet, as The Business reports, Accenture is now to bid for the contract to provide biometric technology for the UK's identity registry, which will underpin the government's identity card scheme.

That, in a way is good news. If its efforts are at least as good as its work RPA and the NHS, Accenture will ensure that the identity card scheme will never actually function, but the one certainty is that even the LSE’s pessimistic forecast of £18 billion for the cost of the scheme will be a gross underestimate. Jenkins records that the cost is escalating past £12 billion towards, on one estimate, £30 billion.

This is not public administration but public chaos Jenkins adds despairingly, but it is not only the administration which is going to wrack and ruin. Henry Porter in The Observer sets out the savage damage done to the constitution by New Labour, echoing a theme we have raised in this blog, with a call for a Bill of Rights.

Porter’s thesis is that Labour's programme of legislation challenges the British constitution like no other administration before it. In a thousand tiny - and not so tiny - cuts Labour threatens our rights and freedoms, the rule of law and the sovereignty of Parliament.

For the past two weeks he has been going through all the Labour legislation that has reduced our freedoms, compromised our rights and menaced the life of Parliament. He found it an extremely depressing experience, not least because he has now discovered that parliament – "your and my elected representatives" - has been sidelined. Welcome to the world, Porter.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, though, Jeremy Clarkson takes us to his world, a world infested with speed cameras, the increase in numbers of which, he shows, exactly matches the slackening off in the rate of decline in road deaths. Commenting on those who have fallen foul of the reign of Gatso, he observes that he’s be willing to bet they'd trade Tony Blair's idea of a nation state for anything. Even the EU.

We cannot agree, as things are hardly better there. For instance, The Business records in depth the total Horlicks that Peter Mandelson is making of EU trade policy while Allister Heath asks: "Is France ungovernable".

However, Clarkson does have a point. Excuse me while I retreat to my bunker.

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Too much reality

There are times when we can understand why the media retreats into itself and feeds off a diet of trivia. Too much reality is almost insufferable and, speaking personally, it is highly corrosive on the morale.

Compare and contrast, for instance, the hype on Live 8 and the orgy of press coverage, with a snippet from the South African online SABC News, which records a despairing plea from Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, South African minister of foreign affairs.

She is asking the EU to reduce its legislative burden on trade which, she says, is crippling the developing countries. This was after a meeting of the India, Brazil and South Africa Commission which noted that the REACH directive alone would cost them billions of dollars.

Dlamini-Zuma estimates that the European Union's new trade laws will cost developing nations more than £5 billion and restrict growth among poor countries, adding, "If you look at the amount Africa will need to comply it is almost double of what the EU gives in aid, so it is going to be a big problem."

This is an issue we have addressed on this blog from time to time, as in here, here and here.

A grown-up newspaper could may hay with Dr Dlamini-Zuma's comments – imagine the headline: "EU red-tape costs Africa twice more than aid". But, like so many with which this blog deals, this is yet another issue that has not taken off in the MSM. Perhaps the Dalai Lama has it right.

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Scary

It seems that all you have to do is put a "defence correspondent" into the cockpit and give him a white-knuckle ride and he'll deliver a gushing, rave review of your latest toy.

That much is evident from the piece by Thomas Harding in The Telegraph today, to mark the introduction of the Eurofighter into squadron service.

Thus Harding starts, "To say that the RAF's new fighter accelerates faster than a Formula 1 car is to sell it very short indeed." Gushing onwards, he writes, "For the first 700ft of take-off, the comparison seems apt, but then 40,000lb of rear thrust put the aircraft into a vertical ascent that feels like being in the Space Shuttle and we soar from Earth to 12,000ft in four seconds flat."

At least the leader is a bit more sanguine, a critical piece headed "Fighter plain foolish".

"At least the wretched thing can get off the ground," it intones, "Six billion pounds over budget, and more than a decade late, the Eurofighter, or Typhoon, is finally operational."

It notes also that the MoD is mounting a propaganda offensive in favour of what is "surely the most expensive and least justified defence procurement decision in British history," recording that the MoD found itself caught in the age-old trap of the spending department: having already sunk gargantuan sums into the project, it could not bear to cancel it, and so had to keep signing the cheques. It continues:

The Typhoon was designed in the 1980s to defend West Germany against a massed attack by Soviet MiGs. A modern aircraft would have low technology requirements for spare parts, the capacity to operate from rough local airfields, long loiter-time and buddy refuelling. The Eurofighter has none of these things.

But rather than go back to first principles, designers kept trying to adapt an essentially unsuitable prototype, at one stage removing a cannon only to find that they had upset the aircraft's aerodynamics, and so having to substitute concrete.

Being a child of its time, the plane was to be built by a European consortium... Bear this sorry episode in mind the next time you hear it claimed that pan-European defence procurement will create economies of scale. And while the fingerprints of several defence ministers are on the murder weapon, it is appropriate that the guiltiest of them all should be the supreme apostle of the European grand projet, Michael Heseltine.

But, at a time when we have no new aircraft carriers, when regiments are being disbanded, when we are short of missiles, military computers, drones and satellites, the Typhoon is a disgraceful misallocation of resources.

For the Telegraph, this is a remarkably cogent analysis, and to get the true flavour of the MoD "spin" all you have to do is read the press release.

Coinciding with the RAF's 88th birthday, it styles the formation of the first operational squadron as a "birthday present" – for the RAF maybe, but not the taxpayer. But what price this claim?

This marks a key milestone in the transition of the Royal Air Force to a more agile, capable, flexible and adaptable expeditionary force, better equipped to meet the demands that are likely to be placed on it in the future.

The release then goes on to add:

This restructuring is essential and will ensure we continue to deliver a highly capable, cost-efficient and powerful Air Force, capable of making a winning contribution both on operations and in humanitarian and relief operations.

As the Telegraph remarks, this is a fast jet designed for the Cold War. It can only operate from fixed airfields, with a massive infrastructure and complex engineering support, with a huge logistic "tail". The last thing it is – or can be – is a weapon suited to expeditionary warfare. And one really does wonder how the Eurofighter will help in "humanitarian and relief operations".

At least the Telegraph leader did not fall for the "spin" but the worrying thing is that the MoD might actually believe the guff it has written. If that is the case, it's more than worrying – it's scary.

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Chirac backs de Villepin

As expected, l’escroc Chirac used his presidential address to the people yesterday to back his Prime Minister and his, relatively sensible, piece of labour legislation.

The Socialists had hoped to defuse the situation by the law, hastily pushed through the Assemblée in Feburary, being declared unconstitutional. That option was defeated on Thursday by the Constitutional Council. It declared that the legislation was completely constitutional and left it to the President to sort the mess out.

In advance of his speech students and high school pupils gathered in the streets of Paris, disrupting traffic and creating havoc generally. The unions are promising another general strike in the near future.

Chirac announced that the law will be implemented but with two changes: the two-year period should be reduced to one year and people should be given an explanation as to why they are being fired, the latter being an eminently reasonable amendment.

By backing de Villepin’s law Chirac is hoping that within a year there will be enough evidence of it producing employment for young people (at present the unemployment rate for the under-26 stands at 23 per cent and would be even higher but for the numbers that leave to work in countries like Britain).

Had he agreed to withdraw the law, de Villepin would have had to resign. They do things differently across the Channel.

In the meantime, the unions are seething and will want something to to pacify them. The 1968 solution of higher social payments and shorter working hours is not really a possibility in a country that is going through a serious economic crisis and where the 35 hour week is already enshrined in law and is destroying employment.

It will be interesting to see how the rest of the country will react to the ongoing problems. We have already seen the young of the banlieus coming into the centre and attacking the spoilt little denizens of the Sorbonne. There have been some counter-demonstrations as well. How long will the less privileged people of France – the ones who cannot get jobs – tolerate the antics of the Parisian youth?

For the moment there appears to be a general, if somewhat notional, support for the opposition to what is a rather footling piece of legislation. One can only surmise that the French population sees this as the thin end of the wedge that will bring those dreaded free-market Anglo-Saxon practices into la belle France.

Of course, if one lookes at the bourse, one sees that many of those practices are there already with foreign investors owning a good chunk of French business, no matter how much the government tries to prevent that. Conversely, the French are happy to go to other countries and buy or invest there.

Still, there have been enough stories in the last couple of years of attempts to prevent take-overs in France to indicate that there is a visceral dislike of that and the politicians, as ever, are happy to tap into it, disregarding the probable economic consequences.

In the meantime the French polling organization CSA has conducted a poll on the new law (CPE):

“Several polls reveal a strong majority wants the law withdrawn, with French youth especially opposed. A poll conducted March 21-22 by the French polling organization CSA found that 66 percent wanted the law withdrawn, while 25 percent opposed withdrawing it. Among those aged 18-29, three-fourths (74%) want the law withdrawn. The highest support for withdrawing the law was among 25-to-29-year-olds—78 percent; among 18-to-24-year-olds it was 72 percent.

Similarly, a poll by the French polling organization BVA conducted March 17-18 found that those who want the CPE withdrawn outnumber those who want it maintained two to one (60% withdraw, 31% maintain). Here too the number is even higher among those aged 15 to 24—68 percent want the law withdrawn—while 24 percent want it maintained.”

That famous Gallic logic seems to be taking a holiday.

“This resistance to removing state protections appears to be related to a broader distrust: in a recent global poll, the French public was the most skeptical of the free market system compared to other countries. France is also one of the most negative countries in their assessment of their country’s economic conditions and the world economy, although French youth are quite optimistic about their own personal prospects.”

The worldwide poll conducted in 20 countries by GlobeScan shows some interesting results, described as “ironic” by journalists who seem unable to think outside their own box.

There is nothing ironic about China, the Philippines, South Korea, India or Indonesia having large majorities in favour of the free market and the free economy. The people there can see what will and will not benefit them. It is high time we took their determination seriously.

The United States and Canada have reasonable majorities (Canada, as to be expected, somewhat lower); four European countries, Britain, Germany, Spain and Poland are hovering with an approval rate in the sixties; Italy just below, with Turkey and Russia below 50 per cent, lower than the Asian and the two African countries on the list.

And which country comes in at the very lowest with 36 per cent being in favour of a free economy and 50 per cent (by far the highest) against it? France. And yet they think they will somehow restore their leading position in the world that they last had in the eighteenth century. Rum.

The measure of the beast

Ninety days into the new year and already the EU commission has produced over 130 "COM" documents, setting out diverse matters, from full blown policy proposals – such as the Green Paper on energy – to diverse proposals for legislation.

Tucked into all that is COM(2006) 129 final, with the relatively innocuous title, "Bridging the Broadband Gap", published on 21 March.

Relatively short, by commission standards, at a mere ten pages, it tells us that, in pursuit of "Broadband for all", the commission is to mobilise all its policy instruments to bridge the broadband gap, including structural and rural development funds.

It estimates the broadband penetration rate at the end of 2005 at 13 percent of population or about 25 percent of households, reaching almost 60 million lines throughout the EU. Yet, it is not reaching some of theless-developed areas, being available to about 60 percent of businesses and households in the remote and rural areas of the EU15, compared with 90 percent in the urban areas.

The commission, therefore, is encouraging member states to close this gap, and is looking to run a conference on the issue next year – a harmless enough venture it would seem, when there seem to be no legislative proposals on the immediate horizon.

However, the German telecoms giant, Deutsche Telekom, is not convinced of the commission's good intentions. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (no link), it is accusing the commission of distorting the image of Germany's telecommunications market.

Brussels is presents Germany as being in mid-table with regard to broadband access, covering around 11 percent of its population, some 8.4 million, compared with 9.8 million in the UK and 9.7 million in France. (The US is the largest market with 40.9 million broadband lines.) This relatively low level it blames on incomplete regulations and a lack of competition.

Deutsche Telekom counters with a array of statistics, complaining that the EU is presenting a one-dimensional aspect of the market, not least by ignoring the fact that broadband access is available to one-third of all homes in Germany, double the average in western European countries.

But what is intriguing about this report is the motivation behind the company’s attack. Apparently, it fears that claims of a lack of competition may represent an attempt by the EU Commission to increase its own influence – another power grab on its way. It looks Deutsche Telekom is getting the measure of the beast.

Will others follow?

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