EU Referendum

We are in the middle of the aid giving frenzy at the moment. As my colleague has pointed out, there seems to be a "beauty contest" as to which organization or country will give more. Not, you understand, which organization or country will achieve most through its aid, but which will give more money.

British people, we are told, have donated over £45 million already. (Another way of calculating that is to say that £1 million is being given every hour.) The British are known to be generous, but did any of those donors stop to ask what that money is for and what will happen to it? Somehow, I doubt it.

After all, did any of the ninnies who bought the reissue of Bob Geldof’s BandAid record stop to ask why the whole process needs to be gone through again, twenty years after the original kerfuffle? Did anyone recall that Geldof himself acknowledged on the tenth anniversary that none of the money he had raised had gone to the supposed recipients? Of course not. Thinking is not something you are supposed to do when it comes to giving aid. None of those who had contributed to the £45 million (with more to come, I expect) would like to be told that the likelihood is that the money will swell numbered accounts of officials in various off-shore tax havens.

As the American ships steam in and hand out aid that actually does some good; as the EU calls a donors’ conference two weeks too late, thus guaranteeing that its aid will do no good and a great deal of harm; as the various NGOs strut the stage, make political speeches but fail to distribute the vast amount of aid that has already been collected; other voices are being raised as well.

There is a certain sameness about natural disasters and their effects. They happen all the time, they cannot be stopped or prevented, they hit rich countries and poor. But the results are completely different. Rich countries are hurt, a few people die, some property gets destroyed. Then immediate aid is distributed and the rebuilding starts. Within a few months all is back to norm.

Poor countries are hit by disasters on the same or, even, smaller scale and they are devastated. Tens of thousands die, whole cities and regions are destroyed, the economic fall-out lasts for decades if not for ever.

After many years and many disasters, it has now become more or less acceptable to point this fact out, though it is still difficult to make people listen to the arguments about the evils of aid. One of the organizations that has been voicing such “heretical” thoughts consistently, throughout its history is he Mises Institute. One does not have to agree with their daily articles (for my taste, they are far too focused on economics without paying enough attention to political ideas) in order to note the good sense in many of them.

Today’s example is of interest. Entitled Government-Enhanced Disaster, it goes through the arguments about the effect natural disasters have and what should be done afterwards.

First the different effects on rich and poor countries, the same differences being noted both geographically and historically:

“In December, 2003, 30,000 people were killed in Bam, Iran, as an earthquake destroyed eighty percent of the buildings in the city. Thirteen years earlier, 40,000 people were killed by an earthquake in Gilan, Iran. In 1998, in Honduras and Nicaragua, Hurricane Mitch killed at least 10,000 people.

In Bangladesh, according to a 2001 UN report, chronic typhoons and flooding have killed over a half million people in the period from 1970 to 1998. Over the same period, 1.2 million died from drought-induced famine in Ethiopia.Many other poor nations have suffered similar catastrophes in recent years. According to the United Nations Development Programme, while only 11 percent of people exposed to natural hazards live in poor countries, they account for more than 53 percent of the total number of deaths. From 1980 to 2000, North Korea had the highest annual per capita death rate from disasters, followed by Mozambique, Armenia, Sudan, and Ethiopia. These are also among the very poorest nations in the world.

This correlation between poverty and natural disaster seems to hold up not only with a cross-section of nations, but also over time. As nations become wealthier, their losses of human life from natural calamities tend to fall. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake (and the subsequent fire) killed at least 3,000 people out of a population of about 400,000. The 1994 quake in the same area killed only 60, out of a population that had almost doubled. Over 8,000 people in the Galveston, Texas area died in the hurricane of 1900, but hurricane Andrew's 1992 path through a much more heavily populated Florida killed only 40 people.”

According to DefenseNews, French defence minister Michèle Alliot-Marie has confirmed that the EU's Galileo satellite navigation system will be available for French military use.

Alliot-Marie, who has been remarkably candid about French military ambitions, was speaking at the launch of the French Helios 2A military reconnaissance satellite on 18 December.

This was only one week after EU member state transport ministers at the Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council meeting in Brussels on 9-10 December had reiterated in their written conclusions that "Galileo is a civil program under civil control."

This is the same language they have been using since the Galileo programme was launched in March 2002, and is now shown for the naked lie that it is and always was.

This is further confirmed by Andrew Brookes, an aerospace analyst at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, who on 22 December said that, "One of the justifications for Galileo is that it will allow any new Euro defence force to have access to the same space assistance as is provided to U.S. forces by GPS." He was referring to the U.S. Global Positioning System used by civilians and military personnel worldwide.

Brookes said Galileo could be used for pinpointing the location of weapons and troops on the ground.

This will come as absolutely no surprise to regular readers of this Blog, and the various links to the subject can be followed from this link.

Whatever views one might have about the EU developing its own separate defence identity, together with its own, independent space capability available for military use, what really is unacceptable is the deceit surrounding this project.

Another example comes in a recently issued EU commission publication on the EU research effort, called "Looking beyond tomorrow – Scientific research in the European Union" which extols the virtues of the Galileo system, describing how it can be applied to "a vast range of civilian activities…".

But it add that it will also "play a role in security operations such as humanitarian aid, evacuation of refugees, peacekeeping and crisis resolution", which implies military usage without actually admitting it.

Interestingly, in a classic example of the chutzpah for which the EU is famous, the pamphlet uses a photograph to illustrate one Galileo application, with the caption: "Fire-fighting planes are guided to the heart of the blaze by satellite navigation".

The picture shows a Canadian-built Canadair CL-415 amphibian and, given that Galileo constellation is not yet up and flying, if it is guided by satellite, it must be using the American GPS system.

So much for scientific research in the European Union.

I suppose it is of some comfort to learn that each nation has its share of bien peasants, ever-willing to denigrate the efforts of their own nation and to side with its critics.

Such is the tenor of a piece published in the New York Times today, republished in the International Herald Tribune supporting the UN emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, who has called the overall aid efforts by rich Western nations "stingy" – with his eye very much on “America's initial measly aid offer of $15 million” to the victims of the tsunami disaster.

The NYT/IHT come down firmly on the side of Egeland, stating that he was "right on target". Says the piece: "We hope Secretary of State Colin Powell was privately embarrassed when, two days into a catastrophic disaster that hit 12 of the world's poorer countries and will cost billions of dollars to meliorate, he held a press conference to say that America, the world's richest nation, would contribute $15 million. That's less than half of what Republicans plan to spend on the Bush inaugural festivities."

Comparisons are now being made with the amounts of money being offered or pledged by various donor countries and organisations, in what is becoming an obscene "beauty contest" as groups vie with each other to be seen to be the most generous.

But what is being lost sight of is that money alone is not the answer to immediate disaster relief and in fact money, in itself, is not an answer at all. This has to be converted into practical help and unless the physical means to deliver aid are present, the money might just as well rot in the banks for all the good it will do.

In that context, there is a letter in today's Telegraph from Prof. Euan Nisbet, Department of Geology, Royal Holloway, University of London. He reminds us that tsunamis can be destructive anywhere in the world and that many of the world's most vulnerable countries are in the Commonwealth.

To deal with a possible disaster, in addition to setting up a warning system, he also suggests that we should have stand-by naval vessels, possibly converted from old ferries, loaded with food, medicine and helicopters.

However, this, in effect, is a role which is being admirably performed by the US Expeditionary Strike Group 5, comprising the amphibious assault ships, USS Bonhomme Richard, USS Duluth and USS Rushmore, which we featured in an earlier posting.

Moreover, the collective costs of this hardware are well in excess of $2 billion, yet the provision of this form of direct aid does not figure in the cash sums offered by the US government.

In the days and week to come, we will start to hear stories of piles of aid rotting on quaysides, of congestion in airports and distribution problems, with whole communities left untouched by the flood of aid that is winging its way towards the disaster area. All this will illustrate that the most pressing problem in disaster relief is often distribution.

Yet it is precisely here that the US assets will prove most valuable, far more so than the flood of money, much of which we know from past experience will be wasted, misused or unspent. In fact, the aid offered will be more precious than any amount that money can buy after the event.

Thus, as the politicians and the bien peasants take over, and the EU assumes its customary air of moral superiority, it will be important to remember that, when it comes to offering real practical help, the NGOs and especially the trans-national organisations like the UN and the EU will not feature highly.

Instead, it will have been nation states, like the US, and like Australia, India, Japan and others, who will have been there in the thick of it providing the action instead of words.

Even without the horrific news from South-East Asia and the undoubted recriminations and misdirected funds that is the news to come, this is not the time to feel anything but depressed.

I have always found it very sad that a country that has been the by-word of liberty in the past, a people who have proudly proclaimed the joys of individual liberty, should now equally proudly proclaim that Britain is the place where every single rule, however stupid and harmful, is obeyed implicitly. Whether that is true is irrelevant. The problem is that blind obedience has taken the place of freedom as a matter for self-congratulations.

That sad little threnody brings us to the whole subject of internal passports (aka ID cards). As it happens, the Wall Street Journal Europe on Tuesday of this week carried a long article about the problem of terrorism in Europe. Its main theme was not quite as new as the two authors, David Crawford and Keith Johnson thought: there is a serious problem in all the western European countries with a few people who have lived in them for two or three generations, who were born and brought up in them, and who should, therefore, feel their immediate loyalty to those countries, actually deciding to join various terrorist organizations.

We knew this when young Britons were found fighting with the Taleban in Afghanistan or among homicide bombers in the Palestine. The Dutch found this out when a young man of Moroccan descent, one who had never lived in Morocco, brutally murdered Theo van Gogh, the film director.

The Spanish are learning to live with the fact (though they are still finding it hard to accept that they threw away an election) that the Madrid bombs were placed there by inhabitants of Spain who had formed themselves into terrorist groups and had links with Al-Quaeda before 9/11. Other terrorist groups, also mostly made up of second and third generation inhabitants of Spain have been arrested.

There are groups in France, in Belgium, in the Netherlands. In other words, in countries that already have ID cards. And, furthermore, all these young men would have had them. The idea that somehow, the introduction of ID cards in Britain would be an adequate substitute for intelligence work is being blown apart (if I may use what can sound as an unfortunate phrase in the circumstances) by the unravelling of the existing groups.

The full posting can be read here.

A US Navy aircraft carrier battle group, based on the carrier USS Lincoln, is heading from Hong Kong to Sumatra. Five ships from the 17-strong group are to be deployed off Sumatra, the area worst hit by Sunday's tsunami. Nine P3C Orion surveillance aircraft, including some based at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan, have also been deployed.

Six C130 transport aircraft based out of Japan are being diverted to Thailand to help in relief operations and the first of many C130s has landed in Indonesia. Flying out of Kadena, Japan, it touched down in the Sumatran city of Medan on Thursday with a load of relief supplies and body bags for the estimated 80,000 dead in this country alone.

The aircraft also brought an advance team of about a dozen troops who will assess the situation and determine the logistics needed for the US relief operation.

Along with the airport at Medan, a Thai navy air base used by US B-52 bombers during the Vietnam War is turning into a hub for the US military-led relief effort, which will also include humanitarian operations for Sri Lanka and India. By next week, 1,000 US military personnel will be based there, helping with relief operations.

In Sri Lanka, 26 medical specialists from the Army, Marines, Air Force and Navy arrived yesterday help with efforts to prevent outbreaks of disease in crowded refugee centres.

The US Navy has also answering the call for help by deploying Expeditionary Strike Group 5, based in Guam. The three-ship force, comprising the amphibious assault ships, USS Bonhomme Richard, USS Duluth and USS Rushmore, initially scheduled for R&R;, were immediately turned round and despatched to the disaster area.

With a combined crew roster of more than 6,000, this force not only has specialist medical capabilities, including surgical theatres, but also super-lift and medium-lift helicopters that can be used for a variety of missions to include search and rescue as well as transport of relief supplies.

Particularly useful will be the force's Air Cushioned Landing Craft Vehicles (LCAC). These are assault landing craft capable of speeds in excess of 40 knots when carrying a 60-ton payload, which can deliver supplies direct onto otherwise inaccesible beaches.

The force has water-making units that can provide about 50,000 gallons of fresh water each day, and carries all-terrain trucks than can be used to deliver supplies to outlying areas. Its complement of US Marines provide a highly disciplined labour force that can be used to assist hard-pressed civilian authorities, while sailors are able to provide electrical services and welding capabilities. In fact, the whole gamut of supplies and capabilities needed in disaster relief are on these ships.

This is just the immediate US response to the disaster, and much more military equipment is being mobilised, ready for deployment as soon as the assessment reports come in.

And what is the EU doing? Next week, it is hosting a donors' conference. The caterers are on high alert.

Human nature being what it is (as Miss Marple would say) and political thinking being what it is (as she most definitely would not say), any admission that a certain political model is a duff one becomes as rare as an albino raven. Rarer, if anything.

Instead, we are told, on no evidence whatsoever, that the given duff model is one that the rest of the world aspires to. The rest of the world may happily choose another model and overtake the duff one in a puff of smoke but that does not stop the strange assertions.

Take the National Health Service, for instance. (No, I don’t especially want it either, but, together with the rest of the country, I am stuck with it.) A duff if ever there was one. Yet, how often have we heard the ridiculous assertions that it was the envy of the world? So envious is the world, apparently, that nobody has the slightest intention of imitating it, presumably because they want to preserve its pure, unadulterated uniqueness. (The Soviet Union and other socialist states do not count, as theirs was the original. Driven by ideology rather than good sense Nye Bevan took the wonky Soviet medical system as his example.)

The same applies to the EU, a customs union that has morphed intentionally into a

“tightly regulated single or internal market, with a cumbersome supranational bureaucracy which now incudes the Commission, Parliament, Council, Court of Justice, the acquis communautaire and the single currency (presently used by fewer than half of EU-25) run by a European Central Bank.”

“… the EU model has not been emulated anywhere in the developed world. The relatively few customs unions that do exist outside Europe are in poor African countries, former Soviet dependencies, Gulf states and developing countries in South America.”

“Meanwhile, the US, building on the success of NAFTA (Canada, the US and Mexico), has signed 15 FTAs and is negotiating or has announced its intention to negotiate FTAs with another 11 countries, making 26 in total. By 2005 it hopes to complete negotiations on the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), creating a 34-country free trade zone of 800 million people stretching from Alask to Tierra del Fuego.”

In the ultimate bureaucrat's dream, this week sees the start of the EU's Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), whereby more than 15,000 power plants and factories across Europe have been given allowances for the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) they will be allowed to emit.

These include plants with an energy use above 20 MW/hour, covering combustion plants, oil refineries, coke ovens, iron and steel plants; and factories making cement, glass, lime, brick, ceramics, pulp and paper.

Those that cannot meet their emission limits are allowed to buy credits from companies which have not used their quotas on a newly established trading market, to avoid financial penalties for overshooting their targets, set at €40 for every excess ton of CO2 they emit.

Needless to say, with handling commissions, this new and entirely artificial market promises to be lucrative for a number of financial institutions, given the scale of the market to judge from non-official trading schemes. Some 2.3 million ton exchanged hands in October on the informal CO2 futures market, as much as the first nine months of the year.

Currently on the unofficial carbon market, one tonne of CO2 trades for an average price of €8.5 ($11), although the price has fluctuated widely, from €5.0 to €13.4 since informal trading began in February. Analysts forecast a market worth €50 billion during the 2005-07 contract period, with 5.0 billion tons of CO2 being traded at an average price of €10 a ton.

Of course, nothing is for nothing and the eventual losers will be thee and me, paying for what amounts to a new "stealth" tax through higher electricity prices and increased commodity costs. There will also be a social cost as large energy users, like aluminium smelters, will be tempted to relocate abroad, taking jobs and their profits with them.

This, of course, comes from an EU that is continually prating about increasing competitiveness, making schemes like this a spectacular "own goal", effectively adding €25 billion a year to the costs of the productive economy, with no long term benefit to the environment. When it comes to green madness, therefore, it could only be EU…

The Financial Times today reviews two books on our favourite subject – after the European Union, this is – blogs. One is by Dan Gillmor, technology correspondent of the San Jose Mercury News, who has been chronicling online innovation for the past decade, and the other by Joe Trippi.

Gillmor's book is called "We the media", a chronicle of "Grassroots journalism by the people, for the people", while Trippi's has the intriguing name: "The revolution will not be televised". He subtitles it: "Democracy, the internet and the overthrow of everything".

I like that last subtitle because I see the "blogosphere" as inherently subversive and see it as a powerful force in bringing down that dream of the European political élites – that accursed European Union.

But, as you would expect, it is the Amercian scene on which these books concentrate, with the FT review telling us that, when the history of the 2004 US presidential election is written, it will contain one word absent from accounts of all previous quadrennial contests. That word is "blog".

These two books, says the FT, go some way to enhancing our understanding of the blog phenomenon as it applies to the political arena, and what the likely implications are for the democratic process from the perspectives of candidates, citizens and the media. It continues:

In the "blogosphere", the bloggers' rather grand collective description of the world they inhabit, there are currently between 4m and 5m blogs and, like many online phenomena, that figure has been projected to double over the next 18 months.

The average blog, it is said, is written by a 15-year-old schoolgirl and contains detailed accounts of what she is wearing, what she is listening to and which boys she has a crush on. And certainly many, many ordinary blogs are just that - stultifyingly ordinary.

This is not another earthquake, hurricane or mega-wave but can be perceived to be almost as disastrous in the wealthy but almost bankrupt western Europe. Hartz IV is the final phase of the German changes in the welfare sector, named after Peter Hartz, the Volkswagen executive who devised the plan, and it is due to kick in on January 1.

The idea is that unemployment benefit will be cut back, streamlined and generally reduced. As yesterday’s International Herald Tribune put it:

“In a nutshell, Germany will dole out money only to those unemployed who need it, and compel them, with the threat of withdrawing all benefits if necessary, to do some kind of work.

After jobless Germans use up normal benefits, whose duration and generosity vary depending on how long a person has worked, they will get only the Hartz IV benefits: €345 per month in western Germany, and €331 in the East.

Recipients of this money, should they fail to find other work, will be also forced into "one-euro jobs," essentially low-paid state make-work programs that require little white-collar skill.”

Now is the time of year when, in the absence of any real news – tsunami disaster apart - we have to suffer endless retrospectives and any number of articles forecasting trends and events for the coming year.

Inevitably, the EU will be subject to this treatment but, oddly, the Washington Times is one of the first newspapers off the mark, courtesy of UPI, which supplied the copy.

Consolidation, according to this source, is likely to be the key word in Brussels in 2005 as Barroso's commission gets down to work after a bumpy start in late 2004. The first task of "the EU's powerful executive body", writes UPI, will be to boost economic growth and create more jobs. Yea, right.

But the "second major challenge of the commission", and the EU's 25 member states, will be "to win approval for the club's constitution". Interesting how they rely on this cuddly term "club" - it doesn’t have the same ring as "evil empire".

In countries like Spain and Ireland, where the EU is hugely popular – or so we are told - there are likely to be large majorities in favour of the "blueprint", but the referendums in France and the Netherlands, due to be held during 2005, "are likely to be close-run affairs."

In both countries there is growing public hostility to the EU, and there is a real possibility that the constitution will be narrowly rejected in one of the two founding members of the club. This would make life easier for eurosceptic Britain and Denmark, which plan to hold referendums in 2006, but would plunge the union into a deep institutional crisis.

Here now, we get to the interesting bit. "In order to prevent this happening," says UPI, "EU leaders are likely to reach out to their 450 million citizens more in 2005."

For the first time, the commission has a vice-president in charge of communications – "the telegenic Swede 'Mad' Margot Wallstrom" - and is expected to show it is not the monster bureaucracy of popular mythology by slowing down its legislative output and focusing on everyday concerns like jobs and crime.

For their part, heads of state will attempt to portray the EU as a success story that has guaranteed peace and prosperity in Europe for half a century as they try to win over wary voters to sign up to the constitution.

Well, if that is all they are planning to do, we have very little to worry about – not least since the "peace myth" is so easily debunked.

Nevertheless, I suspect there will be more to the UK referendum campaign than just these issues. However, it is interesting to see what the official line is.

One is wholly disinclined to join the chorus of second-guessers who, armed with 20/20 hindsight, argue that the Indian Ocean should have been equipped with a tsunami warning system on similar lines to that provided for the Pacific.

For sure, adequate warning would have saved thousands of lives and it is notable that the Kenyan authorities managed to raise the alarm, clearing tens of thousands of people off the beaches before the tidal wave struck.

But what's done is done and there is no point at this stage trying to apportion blame, if any is due, for the scale of the disaster we are watching unfolding on our television screens. One can only pray that the rescue and aid services do their work with maximum expedition and manage to save those people who so desperately need help.

With that, however, we must not allow this disaster to disappear once the immediate crisis is over, when the media has packed its bags and moved off to the next major global event.

Even the most superficial view of the television footage graphically illustrates that this tsunami has caused major damage to the structures and infrastructures of some of the most impoverished regions of the world, damage that is going to take years if not decades to repair.

Here, in the comfortable West, to make our donations and to express our concern is highly laudable, but it is not enough. We need to recognise that help is needed in the long-term, considerable help, way beyond the normal levels of humanitarian aid available through conventional programmes.

The level of funding required is such that we need, with utmost despatch, to rethink how we direct our aid to less privileged countries and how we are going to sustain the high level of aid needed over the years to come.

In this context, we should all pay heed to the words of Bjorn Lomberg on the subject of global warming and his views on the costs of Kyoto. According to his estimates, the best that can be achieved by the expenditure of between $150-350 billion a year is to slow down global warming by a six years of so, without in any way affecting the final outcome.

This compares with the total aid given each year to developing countries of about $50 billion, as against the estimated $200 billion that it would take once and for all solve the single biggest problem in the world. For that money, we could give clean drinking water and sanitation to every single human being on earth,

That calculation was made before the tsunami struck, but the thinking behind Lonberg’s arithmetic is now even more valid. It points to one thing. Kyoto is an expensive and unnecessary luxury that we – and in particular the developing nations - cannot afford.

In the days and week to come, therefore, we must consider quite how many people are to die, or live out their lives in poverty and disease because of the obsession with a formula that is based on cod science and is intent on wasting global resources.

At the forefront of this obsession is the EU which not only wants to saddle its own member state economies with massive, unnecessary costs, but wants nations like the United States and Russia likewise to wreck their.

Now is the time, therefore, to junk Kyoto and to put the money saved where it is really needed and will be for some time to come. And, if political constructs like the EU cannot or will not recognise this simple truth, it is time to junk them as well.

My colleague will be returning to this issue, and the general themes of aid and trade, in the near future - subjects which were never just academic but which have acquired a new urgency. They demand an expression of political will that, in the absence of political leadership, only we, the people, can articulate.

Without any specific topical "hook", today's Times sees a letter published from Professor Alan Lee Williams, Director, Atlantic Council of the United Kingdom, who recently attended the 50th anniversary of the Atlantic Treaty Association (ATA) in Rome.

There, he informs us, some 40 countries reaffirmed their support for Nato and the transatlantic alliance, declaring their hopes that America would continue to play a central role in formulating strategic concepts compatible with the development of the alliance's Response Force and its newly achieved operational capability.

However, writes Prof. Williams, "this show of support by ATA masked its underlying anxiety about the best way of reconciling Europe’s strategic culture with the reality of American power." Opponents of the Iraq war: France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, together with Greece and Luxembourg, apparently regard the fledgling EU Rapid-Reaction Battle Groups as the basis of a possible European superpower.

Williams then focuses on the Nato's ten members' refusal to send troops to the Iraq training academy, which he believes has opened up a deep fissure in the transatlantic relationship but he singles out the US concerns over the EU’s Galileo programme.

According to Williams, the US perceives this - "perhaps wrongly", he adds - as the basis of a collaborative venture with China and Russia, whose future strategic interests are likely to be contrary to those of a transatlantic alliance.

He then writes that many believe that France is seeking to develop a superpower Europe, conceding that "the drift towards a superpower Europe is real". A partnership rather than competition with America is required, if we are to maintain unity, he concludes.

When a man like Prof. Williams writes in this fashion, attention should be paid to what he is saying. Apart from being director of The Atlantic Council of the United Kingdom, he is also chairman of the Atlantic Treaty Association.

He is former chairman of the European Working Group of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. He served as Labour member of parliament for Hornchurch from 1966 to 1970, from March to October 1974 and from 1974 to 1979.

Williams also served as parliamentary private secretary to the secretary of state for defence from 1968-70 and subsequently with The Rt. Hon Roy Mason, with whom he also served as PPS in Northern Ireland (1976-79). He was leader of the United Kingdom Delegation to the North Atlantic Assembly from 1975 to 1979.

This is a man who knows what he is talking about and for him to express his concerns, albeit in a measured and guarded fashion, confirms that there is something seriously amiss.

Just over a week ago, Christopher Booker in his column had tackled the same issue, then remarking that there had been an extraordinary act of duplicity at the heart of the announcement by the defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, that the British Army is to be restructured round a series of "larger regimental formations".

With all the attention was on the abolition of old historic regiments, Mr Hoon did not explain that his new, more mobile units would be ideal for deployment as EU "battle-groups" which Williams marks up as “the basis of a possible European superpower”

Also remarking that the The Tory front bench was well aware of all this, but had not mentioned it because the party does not want the debate on Britain's defences to become a potentially divisive Euro-row, this brought a curious response last Sunday in a letter from Michael Ancram.

Ancram dismisses completely the suggestion that the Army's new regimental structure "is a result of the Government's plan to tailor British regiments to some secret EU manoeuvres", stating that he had told the House of Commons that the changes were not about restructuring but accommodating the Chancellor.

He then went on to state that: "Our position on the European defence project remains the same. Nothing new is being created except EU involvement. The fact is that with the new Battle Groups, the European countries are merely putting on the table military forces that already exist."

With today’s letter, therefore, we have two extremes of the argument. On the one hand, the battle groups are "the basis of a possible European superpower" and, on the other, European countries are "merely putting on the table military forces that already exist."

Of the two, I go with Williams. Ancram is completely wrong. He has misundersttod the nature of the cuts, not realising that Hoon is using the funds liberated to finance the equipment needed for his new "battle groups".

And these "battle groups" are not "existing forces". They are going to be new formations, specially equipped for the purpose and designed to inter-operate with each other. With these, and the development of “European defence identity”, the major European Nato partners are gradually drifting away from the United States as they see competition rather than partnership as the guiding ethos.

As a result, Nato in Europe is struggling to survive and we are in danger of seing the Atlantic alliance collapse. Williams is right to be worried.

Readers who look to this Blog for a constant stream of informed comment on matters EU are going to be sadly disappointed on this one, as we can only express our complete puzzlement over a development which seems to defy logic.

The proximate cause of our sudden lack of certainty is an article in the English language Greek newspaper Kathimerini which reports today that the EU is coming to the rescue of Athens, dolling out some €200 million to help it with its growing refuse problem.

That much, it seems, could hardly give rise to any great mystery except for one thing. While EU member states are closing down their landfill sites and steeling themselves to shelling out billions to finance unnecessary and highly unpopular waste incinerators, the UK alone having to commit £6.9 billion to that effect, the EU money dolled out to Greece is going to finance new landfill sites.

The funds are to go toward the building of new waste processing plants at Skalistiri in Fyli, Mavro Vouno in Grammatiko and probably Keratea, west of Athens, plus the construction of relay stations, for trucks carting away the capital’s 6,000-ton daily refuse output

It is estimated that the first landfill to be built, in Fyli, will be completed within 18 months — just in time for the closure of the capital’s only existing dump, at nearby Ano Liosia. The EU commission has earmarked some €40 million for the Fyli project, while the construction of the Mavro Vouno site will draw about €16 million from EU funds.

Any which way you look at it, this does not make sense. Why, when we are closing down landfill sites and planning to build a network of expensive incinerators to meet EU requirements is the self-same EU funding landfill sites in Greece? One can only ask, what on earth is going on?

Yesterday we posted a story about how, in its own way, the EU could be worse than a tsunami in its long-term effects on the third world.

In that story, we mentioned the plight of Kenyan farmers and, by a strange coincidence, an update of our original story, posted on 4 August, has appeared in Kenya's Standard newspaper.

It appears that the situation has got considerably worse as local horticultural producers are giving up the unequal struggle with EU-inspired red tape and their production is being taken over by importers from the industrialised countries.

These importers now control 40 percent of the export market and are threatening to lock out smallholders from the lucrative EU market, grabbing the lions’ share of the £160 million export trade in fresh fruits, vegetables and cut-flowers for themselves.

Before the horticultural export boom in the 1990s, smallholders produced 70 percent of vegetables and fruits shipped from Kenya but as the scale of exports has grown, the share has dwindled. Now the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) is worried that local producers are being marginalised by multinationals who are establishing their own farms in the developing countries.

FAO says in its 2004 report that by the end of the 1990s, 40 percent of the produce was grown on farms owned or leased directly by importers in the developed countries. Another 42 percent was produced by large commercial farmers while small-holders produced a meagre 18 per cent.

In the wake of this report comes rising anxiety that that stringent market access conditions into the EU – some of which come into force next year – are going to make the situation even worse. Most of the requirements are difficult for smallholders to meet and it is estimated that £16 million is needed to help them comply.

All farmers growing produce for the EU market must provide full evidence of traceability and demonstrate that minimum environmental and hygiene standards were observed.

It is not so much meeting the standards and producing the paperwork which is causing the problems, which are made worse by the requirement for the EU to approve the agrochemical products used – an impossible requirement for small scale farmers because all generic chemicals used locally are banned in the EU.

So much for the caring-sharing EU. With its obsession for bureaucracy, it is gradually killing off local farmers in Kenya, just as its own CAP has been progressively wiping out small farmers in EU member states. And all this is done in the name of "health 'n' safety". But whose health, and whose safety?

Little 'ol Ireland, darling of the Europhile classes, is in trouble with its masters over in Brussels for quite deliberately ignoring an EU directive.

The law in question is Council Directive 92/100/EEC of 19 November 1992 on "rental right and lending rights and on certain rights related to copyright in the field of intellectual property".

It was introduced to harmonise the lending of works by public institutions such as libraries and universities. Because book borrowing may lessen the demand for buying certain works, the directive gave authors the right to forbid the public lending of their work.

Member-states had the option of establishing a right for authors to be paid when their works were lent by public libraries and they also had the right to exempt certain categories of libraries from making this payment.

However, the EU commission found that Ireland, contrary to the terms of the directive, had exempted all public lending institutions from the charge. Just before Christmas, therefore, it announced that it was referring Ireland to the ECJ

Interestingly, a spokeswoman for the Irish Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment pointed out that the decision to exempt all Irish libraries was a deliberate one, on the basis that the Irish lending pool was very small and the State had a policy of making cultural information available to the public.

What is the trouble with these people. Directives are not optional – they are there to be obeyed. After all this time, don't the Irish know who's boss?

It is entirely understandable that such an elemental force of nature as a giant tidal wave, ripping apart communities in south Asia and leaving a trail of death and destruction, should capture the news headlines and all of our sympathy.

But behind those headlines is another force – this one man-made – which in its own way leaves behind it a trail of death and destruction. But so slow and insidious are its effects, and so indirect, that the damage is rarely recognised and never properly calculated.

That force is the European Union – and the damage it does is the result of its predatory and destructive trade policies towards the third world. And while it may not leave piles of bloated corpses on exotic beaches, the death and destruction, in terms of poverty and the concomitant disease and ill-health is every bit as real.

Thus, while the EU doles out its conscience money it depriving Andean subsistence farmers of a chance to prosper, as well as Kenyan farmers, sugar growers and even Chinese computer-makers.

And now, according to The Guardian, it is the turn of tens of thousands of impoverished banana plantation workers and small producers in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Their livelihoods have been put at risk by planned changes to the EU's banana import regime, where the plan is to dispense with a complex system of quotas and tariffs with a single fixed rate tariff of €230 a ton by 2006, compared with the current €75.

Driven by the demands of European supermarket chains for low-priced fruit, this means that multinational corporations controlling the global market are already slashing wages, closing plantations and shifting to even lower-cost countries with a non-union culture.

This is what poverty campaigners call the "race to the bottom" and it will particularly affect Caribbean producers who supply 20 percent of the EU market. Latin American countries, which provide 60 percent, could lose a third of their exports or £400m a year and at least 75,000 jobs.

So damaging will this be that, together with its other baleful effects on fragile, third world economies, it is no exaggeration to suggest that, over the longer term, the EU is actually worse than a tsunami.

"Who'd run a business?" asks Ruth Lea in her "personal view" published in the Daily Telegraph business section today.

Launching into familiar territory, she notes that regulations are estimated to cost business £100 billion (or 10 percent of GDP) a year, but then launches off in a tangent, suggesting that, while the regulatory burden continues to increase in this country, other continental economies are beginning to recognise the problem and do something about it.

Her catalogue of woes makes sombre reading, not least because a substantial part of the new burden coming our way cannot be blamed on “Brussels”. There is, for instance, the "Warwick Agenda", an agreed set of employment law reforms for Labour's third term, which was decided in July 2004 between union leaders and Government ministers.

The measures included ending the "two-tier workforce" in public services, extending the ban on the dismissal of striking workers from eight to 12 weeks and increasing redundancy pay.

Then there are the proposed extensions to "family-friendly policies", including increased paid maternity leave and greater flexibility for parents with young children, as advocated by Patricia Hewitt and seconded by the Chancellor. The Chancellor specifically announced in his pre-Budget Report that paid maternity leave would increase from six months to nine months in 2007, with the goal of a year's paid maternity leave.

Nevertheless, Brussels is right there, adding to the burden. Writes Ruth Lea, the Temporary Agency Workers Directive is temporarily in abeyance, but the Information and Consultation Workers Directive is due to be phased in between 2005 and 2008 and the Equal Treatment Directive concerning age and disability is due in 2006.

Coincidentally, also in the pages of the business section is news of another impost - the third EU money-laundering directive due to come into force at the beginning of 2005.

The two earlier money laundering directives are estimated to have cost the British financial services sector around £100m and now, under the regime imposed by this new directive, universities and service businesses such as office cleaning companies will need to change their business practices, being prepared to notify authorities of any suspicious transactions – i.e., any customers who want to pay more than €15,000 in cash.

The third directive will draw in a host of businesses that are less attuned and not so aware of the risks of money laundering, and that will in many cases not have the necessary safeguards in place. The need for these companies to now track and report on potential money laundering attempts will introduce a new administrative burden – and cost.

It is suggested that, for many companies, the solution is to appoint a specific person to deal with the regulations but, as always, this would be costly for smaller businesses.

If these regulations actually achieved anything – like preventing terrorist activity – there might be some justification for them but, as some experts have observed, the flow of notifications has now become so great that it exceeds the authorities' capabilities to process them. Suspicious cash movements tend to be "buried" in the welter of information about perfectly legitimate transactions and the problem is now set to become considerably worse.

As always, the answer is "targeted" intelligence but this has never been the strong suit of government – and especially EU – organisations, which prefer to go through the procedural motions rather than achieve anything constructive.

Thus, in the dog days of the old year, as we look forward to the bright new year of 2005, the story remains the same – another day, another regulation. And, if Ruth Lea is asking "who'd run a business", increasingly, to the detriment of economic activity in this country, the answer is "not me, guv".

Following the embarrassing failure of the so-called Lisbon agenda which aimed to turn the EU into most competitive region in the world by 2010, a brace of commissioners have come up with another cunning plan.

First off the blocks is EU industry commissioner Guenter Verheugen, who is to launch the plan in February. Like its predecessor, it aims to boost growth across the EU, but this time the focus is on creating new jobs, especially in the services, training and leisure industries.

The plan is supported by Neelie "Board Lady" Kroes, who wants to relax competition rules on companies to boost European businesses, with easier regulations on state subsidies for some sectors She is targeting "unnecessary administrative hurdles", seeking to make the whole control system made "more transparent and less complex".

What is worrying is that Verheugen is calling the plan a "real cultural revolution", an unfortunate choice of words, considering what happened during the last one. But then he is also stating that he wants to "dust off" the current strategy on growth, perhaps unaware that this term was Vietnam-era jargon for helicopter medivac.

Giving more subsidies on easier terms certainly seems to fit this bill, as does another element of this "cunning plan" – doubling EU funding on research to €40bn over the next four years, with tighter co-operation between universities and industry

What nobody seem to be mentioning, however, is the €1 trillion drag on EU member state economies resulting from the rigidity of the social market economy and the stifling regulatory regime. But then, if the new commissions were to get to grips with that, they really would need a cunning plan.

Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister Luxembourg, heading one of the smallest countries in the EU, is planning to take Germany, France and Italy head-on over the Growth and Stability Pacy when his country assumes the EU presidency on 1 January.

He has rejected proposals from the triumvirate to exclude certain types of spending from the eurozone's rules. This, Juncker says, would "open a Pandora's box" and weaken the pact.

Schröder wanted Germany’s net contributions to the EU budget to be taken into account when assessing whether it had broken the pact's three percent deficit limit, the French wanted military spending to be excluded from deficit calculations while the Italian sought to exclude research and development expenditure.

Not mincing words, Juncker has told the Financial Times that he “strongly opposes” removing categories of expenditure from the pact and is working on his own plans for revised rules which he hopes to unveil "by March at the latest".

He is thinking along the lines of keeping the 3 percent deficit ceiling, but giving defaulters "flexibility" in setting timetables to eliminate "excessive" deficits. Countries investing in long-term structural reform of pensions reform or investing for the future would be given more time, as would those with low levels of public debt.

This last proposal will put Juncker up against Berlusconi, who is arguing against the emphasis on debt. His country is massively over the 60 percent pact limit at 106 percent of GDP, a level exceeded only by Greece and comparing rather unfavourably with Luxembourg's four percent.

However, Juncker also appears to be willing to take on Greece, proposing sanctions for countries that disguise deficit and debt problems with false data. "We need to have specific procedures for this kind of behaviour," he says. "If we had had the Greek case two years ago, it would have affected the exchange rate credibility of the currency."

A small man from a small country Juncker may be, but looks like aiming to carry a big stick. However, as we have so often found, when it comes to dealing with the Growth and Stability Pact, words are cheap.

On this morning's BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Peter Mandelson called for Britain to use the referendum to "re-cement" its relationship with Europe.

"Every generation or so in Britain, there needs to be an opportunity to re-state or re-cement our commitment to the European Union," he told the programme. "This is one such opportunity and I think people need to seize it."

Nevertheless, he announced that he would not be playing a central role in the campaign, but would be cheering on Tony Blair "from the sidelines."

Not cheering at all, however, according to the Warsaw Business Journal, are Polish politicians. They seem to be falling over themselves in their haste not to hold their referendum.

At the very earliest, President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, together with left wing parties, wants the referendum to be held at the same time as next year's presidential election.

Worried that the turnout might not meet the requirements for a minimum 50 percent vote, he believes that the presidential elections might attract more voters than the referendum held on its own.

But the main opposition parties want to leave the referendum until 2006, until after UK has held its vote, in the expectation that the constitution will be rejected. The hope is then that Poland will not have to hold its own referendum.

Perhaps they need to borrow some cement from Mr Mandelson.

No one but the hardest-hearted could do anything other than applaud the decision of the EU to send €3 million aid to help the victims of the tsunami which hit southern Asia on Sunday, with a death toll running into thousands.

While every little helps however, one cannot escape the thought that this is merely gesture politics, not least as the Australian government has pledged twice that – over €7 million - in immediate aid and like sums are pouring in from all over the world in cash and in kind.

But if such a comparison does strike a sour note, then it is well merited as the damage the EU does over term to third world economies is in no way compensated for by occasional largess, offered as high profile donations in times of emergency.

This is brought home by a feature article today on the CNN website, which explores the effects of EU trade policies and restrictions on the agricultural economy of Peru.

Such is the obsession with "health 'n' safety", observes scientist Michael Hermann of the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute in Colombia, that if the humble potato, discovered in Peru by the Spanish conquistadors five centuries ago, has only been discovered today, it would almost certainly have been banned from entering the EU market.

That is because potatoes can be toxic, and though they have been an integral part of the South American diet for hundreds of years, they would not pass muster now if measured against the European Union's strict standards for new foods, says Hermann. Furthermore, wheat, a staple that can trigger allergies to gluten, would probably also be vetoed, he adds.

The issue is far from academic, as there are many other plant varieties in Peru, commonly consumed by natives, which are as exotic abroad as potatoes once were. They could also find big markets among European shoppers if they could get through the door but current restrictions prevent their exploitation.

Many have health properties that are recognized locally. One is Yacon, a sweet root said to be beneficial to diabetics; another, the fruit camu camu, has at least 30 times the vitamin C content of oranges, and the oil from the sacha inchi vine is rich in Omega-3 and Omega-6 essential fatty acids that can protect the heart and lower cholesterol.

Although yacon and camu camu are already sold in Japan and the United States, full EU entry is on hold, pending approval under the Novel Food Regulation. That law requires extensive scientific data as proof that foods not widely known in an EU country before May 1997 can be deemed safe.

The approval process is also time-consuming. Exporters say it can take years and cost around $100,000 - prohibitive for small companies trying to market niche products that often lack scientific studies to back them up. Michael Hermann believes the novel food law places an "unreasonably high burden of proof" on producers.

Yet the authentic voice of the EU commission is pitiless: "We cannot lower our guard," says commission spokesman Philip Tod. "If you don't have the (scientific) data, we can't waive our safety rules," he adds. "The Commission can't cut corners with public health, however laudable the intention."

This is a man who, from the comfort of his Brussels base, supports a system that denies Andean farmers the opportunity to better themselves, in an area where more than half the population lives on $1.25 a day or less. The value to Peru of an EU market in such novel foods is estimated to be worth $10 million a year.

Against that, the one-off donation of €3 million to the stricken countries of south Asia is indeed little more than a gesture – almost conscience money – for, while this gift grabs the headlines, behind the scenes the damage done far outweighs what little support the EU has offered.

I’d never heard of it before but yourDictionary.com has just released eight different "Words of the Year" lists featuring the Top Words, Names, Phrases, Numbers, California YouthSpeak, Internet, Sports-related, and Colour-related Words, as well as the Top Words in Pop Music and the Most Frequently Spoken Word On The Planet.

Predictably, the most frequently spoken word on the planet is "OK" but what is really interesting is the "Top word" list. At number four is "Blogosphere", the realm of the weblog. But sneaking in at number ten is "Eurosceptic", reflecting the increased usage of this word and its growing political importance.

There is also an additional "bonus word", a completely new entrant to the English language: Pajamahadeen. It describes those bloggers who have taken a prominent role in vetting (or ensuring the accuracy) of mainstream media news coverage. Its origin stems from the myth (slur?) that bloggers work in their dressing gowns and/or pyjamas – something which is, of course, never true of this Bog.

Either way, whether "pajamahadeen" or "eurosceptic", we are making a mark.

The Mail on Sunday today quotes Michael Howard promising to axe one in five MPs and ministers, and one in three of "the army of spin doctors" recruited by Labour. Getting rid of the MPs, he says, would save £25 million a year, taking into account expenses and overheads.

Without actually admitting it, Howard is nevertheless acknowledging that which we all know, that MPs by and large are a waste of time and space – nothing more than "glorified social workers" as Tony Banks recently described them. With so much legislation being passed by Brussels, going nowhere near parliament, it is hard to disagree.

However, if Howard really wants to save some money, why does he not abolish the MEPs rather than the MPs? That alone could save of better than £80 million and if he goes the whole hog and gets us out of the EU altogether, we gain over £9 billion in saved contributions plus anything up to £20 billion a year in regulatory costs.

For that price, I would even be happy to keep the number of MPs as it was – although losing a few from over-represented Scotland would be no bad thing.

It is rather fitting that one of the first stories offered by Christopher Booker the day after Christmas should be about shit – or "sewage", if you prefer the polite word.

His story actually harps back to an item he ran in August when we learned that Scottish Water was in trouble with its sewage treatment plant at Daldowie outside Glasgow. Here, a plant costing £65 million had been installed to turn 50,000 tons of sewage sludge each year - nearly half of Scotland's entire sewage residue - into pellets.

For four years, this had been feeding Scottish Power's giant 2,400-megawatt power station at Longannet in Fife with a "carbon-neutral" equivalent of 42,000 tons of coal, enough to provide electricity for 30,000 homes. But it was then the subject of a legal action awaiting judgment in the Scottish courts, this whole process is threatened with disaster.

Last winter the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa) ruled that the sewage pellets were not "fuel", but "waste". When the EC Waste Incineration Directive (WID), 2000/76 comes into law at the end of the year, Scottish Power would no longer be allowed to use the pellets to make electricity.

This set Scottish Water a huge problem. Under other EU laws it cannot dump sewage sludge at sea or in landfills. It is becoming all but impossible to use sewage sludge as fertiliser on farm land. On Sepa's interpretation of EC law, the only practical means of disposal was to burn it at great expense in incinerators - but only so long as these served no useful purpose, such as generating electricity. And the incinerators did not yet exist.

As we recounted at the time, Scottish Power had sought judicial review of Sepa's ruling, citing cases in the European Court of Justice that seemed to justify its claim that where a material can be used as fuel, it is not waste.

The judgment had been expected in September, but in fact it was only last Wednesday that the judge, Lord Reed, finally came up with his ruling. He fully upheld Sepa's interpretation of EU law and, unless an appeal succeeds, this means that Scottish Water will be in serious trouble.

The only way it will be able to dispose of sewage will be to have it incinerated, at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds. In other words, it is all right to burn it, but only in a way which produces nothing useful.

Writes Booker, "Well done, Sepa and Lord Reed. And well done Brussels, for bringing us yet another of those ‘environmental benefits’ which Margaret Beckett likes to argue are the chief reason why we should all vote for the new EU constitution."

We are going to hear a lot more of this through the coming year. On top of the fridge debaçle – where incidentally, the Manchester clean-up is costing £850,000 and not the quarter of a million reported by the Telegraph on Friday - more and more of the mad Brussels diktats are about to kick in, not least the Waste Electronic Equipment (WEE) and the End of Life Vehicles Directives, turning our waste system into an even bigger shambles.

With a bit of luck, during this coming year, the mess the EU has made of our waste policy will become so obvious, as car wrecks litter the streets and the epidemic of fly-tipping mulitplies, that everyone will be able to see the the EU for exactly what it is - a pile of sewage.

I really could not resist this…. From the Chinese news agency Xinhuanet:

The constitutional treaty, adopted at a EU Brussels summit in June, is undoubtedly a work of genius. It is nothing short of wisdom, strategic mentality and extraordinary skills. Though constructed on a basis of delicate balances, the constitutional treaty embodies all the EU needs to further promote the integration process.

When my colleague told me about the Christmas message he was going to put up in our joint names I was in the middle of my baking (yes, I do useful things at times) and could only mutter assent as I clutched the receiver with floury hands. However, I can now take a break and support his sentiments.

Merry Christmas to all our readers, thanks for your support, interest and comments. We shall be back on Boxing Day, by which time the mellow mood of the season would have worn off.

As news and events scale down over the Christmas period, we too will be cutting back our coverage. Today and on Christmas day, posts will be very limited but we will pick up after the break with some of the analytical pieces that pressure of time has not permitted us to complete.

In the interim, both of us wish you a very happy and relaxing Christmas and thank you for your support and good wishes that brought us up to 90,000 hits. We look forward to you all being back with us after the break.

Helen & Richard

According to the Polish News Agency, "EU membership works miracles for Poland".

Over the course of the eight months since joining the EU, Poland has become the largest beneficiary of EU aid after Spain, Greece and Portugal. Over €2.5bn has been transferred from Brussels to Warsaw (against €1.3bn paid in contributions to the EU budget).

In addition, for the first time in eight years farmers' incomes have increased; over 70 percent in case of the richest farmers and by one third in the case of the less wealthy ones thanks to EU direct payments, hikes in food prices and increased exports to EU markets.

Businessmen are also satisfied with EU membership as over 90 percent have boosted their incomes. Export production has risen by 24 percent this year, companies plan to increase employment and start making new investments.

Most of the fears linked to EU accession, says the Agency, including massive emigration and a "brain drain" haven't materialised. One of the few negative aspects, however, was a rapid increase in the price of basic food products.

So that's all right then. Polish taxpayers are giving the EU pots of money to make richer farmers richer and line the pockets of businessmen, in exchange for which food prices have gone up across the board, with local shortages because so much material is being exported to the wealthy West - all against a promise of increased employment some time in the future, maybe.

Miracle? It must be how you tell 'em.

At the end of November, readers may recall the dramatic photographs of the massive fridge mountain published in some newspapers, not least the Daily Mail.

We observed at the time that this was yet another benefit of our membership of the EU but now, today, we learn from the Daily Telegraph that we are in for another treat.

In the "news in brief" section, a small article states, "fridge mountain set to subside": the mountain of 100,000 fridges is now to be cleared "with the help of £250,000 of taxpayers' cash."

But do not worry. Environment minister Elliot Morley said this was "an exceptional and isolated case". Until the next one of course.

We did of course have had a perfectly workable system of fridge collection and disposal, which cost the British taxpayer absolutely nothing until the EU and the British government screwed it up so completely.

Aren't we lucky we have such generous taxpayers who are so happy to cough up a quarter of a million readies to bail out the government when it makes cock-ups like this? And to think I spent the weekend in nick for withholding a mere £1000 tax. I might have thought different if I had known the government was going to spend my money on such a worthy cause.

The Independent is quick off the mark with a story on the fisheries council agreement, taking the greenie line as usual, headlining "EU retreat on cod ban may drive species to extinction."

Writes Stephen Castle, the Brussels correspondent, "Cod, once a staple of the British diet, could be fished close to extinction, environmentalists warned yesterday. They said a deal keeping North Sea fishing grounds open to trawlers was 'scandalous'".

But, of course, it is not really the fault of Brussels. "Under pressure from the Government, the European Commission backed away from plans to close up to a fifth of the North Sea to fishing fleets, to prevent collapse of cod stocks," Castle then adds.

"Instead, after a night of haggling, fisheries ministers emerged at 5.30am with a series of piecemeal moves, which include a one-day reduction in the days at sea permitted for some fishermen and tougher enforcement of the existing rules."

True to form, environmental groups are "furious with Britain for blocking the proposed North Sea closures", a move that comes little more than two weeks after the report from the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution proposed more drastic action. It said that, over time, 30 per cent of UK waters should be closed to fishing.

Then, Charlotte Mogensen, fisheries officer for the conservation group WWF, is given plenty of space to say: "For cod, the future looks very bleak because sufficient measures are not being taken. Ministers are putting the socio-economic aspects before the recovery of the species. If it continues this way, in the long run there will not be many fisheries to manage. It is not disappointing, it is scandalous."

Dear, oh dear, oh dear. I have already rehearsed in an earlier posting as to why fisheries closures would be disastrous, both for the fishermen and for the cod. I really, really am tired of these dim, half-witted eco-freaks who, in taking the moral high ground, aim to destroy everything they claim to hold so dear.

And these dim-wits do not even understand what is going on, much less the fishermen – and even I missed it until I saw a piece from the Malta news agency di-ve.com adding a detail which I had forgotten about.

That detail, which I have seen nowhere else – not even in the commission communiqué - informs us that: "With this new agreement, more fish will be caught during 2005 than originally planned but the quota will start decreasing during the coming years." Joe Borg, the fisheries commissioner, is then quoted saying that this would "rebuild stocks without economically crippling the fleets concerned".

Idiot! – me that is. I wrote about it when the White Paper first appeared in May 2002 – the proposed CFP "reform". This is the first year the "reform" applies and what now happens is that a mechanism comes into play called "multi-annual management plans".

Instead of quotas being determined annually at the council bunfight, they are now going to be set for a number of years.

However, while for the first year (2006) the council is allowed to set the catch – defined as "fishing mortality targets" - and the fishing effort limit, in subsequent years, the operation of the plan is to be undertaken by the commission, without needing council approval.

Thus, new broom Joe Borg is taking it softly, softly. Today the fishermen are relatively happy. Next year they are going to be screaming.

Largely, we have spared you the ins and outs of the Microsoft case, not least because "everybody" is quite happy to have a go at Bill Gates and there was an element of shadenfraude watching the EU having a go at his corporate giant.

Setting aside the prejudice engendered by the sight of too many "blue screens", each one signifying that yet again that one of Mr Gates's products have crashed and burned (although XP has been a trouble-free gem), one has to side with Bill on this one.

As most readers will be aware, the EU commission is trying to extract a whacking €497 million fine from Microsoft for its supposed abuse of dominant market position, the latter having bundled its multi-media player with its best-selling Windows operating system, thus – supposedly – freezing out its rivals.

The latest twist in the saga is that Microsoft has just failed to convince the ECJ that it should suspend enforcement action pending an appeal against the fine and, in particular, the need to produce an alternative Windows system without the media player. Microsoft was also objecting to having to disclose source code to rivals, to enable them to improve the performance of their products when used with Windows.

According to Nicholas Economides, an economics professor at New York University, "This is a very serious setback for Microsoft. It's the first time that a court has told them what they can and can't include in Windows. It's like telling General Motors what features it should have in their cars."

Setback it maybe, but the charge – and the remedy is a crock. Like millions of others, I have Windows multimedia bundled on my software, but I do not use it and have access to a number of other systems that work as well if not better. But now, Microsoft is in the mad position of having to produce two versions of Windows, one with the multimedia system and the other without, both at the same price.

You can just imagine the consume reaction: "Oh yes, I'll have the one with less features for the same price," you can hear them saying. Yea, right.

And, in future, because of this ruling, Microsoft is no longer bundling new products into future versions of Windows, so a planned anti-virus programme is to be sold separately, at additional cost. That really does help the consumer. Yet, even then, it is finding a way round, by combining more products with its Office word processing and e-mail software, which does not breach the market abuse rules.

But the biggest farce is that very few ordinary people actually buy Windows, as such. They get it pre-loaded with the computers they buy, so the choice of version is largely made by computer makers. Very few of these will risk selling their products without the multimedia version, so the "EU approved" version will be sitting on the shelves unsold.

Needless to say, though, the good 'ol EU is taking its action to protect consumers. In this, at least it is being consistent. Most other things it does it screws up, so why should it make an exception in this case?

Hands up those who knew that the next EU Presidency is Luxembourg’s. Well, it is and its Prime Minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, is beginning to throw his weight around.

The next six months should see an agreement on the 2007 – 2013 EU budget (during which period, incidentally, there will be national elections, European elections and a new Commission – none of that will have an effect on the budget, which, once agreed, rolls on).

Will it be agreed, though? And on what terms? As we know, the supposedly free-marketeer Commission President Barroso has called several times on the EU donor countries to raise their contribution to the EU budget, in order to enable the creation of new EU projects. Not one’s usual definition of a free-marketeer or liberal economic thinker, but let that pass.

Now we have M Juncker joining the chorus. As all incoming presidential leaders, he has made a statement about the next six months:

"If we don't arrive at an accord on the outlines by June 2005, it will be impossible to enact the programmes which should be available on January 1,2007."

“…to enact legislation for ambitious infrastructure projects and subsidies for the bloc's newest and relatively poorer members foreseen by the EU”.

As usual it is the Chinese news agency Xinhua that has provided an intriguing light on the general rejoicing at the somewhat belated release of the two French journalists by an Iraqi militant group. They were kidnapped in August, causing a ripple of shock in France. The French had thought that they were well protected by their anti-American stance. It turned out that various rather forceful bits of legislation, not to mention the über-forceful behaviour of the French security forces, have made France less loved by Islamic militant groups than they would like to be. How very sad.

It seems that, after a great deal of negotiation and world-wide solidarity (well, among those who owed the French government favours), many trips by various important people, most recently the troubled Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, have finally produced the desired result: the French journalists have been freed, are on their way home and President Chirac made an emotional speech on TV.

We have been here before, with the Italian aid workers. And, what do you know? Even before anyone could ask the obvious question, M Raffarin has denied that any ransom had been paid. One’s usual reaction to an unsolicited denial by a politician is deep suspicion merging into certainty that what he is denying is the truth.

It cannot be so. For we are told by the Communist Senator, Nicolas Borvo that Raffarin assured all at a meeting that there had been no demands for ransom and no payment. That should be enough to doubt the scoffers. As M (or should that be Comrade?) Borvo put it:

"He was very clear. We can consider this to be the word of the prime minister."

After the conclusion of the December fisheries council, the BBC website this afternoon proclaims: "Skippers cheer fish catch deal". This, I suspect is the cheer of condemned men who, having been told they were going to be boiled in oil are crying with relief when they find that they are only going to be boiled in water.

At first sight, however, the news does look encouraging for, as reported yesterday on this Blog, the EU commission plan to close fishing grounds in the North Sea next year has been abandoned and we now hear that a second proposal, to reduce days at sea, has also been largely given up. Scottish fishermen will be able to keep their allocation 15 a month, provided they use 120mm mesh, to reduce the by-catch of juvenile fish.

This is going part of the way towards sensible management, but it is actually the wrong approach. Proven techniques are available which enable haddock to be extracted from a mixed fishery without touching the cod – using what is known as selective gear, but once again the commission has neglected this valuable conservation measure.

Furthermore, many fishermen last year were finding that the days allocation was insufficient to catch their quota allocation and, with larger mesh sizes, longer or more hauls are needed to pull out the fish.

And even then, the days at sea allocation is not without a catch – to coin a phrase. According to the fisheries commissioner Joe Borg at the end-of-council press conference, the full allowance is contingent on the UK adopting additional enforcement measures, including a commitment to an automatic institution of administrative sanctions for infringement of regulations.

This is the equivalent of "on-the-spot" fines, and is going to give already unpopular fisheries inspectors a great deal more power, in circumstances that are inevitably going to lead to considerable injustice.

Moreover, although there are some local quota increases, quota levels overall are 15 percent down, which means that fishing opportunities throughout the waters of EU member states have been cut significantly.

While awaiting the detail – which will not be forthcoming until mid-January - perhaps the only comfort to take from the situation as we know it is the squawking of the environmental groups, which are upset that the commission has not gone ahead with fisheries closures.

Helen Davies fishing policy manager for the World Wildlife Fund, for instance, says she was "shocked" that proposals to close fishing areas had been shelved, adding: "The fishermen might be celebrating now, but we don't think these measures will help the industry at all."

Since the greenies idea of saving the fishing industry is to close down the fishing industry, that she is so "shocked" is not exactly going to cause anyone to lose any sleep.

As we know, the Commission is not going to do anything about the fact that France and Germany, the two largest economies in the eurozone, habitually break through the 3 per cent deficit barrier. (Or the fact that one after another, countries are shown to have submitted creative accounts in order to be accepted into it.) This, the smaller countries thought, was a sign that the Commission was going to turn a blind eye to all their various peccadilloes. But they were wrong in thinking that they could get away with what France and Germany can get away with. Up with this the Commission will not put.

Today the European Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia announced that they are all set to start procedures against Greece and Hungary for non-fulfilment of deficit conditions. As AFP reported it:

“Greece, which has been in breach of the limit since 1997, is targeting a 4.6 percent deficit this year and 4.1 percent in 2005. Hungary's shortfall is forecast at 4.6 percent this year and 4.1 percent in 2005.”

“Pedro Santana Lopes, the outgoing prime minister, said on Tuesday he would announce special measures this week aimed at raising the €750m ($1bn, £516m)needed by December 31 to prevent Portugal from breaching the pact's budget deficit rules.”

There are times when I feel like Victor Meldrew, the hero of the comedy series "One foot in the grave", whose famous catch phrase is, "I don't believe it…". This is definitely one of those times.

The proximate cause of my ire is an article in the Times of Malta proudly (one assumes) announcing the award of €146,000 in EU grants for a "cultural project" on cart ruts. Cart ruts, for chrissake! I don’t believe it!

Led by Malta's Museum of Archaeology, this project, called: "The Significance of Cart Ruts in Ancient Landscapes", aims, in the leaden Eurospeak of these dire lame-brains (how quickly they learn), "to bring cultural heritage into the public domain and address the role of culture in the socio-economic development of a country."

The actual project "involves the documentation and correlation of cart ruts in the Maltese Islands and Spain and includes the development of documentation techniques, the evaluation of sites, seminars on the resulting information, a publication and a travelling exhibition," all directed towards promoting "good practices in sustainable conservation, integrated heritage management and networking between stakeholders at a local and pan-European level."

Arrgggghhhhhhhh!

What is more, Malta is also involved in other cultural projects with EU grants under the so-called Culture 2000 programme. The University of Malta is a co-organiser of a project led by the Perugia local council in Italy which consists of a study of the artistic value of the Order of the Knight Templars. This project was granted €149,000 and is being conducted together with French, Spanish and Italian organisations.

Heritage Malta is participating in a project called Outstep involving its Italian, German and Greek counterparts. The project involves the cultural enhancement of historic buildings through the interaction between historic research and contemporary artworks. The EU has granted €66,000 towards this project.

And so it goes on. The University of Malta is also the co-organiser of another cultural project called Lucas, which "aims at safeguarding and highlighting the sacred woods in Europe." This project is being undertaken together with the local council of Spoleto in Italy and the French organisation Ecole D'Architecture de Toulouse.

Culture 2000 is the Commission's cultural programme and supports annual as well as multi-annual cooperation projects, “thus encouraging and promoting the establishment of European cultural networks. In 2004, 209 annual projects have been selected to a total of about €18.5 million, as well as 24 multi-annual cooperation projects (focusing on the visual arts, performing arts, cultural heritage, books and reading) to a total of about €13.5 million.

Actually – if I may be so bold as to use such an expression – this is a bloody disgrace. As far as Malta goes, it is a scandalous waste of money and resource.

The island of Malta has an unrivalled historical heritage, not least the magnificent forts of St Elmo and San Angelo, guarding the Grand Harbour of Valletta. And they are rotting away under your eyes.

St Elmo is only partially open to the public and many parts are unsafe, while San Angelo is closed up and barred. I only got in to have a look at it by bribing a workman who was helping setting up a firework display. With breathtaking vistas and the sheer staggering scale of the fortress, with the knowledge of its history, the visit was unforgettable. Yet, as I say, these priceless monuments are rotting away, empty and uncared for.

Only a few miles away is the Island of Gozo and dominating the capital Victoria is the castle, of the same name. It has been superbly and sensitively restored, and is fully open to the public, with a splendid roof top restaurant from which one can survey the whole island – it does a roaring trade.

The Valletta forts could do likewise, but there are more ghosts there than people promenading on their splendid walls. And the EU fritters money away on cart ruts. It really is an absolute, utter disgrace. But then, what do you expect.

While Hungary might have had an easy ride getting the constitution passed its compliant legislature, things are not going quite so swimmingly on the western edge of the evil empire.

Portugal, already rocked by political chaos, has now had its constitutional referendum plans thrown into chaos by its own constitutional court. It has rejected the wording of the question laborious hammered out by a fractious parliament, agreed on 18 November after weeks of wrangling.

The question that all parties agreed on was the mind-bogglingly complex: "Do you agree with the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the rule of voting by qualified majority and the new institutional framework of the European Union, in the terms included in the European constitution?", which led the constitutional court to declare the judicial equivalent of "no way, hosay" – in Portuguese, of course.

The judges actually took a long hard look at the wording and decided that it was impossible to answer by a clear Yes or No, which made it unconstitutional.

However, with the Portuguese parliament about to be dissolved after the enforced resignation of the government, there is not now time for the government to propose new wording before elections, to be held on February 20. This means that the referendum, initially scheduled for April, will now almost certainly be pushed back.

This also adds uncertainty to the result for, while the Portuguese are generally pro-EU, their referendums traditionally suffer from low turn-out and there is concern about the consequences of a possible No vote as people dismiss the referendum as a farce and stay at home in their droves.

Meanwhile, across the border in sunny Spain, rain is clearly falling on the constitutional parade.

Having surmounted one hurdle by getting the constitutional court to declare that the EU constitution was compatible their own, the government is finding that nearly 60 percent of Spaniards are now telling pollsters that they fall into the “undecided” category, when it comes to casting their vote at the referendum. That is against 28 percent who said they planned to vote in favour of the constitutional text.

Planned in February, the referendum result looks distinctly shaky, as a similar poll carried out in October had 42.6 percent undecided, 36.5 in favour and 3.2 percent against.

What was particularly fascinating was that the poll also showed that 93.6 percent of those questioned said they planned to cast their ballot, a turnout rate which would be unheard of in Spain since democratic rule was installed 27 years ago. It would be seriously ironic if, after all the largess thrown at the Spanish, it was they who ditched the constitution.

We can always dream...

It took the various environment ministers two weeks to come to a conclusion for the next step after the expiry of the Kyoto protocol in 2012. Negotiations and tense stand-offs dragged on for days, even though many participants left. And the solution: a conference next May in Bonn.

The agreement was proudly described as a compromise between the European and the American point of view. In fact, as the Dutch Environment Minister, Pieter Van Giel put it:

"We fought hard to get this agreement. It is not as much as we had hoped for, but it is a step forward and that is important. In this process it takes two to tango. I am very glad that everybody is on the dance floor now."

“The EU wanted several informal meetings on strengthening the international fight against climate change that would include the United States.”

As well as an indefatigable Blogger on this site, our very own Helen Szamuely also runs the UKIP London Assembly Blog.

Her latest posting there is well worth a look, demonstrating as it does that stupid, pompous and self-important politicians are by no means confined to the EU - as if any of you needed telling that.

Flagged up in our earlier posting, the annual bunfight on fishing is under way in Brussels, with the fisheries ministers of the 25 EU member states meeting to doll out the fish quotas for the forthcoming year.

The hot item on the agenda was a commission proposal to close down 20 percent of the North Sea, with similar closures in the Irish Sea, in pursuit of Franz Fischler’s (the outgoing fisheries commissioner) obsession with protecting the cod stocks.

Early reports of the proceedings, however, indicate that this draconian proposal has been deep sixed in what has been described as a "surprise climbdown" by the commission, now headed by the Maltese Joe Borg.

This will come as a pleasant relief to fisheries minister Ben "Rear Admiral" Bradshaw and his Scottish counterpart Ross Finnie, who will have something with which to go home and claim as "a victory for British fishermen" - something of a ritual outcome for fisheries meetings.

Experienced EU watcher, however, will know to hold off their celebrations until they have seen the small print, as what so often looks like good news turns out to be the opposite once the detail comes in.

At the moment, ministers are haggling over an alternative proposal – a reduction in the number of permitted fishing days at sea from the current 15 a month to 13 – which Bradshaw and Finnie are also supposed to be fighting.

This sort of thing is also wearily familiar, where British ministers get the headlines they want, and then go through ritual haggling over the detail, only to cave in as the talks run into the wee small hours, and the commission gets its way.

If days at sea a cut back, fishermen - who are looking for extra haddock quota in the North Sea, may find they are allocated the fish but are not given enough time in which to catch it, making the concession an empty gesture. Furthermore, whole new rafts of obscure "red tape" are proposed, all of which will make fishing more difficult.

But the detail is so often swamped by the headline and after the media caravan packs its tent, no one reports the anguish of the fishermen in the early days of January, when they realise they have been shafted yet again.

So far, then, the annual bunfight is running true to form and we wait only to find out not whether our fishermen have been betrayed, but how exactly it will be done this time round.

President Putin is visiting Germany, the country with which he has had a long and warm(ish) relationship. It was, after all, in Leipzig that much of his active service as KGB officer passed and where he picked up his supposedly flawless German.

His present friendship with Chancellor Schröder, clearly cannot date back that far but it does raise some interesting and disquieting questions.

The EU has sometimes been seen as a necessary bulwark against an increasingly aggressive, though not precisely confident Russia. In the discussions about the need for endless enlargement, sooner or later somebody points out that the need to take in all the European countries, whether it is the most sensible policy from anybody’s point of view or not, is clear because of Russia. These countries need protections and Europe must stand together.

Alas, the EU does not see it that way. In fact, for various reasons, a central plank of its barely-existent common foreign policy is close friendship with Russia. This, clearly, does not go down terribly well with the new East European members and, in particular, the Baltic states, who have put some pressure on the West Europeans to toughen their stance, if only a little.

During the last bout of the Ukrainian crisis, Javier Solana did a good deal of toing and froing, not to mention wringing of hands, trying to bring about some sort of a compromise. Unfortunately, it was not compromise or stability that the Ukrainians wanted but transparency in the electoral process. The EU was sidelined very early on.

It was suggested by many at the time that negotiations should be conducted by two countries that knew best about the Ukrainian situation and were most closely connected with it historically: Germany and Poland. The Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski, together with his Lithuanian counterpart, rose to the challenge, supporting the people’s revolution and the calls for democratic accountability. Germany demurred. Chancellor Schröder had no desire to annoy his good friend Vladimir.

Schröder’s attitude has caused some disquiet in his own party. He has steadily refused to subscribe even to the mild criticism that other European leaders have expressed of Russia’s behaviour in Chechnya and has called President Putin a “flawless democrat”, an odd statement in the light of recent political decisions in Russia.

The warm and disturbing friendship is not based on purely personal alchemy or the wearisome preference western European leaders show for dictators: there is a purely practical aspect, as well. Germany gets a third of its oil and gas from Russia, while bilateral trade was worth $25bn (18.6bn euros or £12.8bn) last year and is growing steadily.

As Russia works hard to increase its share of the gas and oil supplied to the West and tries to take over the distribution networks, we may see similar friendships flourishing in other countries. Not quite what the East Europeans expected when they joined the EU.

Another one of the new member states has ratified the European Constitution without bothering to call a referendum, possibly because recent turn-outs for elections and, especially, referendums has been very low.

The Hungarian Parliament voted the treaty through without any difficulty, though there seems to be some dispute about numbers. The BBC says that 304 deputies voted in favour with 9 against, 8 abstentions and 64 absent.

The International Herald Tribune says there were 322 votes in favour, 12 against and 8 abstentions with 44 absent. You pays your money and you takes your choice but the result is clear enough, as is the lack of desire to find out what the people of the country think or not think.

The other news from Hungary is that its troops (300 plus equipment) in Iraq are being brought home at the expiration of their mandate, which was not renewed by the Hungarian parliament in view of the forthcoming Iraqi elections. However, Hungary has committed another 150 troops to be sent next June for the probable duration of about one year.

Well, despite everything, we do have our occasional victories, and this one is down to the Blog readers… well done!

What triggered this off was a piece in the Telegraph business section, Monday week last, which asked their readers for nominations "for the central or local government agency associated with the most mind-bogglingly frustrating piece of red tape during 2004." Yet, while all the suggestions offered in the piece referred to British agencies, most to the examples cited were of EU law.

We drew attention to this in the Blog, inviting our readers to write in to the piece author, nominating the EU commission’s DG Environment as "the central government agency" associated with the most mind-bogglingly frustrating piece of red tape

And bless you all – you did! In yesterday's Telegraph (I'm having to catch up), headed: "By a red tape mile, the winners are…!, it turned out that: "Environmental rule makers from here to Brussels take top spot in our inaugural awards”. DG Environment got the "Telegraph Regulatory Creep of the Year".

Initially, according to Richard Tyler, "reader despair was directed at the Financial Services Authority, with Customs & Excise, the Health & Safety Executive, Inland Revenue and the Treasury all picking up votes."

After a slow start, Patricia Hewitt's Department of Trade and Industry and Margaret Beckett's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs then came into contention. And then, Tyler writes: "At the same time, the European Commission's directorate for environmental regulations picked up votes." The final count saw Defra and the EC's (sic) environment directorate tie for the top spot.

We don't begrudge sharing the poll position with Defra – they do indeed produce some pretty foul legislation, unaided by Brussels, even if most of their stuff comes directly from that source.

What was doubly pleasing, though, was that Matthew Farrow, head of environment at the CBI, said he was surprised environmental regulation had come out top in the voting.

It suggested, he said, that the constant stream of new regulations was wearing businesses down. "It's the sheer volume of EU regulations," he said. "There have been over 200 directives on the environment and 32 EU-driven regulations on are in the pipeline".

With faith in our readers, we weren't surprised. Perhaps Mr Farrow should read the Blog. He might lean something.

"Readers", according to Richard Tyler, "were keenly aware that most of the environmental regulations were emanating from Brussels." He cites Denis Cooper, a regular visitor and commenter on our Blog, wrote: "The Regulatory Creep of the Year must live in Brussels, not London, and the worst could be whatever section deals with environment."

Harry Randall, another frequent guest on the Blog, "agreed". He wrote: "For the sheer scale of stupidity of its imposts, I nominate DG Environment. It, not the Environment Agency, was responsible for reclassifying everyday items like computers and fluorescent lights as hazardous, and it produced the legislation that required the number of sites licensed to deal with such waste to be slashed from 182 to 14."

Harry was good enough to tell us that he had lifted the text of his nomination straight off the Blog. His accolade in the Telegraph was well deserved.

What also must have helped was a mention of the award in Christopher Booker's column on Sunday, with Booker also launching his own award with the following words:

I hereby offer a first edition of The Great Deception, the history of the European Union that I wrote with Dr Richard North, as the Elephant in the Room Award 2005. This will be given to the person who spots the most crassly naive example of someone blaming the British Government for a bureaucratic imposition that in fact originates from our real government in Brussels. Special marks will be awarded for spotting contributions from politicians, such as the MP for Henley, who are paid by taxpayers to know better.

In today’s Wall Street Journal Europe Daniel Henninger says, rather unkindly but amusingly:

“ ‘American influence’ is the great white whale of the 21st century, and Jacques Chirac is the Ahab chasing her with a three-masted schooner. Along for the ride is a crew that includes Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il, Kofi Annan, the Saudi royal family, Robert Mugabe, the state committee of Communist China and various others who have ordained themselves leaders for life. At night, seated around the rum keg, they talk about how they have to stop American political power, the Marines or Hollywood.”

“What will be the credibility of an international channel that is led by a multinational with benefits that are dependent on good relations with the government?”

Michael Howard apparently thinks that internal passports (a.k.a. ID cards) are a good thing and insists that he has been assured by police and security chiefs that they are indispensable in the fight against crime and terrorism.

UKIP at the London Assembly has issued a press release challenging him to produce the evidence. In other words: put up or shut up.

Read the full story on the UKIP London Assembly blog.

There can be and is no other explanation - to send two unformed officers to my house at 11.35 on a Saturday night - the busiest period for the police - with instructions to break in to the house and bring me in.

This was an action timed to cause the greatest possible distress and inconvenience, proving once again that, when it comes to police priorities, debt collection (i.e., council tax recovery) stands head and shoulders above such issues as burglary, car crime and the rest.

Anyhow, after 34 hellish hours banged up in a cell 9ft x 9ft, mostly in solitary, I'm back and will begin blogging soon. Thank you Helen for keeping the Blog warm. I will post details of the latest confrontation with what are laughingly called the forces of law and order on our sister blog, prisonerjw7874, later today.

The American commentator in this case is, in fact, a French citizen who has lived in the United States for thirty-three years. So, his views can be seen as well-meaning American. Jean-Loup Archawski is a retired businessman and a member of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s (FPRI) Study Group on America and the West.

He has produced an interesting though somewhat bemused analysis of the European Constitution, clearly attempting to explain the inexplicable. Mr Archawski can be described as both an insider – presumably his links with France are closer than the average American political analyst’s – and an outside commentator. After all, he does not live there. Also, he knows that his audience, that small part of the American public that is interested in European politics, is unlikely to find its way through the maze of it.

His analysis is, therefore, of some interest. He makes the usual point that this is not a constitution as has been understood until now. A constitution ought to be a brief and precise definition of the various parts of the state, their relationship with each other and the relationship between the state and the individual. The European Constitution is not brief, seriously imprecise and goes far beyond the usual scope of such a document.

As Mr Archawski puts it, echoing (probably not realizing that he does so) certain points we have already made on this blog about the managerial style of governance:

“The form of suggested governance is neither a confederation nor a federation. The document reads more like the by-laws of a very large corporation or a bureaucratic behemoth rather than like a constitution organizing the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.”

Goodness me, whatever will they think of next? Apparently, the recently launched EU operation in Bosnia (where the same NATO troops without most of the Americans merely exchanged one lot of badges for another) is considering the use of psychological operations (PsyOps). These will consist of them trying to persuade the local population that the troops are actually very friendly and want to bring peace and harmony. Oh, and also, please could you disarm and make our lives easier.

One EU military officer (nationality not mentioned) told the European Voice:

“In Bosnia, we see it [PsyOps] as a means to promote ethnic tolerance and to talk people into handing over illegal weapons. If you call it propaganda, that is OK. But propaganda is a loaded word. And our approach would be different to that of the US.”

“The US defence department defines PsyOps as operations to convey information to an audience in order to influence their emotions, motives and behaviour. Its purpose is to induce or reinforce attitudes favourable to a military undertaking. In Iraq, PsyOps have included broadcasting messages outside mosques and sending emails to senior personnel in Saddam Hussein’s army, offering them clemency in return for help in locating weapons of mass destruction.”

“People tend to like Europeans more. If I was advising Javier Solana [the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs], I would say emphasize the holistic approach. Say ‘yes, we have soldiers in your country. But we also have aid workers, diplomats, judges. So this is not just about stopping a conflict but we care about the reconstruction of your country too’.”

Maybe they are just trying to prove that this blog is right. No sooner do we publish an analysis of the unstoppable enlargement process, there being no alternative strategies, than the Commission announces that it will bring negotiations with Croatia forward by a month if that country agrees to co-operate fully with the Hague war crimes court, whose examination of the crimes carried out during the ten-year long Yugoslav war is threatening to take longer than the actual hostilities.

Croatian Prime Minister, Ivo Sanader, has promised to hand over the main suspect, General Ante Gotovina, who stands accused of the murder of 100 ethnic Serbs and the expulsion of 150,000 more from their homes.

This promise appears to be enough. Commission President Barroso has announced that close co-operation with the international war crimes court was essential to Croatia’s participation in European integration.

Romania and Bulgaria are being invited to sign entry treaties in April, ahead (rather well ahead, really) of their planned entry in 2007.

The whole thing is completely mad. None of these countries have achieved anything remotely resembling transparent and accountable democracy, honourable polity or economic growth. Come to think of it, that makes them perfect EU members. But how exactly are they all going to be integrated and into what?

Barroso is beginning to sound rather feverish in his repeated assertions about the need for the EU to go on expanding and integrating, no matter what the problems are internally and no matter which outside country we are dealing with. The only ones definitively being left out are Ukraine and Belarus, presumably not to antagonize Russia too much. But has he or, indeed, any of his advisers given any thought to what is the ultimate aim of all this neurotic expansionism is?

The EU’s spokespersons (Solana, Chirac, sometimes Schröder, and sundry others, such as the Foreign Minister of Luxembourg) have echoed the UN’s stand and Kofi Annan’s oft repeated assertion that the Iraqi election should be postponed because of the continuing, though diminishing problems in that country. One can just imagine what would happen if the election were to be postponed. The same people would dance a jig of joy, pointing a finger at American imperialism and President Bush’s refusal to let Iraqis rule themselves. Send in the UN they would proclaim.

Well, the elections in Iraq are, it seems, going ahead though with minimal UN involvement as Secretary General Annan is refusing to commit any more officials. (He it was who refused to commit more peacekeepers in Rwanda just over ten years ago, as it disintegrated into the largest massacre this side of 1945.)

However, in another country where UN troops have been present to no good effect whatsoever, elections are, according to the EU to go ahead: DR Congo, recently described as the biggest man-made catastrophe in the world.

The war in DR Congo has been going on for about seven or eight years and has involved the armies of six surrounding countries, not to mention several domestic government and rebel armies. It has resulted in about 3 million deaths (that is, I accept, a conservative estimate) and the complete destruction of various parts of the country.

The UN has had thousands of troops stationed there with very little result. In fact, the only time we heard about them was when they were accused of various malpractice, including rape of women and girls, some of them very young. The EU also rather proudly sent 800 troops, all of whom stayed in the barracks, too terrified (with good reason) to go out.

Now Louis Michel, the new Development and Humanitarian Aid Commissar (we have had occasion to wonder whether any development will happen in the Third World while those two concepts remain so closely tied in people’s minds) has announced that DR Congo has reached peace and stability. This seems to be at odds with everybody else’s reports, particularly from the eastern part of the country. But M Michel is unperturbed. Elections will go ahead in the country in June and the EU has committed €80 million (£55 million, $106 million) for that purpose.

My predictions are that the sum will grow over the next few months; that there will be no proper accounting; that the elections will be held (if at all) in circumstances of total mayhem, corruption and violence; and that eventually the Court of Auditors will produce a report that will show conclusively that not one euro devoted to DR Congo can be accounted for, some disappearing in that country, some before they even get there. Anyone would like to take me up on any of that?

My colleague is still “indisposed” or rather in the jug, where he is undoubtedly creating mayhem. He is due to appear before the magistrate tomorrow. All his friends hope that he will be sensible enough to get himself released to do real and important work. Further information will be posted as it becomes available.

In an effort to get away from the obsessions of the British media – Blunkett and Beckham with attached partners, children etc – I (for my colleague is still “indisposed”) looked at the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty site.

They conducted an unofficial poll among “broadcasters, editors, correspondents and analysts” to find the top 10 news stories of the year. The list seemed interesting enough to be reproduced on this blog.

Starting from the bottom as is proper with news and beauty contests, we get the world’s most expensive Olympics in Athens weighing in at number 10. RFE/RL, I am glad to say, also managed to refer to one of the most interesting aspects of the Games, the presence of an Afghanistani team, which included women athletes. I do not recall much discussion of that in the British media or of any serious appreciation as to how that was made possible.

At number 9, we have Darfur and the American announcement that they considered this to be genocide. This is particularly poignant as news comes in that once again, the Sudan armies and militias are ignoring the deadlines on disarming.

Number 8 is the dollar’s decline, blamed by some experts on the huge trade and budget deficit. Europe is fretting about the effect that might have on its own economies.

Story number 7 is the Madrid bombing and the subsequent electoral upset with all the attendant consequences. (Incidentally, am I still the only person who is wondering how a dozen or so backpacks could have been left lying around the underground system without a single report being made to the police?)

Number 6 is the EU enlargement on May 1 and number 5 is the handing over power to the Iraqi interim government, led by Iyad Allawi, who addressed Congress to convey his thanks to the American people.

Number 4 is the death of Yasser Arafat, which may well give the necessary impetus to the Middle East peace process, which may finally stop being a process (a weasel word if ever there was one) and become reality.

The three top stories line up as follows:

Number 3 is the American election with President Bush winning a comfortable majority for a second term.

Number 2 is the shocking massacre of children in Beslan, still not properly investigated, and the beginning of a Russia’s rapid spiralling down into autocracy.

Number 1 is the Ukrainian election earlier this month and the stunning popular victory in the achievement of a second run-off.

As ever with lists, people might disagree, not so much with the actual stories but with the order they are placed in. But what struck me very forcibly is how little any of them had to do with the EU. The only definitely EU story is enlargement. Otherwise that great and good body that is supposed to put Europe on the map and make it enormously important appears negatively: it is worried about the slide of the dollar.

Individual European countries do appear: Spain, of course, Greece in a slightly indeterminate fashion, Poland and the Baltic states behind the scenes in the Ukrainian crisis, but not the European Union. How can one account for this?

According to a note from a mutual friend I found when I returned home last night, my colleague on this blog has once again fallen foul of the West Yorkshire constabulary. Just before midnight he was arrested by two police officers, described to me as “verbally aggressive” and carted off to the hoosegow, a.k.a. Bradford Central Police Station.

It seems he owes a largish sum on his local council bill but was not allowed to pay by credit card or go and take money from a friendly hole in the wall. (Not that many of those late on Saturday night in and around Bradford.)

He was allowed a phone call, which he made to a friendly journalist (much more useful than a solicitor) but since then attempts to communicate with him or with the police station have been thwarted.

I shall, in between publishing other news, try to keep our readers informed of the latest developments in this saga. All discussions about planes, tanks and other bits of machinery will have to wait till Dr North is free to indulge in them again.

Even the British government has accepted, though almost certainly only temporarily, that the people of Gibraltar do not want to be ruled by Spain, do not want to be co-ruled by Spain and do want some say in their own future.

The present Spanish government seems to have come close to grasping this. At least there is news that Gibraltar will be represented in future intergovernmental negotiations about the Rock’s future. But, hey, there is always one. The Spanish opposition Popular Party has expressed its shock and horror at this “unilateral” decision. One wonders if “unilateral” is quite the word they wanted but there we are.

It is, according to Mariano Rajoy, leader of the Popular Party, “simply humiliating” to have Gibraltarians discussing their own future.

The people of Gibraltar have several times voted overwhelmingly in favour of remaining British, most recently two years ago. Neither the British nor the Spanish government recognized the validity of the referendum. Presumably, had it been for that joint sovereignty plan, the vote would have been accepted and praised as a symbol of modern politics. But the word no is not something people should utter to politicians.

It was always inevitable, I suppose, that we would have to buy more of the great white elephant of the skies, the Eurofighter – which the RAF now insists on calling the Typhoon but forever should be known as Heseltine's folly.

Having bound up the Germans so tightly in cancellation penalties, to stop them pulling out of the project, Hoon has been hoist with his own petard and has been forced to buy another 89 of the beasts (see link). The costs of cancellation were so great that the alternative would have been have no new toys for the RAF and stumping up mega-zillions of dosh to keep our European partners happy – and HMG out of the law courts.

The day after savaging the Army, therefore, Hoon travelled up to RAF Coningsby in Lincs, to surround himself with "steely-eyed killers" (as we used to call ourselves) exuding confidence in the new toy. Of course, after driving around in clapped-out old Tornado F3s, even flying a Tiger Moth might seem exhilarating, so it is hardly surprising to see the lads trilling over their new piece of kit.

By all accounts the Eurofighter is now a superb aeroplane, from a boy-racer point of view, but that does not make it any more or less of a white elephant. It was originally designed as an air superiority fighter in the days of the Cold War and its original function is largely redundant.

On the other hand, the latest tranche is the ground attack version, which is more suited to current tasks except that, at £60 million a piece, the aircraft are far too expensive to risk in a high-threat environment, against low-value targets. And that is precisely what they will be used for, as we pointed out in a previous posting.

It is the economic equivalent of doing the shopping in a Formula 1 racing car, with the added hazard of the local hoodlums taking potshots at you as you drive to the supermarket.

The whole debaçle, however, raises the broader question of what we want our armed forces to do. As with the Army, we should be asking ourselves what we need the RAF to do, and whether we can afford it.

Here, the United States has been doing some heart-searching in a way that does not seem evident over here. The Pentagon has been building a catalogue of "threat scenarios" which is guiding the thinking on what kind of weapons and technology will be needed to meet future demands.

Trimmed down to its essentials, they have come up with four separate scenarios: the "irregular", comprising the threat of terrorism, insurgency and civil war in areas of strategic interest to the US; the "catastophic", such as a repeat of 9/11, terrorist use of WMD or a rogue nation missile attack; the "traditional", amounting to a conventional air, sea and land war; and "disruptive", which include such elements of "cyber-operations", attempts to disrupt major computer systems of economic or operational importance.

Taking the four categories, each is assessed in terms of probability and vulnerability. Only one, the "catastrophic" threat scores highly in both realms, while conventional war scores low on both.

If we apply this sort of threat assessment to a UK context, the precise mix may differ slightly but the probability of a conventional war, for which the Eurofighter was designed, is equally unlikely. Thus, whichever way you cut it, the primary threats are unlikely to be those for which the Eurofighter is best equipped to deal.

It seems, therefore, that the larger proportion of our defence budget is being spent on the least important threats – all in the interests of European co-operation which long since ceased to have any meaning.

At the moment that is what we are all doing but not for much longer. As my colleague has written, the preliminary hoopla is now over and we are all settling in for a long haul of at least ten, if not fifteen years. During that time all sorts of complications will arise, not just with Turkey but with the other countries that are seeking accession: Romania and Bulgaria and with the EU itself.

Strangely enough, that comment that we cannot tell what the EU will be like in ten years’ time because of its own internal problems elicited no particular disagreement in the discussion I took part in this morning on ITN. The other participants were the Head of Politics at Goldsmith College, London and the Executive Director of the Kurdish Human Rights Project. It was a very civilized discussion and we agreed on many things. What struck me was that my interlocutors, since they were not exactly opponents, seemed rather bemused. They thought that Turkey joining the EU was quite a good idea for Turkey but were well aware of the opposing arguments. But they did not see what other solutions there were.

That, really, is the problem and, I am pleased to say, I managed to raise it during the discussion. Despite the chatter about the common foreign policy, the need to make Europe’s voice heard, the special European values, the EU, in fact, has no idea what to do with other countries. The root of the problem is the nonsense of a common foreign policy when there are no common interests or, even, a common outlook on world affairs. And that goes back to Europe’s diverse and often incompatible history.

Like certain biological organisms, the EU’s existence is necessarily enlargement. Its much touted common foreign and security policy has to be proactive or cease to exist. Action without an obvious purpose is a dangerous element. Potentially, the EU’s necessity to have foreign action and to keep enlarging because it sees no alternatives, is destabilizing.

The now accepted idea that as soon as it is capable of doing so, the EU should send combat groups to sort out troublesome parts of the world in order to further the CFSP reminds one of nothing so much as the usual policy of a weak dictatorship: have a foreign adventure or two in order to take people’s minds off the problems at home.

Nowhere is this vacuum seen more clearly than in the EU’s dealings with the neighbouring countries. Back in 1998 as the negotiations with the East European countries were coming into their own Bill Jamieson (then Economic Editor of the Sunday Telegraph) and I wrote a paper in which we argued that enlargement to the east was not in anybody’s interest, least of all the post-Communist countries. Instead, we said, the EU should take this opportunity to review its own ideological attitudes and start turning the whole structure into a series of free-market agreements.

Naturally, this was not accepted and we were criticized by, among others, Sir Samuel Brittan for producing a political and economic heresy. Early next year I shall be attending the 10th Central and Eastern European Forum, organized by Euromoney plc. The starting point of the conference is rather a sad one. The East European countries, having made enormous advances and achieved great successes in the ten years before their membership of the EU, are now finding that this “may prove a handicap in certain key regards”. The malaise of the EU is now extending to take in the hitherto vibrant economies, as we predicted it would.

The conference is hoping to come up with some answers but the participants will be faced with one immovable obstacle: members of the EU can no longer think merely in terms of their own economy and what is best for them.

Why the problem became insoluble was the EU’s inability or reluctance to think in terms of anything but membership for these countries. They had to be groomed to become EU members, whether it was the right course of action or not. At no time was there a suggestion at the political level that other relationships are possible with neighbouring states.

Having missed the possibility of reassessment with the ten new members, the EU is faced with an impasse. If it offers less than potential membership to other countries this is seen as a slap in the face. If it cannot take the countries in and cannot even think of doing so in the near future, it has no policies. This explains the floundering over Ukraine. The Neighbourhood Agreements give nothing and are there as a palliative to immediate neighbours in the east and not so immediate ones in North Africa.

Turkey is a large, fairly poor country with a history and culture that is very different from that of the European countries. The problems western Europe faced with the post-Communist states will be magnified. That is not to say we should just ignore Turkey or throw it the odd hand-out. It is an unusual country in that it is Muslim but relatively secular; it has been a staunch ally in the Cold War (though that was partly motivated by the knowledge that it was in the front-line); it is making strides towards democracy and a rule of human rights.

Will membership of the EU help in any of this? Probably not. Least of all will it be a help in ensuring that Turkey becomes a constitutional democracy, as the EU is not a democracy itself. It is a seriously flawed political entity and its faults are entirely those already in existence in most non-European countries: lack of accountability, legislation by diktat, an endemic institutional corruption. How has becoming part of it benefited the East European countries? How will it benefit the Balkan states or Turkey?

Everybody understands that taking Turkey in is problematic on many levels; but nobody can think of what else to do. The EU has no other alternatives. It has no particular reasons to stop after Turkey, though the chances are the whole project will collapse, should that membership ever come about. Whatever reason it will advance will be seen as an excuse. At the same time, this constant growth, accompanied by ever greater centralization will, inevitably, destabilize the whole area.

Development since the collapse of communism has been varied in the different countries: some have progressed towards freedom and liberal capitalism quite fast (too fast, in fact, for the European Union, who has tried to unravel some of the reforms in order to impose its own brand of state-driven managerialism); some, like Belarus and the Central Asian states (all those “stans”) have stayed in place, with the difference that more is known about events than before; some, like Ukraine and, perhaps, Romania, are struggling to get free; one country has been moving backward: Russia.

The most recent news from Russia, apart from the ongoing saga of Yukos, which is being destroyed by the government partly to punish its Chairman, Khodorkovsky, for trying to break away from it and for giving money to the political opposition and partly to restore control of the production of energy to the state, has been one of a new law presented to the Lower House of the Duma. This will specify that foreigners who can be shown to have criticized Russia, its people and its culture, which, one must assume, includes the political structure, can be refused a visa without further ado.

One has to accept that a country must be able to choose whether to allow certain people to enter its territory. However, Russia until recently has proclaimed its intention to become an open country like other open countries (give or take complete state control of the media and the abolition of elections on regional level and of individual deputies of the Duma). If this law goes through, all pretence will be finally abandoned.

As a matter of fact, this is not entirely new (or new-old, since this was common practice in the Soviet Union, though there had been no specific judicial base for it). In the spring I applied for a visa to go to a conference organized by the Cato Institute. I wanted a business visa as being easier to get and cheaper – no hassle with hotels, which I did not need as a Russian friend had found me a flat to stay in.

The Institute of Economic Transitions that was supposed to issue the invitation for me to take to the Russian Consulate, explained that all sorts of documentation was needed just to get as far as an invitation. (This had not been true under Yeltsin.) Nothing happened until the last week-end, when the Institute was told that the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was not issuing visas that week-end as the border was being reconstructed. The Senior Research Fellow I had been dealing with was so stunned that he sent me the exact wording. It seems that somewhere along the line something I had done displeased the Russian authorities. Clearly, they have now decided that it is expensive to keep reconstructing the border: why not pass a law that would once and for all get rid of troublesome foreigners.

Other rules are being tightened. The old Soviet propiska is back. You now have to register with the police if you are more than 72 hours away from your home. Actually, those rules never quite disappeared; nor are they unique to Russia. After all, our own Bill to introduce ID cards (or internal passports) states that we shall all have to register every time we move. (And people actually wonder why anyone should oppose the idea.)

Even in the days of Yeltsin long-distance train journeys (and there are quite a few of those taken by Russians) as well as flights required the production of a passport. When I stayed in a Russian town near the Volga, I could not go into the university library to have a look around, because I did not have my passport with me. The fierce guardian of the entrance hall was stunned that I should even think of such an idea.

At the time one could shrug this off with the words: “old habits, old thought processes die hard”. Now as the rules are becoming tighter and tighter and individuals are allowed less and less freedom, shoulder shrugging is no longer in order.

The Turks might think they’ve got it in the bag, but now the guilty secret is out. Headlined in the news magazine "Turkish Weekly" is the proof that Turkey is not yet ready to join the EU. And the Headline? Ah… "Turkey inches towards EU membership".

But if that is not bad enough, consider the sacrilege in the daily "Turkish Press", which offered the stunning headline of: "EU inches towards historic decision on Turkey". Ouch!

We consider it our duty to inform the authorities immediately of these transgressions except that, woops… what about the Guardian? Picked up from the Financial Times database, which also publishes Guardian material, is the headline: "EU inches towards deal with Turkey".

The copy starts with the immortal line: "Turkey was last night inching towards an agreement that could pave the way for membership of the European Union…", obviously covering both bases. Strangely, the headline is missing from the Guardian site. Clearly, they have recognised the error of their ways and tucked it in the back copies

Never mind, Neil Herron has been informed and Trading Standards are on their way to confiscate the headline. As for Turkey… what can one say? Give 'em 25.4 millimetres? Nah.

I know… boring. But actually, no it isn’t because even if you are not in the least bit interested in it, the issue – or at least the EU’s treatment of it – is the archetypal example of why the EU itself cannot work.

"But why now?" you groan – to which the answer is simple. Traditionally, the last council of the year is the fisheries council, this year set for 21-22 December. All the fisheries ministers, including those from the landlocked countries of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Luxembourg and Slovakia, gather together in Brussels to decide how many fish our fishermen can take from our waters.

Together with the ministers from the Mediterranean states of Italy, Malta, Slovenia and Greece – whose countries do not even operate the CFP in their own seas – will also agree the rules and regulations by which our fishermen will be bound.

They will come under pressure from countries like Spain and Portugal, who bring no resources to the table but will insist on their "share" of the maritime bounty that inhabits our water, and will devote a mere two days to considering extraordinarily complex and contentious proposals presented to them by Maltese commissioner, Joe Borg, who has been in the job less than a month.

When the ministers have finished their bit, it will be down to the commission to work out what has been agreed, to tie all the compromises and fudges together and draw up the detailed regulations which will then apply to our fishermen.

Having left it so late in the year, they have no chance of actually publishing these rules by 1 January but, this notwithstanding, they will come into force on that day when the fishermen will be expected to obey them sight unseen.

By past experience, they will get copies several weeks later and take several weeks to understand them, by which time the many flaws will be revealed, and the ministers will have to meet again in an attempt to clean up the mess, without admitting in the first place that they got it wrong.

Quite frankly, you could not even run a p**s-up in a brewery this way, much less a fisheries policy, yet there are still morons out there who say that the CFP "offers the best available framework for tackling the urgent problem of over-fishing in the EU’s waters." Their mantra, of course, is that there are too many fishermen chasing too few fish.

Our problem is that there are too many so-called policy makers and researchers for whom lobotomies would make no difference to their IQs, as there would be so little material to remove.

That irresistible headline on the Russian news website Pravda.Ru with an article that outlines briefly the present travails of the UN Secretary General and the troubled relationship between the United States and the United Nations.

Mr Annan is apparently promising full co-operation with the investigations into the “allegations of bribery, kickbacks and influence-peddling in the oil-for-food program” but it is not clear which of the many committees he has in mind, the six congressional ones, who have all found the UN extremely unhelpful, or the UN’s own under Paul Volcker, which has produced no results so far and has no power to subpoena or discipline.

Mr Annan himself having obviously not managed to collect too much support in Washington, has gone to Brussels, where he achieved what he wanted. After he repeated his promise to co-operate fully with the investigations, Commission President Barroso patted him on the shoulder:

"Kofi Annan can be sure of the EU’s support for him and the for the United Nations."

It was in the air before this Blog started, when on 5 April, defence ministers of the EU member states agreed in Brussels to continue with the implementation of plans to deploy rapid reaction "battle groups" in international danger zones. The groups, each consisting of 1,500 troops, were scheduled to be deployable by 2007 (see link here), forming a central part of the EU's broader defence ambitions.

The story re-emerged in May with the BBC reporting that the defence ministers had now committed themselves to forming seven such battle groups, all part of a broader strategic plan known as the "2010 Headline Goal" whereby the EU should, by 2010 be able to respond “with rapid and decisive action... to the whole spectrum of crisis management operations."

Then, on 21 November, we get the Sunday Times article telling us that Britain is "to commit more than 2,000 troops to a new 18,000-strong European Union army that will be deployed as a peace keeper to the world’s trouble spots".

Not only that, this force would expand by 2007 to comprise a multinational force of up to 12 elite rapid-reaction battle groups — each with 1,500 soldiers. At least two of these groups would be ready to deploy at 15 days’ notice to humanitarian or peacekeeping emergencies, primarily in Africa. Soldiers from the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines had been earmarked for the new force.

Three days later, we get a front page headline in The Times declaring that "Infantry reforms put historic regiments in the line of fire", putting detail to the expected restructuring of the infantry "to create larger regimental formations".

And what is the size of the "larger regimental formations"? Er… about 1,500 men, exactly the size of the "battle-groups" which are to form the core of the new EU Army.

We pointed out this EU dimension in our Blog, at the time, also pointing out that the groups, which would have to a air-portable, would be structured around the FRES concept, which is essential for rapidly deployable expeditionary forces.

As recently as yesterday, we again pointed out the EU dimension and now we are able to look at the text of Hoon's announcement in the Commons yesterday, and what does he say? This is his opening text:

In July, I announced a re-balancing of the Army designed to make it better able to meet the challenges and threats of the 21st century. The changes that I announced then reflect the need both to complement our existing heavy and light-weight capabilities with new medium-weight forces, and to ensure that the Army is equipped, trained and organised to meet the demands of multiple, concurrent and above all expeditionary operations across the full spectrum of military tasks. Reductions in heavy armour, heavy artillery and the infantry will be accompanied by an increase in the number of key specialists, without whom the Army cannot deploy on operations. Our objective is therefore to develop a more deployable, agile and flexible force.

The future Army structure is underpinned by two complementary changes. First, a move towards a more balanced force organised around two armoured brigades, three mechanised brigades, a light and an air assault brigade, in addition, of course, to the Royal Marines Commando Brigade.

We are moving ahead quickly with the changes required to put that in place, and 19 Mechanised Brigade, based in Catterick, will start its conversion to a light brigade in January. The brigade will be ready for deployment on operations if required in the first half of 2006, when it will serve as the contingent NATO response force. Based in Germany, 4th Armoured Brigade will convert to a mechanised brigade in 2006, and the other brigades will adopt their new structures in a similar time frame. The key foundations on which the future Army structure is to be built will be in place by 2008.

However, it is important to emphasise that we cannot use front-line soldiers if they cannot be deployed and sustained on operations because we lack sufficient supporting forces. In parallel, therefore, we are moving ahead with the second element of the re-organisation—making the Army more robust and resilient and able to sustain the enduring expeditionary operations that have become commonplace in recent years. The overriding requirement is to make significant enhancements to the key specialist capabilities—communications, engineers, logisticians, intelligence experts and other key capabilities. At the same time, we want to make fighting units, including the infantry, more robust by ensuring they have adequate numbers.

They are being backed up by an impressive re-equipment programme, introducing new communications equipment such as Bowman and Falcon, enhanced intelligence collection assets such as the Watchkeeper unmanned aerial vehicle and Soothsayer electronic warfare capability, modern vehicles such as the Panther armoured reconnaissance vehicle, and looking further ahead, the ambitious FRES armoured fighting vehicle programme, which will modernise the armoured vehicle fleet and form the basis of the medium-weight capability.

These enhancements will directly improve the ability of the Army to deploy, support and sustain itself on the range of operations that we envisage. That can only be achieved as the result of the planned reduction by four in the number of infantry battalions, which will release around 2,400 posts for redeployment across the force structure.

The Telegraph business section today - the grown-up bit of the newspaper – runs a story about the Financial Services Authority, styled as the "city watchdog", being "out of touch" with business.

The lament is that it is operated by poor quality staff who have a "civil service mentality" and little understanding of the businesses they oversee. So says a survey of more than 3,000 financial companies on the performance of the FSA, which also criticised it for "over-zealous implementation of EU directives".

Among its other sins, it was also said it was focusing on consumer protection "to the detriment" of its other responsibilities.

The report was commissioned by the Financial Services Practitioner Panel, made up of senior industry figures and chaired by Prudential chief executive Jonathan Bloomer. Half the companies surveyed said they "strongly agreed" that they were over-regulated and another third agreed to a lesser extent.

This is the regulator that has handed down more than £22m in fines since it become the single financial watchdog in December 2001. One can speculate that, if there was a regulator of regulators, whether the FSA would also be paying out fines for its own poor performance.

But chief executive of the FSA, John Tiner, partly excused his own organisation’s performance by arguing that European directives were "a huge influence" amounting to 70 percent of FSA policy work. Such is the drag of the EU on one of our most important and profitable industries.

But there is another lesson here. No one could blame the EU directly for the stranglehold the FSA has over the financial services industry, but what you will note from the Telegraph piece is not what it says, and who it quotes, but who it doesn't quote. There is no political voice speaking.

The existence of EU law and its every-growing control over vast sections of our productive life not only creates increasing burdens, it also de-politicises the business of regulation. MPs and even ministers no longer take an interest in the activities of the regulators because so much of their work is outside their responsibility. Effectively, these regulators take their orders from Brussels, and what they do is none of the business of UK legislators.

Brussels – i.e., the commission – however, has neither the resources nor the immediate interest in controlling the day-to-day activities of the regulatory authorities in the member states, which means that they effectively run themselves – with the results that are now all to plain to see.

That is one of the important, if little understood side-effects of rule from Brussels. Our own systems of political scrutiny, oversight and control have been broken down and no longer function. What has replaced it is ineffective – and ever more will be so.

What we are seeing, therefore, is the effects of what Christopher Booker and I have called a slow motion coup d'etat, where gradually the bureaucrats are taking over, and the politicians have been robbed of their power to do anything about it.

The outcome of the talks at the European Council on Turkish accession seem now to be decided. The EU will open accession talks but with one condition: Turkey must recognise Cyprus as an independent nation. That, presumably, means that in the not too distant future Turkey must remove its troops from the island.

But the decision has not been formally announced and we are all left on tenterhooks overnight. Yet, for all the apparent drama – with BBC radio 4's "World Tonight" having devoted most of the programme to the issue of Turkish accession - it is as well to remember that much of what has been and is going on is pure theatre.

Tonight is the night when the heads of state and governments wine and dine, with their foreign affairs ministers dining in a separate room. And with over twenty-five in each venue, sitting round elongated dining tables, the conditions are hardly conducive to proper negotiation.

In fact, the negotiations are actually carried on elsewhere. The really serious talks are between high-level officials and technical teams of Turkish and EU officials, which "continue synchronously" before the meeting of the European Council.

There have also been a series of bilateral meetings, with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan meeting Silvio Berlusconi, while foreign minister Abdullah Gul met his counterparts, all with continuous telephone traffic between all the parties.

By the time a European Council actually starts, the substantive issues have usually been resolved and, immediately after breakfast, the first task of the members – before they get down to their discussions - is to agree the communiqué which will be issued at the conclusion of the council.

This will be no different in this case as, on the agenda, is a meeting with Kofi Annan. This will eat into the time available for any serious talks, had there ever been any really serious intention of having them.

I guess that when we finally see the communiqué, it will say just what we all expected – that accession talks with Turkey will start, and resolution of the Cyprus issue will be made a condition of them proceeding.

Then we will be in for the long haul – something which Turkey is quite used to, having first applied to join the EEC in 1963. The smart money is on the negotiations taking at least ten years, if not longer, which means that the European Council will be dealing with the ongoing drama year after year after year at their Brussels meetings.

One thing is for sure though. The members may announce formally one decision tomorrow, but they will all also be aware that a Turkey is not just for Christmas.

Slightly after 6.30 this evening the heads of government and some heads of state of the 25 members of the European Union will arrive at the Justus Lipsus building in Brussels for the second European Council of the Dutch presidency.

Says the council website, European Council is the name given to the regular meetings of Heads of State and Government of EU Member States, and the President of the European Commission. Sometimes, it adds, it is also called a summit.

But summit it most definitely is not. Although not included in the original Treaty of Rome, the council is an institution of the European Union. It was formally recognised in the Maastricht Treaty and, within the new constitution, it is proposed that it will become a fully-fledged tier of the emerging government of Europe. It is, in effect, the "cabinet" of the EU.

Right from the start, this was the intention of its founder, none other than Jean Monnet, who initially called it the "provisional European government".

That was back in 1972, at the Paris summit on 18 October, the day after Heath's European Communities Bill received Royal Assent. The idea for this summit, to celebrate the "enlargement" of the "Six" to the "Nine", had also originated with Monnet where, amongst other things, Heath called for "a clear timetable for economic and monetary union".

By and large, however, the summit was inconclusive. Monnet felt it had lacked focus and, more importantly, mechanisms for carrying its resolutions forward. His great regret in establishing his "community", the Treaty of Rome had not set up "a supreme body to steer Europe through the difficult transition from national to collective sovereignty". By the end of August 1973, he had decided to remedy this deficiency.

He therefore produced one of his famous plans, outlining a structure for a "Provisional European Government". This body would draw up a plan for "European Union", to include a "European Government" and an elected European Assembly. This "provisional government" would meet regularly. Those taking part would keep its deliberations secret.

Monnet came over to England to discuss his proposal with Ted Heath at Chequers on 18 September 1973, telling him "we must give public opinion the feeling that European affairs are being decided: today, people have the impression that they’re merely being discussed."

Heath readily agreed, but had a reservation about making the proposal public. "Let's just do it," he told Monnet. He also worried about the term "provisional government". "That would get me into great difficulties." he said.

Monnet then approached Georges Pompidou and Willi Brandt. They were equally enthusiastic and neither shared Heath's reservations about the title, although Pompidou warmed to the name "European Union". A member of Pompidou's staff was heard to inquire of a close confidant of Pompidou what this phrase meant. The reply came, "nothing… but then that is the beauty of it".

In late September, Pompidou mentioned Monnet's proposal at a press conference. Heath then took up the baton at the Conservative Party conference on 13 October. "I believe", he said,

...that already some of my colleagues as Heads of Government feel the need for us to get together regularly without large staff so that we can jointly guide the Community along the paths we have already set. I would like to see the Heads of Government of the member countries of the Community meeting together, perhaps twice a year, as I have said, alone and without large staffs, with the President of the Commission being present, as he was at the Summit …our purpose in meeting together would be to lay down the broad direction of European policy.

...lost sight of the philosophy of Jean Monnet: that the Community exists to find common solutions to common problems. Each member state drifted back to seeking its own, unilateral solutions. So we all had to relearn painfully that there is no solution if we act on our own.

Existing European practices have proved inadequate as a means of enabling our countries to organise themselves for collective action… We must break out of this vicious circle, in which the common interests of the Community countries are inadequately served. The existing European institutions are not strong enough today to do it on their own.

...the European institutions were in charge of immense sectors of activity, over which they exercised the share of sovereignty that had been delegated to them. But if they were to work effectively, the governments had to have the same European will and be prepared, acting together as a collective authority, to transfer the additional sovereignty required to achieve a true European Union. The creation of the European Council supplied the means for reaching that essential decision. A major step had been taken.

The widely trailed cuts in the British Army have been announced today by defence secretary Geoff Hoon, who has confirmed the axing of four infantry battalions in what is described as a major restructuring of the Army.

According to various reports, this move prompted angry scenes in the Commons with Scottish National Party MP Annabelle Ewing ordered out of the chamber by the Speaker after calling Mr Hoon a "backstabbing coward".

She was angered by Mr Hoon's confirmation that two single battalion regiments in Scotland – the Royal Scots and The King’s Own Scottish Borderers – would merge into a single battalion and would combine with the other four Scottish regiments, including the Black Watch, to form the new Royal Regiment of Scotland. Details of the other cuts can be found on the Scotsman site.

Hoon claims that his plans "…will make the Army more robust and resilient, able to deploy, support and sustain the enduring expeditionary operations that are essential for a more complex and uncertain world". He added: "The move to larger, multi-battalion regiments that these changes bring about is the only sustainable way in which to structure the infantry for the long term."

But what is significant is that we are not just seeing the "axing" of famous regiments, which has tended to obscure the wider debate. This is but one part of a "wider rebalancing" of the mix of light, medium and heavy forces. This revolves round that magic word FRES, standing for Future Rapid Effects System.

This is the driver of all these changes. Hoon needs to re-equip the Army to fit the expeditionary role required for Britain's forces to fulfil Blair's commitment to playing a leading role in the EU's rapid reaction force. FRES is the answer, but it is expensive. So, with it not becoming available until 2010, at the earliest, he is taking the savings now to fund the future. costs of the project.

Nothing of this emerges from the Conservatives, with shadow foreign secretary Michael Ancram, completely missing the "elephant in the room" when he confined his attack on Hoon to a condemnation of his search for "cost cutting", without seeking to enquire what the savings were for.

Good theatre, it might have been as Ancram declared: "It is a dark day for our armed forces. And an even darker day for the proud regiments it seeks to scrap. It is also a day of shame for this discredited and ineffective Defence Secretary," but he has failed to get near the real issues.

In fact, Ancram has assiduously avoided discussing the underlying agenda: "The Secretary of State says that this is all about reorganisation", he told the Commons, "But this statement is not driven by a need to reorganise. It is driven by the chancellor's demand for financial cuts."

Unfortunately, this is partially true and close enough to sound plausible. But it is also badly wrong. Hoon is being driven by the need to reorganise, and that is being driven by Blair's plans for a greater EU military role for the Army. But Hoon is trying to do it on the cheap, because Brown will not give him the money he needs. That is where the infantry cuts come in.

Thus, instead of trying to ignore the fact that the Army is being subject to one of the most fundamental reorganisations in its history, for an entirely political objective, Ancram should be asking why it is being reorganised.

But then the answer might include the word "Europe" and, as we know, Ancram would not like that. If he was confronted with that, he would have to recognise the "elephant in the room".

Quick as a flash, the EU commission has posted the good tidings that the EU parliament has agreed the budget for 2005.

The largely empty ritual of the EU parliament voting for the budget means that the money for next year's EU finances is secure. It elicited an equally ritual response from Dalia Grybauskaité, commissioner for financial programming and budget, who said: "Financial resources for the enlarged Europe are now secured. The European priorities have been respected."

That is so European… they do love that word "respect". You never obey laws in Euroland, you respect them. You never observe, recognise or conform with traditions, you respect them. Likewise, you never accept, endorse or agree priorities… you guessed it, you respect them. Urghh.

So little Dalia drivels on in her leaden Eurospeak, telling the world that "We have increased funding to support the Lisbon Strategy, to promote freedom, peace, liberty and justice, and to reinforce information to citizens and the debate on the future of the Union." Everything is fine in the world. We can all sit back and relax.

Wait a bit though - what's that about "…reinforce information to citizens and the debate on the future of the Union"? Ah, that's the hike in the EU propaganda budget to help push through the ratification of the constitution. Nice to know our tax money is being well spent.

Anyhow, the 2005 budget for EU 25 is going to be €106.3 billion, representing 1.004 percent of the combined Gross National Income (GNI) of member states. It is an increase of 4.4 percent compared with the budget for 2004.

The rise, we are told, arises from the full incorporation of the new member states and the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. And 2005 is the first year when the reform of the CAP has an important financial impact, says the commission. For "reform" read increase. Spending goes up to €49.7 billion, a hike of 10.2 percent.

Regional policy commitments are set at €42.4 billion, the second largest appropriation in the EU budget - much of which will require co-funding before it is paid – but the commission is alrady warning that there might not be enough money in this pot, suggesting that it may need to present "a preliminary draft amending budget" in the middle of 2005. When the commission comes out with its begging bowl, the EU parliament and the council "have committed themselves to take a swift decision". You bet.

Internal policies "concentrate on the fight against international terrorism" which, together with the budget for health and consumer protection, research, education and culture and transport and energy, amounts to a relatively modest €9.1 billion, although much greater expenditure will be borne by member states in complying with EU requirements.

You will be pleased to know, also, that the EU is going to focus actions on "restoring peace and democracy". Commitments here are set at €5.2 billion, including a paltry €200 million for Iraq (as against £3.1 billion so far from the UK).

Pre-accession aid is set at €2.1 billion. For the first time Croatia is included under this strategy and will receive €105 million, an of 60 percent on 2004. The Turkish Cypriot community, in recognition for their support of the EU island unification, gets €120 million, Romania and Bulgaria get €1,552 and Turkey €286.2 million.

Another day, another dollar, as they say. A good day's work for the parliament, wrapping up €106.3 billion of other peoples' money, and a nice little Christmas present for the commission. I do hope the MEPs enjoy their Christmas dinners in the fleshpots of Strasbourg this week.

While even the supporters of Kyoto are acknowledging that it is of no use whatsoever in dealing with global warming (if, indeed, there is any need or possibility of dealing with it rather than adjusting or making the best of it as people have done in the past), there is some difficulty in agreeing on its political significance.

The problem is that its political aim – international control of the United States – has failed. Not only President Bush is against the whole protocol (something that we are being told over and over again) but Congress voted against it (something that is not mentioned by most commentators).

The International Herald Tribune that has recently set itself up as the cheer-leader for the “sophisticated” pro-European American opinion – though it has problems distinguishing European from EU – published an article yesterday by Nigel Purvis, environment scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, who served as a senior climate change negotiator under Clinton and Bush. Presumably, he must be feeling rather frustrated but one cannot help wondering who he was negotiating with about climate change. Does God take part in endless committee meetings and working dinners? Unlikely.

Mr Purvis’s thesis is that the resurrection of the Kyoto treaty with Russia signing it (though, for some reason, he did not explain that she did so with very bad grace, in response to blatant blackmail and clearly not intending to keep to it) has left the United States behind in international negotiations.

“Kyoto illustrates the fact that the international community questions more than ever America’s moral authority and its commitment to universal values, including environmental stewardship. Anti-Americanism is already on the rise in “old Europe” because of Bush’s policies in Iraq. US resistance to action on global warming only solidifies America’s image abroad as a nation of parochial, selfish and wasteful SUV drivers. Although America remains the brightest beacon of freedom, it must treat seriously the perception abroad that its light has dimmed.”

One of the more egregious lies set out in the FCO’s "Explanatory Memorandum on the EU Constitutional Treaty" is the claim that the new treaty "makes clearer than ever before" that the EU is "a union of sovereign states which only exercises those powers given to it by its members."

In context, this is part of Blair’s general defence to the charge that the EU will, with the advent of its own constitution, become a "superstate". But, leaving aside that defence, one cannot allow the lie of "a union of sovereign states" to rest unchallenged.

The simple rebuttal can be summed up in a single argument. Essentially, with the advent of the constitution, the EU acquired its own legal personality (Art. 1-7). With that, it is a legal entity in its own right, with its own set of rules, its own governing bodies, and entirely autonomous powers. It is not a union of states. It is an autonomous government.

The member states may have given birth to this "Union" but in the same way that a child once born forges a life independent of its mother, so too is the EU an entity in its own right.

For sure, it can only exercise those powers given to it by its members, but those powers, once given, are absolute - there is no provision for their return, no mechanism for scrutiny by the member states, and no check on how it uses those powers. The EU can use them entirely at its own discretion, without further reference to the member states and, in fact, is superior to the member states in the exercise of those powers.

But to claim that the EU is, or was ever intended to be, a union of "sovereign states" is to misunderstand the nature and the history of the project. To find out what was originally intended, all they have to do is read the very first lines of preamble to the original 1957 Treaty of Rome. This states, bold as brass:

Determined to lay the foundations of ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe.

Citizens of the Union shall enjoy the rights and be subject to the duties provided for in the constitution.

Convinced that, while remaining proud of their own national identities and history, the peoples of Europe are determined to transcend their former divisions and, united ever more closely, to forge a common destiny.

For as long as I can remember, environmentalists have freely flung the epithet "Dirty Man of Europe" at Britain. This has been the special taunt of the Europhiles, who have used it to support the claim that we need EU environment law to keep us up to scratch.

I have my own views on this – especially in respect of the notorious Bathing Water Directive. Given how easy it is to rig the sampling, to ensure that results are favourable, I strongly suspect that Britain’s low place in the EU league owes more to the diligence and honesty of our monitoring than the degree of pollution in our waters.

But now we have another survey – this of the North Sea - and for once the UK is not fingered as "the dirty man". It seems that the Dutch portion is the dirtiest in the entire body of water, with several times more litter, chemicals and other pollutants than off the coasts of other countries.

At a presentation in the coastal town of Texel in Holland, researchers of the "Save the North Sea Project" revealed results of their study on the Fulmar - known for eating almost anything they encounter floating on the water - and found that 97 percent of them had plastic in their stomachs.

On average, however, birds found in Dutch waters had 50 pieces of plastic in their stomachs, compared with 25 pieces for birds found in Scottish waters. "Our region is some two to four times dirtier than other parts of the North Sea," researchers said.

As an indication of the scale of the problem, the researcher estimated that some 20,000 tons, or 70,000 cubic metres, of waste, are dumped into the North Sea every year. Of that, 70 percent sinks to the sea bottom, 15 percent floats on the surface and 15 percent washes up on beaches.

To put that in perspective, by the way, the volume of the North Sea is estimated at 94,000 cubic kilometres. At 94,000,000,000,000 cubic metres, that means the proportion of waste approximates 0.000000075 percent. By contrast, the proportion of gold in seawater is approximately 0.0000025 percent, making the quantity of gold present in seawater throughout the world at more than 9 billion tons. I just thought you would like to know that.

Awkward customers the Swedes and have been so since the days of the great king Gustavus Adolphus. Having voted against the euro in a referendum in September 2003, they still maintain that they do not want to abandon the krone. And, indeed, why should they? After all, none of the terrible things that they have been threatened with, have materialized.

According to a survey conducted by Statistics Sweden, 49 per cent will vote no to the country joining the euro, were it conducted the day after the question was asked, 37 per cent would vote yes, and 14 per cent were undecided.

Euro-enthusiasts are trying to console themselves with the thought that the proportion of those saying no has gone down from the last survey, conducted in May. Then 51 per cent said no. On the other hand, the proportion of yes voters has gone down, as well, by one per cent. The undecided have gone up from 11 per cent. All of which reflects merely the fact that the Swedes know that there is no referendum coming on the euro and, therefore, they can afford the luxury of “not knowing” or not bothering to reply properly. (Even the civic-minded Scandinavians must get fed up with these endless polls and questionnaires.)

The Swedish government, as we know, has decided not to have a referendum on the constitution. They know what they are doing. The same poll found that 43.5 percent had a positive view of the EU, compared to 33.6 percent who had a negative view and 22.8 percent who were undecided, before the details of the constitution were even known. A referendum after a dedicated campaign could turn out to be very unsatisfactory from the government’s point of view.

When is it permissible to break EU treaty obligations with impunity? In its leader today the Daily Telegraph gives the answer: when it is the stability pact and the culprits are France and Germany.

This is on the back of its report in the business section, announcing that the commission is to let France and Germany off the hook. It has abandoned efforts to punish France and Germany for breach of the stability and growth pact, offering to turn a blind eye to abuse of EU spending rules – something which, incidentally, we picked up last Sunday.

According to the Telegraph, Joaquin Almunia, the newly appointed economics commissioner, has bowed to the political reality, and agreed that sanctions procedures against the eurozone's two biggest economies would now be dropped. "Given the action taken by France and Germany, it would appear that no further steps are required at this point," he said.

In its leader, the Telegraph very much labours the point, that it is the two states that insisted on the stability pact to curb excessive state spending which have now exceeded its maximum budget deficit (three per cent of GDP) for three years running.

It takes to task the French who "do not even bother to disguise the lamentable state of their public finances". With Gallic sang-froid, they cheerfully admit that their deficit will again break the rules next year.

And, asks the Telegraph, will the commission fine the miscreants, as it is obliged to do under the pact? Not likely, it says, once again answering its own question. Brussels bent the rules a year ago to suit the Franco-German axis, and it is content to do so again. This amounts to a de facto repatriation of fiscal sovereignty to the nation states. So the stability pact is now as dead as a dodo, and even less lamented.

In marking its passing, however, the Telegraph fails to an make the obvious and important point. What this affair underlines is that, for all their legal content and framing, treaties are essentially political constructs. Unless there is the political will to make them work, and the signatories agree to be bound by them - not just at the point of signing or ratification, but through their life – they are so much waste paper.

This is something the people who spend their hours pouring over the minutia of treaty texts – the people whom we used to call "barrack-room lawyers" – so often forget. And this has enormous implications for the UK, not least if that unlikely event transpires – the Conservatives win the general election.

Then, we will see the commitment to repatriate the CFP come to the fore, and the barrack-room lawyers will immediately cry that this cannot be achieved for, if we do it unilaterally, we will be hauled up in front of the ECJ and fined zillions of euros. The response now is ready made – just like France and Germany were hauled so severely punished for breaching the Growth and Stability Pact?

And that really is the point. If there is no political will to see the thing through, the small print of a treaty is just ink on a piece of paper.

De Gaulle knew this. As we have observed before, when he learned that his Elysée treaty, which he had so laboriously agreed with Adenauer, had been carved up by the Bundestag, he simply dismissed the news with a verbal shrug, observing: "Treaties are like maidens and roses; they each have their day."

With little fanfare, the FCO has slipped out the official English version of the proposed EU constitution – so quietly in fact that hardly anyone realised that it had arrived.

Accompanied by an "Explanatory Memorandum on the EU Constitutional Treaty", it was lodged with the Order Office in Parliament on 8 December, oddly enough the same day that that the British Management Data Foundation version also arrived.

The official version, under the beguiling title Command 6429, is available from the FCO website
or you can download the document directly, in two parts – the first being the treaty at 230 pages and the second the annexes at 286 pages, from the links here and here.

However, if you want hard copy, you had better talk to a rich friend. While the BMDF version, with its copious explanatory notes, line-by-line comparisons with previous treaties, and comprehensive index, retails at £27.50, the official version – with not even an index – is priced at a hefty £47.00. That is the price of democracy FCO style.

Following what is becoming something of a tradition in EU affairs, another whistleblower has made the weary journey to Luxembourg, to tell the ECJ of commission misdeeds.

This one is Dorte Schmidt-Brown, a Danish official who worked at Eurostat, the EU's statistics wing, who lifted the lid on what the EU anti-fraud body called "a vast enterprise of looting".

Readers will recall that allegations were made against two of Eurostat's top officials, including Yves Franchet, the French director-general for the past 16 years, who were investigated for alleged use of a private bank account in Luxembourg to cream off £650,000 of public money through one of their retained contractors.

Ms Schmidt-Brown now claims that her name was smeared by the contractor and that the commission did not give her the necessary support during the affair despite pledges to protect whistle blowers. Unaided, she was forced to bring her own libel case against the contractor, which was settled out of court after it apologised for the distress caused.

Enter our old friend Neil Kinnock, then EU administration commissioner, charged with cleaning up the dung hill in Brussels. He initially refused to grant her legal support to fight back against her accusers, although he did eventually relent.

"It is the responsibility of the organisation to protect its employees. The Commission could have done this very easily," Schmidt-Brown said after the hearing yesterday at the Court of the First Instance, where she was asking the court to recognise that the commission was wrong in not seeking the withdrawal of allegations made against her by the contractor in question.

Following so soon in the wake of the recent dismissal of Marta Andreason, the record of the commission for throwing its whistleblowers to the wolves remains at an untarnished 100 percent, in contrast with the somewhat naïve assertion from Schmidt-Brown who said: "I was 100 per cent sure that my hierarchy would protect me."

Where has she been all these years?

While the truckers on Cyprus may be getting extremely fed up with having to conform with EU law (see link), spare a thought for UK truck and PSV operators who, from 1 January this year are also going to be subject to the tender mercies of our new masters in Brussels.

The particular impost they are facing is the requirement to be able to demonstrate that they have "sufficient finances to safely maintain their vehicles and to properly administer the business."

This is set on a sliding scale, related to the number of vehicles operated, with national operators currently being required to show they have available £4,300 for the first vehicle and £2,400 for every vehicle thereafter.

Sensibly, the cash backing required for international operators is set somewhat higher, reflecting the additional costs that might be incurred when operating abroad. Thus, operators must have £5,400 for the first vehicle and £3,000 for each additional vehicle.

But no more is this sensible arrangement to apply. Under EU Directive 96/26/EC, as amended by Directive 98/76/EC, from 1 January not only are the rates going up but both national and international operators must be able to show the same level of financial backing.

This is because the EU will not accept anything that smacks of "national discrimination" and it therefore requires all operators throughout EU member states to be treated in the same fashion.

Thus, UK operators, hitherto required only to have £4,300 in reserve for their first vehicles, are now required to have £6,200. For every additional vehicle they have to find another £3,400, up from £2,400.

The provision applies to all goods vehicles over 3.5 tons and all PSVs, so a small business operating a fleet of, say, ten medium-sized vans for local deliveries round Burnley (or wherever) will have to keep a cash reserve of £36,800 – up from £25,900 and exactly the same as a Greek or Spanish operator running a fleet of ten juggernauts into the UK.

This may be a small thing but it is yet another illustration of the utter fatuity of the vacuous and utterly dishonest European Union motto: "Unity in diversity".

Jacques "Wheel" Barrot, in his humble post as transport commissioner, was a busy little bee last week at the first transport council of his reign. Not only did he shepherd through the Galileo system to its "historic" deployment phase, he also took time out to introduce an ambitious road safety strategy, subsequently approved by the assembled transport ministers.

The aim is to halve the number of people killed and injured by 2010, an aim curiously similar to that of the current Labour administration, and amongst the delights in store for us is the provision of automatic devices to limit vehicle speeds.

There is, in fact, a certain linkage here between this plan and Galileo, the idea being to couple "cruise control" technology with the Galileo positioning signal, to provide remote mechanisms for automatically cutting speeds, in line with prevailing road speed limits - a "backseat driver" in every car.

And, true to form, the EU has ambitions of making this system compulsory, so that drivers will be forced to have the system fitted – incidentally providing a valuable income stream for Galileo, as member states will be required to pay license fees for its use (which will, no doubt, be passed on to its unwilling end-users).

Those who might wonder what authority the EU has to involve itself in these matters would do well to read our earlier post on the subject, where we revealed that a little-known amendment to the Treaty of Rome, incorporated in the Maastricht treaty, modified Article 75, to include road safety in the Common Transport Policy. In one fell swoop, the commission massively extendedc its powers, but only now is it beginning to make use of them

In its current strategy, the EU commission is concentrating on "rules enforcement" and on sharing best practices at EU, national and local levels. It is in the process of developing cross-border enforcement initiatives, standardising traffic laws, fines and enforcement procedures- to say nothing of speed limits.

In the council conclusions of 10 December, ministers are also going along with the idea that a percentage of vehicle taxes, motorway fees, insurance premiums, et cetera, should be allocated to road safety improvements (such as the Euro-road hump?). They also agreed an idea which should delight all jaded motorists: allocating a part of fines for traffic offences to road safety improvements. Guess which bit Gordon Brown will be happiest with?

The French newspaper Le Monde has today reported on the Galileo story, the system having been given the go-ahead on 10 December by the transport ministers of the 25 EU member states.

What makes this report interesting is that the newspaper goes out of its way to emphasise that the system is intended only for civilian use. Unlike the GPS developed under the direction of the American army, it claims, Galileo will have to exclude military applications.

In a detail that was curiously absent from the commission press statement, we are told that this was the condition imposed by the transport ministers of the 25, in order to keep on board the "sceptics" such as the UK, which intends to keep using the US system. This applied particularly to the high definition encrypted PRS signal, which must be confined to civilian applications. Thus civilian-only application was "set in stone" (coulée dans le marbre).

Galileo was confirmed by the member states as "a civilian programme under civil control" and only on the basis of that assurance was the go-ahead given. Any change from that principle will require a unanimous decision, allowing the UK, or the Netherlands, says Le Monde, to veto military use of Galileo.

Furthermore, the British insisted that the tariffs applied to the PRS were calculated on a cost-only basis, with no profit margin for private operators, that only those countries interested in using PRS would finance that part of the system, and that NATO should continue to use only the US system.

With that green light, Jacques "Wheel" Barrot, the French commissioner in his humble role as transport commissioner, was able to announce an “historic decision”. (Curiously, his surname “Barrot” translates into English as "deck-beam" – as in "thick as two…?")

Says Le Monde, these restrictions could complicate the task of the private sector partners, which are expected to finance two thirds of the deployment phase and have an interest in ensuring that applications are as broad as possible. But one of the consortia interested in bidding for the project dismissed the restraint, saying that PRS did not contribute much to the finances.

And, despite the euphoria from Barrot, it emerges that no financial contribution will be forthcoming from the Community, which is expected to be about €1 billion, until the EU budget has been settled for 2007-2013. Nevertheless, Barrot made a point of assuring journalists that these uncertainties would not stop the private sector from going ahead.

In another delicious irony, "private sector" in French reads as le secteur privé, which can also be translated as "deprived sector". With M. Barrot around, that may well be the case, when the charge for his services is extracted.

The latest person to complain about the strong euro and its effect on the euro zone’s economy is the French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. On the one hand, he said:

“A strong euro reduces the energy bill made out in dollars,”.

“… it weighs on our exports and the euro zone’s economic growth. In France, as in the rest of the euro zone, we are not satisfied with the current situation.”

“… pay the bill for major imbalances in the world economy, especially the current-account deficit and the budget deficit in the United States.”

“The Europeans are sitting there as a passive third-party in a great financial transaction between the United States and China.”

“Looser money could pump up domestic consumption and help right the global imbalances. If the Dutch and the Germans were to adopt even a bit of the exuberal materialism of Americans, Europe would soak up a greater share of Chinese toys and Japanese stereo equipment.”

Not accepting that it has been caught with its hands in the till, the EU, after having been slammed by the WTO last August for robbing developing countries blind with its rapacious subsidised sugar scam, is now to appeal against the WTO judgment.

It has told the WTO that it will be filing papers on 13 January, despite today being the last day permitted for lodging an appeal. However, it has told the WTO it had agreed with complainants Australia, Brazil and Thailand to apply for an extension of the deadline until January – so that's all right then.

Meanwhile, in an apparently separate development, France has formally proposed that its former EU commissioner, Pascal Lamy, who spent his long and illustrious career defending French interests as EU trade commissioner, should be the candidate to head the WTO as director general.

Interestingly, the very man who must have prepared the papers for the EU's appeal is up against Luis Felipe Seixas Correa, Brazil's WTO envoy - Brazil, of course, being one of the principal complainants against the EU's rapacious behaviour on the world trading scene.

Given that the main culprit in the sugar scam was France, with with gross over-production, it takes little imagination to work out how convenient it would be to have a Frenchman in charge of the WTO while it is handling the EU appeal.

Lamy also faces competition from Mauritius and Uruguay, who have until May to make their pitch in what is expected, somewhat predictably, to become an acrimonious dispute between the EU and Brazil

Amazingly, in an unpublicised agreement last week, all the 25 governments of the EU member states governments backed Lamy's candidature, even the British government – which must have suffered most from Lamy's dedication to the cause of his political masters in Paris.

Lamy, himself, is protesting that he would try to be impartial, and not promote the interests of France or Europe, which is just about as convincing as the Big Bad Wolf promising not to eat Little Red Riding Hood. Since we're in the mood for mixing metaphors, we can also say that putting Lamy at the head of the WTO would be akin to putting Billy Bunter in charge of the tuck shop.

Not so very long ago, many of us were taking the view that the opposition to the euro was narrowly focused to a dangerous extent. For, while the then business "Yes to Europe – No to the euro" campaign was building the ramparts against the single currency – with the generous help of Gordon Brown – the tide of integration was sweeping round it.

It was then that we dreamed up the picture – I don’t know who thought of it first – of the resistants being the ill-fated Maginot line, holding firm while the panzers of integration swept through the Ardennes.

And once again, or so it seems, the panzers are on the march – if they ever stopped, this time with another clever little scheme cooked up by the EU commission: the "Euromortgage".

Reported by The Scotsman website today, under the startlingly candid headline of, "Euromortgage Plan to Integrate EU Homebuyers", the commission is proposing that house-buyers should be able to shop around in the 25 member states for the best loan deals available.

This is the brain-child of the Forum Group on Mortgage Credit, set up by the commission, which argues that an effective single European market for mortgages could mean cheaper loans for all.

This would mean streamlining the EU-wide home loans sector to take away the potential pitfalls of borrowing abroad, with the idea being sold on the benefits to consumers of more choice and financial savings, as well as opening up a single market for lenders.

But it would also mean serious inroads into the monetary sovereignty of member states, who rely on being able to fine-tune interest rates to cool over-heated housing markets, and damp-down consumer spending when it threatens to get out of control.

This is an option lost to those member states which have already joined the single currency and the prospect of its loss is one of the most persuasive factors in the argument for not joining. With a single market for housing loans (and surely other loans would follow), even non-euro members effectively lose control of monetary policy.

The net outcome of such a move – and many others like it – is that euro refuseniks gradually lose many or all of the advantages of being outside the euro, while gaining none of the slender benefits of membership. The balance of the argument thus shifts, and the case for staying out is weakened.

Anti-euro campaigners will thus look out of their armoured forts one day and see the tanks parked up behind them, their guns pointing towards their exposed rears, leaving nothing else but to run up the white flags.

That is the trouble with partial campaigns. To mix metaphors outrageously, once you cuddle up to the tar baby, you have to go all the way. Like the impossibility of being a bit pregnant, as far as the EU is concerned, there is no such thing as a little bit of integration.

Following the refusal of the EU to lift the arms embargo on China, the gloves are really coming off.

In an extraordinarily strident piece which abandons any pretence of diplomacy, the China Daily, has launched into a vitriolic attack against the US, reminiscent of the worst days of the Cold War.

Headed, "Why is the EU refusing to lift the arms embargo against China?", the answer China Daily gives is: "Because Uncle Sam objects. The USA, in its anti-communism myopia that has reined since the McCarthy era, still sees itself as protecting the world from the evils of anything that does not look, smell or taste like its brand of democracy."

Continuing in this vein, it adds:

The US has not learned the appropriate lessons available during the 20th century and hence perpetuates its foreign policy mistakes into the 21st century. The US has learned nothing from Korea, Viet Nahm (sic), Taiwan, Hong Kong or Macau. Now the US insists that Iraq and Afganistan become US style democracies. The US is anti-Cuba but fails to see the hypocricy in its Taiwan stance.

Why is the third world rebelling and attacking US targets? Because the third world is tired of US intervention in internal affairs, just like the US threatening reprisals against the EU if it lifts the arms embargo against China. Once again the US meddles in China's internal affairs, judging China's human rights by the US standards it imposes on the rest of the world. And the US sells arms to Taiwan. Japan declares Beijing a military threat, also probably under pressure from its US benefactor.

In the land of diversity, conformity is compulsory. That is what several thousand Cypriot truck drivers are finding out; and they do not like it. According to the news agency AFP, they went on indefinite strike today, blockading the island's two main sea ports in Limassol and Larnaca.

The truckers are complaining about EU harmonisation laws which prohibit the issue of operators' licenses to individual trucks but require them to be issued to companies, preventing them being sold on after owners retire for a fee that can reach up to 120,000 dollars with the vehicle.

They are also angry at the introduction of costlier modifications, tougher professional examinations and plans to phase out at least 1,000 old lorries from the roads.

Still unaware of how the system works, they are now demanding amendments to the rules which they say the government had promised them during a previous week-long crippling strike in October 2003, estimated to have cost the Cyprus economy about 200 million dollars.

Long lines of trucks are now blockading the ports and industrial areas, with two cargo ships already stuck at Limassol unable to unload bricks and iron and containers piling up at the dockside. The action, by members of unions representing the island's 4,500 truckers, could have dire consequences on the economy.

"Today we find ourselves at a deadlock, and the only solution out of this deadlock is for a declaration to be issued for the postponement of these harmonisation laws," said a statement from the Cyprus small business union, the main body representing the truckers.

If a solution is not forthcoming, determined truckers are saying that they wil take wider militant action and block key transport routes. There is also concern that a prolonged dispute could lead to shortages in construction material, foodstuffs and pharmaceuticals.

"Unjustified, illogical and pre-determined," is how government spokesman Kypros Chrysostomides described the action. "The damage that will be caused to various sectors of the economy will be especially tough." The employers federation also called for dialogue to avoid economic crisis.

Dialogue hardly seems appropriate. Someone needs to remind the truckers that, on 1 May they joined an organisation called the European Union which, while sporting its motto, "Unity in diversity" (or in Latin if you prefer: In varietate concordia), demands conformity in all things.

Where are the Europhiles storming in to justify this latest bit of lunacy? Silent as always they are, when there is a real problem with their beloved construct.

This one, the ports directive, has been hanging around for a while, having been first introduced in 2001 and "torpedoed" by the EU parliament in November 2003. Now, it has re-emerged with a vengeance and its the subject of a report in today's Daily Telegraph.

Actually, the new proposal was made on 13 October by the commission - and was one of the last acts of the outgoing commissioner for transport, President Loyola de Palacio, who had been trying for some years to get her "market access to port services" legislation on to the law books.

Like all community initiatives, it is dressed up in high-flown language, set out in the aims. The proposed directive thus "aims at boosting the competitiveness of EU ports and contributing to reduce congestion and environmental pollution by promoting inter alia maritime transport." De Palacio, in the leaden language of her ilk wants to create a "clear and transparent framework" for port services.

So what is it all about? In essence, the directive seeks to impose rules governing the right to provide cargo handling services within a port, licensing operators to provide such services to as yet undefined "competent authorities" for limited periods. Licences would be for a maximum of eight years where no investment is required; 12 years where the licensee invested in "movable assets" such as fork-lift trucks; and 30 years where it paid for "immovable assets" such as new warehouses.

It sounds like a good idea in principle – as they so often do – but then listen to David Ord, managing director of Bristol Port Company. He calls of Palacio's "last act of retribution", condemning it as "simply bureaucratic", doing nothing to improve the competitiveness of UK plc.

He is not wrong. The point as issue is that the directive makes partial sense on the continent, where the big ports are state-owned, run by comfortable cartels which can set their own charges and conditions, seeing off competitors and stifling free-enterprise and innovation.

What the commission is trying to achieve is "intra-port competition" (competition between providers of a same port service within a port), whereas, in the UK, the industry is structured differently.

We have already gone through our denationalisation and have a network of private ports, such as Mersey Docks, Associated British Ports and Hutchison (the owner of Felixstowe), which compete with each other for business. And with that larger network of ports, there is healthy competition already, between ports.

John Dempster, director of the UK Major Ports Group, which represents the big port companies, said the new directive could force a port such as Felixstowe or Bristol to split off its cargo-handling activities and periodically put them up for tender. This, he says, could "lead to a situation where the existing operator was forced out," he said.

According to The Telegraph, he also questions which "competent authority" would award licences, believing the process could become bogged down at the Office of Fair Trading. David Ord says that, as the owner of the port, it wis "outrageous" that "assets I am buying today, I would potentially lose control and ownership of".

He adds that no industry could allow this, even if the EU did envisage some form of compensation. "If I build a factory and I kit it and I employ the people who are working in it, are you telling me it's fair that after 30 years someone else can come through and claim it? It's like a Soviet economy," he says.

Dempster is equally forthright, stating that the EU is trying to address the problem in continental ports where it is alleged there are cosy cartels operating services. “The trouble is it's 'one size fits all' and we are the innocent victims in the cross-fire," he declares.

And there you have it. So often do we meet this situation, where the UK is the odd man out, but we have to go along with the flow, just because the "colleagues" need to deal with their own problems. How longs is it, one wonders, before the penny drops and our political masters realise that the UK simply does not belong in a political construct designed for the very different circumstances of a continental economy and society?

To celebrate what has been a productive year for regulators, The Daily Telegraph is launching the Regulatory Creep of the Year award.

On reading this, we immediately thought of Boris Johnson. But them we saw that the paper was asking for nominations "for the central or local government agency associated with the most mind-bogglingly frustrating piece of red tape during 2004."

The worst offenders, it says, will then be named and shamed in the newspaper next Monday, with the biggest loser receiving the first ever red tape award.

Perhaps, the Telegraph adds, it could be Gordon Brown or Patricia Hewitt's Department of Trade and Industry. Not content with introducing 21 major new pieces of employment law since 1997, the DTI issued new disciplinary and dismissal regulations in October. They were meant to make it easier for an employer to safely sack a member of staff while at the same time clearly stating the employee's right to be treated fairly.

The supposedly three-stage process turned into a 13-stage minefield for employers during the drafting. It was so complicated that the DTI wasted more than £200,000 sending out a million leaflets that aimed to explain the rules but gave the wrong information.

It continues: "But many other government departments and agencies are likely to challenge the DTI to this year's top spot. The Environment Agency's decision in July to reclassify everyday items like computers and fluorescent lights as hazardous, but slash the number of sites licensed to deal with such waste from 182 to 14, was a corker. Then to cap it all, the agency then attacked business for fly tipping."

"The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which is responsible for the EA, has also been busy. New regulations affecting farmers - the so-called cross compliance rules - were only sent out on December 6 but from January 1 will determine whether farmers can apply for subsidies or not."

"According to the National Farmers Union, the regulations now give Secretary of State Margaret Beckett the right to tell farmers whether they can harvest their crops or not. This performance meets two important Regulatory Creep award criteria: being ill conceived and poorly timed."

We are told that the trophy, 20 cm high (8 inches in real money), has been created by Glasgow Arts School sculptor Andy Knowles, using EU-approved resin and UK standard red electrical tape. It complies with all known health and safety, employment and environmental regulations. We must point out, says the Telegraph, that, if dropped, it could hurt someone's foot.

All jolly good fun, but it misses the point - the "elephant in the room strikes again". Much of the legislation to which the paper refers is produced by our government over the water, in Brussels. The British departments are only implementing it – albeit with the occasional bit of gold plating. Award nominations, therefore, should include departments of our true central government – the EU commission.

For the sheer scale of stupidity of its imposts, we nominate DG Environment. It, not the Environment Agency, was responsible for reclassifying everyday items like computers and fluorescent lights as hazardous, and it produced the legislation that required the number of sites licensed to deal with such waste to be slashed from 182 to 14.

Nominations should be sent to Richard Tyler, which you can do from this link. We invite you to join us in nominating DG Environment, Brussels.

[In order to make this posting more readable, it has been broken up into two parts, which do follow each other. The EU Defence and Security White Paper will be discussed separately.]

American commentators who are interested in the relationship between the United States and what they designate as Europe have been asking what “Europe” and the “Europeans” will do in return for Bush displaying a readiness to talk and negotiate. He has gone along with European suggestions on the next step in the Middle Eastern peace negotiations, though clearly his instinct was to wait till the Palestinian elections are over and the new leader (whoever he may be) shows himself in control and interested in negotiating. Those instincts may yet prove to be correct.

President Bush has also announced through Secretary of State Powell that he is coming to Europe in February to discuss the various problems that have cropped up in trans-Atlantic relations. What are the Europeans doing in return? Well, very little is the obvious answer, because what is described as “Europeans”, that is the enarquiste representatives of what is considered to be “European attitude” but is really a crystallization of the supranational thinking that affects these people, are not interested in sorting out differences. They want to see the vulgar Americans who insist on voting the way they see right and defending what they see is right, vanquished and the new, post-democratic, post-religious, ideologically statist politics to triumph.

At the last meeting of the European Parliament Defence and Security Committee, the discussion was about an EU Defence White Paper, presented by an “independent task force”, that is, the European Union Institute for Security Studies, based in Paris. So independent is this body that its existence was brought forth by a Council Joint Action and “has the status of an autonomous agency that comes under the EU’s second ‘pillar’ – the Common Foreign and Security Policy”.

The Institute is very proud of the fact that it defends no particular national interest:

“Its aim is to help create a common European security culture, to enrich the strategic debate, and systematically to promote the interests of the Union.”

1. Large scale peace support operations, the weakness here was the current inadequate troop levels in the EU.

2. High intensity crisis management, this requires rapid political decision making and a rapid deployment capability.

3. Traditional regional wars, e.g. the Gulf. The issues here were about armaments, deployment, locations of HQs and working with other, e.g. the USA.

4. Pre-emptive strikes, e.g. for countering Weapons of Mass Destruction. These operations require Special Forces and there was a problem with numbers.

5. Homeland defence (civil protection rather than military operations).

Interestingly, Mme Gnesotto, Director of the European Union Institute for Security Studies and Chairman of the Committee that wrote the proposal for an EU Defence White Paper, expressed her views quite forcefully about “Europe” and America in an editorial for Le Figaro on November 8. Presumably it had taken her several days and several tons of smelling salts to get over the shock of the presidential election result.

Our readers must bear in mind that her thoughts are not those of a random journalist but of a woman who through her position exerts a great deal of influence on the defence and security thinking in the European Union.

Her starting point was that rather odd one that we have noted before: apparently various soundings and opinion polls have shown that a very large majority of the world’s citizens voted for Kerry. (To be fair, Mme Gnesotto or the editor of Le Figaro put the word voted in quotations marks.) George Bush’s comfortable victory left these people angry, bewildered, disturbed.

How on earth do the world’s citizens (whatever that may be) vote for the American president? Most of them do not even vote for their own governments, particularly not in those countries that the French government, for some unaccountable reason is particularly friendly to. Presumbaly, what Mme Gnesotto means is that she and her like on the international conference circuit liked to think that they would have voted for Kerry. (Why she thinks John Kerry’s foreign policy would have been any different is anybody’s guess.)

It is clear to Mme Gnesotto that it is the American people who are out of step with the world. Those who voted for Bush, she explained confidently, were not interested in the war in Iraq or in economic problems. They were voting entirely for moral and religious reasons, enacting a kind of a modern morality play. These benighted individuals perceived the war against terrorism as a war of Right against Wrong. (How different from the sophisticated French politicians who manage to support terroists abroad while introducing draconian rules to deal with anyone suspected of even saying something wrong in their own country. No right and wrong here.)

America, by electing Bush, has isolated herself even more from all democracies. Then again, Mme Gnesotto seems to think that other democracies means the European Union, a questionable definition. As an additional argument she produces the notion that the very ideas that served to elect Bush, served to disqualify a possible European Commissioner: “social intolerance, religious fundamentalism, an apology for inequality among the sexes”.

One rather wonders whether Mme Gnessotto has paid any attention to the religious diversity in the United States and the number of women who are in high position in business and politics. (She was not to know that the new Secretary of State would be female, but the possibility was discussed from the day of Bush’s re-election.)

Furthermore, the open election of the American president is a tad different from the somewhat sordid, secretive deals that create the European Commission.

Mme Gnesotto shows herself to be seriously disquieted by the evident preference of the Bush administration to conduct bilateral relations with European countries, but she is hopeful that realism would overcome ideology and, presumably, the opinions of the great and the good will be deemed more important than democratic accountability.

Where she gets into a muddle and her Gallic logic fails her is whether the division in Europe over Iraq has weakened or strengthened the Union. On the whole, she feels, it has not harmed the process of integration, the ultimate good in European politics: the commons security and defence policy is going ahead as planned (without the common interests), the constitution was signed, there is no sign of political disintegration.

On the other hand, America has suffered from the European division over Iraq, because it has meant that the European allies have not given as much help as was expected. For some reason, this fills Mme Gnesotto with delight. Apparently, this has resulted in America’s isolation in Iraq, which is rather curious since a division would imply that some (most, as it happens) European countries must have supported American action and joined the coalition.

The likes of Mme Gnesotto are, as I have said, not interested in trans-Atlantic deals. They want an acknowledgement that America is in the wrong, and particularly in the wrong for not following instructions so clearly issued by the European elite (instructions that the people of Europe do not follow all the time, either). And one can see what it is they are really afraid of: that the notion of accountable democracy will undermine the integration process and that, possibly, the American administration, which does not see any advantages to that process (and why should it, since it is full of hostility towards the United States?) will help that along by refusing to deal with the EU as a political union.

I do so fear that President Bush’s advances will be rebuffed at the very least in France. The important thing is, surely, not to accept the establishment of that country as the self-appointed spokespersons for the whole of the varied continent of Europe (not to mention the islands off its shore).

It would be almost trite to observe that immigration is a "hot" issue in the UK, to say nothing of the rest of Europe, other than as an introduction to the thought that there are two sides to every coin and that it is sometimes interesting to see the issue from a completely different perspective.

That perspective was brought to us yesterday by The Times of India in an article entitled "Iron curtains across EU". Its writers observe that a new immigration law comes into force in Germany in less than three weeks time, which sends a message to "Indian techies" thinking of heading for the Fatherland.

"Ponder long, consider hard," say The Times writers, "Germany 2005 may be difficult territory to colonise with our skills. So also Holland. And France. And Italy. And who knows, Britain too, may one day soon, be pulling up the cultural drawbridge and barricading itself against the non-European barbarians at its gate."

Continuing on their theme, they quote Churchill, admitting that he never meant it in quite this way: "Churchill's ‘iron curtain’," they write, "is once again descending across Europe."

Then it sealed off the ancient cities of Eastern Europe but today that iron curtain is draped across Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and Rome. It enfolds other, smaller cities and towns. Its tassels fall untidily everywhere. It screens off minds from the 'other'. For, "multi-kulti" has gone out of fashion. Hard-won European tolerance to a fault has suddenly become an outsize cheque that bounced badly, dashing hopes of a sizeable future pay-off.

"How else", asks The Times, "to read the remarks of Germany's opposition leader Angela Merkel, when she announced that the very idea of a multicultural society was flawed? And what to make of Holland's chant, "normen en warden" (Dutch norms and values), even as it embarks upon one of the largest deportations of foreigners in modern European history?"

Why else would France ban conspicuous religious symbols such as the Jewish yarmulke, Muslim hijab and Sikh turban in state schools? And how to justify the UK's tough new measures to repatriate rejected asylum claimants? Italy, meanwhile, has promised it will never repeat the amnesties granted to illegal immigrants.

Right or wrong, but everyone seems to know why the continent is falling under the hypnotic spell of the mono-culturalism mantra. European Muslims are seen to be too many and too unreconstructed for white Christian Europeans to suffer, post-9/11.

Holland has seen the ugly murder of film-maker Theo, great-great-great nephew of Vincent van Gogh, for daring to be rude about living Islam. Berlin has heard a secret recording on television of an imam telling the faithful the Germans would "burn in hell" because they were unbelievers. And Britain has discovered that Muslim-dominated parts of its cities might very well be in deepest Pakistan.

Normally this is something one asks about the EU. While giving itself all the appurtenances of a state, it also sets out its stall as a region in what it sees as the future, regionalized world politics.

Now, it seems, the EU’s rather sorry example is being copied in South America. Representatives of 12 South American countries met in the ancient Inca city of Cuzco to create an economic and political union that would give these countries a strong voice against America, Europe and Asia.

By America they mean the United States and problems have arisen about that already. The more left-leaning countries like Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela want to see the block as a counterweight to the great neighbour in the north. Others are worried about bilateral relations and do not exactly trust the likes of Venezuelan President Chavez.

In any case, the presidents of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Ecuador did not bother to attend but sent ministers, which raised the inevitable question of just how committed are they to the enterprise. The Foreign Minister of Paraguay, Leila Rachid, was not planning to sign any documents and indicated that her country was not interested in any blocs. All they did, according to her, was to create bureaucracies and South America has enough with Mercosur. Sounds a reasonable politician.

This is the third meeting of the South American leaders since 2000 when Brazil invited them all to discuss projects to link the countries through a network of highways, railways and rivers to boost trade in the region. Not much has come of that, although Peru and Brazil have now signed an agreement to finance a highway that will connect the southwest of Brazil to Peru's Pacific ports of Matarani, Ilo and Marcona.

On the whole, creating political blocs and signing ringing declarations is easier than negotiating detailed agreements that would actually raise economic productivity and living standards in that potentially very rich continent. After all Mercosur and the Andean Community, the two regional trade blocs have been unable to come to any kind of an agreement on lowering tariffs and opening up trade. In fact the two organizations cannot agree on common tariffs for their own members. So the politicians have decided to go for the other option – an economic and political bloc that would give them the right to throw their weight around in the world and never mind the people of their countries.

Then again, there is word that there will be a pan-American free trade area agreement signed some time next year. How will all these regional blocs and power-hungry politicians fare then?

Given the amount of publicity Germany has attracted in the past over its failure to meet the Growth and Stability Pact rules – and the fact that, for three years running it has been in breach, with a fourth in prospect – one might have thought that news of a sly little deal between German finance minister Hans Eichel and newly appointed EU economic commissioner Joaquin Almunia was of some interest.

And indeed it is. From an announcement in the German news magazine Der Spiegel yesterday, we learn that the Spanish commissioner has agreed with Eichel that the plan he has cooked up is sufficient to enable the commission to avoid having to take action – even though the chances of Germany actually achieving the required 3 percent target on its current account deficit is next to nil.

But what is particularly interesting is that the only English-language version of this report currently available has not been posted through any "normal" news channels. The only source we have found is Xinhuanet, the official state news agency of the Peoples’ Republic of China. Thus, the only way we get to hear about the doings of the "transparent" and supposedly democratic European Union is through the press agency of a totalitarian state.

Ironic or what?

[Health warning: this posting is going to be nice about somebody.]

Opinion polls come and opinion polls go. It is always a mistake to place too much reliance on them and it is certainly a mistake to think that a campaign can be conducted entirely by pointing out that all the opinion polls are on our side. For one day they might not be. Then what will the Vote – No campaign say? (Woops, no, they were not the ones I was going to be nice about. Anyone who wants to attack me because of my lack of friendliness towards the Vote – No campaign, feel free to do so.)

Another ICM poll, conducted for the European Foundation (I shall be nice about them when they stop repeating the mantra about what a good thing the Single Market is. It is not.) shows that 58 per cent of the country would like to see the existing EU treaties re-negotiated and turn them into simple trade and association agreements. (No, dear, the Single Market is not simply a trade and association agreement.)

Apparently, this percentage is even higher among young people, rising to 68 per cent in the 18 to 24 age group. That, of course, is not all that surprising. When you think about what it was that made people of some generations support Britain’s involvement in the European project, none of those conditions apply to the younger generation.

To them Europe, especially western Europe, is not glamorous or exciting. France is the place you go to for the week-end if you can think of nothing more interesting to do. Spain is where most of one’s friends go on holiday every year. School-leavers, taking a gap year before deciding what to do next, head off to the United States, Australia, China, India. The world, not the EU, is their oyster.

Nor are they too worried about a possible war between France and Germany, the likely cause of much of that integrationist ideology. To most people under the age of fifty it is impossible. Therefore, the idea of creating an ever more complicated and oppressive raft of regulations in order to prevent a war that is never going to happen must seem plain daft.

Before anybody jumps on me about being too optimistic about the unlikelihood of a war between France and Germany, let me go into a short historical peroration. The three wars that destroyed Europe, and whose results we are still living with (witness the mess in Ukraine and Belarus, not to mention Russia and the former Yugoslavia) all took place within the space of just over 70 years, from 1870 to 1945. The period since then has been almost as long. Since 1945 many other international problems have emerged. So why are we still going on about that brief historical interlude and using it as a spring board for future plans? Clearly, people in their twenties are not going to be interested in that.

Radio Free Europe quoted the opinion poll and interviewed a spokesman for UKIP, rightly explaining to the international readership of its website, that voters have been deserting the Conservative Party for UKIP because of the former’s rather incomprehensible stand on matters European.

RFE also interviewed Lord Pearson of Rannoch, now an independent Conservative peer. Readers of this blog will recall that he, together with Lord Willoughby de Broke, a member of one of the most illustrious Tory families, and Baroness Cox, whose work on behalf of many suffering people in the world has been tireless, were deprived of the whip in the House of Lords, after calling on people to vote for UKIP in the European elections.

Being deprived of the whip may not sound too much. But the peers in question did stand up to some rather nasty treatment from their own party and certain other europhile peers. People who are about to rush in to comment about those wonderful highly paid Conservative MEPs (no, I am not going to be nice about them either) might like to recall that these did not stand up to the slightest frown on the party leader’s face.

So, there we are, this posting is being nice about the peers who have stood up for their beliefs and principles. And just to add to the general feeling of Dickensian good will, let me quote a couple of paragraphs from the interview with Lord Pearson:

“I think the European project was an honorable project at the time. I think the people who invented it thought they were doing the best thing to prevent war in Europe. But it excludes the people from the decision-making process, and I think you are beginning to see signs of great discontent. The whole European project should be abandoned. Europe should be a Europe of collaborating democracies, trading freely and linked through NATO. That way lies peace and prosperity.”

“All of our industry and commerce, all of our social and labour policy, all of our environment, agriculture, fish, and foreign aid, are already decided in Brussels, completely bypassing the national parliaments. The national parliaments are a rubber stamp for all those areas. And, furthermore, if the governments agree unanimously a new law in Brussels, in common foreign andsecurity policy, and in justice and home affairs, Parliament again has to rubber-stamp it.”

Health warning: this is not a concise piece

A couple of angry pieces we (all right, I) wrote recently evoked sharp rebukes from a few of our readers (and only a few), suggesting that: a) we were being unkind to the subjects of our wrath and; b) we were falling short of the standards we had set ourselves on this Blog, in terms of measured reporting of events.

This small chorus has now been joined by the squeaking of "Toby", over on the Europhile “Straight banana” Blog who is rapidly shifting his allegiances to North Sea Diaries, which he considers is a really rather good eurosceptic Blog (and indeed it is). He thinks it is rapidly supplanting "old favourites" like EU Referendum because it has the three cardinal virtues of logic, civility and conciseness.

However, while the Tobys of this world can sit in their ivory towers, and declare that it is legal to sell a pint of shandy in a pub (it isn’t – but Toby, typical of the Europhile breed, does not even know his EU law), we down here at the coal face have daily to deal the growing impact of the construct he so loves – and knows so little about.

And, believe me, the tax collectors and the bailiffs are not at all civil when they come with their hands out, demanding money to keep the likes of Toby in the comfort and style which they so clearly does not deserve, and neither are the court officials, the custody officers and the prison warders. But they, and the serried ranks of surly officials – with their final resort to state violence – underpin the system about which Mr Toby would like us to be so civil.

In fact, the only rational response - to the malign effect this dire, undemocratic, bureaucratic machine has on the lives of good people, to the increasing restrictions on our freedoms it imposes, and on the massive waste of money it encourages – is anger. Inevitably, some of that is, occasionally, going to spill over on to this Blog.

But, as some readers have noted, our ire is not confined only to our enemies in the EU – and make no mistake about it, they are our enemies – but also those who would seem to be our friends, not least the self-appointed “Vote No” campaign that has set itself up to fight the referendum.

Apart from anything else, we object to the "Yes-Noes" because their campaign, in its current guise, it is hoovering up donor money, to fritter away on worthless projects (the cinema ad cost £100,000) and poorly researched literature, while more worthy organisations like the CPS (under Ruth Lea) and the IEA - to say nothing of the Bruges Group - are struggling for funds.

The Bruges Group is a particular case in point, which is now unable even to afford producing any more of its pamphlets. All of these organisations lay the drying up of funds at the door of "Vote No", which is spending most of its resources on fund-raising, without any clear idea of what it wants to spend the money on.

Yet, other organisations are needed to take part in the "no" campaign and their activities will be essential to give as broad a base as possible to the argument. In that context, the "Vote No" campaign exerts a malign influence, by running a poor campaign in its own name (while purporting to represent us all) and robbing others - which could do better - of funds to do their job.

Weighing the "Vote No" campaign in the balance, therefore, I continue to believe that it is a net drain on the resources of the "no" campaigners, and we would be better off without it, as it is currently structured.

But another part of the reason why I am so quick to attack "Vote No" is because I hope to force it to change its ways. I tried the polite, diplomatic and reasoned way, and that was ignored, so it is now full-frontal. At this stage, I think moulding the campaign is more important than fighting it.

This could have been avoided if the personalities in the "Vote No" campaign had been more responsive, and had been prepared to consult more widely and listen to what many people have been saying. They clearly were not prepared to do this and the consequences were as inevitable as they were predictable.

Obviously, as the referendum moves further up the agenda, our emphasis will change - by which time I hope I will have achieved some of my objectives (i.e., a more effective campaign). Either way, I will have to bite my tongue, but not just yet.

As for the more recent pieces that excited our readers’ attention, on was the piece on Boris Johnson, about whom I was so rude.

What triggers pieces like this, though, is a sense of outrage. We get excited about Blunkett stealing £180 from the state to fund his mistress’s (first class) travel – and so we should. But what about our Boris – paid well over twice the national average from state funds, at about £57,000 a year, a handsome pension when he retires, and an average of £118,000 in annual expenses. This is for him to do a job, a job which he so lamentably fails to do. Which is worse: Blunkett stealing £180 or Boris wasting £175,000 a year?

Much the same goes for Daniel Hannan who, while pursuing a lucrative career as a journalist, also happens to be on the state payroll as an MEP, his net cost to us all being £1.2 million a year. A "nice lad" he might be, but what has he done to justify that sort of expenditure?

And let me remind you dear readers – we are not given the option of paying for these people. In the final analysis, if you do not cough up, you will have people at you door and, if you ignore them, you will have the police following them, using force if necessary, to take you to their kangaroo courts, from which you go to prison.

Yet Mr Toby wants civility? He should actually be thankful that all he is getting is anger. Many more sanguine voices than mine cautiously predict that, if this continued encroachment on our liberties continues, the result will be akin to, if not actually, civil war.

This you have to see. Szamuely tells me that the Russian comment at the bottom says: "It's good to know we are not the only ones to do things in a different fashion."

A prize to the reader who can offer the most imaginative EU link!

One of the chores that we willingly undertake in compiling this Blog is the routine monitoring of newspapers, broadcast media, agencies, specialist journals and websites.

We also subscribe to several (expensive) news databases, which give us access to sources not generally available to the public, and occasionally benefit from "insider" tips from our readers and supporters. From all of this generally, we are able to provide a constant flow of new material for the Blog.

Strangely – or perhaps not, if you think about it – the job is much harder when there is little news around, and it was sometimes a real struggle through the summer finding anything at all worthy of posting.

We had thought that, as the summer and its concomitant "silly season" wore out, and we got into the political season, things would pick up. By and large, they have, but not by any means to the same tempo that we have seen in previous years.

In fact, there seems to be a strange listlessness, a curious lack of political depth and an absence of substance – as if everyone is going through the motions, but is not really engaged.

We have remarked many times on how the media seems to have given up reporting real news and now concentrates on "soap opera" politics, of the Brown, Blair, Boris and Blunkett variety, immersed in its own tiny, self-regarding bubble

Today, I had hoped, perhaps to be reporting on the media response to yesterday’s transport council approval of the Galileo project, but apart from one, thin piece in the Daily Telegraph, I could find no mention of it.

You would have thought that the two great Europhile papers, the Independent and the Guardian, might have been quick to parade this EU "triumph" but not a word about it can you find.

There are some other stories grumbling about, not least the continuing Airbus drama, where Airbus industries are taking on Boeing once more, by producing an equivalent to the long-range, medium load airliner, the 7E7, in addition to producing their alternative to the Jumbo, the A380.

Considering that the Airbus projects are fuelled with generous state loans, most of which are never repaid, this is definitely one we will follow but, at the moment, it remains on our "watching brief" file.

Turkey grumbles on, but that will come to a head on the 17th when the European Council meets, so we will not trouble you with it yet, and there are a few fishing stories going round, but we thought we would spare you from too much on this, until the fisheries council meets on the 21st December.

One further subject we thought of covering was the story by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph, who has moved away from reporting the EU today, to report on the exodus of the white, middle-class Dutch from their home country – refugees from a failed experiment in multi-culturalism.

We offer it without comment except to remark that, while the EU preens itself on how keen countries outside the Union are to join, the peoples inside the Union are voting with their feet and getting out. This may be too simplistic a view, but you can never accuse us of missing the opportunity of making a cheap jibe at the "project".

We also have to note that "Houdini" Berlusconi has managed to escape criminal conviction in the Italian courts, and express ritual outrage at the "continental crooks", while noting that at least Berlusconi was accused of giving money away (in bribes), rather than stealing from the state, as in the case of l’escroc Chirac.

So, with that, we finish as we start with the observation that there seems to be a curious lack of news, resorting to the final, desperate ploy of a Blogger bereft of something new to write about – that of lifting from someone else's Blog.

Have a look at Fainting in Coyles, where you will see an infuriating story of how the EU parliament spent €50,000 of our money, celebrating its approval of the EU constitution. Nice spot Gawain.

If you have nothing else to do, read the piece in Tech Central Station on Eurobloggers. EU Referendum gets a favourable mention. Preen, preeen! In the meantime, I have the day job to do. Let me know if you find anything worth reporting.

The Guardian today picks up on the Eurobarometer poll issued yesterday, which conveys what some feel should be a stark warning to Eurosceptics. In glaring contradiction to the bulk of opinion poll evidence over the past two years, almost half of British voters favour a European constitution.

This latest half-yearly Eurobarometer poll, carried out for the EU commission, surveyed 1,310 UK adults, finding that 49 percent of Britons favoured the constitution, with 29 percent against and 22 percent undecided. This compared with an overall 68 percent support among the 25 EU members as a whole.

However, there is a "health warning" in that the support is expressed in terms of support for the concept of a constitution. It is not an assessment of actual constitution proposed or an indication of voting intentions.

The UK findings were immediately dismissed as "ridiculous" by the "Yes-No" campaign, with the Lord High Chief Executive of the self-appointed "Vote No" campaign, Alex Hickman, arguing that it contradicted other polls which, on average, suggested a 2-1 vote against the constitution in the proposed referendum.

He cited a poll carried out for ICM in November, which showed British voters casting 69 percent against the proposed constitution, with 24 percent in favour and 7 percent undecided.

If Eurobarometer is an accurate poll, however – and I am not qualified to say, one way or another, then it is indeed a stark warning for Eurosceptics that there is a hard battle ahead and a majority "no" vote is far from a foregone conclusion.

Some will argue that this should mean that Eurosceptics should unite behind the "Yes-Noes" for the good of the common cause, although we maintain that, as long as the "Vote No" campaign continues to display its current tactical and strategic ineptness, any "no" vote will be won – if it is won – in spite of, rather than because of their campaign.

The one consolation is that early polls in the North East, before the campaign for an elected regional assembly got going, polls showed high levels of support for the concept. But once people started to focus on the issues, as we know, support plummeted.

It is also the case that the "no" voters were very much guided by "anti-politician" sentiments and, if this same feeling can be captured nation-wide, the Eurobarometer poll is not perhaps such bad news after all.

The Commission has announced that it intends to spend “a further €7 million (£4.84 million) in humanitarian aid for people made vulnerable by the Middle East crisis”. No, since you ask, it is not going to help people who have been victims of terrorist violence or, for that matter, victims of any violence doshed out by Javier Solana’s friends, Hamas and other suchlike organizations.

The money is meant to help the poorest Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza as well as used to “to help rehabilitate the shelters of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria”. The money will be channelled through ECHO (European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Office.

This will bring the amount the EU has spent in the Palestinian territories this year up to €37 million (£25.6 million), not a cent of which has been accounted for. This rather large sum of money appears to have had an entirely negative effect.

The intifada (started by the late unlamented pet of the EU, Chairman Arafat) has reduced the Palestinian people to the lowest level of poverty so far. The security barrier, put up by Israel to prevent terrorist attacks, has kept people away from the only sources of work and healthcare in the area, Israel. (Although it has prevented brainwashed and pressurized Palestinian children from blowing themselves up.)

One can but hope that Arafat’s death will lead to a new beginning for the unfortunate Palestinian people and they will no longer have to live in shelters, rehabilitated or otherwise.

In the meantime, could we have some accurate accounts of the money pumped into that rather troubled part of the world?

This is getting tiresome. Surely the Minister can do better than change the subject to ad hominem attacks whenever a question is asked that is in some ways critical of the great European project?

On December 7 Lord Pearson of Rannoch asked whether the Government was satisfied that the new Commission was “suitably composed to act as the initiator and executive of European Union legislation”. Given the Commission’s unique position as the initiator of all EU legislation as well as the executive body and given the somewhat shambolic start to the Barrosso team’s tenure, this is not an unreasonable question.

Nor was the response unreasonable, just plain mad. Baroness Crawley for the Government replied:

“My Lords, yes. The Government have every confidence in President Barroso's Commission. We can only applaud the new Commission's focus on delivery, reform and better regulation. We look forward to working with it to face some of the great common challenges—Africa, climate change and European economic reform—during our presidency next year of both the G8 and the EU”

“My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for that admirably succinct reply. But is she aware that the new Commission contains six former communists,an agriculture commissioner who benefits from the CAP, an anti-fraud commissioner who has been tried for fraud, Monsieur Barrot who was found guilty of fraud but who was pardoned by President Chirac, for fairly obvious reasons, not to mention that fine example of British political probity, Mr Peter Mandelson?

Does the noble Baroness further agree that the Latvian candidate did not make it on to the Commission because she favours member states retaining their tax systems and that Signor Buttiglione was excluded because he is a good Catholic and a thoroughly decent man?

In those circumstances, can the noble Baroness tell the House why Her Majesty's Government are happy to see most of our new laws largely controlled by such people, as they now are?”

With the world crashing around us, UKIP has once again captured some headlines, this time with the shattering news that its deputy Mike Natrass is going to stand in the general election against Bill Cash MP, doyen of the Eurosceptic movement.

Mr Cash is not everyone's cup of tea but no one can dispute that he puts a great deal of work into pursuing the anti-EU agenda, so his absence from the Parliament induced by UKIP splitting the vote would be serious blow to the cause. One wonders, therefore, what UKIP thinks it is playing at.

However, I hugely enjoyed – in an ironic sense – UKIP leader Roger Knapman (aka "the invisible man") defending his party’s decision on Radio 4’s "World at One", when he claimed: "We’ve got a real input into politics".

Even many members of his own party may not be agreeing with this, given the recent saga of the UKIP draft manifesto, published briefly on the UKIP website and then hastily withdrawn after it was rejected by its NEC on Tuesday.

Not the sharpest knives in the drawer, even the NEC members were embarrassed by the puerile naivity and lack of political nounce displayed by the document, which could not have been worse if it had been written by a seminar of primary school kids.

If you want to sample the toe-curling embarrassment for yourselves, it has been republished on another site here. If you want to follow the full ghastly saga of UKIP’s attempt to pretend it is a grown-up party, have a look at UKIP Uncovered.

In a burst of triumphalism, the Commission has just announced that Galileo – its rival version of the GPS system is "on the home straight".

Following the Transport Council meeting, held last night and continuing into today, the commission is crowing that the system "will definitely become operational in 2008: a decisive stage has just been completed which will allow the Galileo programme to be fully completed, despite the obstacles along the way."

The council today confirmed the technical characteristics of the system, in particular with regard to the services being offered and has "decided in favour of moving on to the launching (2006-2008) and operational phases of the project" It has also confirmed that the EU (i.e. the taxpayers of the EU member states) will contribute to the funding of those two phases.

All of this has prompted M. Jacques "Wheel" Barrot, rejoicing in his humble post of transport commissioner, to chortle: "Galileo is without a doubt the most wonderful European technological project. We are now on the home straight: next year will see the launch of the first satellites".

Barely able to restrain his enthusiasm, he adds: "Galileo will be as much of a technological revolution as mobile telephony. This venture shows how capable Europe is of making a united effort in pursuit of a common goal."

This, of course, flies in the face of the recent House of Commons Select Committee Report which cast doubts on the economic viability of the project, cautioning the government that it should not "let itself be bullied into jumping." That just goes to show how influential our Parliament is when it comes to EU matters.

Amid rumours that transport secretary Alistair Darling was going to attempt to block the deal, it also perhaps suggest that, once again, the UK has caved in on a point of principle.

We are now informed by the commission that the programme will continue through its four phases: the first was the definition of the project, which was developed between 2002 and 2005, with a total cost of € 1.1 billion.

It now enters its deployment phase, from 2006 to 2008, at a cost of € 2.1 billion (of which one third will be from the public and two-thirds from the private sector). This will be follwed by the operation and exploitation phases.

Exploitation costs are estimated at €220 million a year with an exceptional contribution of the public sector for the first few years of €500 million. Thereafter, the commission claims, these costs will be entirely covered by the private sector.

Amid all this triumphalism, however, the commission is strangely quite about that could be a significant set-back, with reports of India about to withdraw from the project, taking with it €300 million of funding. All it has to say on this matter is that "the Commission is continuing to negotiate co-operation agreements with third countries."

Trailing in the footsteps of this Blog - which has been watching the incremental progress of EU Defence integration with growing dismay – comes a paper, "New Frontiers in Defence: Between Global Opportunities and Continental Policing", written by an anonymous senior foreign and security policy official, published by the New Frontiers Foundation think-tank.

Muddled, verbose - its 74 pages betraying the fact that it was rushed into print more with a view to establishing Dominic Cummings’s place in a debate which had started without him - it nevertheless makes a contribution to the debate and has triggered some useful additional publicity in The Times and The Sun.

The points made by the paper are in fact better summarised in the Times piece, which states that Britain is increasingly "paralysed and bewildered" as it tries to respond to differences between Europe and the United States over defence.

The report continues, elucidating the New Frontiers Theme that the government is putting its defence links with America at risk in order to enhance its credentials with the EU and particularly France, which is keen on a superpower alliance with China.

We are told that the anonymous author of the paper has said. Britain should reject attempts to turn the EU into a defence bloc that opposes US foreign policy in principle, adding that "Britain's defence strategy has been confused by the lack of a coherent vision and the desire of political elites to be part of the European project."

In particular, the official "reveals" a "new risk" to transatlantic relations over the development of Galileo, the EU’s space-based navigation programme "which has been poorly thought through and practically ignored", an odd claim seeing as how much the Galileo issue has been the subject of a Bruges Group paper last June, and over 25 postings on this Blog, which in turn have fuelled numerous newspaper articles, not least in The Sunday Telegraph, The Business and, latterly The Daily Telegraph. One would be more charitable about the New Foundation paper if it had acknowledged previous work instead of trying to claim it had just invented the wheel all by itself.

Nevertheless, it is helpful that the official should reinforce the message that the Americans are rightly concerned about the consequences should a future adversary get control of the system, for which collaboration with China is being proposed – exactly the issue raised in the Bruges Group paper.

The paper's central failing, though, apart from its limited grasp of military technology – for instance, treating Network Enabled Capability (NEC) and the Future Rapid Effects System (FRES) as if they were different things, when they are the same, then wrongly describing FRES as "Future Combat Vehicles", which completely misunderstands the nature of the project – is that it understates the degree to which technical integration is already underway, to the extent that we are already deeply embedded in the EU defence machine (see also here).

Despite this, the paper is worth a read and, with luck, it will trigger something of a further media response, in which case the debate can develop and the further issues can be explored.

European integration is to take another lurch forward in the New Year when the fledgling European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) – the EU's very own coastguard service – will charter its own emergency oil spill vessels, covering most of Europe's sensitive coastline.

Initially, EMSA plans to hire private sector vessels on standby contracts, operaing in four areas: the Baltic Sea, the western entrance to the Channel, the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean. With only a modest budget as yet available, amounting to € 18m ($21.7m), it is looking to use bunker or supply vessels, which will be fitted with anti-pollution equipment.

The idea us that the ships will go about their normal business but will be available to EMSA, on request from a coastal state, for emergency oil spill operations in the event of a major oil spillage. Yet experts admit that the coverage provided by these vessels will be limited and EMSA has originally wanted a budget of €20m to give improved coastal coverage,.

Nevertheless, even this modest and largely ineffective provision represents a major victory for the stealthy progress of EU agencies, which include the Fisheries Control Agency, with which the Commission intends to take over control of all fisheries enforcement in the waters of EU member states.

The EMSA owes its existence to the Commission's successful exploitation of two major shipping disasters which affected member states, the first on 12 December 1999 when the tanker Erika, carrying approximately 30,000 tons of heavy fuel oil, broke in two in heavy seas off the coast of Brittany, spilling some 14,000 tons of oil were spilled and polluting more than 100 miles of Atlantic coastline.

Within days, Loyola de Palacio, then Vice-President for Transport and Energy, had rushed out pre-prepared proposals for an EU coastguard service. By June 2002, the commission had set up EMSA, originally with limited responsibilities, confined mainly to providing technical and scientific assistance to the commission and member states on matters relating to the proper implementation of EU law on maritime safety and pollution by ships.

Then, in November 2002, the second disaster occurred, when the tanker Prestige, carrying 77,000 tons of fuel oil, broke up in heavy seas off the Atlantic coast of Galicia, destroying one of the most beautiful and richest areas for fishing in Europe.

Although the disaster was caused almost entirely by the incompetence of the Spanish authorities, MEPs joined in the calls for an EU coastguard service, to which a willing commission responded. In December 2003, EMSA thus given additional tasks by the European Council related to oil pollution response, ship security and training of seafarers, beginning operations in February of this year.

This is a classic example of the "beneficial crisis" at work, where the commission makes its plans and then waits until there is some sort of disaster or crisis, which it then exploits. And, while the current provision for oil-spillage vessels is largely token, this is yet another opportunity for the commission to blow its own trumpet, all in the interests of promoting even more integration.

Following on from Helen’s posting about the possible postponement of the Referendum Bill until after the election, this should come as no surprise to any close student of the relationship between EU and UK politics.

Essentially, British politicians, either side of the divide, prefer to fight general elections on domestic issues, and are very uncomfortable when the wider world – and especially "Europe" - intervenes.

Even when the enthusiastically Europhile Ted Heath held the 1970 general election – when there was only 15 percent of voters were in favour of joining the EEC and nearly sixty percent were against – "Europe" hardly featured in the campaign.

Sixty-two percent of Conservative candidates made no reference to the EEC in their election addresses and only two percent declared strong support for British entry.

Heath devoted only three percent of his speeches to the Common Market and, for a prime-minister-to-be , who just two weeks after he was elected was to pack his foreign secretary off to Brussels to start entry negotiations, his Party manifesto was remarkably low-key. It contained only a one-line promise: "…to negotiate, no more, no less," - one of the more egregious of Heath's lies.

In television and radio coverage, the Common Market did not even feature among the top 12 issues.

Prior to the 1974 election however, when Wilson suddenly went to the country in October, the Common Market was certainly threatening to become an election issue. However, Wilson, having first resisted the idea, included the option of a referendum in the Labour Party manifesto, thus neutralising the issue electorally.

Subsequently, our current prime minister saw first hand the baleful effect "Europe" could exercise on electoral fortunes. As a lowly candidate for Sedgefield, Tony Blair joined his leader Michael Foot in committing to withdrawal from the EEC, writing in his electoral address:

We'll negotiate a withdrawal from the EEC, which has drained our national resources and destroyed jobs.

Senior ministers have finally realised the issue cannot be ignored until the election is safely out of the way. Almost certainly the bill that gives the go-ahead for a referendum will be debated in the Commons next month. This will be one of the few occasions when a parliamentary event attracts wider interest.

Poor old Colin Powell. He still thinks that if he is friendly to “Europeans” (as opposed to European countries), they will be friendly to him and the United States. All this despite the mauling he had from France before the Iraqi war and the present refusal by the European members of NATO to do anything at all to help either Iraq or Afghanistan.

He has made various statements during his discussions with the NATO foreign ministers on the need for trans-Atlantic co-operation and the importance of friendly collaboration between Europe and the United States. Secretary of State Powell is, of course, on his way out. His successor, Condoleeza Rice, is an expert on Russia and Eastern Europe. It will be interesting to see whether she will be able to find her way round those rather pesky State Department advisers who keep insisting that there is such a thing as a “European opinion” and that it is best represented by whatever the French President, backed by German, Spanish and Luxembourg politicians happens to say.

Still, he did mention one fact: President Bush will be visiting Europe on February 22, a month after his inauguration. He will be having a summit with all the NATO leaders and all the EU leaders, which will be separate occasions, one hopes. He will also be having meetings with separate European leaders and that might be ultimately more fruitful.

Business managers of both Houses of Parliament are worried that they will not have time to push through the EU Constitution Referendum Bill before the next election, still most likely to be in May.

They are anxious that the Conservatives (and, even more importantly, members of the House of Lords) will produce what they wryly call “a Maastricht scenario” that will drag out and take time away from other rather controversial measures such as the introduction of internal passports a.k.a. ID cards or the setting up of a Serious Organized Crime Police Force (dubbed the British FBI by those witty wags in the newspapers).

What the business managers or the usual channels, as they are sometimes described, do not mention is another fear, but one can almost hear it in their voices. The Maastricht debates in both Houses (and let us remember that with all his faults John Major did not guillotine what was indisputably a constitutional Bill) became a wasting disease. As the endless debates dragged on, the Conservative government bled slowly to death. This is not likely to happen to a government with a majority of the size this one has, but a wasting disease is not wanted just before a general election.

The likelihood is, therefore, that the Referendum Bill will be introduced immediately after the election, though it may well be published in January when we are also going to find out what the question will be and whether it will ask about the treaty or the constitution itself.

Lucy Powell of Britain in Europe is still insisting that there will be no messing about with the question. It will be simple and straightforward, just as the Prime Minister’s office is promising us. The Vote – No campaign, capable of making a statement since this is really rather straightforward, is fussing over the difference between “a treaty to establish a European Constitution” or “European Constitution” tout court. Both would be technically correct.

It remains unclear when the actual Bill to amend the European Communities Act, that is to add the new treaty to British legislation (subject, for once, to a referendum vote) will be debated. Will that, too, be left till after the election? That could cause problems, as there will not be a great deal of time between that and the British Presidency of the EU. Surely, Tony Blair will not want a “Maastricht scenario” while he is wining and dining his colleagues from the other member states.

Of the 160-or so recent reports on the EU arms embargo drama, listed on Google, perhaps one of the best is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s, in the Daily Telegraph. Clearly, the subs were not up to butchering this one, in the manner they do so often.

Thus, writes Ambrose, the EU, after all, refused a Franco-German request to lift its arms embargo on China amid fierce disagreements over the country's human rights record and military ambitions.

Furthermore, the EU has also refused to recognise China as a "market economy", a badge coveted as proof of Beijing's acceptance on the world stage and needed to blunt trade disputes.
Bernard Bot, the Dutch foreign minister, speaking for the EU presidency, said the time was "not right", while the summit communiqué pledged to "continue to work towards lifting the embargo", though no date was set.

Clearly, some of the most principled opposition has come from the Swedes, with Cecilia Malmstrom, a Swedish MEP, saying that the EU should not sell its soul. "China may be a nice business opportunity, but it is still the world's biggest dictatorship," she added.

France, meanwhile, took some much-deserved flak from the campaigning group "Human Rights Watch", which accused Paris of "cynical realpolitik." "France and some other EU members have made it clear that they no longer want to let human rights stand in the way of making money," it said.

Interestingly, Ambrose also reports that: China has already won favoured status as a full partner in the EU's Galileo satellite project, designed to challenge America's GPS monopoly in space, adding:

While ostensibly civilian, the technology can easily be switched to military purposes. The US Defence Department has threatened to blow the satellites out of the sky if American lives are put at risk.

Boris Johnson – need I say more? The man-child is in full flow this morning in The Daily Telegraph, sounding off about the infamous "part P" amendments to the Building Regulations.

These are the ones that require most electrical work in domestic premises to inspected by local council building control, unless carried out by a certified electrician.

But in little Boris’s foetid excuse for a brain, these are a manifestation of Labour’s "profligacy and waste. This, he opines, demonstrates that we "need a new approach to government, which doesn’t foist this kind of regulation on people, with all its fiscal consequences".

How ironic that the man-child should have used the words "new approach", because this is precisely what these Regulations are about, as we reported on our Blog on 7 November.

They are part of the EU's "new approach" to harmonisation, whereby when an EU standard is promulgated though either of its standards bodies, CEN or CENELEC, member state standards bodies are obliged to adopt them, whence they are incorporated into law. And, of course, whether we had a Labour or Conservative government, both would be obliged to put them into effect.

It doesn’t help of course, that the likes of the BBC deliberately keep the population in ignorance of EU involvement (see link) but one might expect that our highly-paid legislators should know something about how our laws are made in this country – especially in this case, when Boris is being paid an extra bundle of dosh to write in the Torygraph.

But, as usual, Boris would rather parade his vacuous ignorance, than actually spend the time learning anything – perhaps he should start reading this Blog, although he is far too grand to do anything so constructive.

Such is the calibre of the man that he believes that the two "golden rules of politics" are: "repetition" and "repetition". They might hold good if you have anything worth saying in the first place, which Boris clearly doesn’t. But then, what do you expect from such a dimwit.

For the record, I have three "golden rules of politics". My first is: "Don’t f**k with North"; the second, "make the right enemies"; and the third is "never trust a Tory". In respect of our Boris, that applies in spades.

Having got their fingers thoroughly burnt in the euro referendum last year – with 56.1 percent voting against and 41.8 percent in favour, on a turnout of 81.2 percent, the Swedish political élites are determined not to suffer the same bruising experience again.

Giving the game away is leader of the Moderate Unity Party, Fredrik Reinfeldt, one of five "non-socialist" parties which, with the ruling government party, are all in favour of the EU constitution. He has found out that "it would not be possible to describe the new EU Constitution as popular with Swedish voters", so he and his political allies have done the obvious democratic thing – and decided not to have a referendum.

Instead, the Riksdag (Swedish parliament), with its built-in pro-constitution majority, will approve it for their reluctant constituents, the vote being scheduled for December next year.
In the meantime, the parties have agreed to use this year to "stimulate extensive debate about what we really want from the EU," says Lars Danielsson, the prime minister's right-hand man.

"This won't just be about the Treaty but also what the EU should do and should not do in the future: how big can the EU become, should Russia join and similar questions," he insists, adding: "We believe it is important that this debate is as wide-ranging as possible."

To aid the debate, the (pro-constitution) government has set up a new organisation called the "EU 2004 Committee", which will "compile more information on the new constitution" for distribution to the frenzied masses. Then all of the pro-constitution parties will try to organise their own debates around the country.

They will invite their largely sceptical countrymen (and women) to air their differing views of the Union", making sure they are not able to express those views in the ballot box, and then the MPs can toddle off to their Riksdag and cast their own votes in favour of the constitution.

Aren’t the Swedes lucky that they live in a democracy!

Despite assurances given by the Financial Times yesterday, it would appear that the question for the referendum is still being decided. Or so the spokesman said for Prime Minister Blair, but what does he know.

Lucy Powell, Campaign Director of Britain in Europe has said scornfully that she believed that the question will be simple and not loaded. Of course not.

"Opponents try and claim the public will be duped or that lots of money will be spent on this by the government, which is a total falsehood," Powell told Reuters. "This shows the government, as we are, is confident in its arguments," she added.

Only two days ago this Blog was railing at the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, with its report - then unpublished - on fishing.

From what we had then seen, it looked very much as if the Commission was ignoring the "elephant in the room", making recommendations to the government on fishing policy which is, in fact, controlled by the European Union.

Discerning readers might have noticed a subtle shift in direction the following day, when we placidly observed that the BBC, in featuring the Commission's report, had introduced the subject, with the opening announcement, "British fisheries policies are failing ..."; yet another example of the "elephant in the room".

With the temperate, calm, deliberation for which we have rightly become famous, we also noted that we did not have a British fisheries policy, labelling the BBC - with somewhat surgical precision, even though we say so ourselves - as "stupid, ignorant, blind people".

At the time, the Commission's report was still unpublished and we were relying on the BBC in particular for our understanding of the main recommendation which, as the BBC reported, was that the sea "should be treated in the same way as endangered areas on land".

The BBC then gave airtime on the Today programme to Sir Tom Blundell, chairman of the Commission, who argued that "We need to take positive steps to allow the environment to recover. Marine reserves should be created to protect 30 percent of the UK's seas from fishing."
But now we have the report, all 497 pages of it. If any reader feels inclined to wade through it, the link is here.

And having read it – yes, dear reader, we have read it... well... some of it – we see that we were in fact over-generous in our calm, temperate approach to the BBC. Call me pedantic if you like, but the Commission did NOT recommend closing down 30 percent of British waters. Its exact recommendation was (and, as always, bear with me on this one - the point will soon emerge) that:

...the UK government should: develop selection criteria for establishing a network of marine protected areas so that, within the next five years, a large-scale, ecologically-coherent network of marine protected areas is implemented within the UK. This should lead to 30 percent of the UK’s exclusive economic zone being established as no-take reserves closed to commercial fishing; and develop these proposals in consultation with the public and stakeholders (para 8.69).

Changes are needed both at the UK and European level, where the UK government should be prepared to make the case for a new EC Directive for the designation of large-scale MPA networks protected from the effects of fishing.

Turkey is going to put a severe strain on the EU’s inflexible attitude to its neighbouring countries, more so, in fact, than Ukraine, where Solana has been rushing around to no good purpose.

The problem, as we have mentioned before (once or twice), is that the EU, for all its much vaunted common foreign policy, common security policy, common this and common that, has no policy towards other countries. It can build up structures for itself and it can propose sending peace-building troops (if it can afford them) to create structures in other places. It does not have any substantive policies because it has no common interests (the most important commonality) or common ideas. Gesture politics and empty structure-building can be very dangerous.

With neighbouring countries there are only two options: either they become members or … well, we are not quite sure. We’ll give them some money and ignore them. Had a new policy been inaugurated with the East European countries as soon as they had broken out of the shackles of communism, the EU would not now be in the mess it is in with regards to Ukraine and, especially, Turkey.

Having insisted on membership for the ones that have already come in, it cannot offer anything else to the countries still outside. But Turkey’s membership is impossible for all sorts of political, economic and social reasons. We have reached stalemate.

During the next European Council Summit in Brussels on December 16 – 17 a decision will be taken for a date to open membership negotiations. Perhaps. Even if the date is set, those negotiations will go on for another ten years at least. Who can possibly tell what sort of a predicament will the EU be then?

Meanwhile, President Chirac insists that even when all the negotiations and tortuous agreements have gone through, France must have a referendum on Turkey’s membership. Why France specifically? Well, who knows. Why any member state, in fact, since the new Constitutions is meant to abolish finally all these petty little distinctions? Now you’re asking.

Another problem has emerged, or, rather, come into the foreground again: Cyprus or, to be quite precise, Greek Cyprus, which is the one that is a member state, though it did not vote for the UN peace plan, while Turkish Cyprus did. Confused? Read on.

The Dutch Presidency has asked Turkey to extend its 1963 association agreement with the then EEC to include all ten new member states, that is (Greek) Cyprus, as well. Turkey, in turn, reminded the Dutch Presidency that it was not Greek Cyprus that voted for the plan but the Turkish one. Cyprus (that is Greek Cyprus) is threatening to veto Turkey’s application for membership and, it seems, the Dutch Prime Minister’s negotiations with the Cypriot President have not come up with any solutions.

The Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the meantime, has announced that Turkey has done everything in its powers to qualify for membership and all these additional demands are unfair.

Needless to say, there is an extra complication. Another country has been paying a great deal of attention to all these goings on: Russia. President Putin, who has been travelling round the world, went to Turkey as well. This was a spectacularly high-powered visit. He took several ministers, including Sergei Ivanov, the Defence Minister and Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Minister (both, incidentally, from the group of siloviki, that is former security services operators). He was also accompanied by the Presidents of the Autonomous Republics of Tatarstan and Ingushetiya, who are uneasily eyeing the spreading conflict (or bloodbath) of Chechnya.

So Putin met President Ahmed Necdet Sezer in Ankara and while we do not exactly know who said what to whom we do know the result: a wide-ranging agreement between the two countries on matters of mutual interest. Some of these have to do with supposed anti-terrorist co-operation; others with energy. Recently, Moscow and Ankara signed an investment protection protocol and gas transportation co-operation accord between Gazprom and Botas. These will boost natural gas exports from Russia via the Black Sea and the projected Trans-Thracian pipeline. It is worth noting that Gazprom is a more or less re-nationalized company that is gradually asserting its control over the whole of Russian gas production.

Naturally, problems between the two countries will remain, not least over Turkey’s relations with the Muslim and oil-rich former Soviet states in Central Asia and the Caucasus. It would like to have a more active role in the troubled Transcaucasian region, while Russia feels that any independent activity on the part of the former Soviet republics is somehow a hostile act towards Russia.

One wonders whether the EU is watching these developments.

Bear with me. This is an EU story.

Currently, my garden is taking on the aspect of a scene from the famous Hitchcock film. Each time I venture out of doors, I see the ridges of the houses opposite, the TV aerials, the telephone wires… lined with birds, all staring at me accusingly, silently mouthing (chirping? ... silently? er ... you get the point) the words, "where the ... are they?".

It all started out so innocently. We used to buy those fat balls for the birds, to hang on the trees for the tits and others to feed on. But then we discovered that some of the ground-feeding birds loved them as well, and would devour two or three balls in less then an hour when we put them on the lawn.

That got a bit expensive, so I started making them myself ... one of those Saturday chores. The recipe is a pound of lard melted, to which is added bread crumbs, mixed seed and chopped-up peanuts. And boy, do the birds love them.

But, no longer. All of a sudden, there is no lard to be had. Mrs EU Referendum has been scouring the shops and supermarkets within a ten-mile radius and… nada. It is scarcer than hens' teeth or rocking horse sh*t.

The reason we are told is EU enlargement. Since Poland joined, from which we are told, much of the lard comes, the multi-nationals have moved in big-time and have taken over a huge slug of the pig producing industry.

The bulk of pig production now, instead of being home-slaughtered, is now being exported live to the lucrative EU market, and there is a shortage of pigs for home-production in Poland. And, no pigs ... no lard. It is as simple as that.

Thus, as the birds start tapping at the windows, their accusing stares reminding me of my failures – not that I need any reminding of those – I sit here tapping at my keyboard, contemplating yet another benefit of EU membership. Will someone please tell the birds?

Unwise to the point of reckless, the EU seems determined to rub the US the wrong way and give into the Chinese, lifting the arms embargo.

So says The Times this morning, reporting a "new transatlantic rift" that will open today when the EU formally tells China that it is prepared to lift the embargo.

According to The Times, Washington said that the prospect that its Pacific forces could be threatened by advanced European weapons sold to China was unacceptable and that lifting the embargo would lead to restrictions on American co-operation with Europe on defence issues.

"We can't countenance the notion of advanced European weapons technology finding its way into the People's Army and threatening our forces in the region, or Taiwan," a US government official told The Times. "It is very close to the bone for us. It is not at all in the EU’s interest to lift the arms embargo."

At the EU-China summit in The Hague, Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, will tell Wen Jiabao, his Chinese counterpart, that Europe has agreed in principle to end the embargo once China improves its human rights record and the EU has agreed a new code of conduct for arms sales.

As we have pointed out many times on this Blog (see for instance, here),the embargo has become one of the most sensitive geo-political issues, with the United States worried that its European allies will be arming a country that it sees as a potential military rival.

And, as we have also reported, China is spending billions of dollars upgrading its military capability and is rapidly becoming an economic superpower. Now The Times notes that Washington is concerned that East Asia remains militarily unstable, with China threatening Taiwan and North Korea threatening South Korea.

The US is worried that Europe will sell China advanced technology, such as over-the-horizon-targeting systems (guided by Galileo GPS signals) that would enable the Chinese military to strike American ships hundreds of miles out in the Pacific.

The Times also notes that Congress already is planning legislation that would ban the Pentagon from trading with any country that makes military sales to China and, as we have observed (here) is already making technology transfers difficult.

Britain, and Blair in particular, is piggy-in-the-middle on all this, with everything to lose and very little to gain, but under considerable pressure to show "solidarity" with France and Germany. Blair thus has agreed in principle to lift the embargo, but he must surely hope that some of the other member states block any deal, saving him from having to make another "difficult decision".

Despite being flagged up well in advance as a keynote speech, Jack Straw's little offering on the EU constitution yesterday seems to have gone down like a lead balloon with the media.

The only newspaper which appears to have given the speech any coverage in the Europhile Guardian and then only in a perfunctory manner, recording "Straw's warning on EU referendum no".

Having read the speech and tried to dissect it, I can see why editors have seen fit to spike it – quite frankly, it was boring to the point of tedium, offering very little of substance and nothing really new. In the final analysis, if that is all Straw can offer, then he has a real problem on his hands.

Nevertheless, the Guardian did try to inject some life into the story, counter-pointing with a "warning" from industry secretary, Patricia Hewitt, who is insisting that "Britain would lose its ability to create a pro-market EU economy if it rejected the treaty."

This somewhat tendentious statement presumes, of course, that the EU – or, more specifically, the EU member states – are at all interested in developing a pro-market economy, but it sits oddly with the Straw speech who effectively claims that our membership has already enabled us to develop a pro-market economy.

"History shows that we have shaped Europe in our interests when Britain has been strong, engaged and influential," says Straw. You can see the contradiction. Hewitt makes claims of what the constitution will enable us to do, whereas Straw argues that this is what we have already been able to achieve.

Despite this, what we do learn is that Ms Hewitt has been in extensive discussions with the prime minister on how to win over British business to the EU treaty, but we are not told whether her wisdom was fed into the Straw speech.

We are simply left with the Guardian’s view of the speech which, to them, suggests that "any government yes campaign will focus as much on the consequences of a no vote as the benefits of the constitution itself." But, as Straw himself admits, this would bring us into unknown territory.

O Sr. Barroso está na merda profunda - or so I am told. It seems that the political chaos created by his deputy, whom he left in charge of Portugal after scuttling off to Brussels to take up his post as ruler in chief of the evil empire, is coming back to haunt him big-time.

Conscious that his departed political allies are now blaming him for the chaos, and his name is inextricably linked with the EU, El Barroso has twigged that his personal merda-factor (or its Portuguese equivalent) could affect the way his compatriots vote in the forthcoming EU referendum.

Not wishing to be remembered in the history books as the president who brought down the constitution, José Manuel Durao is now pleading with what is left of his country’s government to delay the planned referendum, tentatively scheduled for March, in case it becomes a "how-dare-you-bugger-off-and leave-us-with-that-idiot" vote which, loosely translated into Portuguese, comes out as "no".

Convincing absolutely no one, he claims his real reason for the delay is that "a time of political crisis is certainly not the best moment to discuss the European constitution." That is what he tried telling reporters on the sidelines of a conference, oddly enough on European identity. Barroso must be wishing for a change – of identity, that is, possibly Outer Mongolian.

Anyhow, within a matter of months, there will be a general election in Portugal, when it is expected that the main opposition Socialists, who in September elected a telegenic new leader, former environment minister Jose Socrates, will sweep to a landslide victory.

Although, like Barroso’s party, the Socialists back the EU constitution, it remains to be seen whether the new man, who will have the power to decide when the referendum is held, will be able to resist the temptation to drop his former rival deeper in the merda.

As expected, Jack Straw today delivered his speech on the EU constitution at the Centre of European Reform, London, hosted by Charles Grant, director of the Centre and one time biographer of Jacques Delors.

Surrounded by Europhiles and thus utterly at home with an uncritical audience, Straw was there "to set out today the case for the new EU Constitution". And his basic theme was:

If we approve this Constitution, we will be making it our kind of Europe, a Europe in which Britain is strong. If we reject it, we will end up with a weak and marginalised Britain in a worse kind of European Union.

Europe circa 1973 means an EU without the Single Market; barriers everywhere to British businesses; energy, transport and telecoms run by isolated national monopolies; the Common Agricultural Policy entirely untouched by the reforms to it which we have since secured, and secured I might add through majority voting. There would be no mechanisms for working together against illegal immigration, drug trafficking and international organised crime; and only the most rudimentary ones for using our collective influence on the world stage.

The cold war is with us again. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has just had a two-day conference in Sofia, which ended with no joint declaration. Along the lines there was a serious falling out between Russia and the United States, with the latter dismissing accusations of trying to extend its influence into Ukraine and Russia snarling when accused, in turn, of backtracking on undertakings to pull troops out of Moldova and Georgia.

It is a little rich for President Putin, who went to Ukraine twice during the election campaign, summoned President Kuchma once before the campaign and again a few days ago, as well as made angry statements about decisions by the Ukrainian parliament (Rada) and Supreme Court, to accuse other people of trying to extend their influence. But then, President Putin and the siloviki around him do not view Ukraine as an independent country. In fact, the concept of an independent country is alien to these people, as it was alien to the Soviet Union. If it is our “near abroad” (nasha zagranitsa) it is ours to play around with. Any other opinion is unwarranted interference. Democracy? Fair elections? What’s that?

Unfortunately for us, Javier Solana, the chief panjandrum of the EU's supposedly common foreign and security policy, seems to go along with this notion. He has spent his time rushing around, negotiating for a compromise. A compromise between whom? Well, the people who grossly mishandled the Ukrainian election and those who would like to see the system reformed, made free and fair; a compromise between an ever more autocratic Russian government who is openly trying to suborn its neighbour and the people of the neighbouring country, who want to be independent and move away from autocracy and corruption. Some compromise, some foreign policy.

The Greeks need not feel alone. It seems the Italians cheated on their entry credentials to the euro as well. Apparently, it was not simply a question of hiding state pensions or rapidly selling off stocks to the lowest bidder, but actual misreporting on the budget.

According to the Dow Jones Newswires, the Commission has noticed that the deficit figures reported by the Italian government were between 0.3 and 1.7 per cent lower than the actual figures every year since 1997. This included the period of Italy’s – and other countries’ - self-grooming for the euro.

The Italian government maintains that the discrepancy is merely a statistical one. They always are. The Commission thinks otherwise. Sternly, it has announced:

“The magnitude of the inconsistency has reached levels with are difficult to justify as mere statistical discrepancies.”

After being flagged up yesterday, the report from the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, entitled "Turning The Tide: Addressing The Impact Of Fisheries On The Marine Environment", made lead item on the BBC Radio 4 one o’clock news and featured prominently on the Today programme this morning.

Interviewed on the Today programme was the chairman of the Commission, Sir Tom Blundell, followed by the egregious Ben "Rear Admiral" Bradshaw, our fisheries minister.

What grated, as you might expect, was the way the BBC introduced the subject, with the opening announcement, "British fisheries policies are failing…"; yet another example of the "elephant in the room". WE do not have a British fisheries policy, you stupid, ignorant, blind people. We have a common fisheries policy, run by the EU.

But then, could really could not expect the BBC to run with an announcement that "the EU’s fishing policies are failing…". That would never do.

However, despite its prominence in the media, the actual report remains elusive, the Commission’s website still flagging up a report from August 2004 as its latest production. Apart from yesterday’s story by the Telegraph all we have to rely on is agency copy and a report from The Independent, which is clearly based on agency sources.

From that, however, we have learnt enough to be able to assert that the report is a classic example of why environmentalists should never be allowed anywhere near public policy.

The Commission's main recommendation is that the sea "should be treated in the same way as endangered areas on land", with Blundell arguing that "We need to take positive steps to allow the environment to recover. Marine reserves should be created to protect 30 percent of the UK's seas from fishing."

The man is a fool and his committee is a bunch of ignorant idiots. Rightly, "industry leaders" have accused the Commission of having "tunnel vision" and talking "codswallop".

The key point, of course – which does not exactly take rocket science to figure out – is that we have mixed fisheries, in which some but not all species are threatened. For instance, in the North Sea, Cod stocks are threatened – although this may be more the result of climate change than "over-fishing" – but, as has been pointed out on numerous occasions, Haddock stocks are at a thirty-year high.

Now, dear reader, it has also been pointed out that Haddock compete with Cod for the same food sources. Moreover, when you have a surge in any fish population, as they mature, there is a danger that they outstrip the available food supply. There is evidence of this actually happening in the North Sea, with under-size mature Haddock being caught, showing signs of malnutrition.

And what happens then? The Haddock predate on the Cod fry, putting those stocks further at risk. To keep the stock balanced, and to give the Cod the best chance of recovery, the last thing you do is stop fishing. The very last thing in this world you want is closed areas.

Instead, fishermen should be sent into the areas to fish hard for Haddock, using selective gear which can surgically extract the Haddock without touching the Cod, thus thinning out the Haddock in much the same way that you thin out seedlings from an over-crowded bed.

This much fishery scientists know, and it is this strategy that has enabled the Faeroes to "square the circle", increasing the fishing effort and thus the catches while ending up with an increased biomass.

But this is the very strategy that the EU commission has prevented British fishermen adopting, and now this fool Blundell wants to make things even worse. Not surprisingly, the BBC treated him with reverence. I don't know which is worse – the fool or its mouthpiece.

Paitence Wheatcroft, in the business section of The Times today, comments on Marta Andreason's little talk in London yesterday, on behalf of the "Yes-noes", led by the Lord High Chief Executive of "Vote No", the famous Alex Hickman.

Writes Ms Wheatcroft, Andreason is a heroine to the supporters of the "Vote No" campaign, "as she should be to all who are interested in what happens to their tax money."

Well, not according to David Bamber, who was present at the meeting, and posted an e-mail on the Eurorealist discussion group when he got back. "I have just been to a 'No Campaign' meeting with Marta Andreasen speaking," he wrote:

I regret to inform you that Richard North is right (once again). The "No Campaign" is a pro-membership group operating on the pretext of "Reformation of the EU". (If only they knew what Reformation meant!). So I am afraid that they are really not our sort of people.

However, I did try to keep our end up by asking the question, "What changes to the EU do you envisage would justify the UK's continued membership of the EU." The answer was a fudge. Something about accounting procedures... When asked whether she was optimistic of success, she said that she would keep her opinions on that matter private.

Wait for it ... promise not to laugh ... I said, wait for it ... The EU is going to have another deregulation campaign.

Now you can laugh.

But no, not this time ... they’re serius ... reely, reely serius. They're going to cut red tape.

So say the finance and industry ministers who are meeting today to, in the words of The Financial Times. "commit themselves to a renewed onslaught on EU red tape". And they reely are serius this time, honest guv!

We are told they want "a new system" ... not another new system ... sorry, sorry ... they want "a new system to measure the cost of EU regulations". And, by George they are going to have it in place by June 2005. What’s more, it is going to pave the way for "a systematic campaign to reduce the burden on business."

Yea, right!

Conscious that people might be a teensy weensy bit sceptical about so grand a claim Gerrit Zalm, the Dutch finance minister, told the Financial Times that past deregulation drives had, sort of ... er ... well, run into a bit of resistance from officials inside the EU commission. Fancy that!

But now things were going to be diffrent. El Barroso's new commission was "signed up to the campaign". Enter stage German. "Zee EU's regulatory burden vill go down, not up. If it doesn't, vee vill block zee regulations." Exit stage German ... the man's a Dutchman, after all.

Und just to prove zat it vill verk - sorry, the German left already ... will work, this brand new, improved, washes whiter initiative is backed by ministers from Ireland and the Netherlands, to say nothing of Luxembourg, UK, Austria and Finland, the holders of the next four successive EU presidencies.

That proves it: Member States Mean Business.

Mr Zalm has no doubts about this. There is now "a cultural shift" at the EU commission. They all love deregulation now... yes, yes, they absolutely love it. In the past, they loved regulation. Deregulation was an attack on the commission; it was ... how you say? ... a "very negative attitude." Nasty things these "negative attitudes".

But that was when the commission thought deregulation was turning two regulations into one beautiful regulation. (No, I did not invent this ... this is what the man actually said.) That was "better regulation". But now they know different ... they have been reprogrammed.

Where they counted pages, we will count the cost, says Zalm, who wants the EU to copy his country and cut the regulatory burden by 25 percent. Oh, goody, that means only €750 billion instead of €1 trillion a year.

And how is this miracle going to happen? Please, please don't laugh. You'll hurt their feelings. El Barroso is preparing a paper "outlining a common methodology for assessing the cost of EU regulation, present and future." Oh, all right, do laugh then!

Says the FT, "the initiative is an important test for the European Commission, whose top officials have traditionally been attracted to the task of legislating and policy-making, not to the grind of cutting red tape."

That it might be, but nothing like the test of our credulity. Pigs with afterburners might be more plausible.

(Health warning: this is another divisive posting.)

I have spent part of yesterday evening listening to Alex Hickman, Chief Executive of the Vote-No campaign (before he had to rush off in order to be present at the talk given by Marta Andreasen on how to reform the EU by making its accountancy system more transparent). Sadly, I have to report that neither he nor, apparently, the Vote-No campaign have a real understanding of the magnitude of the task or what the issues are.

Mr Hickman, who ran Business for Sterling while Gordon Brown was winning the fight for them, explained that the campaign has, in a way, gone back to its roots and is concentrating on business people and business organization. It is a little odd to think that business opinion will be of any value in the constitution referendum. We are not talking about the currency here or interest rates but about a whole raft of issues. As one of those will be the environment, having businesses line up on the no side might actually be quite useful for the yes camapaign.

It is the contention of the Vote-No campaign that it would be counterproductive to discuss the wider issues and all efforts should be concentrated on the constitution and on getting the no vote out. A perfectly reasonable argument, except for one thing – the constitution is about wider issues and these will come up in the discussion.

It seems that, although the famous or infamous “Europe Yes – Constitution No” cinema advert has gone out, no decision has been taken on what other slogans or messages might be put out. It will not be Europe Yes, he assured us, but EU reform yes. Not a catchy slogan and one that is calculated to introduce yet more confusion in the minds of the undecided at whom the entire campaign is aimed. After all, the yes side will be saying that their shining new constitution is absolutely essential in order to reform the EU. Have we not already heard mutterings about people rejecting the reform constitution?

What worries the Vote – No campaign is that the government will use scare tactics. Actually, as my colleague has pointed out, they are lining up positive arguments as well and the eurosceptic side ignores those at its peril. The government, said Mr Hickman, will tell people that voting no means being out of the EU. We must counteract that by never mentioning anything outside the constitution at all.

While some people may agree with that idea, many of us have seen the knots that the “I am for the EU/single market/previous treaties but against the euro/constitution” brigade ties itself into. Much easier to say well, yes, perhaps this will mean a completely different relationship with other countries in Europe and the world. Anything wrong with that? Like so many politicos, Mr Hickman and his colleagues underestimate people’s ability to understand straightforward ideas and see through humbug. For that is what they are producing: humbug.

Sadly, there is far too much emphasis on who will be taking part: businessmen, celebrities, politicians and far too little on what this is all about, that is Britain’s future. (Incidentally, I was rather surprised to hear that Mr Hickman considered Bob Geldorf’s involvement a huge success. Who on earth pays attention to that clapped out rock dancer and ridiculous aid groupie? Not the young, who think he is a wrinklie; not the middle aged, who think he is preposterous; not the old who have probably not heard of him.)

So what will be the Vote – No campaign talking about when it does go out beyond the London cinemas? Ahem, it seems that they have not decided yet. There will be focus groups and there will be opinion polls. They will talk about power going to Brussels and how much more the EU will cost after the constitution. What will they say when people talk of all the power that has already gone to Brussels and the cost without the constitution? Not disclosed. And, of course, they will talk about the EU taking over matters of criminal justice and asylum. Unfortunately, most of this is going through, constitution or no constitution with Tampere II being adopted.

I can, however, report one positive development. It seems some of those “bright” young lads must have read the blog. Mr Hickman assured us that they were not going to neglect the core voters, since they were the people who would be knocking on doors and doing the actual campaigning. What he could not explain, as, it seems, no decision had been taken, is what will be in the literature that these people will be asked to hand out. So far, nothing Mr Hickman has said makes me think that the large proportion of eurosceptics will want to have anything to do with him or his campaign.

Curiously enough, it has not occurred to those boys that virtually announcing yourself to be the No campaign does not make it so. They are merely doing their best to split the eurosceptic movement. They may not succeed.

"We are winning the argument on the harmonisation of tax rates", said Gordon Brown in May 2003. "Federalist ambitions are giving way to inter-governmental realities," he said.

That was, of course, in relation to the question of including taxation powers in the EU constitution but, as we remarked in October of this year, who needs the constitution? The EU is going ahead with taxation laws anyway, under the existing treaties.

This we have pointed out in several of our postings, see for instance here and here, with the legal adventurism of the ECJ paving the way for increased control over member state tax systems, using existing treaty provisions.

So active has the court been that, over the past ten years, it has ruled against member states in 85 out of 87 cases relating to discriminatory tax legislation – coincidentally in favour of the taxpayer.

And so it came to pass that today that The Financial Times reports the government is discussing changes to the corporate tax system, in order to protecting the UK's tax revenues from being undermined by future ECJ rulings.

Those cases present "potentially the greatest threat to UK and other EU states' tax revenues in the medium term", according to Ernst & Young, the professional services firm, with the Inland Revenue estimating that £10bn-£20bn of tax revenue is at risk.

Brown is being forced to choose between removing tax privileges from UK-based organisations, or granting them to non-UK companies, a move that could cost the exchequer a fortune. Thus, the preferred option is to remove the privilege altogether in order not to discriminate against companies in other EU member states.

Thus, having seen the government resist harmonisation of direct tax regimes through the constitution, we now see that the EU is succeeding in achieving this objective by the back door – driving a cart and horse through the idea of fiscal sovereignty.

Back in the days of sovietology there was a somewhat satirical song about the subject, written by people who had a genuine interest in developments in the Soviet Union. One verse of it went as follows:

Conferences all day long
On Marxist ideology.
Is Brezhnev getting weak or strong?
That is sovietology.

Two separate pieces, one in the Observer yesterday, and one in the Independent today, signal that the temperature on the EU constitution is set to rise.

The piece yesterday was by the great sage of the Left, Will Hutton, the knower of all things, who dissects Gordon Brown's thinking on the EU, under the title "Brown is on the ball yet again".

Says Hutton, on the EU constitution, Brown, and the government will be bringing forward a national plan as part of a co-ordinated European effort which Britain will lead during its presidency of the EU next year. Hutton opines that this is "intriguing both economically and politically":

Instead of a rarefied debate about whether the pound has met the tests to join the euro, this will be a debate about lifting R&D;, science spending and business investment, raising employment, reducing regional inequality, lowering poverty, improving skill levels and curbing environmental damage...

...get challenged over why they would not want to hit these targets and why it is wrong for Britain to lead a European effort to achieve them, obviously to the benefit of both Britain and Europe.

The front page of The Daily Telegraph today sports an "exclusive" by Charles Clover headed "Health advice to eat more fish 'is threatening stocks'".

It trails the impending publication (due out tomorrow) by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution following "an 18-month investigation of over-fishing", and retails one of 60 recommendations for "radical change" in Government policy to emerge from the report.

That recommendation is that government advice that people should eat two portions of fish a week should be scrapped because rising consumption could destroy depleted fishing grounds.

Clover also builds in another "scoop". The Prince of Wales has been prevailed upon to lend his name to an op-ed in the Telegraph, where he endorses the Royal Commission's call for urgent action to protect the marine environment and future food supplies.

Edging into dangerous political territory, he singles out for particular criticism the "appalling" destruction of dolphins and porpoises by trawlers catching bass in the Channel as an example of the multiple failures of the EU's Common Fisheries Policy.

This, in fact, is an example of a humiliating rebuff delivered by the commission to fisheries minister Ben "Rear Admiral" Bradshaw. After he and his predecessor Elliot Morely had committed to stopping high-speed pair trawling for Bass on the Western Approaches - cited as the cause of the carnage – Bradshaw went cap in hand to the commission asking for a ban, only to have his entreaties rejected on the grounds of "insufficient proof of damage' See links, here, here and here.

Returning to the Clover story, however, he still buys in to the oft-repeated canard of "over-fishing" causing the problems, citing the Royal Commission, which argues that "the Treasury must face up to the Government's responsibility for allowing over-fishing and pay fishermen off when they are put out of business by such recovery measures."

We will examine to Commission's report with interest but, on the basis of today's report, it looks very much as if the Commission is ignoring that huge "elephant in the room" – the European Union – which dictates which fishing vessels have access to UK waters, under the doctrine of "equal access".

Nevertheless, Clover is beginning to show some understanding some of the issues. Writing of the EU commission's attempt to preserve Cod stocks – by closing down whole fisheries, in which mixed stocks of Cod and Haddock abound - for the first time he makes reference to selective fishing, offering the hesitant criticism that it is not clear whether the EU commission has any intention of recommending selective methods that are used in other countries to catch haddock without catching cod.

This is something that the commission has been notoriously slow to accept, yet techniques are available – and well-proven – which allow fishermen to "surgically extract" Haddock in mixed fisheries, without touching the Cod.

The Prince of Wales hints at this dereliction, writing that "The most generous interpretation that can be put on the present situation is that we are just about managing the inexorable decline of our fisheries."

He adds that no one could be unmoved by the desperate consequences for fishermen and their families. But he is "confident that, with decisive action and proper long-term management, it should be possible to achieve greater numbers of fish and higher catches."

That is true. It is entirely possible to both increase catches and end up with an increased biomass, given good fisheries management techniques. But those techniques are never going to be applied as long as UK waters come under the leaden jurisdiction of the CFP.

Next week, on 13 December, the Conservative Party is to publish its proposals for a detailed fisheries management system, under national and local control, to replace the CFP, thus honouring Michael Howard’s commitment that a Conservative government will repatriate the CFP. This may prove the last hope for UK fisheries, before the damage done by the EU becomes irreparable.

Without giving too much away, it will place the responsibility for the decline in fish stocks squarely at the feet of the current management - the European Union. Watch this space.

Reprinted in today's International Herald Tribune, from the New York Times is an article that tells us that that enthusiasm for joining the euro has cooled markedly amongst some of the ten recent accession countries.

When the ten joined last May, there was heady talk about advancing swiftly to the next step in European integration: the euro. But now several countries have pushed back their timetables for joining until the end of the decade, while they struggle to clean up their debt-stained public finances.

As the dates keep slipping, many are wondering how the newcomers will ever meet the economic preconditions for adopting the currency.

Cited by the IHT, Katinka Barysch, the chief economist at the Center for European Reform, says: "There was an unjustified optimism about these countries joining the euro. It was originally thought they would join the euro two years after joining the EU. Now it's clear that won't happen."

It seems, though, that it is not just meeting the entry criteria that is giving some countries second thoughts. Central Europeans see no appeal in shackling their fast-growing economies to the lumbering giants of Western Europe, while the strong euro (or weak dollar) has hobbled their exports - a fact not lost on the new members, with their export-driven economies.

Then there is the inability of existing members to meet the requirements of the Growth and Stability Pact, and the refusal of Germany and France to conform, on top of the news that Greece fudged its figures in order to join.

Chickens are coming home to roost in a big way, when some of the new entrants are also complaining about the "one-size-fits-all" interest rates. The ECB is keeping interest rates at historically low levels to prop up the fragile recoveries in Germany and France, but that would be entirely the wrong strategy for Poland, with its brisk growth and ballooning deficits. "If Poland had euro-zone interest rates, inflation would go through the roof," Barysch says.

However, it seems that Estonia, which has already tied its currency to the euro, together with Lithuania and Slovenia, which have done likewise, are still prepared to take the plunge.

But Hungary is also looking to an early entry. In 2003, when the central bank modestly devalued the forint, and traders promptly dumped the currency, and since then the currency has fluctuated wildly, unnerving Hungarian exporters and government officials. As a result, "Hungary can no longer afford to have its own funny money," says Peter Akos Bod, a former central bank president.

Nice comment that. Now he is looking to have someone else's "funny money".

In what was a busy day yesterday – day jobs know no frontiers – there was scare time to complete the usual review of the Booker column and especially the lead story about how the EU constitution has come to be published in the Cotswolds

It really is quite remarkable that, when Tony Blair and his fellow heads of government met in Rome on October 30 to sign the supposedly finished constitution, they cannot have been putting their names to the document itself. If it had have existed, we would have seen the fully finished version in print, by now – and we haven’t.

For sure, the electronic version can be downloaded, in segments, from the EU commission website, but this does not have the look of a finished, publishable document. Only today will that be available, set out in full in a single document. And that is thanks to an independent publishing venture run by an 89-year-old former brigadier from a small office in the Cotswolds.

The production is thanks to a remarkable feat of detailed research by the British Management Data Foundation, run by Brig Anthony Cowgill and his son Andrew, a 47-year-old tax expert.

Producing versions of EU treaties has become something of a family tradition for this team, ever since, twelve years ago, Brig Cowgill was shocked to learn that Parliament was being asked to approve the Maastricht Treaty before the full text of what John Major had agreed to was made available for MPs to read in any form they could understand.

The late Sir Keith Joseph circulated 1,500 copies of the BMDF's "consolidated" version of the treaty to politicians, showing the Maastricht amendments in context.

In coming months, as the constitution moves to the top of the political agenda, with a referendum likely early in 2006, the BMDF's definitive version of the constitution's text, with a wealth of explanatory material, is certain to be widely cited.

For politicians, the media and anyone concerned with the implications of the constitution for the future of Britain and Europe, it will become the single most authoritative, user-friendly version of a document at the centre of national debate.

The BMDF has consolidated the EU's 844 separate web-pages in just 270 printed ones, showing all 448 articles of the constitution (that of the USA contains only 26). It also adds supporting documents, invaluable analysis and a proper index (copies of The European Constitution in Perspective can be ordered on 01452 812837 at £27.50).

Another story in The Business today, which is packed with more news about EU issues than the rest of the Sunday broadsheets combined – is a story that has been doing the rounds about a speech made by the egregious Denis MacShame to students in Durham.

First aired in the Daily Mail last week, MacShame was caught on tape declaring that the chancellor's famous "five tests" for joining the euro were a "red herring" to be cast aside whenever it was politically expedient. But what also set the tongues wagging was an admission by MacShame that the EU constitution was likely to be the first in several steps of European integration.

It is indeed helpful to have confirmation of this from MacShame but what is a tad surprising is that anyone should have thought this was something new.

Not least, that intent was made clear by the Constitutional Affairs Committee of the EU Parliament last week but, more specifically, this was spelt out in detail by Dominic Strauss-Kahn, last April, in a report commissioned by Prodi called "Building a Political Europe". There is also a link on our sidebar to this.

Interestingly, The Business cites Neil O'Brien of the "Yes-No" campaign (aka "Vote No") who says that MacShame's "candour" had given them "enough ammunition to fill a whole campaign". What O'Brien would make of Strauss-Kahn's report, heavens only knows.

The Sunday Times appears to think that George Galloway’s somewhat Pyrrhic victory over the Telegraph newspapers is something to celebrate. They are clearly not aware of what the judgement implies. The judge did not say that the documents were lies or forgeries, merely that the Telegraph newspapers should not have published them in such a hurry, as it gave a nasty impression of what Galloway was up to.

Apparently it is absolutely fine for Home Secretaries to demand DNA tests and conduct public vendettas against former lovers and equally fine for newspapers to publish photographs of that woman and her child whose life the said Home Secretary is trying to blight but it is not all right for a newspaper to inform its readers that documents have been discovered, which indicate financial and political malpractice on the part of an elected member of parliament. Rum world we live in.

There was one interesting comment that George Galloway made. In his view the war against the Telegraph newspapers (not over yet, since the group is thinking about appealing against the judgement) is merely the beginning of his path, which will end, presumably, in his total glorification. He is going after bigger fish, he announced confidently.

It is not clear what he means by that. Standing against Oona King on behalf of his rather ridiculous party cannot be it, although Mr Galloway may think so. After all, one of the advantages of leading a small party is that you become a very big fish, indeed, in a small and fetid pond. (Another similar pond is being dug by the indefatigable Redgrave siblings, I note. Relations between the two peace and respect parties should be interesting to watch.)

Still, Galloway is right. There is bigger fish to fry. Much bigger than a back bench MP with a nauseating track record of support for tyrants and terrorists. The oil-for-food scandal is spreading like an oil slick itself. It is now Kofi Annan who is in many people’s sights.

Another article in the Sunday Times talks of the American right attacking that would-be saintly character. The more they attack, says the article, the more other people spring to his defence. However, as Sarah Baxter, the author, points out, the defence is only so-so. E-mails by high UN officials demanding support for the Secretary-General from other employees, who had no option but to sign, are not indicative of real feeling.

The oil-for-food scandal and Kojo Annan’s continuing payments by the Swiss company investigated as part of the enquiry come on top of a great deal of dissatisfaction with the UN.

Annan is seen as responsible for the inept handling of Rwanda, which resulted in the largest massacre for many years. As the man in charge of the peacekeeping forces, he was the one from whom more help had been requested by the UN general on the ground and he was the one who refused to send that help.

Then there is the lack of discipline of UN troops. There were many stories of this in Bosnia though it was the ones in DR Congo that hit the headlines. (And while we are on the subject of Bosnia, there is the minor problem of UN troops not doing their job of protecting unarmed citizens. Srebrenice was the biggest story but there were numerous other, smaller ones.)

There are complaints about his handling of staff, the most recent one being his pardoning a high UN official who was accused of sexual harrassment. An earlier story was a refusal to prosecute a Rwandan employee, who is suspposed to have participated in the massacres.

There is, of course, the knee-jerk reaction of defending the UN and Kofi Annan, no matter what:

“Indeed, the more the American right has criticised Annan, the more the world’s 191 member states have rallied to his side. Britain, Germany, France,Russia, and China publicly defended him last week, while 54 African nations sent a letter of support. Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, declared Annan to be doing “an excellent job”.”

“under siege for its tepid support for democracy, tolerance of dictators, phoney ballots and alleged corruption over oil for food to Iraq”.

“A wounded lame duck secretary-general might lack the authority to push the reforms through against Bush’s wishes. Alternatively, the departure of Annan under a cloud of scandal could pave the way for the appointment of a new West-friendly secretary-general who has the moral stature to cleanse the UN. In diplomacy it is called a “win-win” situation.”

As we try to follow the twists and turns of the efforts by various parties to get the EU arms embargo on China lifted, the story has taken another bizarre twist.

As we left the story, the Chinese were exerting pressure on Schröder to support the lifting of the ban, using the leverage of a €1.4 billion order for five Airbus A380 airliners (link here).

But, such is the political sensitivity of the ban – and the opposition to lifting it – that the only hope France and Germany of succeeding is by agreeing to a strengthening of the code of conduct on EU arms sales.

Against that background (link here), you would have thought that France – which in 2002 accounted for €105 million of the €210 million of arms sale by EU countries to China - would be right behind the code of conduct, seeing to extol its virtues and not making any waves.

But not a bit of it. Despite its vital role in paving the way to the lifting of the ban, France is resisting moves to strengthen the code, and in particular the proposed requirement for arms sales to China to be openly declared by the exporting country.

Even though this provision is widely regarded a "largely symbollic" – i.e., a fig leaf – Paris is rejecting the idea out of hand. How this will play out during the 7th EU-China summit – which starts in the Netherlands on Wednesday – is anyone's guess, but it cannot help.

And why France, which is so keen to see the ban lifted, should apparently be going out of its way to sabotage its own efforts, completely defies comprehension.

So which is more important – Blunkett stealing £180 from the taxpayer (misusing a first class rail warrant by giving it to someone else’s spouse) or the fact that EU red tape is now costing €1 trillion a year?

Clearly a no-brainer – Blunkett wins by a mile, if today’s batch of Sunday papers is any guide. Unless, of course, you read Booker’s column in the Sunday Telegraph or the only grown-up newspaper in town, The Business, which give the red-tape story front page headline treatment.

Flagged up on this Blog last Tuesday, Allister Heath of The Business follows the story through, pointing out that the figure is based on "ground-breaking but over-looked research published by the US Federal Reserve Bank" which calculates that Europe's failure to reform its economies along US lines is costing an extra 12.4 percent of gross domestic product a year.

The chilling thing is that the EU commission endorses this research yet, despite the earth-shattering importance of the findings, the bulk of the media remain silent.

This leads Allister Heath, in his comment piece on pg. 14 of The Business, to remark that, "someone must have been asleep in Brussels last week – or perhaps the hoped nobody would notice…". He is, actually, too kind. The whole damn media was asleep, missing out on such a major news story.

Booker takes a similar line, pointing out the same bones of the story, that "buried in the European Commission's 354-page annual report on 'Competitiveness' last week was an astonishing admission. If the EU could reduce its 'regulatory burden' to the American level, the report claimed, it could raise its gross domestic product by 12 percent." He continues:

It is 12 years since I began reporting regularly here on the impact on Britain's businesses of the explosion of regulation taking place at that time. I did so partly because I could see that this amounted to a mutation in the nature of our government, which we in the media were somehow not noticing; and partly because the costs and consequences of this new form of state intervention - allowing unaccountable officials to produce a deluge of new laws that were in effect outside political control - seemed unfathomable.

The way our politics are now covered by the media conjures up the image of a theatre. On the stage, hypnotically watched by the commentators, unfolds a kind of continually entertaining soap-opera, centred on the antics of Messrs Blair, Brown, Blunkett, Boris and Co. Just occasionally, someone like me pops his head through the door to ask: "Don't you realise that the real business of government these days is taking place outside the theatre, and none of you are noticing it?"

Now that even the European Commission is admitting that this is responsible in a negative fashion for no less than 12 per cent of the entire economic activity of our country and the EU as a whole, perhaps a few more of the audience will nip outside that brightly-lit theatre to see what is going on.

Today, Booker covers in his column, amongst other things, the ongoing drama of the EU’s Galileo positioning satellite project, in which story he gives a link to this site.

For the convenience of Sunday Telegraph readers, who wish to follow the story, we offer a link here to our original story on the select committee (which includes links to all our earlier postings), plus a link to the most recent posting on Galileo (here).

We will be doing our usual review of the column later today.

That is the view of Italian minister of justice Roberto Castelli, who is convinced that the EU constitution should be approved in Italy with a popular referendum. He is sure it would then be approved.

"The road to the EU Constitution,” he said on Radio Padania Libera, "was concluded in Rome last month, having started with the referendum in 1989. Perhaps the Italian people did not completely realise back then exactly what they were deciding, but 90 percent voted for, therefore that decision must stand. One can, however, debate and it would be nice for a road opened with a referendum, to be closed in the same way, as other European countries are doing."

One does love the candour of these Italians: "Perhaps the Italian people did not completely realise… what they were deciding." You bet!

Anyhow, Castelli disputes that there is a constitutional bar (Italian constitution, that is), saying that it would be easy enough to make a constitutional law, as was done in 1998. "Parliament could approve it in a really short time", he says.

Not only that, he adds, the ministers who are in favour of the EU constitution are those who should have an interest in having a vote because "after the bombardment of propaganda that we had on the importance of Europe, I believe the Italian people would vote for a 'yes'". The campaign, though, would mean that there would be a public debate.

Interestingly, a referendum would rather put Prodi on the spot. He would have to support it, but that would put him alongside Berlusconi, at the same time he was gearing up to fight him for the premiership. If Berlusconi has a sense of humour, he should go for it.

While Barroso struggles to deal with his new job as commission president, having already weathered the unprecedented crisis of having his original line-up rejected by the EU parliament, trouble is breaking out back home.

Having been plucked from his job as a moderately successful (in the opinion of some commentators) prime minister of Portugal, last July he handed the country over to Santana Lopes, his deputy in the Social Democratic Party (PSD).

Lopes, however, has made such a mess of things that he is being slated as "the most incompetent prime minister to govern Portugal in 30 years of democracy". The situation has deteriorated to such an extent that, last Tuesday, president Jorge Sampaio decided to withdraw his confidence in the man, leaving the country adrift and in political turmoil.

Sampaio now has to meet with his Council of State, after which parliament will be dissolved within 10 or 15 days, and early elections will be called, to be held within 55 to 60 days.

But the man who is being placed firmly in the frame for the chaos is one José Manuel Durao Barroso who, before scuttling off to Brussels to take up his new job, gave his "personal and political guarantees" that the Portuguese government would be in excellent hands.

According to Costância da Cunha e Sá, a former director of the conservative weekly O Independente and one of Portugal's most highly-respected analysts, "that did not come to pass, and it is a disgrace that the president of the Commission refuses to assume his responsibility for what he left behind him."

That view, it seems, is widely shared by Portugal's most prominent analysts, who have been making an enormous effort on the country's main TV and radio stations to explain how so many problems, conflicts and public gaffes could have occurred in just four months.

The trigger for Sampaio's action was the resignation of minister of youth and sports, Henrique Chaves, just four days after he assumed the post having until then held the influential position of "ministerial assistant to the prime minister". His appointment to the youth and sports portfolio was seen as a humiliating demotion. On resigning, Chaves accused Lopes of "lack of loyalty" and of "failing to tell the truth" on a number of occasions.

This was the latest of a series of conflicts within the PSD and the coalition government, not least of these has Lopes contradicting his own finance minister. He had been fighting off pressure to reduce taxes, claiming that the economic situation made reductions impossible, only to have the prime minister declare, in a "fiery speech" that the economic crisis was over and tax cuts were "imminent".

Meanwhile, there has been open warfare between other senior minister, spilling onto the front pages of the country's major newspapers, followed by other members of the cabinet publicly disowning their own government, reaching a climax when the minister tried to pressurise the state-run into covering up the discord.

This led the deputy editor of the influential newspaper Diario Económico to recalled that Barroso had named Lopes as his successor in the name of stability when, in fact, his appointment has led to tremendous instability, a factor "that has marked his entire turbulent political performance."

He described the 135 days of Santana Lopes' leadership as "a succession of ridiculous situations straight out of a comedy," giving rise to the danger that Portugal would cease to be seen as a "serious country" by the rest of the world". Instead, it would be considered a "circus", Guerra added.

Back in Brussels, Barroso's attention is elsewhere, warning in an newspaper interview published today that the enlarged EU faced the risk of breaking up under pressure from populist parties on the left and right. "The challenge which confronts Europe today is not the risk of a federal super-state and the erosion of our national traditions but the possibility of disintegration," the claimed.

Perhaps it might be a better idea, for his own reputation and of his own country, if he took a closer look at the troubles in his own back yard.

Schröder is in for a difficult time as he heads to China tomorrow, not least to finalise a deal for five Airbus A380 airliners, worth 1.4 billion dollars (link here).

Lured by the prospect of such riches, he knows the price he must pay is to agree to the lifting of the EU arms embargo – something he has personally faovoured for some time.

But he does not go with the blessing of the Bundestag and Christa Nickels, head of the human rights commission of the German parliament, in an interview with the Berliner Zeitung daily, is saying that Schröder should not defy parliamentary opinion.

"If our chancellor announces something while he is abroad which goes against the vote of his own parliament he discredits the concept of separation of powers," she says, adding: "This would not really be the promotion of democracy."

Nickels concedes that China had made progress since the embargo was imposed in 1989, but the ruling coalition of Schröder's Social Democrats and the Greens had made "respect for human rights" a pre-condition of lifting the arms embargo. The Bundestag voted at the end of October in favour of the embargo being maintained and was followed by the European Parliament in mid-November.

Torn between showing "solidarity" with France, which has been the prime mover in seeking to lift the arms embargo, and his own parliament, this will be a difficult test for a man who is also under increasing pressure economically, as the euro continues to strengthen against the dollar and unemployment continues to increase. And, he decides to jump into bed with China, which way will Blair go?

Behind the scenes, I have been conducting a spirited e-mail correspondence with a number of readers who, alarmed at the apparent divisions in the Eurosceptic camp, have urged us to cease attacking what we have described as the "self-appointed Vote No campaign".

That has coincided with a criticism of this Blog, circulated on a widely distributed Eurosceptic list, so we thought we ought to make it clear to our readers – the numbers of whom are growing by the week – that we have no intention whatsoever of scaling down those attacks.

We note with dismay, for instance, that the self-same, self-appointed "Vote No" campaign in holding a public meeting on Monday in London, starring Marta Andreason, who will be talking about "reform of the EU".

Setting aside the question of what an Argentinean-born accountant can tell us of the wider issues of the EU – and therefore the "reforms" it needs to undertake – it really is no business of an anti-EU constitution campaign to be promoting the idea of reforming the EU.

As my colleague wrote earlier, this dangerously blurs the issue. How is the broader public supposed to distinguish between the idea of voting "no" to reform the EU and voting "yes" to the constitution in order to reform the EU?

On that basis, the "Vote No" campaign, far from being part of the solution, has entrenched itself firmly in the territory marked "part of the problem". While we have set ourselves the task of winning the "no" vote in the forthcoming referendum, this campaign seems intent on losing it.

Perhaps the greatest error of the "Vote No" campaign, though, is in following the perceived wisdom of the political classes that campaigns are won and lost in the fight for the centre ground. This is why Conservative strategists have purchased their "voter's vault" software, which helps identify swing voters in the marginal constituencies, at whom most of the electioneering will be directed.

The thinking is that the core Tory constituencies can be ignored, as their votes are in the bag anyway, and the hard-core Labourites can be likewise ignored, as they will never be turned.

Thus, as the game plays out, what are laughingly called strategists devote their time to finding out what the key group of "swing voters" want, then devising messages which they believe will attract their favour. This is the "centre ground" and nothing must be done which will scare off the inhabitants, even at the risk of alienating the core vote.

This is not, incidentally, a strategy of which the much revered Margaret Thatcher would have approved. Despite being detested by the Left, she managed to turn constituencies on the Labour heartland, who were attracted to her brand of conviction politics.

But now we are in the grip of the "strategists", the result being the insipid, value-free politics that are, in fact, turning people off politics. It leaves the Conservative Party with a platform that looks, to all the world, as if they are saying, find out what Labour is saying and offer something just a little bit different – but not so different as to frighten the horses.

This is what it looks like from the outside, but the reality is that Labour is also playing the same game – appealing to the middle ground – so both the main parties are fighting over the same territory, trying to appeal to the same narrow group of voters. No wonder they all sound the same.

Even if the "Vote No" people follow down this path, as they seem to be doing, their efforts still may not be sufficient to lose us the "no" vote, but the campaign will be hardly inspirational, and the turnout may be low.

But, to take a cue from the recent North East Referendum campaign, which won a substantial victory in spite of and not because of the official "Yes-No" effort, there is more to play for than simply a narrow win. Has the North East victory been a close run thing, Prescott may have taken heart, and kept his plans for regionalisation alive, and sought to reintroduce them in the near future. As is stands, though, his plans for elected regional assemblies are dead in the water.

Similarly, a narrow victory in the EU referendum will be no victory at all. The elites will take heart from that, fudge a few changes, as they did with the Danes and the Irish, and come back again – perhaps even declining a second referendum on the grounds that they have addressed the voters' reservations, and there is no need for another, expensive test of opinion.

If there is to be a victory, therefore, it has to be a resounding victory – nothing less than 80 percent or more against the constitution, on the back of a high turnout.

And here, the self-appointed "Vote No" campaign have completely misjudged the strategic need, and the mood of the people. In fact, the bulk of people do not give a damn about the EU – other than regarding it as a passing nuisance – and are certainly not going to weigh the arguments for and against the constitution in the balance.

But what they do care passionately about is those lying, thieving, cheating politicians – of all parties - who have been taking them for a ride, who took them into the EU without their permission, and kept them there on the back of lies and more lies. The referendum, in this context, will be nothing more or less sophisticated than an opportunity for the people to give the politicians a "good kicking". Voting time will be pay-back time.

This is the mood which the "no" campaign in the North East so successfully caught. It is the mood that Kilroy-Silk, whatever his faults, so cleverly captures, and it explains the attraction of UKIP. While its members take time off to do what they do best – to fight amongst themselves – its message endures and will continue to attract support.

That really is what the referendum must be about, if it is to succeed – an opportunity to give the politicians a "kicking". The "yes-nos" of the self-appointed "Vote No" campaign are not even close to understanding this and, until they do - and act upon it - we will continue to give them a "kicking".

The Washington Post, that staunchly left-wing newspaper – bastion of the "liberal" (i.e., anti-Bush) establishment – has already published tomorrow's piece from its star columnist, Robert Kagan. There is nothing like being ahead of the game.

Entitled, "[the] Embraceable EU", Kagan takes on the "unfolding drama of Ukraine" and argues that "the Bush administration and the European Union have committed a flagrant act of transatlantic cooperation."

If Ukrainians eventually vote in a free and fair election and thereby thwart the reemergence of an authoritarian Russian empire along the borders of democratic Europe, he writes, it will be one of those rare hinges of history where looming disaster was turned into glittering opportunity.

Not my title, but one borrowed from Arab News published in Saudi Arabia, written by journalist Amir Taheri.

As a comment on the situation in Iran, it is such a complete analysis of the situation, viz-à-viz the EU, that it defies precis, without losing the essence. Unusually, therefore, I have decided to publish the article in full, on this Blog:

In a manner that recalls haggling in a Persian bazaar, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Islamic Republic of Iran are engaged in a tussle about the meaning of their recently concluded bargain over Tehran’s nuclear program.

Earlier this month Tehran agreed to “completely freeze” its uranium enrichment program in exchange for economic and technological goodies from the European Union. But just moments after the deal was announced Tehran declared that the promised "freeze" was neither complete nor permanent.

"This is a voluntary and temporary freeze," Hassan Rouhani, the mulla who headed Tehran's team in talks with the EU said. "We can end it whenever necessary."

Then Muhammad El-Baradei, the head of the IAEA, reported that the "freeze", had ended before it started because Tehran insisted it should keep 20 centrifuges running, producing hexafluoride gases needed to make atomic bombs. A couple of days later Tehran came back with another promise to honour the deal, thus calming the game and postponing confrontation for a few more months. In another context, and another time, this was known as the “ cheat-and-retreat” tactic.

Cartesians would describe the method used by the European Union to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions as “drowning the fish”. In other words the EU has chosen to completely miss the point. The Iranian nuclear program is a geo-strategic issue that concerns vital aspects of regional and international politics, not a technical one about centrifuges and a temporary “freeze” in uranium enrichment. (Incidentally, the deal left out Iran’s plutonium program altogether.)

Let us make a few points clear before tackling the real issue.

First, the problem between the IAEA and Tehran is not about an attempt by big powers, especially the United States, to deprive Iran of its rights. A recent article in The Washington Post presents the whole issue as an attempt by the Bush administration to prevent poor little Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons against Russia, Pakistan, and Israel.

Iran may well be threatened by the countries mentioned; and, even if it is not, its leaders may have the right to mistakenly assume such a threat. Iran also has the right to develop nuclear weapons. What it does not have the right to do is to continue enjoying the benefits of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a signatory while violating it by developing a nuclear weapons' "surge capacity".

Contrary to what The Washington Post article pretends, nobody is trying to impose anything "imperialistic" or "neoconic" on the mullas who may or may not be as angelic as he thinks. All that is demanded is that they either comply with the NPT or get out and do as they please. Membership of he NPT is not obligatory for any country. Many countries that wanted to develop nuclear weapons stayed out of the NPT — among them France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, Egypt and, more recently, North Korea.

But even then this is not the real issue. Everyone knows that the current Iranian leaders have decided to develop a nuclear weapons capacity as part of the National Defense Doctrine that they put place in the mid-1990s. The nuclear capacity is one of the three pillars of that doctrine. (The other two are a large ground army to sustain heavy casualties in a long war, and a missiles program to make up for the weakness of the Iranian Air Force.)

All that is no secret. EU ambassadors in Tehran would know this by reading the newspapers, following the debates in the Islamic Consultative Assembly, and listening to Friday sermons by establishment mullas.

My guess is that the EU knows that Tehran is determined to obtain a nuclear weapons capacity. The EU must also know that Tehran will not abandon a key element of its defense doctrine to please powers that it regards as "satanic".

So, why is the EU playing this charade?

One reason is that EU is run by techno-bureaucrats masquerading as politicians. The techno-bureaucrat cannot conceive of an adversary that does not play the game by his rules. We are witnessing a clash of cultures. On the European side we have the products of a society in which politics is defined as the art of distributing resources, accommodating differences, and placing laws made by consensus above faith and ideology. In that type of politics there is no right and wrong, no good and evil, as such — only legal and illegal.

The practitioner of that type of politics interprets his lack of critical judgment as tolerance of diversity.

On the other side we have the Khomeinist politicians who regard their brand of Islam as the only true religion that should, one day, conquer the world. They claim that, with the Soviet Union in the dust bin of history, their regime offers the only alternative vision of the world to that of the United States.

They see the Middle East as the immediate battleground between the two visions because both the Islamic Republic and the United States are now committed to changing the regional status quo. The US wants to do so by fostering democratic regimes, starting with Afghanistan and Iraq. The Islamic Republic wants to unite the region under the banner of Khomeinist Islam.

The US is promoting a two-state solution for the Palestine-Israel conflict. The Islamic Republic is committed to a one-state solution, to be known as Palestine, in which Jews would ultimately become a minority. The US, and the West in general, regard their concept of human rights as the highest of values. The present leaders in Tehran see it, in the words of Khomeini, as a “Jewish-Crusader plot” to undermine Islamic culture.

The mullas know that, sooner or later, these two visions will clash in the Middle East. They are not prepared to let the US remold the Middle East after its own fashion. They also believe that they can win the battle of ideas. Their only fear is that, at some point, American military power would not only check their ambitions but threaten their regime. They see nuclear weapons as a deterrent against the use of American military power to thwart their plans for the kind of Middle East that the late ayatollah dreamed of.

"Had Saddam had nuclear weapons, he would still be in power," says Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the key figures in the Tehran establishment.

The EU knows that it cannot prevent Iran from building a nuclear arsenal. The diplomatic circus, in which the IAEA is enlisted as clown, is aimed at fudging the issue by nurturing false hopes of a negotiated solution. Michel Barnier, the French foreign minister, let the cat out of the bag when he said that all that the EU wanted was "to prevent another Iraq."

In other words, the EU has organized this Punch-and-Judy show to deprive the US, regarded by Barnier & Co as a "rogue hyper-power", of an excuse to use force against the mullas. This may well be a laudable objective. But it does not answer the real question: Can the region, and, indeed, the world, including the EU, be comfortable with the prospect of a regime with messianic ambitions being armed with nuclear weapons in the Middle East?

I could not even begin to put this better myself, and what gives the article its power is that it is written by an Arab, from an Arab perspective. Furthermore, as this is not a Eurosceptic "rant", it gains even more power in illustrating the utter fatuity and the destructive negativity of the EU policy towards Iran. This article should be given the widest possible circulation.

Some of our readers may have noticed articles about a recent report by the International Committee of the Red Cross in which that supposedly apolitical organization was complaining about conditions for Taliban and Al-Quaeda detainees at Guantanamo. Some of those readers will recall that there had been previous reports about Abu Ghraib. There had also been stories of the Red Cross pulling out its workers from Afghanistan and Iraq because it was dangerous (understandable but perplexing – if there were no danger and hardship the Red Cross would not have been called in) and, even, refusing to function because it disapproved of the American-led coalition.

Before we all note that the Red Cross had never once complained about conditions in Iraqi gaols (or many others) we need to point out that not complaining is the entirely proper procedure for that organization.

The Red Cross League was founded after the Austrian-Italian war by the Swiss Henri Dunant (hence the symbol – the Swiss flag reversed) and was given immunity by the Geneva Convention in times of war.

Since 1864 it has acquired an enviable reputation for its tireless activity in war and peace, helping the sick, the wounded and prisoners of war. The Red Cross, because of its special position within the Geneva Convention has been able to help prisoners in many different countries and in many conditions. It is one of the black marks against Stalin’s leadership of the Soviet war effort is that he had refused not only to sign the Geneva Convention, thus abandoning those millions of Red Army soldiers who had been taken prisoner, but would not even help the Red Cross to find them and organize food parcels for them.

All this activity depended entirely on the Red Cross remaining outside politics, negotiating directly and confidentially with governments and upholding the terms of the Geneva Convention.

This is no longer so. The ICRC has become a political organization, with its own agenda, which is, unsurprisingly, anti-American and anti-Western. In fact, it has joined that great group of NGOs and transnational organizations (tranzis) who have effectively declared war on liberal democracy and its greatest representative, the United States.

Part of the Red Cross’s abandoning its duties can be seen in some of the tasks it takes on. Its British branch, for instance, has a well-staffed office that deals with asylum seekers and their problems. There are many organizations, both governmental ones and NGOs in Britain that deal with asylum seekers and their problems. Why does the Red Cross need to concern itself with it all?

At least that is harmless. When it comes to the war against terror, the ICRC has positioned itself clearly against the coalition forces, when it is supposed to have no position at all. It has, as I pointed out above, manifestly failed in its duty in both Afghanistan and Iraq. It has made statements that showed the reason for its reluctance to carry on with its job is a dislike of the anti-terrorist coalition and its aims.

With the report on Guantanamo, the ICRC has gone even further. It has now openly proclaimed itself to be anti-American and, in order, to criticize that country, it has wilfully misinterpreted the terms of the Geneva Convention. The ICRC report demands POW rights and, even, greater than POW privileges for combatants who are not in uniform and who specifically target civilians. That is not in the terms of the Geneva Convention.

The ICRC criticizes American interrogation methods, though its idea of what counts as psychological pressure seems rather fey: uncertainty about the term of imprisonment is apparently one such example. It also criticizes the American habit of sending in doctors to examine the prisoners at Guantanamo.

Another good organization lost to the transnational oligarchies and the self-appointed elites, who feel that they should be in charge of political decisions, without being accountable to anyone. Let us remember that the ultimate political expression of that mentality is the European Union. The tranzis’ hatred for the United States is caused by their understanding that with all its faults, that country is the strongest protector and promoter of liberal, accountable democracy in the world. One day Britain, the country where most of those ideas were born, will once again line up on the side of true democracy.

This tale should have been told a little while ago. Some of our readers might put my silence down to basic good nature, others will probably suspect dark manoeuvring. In fact, it is neither. I simply decided that the Conservative Party’s European so-called policy does not need to be discussed any more than is absolutely necessary.

However, there has been a certain amount of attention focussed on one of the bright eurosceptic stars of the Conservatives and that is Daniel Hannan MEP (and well-known journalist as my colleague has pointed out). Mr Hannan is about to have a pamphlet published by Politeia, the gist of which will be that a no vote in the referendum will put Britain in a splendid position to renegotiate her status within the EU and relationship with the other member states but only if the right government is in place. No prizes for guessing which one is the right government – the one led by a man who keeps telling us that under him this, that and the other will be repatriated, or, at least, partially repatriated, but not explaining exactly how this wonderful state of affairs is to be achieved as exist from the EU is not to be contemplated. Somehow, it will all come right on the night.

A summary of the forthcoming pamphlet has so far been published in the Sunday Telegraph, eurofacts and Freedom Today, the magazine of the Freedom Association. Mr Hannan is doing what every journalist does: recycling his material. Unfortunately for him many of the same people read the three publications (though, clearly, not all the readers of the Sunday Telegraph look at the other two).

My colleague has already given his critique of the ideas expressed in the article and has had occasion to remind our readers of the fact that Mr Hannan, his colleague Roger Helmer MEP and sundry other supposedly eurosceptic members of the Conservative Party at the European Parliament, belong to the ultra-federalist European People’s Party, the EPP.

What he did not tell is the prologue to the sad tale of the eurosceptics marching back into the federalist grouping. For a year or so before May 1 of this year, the date on which the East European countries joined the EU, there had been feverish negotiations and speculations about the effect this event might have on the political atmosphere inside the enlarged Union.

One development that fascinated all was the arrival of numerous, right-of-centre, reasonably eurosceptic, pro-British and pro-American politicians. Surely that would make a difference. (Without wishing to blow my own trumpet too much, I claim to be one of the first to have noted that there would be a new tension in the common foreign and security policy. But I did not think there would be many other changes.)

Most of the East European sceptics realized very early that they stood no chance of getting a no vote in their countries’ referendums on accession. There were many reasons for this: a desire to belong fully to the West; fear of Russia; the impossibility of having any other agreements with West European countries as the EU had decreed that no other relationship was possible; and, not least, the fact that in most of those countries the outright opponents of membership were either very nasty nationalist or unreconstructed communist parties. As it is, most of the referendums had a low turn-out, thus registering a certain lack of enthusiasm for the whole project.

On the other hand, it was felt, the influx of the new countries and new politicians after the European elections of June would mark a new beginning for the whole right-of-centre movement inside the EU, particularly the European Parliament. Plans were laid for a new grouping that would be led by the British Conservatives and would include various parties such as the Czech ODS and the Hungarian FIDESZ as well as a few genuinely conservative West Europeans. The East Europeans talked excitedly of this new grouping and the fact that through it they would be able to work together with the people they perceived as their friends and allies.

In the existing members and among some outside observers, mostly in the United States, there was a feeling that this would be a definitive and important change in the politics of the EU. This was the way those ideas the East Europeans had worked out for themselves in their ten years of independence would enter the political bloodstream of the tired old Union.

Alas for high hopes. Before the European election Michael Howard, the Conservative leader and he who will allegedly lead us into the newly negotiated free trade alliance with the Continental countries, issued his diktat: the Conservative MEPs would go back into the European People’s Party and stay in that federalist grouping.

What could the Tory eurosceptics have done? Well, they could have said no. There were about half a dozen of them in leading positions on the lists and many more in slightly lower places. They could not have all been fired. They all, they assure us, fought like tigers, had rows, screaming matches, what have you. But the sad truth is that like little lambkins they all agreed to go back into the federalist EPP.

When the new right-of-centre, eurosceptic politicians from the East European countries appeared in Brussels they were met with a, to them, stunning situation. The British Conservatives, who had been scheduled to lead the new grouping, were not there. They were in the old grouping and a federalist one at that.

The new members accommodated themselves as best they could and dispersed between one or two more or less right-wing groups. The great revolution in EU parliamentary politics never happened. And the East Europeans were betrayed again – by their supposed allies the British Conservative eurosceptics.