EU Referendum

SecGen Kofi Annan (father of Kojo) is going to China. Nothing special in that. As Liu Jianchao, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said:

“It will be Annan's seventh visit to China since he took office, and the two sides will exchange views on international and regional issues of common interest.”

“China supports reform of the U.N. Security Council ... but priority should be given to increasing the representation of developing countries, especially African countries.”

“Some call what the U.S. is trying to achieve -- with significant support from other countries, notably Japan -- the GE-ization of the U.N., that is, introducing the modern management mechanisms of global companies. Together the U.S. and Japan provide more than 40% of U.N. funds (the U.S. 22% and Japan 19%). Among the leading opponents are Pakistan, Egypt and India.”

“The body that symbolizes the problem is also the source of much of the resistance to reform. Known as the Fifth Committee, it is the main council of the General Assembly responsible for administration and budgetary matters. It has 191 members and micromanages to a degree that it is nearly impossible for the secretary general to fire poor performers or shift resources between operations. Imagine a Western legislature having a committee that signs off not just on all expenditures but on each staff position in every mission. Management reform, if it is to work, would take much of that power and give it to a chief executive.

The most effective parts of the United Nations are funded voluntarily and aren't beholden to the Fifth Committee or the General Assembly. They include the United Nations Development program, the World Health Organization, the World Food program and UNICEF. Mr. Bolton has supported a shift of U.N. funding toward such voluntary activities, where competition for government funds with non-UN organizations has created more competitive, efficient organizations.”

“While many diplomats search for Mr. Bolton's hidden motives in pushing this agenda, they've missed the most obvious: the Bush administration has realized at great pain via Iraq that it can't achieve much in the world without more effective multilateralism. The challenges increasingly defy unilateral solutions: terrorism, international crime, pandemic threats, global warming, nuclear proliferation.”

“If we have a good story on reform, I'll tell it to the Hill. If we don't, I'm not going to spin it. What they know is that I am is a tough negotiator for U.S. positions.”

“We're two months beyond the September summit and we are not making the kind of progress we would like.”

“We were co-chairmen of a bipartisan task force that was authorized by the U.S. Congress late last year to study ways to make the United Nations more effective. The group spanned a very wide range of political and ideological perspectives, and we couldn't agree on everything. But when we issued a consensus report in June, what was most striking was the extent to which we were able to find common ground, including our most important finding, which was ''the firm belief that an effective United Nations is in America's interests.''”

“As others have said, UN reform is a process, not an event. Yet, it is reasonable to be concerned about the lack of progress at the September summit, which as the largest gathering of world leaders ever, provided a signal opportunity. It will continue to take concerted leadership by the United States, working with the world's other democracies, to help the United Nations meet the enduring goals of its Charter.”

The Daily Telegraph's claims on the EU budget, spread over the front page of today’s edition have done little to add light to an increasingly complex situation.

Written by David Rennie, the Brussels correspondent, with Toby Helms, the paper has it that Blair is “ready to surrender EU rebate with no payback”. Such an outcome would hardly be a surprise, considering Blair’s firm “red lines” on the EU constitution, which became perforated lines, and then pink lines and then no lines at all. Blair, if nothing else, continues the dishonourable tradition of so many of our prime ministers, of talking tough and then giving way under pressure.

However, The Telegraph adds a novel twist, relying on unnamed "Whitehall sources" to suggest that Blair is planning to split the rebate into parts that he can defend as "fair" - including Britain's rebate from the Common Agricultural Policy - and others that are less easy to justify, including spending on enlargement.

By contrast, though, The Times has it that our beloved leader is holding firm on the rebate, and has indicated that he was ready to call a halt to next month's European Council, rather than compromise on the rebate.

That was this morning, and later in the day, with the Telegraph story clearly in mind, journalists tackled the prime minister’s official spokesman (PMOS) during the daily briefing. The PMOS was uncompromising, stating that the rebate was an "indivisible whole". Blair;s position on the rebate was in line with what he had said in the summer and in various speeches to the EU Parliament, Mansion House speech etc., etc. In other words, nothing had changed.

That did not stop Barroso pitching in today, telling Blair not to reverse the legend of Robin Hood by robbing poor new east European members to pay the rich in the European Union's budget.

Commission spokesman Johannes Laitenberger said Barroso had had a long and "very frank" exchange of views with Blair, later telling a news conference, "You all know the old story of Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. The president has made it very clear that he does not expect the British presidency to take the role of the Sheriff of Nottingham, taking from the poor to give to the rich".

Meanwhile, the newly appointed German chancellor Angela Merkel has told her own told parliament that she was prepared to contribute to a reasonable and durable compromise that served all of Europe. "But one thing is also quite clear," she says. "The new government will emphatically pursue German interests. Given our budget position, we cannot accept any excessive financial demands in the light of our own problems."

All that makes the situation just about clear as mud. We are going to have to wait until Monday when the formal British proposal is presented to the meeting of foreign ministers of the EU member states, when we will then be able to pick over the bones of the deal.

COMMENT THREAD

Simon Jenkins, that doyen of the MSM, and a man whose ability to get things wrong comes second only to Lord Rees-Mogg, was pontificating in the Sunday Times. Among other things Mr Jenkins informs his readers of the following:

"That Blair and Bush should have discussed bombing the Al-Jazeera building in Qatar is hardly surprising. They agreed to bomb the headquarters of Serbian television during the Kosovo war."

While Bill Clinton was President? Sheesh, that's smart.

COMMENT THREAD

You cannot fault Jacques "Wheel" Barrot for lack of ambition. Despite the criminal record that dare not speak his name, as EU transport commissioner he is planning to set up what might be the granddaddy of all EU agencies. Never mind the European Railways Agency, says our Jacques, he wants an all-embracing TransEuropean Transport Agency.

This is according to Lloyds List, which reports that the new agency is being mooted in “an internal document”, with Jacques arguing that a separate agency is needed to oversee the EU's “burgeoning transeuropean transport network”.

The "Transeuropean Transport Network Executive Agency" would have similar staffing levels to the newly created European Maritime Safety Agency: about 100 when fully operational. But it would oversee a budget of potentially more than €3bn ($3.5bn) a year and would consist of experts committed to "higher quality and effectiveness of project management".

The undated memo suggests the commission take a formal decision to create the agency early in the New Year, allowing the body to come into being some time in the following months. Its rationale is that the commission, in its present organisational form, "might find it difficult to handle the financial and technical management of a budget that has more than tripled," the memo adds.

That is, of course, if the budget settlement is agreed, which looks uncertain at this time. But the fact that the commission is planning yet another of its agencies to take out a huge chunk of work currently handled by member states is yet another example of the paradox of the EU. One the one hand, the construct is dying politically, and even its own acolytes are losing faith. On the other, the pace of integration continues unabated.

But then, so they say, the Roman Empire was already in decline when it commissioned some of its finest, most grandiose buildings. Perhaps this is what we are seeing now, the new agencies being the Roman equivalent.

COMMENT THREAD

German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries is trying very hard. Well, she is quite trying, especially as far as the German Constitutional Court and the länder are concerned.

Frustrated in her attempt to use the European Arrest Warrant to extradite a German national who had been accused of financing terrorist organizations and activities to Spain by the Karlsruhe Court’s decision on July 18, she has now produced a draft amendment to the European Arrest Warrant Act, which has been sent round the governments of the länder and relevant interest groups for comment.

Under the proposed new law

“criminal offender would not be able to avoid extradition on the basis of citizenship if the crime committed were related in some important way to another country. This would be the case, for instance, if a murder were committed abroad. German nationals would also be extradited in cases involving terrorist acts or international drug trafficking.”

What to make of the bizarre situation where member states found to have allowed the operation of "secret CIA detention camps" are being threatened with loss of their EU voting rights?

This is according to the Guardian today, and many others, where the EU justice and home affairs commissioner, Franco Frattini, said there would be "serious consequences" if reports of CIA jails in Europe turned out to be true.

The finger is being pointed at Poland and Bulgaria, the latter not even a member, with Frattini stating yesterday that he "would be obliged to propose to the Council serious consequences, including the suspension of voting rights in the council."

This, of course, is redolent of the fracas in 2000, when the "extreme-right" Austrian Freedom Party received 52 seats in the lower house of Parliament, giving it a share in government. Led by Joerg Haider, who had earned notoriety after making remarks interpreted as praising of Hitler's Germany, was quickly blackballed by the other 14 (then) member states. Amongst other things, Austria was permitted to join in only the most formal of discussions concerning EU business, and was excluded from any unofficial negotiations.

Of course, the brave Frattini's is somewhat into camps himself, proposing as Italian foreign minister the creation of transit camps in the Mediterranean – Libya was suggested - for illegal immigrants as a way of countering the wave of human traffic heading for Europe. Dubbed at the time the EU’s concentration camps, in August 2004, Berlusconi went so far as to discuss the details with that well-known humanitarian, Colonel Ghaddafi.

A year previously, Frattini's ministerial colleague, Umberto Bossi, had come up with a slightly more radical scheme, suggesting that boats carrying illegal immigrants should be shot out of the water. In Corriere della Sera, he was quoted as saying, "After the second or third warning, boom... the cannon roars… Without any beating about the bush. The cannon that blows everyone out of the water. Otherwise this business will never end."

Needless to say, there was then no suggestion then, or a year later that Italy should be drummed out of the EU. Shooting nig-nogs or locking them up in concentration camps is quite acceptable. But helping the Americans keep Islamic terrorists off the streets – now that is a really serious matter.

COMMENT THREAD

Last weekend, in case you had not noticed, was the Euro-Mediterranean Summit in Barcelona. And, according to The Spain Herald it at least served one purpose.

It made us realise, says the paper, that Prime Minister Zapatero gets supremely bored during these international summits. This they learned this thanks to an "indiscrete microphone" that picked up his conversation with a staffer who said "I'm going to find you an interview so you don't get bored stuck here for four hours." Clearly, those working for the Prime Minister know him well. The Spanish Prime Minister cares nothing about what comes of these Summits. He goes to the photo session, passes the time and that is that.

In full flight, the paper continues:

The "indiscrete microphone" in Barcelona, far from being anecdotal, has revealed this Prime Minister’s frivolous attitude toward his job. Where is he defending Spanish interests? Where is his concern for upholding principles that benefit Spain? Where is his drive to put Spain's general interests above his own personal goals? Zapatero has no clue how to negotiate international forums (we already knew this), but now we find out he does not even have the least concern in gaining a presence in these world events. We always had the impression the Prime Minister was like "an octopus in the garage", but now we have proof.

Zapatero gets bored at these Summits and cares little about their results. What the conclusions say is of no consequence. The only important thing for the Prime Minister is being able to "sell something". The content doesn't matter. Zapatero and his aids have show us their rude and simplistic natures.

Zapatero’s exceedingly low political profile is worrisome. And it is noteworthy how little ambition this man has to secure Spain in a privileged spot on the international political scene. What, then, interests the Prime Minister? Such a lack of seriousness is frightening. Moreover, knowing that in Brussels negotiations are beginning over the EU budget and how to divide up the funds, we can have very little hope that this man, who cannot negotiate and lacks the bravery to defend our interests, will accomplish much for Spain. Zapatero is bored. And that says it all.

Seeing as the Euro-Army isn't actually going to fight anyone, we have found a use for it - implementing the End of Life Vehicles Directive.














Culled from the North archives.

COMMENT THREAD

The "think tank" which calls itself "Open Europe" has laboured mightily and produced a report on EU regulation.

Entitled Less regulation – four ways to cut the burden of EU red tape, it runs to 28 pages, adding another useful contribution to the corps of literature on the burden of EU legislation.

However, the report starts with an introduction from Sir John Egan, past president of the CBI, who welcomes Barroso's recent promise to build a "bonfire of regulations", but then notes that, "so far we seem to have seen a lot of smoke but little fire."

Despite Barroso's good intentions, the EU's production of new regulations is actually increasing at an alarming rate. Of the 22,000 pieces of legislation on the EU statute book, about 12,000 have been introduced in the eight years since 1997, compared to 10,000 during the forty years from 1957 to 1997. Thus, concludes Egan, "Look closely at what the European Commission's 'war on red tape' really means and the sad answer is: not very much," then citing Le Figaro's description of the current deregulation initiative as "largely cosmetic".

Much more of this is found in the body of the report, painting a comprehensive picture of the failure of deregulation at the EU level. But, instead of drawing the obvious conclusion – that deregulation in the EU is simply a non-starter – the Open Europe wonks simply come up with four wonderful ideas for reducing red tape.

First, they want the EU to abandon the idea of "better" regulation and focus on less regulation. Then, the EU should adopt the Dutch deregulation system, conducting a proper economic audit of the whole body of existing legislation, following a Dutch target of reducing administrative costs by 25 percent.

Third, they write, MPs at Westminster need far greater powers to raise the alarm about upcoming EU regulations at an early stage. The current EU scrutiny committee is seriously under-powered to deal with the flood of EU legislation. Finally, they want it made compulsory for the EU to carry out proper Regulatory Impact Assessments before legislating.

One need not waste time evaluating all these proposals as they fall at the first hurdle. Given the very evidence that the unit itself offers, the chances of the EU adopting a policy of "less regulation" is precisely nil.

This is not just because the commission is fundamentally incapable of carrying out such a programme, it is also because regulation - in the context of the Monnet method – is the primary tool of economic integration, from which political integration is intended to follow. Thus, the primary purpose of the commission is to create regulation and to ask it to do less is like asking for less sex in a brothel.

Thus, while one would like to applaud the work of Open Europe, all one sees is this mind-sapping head in-the-sand attitude, leaving us to ask, what does it take for them to see the blindingly obvious?

COMMENT THREAD

Well, not quite farewell, as the now resigned transport commissioner is staying in his £2.1 million "pad" in Belgravia, will collect the unpaid bonuses (which have no connection with achievement) and continue to draw an estimated salary of £100,000 a year as a "consultant" to Hizonner, the Mayor.

Transport for London, meantime, remains an expensive and inefficient part of the unaccountable governance of this city, as described again by OneLondon.

COMMENT THREAD

Give journalists time and they will get the news. Several days after this blog (and one or two others) ran the story of Iranian bloggers and their importance in the fight against the tyranny of the Mullahs and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Daily Telegraph has decided to run a story on it.

At least, they recognize that this is a story of great importance. The article gives some details of the government’s activity:

“The authorities have reportedly spent millions on programmes designed to filter cyberspace and block access to controversial sites, with names such as "regime change Iran", "free thoughts on Iran" and "women against fundamentalism".

As part of the most recent clampdown, reported in the reformist newspaper Shargh, Iran's Telecom company has ordered all service providers to block access to blogrolling.com, a free service enabling users to track their favourite weblogs and be informed when they are updated.”

Bloggers and their readers use ever more ingenious methods for circumventing all these programmes and clampdowns and the government is clearly beginning to feel that the battle is one it is losing.

It might have been useful for the article to have linked the story of the bloggers and their desperate battle with Iran’s tyrannical government, described by Baroness Nicolls, for some reason as

“an advanced form of democracy in the region”,

with the ongoing attempt to take control of the internet away from ICANN in the United States, but that would be too much to expect.

COMMENT THREAD

Philip Johnston excels himself in his "Home Front" column in The Daily Telegraph today.

Dealing with the vexed question of the European Evidence Warrant – which follows on from the European Arrest Warrant – he postulates the scenario based on David Irving, the British historian, who is in an Austrian jail facing trial on a charge of denying the Holocaust.

This is a crime in Austria and in several other European countries, but not in ours but, while Irvingwas arrested in Austria for two lectures he gave in 1989, imagine, writes Johnston, if Austria could order the Met to search Mr Irving's home and office in England for evidence, and seize papers and documents. "Could it possibly be right for the British authorities to enter a person's home at the request of a foreign court to obtain evidence for the prosecution of a crime that is not a crime in Britain?" he asks, then continuing:

Yet that is precisely what is proposed under the European Evidence Warrant (EEW), which is due to be agreed by EU justice and interior ministers this week. This is yet another plank in the gradual development of a common European judicial area. If anyone seriously believed that the rejection of the proposed constitution marked the high-water mark of European integrationist ambitions, then they have not been paying much attention to what has being going on in the criminal justice sphere.

Already, we have Eurojust, which advises on prosecutions; Europol, which has grown from a small, complementary intelligence agency into a large operational force; a putative European public prosecutor, an office that would probably have been established by now but for Britain's opposition; and the European arrest warrant, which can be exercised in any of the 25 member states for 32 crimes.

This edifice has been set up almost without public debate. Indeed, anyone who suggests that common judicial procedures look suspiciously like the trappings of a state is regarded as either a Europhobic zealot or someone who favours organised crime and terrorism. But the fact is that the perfectly reasonable concept of "mutual assistance" in criminal justice matters, first outlined in 1999, has been taken much further than suggested then.

The Commons committee that scrutinises EU laws has been tracking its progress through various stages of negotiation and is to hold a debate on Thursday. It is fiercely critical of the powers that the warrant bestows on prosecuting authorities and especially its impact on the doctrine of dual criminality, which states that no one can be extradited for a crime that is not also an offence in this country.

However, since the EU wants to treat itself as one country for judicial purposes, it would like to do away with dual criminality and has been gradually watering it down. The 32 crimes for which the European arrest warrant can already be exercised include offences such as xenophobia and racism, for which there are no British equivalents. The one concession to dual criminality is that, if the "offence", such as Holocaust denial, is largely committed on British soil, extradition cannot take place. But even this safeguard is likely to be abolished when the matter is reviewed in five years' time.

The EEW continues to chip away at the concept. In a report published ahead of this week's debate, the Commons scrutiny committee said: "If a foreign authority were to regard the publishing by a journalist of an article trivialising war crimes as the offence of 'racism and xenophobia', or the paying of officials for information about fraud or mismanagement of public bodies as 'corruption', then. under the EEW, a journalist who had written such an article or arranged for such payments here would be at risk of a search of his home and office in this country in support of foreign criminal proceedings."

The committee adds: "The doctrine of dual criminality is more than a mere technicality, as it gives the United Kingdom citizen - or any other person within the jurisdiction - a guarantee that he will not be pursued by police and prosecution authorities for his conduct which is lawful in this country. In our view, this proposal too lightly discards this guarantee."

The committee expressed "in the strongest terms our concerns that the measure could and would be used by foreign authorities to subject persons in this country to the exercise of police powers when, under the laws of various parts of the UK, they have done nothing wrong".

Imagine if the Government had proposed that the police should be able to search an individual's home and office, and impound his personal belongings, even though he had not committed a crime nor was suspected of one. Consider the parliamentary rows, the impassioned speeches about the rule of law, the inevitable defeat for the Government in the Lords.

Yet European laws that drive a coach and horses through some of our most cherished legal safeguards are enacted with hardly a whimper of protest, despite the best endeavours of the parliamentary scrutineers.

The great leader Blair is in for a busy week, embarking on – according to the Scotsman - "a frantic round of diplomacy in a last ditch bid to secure a deal from the EU budget." He is to hold talks with seven of the 10 EU accession countries in an attempt to win support for what are being called "British compromise proposals", prior to the European Council on 15-16 December.

Having already held talks with the Maltese premier last Saturday in Malta, and on Sunday night with Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Spain's prime minister, on the margins of an EU-Mediterranean summit in Barcelona. his next stop is Kiev. He will arrive Wednesday for an EU-Ukraine summit on Thursday and then fly to Tallinn for talks with the accession countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania before flying on to Budapest for talks with Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

As for the great "compromise", the Financial Times is reporting that Britain is to propose significant cuts to the budget, with some of the continent’s poorest countries losing aid. This, we are told, is "a move to help resolve the row over the UK's €5bn budget rebate."

Having already hacked off Chirac, this ploy seems to be calculated to upset just about every one of the new accession countries. Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, Poland's new prime minister, is already expressing concern at losing part of the €60bn of net EU transfers it was expecting by 2013, while others may join the fray.

The idea is to cut €871bn from the budget proposal, releasing cash to allow the British presidency to cut the net payments of the Netherlands and Sweden. Crucially, the savings could be used to cushion the impact on the UK if, as expected, Blair agrees to negotiate away part of the rebate.

On the basis of his recent and forthcoming travels, however, Blair might resolve the issue rather more painlessly by the simple expedient of donating his air miles to the EU.

COMMENT THREAD

As this blog has pointed out before, the idea of the internet being run “by the world” is not only preposterous (how precisely is the world going to run it as most of the world has no say in the way individual countries and societies are run?) but downright dangerous.

This is not just because handing anything over to the UN (responsible most recently for the oil-for-food scam) is a lunatic idea but because the proposal emanates from and is enthusiastically supported by some of the world’s worst tyrants (and the European Union with Britain as part of it).

While the idea was proposed by Iran, whose rulers have a serious problem with the country’s bloggers, the communist rulers of China were not far behind. They, too, have a problem.

The number of Chinese bloggers is estimated to be between one and two million. Some blog in Chinese, some in English and many bring news from other websites onto their blogs.

Now, one can argue that even 2 million bloggers is a small drop in a very large ocean, as far as China is concerned (though one must not forget that there are many bloggers outside mainland China, who can be read by Chinese internet surfers). But in a country where, despite some naïve glorification by Western liberals who do not look too far, control of political opinion is still paramount, even such a relatively small number is a problem.

According to an article in Thursday’s International Herald Tribune

“Under President Hu Jintao, the government has waged an energetic campaign against freedom of expression - prohibiting the promotion of public intellectuals by the news media and imposing restrictions on Web sites, like requirements to register domain names.

The government has also pressured search engine companies to bar sensitive topics, particularly those dealing with democracy and human rights, and has heavily censored online bulletin board discussions at universities and elsewhere.

So far, the Chinese authorities have mostly relied on Internet service providers to police the Web logs. Commentary that is too provocative or too directly critical of the government is often blocked by the provider, and sometimes the sites are swamped by opposing comments - believed by many to be from official censors - that are more favorable to the government.

Blogs are sometimes shut down altogether, temporarily or permanently. But the authorities do not yet seem to have an answer to the proliferation of public opinion in this form.”

Manouchehr Mottaki, Iranian Foreign Minister, but also the Islamic Republic’s former ambassador to Japan and, before that, to Turkey, is planning a visit to the latter this week.

Mr Mottaki’s history is quite colourful. According to Iran Focus

“As a radical Islamist in his student days in India’s Bangalore University, Mottaki was a fervent supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini. He returned to Iran during the revolution and joined the ranks of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) soon after the fall of the Shah’s regime in 1979. After taking part in the bloody campaign against Kurdish dissidents, Mottaki moved to the Foreign Ministry, where for some time he was the IRGC liaison officer.

Mottaki was appointed Iran’s ambassador to Turkey in 1985 and it was during his tenure in Ankara that the Revolutionary Guard-turned-diplomat became involved in a number of terror attacks and assassinations of dissidents, according to Iranian opposition figures and defectors. In the 1980s and the early 1990s, at least 50 Iranian dissidents were kidnapped or assassinated in Turkey by Iranian secret agents often working closely with diplomats from Iran’s embassy and consulates.

On Mottaki’s watch, the Iranian embassy in Ankara and the consulate-general in Istanbul were turned into safe houses for agents of Iran’s notorious secret police hunting down Iranian dissidents, according to exiles.”

In 1989 Ambassador Mottaki was asked to leave Turkey as his involvement with terrorist activity became known. Now he is returning for a visit, much to the dissatisfaction of human rights groups and Iranian dissident groups in the West.

Simon Bailey of the London based Gulf Intelligence Monitor maintains that this will not help Turkey in its efforts to strengthen its democratic credentials for membership of the European Union. But there seems to be little indication of the EU making any sort of representation on the subject. Mottaki is, after all, Foreign Minister and the EU never quarrels with anybody’s foreign ministers. Well, not with any dictatorship’s foreign minister. Some EU politicians do display a certain petulance when senior American politicians travel to Europe.

COMMENT THREAD

Looking at the print edition of The Sunday Times this morning, I could not help but feel a little smug on seeing the headline, "Carrier delays put navy's air defence at risk". After all, I did this story on 29 October, nearly a full month ago.

At least, I thought, the paper did run the story, albeit tucked into the gutter on page 8, leaving the front page to a photograph of the rowers who plan to cross the Atlantic in the nude.

Referring to the online edition for a link, however, put a different perspective on the Times's "scoop". It had been replaced by a much, much more important defence story, headed: "MoD probe into naked marines' initiation fight", the writer slavering over the details of "naked marines" shown "reportedly cheering as two new recruits are ordered to fight each other."

Being far too serious, the carrier story had been relegated to three short paragraphs at the end, the only new fact surviving being the news that the overall cost of the ships is predicted to climb from £2.8 billion to as much as £4.2 billion.

In a week where there have been important, even sinister developments in the (lack of) defence of our nation, the government must be counting its blessing that the media is so utterly useless on defence issues, and so easily distracted by by trivia.

It is to Booker in his Sunday Telegraph column, therefore, that adult readers must turn for some serious defence news – having got past the front-page story on sex slaves, which no doubt had readers enthralled.

Booker weaves together the pieces that have appeared on this blog, writing that last week moved up by several notches the slow-motion catastrophe unfolding over Britain's defence policy, ending our "special relationship" with the US and committing us to total dependence on our EU partners:

First, EU defence ministers confirmed their moves towards creating a "European defence industry", which is in practice committing Britain to waste billions of pounds buying equipment from our EU partners, when we would formerly have bought superior and cheaper equipment made in the US or Britain.

Second, President Bush had to cave in to the US Congress's wish to end the release to Britain of sensitive technological information, on the grounds that we can no longer be trusted not to pass this on to other EU countries or China. This spells an end to such joint Anglo-US defence projects as the F-35 joint strike fighter.

Third, the Ministry of Defence provided "non-answers" to questions put by MPs, including the Tories' front-bench spokesman Gerald Howarth, on the recent decision, revealed in this column, that we are to lose our last explosives-making facilities, making us wholly dependent on explosives imported from abroad. The MoD refuses to say where all the explosives for Britain's Armed Forces will in future be made.

Meanwhile the National Audit Office covered up for the MoD by producing a joke report on various recent defence projects. It congratulated the MoD for bringing in on time the Javelin anti-tank missile, without admitting that this has been available since 1996, and that we only bought it from the US after wasting £109 million on a Continental version that did not work.

The NAO approved the Army's biggest ever truck purchase from the German firm MAN, without pointing out that the trucks failed to meet specification and that better vehicles could have been bought from two US-British consortia. The report congratulated the MoD on "saving £157 million" on its order for a French missile for the Eurofighter, without pointing out that it could have saved £900 million by buying the US equivalent.

The NAO also fell for MoD spin that it had "saved £145 million" by reducing the efficiency of its three planned Type-45 destroyers, equipped only with French anti-aircraft missiles and costing £1 billion each. It did not explain that we could have followed the example of the Australian Navy by buying US-designed ships, British-built and equipped also to fire cruise and anti-submarine missiles. Complete with missile systems, these would have cost only £600 million each, saving £1.2 billion for much more capable ships.

Finally the Queen gave Royal Assent to the MoD's scrapping of our last county-based infantry regiments, to be merged into new "large regiments" to fit the British Army to the needs of the "European Rapid Reaction Force".

You would think that Dr Eamonn Butler, director of the free-market Adam Smith Institute, would know better. But here he is, in the pages of The Business today, offering a peon of praise to the EU's commission for its attempts to "liberalise" Europe's rail industries.

For sure, the railways on the Continent are classic examples of the heavily-subsidised state-owned dinosaurs, typified by the French-owned SNCF, and Butler makes a good case for breaking up the state monopolies and allowing the wind of competition to rip through the sector.

But, without showing any sign of understanding what is going on, Butler writes cheerily about the commission wanting to be "proactive promoters of market entry and competition, and functionality independent of ministers".

Reference to the commission’s website, however, reveals the true – and predicable – agenda. As we pointed out in respect of the commission’s activities in the energy sector, it is not liberalisation in which the commission is expressing an interest, but integration.

Under the guise of promoting competition and all the free-market values that Butler espouses, the commission is seeking to detach the railways from their national bases, only then to re-order them on a supranational level, under the control of the commission, responsible to its own European Railway Agency.

Integration of the railway system was in fact first attempted way back in 1952, by the then European Coal and Steel Community, with Mr Monnet's High Authority – the forerunner of the present commission – arguing that there was little point in standardising cross-border prices for coal and steel if there were large variations in rail freight charges and conditions.

Then, as always, the ultimate objective was to foster a state of interdependence, breaking down the ability of individual nation states to act independently, making them reliant on the supranational government. Back in the 50s, this was a step too far, but the fact that the process was attempted all those years ago is a salutary reminder of the longevity of the ambitions of the integrationists, and their sheer, dogged persistence.

Nevertheless, that there should be better co-ordination between national railway systems, cross-border co-operation and liberalisation. Such moves would be in the economic interests of the countries of Europe and could be best managed by a series of intergovernmental agreements, using the established mechanism of the convention.

That is the direction Butler should be looking. After all, it was said of Mussolini that his great achievement was to make the railways run on time, but no one would suggest reintroducing Fascist dictators for that reason. Similarly, rather than applauding the commission's attempts to make the trains run on time, he should recognise that the price is economic and political integration. That is a price too high.

COMMENT THREAD

As a tailpiece in his incredible shrinking column, relegated to the penultimate page of The Sunday Telegraph, Booker has managed to get in a plug for our new edition of The Great Deception. He writes:

Last weekend at the annual conference of the Bruges Group, Dr Richard North and I launched a new paperback edition of The Great Deception, our best-selling history of the EU (Continuum, £9.99). This has been extensively revised and updated, to include the story behind the rise and semi-fall of the EU constitution.”

When the first edition appeared in 2003, it was praised by historians and commentators as by far the fullest and most revealing account of the "European project" to date, and sold more than 10,000 copies.

Last weekend all 50 copies of the new edition on sale were snapped up. But anyone who tries to order it via Amazon must be careful to look for the new subtitle "Can The European Union Survive?" Thanks to the legendary idiosyncrasy of that computerised bureaucracy, it still shows the cover of the old edition, by which some readers have already been misled.

Sometimes a coincidence happens which is too important to ignore. This is one of them.

On my desk for a few days now has been a copy of an article from the October edition of the RUSI (Royal United Services Institute) Journal, headed "Britain's Armed Forces Under Threat", with a strap line reading: "A journalist's lament" (online here, but subscription only).

The article is by Max Hastings, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, some time defence correspondent and one of the few military historians, in my opinion, who understands the technology of warfare and its role in shaping events.

Anyhow, Hastings is in "lament mode", concerned at the indifference of the media and the public in general – to say nothing of the politicians – about defence issues. He also echoes a refrain oft rehearsed by this Blog, the absence of an informed media debate on the Services, one reason for which, he believes, is unwillingness of serving officers to give private briefings to journalists. In that context, this section caught my eye:

In the absence of informed private briefing, media debate on the Services is conducted at the shallowest possible level. For instance, many perceive a strong case for the large regiments policy. However painful for those units affected, the single battalion structure seems doomed. Yet, in the absence of effective, top-level briefing, media coverage of this issue lapsed into a familiar howl of anguish about cap badges, which does no service to the real interests of the corps of infantry.

Our first instinct, when we started this blog, was to make a running commentary of all the developments in the EU, keeping our readers up to date with all the news emanating from Brussels.

We soon abandoned that idea, not least because of the weight of information, but also because of the repetitiveness and sheer tedium of much of the subject matter. That perhaps, as we have observed before, is the real genius of the EU – making vital subjects so utterly boring that no one takes any notice of them, leaving the officials to get on with their plans for integrating Europe, undisturbed by the glare of publicity and the scrutiny that comes with it.

Hats off, therefore, to the Spectator this week, therefore, which has given space to a long article by The Times European correspondent, Anthony Browne, who, under the heading, "Brussels bites back", reminds us that, while the French and Dutch "no" votes may have killed off the constitution, they certainly didn't kill off European integration.

Browne, who is not our favourite correspondent, nevertheless, does a competent job in picking up on recent actions by the EU to illustrate his thesis, starting with a fictional scenario whereby a crash in central London of Banana Republic Airlines Flight 101, which killed 453 people and created a swath of destruction across Islington.

This, he takes as the last straw which provokes Britain's withdrawal from the EU. "Few could understand," he writes, "how the judges in the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg had the power to overturn the secretary of state's ban on the airline for its poor safety record, giving it the right to enter UK airspace." He continues:

As the body-count mounted, not even the most ardent Europhiles wanted to justify the fact that a panel of unelected and unaccountable judges with no known expertise in aviation safety had the power to overrule the British government on banning airlines from flying into Britain. Public blame of the EU was sealed when it emerged that the reason no one could remember the British government handing over this power to the EU’s supreme court in Luxembourg was that ministers had never publicly announced it — no statement in Parliament, not even a press release. They had gone along with the usual EU method, agreeing things behind closed doors.

You may think I am making this up, but the only bit that’s not true — yet — is the accident. You won’t have read about it in the papers or heard it in Parliament, but the government has indeed agreed in principle to give up its final say on which airlines fly into Britain as part of a harmonised EU aviation-safety regime. The main part of the regime — which, an official admitted to me, involves a wholesale transfer of powers from the UK's Civil Aviation Authority to the European Aviation Safety Agency in Cologne — was announced last week by the European Commission. Whatever the merits of transferring control of aviation safety in Britain’s skies from London to Brussels, Luxembourg and Cologne — and they do exist — don’t expect to hear a debate about it. "It is very politically sensitive," one EU official told me.

It is rather fitting that the National Audit Office "Major Projects Report 2005", published today, should have on its front cover a large colour photograph of a Javelin missile blowing up a tank.

In a report, pre-empted by Lord Drayson in a "puff" published by The Telegraph TEXT on Wednesday, the MoD is applauded for getting a “grip on spiralling costs”, with the over-all forecast cost on the 20 biggest defence projects falling by £699m in the year to 31 March.

One of the examples of this new-found "grip" is the very Javelin missile, which is featured at length in the report and merits two further large colour photographs. In July 2005, according to the NAO, the Light Forces Anti-Tank Guided Weapon also known as Javelin entered service with the Army some four months before the expected delivery date of November 2005 approved at Main Gate. Training was completed before the in-service date was declared and the equipment is fully operational.

All this sounds ever so good, but for the fact that its introduction represents the ultimate failure of European defence manufacturing and a massive waste of money by the MoD. Thus, as we pointed out in August, the “success” of the MoD on this missile is simply an example of New Labour and its "spin" machine – and the NAO has fallen for it, hook line and sinker.

The Javelin is in fact a US-designed weapon, produced by Raytheon/Lockheed Martin, first issued to US forces in 1996 but ordered for the British Army only in January 2003, to replace the 20-year-old Milan missile. It was not the MoD's first choice of weapons system, as the preferred weapon was the Euromissile MR Trigat.

However, by June 1999, substantial delays had been experienced in the missile development. The UK had become dangerously exposed as existing stocks of the Milan missile were running down, the government was forced by July 2000 to withdraw from the project, writing off £109,314,000 in development costs, then to buy the off-the-shelf US system – which, in any event, had better performance than the proposed MR Trigat.

But equal sleight of hand is being deployed with other projects. We are told that the MoD has "saved" £145 million on the Type 45 destroyers, albeit at the cost of "reduced capabilities", which is regarded as reflecting "greater realism on the part of the acquisition community." Those "reduced capabilities" are the omission of the sonar suites from the new destroyers, which means the ships have no anti-submarine capability.

Yet, as we reported, also in August, we are spending £1 billion per ship, to include the French-made PAAMS missile system, while the Australians are buying the US-equivalent Arleigh Burke DDG-51 class – which they are building in their own yards – for a "mere" £600 million each.

Worse still, while the Type 45s are restricted to anti-aircraft warfare only – which makes them virtually redundant if there is no air threat – the DG51s can be armed with ASROC anti-submarine missiles or with Tomahawk cruise missiles for land attack. In other words, we are buying less for more and, because we are reducing capabilities still further, this is regarded as a success.

Then there is the European Meteor air-to-air missile intended to equip the Eurofighter, on which the government is "saving" – i.e., not spending - £151 million by reducing the number of missiles it will but. But, once more in August (that was a busy month) we reported that the US equivalent Raytheon missile was available as a package for £500 million and, instead, the MoD had opted for Meteor at a cost of £1.1 billion, now increased to £1.4 billion. Thus, saving £151 million on an overspend of £900 million is regarded as a success.

There are other savings as well – for instance, the MoD has cut £1.4 million from the ASTOR (Airborne Strand-off Radar) system, but only by not incorporating the originally specified flight refuelling system, which drastically limits range and endurance. Another £1.8 million is saved on the truck fleets, by buying MAN trucks, but again that has a price. The vehicles are unable to meet defence planning assumptions and are not equipped for all climatic conditions.

Effectively, failures are being dressed up and paraded as successes and, not only has the NAO swallowed it, so has today’s Daily Telegraph which dutifully reports: "MoD cuts equipment orders to save £700m", without one hint of criticism.

Of course, there is always the Conservative Party but one somehow doubts whether the current defence team will make a fuss. By such neglect does our current government get away with it.

COMMENT THREAD

When I joined local government, some forty years ago, there was a worn patch of lino by my desk, scuffed by the generations of inspectors before me. When I suggested that we might replace the flooring, I was sternly reminded that it was ratepayers' money I wanted to spend. The floor was perfectly durable and would remain.

As for getting a protective overall, that was a story in itself. They weren't issued routinely as inspectors only observed - they didn't get "stuck in" – so normal clothing sufficed.

One day, however, the main sewer in the town surcharged, depositing its contents in the cellar of a local pub. That was put down as one of those things but, when the same thing happened a couple of weeks later, we had a very unhappy publican visiting us at the town hall.

I arranged for a site meeting with the water authority and, at the appointed time, two "suits" turned up. They blithely told us that the sewer was below capacity as there had been extra housing connected upstream. But never mind, they said, there was £500,000 in the budget (at lot of money then) to replace the sewer and works would start in a year's time.

My publican was not a happy bunny and he did not believe the suits either. The housing had been in about two years and we'd only just started having this problem. In a flash of inspiration, I asked if anyone had been down the sewer to see if there were any problems… blank stares.

No time like the present, I chirped and had my crew – which I just happened to have in attendance – lift the manhole cover. Down I went, and it was deep, about 50 feet. Lacking an overall, I too was in my suit, but what the heck.

In the narrow confines of the chamber, I had to contort myself to look up the barrel of the sewer, a nine inch main, and could just discern the shape of an obstruction. The next day, I got my crew down there and, believe it or not, they extracted a railway sleeper from the pipe. They had to cut it in sections to remove it and, to this day, we never worked out how it got there. The sewer ran free and the enlargement scheme was quietly forgotten.

Anyhow, on the day, there is me, a tad soiled and somewhat odiferous. In something of a mood, I jumped in the car and went straight off to the boss's office, storming in on his meeting with the committee chairman. Either I get an overall or you lose an inspector, I told him, dripping the evidence of why I needed one on his carpet.

By the time I got back to the office, after a shower and change of clothing, sitting on my desk, alongside the worn lino, was a pristine overall and – joy – a shiny pair of wellies.

But that was forty years ago, when we had councillors who could pop in at any moment and demand to know what we were doing - we never spent a penny until we had to. The same mindset went for civil servants, with HM Treasury suitably parsimonious, but not any more.

According to the BBC website, Ministry of Defence officials have spent £348,000 on flat screen televisions for their newly refurbished London office. The 134 state-of-the-art TVs cost £2,597 each, and despite outraged denials, their main use is to watch cricket – or so claims Lib Dem MP Norman Lamb, who says he was told they were great for watching Test Matches.

Myself, I reckon "Tellytubbies" is more their style, although my colleague thinks that programme is probably too intellectually demanding for MoD officials.

Mr Lamb, says that although it was "only a little example" it "smacked of central office profligacy" and was "symptomatic of the attitude" of government departments towards costs. But it is also symptomatic of "arrogance of office" - civil servants who know they cannot be brought to book and have now become our masters.

COMMENT THREAD

[Some of our readers would have followed the link to OneLondon and read this posting already. However, OneLondon is a somewhat more official blog than this one and the posting had to be removed. We have decided to put it up in its entirety on this blog.]

Plod Blair (Sir Ian of that Ilk) has called for a “public debate on the kind of police service Londoners want”. It is not entirely clear why he needs a public debate, as the MPS (or the Met as we used to call it) has been doing nothing but consulting with various people and organizations about policing. In fact, at various times they have been overwhelmed by comments from Londoners (though, presumably, these were not stakeholders and, therefore, of not importance) of what kind of police service they want.

We want the kind of police service that is visible in a slightly different way from the way it is now. In other words, we want police officers on the beat, paying attention to what is going on around them, not chatting to each other or playing with their mobile phones.

We want the kind of police service that does not cheerfully tell us that it is entirely our own fault if our houses are burgled, our cars are vandalized, our mobile phones are stolen and our children are attacked on the way home from school. And there is nothing they can do about it.

We want the kind of police service that does not respond with a “well what do you expect” type of shoulder shrugging or a merry laughter when a crime is reported.

What is there to debate?

And I can also tell Plod Blair what kind of police service we do not really care for. I found myself in genteel St James’s Square earlier today. Across the road from Chatham House (The Royal Institute of International Affairs) there was a tiny, well-behaved demonstration of people shouting: “Poland stop your homophobia”. I assume an important Polish speaker was addressing the RIIA and a dozen people decided to demonstrate.

One side of the square and the street beside it was filled with police officers of every variety, some standing around, some chatting to each other, some exercising their ability to communicate with the community at large, by chatting to local shopkeepers.

I stopped to count the number of officers, whereupon one of them asked me what I was doing. I told him that there were more officers than demonstrators. He grinned widely and said that I was wrong: there were fourteen of them and only thirteen police. At that point another car drew up and disgorged two more of London’s finest.

Earth to Plod Blair (Sir Ian of that Ilk): we do not want this kind of police service!

Nevertheless, the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA), which supposedly supervises the MPS, without being able to do much about it or being accountable themselves to anybody, is very excited about the debate. It has held a conference, during which there were workshops, showcasings of “emerging models of local engagement” and discussions with stakeholders.There was also an intention to

“… review the role of borough-wide Community Police Consultation Groups (CPCGs)and discuss the new Safer Neighbourhood Community Panels and how they will relate to existing consultation methods.”

Jolly good. Will this reduce the crime rate or increase the clear-up rate? Don’t bother me with facts.

Catherine Crawford, the MPA Chief Executive issued a statement before the conference, the first paragraph of which shows the lady to have a very poor grasp of grammar but a good knowledge of meaningless jargon:

“If Londoners are to truly engage in the future of policing, and if citizens are to be truly at the heart of everything that the police do, this conference is particularly timely in discussing how we can do this in a real, productive and ongoing fashion.”

Sheesh. All we want is not to have our homes broken into or our children attacked on the way home from school.

Meanwhile, Plod Blair (Sir Ian of that Ilk) has taken time out from meetings with supermodels on the subject of their possible drug-taking (as Kate Moss has not been charged we must assume the evidence is negligible and the Superplods were wasting their time) to deliver this year’s Dimbleby lecture on the subject of policing.

Plod Blair, let us recall, was the man who went on radio to tell the world that the Met … woops … sorry …. MPS set a golden standard in counter-terrorism. The date? July 7, 2005. The time? Around 8.30 am, that is an hour or so before four bombs went off on London transport, killing over 50 people and injuring several hundred more.

Did the man ever apologize for his arrogance and inefficiency? Not on your life.

Plod Blair’s deputy it was, who told us on the same day that the words Islamic and terrorism cannot be used in the same sentence. Did he ever apologize for his stupidity? Don’t ask silly questions.

I may add that so far as anyone knows nobody has been arrested in connection with the 7/7 bombings.

Then came July 21 and London became the first city outside the Middle East to have had two bomb attacks within two weeks. Luckily for us, the second wave of would-be bombers consisted of complete amateurs.

Then came the infamous episode of the Brazilian electrician, the complete and utter mess made by the MPS and Blair’s attempts to cover up and deflect justice.And then came the endless demands for more power to the police and the disgraceful political campaigning for the 90-day detention clause in the government’s Anti-Terrorism Bill.

In the meantime, the crime rate in London, whichever way you fiddle the figures, keeps rising, even though people have given up reporting anything they do not need to report for insurance purposes. Violent crime, which is still reported, is on the rise. Well, what kind of policing do Londoners want, Sir Ian?

The Dimbleby lecture was an extended repetition of the same question: what kind of policing do Londoners want and how is it to be decided. The presumption is that Londoners want tougher policing and more power to the police. Well, errm, not necessarily. We want more efficient policing. But what are we to make of paragraphs like this one:

“In 2012, we will want Britain to be an open, diverse society, withequality of opportunity and freedom of movement for all, with the Olympics demonstrating and showcasing that Britain. Events in Paris - and in the Lozells area of Birmingham - show how fragile that vision might be and how incredibly important policing is to its realisation. The connection between the environment that local policing can engender and the way in which the Olympics will be policed is absolutely clear. The Olympics will not take place in a vacuum: they will be policed in a manner reflective of a wider Britain.

Who will decide? The police, the government, the media or you? This is not a time for a Royal Commission but for open thought. It is a time for politicians and commentators of every stripe and opinion actively to consider how citizens can be involved in a debate about what kind of police service we want. We need to embed the citizen in everything we do: we could make a small start, for instance, by insisting that the shortly to be created National Policing Improvement Agency should have a permanent and powerful citizens panel.”

It seems that nothing much counts until the wretched Olympics.But what is Plod Blair proposing? Well, not a lot, apart from the National Policing Improvement Agency, that is. We shall have lots of consultations and the public must get more involved. One could argue that since the public tends to be at the receiving end of both the crime and the run-amok policing that closes off whole streets for days on end because of an accident, it is already involved. But no, that is not good enough for Sir Ian of that Ilk:

“We need - you need - to move from policing by consent, which is the bedrock of our policing settlement but which is passive, to policing by direct collaboration, which is active. The police service needs public engagement and debate to help it fit the multi-cultural, open society to which the London Olympics aspire, a Britain in which I want to live and in which I want my children to live. That Britain cannot succeed without a police service to match. You need to decide what kind of police service we want.”

To which most of us would say: just do it. Stop concentrating on minor traffic offences, stop rolling out in enormous force every time a dozen people decide to demonstrate about some political issue, stop playing with endless toys. Find out what is going on around you, try to prevent crime and catch those responsible if you have not managed to do so. Not easy, perhaps, but nobody forced you to put that uniform on.

It seems, however, that Plod Blair and his friend PM Blair have their own ideas of what the police should be doing. Sir Ian quoted from the 1997 statement by the then incoming Labour government. According to this the “overarching purpose of the police service” is:

“… to build a safe, just and tolerant society, in which the rights and responsibilities of individuals, families and communities are properly balanced, and the protection and security of the public are maintained.”

The police service is there to build some kind of a society? The last time I read anything like this was in the instructions handed out by “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka (subsequently renamed many times and now known as the FSB) to his “knights of the revolution”.Have we really come to a situation in which the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (oh all right, the MPS) echoes the founder of the Soviet secret police?

COMMENT THREAD

As a result of researching the labyrinthine issue of defence procurement, readers will know that we have concluded that the MoD appears to be exhibiting a strong "Europe first" bias when it comes to major contracts for our armed forces.

But, as we indicated in a post, a couple of days ago one cannot also rule out the possibility of corruption affecting the choice of supplier and, to a certain extent, it may be that European manufacturers have bigger slush funds than their British counterparts.

In this context, it is very often the small clues that give the game away and, while we have no doubts that the MoD is operating a "Europe first" policy, one of the smaller (value-wise) contracts – this one for the Panther Command and Liaison Vehicle - does have aspects which are indistinguishable from corruption.

Not least is the admission from former MoD civil servant Andrew Simpson that, as an MoD desk officer, he initiated the Future Command and Liaison programme, which resulted in the procurement of the Panther vehicle, only for him then to move over and take a lucrative consultancy job for the Italian builders of the vehicle, Iveco.

Readers will recall that the Panther was entered into the procurement competition after the shortlist had closed, at the specific behest of the MoD. The MoD – presumably under the guidance of Simpson - then went on to select the vehicle, despite its unit cost of £413,000 against the clearly better competitor, the South African-built RG31M which was selling for £124,000 less, for each vehicle.

As an indication of just how good the RG31 actually is comes from the US, a country notorious for its reluctance to buy foreign military equipment. Yet, recently, it purchased 146 of these vehicles for use in Afghanistan and Iraq, and US troops have nothing but praise for them.

But what brings this issue into high profile is that, according to DefenceNews, the United Arab Emirates have now ordered 28 RG31Ms, adding another client to a long list which includes the United Nations.

More and more, the Panther contracts looks suspect, and it is increasingly difficult to explain why the MoD insists on buying second-rate European equipment at a higher price than other better equipment, and even more so than in this case, when the RG31 is built by a wholly-owned subsidiary of BAE Systems – the largest of the British defence contractors.

For our latest report, see here.

COMMENT THREAD

Dear old Auntie maintains that it has the highest standards in reporting but we, on this side of the debate about the EU and tranzis in general know the truth about that. Thanks to USS Neverdock, who has tracked down John Simpson's appalling comments about the July 7 terrorists being "misguided criminals". But then John Simpson is the man who still believes that the mock-fight between branches of the Securitate he witnessed in Bucharest, was a real revolution. Talk about "misguided".

The Times this morning picks up on our story posted the day before yesterday on the saga of criminal penalties applicable to EU law.

Headed, "EU to take Britain's right to decide what makes a crime", by the egregious Anthony Browne, the strap-line runs: "Brussels has listed seven offences that it wants to become the first pan-European crimes", setting the scene for a highly alarmist report.

Far be it for us to undermine what is evidently a bonanza for Eurosceptics, so we can afford to revel in the statement that "Brussels unveiled detailed proposals yesterday that would for the first time create a body of pan-European criminal law and force member states to punish citizens who transgress it."

Continues The Times, "The ruling means that for the first time in British legal history, the British government and Parliament will no longer have the sovereign right to decide what constitutes a crime and what the punishment should be." And so on it goes.

The only problem for us is a certain irritation at the sheer amateurism of the piece. For a start, this is not, as Browne asserts, a ruling. It is simply a commission communication, setting out the commission's view on the ECJ judgement. And neither are these "pan-European" crimes. They are crimes, as determined by member state laws – albeit at the behest of the Community - and they already exist, having been defined by the Council under "pillar three" of the treaty.

But, as to the substantive point, it has always been implicit in the EU treaties that member states should adopt appropriate and proportional penalties, applicable to their citizens, for failures to comply with EU law transposed into their own legal codes. After all, if member states adopted the laws but imposed no penalties, the laws would have no effect.

What the ECJ judgement does, however, is clarify the commission's powers, giving the acquis primacy over "pillar three" decisions. It also states explicitly that the commission has the right to propose "appropriate measures of criminal law" but, "only on the condition that there is clear need to combat serious shortcomings in the implementation of the Community’s objectives" and to "provide for criminal law measures to ensure the full effectiveness of a Community policy…".

If media sources take exception to this, we are happy to see the outrage expressed, but the truth is that we have been subject to criminal laws imposed by our own government, in relations to offences created by the Community, ever since we joined the EEC. To that extent, our picture, showing the Royal Coat of Arms, has been a fraud for many years. When, as they do so often, our judges convict people for breaches of EU-inspired law, it would be more honest if they sat under a ring of stars.

Despite this, there is nothing especially new in the current developments, but, whatever. Enjoy the moment.

COMMENT THREAD

Naturally, I am delighted that Germany has finally managed to follow in Britain's footsteps and elect a woman Chancellor and I hope that she will be as successful as our first woman Prime Minister was. Somehow, I do not think so at the moment but I may yet be pleasantly surprised.

After much agitation Angela Merkel was elected to be Chancellor by the Bundestag on Tuesday and spent yesterday travelling, first to Paris, then to Brussels. In Paris she came across her first difficulty: President Chirac, who insisted on kissing her hand. Merkel must have been wondering whether that was not too high a price to pay.

Anyhow, she had lunch in Paris and an afternoon snack in Brussels, we are reliably informed by Deutsche Welle. The fact that she visited Paris first of all is seen as a sign that she is keen to affirm that the Franco-German axis is at the heart of the European project.

In Brussels, Chancellor Merkel visited NATO Headquarters and reiterated her desire to see closer relations between Germany and the United States, soured as they were by her predecessor’s rather flamboyant anti-Americanism. Germany will not, she repeated, train Iraqi military personnel within that country but will do so in neighbouring states.

She voiced her strong support for NATO:

“NATO should be, I believe, the place where people turn first, where member states turn first, to discuss political issues of common concern. First and foremost we should try to pursue the approach that NATO is the place for such discussions. I believe that is very necessary ... only that way can we see to it that NATO continues to be a political alliance.”

A great deal of excitement has been generated on the French blogosphere, both in English and in French. It seems that Nicolas Sarkozy, Minister of the Interior and President-in-Waiting-if-that-dastardly-Villepin-does-not-beat-him has become involved in a blog discussion with the Kassowitz, a cinéaste.

This, as our French colleagues point out, is going beyond the sort of silly self-promotion that the fragrant Margot is indulging in. This is the beginnings of a serious political debate. Will our politicians learn to to do the same?

COMMENT THREAD

Congratulations are due to the Financial Times for behaving like a grown-up newspaper, leading as they do today on the story about the UK being denied the waiver on US arms technology.

This is the ITAR (International Trade in Arms Regulations) controversy which we first broached on this Blog in October 2004 - amazingly over a year ago – and which has largely been ignored by our own infantile media – despite the fundamental strategic importance of the issue to our nation.

Then, over a year ago, the UK was looking to a relaxation of the regulations, by way of a “waiver”, which would have eased the cumbersome bureaucratic control on the transfer of technology. But, while Bush was disposed to grant it, two powerful Senators, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., chairman of the House International Relations Committee, mounted a successful campaign to prevent the president giving way.

Since then, there have been a succession of UK officials wending their way to the Hill, in an attempt to resuscitate the "waiver", and even direct intervention by Geoff Hoon, then UK defence minister, and by Blair. But, as the FT now reports, the UK looks set to lose what has been a five-year battle on the waiver, having been told by Bush administration officials that political opposition on the Hill technologies has become insurmountable.

The FT also reports that US and UK officials are now trying to come up with ways to strengthen military technology co-operation without having to change the US export law

The central figure in the blockage all along has been Henry Hyde, and his concern, as it has always been, is the leakage of technology from the UK to our European “partners” and thence to China and other potentially hostile powers. Currently, he cites the UK’s refusal to strengthen its own laws on transferring military technologies to third countries. He will know, however, the of the Framework Agreement with European nations, signed by Geoff Hoon in 2000, which prevents the UK doing just that.

To Hyde, this lack of specific laws that prevent transfers of military technology to third countries has been a particular problem. With the open UK defence market, which has big representation from military contractors based in places such as Paris and Munich, Hyde has warned that technologies transferred to Britain may find their ways to capitals less friendly to US interests. And, in a blistering report prepared by Hyde's committee last year, he lashed out at Britain's refusal to address the third-party loophole, calling it "not only disappointing, but potentially highly prejudicial to US interests around the world".

His views have also been coloured by Britain's push to lift the European Union's arms embargo on China and has been an outspoken critic of the EU's move, and Britain's support for removing the ban.

In more immediate practical terms, this could have a significant impact on the STOVL version of the joint Anglo-US F-35 Joint Strike Fighter project, as we pointed out last July, and its implications for the carrier project. We cannot help but wonder whether John Reid’s enthusiasm for the "voluntary" code of practice on European arms procurement, which was formally agreed on Monday in Brussels, is in some way related to this whole issue.

Either way, today's news from the FT is a grave and important development. It is a pity that the rest of the media is not sufficiently grown-up to report on the implications.

COMMENT THREAD

It seems we have good company as far as general disillusionment with the EU goes. According to Reuters, Malta is qualifying for membership of this once exclusive club, with "euphoria" waning as the EU struggles to approve a budget and poorer new members face having to share the cost of enlargement.

Prime minister Lawrence Gonzi says his country still stood by the sacrifices it made to qualify and was benefiting from millions of euros of annual aid but the joy of joining had yielded to a realisation that the proposed EU constitution was in limbo and that the budget was in deadlock.

Another factor which might even turn disillusionment into cynicism and even downright hostility is the extraordinary news that, according to Malta Today, Gonzi’s National Party has been awarded a major €565,000 contract from the EU for providing a daily press review to the Commission representation in Malta.

Incredibly, the EU commission is claiming there is no "situation of conflict of interest", even though the press review is prepared by the in-house research bureau, which also provides the party with its own press review every day.

The contract won by Media.Link Communications, which is owned by the PN. Deputy prime minister Tonio Borg, is both a nominal shareholder and a director of the company. A direct UK equivalent would be the commission awarding the contract to a press company owned by the Labour Party, with John Prescott as a director.

Nevertheless, a spokesperson for the fragrant Margot, Mikolaj Dowgielewicz, insists that, "The fact that a tenderer was owned by a political party was not considered to be a situation of conflict of interests as defined in the tender specifications."

So that's all right then.

COMMENT THREAD

There has been an interesting development in the saga of criminal penalties applicable to EU law.

Readers will recall the furore last September when the ECJ overturned a Council framework decision on this issue, specifically who had authority to dictate penalties relating to environmental law.

Widely misunderstood by the hacks at the time – many of whom believed that the EU had suddenly acquired powers to send people to jail, this – as we pointed out – was actually a turf war. The Council had decided it could determine criminal penalty levels under the judicial co-operation provisions of the Maastricht Treaty, as amended – the so-called "third pillar" provisions - while the commission disagreed.

Instead, the commission argued that, where the policy areas came within the competences of the Treaty, and the application of criminal law was necessary to ensure the effective implementation of laws made within those policy areas, then the "first pillar" legislative procedures should be used, with the commission maintaining its exclusive right to make proposals.

With the ECJ having agreed with the commission, officials have gone back through previous Council decisions relating to criminal penalties and, tomorrow, the commission will unveil a “communication (as yet unnumbered) pointing out that other areas of community law are affected as well. In these areas, it further asserts that the Council's decisions are made "on the wrong legal basis" and thus intends to issue proposals to remedy the situation.

Issues the commission believes require remedial treatment include criminal penalties and sanctions against counterfeiting in connection with the euro, "combating fraud and counterfeiting of non-cash means of payment", money laundering, assisting illegal immigration, corruption in the private sector, attacks against information systems and ship-source pollution.

No doubt, following the official publication of the commission’s proposals tomorrow, there may be much media outrage at the fact that the Community is specifying penalties in these areas at all. If nothing else, this will help to underline how much of our government – including the definition of specific offences and the determination of the type of penalties that should be applied.

But, as before, in practical terms, nothing much has changed. The principle has long been accepted. All this is about is whether the Council on its own, or the commission proposing to the Council (and EU parliament), can decide on these issues. And, in the final analysis, if the Council – and/or the parliament for that matter – does not like the commission's proposals, either can reject them.

Nevertheless, it is fascinating to watch the power-play at work and, as we noted earlier, this time the commission has succeeded in taming the unilateralist tendencies of the Council. So the battle continues.

COMMENT THREAD

Some of our readers (not many I expect) may have wondered why we should be so vehement in our attack on the idea that the UN should set up an international forum, on which all the many tyrants and dictators are to be represented to run the internet. Why did we think it was disgraceful that Britain, on whose behalf the EU negotiated, should find herself on the side of the tranzis and the tyrants and against the US, Australia, Canada and other liberal democracies? After all, does it really matter?

Let us look a little more closely at what might be motivating one of the proponents of the move, Iran. The mullahs and the new president, who is busy purging all opponents, reversing the few liberalizing measures and threatening Israel with extinction, have a problem on their hands. It is called the internet, more specifically the blogosphere, which is enthusiastically used by all the dissidents.

According to Rachel Hoff, a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute,

“Iranian dissidents are increasingly penning blogs to voice criticism of the Islamic Republic and to push for freedom and democracy. With an estimated 100,000 active Iranian blogs, Persian is now tied with French as the second most common blogging language after English.”

“Blogging has revolutionized dissent in Iran. By providing private citizens a public voice, blogs may be the most powerful tool in the dissidents' arsenal. As an Iranian blogger known as Saena wrote, "Weblogs are one weapon that even the Islamic Republic cannot beat."[7] As the cases of Arash Sigarchi and other imprisoned bloggers show, though, the Iranian regime is trying to crush these new outlets of democratic dissent. Throughout the Middle East, the race is on between journalists opening new websites and regimes such as the Islamic Republic trying to censor cyberspace.”

All the way from the Commission to Transport for London, taking in the police and many other organizations en route. It is the TfL and its haughty attitude to the people of London with regards to the Routemaster and those ghastly and inefficient bendy buses, that are the subject of the OneLondon posting.

COMMENT THREAD

I confidently asserted yesterday that the mainstream media would take no notice whatsoever of the decision by defence ministers of the EU member states to adopt a "voluntary" code of practice on European arms procurement.

In one particular respect, I was wrong. The Times, at least, has run an article, albeit a tiny, down-page affair, which announces: "Europe to open up arms trade".

Written by the paper's EU correspondent Anthony Browne, however, the paper need not have bothered. If it is the duty of the media to inform, then Browne's piece was a parody of journalism.

True, he gets the basics right – but then he could have picked those up from any agency report – that “European” defence ministers have agreed to open up Europe’s €30 billion (£21 billion) annual military equipment market. Browne reports that this is "a big step towards the EU's desire to become a military superpower", which is highly debatable, given that all member states bar France and the UK are cutting back heavily on defence spending.

But the most tendentious comment from Browne is that: "The move will create a potential bonanza for British defence companies, which are among the most efficient in the continent, giving them far greater access to the European market." He goes on to write: "John Reid, the Defence Secretary, brokered an agreement with his counterparts to stop protecting national defence industries, in an attempt to boost Europe’s military capacity by creating a continent-wide defence industry."

In terms of reporting, this is utter garbage. The very history of the project tells us that when EU markets are "opened up", the invariable result is that the UK lifts its restrictions while the "colleagues" maintain theirs and the flow of goods is one-way.

Given the extraordinary flow of military spending on European supplies – well recorded by this Blog – any so-called "liberalisation" can only be expected to increase the amount of European equipment purchased by the MoD, with very little in the way of reciprocal spending by our "partners".

Nor is the spending solely determined by political imperatives. As I has hoped when we started taking a very public interest in defence procurement, people are starting to come out of the woodwork.

Recently, I received a comprehensive dossier on bribery and corruption relating to the purchase by the MoD of defence equipment from a European company, in preference to one of our own, on the basis of very large sums of “brown envelope” cash changing hands.

Corruption is nothing new in the MoD, although it seems one part of the defence integration process is to import some of the less desirable “European values”, those which are practised so freely in the EU commission and French political circles. I will have more to write about this in due course.

COMMENT THREAD

We covered it last night - the EU budget meeting in Brussels - when it was predicted that it would be a waste of time. And despite the burbling of the Today programme this morning, about what great things Jack Straw would do, that is precisely what it turned out to be – in spades.

But what is different this time is the candour with which the other member states are expressing themselves - none of your carefully crafted diplomacy here.

Belgian foreign minister, Karel de Gucht, set the tone, saying: "We are sitting here wasting our time." Finnish foreign minister, Erkii Tuomioja, told Mr Straw: "As there is nothing new to discuss, I have nothing new to say," and French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, warned the UK presidency that there was a "general feeling of concern" over the lack of progress.

Little Straw was left bleating that the British position on the rebate was justified and Europe minister, Douglas Alexander, told the talks that the rebate was "an enduring British reality".

It is an odd thing that, for a "dead end" we use a French phrase that the French themselves don't use – cul de sac. They use the word impasse. And that is just what it is.

COMMENT THREAD

Such is the thrall of the "Dianafication" phenomenon in the treatment of tragic events, that criticism of the police in juxtaposition to news of the Bradford shootings has brought rebukes on this Blog's forum.

But I do wonder whether I am the only person in the world to have read the description of the transfer of the shooting suspects from London back to Yorkshire with growing dismay. Recorded by the Daily Mirror, the account went as follows:

A ring of steel surrounded five of the six suspects as they were driven 200 miles from London to West Yorkshire yesterday. The maximum security convoy was guarded by armed officers and shadowed by a police helicopter. It included seven white Transit vans and eight police cars with flashing lights. Other unmarked vehicles travelled alongside in a rolling roadblock up the M1. Slip roads were temporarily sealed off to allow the convoy a smooth passage north.

Significant amounts of cash are handed in at travel agencies by people arranging money transfers for relatives in Pakistan. Shahid Bhatti, owner of Bradford Travel on Lumb Lane in Bradford city centre, said: "Over the past 10 years a pattern has been established of robberies on travel agencies in Bradford. "We have been targeted because people know about the money transfers. "My brother was robbed outside our office in 1997 and since then we have increased our security. We have installed CCTV cameras and we report any unusual behaviour on Lumb Lane. "This incident is a horrible tragedy, but we've been expecting something like this."

Today, we reach an important milestone in the life of this Blog, our first half-million hits since we started on Thursday 22 April 2004. Having posted over 3,000 articles since then, we thank our readers from around the world for visiting the site and for commenting on our posts – especially our 168 forum members who take their savaging in such good heart.

That said, the average daily hit rate in the nineteen months of our existence is less than a thousand per day, representing considerably fewer actual readers. And even though we did manage to peak at nearly 5,000 hits on the day, at the time of the Dutch referendum in June, we now stumble on at an average daily rate during the week of about 1300.

Measured in crude terms, against the circulation of the mainstream media and the political magazines such as the Spectator, that is truly a pathetic performance. Even with the syndication to the Bruges Group and the "No Campaign" website, and e-mail distribution of some of our posts, it is a circulation that does not merit the prodigious amount of hard work that I and my co-editor, Dr Helen Szamuely, put into the writing.

This is not a reflection of the content. Both Helen and I are published authors and write frequently for paid journals – not least my piece in The Business yesterday. We know that our material is good quality, and appreciate those of our readers who write to us, telling us so.

Given that we are one of the more successful sites, what this demonstrates is that, while blogging has come of age in the United States – with some of the political sites taking over half a million hits a day – it is a phenomenon that has yet to make its mark in the United Kingdom, especially so as more than 40 percent of our hits come from the United States.

That we are so often behind the United States in various trends, yet often follow, is some small consolation to us. We anticipate that, as blogging catches on here, our hit rate will climb accordingly. As my co-editor often remarks, we are in this for the long term.

However, in watching the glacial climb of the daily average – and it is rising, following the dip after the French and Dutch referendums - we have learned something of our readership and what we have found remarkable is as much who does not visit the site as who does. While many journalists visit us, notably absent are politicians and their research assistants in both Westminster and the EU parliament. But especially absent are the bulk of people who call themselves activists in the Eurosceptic movement.

The absence of the latter category is especially interesting as, in starting out the blog, we thought a diet of news and informed comment from two experts in the field would be of special interest to activists. In presuming this, however, we were wrong. It is a measure of the failure of the Eurosceptic movement that it is actually largely uninterested in the European Union and its machinations, or issues relating to it. Many of its members are often so self-obsessed that the epithet "little Englander" is quite correctly applied to them.

To an extent, though, we have not set out to court this group, and will not pander to their prejudices – we have enough of our own. And, in other instances, we have quite deliberately set out to antagonise groups that might be thought to be our natural allies, such as the new Open Europe group. But we maintain our stance that the EU "reformers" are probably more harmful to the cause than the out and out Europhiles, in diluting the message that the construct is unreformable.

For others, our robust commentary is not to their taste, or they find our "line" offensive or so profoundly disagree with us that they cannot read us. Thus, it is a small but select band that regularly visits our site. We would be less than honest if we said other than we would prefer it to be larger but, despite that, we intend to retain our fiercely independent and individual styles, calling it as we see it. And, if even as co-editors, we do not always agree amongst ourselves, we do not expect our readers always to agree with us.

So, here we are, 500,000-up, and I even managed to find a picture of a "toy" to celebrate the event. With modest growth, we should make the million-mark about this time next year, if we are still around. That, dear readers – all else being equal – is up to you. As long as we see steady growth in the readership, we judge that our writing is worth the effort. On the other hand, in the free market for information that is the internet, if there is no demand for our product, then we will let market forces take their course.

You can decide whether the blog survives, by talking about it and promoting it, and encouraging others to visit. Or you can allow it to slide to the obscurity of a decent burial. Over to you.

COMMENT THREAD

The Financial Times has picked up on the defence ministers' meeting which will be held today formally to agree a “voluntary” code of practice on defence procurement. This news we tucked in to a post on Saturday, reminding our readers that the heads of agreement were in fact settled in October at RAF Lyneham.

Although we have followed the twists and turns of this issue very closely, from the EU commission's white paper on defence procurement in September 2004 to the present day, it is one which has been almost totally ignored by the mainstream media. My guess is that, beyond the Financial Times and le Figaro, that indifference will continue – athough a full account can be found on the Euractiv site.

Reading the runes of the FT piece, however, we note with interest that our own defence secretary, John Reid, is hailing the agreement as “a practical first step towards more competition”, and also praising EU countries’ efforts “to move towards common purchasing for projects such as air-to-air refuelling and drone aircraft.” Having bought the Airbus flight refuelling option, Reid is in this respect indulging in an element of self-congratulation, but the reference to "drones" (i.e., unmanned aerial vehicles) is perhaps just as significant.

As we remarked earlier, until June this year when the project was cancelled, the UK was in partnership with the United States on the development of advanced UAVs in a programme known as FOAS – the Future Offensive Air System. This was to replace the strike capability of the RAF's fleet of Tornado GR4s which is expected to reach the end of its operational life around 2018.

So far, no other programme has been substituted by the French are running a multi-national project called Neuron, aimed at developing the advanced UAVs to which the FOAS programme was devoted. A mock-up of the first model was unveiled at the Paris air show on 2 June (see picture), just as Reid was cancelling FOAS. The suspicion is that the UK will now throw its lot in with the French, further integrating our defence capabilities – a suspicion reinforced by Reid's comments.

In an equally sinister development, the French are co-operating closely with the Russians on UAV development and, of course, the Russians are major arms suppliers to the Chinese. The closer integration of defence procurement that will come today with the signing of the agreement will, therefore, suck us into the nexus of arms suppliers to the Peoples' Republic of China and, inevitably, distance us further from the United States.

Nevertheless, none of this is important enough for the mainstream media to report.

COMMENT THREAD

If it's Monday it must be Brussels, and if it's Brussels, it must be the budget… it's groundhog day again. And the other foreign ministers of the EU member states are not only fed up with what they believe to be British stalling tactics, they are preparing to say so.

According to Reuters, poor little Jackie Straw has promised "comprehensive proposals" on the 2007-2013 budget settlement, but only just before a special ministerial meeting on 7 December, giving little time for consideration before the European Council on 15-16 December.

Needless to say, this is not good enough for the "colleagues". "We are wasting time talking about secondary issues without tackling the real problem," one EU ambassador complained. Yet another member state official said ministers might as well exchange statements by letter and save the plane fare to Brussels since there was to be no negotiation.

We have a better idea. Why don’t they join the 20th Century and send each other faxes?

COMMENT THREAD

Yesterday’s Bruges Group conference ended with a session I chaired (with ferocious discipline, even though I say so myself) with two speakers: my colleague Dr Richard North (no, we did not plan this) and the redoubtable Ruth Lea, Director of the Centre for Policy Research.

My colleague has already mentioned the event but I want to tackle the subject from a slightly different perspective.

There was not a great deal of disagreement between the two in that both spoke of the need for this country to leave the EU and both mentioned without going into too much detail several alternative scenarios. Where there was a divergence was between Ms Lea’s sunny political optimism and Dr North’s rather more difficult discussion of the practical problems that will need to be overcome for this country to start functioning again as an independent entity. Not that they cannot be overcome but there seems little point in pretending that they do not or will not exist.

One interesting point that came up, though it was not really discussed either in that session or a previous one when Dan Hannan had touched on it: what kind of a country do we want to live in. Mr Hannan is a member of the Direct Democracy group in the Conservative Party and is very keen on local accountability – a view with which this blog sympathizes a great deal.

During questions Mr Hannan repeated several times that reforms to make government accountable will have to be introduced in this country as well. (In fact, his comments on the police, particularly the Met, would not have pleased several of our readers and members of the forum.)

This is a subject we have discussed on this blog several times and intend to do so again and again in the future: freedom, democracy, accountability are issues that will not simply go away if and when we are out of the European Union. The infamous European model has eaten into our social structure.

Dr North put this slightly differently: we need to work out what kind of a country we are and want to be. I would go even further: we need to find a new historical narrative that links the past with the future.

That means that we cannot simply go back to some nebulous past entity. In the first place, one can never go back. Nothing is the same, the world has changed and what seemed right for this country fifty or seventy years ago, cannot be so any more. (And that assumes that what people imagine was true for that period was, indeed, so – an unlikely proposition.)

Secondly we started from that situation to get to what we have now. So, even if we could, we probably would not want to go back there, for fear of ending up with exactly the same or, even, worse result.

Interestingly enough, this discussion is going on in other countries, particularly among people who are developing the Anglosphere idea. The Anglosphere is not the old Commonwealth writ large or writ any way. It is a narrative that is being developed for the future, linking many past ones, one of which was the Commonwealth.

A recent posting on Albion’s Seedling by Lexington Green deals with precisely that issue and raises some important points that need to be discussed. I can, at this stage, do no better than direct those of our readers who are interested in the subject to Lex’s words. The project, of course, is to be continued.

COMMENT THREAD

"Leaving the EU would not make any difference," my colleague Helen Szamuely remarked yesterday evening. She was chairing the final session of the Bruges Group meeting in Kings College London, where Ruth Lea and I had given our views on alternatives the European Union.

The point Helen was making – which Ruth Lea had also made – is that as long as this government (and previous ones, for that matter), share the same dirigiste, centrist mindset as the legislators in our Brussels government, then we would continue to suffer from the same type of managerial, anti-democratic form of government that emanates from the European Union. Nothing very much will change.

No more so is that evident that in the story offered by Christopher Booker in his column this week, where he reports on the government plans to restructure the 43 local police forces of England and Wales on regional lines.

Although the title of the piece is: "The urge for 'Euro-regions' plays fast and loose with law and order", there is no evidence that this restructuring – the most fundamental in 170 years of British policing – is being carried out to any sort of European agenda. While, as Booker's story reveals, home secretary Charles Clarke is pushing regional structures with extraordinary speed, there is no "smoking gun" which can prove that Brussels is behind the plan.

Nevertheless, there is clearly a European agenda to the regionalisation process, which is being pursued regardless of the decisive "no" vote in the North East regional assembly referendum. This will result in our police forces being cut from the existing 43 to 12, corresponding with the 10 regions of England, London and Wales (the two largest regions, South East and North West, can each have two forces). Wales is to have just one force, not four as now. The seven South West forces are also to be merged into just one, from the Cotswolds to Cornwall.

With the murder of Sharon Beshenivsky, the 38-year-old Bradford, PC still very recent, there is much in this weekend's newspapers on the story but it is only Booker who deals with the regionalisation story. Yet, while the general media takes the predictable and largely unproductive line of pursuing the question of whether all police officers should be armed – the Beshenivsky death and the move towards larger police forces are not entirely unconnected.

Rehearsing the key facts of the Beshenivsky murder, we are told that she and her colleague, Teresa Milburn, 37, were responding to a silent panic alarm, relayed from a private security company, and walked into a hail of bullets as they arrived at the scene, an Asian travel agent in Morely Street, Bradford, by the name of The Universal Travel Express.

West Yorkshire chief constable Colin Cramphorn says they had no reason to believe that this was anything but a routine call-out, but the locals might disagree. According to The Sunday Times report:

Though the modest shop looks unremarkable, it was, as locals knew, a conduit for significant amounts of cash. Many of the largely Asian local community took money to the agency so that it could be transferred to friends or relatives in Pakistan. It was known as one of the quickest ways to send help to those in need after the earthquake in Kashmir. "There was a lot of cash there; people come in with it so it can be wired back home," said Sher Khan, a local councillor and friend of the family that runs the agency. "Many extra people have been doing that since the earthquake."

Why nobody ever does anything about Brussels' great financial scandal.

For the eleventh year in a row, the EU's auditors have refused to sign the Commission's accounts. Europe’s finance ministers keep turning a blind eye and so the problem goes on and on...

In The Business today, by European Analyst, Richard North.

Enjoy.

COMMENT THREAD

I have had several phone calls asking me whether I was involved in the shooting of the two police officers in Bradford yesterday… I cannot imagine why.

Rather sourly, however, I note that there is rather less of an outpouring of grief for the 20 percent rise in deaths involving police vehicles, the figure now reaching 44 last year, up from 17 in 2000-1. And the current figure includes four entirely innocent pedestrians, including an 18-year-old woman, slaughtered by police cars responding to emergency calls.

Driving of a different sort is on the mind of the Irish Independent, which headlines today, "The EU has driven us to war... virtually". It is reporting that the EU is running a war game next Tuesday for 10 days, a virtual war fought out in computer generated form on an "imaginary" island of Atlantia. The exercise is based on the rapid deployment of troops in a "fictitious crisis scenario". Known as Milex 05, the military exercise will test how the EU's newly created command structure would work in the event of a crisis.

The Irish Independent notes a curious similarity between "Atlantia" and the Emerald Isle, where a conflict scenario between two ethnic groups has been set up to test the mettle of 450 EU military planners. That, at the moment, is 450 more than the number of troops the EU is able to field.

Meanwhile, in what passes for the real world, next Monday defence ministers of the EU member states will meet to agree a voluntary code of conduct on equipment procurement. This formalises the agreement reached in October, at RAF Lyneham, ostensibly opening up the $35 billion a year trade in European defence equipment.

The deal will be made at a meeting of the European Defence Agency's steering board in Brussels, when all the EU member state defence ministers apart from Denmark are expected to sign up.

Nick Witney, chief executive of the European Defence Agency happily burbles that this will be a landmark decision. "The desire to inject competition into this hitherto protected market has been something that has been recognised as hugely beneficial for decades, but we haven't found a way to do it," he says.

Behind this initiative is the shadowy figure of the EU commission, which has threatened to propose legislation, redefining the defence exemptions encapsulated in Article 296 of the Treaty. It has now promised to hold off until it sees how the code of practice works.

Meanwhile, Joachim Wuermeling, the German MEP who drew up the EU parliament's response to the commission's green paper on defence procurement, is claiming that greater competition in the industry would "save taxpayers' money, make the European defence industry more competitive and help create a European defence identity." Presumably, he has not heard of the Luftwaffe plans to lease US-built C-130s.

Nevertheless, it is, of course, the creation of the "European defence identity" which is of greatest interest to the EU but, as long as the "colleagues" confine themselves to virtual war games, sorting out ethnic groups in "Atlantia", no great harm can come. The slaughter of innocent civilians can be safely left to the police.

COMMENT THREAD

It has begun. The first person to admit that yes, indeed, he did take money from Saddam Hussein as part of the oil-for-food scam, is Jean-Bernard Mérimée, a distinguished French diplomat (aren’t they all?) and one who holds the rather bizarre title of “ambassador for life”.

M Mérimée told judge Philippe Courroye that he was very sorry that he took the $156,000 (then worth about £108,000) in 2002, allegedly to renovate the house he owned in southern Morocco. What is interesting about the date is that at the time M Mérimée was not French ambassador to the UN but special adviser to SecGen Kofi Annan (father of Kojo).

It seems that M l’ambassadeur, according to Le Figaro, as quoted in the Daily Telegraph is only half regretful. Clearly he regrets having been found out but he does not precisely see what is wrong with being paid for services.

The money, according to him, was in recompense for the work he did for Iraq and work must be paid for. Well, that is not completely unreasonable. It just depends on your definition of Iraq.

COMMENT THREAD

The really depressing thing about the REACH vote in the EU parliament yesterday is the waste of so much energy by so many people who, though basically well-intentioned, have done completely the wrong thing.

REACH, as readers will recall, is another of those clever little acronyms at which the EU regulators so excel, standing for Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals system. As the Telegraph puts it today, it will – if finally approved - force companies to test thousands of chemicals, many used in common household products like paint, cleaners, toys and furniture, for their effects on human health and the environment.

It has been described by Gunter Verheugen, the EU industry commissioner, as "possibly the most controversial and complex piece of legislation in European history" and it was yesterday that the EU parliament passed the law through the "first reading" procedure, having substantially amended it in is passage.

As it stood, the law applied to some 30,000 commercially produced chemicals formulated before 1981, requiring producers to demonstrate that they are "safe" for use before they can continue marketing them, but the MEPs, while accepting the principal of the legislation, have introduced lower requirements on chemicals produced in quantities of less than 10 tons a year. This means that the industry will not have to assess the harmfulness of up to 90 percent of 17,500 chemicals in that category.

Voting 407 to 155 for the amended legislation with 41 abstentions, the MEPs were applauded by their president, Josep Borrell, who said that the parliament had shown "that it lives up to its responsibilities and, as legislator, has responded to some of the fears of Europeans, ensuring competitive jobs together with a high level of protection of health and the environment."

In fact, it has achieved exactly the opposite - albeit is a less damaging form than was originally proposed – as the very idea of a regulatory regime for testing and authorising chemicals is fundamentally flawed.

Working with campaigners on the harm done to farmers by organophosphate sheep dips and other pesticides from the same group, I have seen first hand how the regulatory system – of the type now adopted in REACH - not only fails to protect vulnerable people but actually perpetuates their misery and prevents demonstrably harmful chemicals from being withdrawn.

The problem lies in the fallibility of the testing regime which, based on animal tests, can neither predict fully human reactions to chemicals nor in any way deal with the effects of low-level toxicity or the proportion of people who may be unduly susceptible to particular chemicals. Nor even can the testing regime deal with the effects of mixtures of chemicals which may be used in the same environment, which exhibit can exhibit significant synergistic effects.

Instead, what the testing and authorisation regime does do is provide government approval to a product which has passed a a wholly inadequate testing regime, which becomes a de facto certificate of safety, which the government itself underwrites. Thus when – as on occasions happens – a product is found to be unduly hazardous in a way not predicted by the testing regime, the government is complicit in the failure. Victims of chemical damage, therefore, then not only have to take on the chemical manufacturers but the government as well.

A far better system would be that originally applying to food where anyone can market a product but must apply a duty of care – which includes predictive testing where appropriate. Ranged against the producer is the whole weight of the state - backed by a fully funded surveillance system and untainted by having given "prior approval" - which can prosecute those who get it wrong, and can assist victims in securing damages. The deterrent effect has ensured that our food supply has been largely the safest in the world.

By introducing a system which in many cases has failed to ensure pharmaceutical and pesticide safety, the MEPs have not, as Borrell claims, ensured high level of protection of health and the environment. They have, in fact, tilted the balance decisively against the consumer.

However, all is not lost – yet. Britain, as holder of the EU presidency, has decided that the Council will consider its position on the directive on 19 December. If it does not agree with the parliament's position, then the parliament will either have to change its stance, or the legislation will fall. It could be well into next year before we know the fate of this law.

COMMENT THREAD

It is, in a sense, appropriate that the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) should have taken place in Tunisia, a country with a particularly bad human rights record when it comes to journalists and, indeed, users of the net.

As this blog has reported, the agreement has left control of the domain distribution in the hands of ICANN but has also charged the UN with setting up a forum that will, as the EU and others hope, eventually take over.

The aim of this Summit and, indeed, of the attempted power grab was supposed to be to overcome the digital divide between rich developed countries and others. But the digital divide, as we know, is between countries where people can use the internet freely and those where the government controls its use and punishes those who try to step outside that control. By a strange coincidence the impetus to move control of the internet from the USA to the UN came from the latter governments and has been, shamefully, supported by the EU, which speaks on Britain’s behalf.

According to the ISN Security Watch:

“The New York-based Human Rights Watch has accused the Tunisian government of detaining critical online writers and blocking websites that publish reports of human rights abuses in the country.

The group stressed that Tunisia had made some progress in increasing access to the internet over the past few years, lifting bans on some websites, but that it continued to flout its national and international legal commitments to free expression, the right to access information, and the right to privacy by censoring the internet. The group said the government was still imprisoning
writers for expressing their views online, and imposing undue regulations on its Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and internet cafés.”

Entirely the right country in which the discussion about the digital divide should be taking place.

Interestingly, the Summit was opened by the President of Switzerland, who made the following apposite comments:

“It is, quite frankly, unacceptable for the United Nations to continue to include among its members states which imprison citizens for the sole reason that they have criticized their government on the Internet or in the media.”

How sad. Because, of course, we have to accept that state of affairs and it is that very United Nations that is claiming the right to take over and run the internet (as well as, if not better than the way they ran the oil-for-food programme).

While this was going on, the Tunisian police prevented a meeting of the Tunisian Civil Society summit and its spokesman’s attempt to describe the situation to ISN Security Watch by telephone was interrupted.

There have been other incidents of attacks on journalists both Tunisian and foreign, whenever stories appeared about the human rights situation.

And just to demonstrate quite definitively what that digital divide is about

“Tests conducted between 2.30pm and 4.30pm using the 3S Global Net ISP found that the French and Arabic press releases for Human Rights Watch’s latest report on internet freedom in the Middle East were also blocked in Tunis.

Users trying to access these pages received a page disguised to look like a French-language Microsoft Internet Explorer error page that read “Impossible de trouver la page” (“Impossible to find the page”).

The results were consistent with the blocking behaviour exhibited in previous tests documented in a Human Rights Watch’s report.”

These are the people who are demanding that the terrible American “control” of the internet should cease and they are the ones with whom we, in Europe, line ourselves up.

COMMENT THREAD

There was a time when Her Majesty's Government was responsible for the defence of this country, and with it the freedom of the Queen's subjects. But, in the brave new Blairite world, this, it seems, is no longer the case.

That much emerges from our reports on the closure by BAE Systems of the former Royal Ordnance factories in Bridgwater and Chorley, which provoked a flurry of Parliamentary Questions from Conservative defence spokesman Gerald Howarth, and others.

Asked by Howarth whether he expected the supply of components to be affected by the proposed closure of the BAE ordnance factory at Bridgwater, minister of state for defence, Adam Ingram, replied that BAE Systems Land Systems would "remain responsible for the maintenance of security of supply of components currently manufactured at the Bridgwater factory".

When also asked what assessment he had made of the implications for security of supply of the proposed closure of sites at Bridgewater and Chorley, Ingram replied in like manner that BAE Systems "are responsible for security of supply of ammunition." He went on to say that they have provided detailed plans to the Ministry of Defence, plans which, of course, are not in the public domain.

To an extent, the possible adverse effects of our ammunition and other essential military supplies being manufactured abroad can be militated by maintaining strategic stocks in this country. Thus, the question by Lindsay Hoyle, Labour MP for Chorley, was of special relevance.

Hoyle asked what were the plans for the management and security of the Heapey ammunitions storage facility, in the event of the closure Royal Ordnance Chorley, only to get another dead-bat answer from Ingram: "The Heapey magazine facility is owned by BAE Systems. The management and security of the facility are matters for the company."

There it is then. The provision and security of vital military supplies is nothing to do with her Majesty's government. It is entirely the responsibility of BAE Systems – and, of course, L'Escroc Chirac, in whose country much of the supplies will now be manufactured.

COMMENT THREAD

Jacques "Wheel" Barrot, the EU’s transport commissioner has announced a €20 billion makeover for Europe’s air traffic control system, allowing a doubling of the number of flights in the next 15 years.

Styled as a "European air traffic management Master Plan", it is code-named SESAR. The Commission claims it to be a "new-generation air traffic management system" which "will be vital for managing the growth in air traffic". It is to be developed together with Eurocontrol - which will meet half the initial €30 million costs - and, in a second phase, with (unspecified) industrial partners.

And at the heart of this system, which is part of the EU's "Single European Sky" initiative is, guess what – the Galileo satellite global positioning system. And there is the money-spinner. Despite the fact that commercial (and military) aircraft currently use the US "Navstar" GPS system, the EU will make it mandatory for all aircraft entering European airspace to be equipped to receive the Galileo system – for a fee, of course, thus bailing out a totally unnecessary system.

All we have to do now it wait to see which French firm (or consortium) gets the development contract – or is that being too cynical?

COMMENT THREAD

Having spent two days out in London, talking to anyone who would listen about the EU defence agenda, I return to read the current edition of DefenseNews. Reading one particular piece, I could not avoid a little snigger – I think they call it schadenfreude.

Anyhow, what gives rise to the amusement is that the German Air Force, which still rejoices in the title Luftwaffe, is so embarrassed by the limitations of its fleet of two-engined Transall military cargo aircraft – with an average age of 30 years - that it is looking to lease new aircraft to augment its capability.

Bear in mind, please, that the Germans are one of the launch customers for that sterling symbol of European aviation prowess, proposing to buy 60 Airbus A400Ms. These are the aircraft that the UK has also committed to buy, whence it will progressively phase out its US-built Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules fleet.

And the aircraft the Germans are considering? Er… Germany's defense chief has ordered the Air Force to study options for leasing a handful of Lockheed Martin C-130J airlifters.

Army Gen. Wolfgang Schneiderhan made the request to Lt. Gen. Klaus-Peter Stieglitz, Air Force chief, shortly after the parliamentary elections in September. The four-engine C-130s would augment the country's 86 two-engine C-160 Transalls, which have had difficulties crossing the Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan while flying from Uzbekistan to Kabul and Kunduz, delaying the delivery of supplies, troops.

Even German Defence Minister Peter Struck has been embarrassed by the poor performance, and has began flying aboard foreign C-130s to visit troops.

Of course, the "colleagues" are a tad worried, with one official reporting that they fear the lease would delay the service entry of the Airbus A400M European transport aircraft and jeopardise other procurement programmes. Their concerns are strengthened by one parliamentary source in Berlin who is suggesting a long-term lease. Some Air Force officials fear that such a solution could potentially deviate existing program arrangements for the A400M.

However, reality is intruding. Another defence official in Berlin is saying that a lease would improve the Bundeswehr's ability to participate in military operations abroad. "The current fleet of C-160s just has too many limitations in terms of range, the capability to land on austere airfields, etc.," he says.

Lockheed Martin is, of course, delighted, and says it is "in discussions with several European countries with reference to the lease or acquisition of C-130Js." Of course, being American, they are far to polite to snigger. As for this Blog…

COMMENT THREAD

The outcome of the Internet Governance summit in Tunis was a compromise. Luckily for all users of the net, it was a compromise that left the management and administration of the Domain Name System in the hands of ICANN. This organization, though non-profit-making, international in its board and staff, and not heavy-handed in its control, seems to have acquired the aspect of the devil incarnate as far as the opposition to “American control of the net” is concerned.

The agreement in Tunis calls on the UN to establish an Internet Governance Forum next year. One hundred countries have signed up to the agreement and expect the Forum eventually to yield some kind of an international bureaucracy to plague the net users, whether they be big business or individual bloggers.

So far, the forum, according to the agreement,

“would have no oversight function and would not replace existing arrangements, mechanisms, institutions and organizations”.

“would have no involvement in day-to-day or technical operations of the Internet”.

“As little as possible, one would hope. It would be most useful as a means of co-ordinating efforts to address such cyber crimes as e-mail fraud (also known as “phishing”) and cyber annoyances like spam.”

“Beyond that, it’s difficult to see how the forum differs significantly from ICANN’s existing Governmental Advisory Committee other than operating under the UN’s auspices. In this some participants – notably, the European Union – are inclined to see the birth of an entity that will evolve into ICANN’s successor.

Others, led by the US, are confident that a forum envisioned in Tunis as “lightweight and decentralized” will remain so. Businesses and other parties interested in a red-tape-free Internet must be vigilant to prevent the scenario preferred by Europeans from becoming reality.”

“The agreement would lead to "further internationalization of Internet governance, and enhanced intergovernmental cooperation to this end," wrote the European Union in a statement.

"In the short term, US oversight is not immediately challenged," an EU source told Reuters. "But in the long term they are under obligation to negotiate with all the states about the future and evolution of Internet governance."”

“A world wide web should also be in the world's control -- not the only world power. The decision of what really happens in the Internet continues to be made by ICANN. It won't be long before the problem is once again on the agenda of a world summit.”

Say what you like about Lord Pearson of Rannoch but he is persistent. And a good thing, too.

This week he had a reply to a written question:

“What proportion of new United Kingdom legislation has originated in the European Union since 1998?”

“Based on the analysis of regulatory impact assessments carried out on EU and domestic legislation, we estimate that around half of all UK legislation with an impact on business, charities or the voluntary sector emanates from the EU. Analysis by the Library of the House of UK statutory instruments implemented annually under the European Communities Act, suggests that on average, since 1998, around 9 per cent. of statutory instruments originate from Brussels (Standard Note SN/IA/2888). The total volume of statutory instruments of course encompasses a wide range of instruments, including those, such as road closures, with purely local effect.”

Dr North will be in London for his presentation at the Centre for Policy Studies of the paper "The wrong side of the hill". I shall be in the audience, quiet as a mouse. He is staying over to give evidence to the Conservative European Reform Forum. I am sure readers will wish him luck and we are all looking forward to his account of both events. In the meantime, I shall try to pick up the slack on the forum but, inevitably, there will be a little less posting today.

The EU is losing patience with (some) member states – notably Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland – over the so-called deregulation of the energy market. The commission is thus threatening legal action to stop, according to the International Herald Tribune "remnants of state energy monopolies from crippling competition in power markets around the EU".

The European antitrust commissioner, Neelie Kroes, said a new report "found evidence of serious malfunctions" in the Union energy market, declaring, "I am determined to use competition law to protect European industry and consumers," Kroes said.

The commission's report described a lethargic market where deregulation had so far largely failed. Millions of customers were still left without an alternative to the nationally established suppliers, often the successors of monopoly companies.
On this, the commission is positioning itself as the "consumers' champion", pointing out that in most member states, the three biggest companies have a share of more than three-quarters of the national electricity and natural gas markets, despite years of European legislation designed to open up the sector.

However, what is often termed the "liberalisation agenda" of the commission is much misunderstood, particularly by Conservative MEPs, who often laud this as one of the unalloyed benefits of the EU. But the real agenda is revealed by Barroso, who is promising that the commission "come forward with a new, truly European energy policy in 2006."

This is not liberalisation or privatisation in the Thatcherite mould, but something completely different. What the commission is after is, as Barosso reveals, the creation of a European energy market, where the individual utilities are detached from their national bases and recreated on a cross-border, European level, under the regulatory control of the commission.

In essence, therefore, energy “liberalisation” is a profoundly integrationalist measure, on the one hand forcing member states to become reliant on each other for energy supplies – the doctrine of "interdependence", which is at the heart of the Monnet method - while, on the other, giving the supreme control of the energy market to the supranational government – the commission in Brussels.

For those simple souls who actually believe that the commission's agenda is motivated by anything else, they need to be aware that they are labouring under false impressions, a serious case of mistaken identity.

COMMENT THREAD

For reasons that may not be entirely clear to everybody, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has made the progress on the Palestinian state her very own project. Maybe, having been known as a Russian expert and having not managed to understand the European Union, she is enlarging her specialist expertise.

Whatever the reason, she postponed a trip to the APEC meeting, to stay in Jerusalem and beat her way through to an agreement on the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

Secretary Rice has spoken soulfully of the various things the Palestinians, especially in Gaza, need, in order to achieve economic and political progress, saying of the latest agreement:

“This agreement is intended to give the Palestinian people the freedom to move, to trade, to live ordinary lives.”

“In a sign of tensions, President Mahmoud Abbas, in a speech after the Gaza deal was unveiled, accused Israel of trying to avoid peace talks and incite Palestinian civil war by insisting that militants be disarmed before any negotiations on statehood.”

“An Israeli Defense Ministry source said a compromise was reached whereby Israeli and Palestinian security officers will man a control room a few kilometers (miles) from Rafah monitoring remote-control cameras at the border crossing.”

“The deal also includes video surveillance of the Rafah crossing to Egypt by a joint EU-Palestinian team.

Israel will have access to the video via the Europeans, but will not have veto power over individuals moving through Rafah, as it had wanted.”

An extraordinary article in The Daily Telegraph today announced that the EU is "to build network of spy satellites".

The multi-billion-pound system is known as "Global Monitoring for Environment and Security" (GMES), on which the commission, with the European Space Agency, has already spent £154 million on preparatory work, and expects the whole project to cost £1.54 billion between 2006 and 2013.

But what makes the article so extraordinary is that this project was actually announced in March 2002 and its definitive structure was set out in a commission communication in February last year.

However, far be it for us to look a gift horse in the mouth. Anything which draws attention to the EU's plans in space is welcome, especially as the Telegraph piece, by David Rennie, tells us that this network of spy satellites will allow Brussels "to ensure nations and private individuals are obeying its policies."

Also of interest is that, while the system was originally intended to be up and running by 2008, the date has slipped to 2010, according to a commission spokesman, announcing the launch of a "pilot stage" for GMES.

Predictably, as it has done with Galileo, the commission stressed its "user-friendly" application in guiding relief work after disasters or providing real time images of forest fires or oil spills. But, writes Rennie, “a commission memo” also acknowledged that GMES would play a key role in the "implementation, review and monitoring of EU policies", including watching for agriculture and fisheries fraud and boosting "internal security".

In addition, Rennie continues, officials hope GMES will support the EU's first steps towards becoming a military power. It will "provide authorities with necessary elements for a European Security and Defence Policy", the commission memo said.

That "memo" was the commission communication produced in 2004 (link above), but never mind – it is good to see this Blog's warnings in print in the MSM, especially as Rennie goes on to write that US politicians are already suspicious of Galileo project.

Curiously, there is nothing written of UK involvement in GMES but, as part of the EU and a member of the ESA, we will be funding the system, even though, traditionally, we have largely relied on US satellite data. Once again, therefore, the UK is piggy-in-the-middle, with yet another strand pulling it in the direction of Europe.

COMMENT THREAD

So, for the eleventh year, the EU's Court of Auditors has refused to sign off the accounts. That much was revealed by ECA president Hubert Weber at the EU parliament in Strasbourg yesterday, leading to a predictable chorus of disapproval, not least from the Conservatives and UKIP, which denounces "The EU's Fairytale Accounts".

However, while your average Eurosceptic may be crowing at yet another example of the EU’s ineptitude, not everything is quite as straightforward as it seems. Several reports, not least in Eupolitix and The Independent point up that because about 80 percent of EU spending is conducted by national and regional authorities and it is in these areas that the greatest concern is expressed by the Court.

Says Weber, "The supervisory and control systems are not yet implemented and operating effectively and payments are still affected by errors," adding that agricultural spending was particularly error-strewn. Far from directing his ire at the commission, therefore, Weber was particularly critical of the national authorities, stating that "The improvement in systems and controls at the level of the commission has not been reflected in those within the member states."

Even the triumphant Conservative MEP James Elles is warning that the member states must face up to their responsibility to ensure euro-funds channelled through them were better accounted for. He is echoes by Chris Davies, leader of the British Liberal Democrat MEPs, who declares that: "The finger of blame should be pointed towards Gordon Brown and his fellow finance ministers who have refused to accept responsibility for the money spent by their own administrations.”

As for the commission, in its classic, gruesome Euro-speak, it is telling us that it has:

…proposed to the other institutions a roadmap to an integrated control framework, which will provide the Commission and its stakeholders with a reinforced assurance as to the legal and regular use of EU monies, including under shared management with Member States. The Commission has undertaken an analysis of the gaps between its existing internal control framework and that advocated by the Court of Auditors in its opinion 2/2004 on the "single audit" model and a proposal for a Community internal control framework. The gap analysis has been discussed by an expert panel with representatives from all Member States in September 2005, and is being jointly examined by Commission services and the auditors.

Old enmities die hard, and never more so than between Poland and Russia. Relations are already strained by a deal between Russian and Germany to build a $5 billion gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea, bypassing Poland and the Baltic states and taking Russian gas directly to western Europe - thereby depriving the detoured countries of lucrative transit fees.

This is on the back of Ukraine's "orange revolution", when Poland acted as mediator, and pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko beat his pro-Russian rival Viktor Yanukovich in the disputed presidential election.

Relations then worsened in May, when Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski was snubbed by Russian President Vladimir Putin during a visit to Moscow to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.

But now, inexplicably, according to Polish foreign minister Stefan Meller, Russia has imposed restrictions on imports of Polish farm produce and meat.

So serious is the situation that, prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz is appealing to the EU commission to help sort it out, with the news agency AFX reporting that he has even made a public appeal on national radio.

The Russian authorities are saying that they have taken their action because of fraudulent practices among Polish exporters, including falsification of health and hygiene certificates, as if a member of the European Union could ever stoop so low.

In Poland, the restrictions are considered politically motivated and aimed as a test of the new conservative minority government led by Marcinkiewicz. "All the signs from Moscow must be analysed in a political context," Meller said in the Polish Rzeczpospolita daily. "If the incidents of which Russia accuses us did occur, they were already known," he said.

So far, there are no tanks massing on the borders but it remains to be seen whether the commission will intervene or whether, as so often is the case with the Eastern and central European states, their external relations are suddenly, in defiance of the Common Foreign and Security Policy, merely "bilateral" problems.

COMMENT THREAD

Riots can go one of two ways. If there is a big enough impetus they can turn into a real revolution or they can slowly peter out. It looks like the French riots of the last two weeks will go the second way. For the time being, that is.

It seems that only a few hundred cars are burned every night instead of the 1,200 or 1,300 that were being torched just a few days ago. Am I the only person around who is finding two things slightly odd: one is the number of cars in the banlieus; and the fact that nobody thinks of moving the ones that had not been torched to a safer place during the day. I hope we get an explanation for it all some time.

The European Union, as my colleague has pointed out, has finally made its appearance with offers of dosh, though, it could be merely credit relief. Hard to tell. In any case they are offering €50 million to help build various facilities in the horrible and now severely damaged areas.

That is very generous, particularly as this is our money that is being shelled out. But has nobody managed to recall that at least £58 million from the social housing fund has been misappropriated by various politicians of the UMP while l’escroc Chirac was Mayor of Paris. (That is the sum we know about definitely. There have been other unresolved cases about money that belongs to the people of Paris disappearing.)

It is not only the banlieus that are the problem. It seems that we have forgotten a few other fires: one big one last year, two slightly smaller ones this year of tenement blocks for immigrants. In each fire a large number of children died. Had these tenements been inspected by the fire brigade, one wonders.

Apart from a few copy-cat car torchings the riots did not spread to other countries (the matter of Århus is different and needs to be discussed separately), which would vindicate those of us who have maintained from the very beginning that this is not a jihad but a long overdue explosion caused by the various tensions within France.

Last Thursday John Vinocur wrote in the International Herald Tribune:

“On one hand, there is French hubris, and its gratuitously insulting embrace of France’s immigrants as partners in the country’s threadbare formulas of grandeur, equality and universality.

On the other, there is the eternal French dependency on the state, the allegiance to the French model that has failed to provide the jobs, education, housing or respect adequate to integrate Arab and African Muslims into a rich and resourceful country with real claims to special grace.”

“The riots have been seized on, sometimes gleefully, by excitable right-wing commentators as the intifada of a new Eurabia. It is more accurately seen as the unthinking rebellion of an underclass. It has been one of the more sophisticated criticisms of the Left that capitalism in the Information Age has created an unemployed (and increasingly unemployable), marginalised underclass amid general prosperity, a group with none of the strengths, culture or ambitions of the old industrial working class.

Current events in France show that left-wing, big-government societies in the 21st century, for all their emphasis on welfare and social solidarity, have an underclass of their own, whose condition may be even more hopeless than the underclass of capitalist societies. On the streets of the rougher French suburbs this past fortnight, we have just glimpsed the grim underbelly of the European social model.”

“An Arab kid in Clichy-sous-Bois may not articulate it, but what rage it must create to hear he lives in the greatest, smartest, most fair country in the world, revered as Islam’s best-friend-in-the-west from Algeria to Oman, and then have to deal with a French realityof racist scorn and rejection.”

“It is tragic to hear calls to smother these flames with yet more money. Throwing alms at the impoverished suburbs has been tried for 30 years in France: it is no substitute for market-led policies which find people jobs. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has proposed to add E100m in subsidies to local community associations, add 5,000 teaching assistant posts, offer 20,000 work contracts with local governments and set up an anti-discrimination agency.

It is a dismal dirigiste prescription and shows he has learnt nothing. Billions have already been spent on infrastructure projects for the ghettos and achieve nothing. Using taxpayers’ money to create non-jobs simply drags the wealth-creating side of the economy down further.”

“The Sarkozy and Villepin camps are already back to poling and counting potential votes. One can already see how the blame game will be played once a decent interval elapsed after the crisis. Mr de Villepin will note that something must have been wrong at the interior ministry to let such events develop. And Mr Sarkozy will point out that he was not responsible for job creation.

With the ailing president absent and the fractured left mum, France is a headless body. It’s been a very long time, in French political history, since a leader of either persuasion has stepped back, paused, thought and wondered what would be in the public good, whatever the pollsters might tell him.

Cynicism is played in the open through infighting at the highest levels and with the media counting points as ringside judges. And if the ruling elites have their say, nothing will move in the next 18 months as no one will want to take the risks unavoidably associated with reform. So, everyone, back to normal.”

We have remarked on it before and even last night there was a particularly egregious example of EU requirements being discussed, without the EU even being mentioned. And here we go again.

In that well-known publication, The Bradford Telegraph and Argus – which boasts that it outsells the combined total of national dailies within its area - features a long article by David Snowball, assistant regional director of the Health & Safety Executive, to commemorate "ladder week".

Headed: "steps to ensure the safety of ladder users", Snowball deals in detail with the hazards of ladder usage, with reference to the government's Work at Height Regulations, to which effect his organisation's "ladder week" has been devoted.

But nowhere in his article is there any mention that the Regulations to which he refers are based on and required by the EU’s working at heights directive (Directive 2001/45/EC, 27 June 2001). Bizarrely, there is not a single mention of the EU in the whole piece. You would think there was something to hide.

COMMENT THREAD

In a recent council by-election for Edinburgh City - Murrayfield Ward, on 10th November 2005, the Conservatives polled 1327, against the Lib Dems on 859, an Independent candidate on 226 and Labour with 114.

The Greens scored 58, the SNP 52, and the Liberal Party 12. UKIP, however, stormed home with four - yes, four - votes. What makes you think they are flogging a dead horse?

COMMENT THREAD

It used to be, as the great Yorkshire saying went, where there's muck, there's brass, but that has now been overtaken by the great European Union which is creating untold wealth for a select few in the recycling business.

According to the Telegraph business section today, Britain’s largest scrap metal group is coining it, having seen sales surpass £1billion for the first time last year. This is after tackling 20,000 cars and 12,000 fridges a week handed over for scrapping, all courtesy of the EU.

The firm in question is European Metal Recycling, which has recycled its one- millionth fridge at its £2.5m purpose-built facility in Willesden Junction, in north-west London, and has reported company profits nearly doubled to £101m in 2004 on sales 40pc higher to £1.15billion.

The company is chaired by Philip Sheppard, dubbed "the god of metal recycling", and who this year leapt from equal 206th to equal 93rd in the Sunday Times Rich List with his family and their estimated £510m fortune, with the highest-paid director receiving £6.75m, including pension contributions, up from £5.95m in 2003.

Meanwhile, on Radio 4's Westminster Hour last night Andrew Rawnsley ran a feature on the expected increase in council tax, hearing complaints from Wolverhampton Council that the current government targets on recycling were adding at least a £1 million to the council’s annual bill – with not a single mention of the EU.

Likewise, Bradford's current edition of its local propaganda news sheet, Community Pride, proudly headlined its "Waste crime clampdown", recording how fly-tippers were among the targets "during the biggest crackdown on waste crime ever".

Of course, with the Landfill Directive coming into force in July last year, closing down nearly 190 of the 200 toxic waste tips in the country, and making tipping so much more expensive and difficult, fly-tipping has become epidemic throughout the nation - but this is not mentioned.

Never mind, according to Community Pride, officers from Bradford Council's environmental services department, with "colleagues" from the Environmental Agency, West Yorkshire Police, West Yorkshire Trading Standards, Leeds City Council and Customs and Excise, were on the case, in their fabled clampdown.

Small wonder that Ruth Lea is complaining in today’s Personal View that: “Our overweight public sector is threatening to devour the economy”. But, for those officials, on their weighted salaries, guaranteed annual increments and final salary pensions, they're not worried. They are too busy blessing the EU for the job opportunities it is creating.

COMMENT THREAD

Throughout the prolonged spasm of rioting in France, now in its 17th day, one dog which has been strangely silent is the European Union. Quick to give its opinion – wanted or not – on any manner of issues, it has refrained to commenting, much less offering anything like criticism.

Now, that silence is broken. El presidente Barroso has leapt into the foreground, not of course criticising France but actually offering money - €50 million, "to help it tackle problems in its suburbs that have provoked unrest”.

According to Reuters, Barroso revealed his offer on Europe 1 radio, stating that the main challenge facing France in dealing with impoverished suburbs was to create youth employment, "The best social politics is to create employment," he said. "When you have 60 percent of youths unemployed in suburbs it is a problem."

Interestingly, Barroso said he had offered to make the funds available in a letter to Villepin on Friday. "If the French authorities want to do this with us, it is possible to do it with a rescheduling of credits," he is reported as saying, which seems to suggest that this is not new money. Could it be that Barroso is grandstanding? Perish the thought.

COMMENT THREAD

Few stories I have reported over the years, Christopher Booker writes in The Sunday Telegraph have been more significant than my revelation last week that Britain's Armed Forces are for the first time in history to become dependent for their ammunition and missiles on explosives imported from abroad. The planned closure of our last two Royal Ordnance explosives factories means our forces will be unable to operate without the tacit consent of foreign governments, notably that of France.

Booker is picking up on the story rehearsed on this Blog earlier this week, which is hardly surprising as, amongst my many day jobs, I provide a research function for the column.

Thus, reports Booker, duly informed by the Blog, almost the only paper which picked up on this was Defense News, the leading US defence journal. Meanwhile it was not denied in the carefully worded answers given to questions I put to BAE Systems, owners of the plants due to close, and the Ministry of Defence. He continues:

BAE Systems refuses to admit where it plans to source its explosives (although it is now in partnership with a French state firm which boasts of creating hundreds of jobs). It merely insists that the MoD has approved its plans as being aligned with the ministry's "defence industrial strategy".

Since the MoD is now sourcing most defence contracts with our EU "partners", in line with its policy of European defence integration, this is hardly surprising. The MoD itself merely says it is "confident that BAE Systems has in place a robust supply chain for the delivery of general munitions with alternative sources in place to guarantee continuity and security of supply".

The MoD also announced last week that it is to close large parts of its aviation and military repair and engineering services, with the loss of 1,900 jobs. The Army's engineering service was part of an Anglo-US consortium bidding for the Army's biggest-ever trucks order, which would have created 600 British jobs.

To the surprise of defence experts, this £1.1 billion order went instead to a German firm, Man-Nutzfarzheuge, now boasting on its website that this will "safeguard jobs" in Vienna. Considering the huge price we are now paying for it, the MoD must be delighted that its new "Europe-first" policy continues to attract so little public notice.

Writing as someone who has been in a senior position in the UK defence industry, he says, I do not recognise the picture painted by Richard North of a UK government policy of "Europe first" in defence procurement. Where he cites particular decisions on armoured-vehicle programmes as evidence of this policy he has simply got his facts wrong. Prest continues:

The UK approach is, broadly, to source from UK companies where the right equipment is available at sensible cost. When it is not, the MoD looks mainly to the US, but also to Europe, for allies with advanced technology to fill the gap. Which way to go on an individual project is a function of cost, technical performance, risk, employment and industrial considerations, and a desire to keep some balance between transatlantic and European commitments.

In this sense, UK policy on defence procurement is a microcosm of broader national policy, which is precisely not to choose between US and European destinies. Nothing discomfits Whitehall more than the idea that one day it may have to. Until now this has been a broadly sensible policy in defence procurement.

The real and interesting question is whether it will continue to be. Because of rising costs and shrinking budgets, the UK is increasingly looking overseas for defence technology. But the US relationship is an unequal one. We need their technology much more than the Americans need ours. As a result, the US is loath to share key aspects: for example critical software for the Joint Strike Fighter. Without this the UK does not have sovereign use of a system which could be fundamental to national security.

For all the difficulties in funding and efficiency that afflict European co-operative programmes, it is at least possible to establish true reciprocity in technology exchange. But while continental firms are consolidating in Europe, UK firms are focusing their efforts mainly on the US market. This, in the long run, combined with the UK's commitment of resources to transatlantic programmes, may make it more difficult for the UK to participate as a full partner in European defence technology development. Then we may not get what need from either flank. In the words of the Swahili proverb "he who rides two horses breaks his backside".

The Sunday Telegraph has picked up a story my colleague wrote about back in September, though, to be fair, he found it in the Financial Times Observer column. Presumably, because the Commission official was not named in the original story, Justin Stares in Brussels has decided that these are two separate people. Or, maybe, he simply does not read any other newspaper, let alone any blog.

Still, the story does bear repeating, reminding us as it does of past accusations issued against whistle blowers by the Commission and those of us with longer memory of the way the dear departed Soviet Union used to deal with dissidents.

It seems that Jose Sequeira, a Portuguese career diplomat, who has been working in the Commission’s ministry for development (what on earth is that?) has found, to his surprise, that there are entries in his personnel notes which said that his behaviour “sowed doubt regarding the state of his mental health”. Well, not creeping schizophrenia, at least, so beloved by Soviet psychiatrists.

What was this behaviour, one asks oneself? Or, rather, one asks the Commission? According to the Telegraph article

“He was put on permanent sick leave after tests found he suffered "verbal hyper-productivity" and a "lack of conceptual content" in his speech.”

“They offered me early retirement in February 2004 and I refused. The medical service then began to call me straight away asking me to come in for consultations, which I thought was strange. A month later I received notice that I had been placed on compulsory medical leave for psychiatric reasons but told that the commission would drop the issue if I agreed to early retirement.

I protested, and a few days later the doctor came to my desk with security guards to physically remove me from my building. There is a system of psychiatric trials in place in the commission and I am a victim. I am not the only one, but the first to decide to fight the system.”

“… his relationship with his superiors soured when they became wrongly convinced that he was planning to blow the whistle on an internal fraud scandal. He says that he had no knowledge of any fraud, but that he then fell victim to a campaign to discredit him.”

As I listened to the Service of Remembrance on Radio 4 (first time I listened to it for months - in fact, possibly, exactly a year), and heard of the High Commissioners laying wreaths to honour the soldiers of their countries, who had volunteered to fight in the two big wars of the twentieth century, I thought of the silliness of trying to find a "new narrative" for the descendants of many immigrants in this country, particularly the Muslims, most of whom are from the Indian sub-continent.

As ever, the obvious answer is the teaching of history: that of Britain, of the British Empire and, with an eye to the future, as all good history teaching must be, of the Anglosphere. The full posting on the subject can be read on Albion's Seedling.

COMMENT THREAD

In The Business today, Bill Jamieson – former economics editor for The Sunday Telegraph when it was still a newspaper – writes an analysis of the current status of the euro, described as "a truly damaged currency".

He opens his piece by highlighting the massive US trade gap of $66bn (£37bn, E55bn), up from $59bn a month ago which, he writes, should have sent the US dollar crashing. But, instead, the dollar rose and the euro fell to a two-year low. Its latest bout of weakness, the euro has lost two percent on the week, taking its fall against the dollar since August to 5 percent and the plunge from its December 2004 highs to a numbing 14 percent, taking it once again below its 1999 launch level.

Jamieson then offers his reasons for the “plunge”, some of which are quite familiar to readers of this Blog. But he also points out that higher US short-term interest rates – now at four percent against the euro zone’s two – have made the dollar all the more appealing.

This, adds Jamieson, is creating a growing crisis over the credibility of the ECB. It is struggling to balance the inflationary risk from a weakening currency, which dictates a rise in interest rates, against pressure from the French finance minister who argues that a hike now would be highly unwelcome and difficult to sell to French businesses and households. Nor indeed would Germany welcome a rise that might damage what is already a frail recovery.

Jamieson cites Stephen Lewis, economist with London-based Monument Securities, saying that "…the longer the ECB delays in raising interest rates, the stronger will be the impression of disunity in its decision-making and possibly the belief that it is yielding to political pressures."

Therein lies the dilemma inherent in the euro experiment ever since it started – what is necessary for the health of the currency is not what is acceptable to members. And, in attempting to ride two horses, the ECB risks falling off both.

COMMENT THREAD

Few things are higher up on the list of benefits of the EU than its "achievements" in the field of the environment. But, it seems while member states are happy enough to laud the theory, it seems they are less happy with the practice.

That much is evident from the irritation of the EU commission, which has noted that it has been nine years since member states adopted the 1996 hugely complex Integrated Pollution Prevention Control (IPPC) Directive, yet many states are failing to adopt it. Infringement procedures are ongoing against eight Member States due to incorrect transposition.

Even those member states which have fully adopted the law are in trouble. Although they still have two years to ensure all factories, power stations and agri-business comply, such is the complexity of the Directive, requiring a bureaucratic layer of inspections, standards and approvals that it is unlikely that there systems will be in place throughout the Community by the deadline. Hence, there are rumblings from the upper echelons of the commission that its patience is wearing thin.

Meanwhile, that other great legislative leviathan, the proposed REACH Directive - is running into trouble. This week, the German Bundesrat called on the Federal Government not to accept the current proposals, arguing that the course and outcome of the consultation procedures in the EU had been unsatisfactory. The Bundesrat wanted the Directive to be simpler, more transparent and more cost effective.

The newly formed Federal government responded by asking Britain, in its role as the EU presidency, to delay a Council vote later this month. This was accepted and a new meeting is planned for the end of the year.

Environmental groups, however, are suspicious that Merkel's government will call for further changes to the draft Directive, not least because Germany is by far the biggest producer of chemicals in the EU, and companies such as BASF and Degussa have considerable political influence.

The next move, though, is a vote in the EU parliament this coming week, whence the EPP and the Socialists – the two largest groups in the parliament – will vote to water-down the directive, removing a large proportion of the 30,000 substances for which full registration and testing requirements.

When the EU parliament itself – one of the cheerleaders for EU environmental legislation – has cold feet, this is clear evidence of a certain loss of enthusiasm for the project.

COMMENT THREAD

Even though the idea of the tranzies taking over the internet is plainly preposterous, as my colleague pointed out last month, the EU commission is still persevering in its attempts to detach the US from the system.

This is the spat about who should control the so-called "top-level domains", currently administered by the California-based non-profit company, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), under the oversight of the US Department of Commerce.

But EU officials are now complaining that Washington has changed the rules of the game and plans to keep permanent control of the system. According to Reuters, the EU is claiming that there was an agreement that Department of Commerce control would be phased out but this summer, but the US has now announced they would maintain this oversight function.

The Commission wants to take Commerce out of the loop but, amazingly, does not have any concrete alternative proposals. It officials simply resort to arguing that the system should be under the control of an international body, in which "the role of governments ... should be mainly focussed on principal issues of public policy, excluding any involvement in the day-to-day operations."

Americans are less than impressed, contrasting their "light touch" with the prospect of interference from upwards of 200 countries. "We don't really see how an organisation can have oversight and final veto control and not have an impact on day-to-day activities," says David McGuire of the non-government Centre for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C. "We don't think it's optimal for any government to be directly involved in the oversight management," of ICANN.

McGuire says the US government has never reversed an ICANN decision and eventually the organisation should stand on its own two feet.

The whole issue comes to a head at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis on Wednesday and Thursday, when the EU will press its case, alongside most of the rest of the world. With the US still not budging, it should be an interesting meeting.

COMMENT THREAD

Remember those heady days when the German Christian Democrats under Angela Merkel were going to re-write the script in Germany? When they were going to introduce reforms that would free up the economy, lower taxation, decrease public spending, turn the country once again into the motor of Europe?

Well, no, as it happens I cannot remember them either. All too long ago and overlaid by weak campaigning, an indecisive result, shenanigans between the parties.

A day ahead of schedule the grand coalition, the second in post-WWII German history has been signed, though not yet delivered, since the various party congresses have to put their seal of approval.

But, as Chico and Groucho agreed in “A Night at the Opera” we have a contract. Unlike theirs, which had been reduced to a tiny strip of paper by the destruction of all the articles either or both of them disliked, this one weighs in at 130 pages of policy detail.

Among them, we have the following items, as quoted by the BBC World Service website:

“Reports say top wage earners will have to pay an extra 3% in income tax, VAT will rise by 3% and social insurance contributions will also go up.”

“The parties agreed in their program to raise the main value-added tax rate by three points to 19 percent from 2007, an unpopular measure whose revenue will be used to plug the budget and lower non-wage labor costs to promote hiring.

The retirement age will gradually be raised to 67 from 65.

…

One crucial area where the new government will continue the legacy of its predecessor is nuclear energy.

Schröder's government had committed itself to gradually phasing out nuclear power, a point that most conservatives opposed tooth and nail. The issue was set to be one of the most serious stumbling blocks in coalition negotiations between the two sides. But Merkel's new government, in a sign of compromise, now says it will continue on the same course and shut down all of the country's nuclear power plants over the next two decades.

On foreign policy, the incoming government will seek improved relations with the United States -- strained over German opposition to the Iraq war and strengthen ties with European Union partners.”

This posting has to start with a declaration of interest: ever since the glamorous Sir Christopher Meyer and his even more glamorous wife Catherine took up residence in the British embassy in Washington DC, I have experienced extreme nausea at the mention of their names.

This, I suspect, had something to do with the endless, sick-making drooling of the media about their youth, their charm, their glamour, his brilliance and her elegance. The last time we had that sort of adulation going on about the charm and glamour of the couple that was supposedly representing this country in the United States was back in the days of the Jays, Peter and Margaret. That came a cropper with scandals, infidelities and broken marriages all round.

If we must have ambassadors, a questionable proposition in this day of easy communication, they should not, in my opinion, be self-publicizing glamour boys or girls. The Meyers seemed the epitome of Blairite politics and diplomacy. So, I was not unduly surprised when Sir Christopher proceeded to stab the Prime Minister and the entire government severally and together in the back by publishing a somewhat self-serving (his brilliance as described by himself in his book appears to be undeniable) memoir of his days in the American capital.

Well, now, before we start to laugh too heartily at another problems Tony Blair seems to have encountered, let us have a look at the truth of the matter.

Sir Christopher Meyer is a civil servant, a diplomat. One assumes he signed something called the Official Secrets’ Act at some point in his career but that does not seem to inhibit anyone any more. As ambassador he was in a position of trust and confidentiality. Above all, he is not supposed to engage in open party politicking. Two years after his ambassadorship he is not exactly expected to diss his employer, the British government.

One of the big questions in this rather distasteful saga was asked by Ferdinand Mount in today’s Daily Telegraph:

“So why did the Cabinet Office wave the book through without suppressing a semi-colon? I cannot imagine such a thing happening under Heath or Thatcher. It is, after all, a longstanding rule that former ambassadors do not publish books containing confidential stuff on topics that are still hot.

And this rule is certainly not defunct. The Foreign Office has just refused Sir Jeremy Greenstock permission to publish a memoir of his time at the UN, originally due out last week.”

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month 1918 the First World War came to an end (except in Russia where it had come to an end in March of that year). Since then the day has been used as a memorial to all those who have died in that and subsequent wars. Despite the fact that the ceremony itself has been moved to Sunday in Britain, for many people across the world (it is called Veterans’ Day in the United States) this is the day of remembrance.

By a strange coincidence I shall be in Bush House at that hour, recording my part in a programme about the EU and its history. (Yes, that’s right it will be in Russian, nasty, xenophobic, inward looking eurosceptic that I am.) And my theme? That it was the shock of the First World War and its immediate aftermath on the Continent that turned people’s minds seriously towards the idea of Union.

It may be special pleading but as my text I shall take “The Great Deception”, the only book, so far, that has traced the history of this pernicious organization to its sources.

COMMENT THREAD

It was on 1 November that we broke the story that BAE Systems was to close two former Royal Ordnance factories, one in Bridgwater, Somerset, the other in Chorley, Lancs, respectively the last UK manufacturer of military explosives and of “initiators”, the explosive charges used for igniting small-arms ammunition.

Apart from Christopher Booker, in The Sunday Telegraph, however, no national newspaper has picked up the story, and it has been left entirely to the specialist journals to fill in the details.

One such is this week's edition of DefenseNews which devotes the best part of a page to the story, under the headline, "No Boom in British Munitions", adding the strap "BAE's Move to Imports Leaves Just Three Domestic Plants".

And there we have the issue in a nutshell. When the government-owned factories were privatised in 1984, to become Royal Ordnance PLC, there were 37 factories in operation, ensuring Britain was entirely self-sufficient ammunition and explosives manufacture.

In April 1987, though, the business was acquired by BAE Systems in April 1987 for the knock-down price of £190 million, whence the company has been steadily closing down plants and moving production abroad, slowly withdrawing from a business that can trace its history back to the creation of the Royal Gunpowder Factory at Waltham Abbey in 1560 (with buildings remaining on the site until recently – illustrated above left. )

In August of this year, we pointed out how this steady disposal of assets was leaving us as a nation dangerously vulnerable, not least because we no longer have a domestic capability to manufacture the Army's assault rifles, and it is precisely this issue that DefenceNews picks up.

Ending production at the Bridgwater and Chorley sites, says the journal, means the Ministry of Defence’s only local ammunition supplier will depend on imports for the bulk of its key raw materials. From its heyday, BAE's munitions activities in Britain will be reduced to a rump operation comprising a medium- and large-caliber ammunition-filling facility at Glascoed, a small arms ammunition plant at Radway Green and a shell casing foundry at Birtley.

The contraction of the Royal Ordnance business has come despite the 1999 “Framework Partnering Agreement” between BAE and the MoD, where BAE undertook to supply the Army's ammunitions needs against a guaranteed minimum level of orders for 10 years. BAE has fulfilled its orders increasingly by importing materials, which last year totalled £20 million against only £1 million pounds in 2000

BAE is justifying its closure of the Bridgwater plant, saying production is only running at about 400 tons a year, against a plant capacity of 7,000 tons a year, and it has been losing money for years. It also claims that it has not decided where it will find a source for the materials, suggesting that it may buy from the US.

However, on both counts, the company seems to be economical with the truth, as it has not revealed its tie-up with the French state-owned Societe Nationale des Poudres et Explosifs (SNPE). Nor has it mentioned its partnership with the French owned GIAT to produce the guns using the innovative "case telescoped ammunition" for the next generation of armoured vehicles – ammunition which will be manufactured in France.

DefenseNews also confirms that Bridgwater also supplies strategic material for Britain’s nuclear warhead program and a BAE spokesman said the “Atomic Weapons Establishment had contracted the company to manufacture a strategic stockpile of critical materials to support their long-term requirements.”

Where we are going to obtain these material is not yet clear, but we are already dangerously reliant on imports. Previous closures of the Bishopton propellant factory and Blackburn fuse plant saw the bulk of production replaced by imports from Germany. BAE imports propellants from Nitrochemie under a long-term partnership and fuses are supplied by Junghans.

Thus, with the latest closures, the bulk of four key ingredients for munitions manufacture will be imported to Glascoed for assembly into finished products, which has had Gerald Howarth, the Conservative Party’s shadow defense minister stating that "Security of supply is the critical issue here… We do not want to face a situation where UK forces are hobbled".

However, currently being undertaken by the MoD is a review of the Defence Industry Strategy (DIS), which is due to be completed by mid-December, when the list of materials which should be manufactured locally will be announced.

Pre-empting this review, however, the MoD has already indicated that the BAE closures fall outside the list of manufacturing capabilities it wishes to keep. A spokesman recently that although it was purely a commercial decision by BAE, the “decision was taken in the context of the sustainment strategy for munitions, which is part of the DIS.”

As we remarked earlier, this is utter madness but, what is doubly terrifying is that the media in general seems unable to grasp the importance of this issue, a situation where, at a critical time, the British Army could find itself unable to fight through ammunition supplies being withheld.

COMMENT THREAD

As Libby’s indictment and the Plame/Wilson saga trundles on and as more and more people begin to question the CIA’s role in politics, the subject of the yellowcake that Saddam may or may not have wanted to buy in Niger has cropped up in Europe. And what a convoluted tale it is, to be sure.

The man who has been accused of passing on the forged documents about the possible Niger shopping expedition is Rocco Martino, a one-time spy with Italian military intelligence agency Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare (SISMI). In fact, he has also been accused of forging them but whether he did or did not, he is supposed to have done so off his own bat.

As ISN Security Watch repeated on Monday:

“Enzo Bianco, chairman of an oversight committee on Italy’s secret services, said on 3 November that SISMI had played no role in passing on the bogus information.”

“Once he had the information in hand, he turned to Italian news magazine Panorama to publish an article based on part of it, and then he sold the entire dossier to US intelligence officials after first shopping it to Italy, Britain, France, and a US television network.”

This is definitely one of those issues where, if you think you know what is going on, you haven't been listening. But the one thing which is certain is that the latest trade talks on the Doha round of WTO negotiations, due to climax in Hong Kong next month, have gone belly-up and everybody seems to be blaming the EU – except the EU of course.

As we left it in early October, a breakthrough was in the offing on the previously stalled talks, with US trade representative, Robert Portman, leading the way. He came up with an offer to cut "the most trade-distorting American farm support" by 60 percent by 2013, reducing the US "subsidy ceiling" from $19 billion a year to $7.6 billion.

This was conditional on the EU following suit with an 80 percent reduction, to which the EU trade commissioner Mandelson responded. He called the US offer "constructive” and announced a plan to cut EU agricultural subsidies by 70 percent and to set a ceiling of 10 percent for industrial tariffs. He was then roundly condemned by L'Escroc Chirac, who accused Mandelson of exceeding his mandate, whereupon the trade commissioner promptly did a handbrake turn, covering his tracks in a welter of incomprehensible detail.

However, even Mandelson's genius for spin has not been able to conceal that France, which receives around 21 percent of EU farming subsidies, placed further shackles on him. It threatened to use a veto if France found the outcome of the talks, currently being held in Geneva, unacceptable.

As it stands – although not even the specialist journals appear to agree – while the US offer has remained on the table, the EU is offering a range of tariff cuts of between 35 and 60 percent, each applicable to different goods, averaging out at 46 percent – or 38 percent, depending on which source you read - across the board from a very high base.

Whatever the actual rate, that is very far short of the minimum acceptable 54 percent that the developing countries, backed by the US, are asking for, especially when, according to the US agriculture department's foreign service administrator, Ellen Terpstra, the US actually has an average tariff rate of 12 percent, compared with the EU average of 31 percent.

So it is that, this morning, The Times is recording that "squabbling ministers from key trading blocs" are blaming each other after hopes of a breakthrough evaporated. As the latest impasse, says the paper, raised fears that the Hong Kong meeting may end in debacle like the previous WTO ministerial summit, in Cancún in 2003, and raise doubts over the WTO's viability.

Reuters has Brazil's Foreign Minister Celso Amorim accusing the EU of coming up with nothing new on agriculture, complaining that the way out of the tariff impasse "fell on deaf ears" with European negotiators.

The Australian Daily Telegraph is more robust, reporting: "Dismay at EU tariff 'obscenity'", citing Geoff Raby, deputy secretary of the (Australian) Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, claiming that the EU was unable to cut agricultural tariffs to free up world trade because it lacks the political will to take on wealthy farmers.

He is warning of a potential "train smash" for Australia when trade ministers meet in Hong Kong, also branding Switzerland, Norway and Japan as "intransigent" in negotiations and attacking their defence of protectionist policies as an "obscenity".

Altogether, no one is particularly surprised at this turn of events, and a failure next month will accelerate the trend towards bi- and multilateral trade agreements outside the framework of the WTO. Meanwhile, shackled to the EU, we continue to be lumbered with a policy designed for France, leaving Blair's attempts to aid developing countries, through liberalising trade, in tatters.

At this point, one collapses, jibbering, Doha… ha, ha, ha…

COMMENT THREAD

Since the start of the Tory leadership campaign, and especially after the field was narrowed down to two candidates, we have been looking for some “clear blue water” between them, on EU policy.

For reasons we need not rehearse here, but have explored previously on this Blog, we say little in the way of practical difference between David Cameron and David Davis – neither, in our view, offering realistic policies that had any chance of success.

However, this evening, all that changed. Following meetings with both candidates, Owen Paterson MP – a leading member of the Cornerstone Group failed to get any assurances from Cameron that the current Conservative Party commitment on repatriating the EU's Common Fisheries Policy would be honoured.

On the other hand, David Davis has decided, unequivocally, to support the existing policy and, in particular, to back the terms of the letter offered by Michael Howard on 10 June last year, addressed to John Whittingdale, OBE MP, then shadow agriculture and fisheries minister, after a meeting between Mr Howard and Messrs Whittingdale and Owen Paterson MP.

To remind readers, the text of the letter was as follows:

Dear John

You told me this evening that a number of those in the fishing industry have commented on my remarks on the Today Programme this morning. I thought it would therefore he helpful if I reiterated the position which I set out very clearly in Dundee and in my subsequent visits to fishing communities during this campaign.

We are determined that the next Conservative government will establish national and local control over fishing. We intend to raise this in the Council of Ministers at the first opportunity and I believe we can achieve this through negotiation. However, should negotiations not succeed, it remains the case, as I said in Plymouth, that the British Parliament is supreme and we would introduce the necessary legislation to bring about full national and local control.

Yours ever

Michael.

Dear President Bush,

This blog has been extremely supportive of your war on terrorism and we have, even, suggested that the Nobel Peace Prize should go to the body of men and women who have done more for peace and democracy round the world than any other: the US Marine Corps. (We do acknowledge the achievement of the rest of the American services and, indeed, of the coalition troops.)

On balance, it seems to us that you will have to consider opening up another front but, on the good side, this may be the decisive one.

Another country is being engulfed in disorder that might easily spread across a continent (it has not so far, because that country’s problems are greater than many of the others’). This disorder has grown out of the dysfunctionality and extreme corruption of the political system. Your advisers would have told you that the president of this country managed to beat his extreme right-wing rival on a slogan: “Vote for the crook not the fascist.”

The country in question suffers from a severe democratic deficit with an ultra-centralized political system that is run by a small political elite. It has little by way of a free media and its tradition of democracy is very weak.

When, as we hope, the Marines deal with the present disorders, there will have to be a regime change accompanied by a constitutional convention. I very much fear the process of democratizing this particular country might be more difficult than similar processes were in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, it needs to be done.

Why does it need to be done, you might ask. After all, there are many dysfunctional, corrupt countries in the world, which periodically erupt into tribal violence. The United States, quite rightly, cannot police them all.

This particular country is a special case. It does have WMDs, though we do not know exactly the state they are in or who they are aimed at. You might have had better intelligence on that, although, to be quite candid, given the attachment some of your advisers feel for the country in question, you ought to read reports very carefully and balance them against others.

There are other reasons why this particular country needs your attention and why, quite possibly, no other will afterwards. In the first place, it is a country that is implacably hostile to the United States and to the Anglosphere. That, in itself, is not a reason for having to intervene. But it has created a union (which is not as strong as it used to be, since its social model is going up in flames even as we speak), whose prime purpose is to oppose the United States.

The country in question and its corrupt political leadership have an extensive track record of supporting tyrannical regimes and terrorists as well as terror masters. Remember who gave all possible help and support to Chairman Yasser Arafat, to the detriment of the peace process in the Middle East? Remember who had close and mutually beneficial relations with Saddam Hussein? I could go on.

It is not only political and financial support that anti-American dictators and various terror masters can hope for. The country in question has provided ideological training to an even greater extent than the Soviet Union had done in the past. Several of the world’s worst, most bloodthirsty dictators and mass murderers were radicalized not in their own countries but in the one I am describing.

From every point of view, Mr President, it is highly expedient that the United States looks carefully at the possibilities of dealing with this particular problem. Do not look to the United Nations. Any resolution you might contemplate would be blocked by China, the country’s greatest friend.

It is up to you to make a decision. However, let me assure you that should the United States decide to launch Operation French Freedom, Britain will be there with you, just as it was in 1944.

COMMENT THREAD

Reported on the BBC website, under the headline "Defence shake-up hits 1,900 jobs", we learn that the MoD has announced a “jobs shake-up”. It is to close down some of the operations run by the Defence Aviation Repair Agency's (DARA) and the Army engineering and repair service, ABRO.

DARA is to lose its fast-jet site in St Athan, south Wales, which will close with 500 job losses, and its engine maintenance business in Fleetlands, Hampshire, with the loss of 225 jobs.

But especially significant are the 1,226 jobs that are being axed from ABRO, not least from the units at Warminster, Wiltshire, which is to lose approximately 100 posts.

Now go back to October last year, when the MoD announced that it was to award the contract to build 5,200 trucks for the Army to MAN, the manufacture to be carried out by MAN Nutzfahrzeuge Österreich AG in Austria. No wonder the MAN website happily chirped that the contract "ensures a continuous workload for the Vienna plant and thus helps to safeguard jobs".

But one of the losers (and the favourite for the contract) was an Anglo-American consortium led by the Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Truck Corporation, maker of trucks for the US forces and supplier of tank transporters and wheeled tankers to the British Army.

Interestingly, one of Oshkosh's partners was ABRO, which was to have manufactured the cargo bodies for the trucks, installed ancillary equipment, performed final test and delivery functions, and provided through-life maintenance support.

If the truck contract had been won by Oshkosh, of the 600 British workers who would have been employed, ABRO would have secured approximately 100 posts, the majority of which would have been at their site in Warminster, Wiltshire.

Hey, never mind though. MAN Nutzfahrzeuge Österreich AG in Austria has "a continuous workload for the Vienna plant" which "thus helps to safeguard jobs" – Austrian jobs.

COMMENT THREAD

No, not riots, not even, it would seem, copy cat ones (I may be speaking too soon on that) but the usual run of the mill, stuck in the mud political negotiations.

The time is approaching for the grand coalition to take shape but as we have written before, this shape ain’t taking. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Europe [subscription only] there is an interesting article by Mariam Lau, op-ed page editor of Die Welt.

Entitled The Bossis, the piece points out that there has been a recent shift in political opinion about the East. The ossis are moving into mainstream political life and taking over. Not only is Angela Merkel a scientist from the former DDR but so is the newly chosen SPD chairman, the Brandenburg governor, Matthias Platzeck. While Ms Merkel has a degree in physical chemistry, Mr Platzeck is an engineer for biomedical cybernetics.

In the old DDR it was scientists rather than “teachers and jurists” who took political posts, says Ms Lau. There are other scientist ossies at the top of the political tree: Thomas de Maizière, the new secretary of the chancellery, Wolfgang Tiefensee, designated minister for transport and others.

Their background is not dissimilar. They come

“from politial and/or religious families, which upheld a bourgeois tradition in the hostile climate of an ‘Arbeiter und Bauernstaat’ (state of workers and peasants). None of them was a hero of the East German ‘revolution’. They came to the civil rights movement relatively late in time. This is why some of the 68ers accuse them of cowardice. That’s hard to swallow from a generation whose own claim to ‘resistance’ credentials is rooted in street-fighting the democratic government of Willy Brandt – himself a former refugee from Hitler’s Germany.”

“Ms Merkel and Mr Platzeck share a pragamatic, can-do attitude and a lack of patience for ideology. They have no take in the enduring battles between the ‘68ers’ and the conservatives that the West Germans are so fond of fighting. In the very same week that the famous Frauenkirche in Dresden was formally reconsecrated – when East and West Germans were praising technicians, engineers and civil society rather than nursing old resentments – it seems that that the Federal Republic as we knew it has finally come to an end.”

“The rise of the Bossis is more than pure coincidence. What happened in Berlin last week was a clear failure of the West’s political elites, who put their own needs, careers and moods before the interests of their parties, let alone the country as a whole.”

In today’s International Herald Tribune Catherine Field gives an interesting analysis of the French riots and their origin. [I may as well warn some of our readers that she does not think that it is an intifada or a jihad.]

Her suggestions of long-term answers are hit and mix in my opinion: breaking up the stranglehold of the enarques on public life is a good idea, an encouragement of social and political integration even better, but throwing more government money without economic and social reforms will do nothing.

A far more interesting exchange of ideas can be seen in the Letters section of the newspaper.

But Ms Field does come up with a wonderful couple of sentences:

“President Jacques Chirac is notorious for trying to foil investigations into his scandal-tainted financial past. Unsurprisingly, there were only guffaws when he warned rioters that France is a country where justice is firmly applied.”

Clearly, the Telegraph has run out of photographs of scantily-clad supermodels and the Royals cannot be doing anything terribly interesting.

This means - at last – that it has elevated the French riots to the front page, complete with picture. And this at a time when the BBC is desperately trying to convey the impression that the situation is calming down

Anyhow, under the headline, "Leaders fiddle as France burns" – not exactly original, but never mind – the paper reports that the riots have "spun out of control", describing prime minister Villepin as "beleaguered".

MarkSteyn also gives over his column to the riots, under the headline "Early skirmish in the Eurabian civil war". His thesis seems to be that the describing the riots as spontaneous "rage" are wide of the mark - "a very slapdash characterisation of what, after two weeks, is looking like a rather shrewd and disciplined campaign." "Some of us," writes Steyn, "believe this is an early skirmish in the Eurabian civil war."

Actually, I share my colleague's view that this ain't necessarily so. In any dysfunctional society – and what is France if not that? – the violence always erupts amongst the disadvantaged, so the fact immigrant population also being the most disadvantaged is difficult to disentangle.

Certainly, the smouldering resentment is there, and you don’t have to stay in France for very long before you realise how "institutionally racist" the society really is. All you need to do is watch the queues at immigration at the airport and see how much longer it takes for the official to clear someone with a dark skin.

And as for Steyn's "shrewd and disciplined campaign", I think he neglects what they have been finding in Iraq, where the terrorists are no longer operating in defined cells with a set hierarchy.

The marvels of the mobile 'phone, texting, and the internet, means that different groups and individuals can share knowledge, "intelligence" and tactics, with amazing rapidity, learning from each others' experiences, without any single guiding mind. If technology favours democracy, it is also the handmaiden of anarchy.

That said, the leader expresses the fear that the riots could spread through Europe.

It refers to comparisons with the May events of 1968, and even the revolutions of 1848, are tempting, but ventures that the current riots are distinguished more by their differences than their similarities. They have no clear political aim beyond an expression of disgust with the government and, in particular, the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, and have not attracted other sections of society.

But, says the paper, the sense of impending crisis is deepened by the extraordinary weakness of those in office. France is marked by fin de régime rivalry between Mr Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister. Germany faces the sclerosis of a grand coalition. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi is more discredited than ever. In Britain, while Tony Blair defiantly bangs the security drum, the electorate waits for him to step down.

There, the paper has a point. When there is a vacuum of power at the centre, dark forces go to work and, if nothing else, the French riots have been fed by indecision and bickering in the government. And, elsewhere, there is a general feeling of malaise, of disillusionment with politicians, expressed by low voting figures. On this, concludes, the leader, the riots rocking France could feed.

I have a feeling that this is not very far off the mark.

COMMENT THREAD

"Everyone is pulling in their own directions." So says Jaroslaw Pietras, the Polish minister for European affairs, at the end of yesterday's first formal negotiations on the EU budget since the rancorous June European Council meeting.

"We cannot see any package emerging from today's discussions," Pietras added, underlining what little Jack Straw – who chaired the talks – describes as "the intense difficulty of securing a compromise by December".

With touching naivety, Graham Bowley of the International Herald Tribune reports that an agreement would go a long way toward repairing the spirit of co-operation that was damaged by the breakdown of the June meeting. Any deal, Bowley continues, would also illustrate the political lessons drawn from the referendums in France and the Netherlands in May and June.

Needless to say, the definition of "co-operation" in the Community lexicon is "give and take", as further defined by France, meaning "you give and we take". While their capital burns – or, at least, a goodly number of cars and buildings – the French continue to resist any cuts spending on farm support, while demanding that Britain gives up its rebate.

Meanwhile, Straw bleats away, telling assembled reporters that, "We made it clear there will have to be significant changes in levels of overall spending of the EU and in the structure of funding compared to what was on the table in June if there is going to be a deal in December."

In other words, there ain't going to be a deal – not until Tony Blair and his less than merry men manage to cobble together a formula that gives France what it wants, while making the deal looking acceptable to the British public. And that is not going to be easy. There are far too many people watching, ready to cry foul.

It looks like Finland, which is next in the hot seat of the EU presidency, is going to have to make the running.

COMMENT THREAD

Andreas Noll provides a gloomy but balanced analysis on Deutsche Welle of the situation in France and the possible consequences to the rest of Europe. While not excluding the Muslim aspect of the problem, he sees it as essentially a European failure, ending with the following paragraph:

“Attempts to integrate rapidly growing Muslim communities in other countries haven't been much more successful. Europe has so far not found a solution for the integration of a group that has a hold on the future -- at least from a demographic perspective -- but that has no idea what this future should look like.”

"I love my family, I love my children, I love my dogs, but I don't love Europe." So says Reijo Kemppinen and, before you ask "so what?", he is the EU's new man in London – specifically, head of the European Commission’s UK office, a replacement for Jim Dougal, who resigned complaining about Commission bureaucracy.

And, while Paris burns, The Times has interviewed the man on taking up his new post, only to gain the "rather unexpected confession".

This, apparently is part of a new approach by Brussels, aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the British people. Kemppinen wants to transform the debate in Britain, starting a publicity drive not just to raise the profile of the Commission, and finally to reconcile Britons to being in the EU.

He tells The Times: "I am not calling for everyone to be a Europhile or a supporter of Europe, but to step away from this useless argument about whether you're a member of Europe or not." As far as Kemppinen is concerned, "The fact is that Britain is part of Europe and part of the EU and will stay part of the EU."

He has no time for the "in-out" argument, adding that "As long as every piece of work the EU produces is analysed through the argument of to be or not to be (in the EU), the journalism will be distorted. The editorial line doesn’t allow room for other arguments."

Kemppinen's post — in effect the EU's ambassador to Britain, says The Times — is often seen as the most difficult job in the Commission, not least because of the innate hostility displayed by the British to the "project" But Kemppinen, a 48-year-old Finn and a former chief spokesman for Romano Prodi, is the first non-citizen to head one of the EU's national offices.

Despite this, he intends to take the bull by the horns, taking on extra staff to change the debate by arranging conferences and seminars. He also plans to send teams of press officers out to speak to regional newspapers, and set up EU information centres around the country.

He also eschews defensively rejecting criticism, agreeing with many complaints about the EU, from excessive regulation to absurd laws, and is keen not to turn critics into enemies.

"If you love Europe, please say it, but if someone doesn't love Europe, please don't define them as Eurosceptic," he says. "I refuse to define Britain’s relationship to Europe by the word Eurosceptic. Perhaps it is where I came from, but I have always had great difficulties labelling Britain as Eurosceptic."

Well, Mr Kemppinen, we wish you luck. But, as always, you are barking up the wrong tree – as your ilk always does. It's not "Europe" we have a problem with – it's the European Union. Perhaps you might make it your first task to learn the difference and, just to help you out, we’ve printed a map for you.

COMMENT THREAD

Now that the French riots have gone on long enough even for the British media to start paying attention (as usual the blogs, this one included, were there ahead of the MSM) the time has come for analyzing the commentators, as these events are not deemed to be important enough for any analysis to be published here or anywhere else.

There have been so many reactions outside the British media and on the blogs that it is hard to know where to start. But I have derived no small amusement from the fact that people who have been blithely calling for a revolution and gleefully predicting that soon the people will rise against the terrible European monolith are among those first to squeal about the French riots.

This is not a revolution, nor an insurrection, nor an intifada (just try coping with that as the Israelis have had to). It is a series of riots that are not leading anywhere special and have grown out of the peculiar tensions that have existed in French society for decades, possibly since the Algerian war. And yet, it seems, that the predicted riots and possible revolution meets with no approval among those who had done the predicting.

Far from looking at the causes they are largely blaming Islamic fundamentalists, chattering on about Eurabia and all but demanding that the French police employ the harshest measures possible. (And believe me there is little the French police does not know about harsh measures.)

All of which proves the point I have made once or twice on the forum: revolutions are not nice things. Riots are not nice things. They are scary. Think of the unfortunate people who are not burning cars or throwing stones but are caught in those appalling banlieus, their lives already hopeless, now surrounded by this violence and knowing that at some point they will all have to pay for the fact that the French government has lost its head.

There are curious omissions in the babel of comments. For instance, nobody is pointing out the fact that it cannot be French foreign policy that is causing these riots. France has famously (or infamously, given what has come out in the Volcker’s report) opposed the Iraqi war.

Equally famously it has tried to meddle in Middle Eastern politics, largely unsuccessfully but always on the side of the dictators and terrorists. Some of this can be put down to the basic theme of French foreign policy, which is the European common foreign policy in embryo: an opposition to the United States no matter where, when or how.

Some of it, on the other hand, as has been pointed out before, was motivated by fear. Fear of the large and growing Muslim population inside the country, which has, as anyone with the slightest knowledge of France, perceived some time ago, been treated abominably badly.

For the same reason, it would seem, though here the record is murkier, French authorities have largely looked the other way at the growing instances of anti-Semitism and attacks on Jewish targets. It may have been Muslim youths, apparently inflamed by events in the Palestine, or it may have been a mixture of dissatisfied Muslim and non-Muslim underclass, inflamed by left-wing propaganda. As there were no serious investigations we do not know.

Then there is another aspect of the problem that is rarely mentioned though Fukuyama, never afraid of controversy, pointed it out: the European social model, particularly strong and well regarded in France, has created high unemployment, made it impossible to start new businesses and next to impossible for people with no qualification get jobs.

Over on Chicagoboyz, where intellectual argument tends to be the order of the day, Lexington Green has written amusingly about the collapse of the American Left’s second Utopia – Europe and, specifically, France.

We, too, have noted on occasion the strange American tendency among that strange breed of anti-American Americans to praise Europe or the EU or France, largely indiscriminately as the place which provides social cohesion through a high taxation, high regulation system; in which the benevolent government ceaselessly watches over the people’s welfare and accumulates more and more power for that purpose; and in which lower productivity is not the sign of a sick economy but of a greater enjoyment of life.

Let us hope these riots, which have been predicted for a long time, will blow away those fancies but if I know left-wing pundits (and unfortunately I do know them) they will either pretend nothing happened or find any number of excuses, preferably, ones that blame the United States or root around for yet another semi-Utopia.

It is unfortunate that those, mostly across the blogosphere, who have presented these riots as a new revolt of Islam are playing the same game. If there is nothing rotten in the state of France, if this is merely part of a world-wide Islamic attack on the West, then we can simply forget about French and European problems. They do not really exist.

A small minority, poor and marginalized through its own faults, has been stirred to violence and as soon as that is put down, we can go back to worshipping the European social model and its various delightful aspects: high taxation, impossible regulation, protectionism, high unemployment and a smouldering resentment that will break out in some other way.

There have been other comments. On Chicagoboyz a series of postings by Ralf Goergens, the elegant weasel of our forum, I suspect, have tried to look at the genuine grievances and resentments that have set off the mindless and semi-organized violence of the last week and a half. (Although there has been some talk of organizers who ensure that lads get around from place to place quickly, there seems to be little of real organization and people who might consider themselves to have authority over the youngsters are as much at a loss as the government is.)

One of Goergens’s postings deals with the architecture of the banlieus, the soullessness of the buildings and impossibility of a fruitful human existence in them. He traces the ideas behind those monstrosities to Le Corbusier, arguably one of the evil geniuses of the twentieth century with his ideas of social and cultural experimentation on human beings. We in this country, who have known the problems of the council estates, those tenth rate embodiments of Corbusier’s plans, should not dismiss these arguments.

Goergens was challenged when he posited that far from wanting to create a separate community, what the rioters and, indeed, the people in the banlieus want is to integrate in French culture. This has been dismissed by the “it is all an intifada” commentators but that, once again, does not take into account the peculiarity of the French situation.

By and large, it seems, that is precisely what many of the newcomers and not so newcomers (third generation or so) would like. Remember with what unexpected ease the problem of the banned headscarf was solved. Very few people protested. When a couple of French journalist were kidnapped and one of the demands was that the ban be rescinded, North Africans and their descendants joined a demonstration against the kidnappers. They proclaimed themselves to be French, who would obey the French law. In return, they expected France to recognize them as equals.

France has always described its colonies as being part of the mother country – France Outre Mer. As we know, that means certain islands in the Caribbean can produce all-important votes in referendums. It also means that France feels fully justified to march in and sort out recalcitrant fromer colonies such as the Côte d’Ivoire. (Not that they are having all that much success, but let that pass.)

In theory that also means that all those who arrive in France from the former colonies, especially those who found they had to flee as a result of the Algerian war and its rather sudden ending, are French and will be treated as such. Alas, this has not been the case and the resentment has been smouldering, strengthened by the undoubted frequent brutality displayed by the police.

On Deutsche Welle there have been worried discussions as to whether riots like this could happen in Germany. Opinion seems to be that it is unlikely for a somewhat unexpected reason:

“Those allegedly responsible -- groups of young Muslim men of largely North African and black African origin -- have said that they are protesting economic misery, racial discrimination and provocative policing.

But while some blame the government's recent hardline law-and-order policies, others see the root of the problem in broken promises by the French government to its immigrant communities: The French integration model insists that all citizens are equal before the state, but some say cultural minorities are being left without a voice.

In Germany, on the other hand, immigrants have so far lacked any sense of entitlement. Unlike France, Britain or the Netherlands, Berlin has only recently opened up citizenship and loosened naturalization laws.”

Well, the new dumbed-down Sunday Telegraph is with us and, entirely in keeping with its editor’s desire to make it "intelligent and elegant", the front page is graced with a picture of Kate Moss, coke-snorting supermodel, in exotic lingerie.

Meanwhile, exiled to its new home on the inside back page is the truncated Booker column, with a story which, in a serious – as opposed to an “intelligent and elegant” newspaper, would have been on the front page.

Crammed into 500 words is a story which completes with such delights as the page three "Harry Potter and the Goblet of fear", occupying a full half page, with pictures and the stunning revelation on page five that "William beats Harry in Army intelligence test".

And the trivia consigned to page 37? Oh, that's just a boring little tale about how BAE Systems is closing down the last factory in the UK that makes military explosives, and another which makes a key component from rifle ammunition, moving the production to France.

Even the headline is calculated to inspire ennui in Mz Sand's "intelligent and elegant" newspaper, asking "Is it wise for an army to buy its shells abroad", a headline which also manages both to downplay the gravity of the issue and get it wrong.

Picked up by us on Tuesday and run on this Blog, the issue is, as Booker records, BAE Systems’s decision to close the former Royal Ordnance plants at Bridgwater, Somerset, and Chorley, Lancashire, incidentally with the loss of 200 jobs.

At the Bridgwater plant is made a range of military explosives, needed for shells and missiles used by Britain's Armed Forces, including components for our nuclear weapons. At Chorley, an equally vital function is carried out – making the "initiators" for rifle cartridges – the tiny blob of explosive in the base of the cartridge which explodes when struck by the firing pin, setting off the propellant charge.

As regards the Chorley plant, Union officials have told us that, for the last two years, senior production staff have been seconded to a factory in France to set up new machinery and teach the staff there how to run it – concrete evidence that the production is to be moved to France.

But the “smoking gun” seems to be an agreement which approved by the French Senate on 7 May 1998, the record of which shows that it was planned to set up a joint company between BAE Systems and the French state-owned Société Nationale des Poudres et Explosifs (SNPE), to manufacture “powders and explosives”. But the killer passage (machine translation) is this:

The Minister for defence moreover specified that a majority of the activities of production would be maintained in France and that Royal Ordnance would reduce the share of activity of its own installations in Great Britain (Bridgewater and Bishopton) or in the Netherlands where it also has a factory (Muiden). He however added that alliance would modify the distribution of the activity between the three French sites: the site of Angouleme, which is depend on the markets of the armament, would be private of part of its activity since 1999 whereas the establishments of Bergerac and Sorgues would profit from the clear creation of a hundred employment.

If not in actualité, the picture to the left of Berlaymont must accurately reflect the state of mind of its denizens, following the release of the latest Eurobarometer "snapshot" of opinion on the EU.

This is according to The Business, this morning, which reports that the survey has found confidence in the EU in freefall across almost every member state. It represents a "cascade" which, says the research firm that conducted the study, is the most severe since records began in 1975.

Furthermore, the survey reveals that that only one-third of Britons see benefit in continued membership, the lowest in the 25 countries polled. Overall, trust in the EU commission has plunged from 52 percent to 46 percent throughout the union and, in Britain, the picture is even bleaker for our government across the water. It is trusted by only by 31 percent and distrusted by 38 percent. A majority – 42 percent to 40 percent – believe the UK has not benefited from its 30-year membership and only 36 percent of those questioned considered membership "a good thing".

The full 440-page report is available on the Eurobarometer website and even the selective optimism cannot conceal a picture of unremitting gloom.

For the Tory leadership contest, the report has some considerable significance. Compared with the tentative steps suggested by the candidates to effect a selective withdrawal from the EU, the survey shows that public opinion is way ahead of what is on offer. Arguably, the two Davids are misreading public opinion and risk missing the boat.

COMMENT THREAD

It seems appropriate to discuss sources of radicalism and the question of terrorism that is rooted in religion as well as political dissatisfaction on the anniversary of that earlier attempt to undermine the government of England. 400 years ago yesterday the plot to blow up Parliament was discovered with dire consequences for its perpetrators.

Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même. Once again we are facing an enemy that is outside the country as well as inside it. Europe, though not Britain particularly, has fought Islam before but it was usually in the shape of an external, and highly visible enemy. Now, we are less sure. Most of the Muslims we know are not our enemies. They want out of life much the same sort of things non-Muslims want: a job, a home, a family, good things for the children. But how do we know who are the ones who want something else: destruction and a weird idea of future conquest?

The parallels are not exact. I shall, I expect, be reminded by various readers that the Catholics of Elizabethan and Jacobean England had been here for as long as the Potestants had (though Guy Fawkes himself was not, I believe, of English origin), while the Muslims are relatively recent incomers.

But the real difference is not there but in the reaction. A new, muscular and aggressive Protestantism fought what it perceived to be the enemy. There was more to it than that, as there is in the fight with radical Islam. Catholicism was seen as a political enemy. Even later in the seventeenth century Milton in his Areopagitica explained why he did not consider it advisable to be tolerant of the Catholics – they were then the country’s political enemies.

Political enemies had to be dealt with in a political way as many a hapless Catholic found out under Elizabeth’s reign. Her answer to the Pope’s “fatwa”, if one may put it that way, was to create the most efficient secret service of the day.

Walsingham’s lads dealt efficiently with Catholic plotters; knew exactly on which ships young scions of recusant families were departing to study on the Continent; and, if needs be, kidnapped escaping priests from the Catholic Lowlands.

Protestantism under Elizabeth blended into the concept of England, developed earlier than any other country’s self-definition as a cursory reading of Shakespeare’s history plays as well as other contemporary writings will show.

Modern Europe and modern Britain are, of course, very different. Gradually, we can see certain ideas being formulated about the fight we need to wage but it is taking a long time, the main problem being is that few people can seriously define what it is they are fighting for. (I believe I have pointed out in the past that only Hungarians manage to define Englishness or Britishness to any satisfactory degree.)

Francis Fukuyama, the eminent philosopher, goes further than that. In an article last Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal Europe [subscription only] he posited the theory that the roots of radical jihadist terrorism are not in the Middle East but in Western Europe.

This is not such an extraordinary idea. Let us remember that some of the worst ideologically motivated bloodthirsty dictators such as Pol Pot, Ho-Chi Minh and sundry African rulers, were not radicalized by seeing the poverty or alienation of their people but by studying in Western Europe, notably France.

(Of course, there were the Marxist African rulers who were educated and trained in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites but that was a deliberate plan.)

With the Muslims the problem lies in the non-existent social and cultural networks.

“We profoundly misunderstand contemporary Islamist ideology when we see it as an assertion of traditional Muslim values or culture. In a traditional Muslim country, your religious identity is not a matter of choice; you receive it, along with your social status, customs and habits, even your future marriage partner, from you social environment. In such a society there is no confusion as to who you are, since your identity is given to you and sanctioned by all of society’s institutions, from the family to the mosque to the state.”

“The same [certainty of identity] is not true for a Muslim who lives as an immigrant in a suburb of Amsterdam or Paris. All of a sudden, your identity is up for grabs; you have seemingly infinite choices in deciding how far you want to try to integrate into the surrounding, non-Muslim society.

…

The identity problem is particularly severe for second- and third-generation children of immigrants. They grow up outside of the traditional culture of their parents, but unlike most newcomers to the U.S., few feel truly accepted by the surrounding society.”

“Contermporary Europeans downplay national identity in favour of an open, tolerant, ‘post-national’ Europeanness. But the Dutch, Germans, French and others all retain a strong sense of their national identity, and to differing degrees it is one that is not accessible to people coming from Turkey, Morocco or Pakistan.”

“Integration is further inhibited by the fact that rigis European labour laws have made low-skill jobs hard ot find for recent immigrants or their children. A significant proportion of immigrants are on welfare, meaning that they do not have the dignity of contributing through their labour to the surrounding society. They and their children understand themselves as outsiders.”

“It is in this context that someone like Osama bin Laden appears, offering young converts a universalistic, pure version of Islam that has been stripped of its local saints, customs and traditions. Radical Islamism tells them exactly who they are – respected memebrs of a global Muslm umma to which they can belong despite their lives in lands of unbelief.”

“Democracy and modernization in the Muslim world are desirable for their own sake, but we will continue to have a big problem with terrorism in Europe regardless of what happens there.”

The eighth day of rioting in Paris, with the unrest spreading outwards into new parts of the country. But hey! Who cares? Certainly The Independent does not – it has other fish to fry.

Its lead today is President George Bush, "his presidency foundering and his popularity at record lows at home," who ran into new protests at a Western hemisphere summit in Argentina. And, quelle horreur, not far from the sealed-off, massively protected hotel where the leaders met, some 10,000 demonstrators marched through the resort city of Mar del Plata chanting "Get Out Bush."

This clear anti-American bias was one of the things my colleague and I talked about on the Charlie Wolf show this morning, in between talking at length about the two Davids.

It is interesting how being put on the spot during a radio broadcast focuses the mind, as indeed it did when Charlie asked me what I thought of yesterday’s televised debate. Quick as a flash – I kid you not – I came up with the stunningly original line, “Well you’ve heard of fantasy football – well this was fantasy politics”.

To be fair to Davis, I did think he talked a lot of sense on tax, and said so, but it is in his "Europe" policy, in common with David Cameron, that he dwells in never-never land.

Cameron, of course, is more vacuous, claiming that he can "handbag" the EU into giving him what he wants – which is not very much at all – but Davis, who sounds as if he has thought his policy through, has an equally unworkable plan.

Before dwelling on this, I must digress, and remind readers that, with Christopher Booker, I wrote a book on the history of the European Union – 300,000 words of it. The way we work is that I produce the briefs, from which Booker writes to final copy, to which effect I produced the best part of two million words, much of it summaries of original records, debates and news cuttings.

To get these, I read every word of the UK Parliament’s Maastricht debates, and every treaty debate since. I read over 600 books, and thousands of documents, and when it came to the first day of the EU convention on a constitution for Europe, I was there, in the Parliament, watching it.

The point – and there is a point – is that I have spent decades of my life studying this animal called the European Union. I live and breath EU politics, 24/7 and know as well as anyone how it works and what makes it tick.

And when Mr Davis confidently asserts that he can hold a referendum in the UK on what powers to repatriate, and then go over to Brussels and expect the colleagues to roll over and give him what he wants, he is wrong.

I am not sure whether Davis understands this, but for the Community to repatriate powers would require a treaty change. For that to happen, firstly the European Council must agree to hold an Intergovernmental Conference (IGC), and that that requires a majority vote.

Then there must be that prolonged and fractious process of an IGC, for which a draft treaty must be prepared, with many more drafts to follow. Throughout the process, which could take years, the UK government has - GB has to persuade all the other member states to include their changes, and to desist from adding any of their own, that would diminish the UK position.

Then, the final treaty draft must be agreed by all 25 member state heads of government/state – unanimously – at a summit meeting. And we have all too recent experience of how difficult these can be. The last, on the budget, broke up in disarray, without agreement.

Should that hurdle be overcome, and the draft be agreed, the new treaty must be ratified by all 25 member states, some of them by referendum. Any one member state can block the treaty. And this is precisely what happened with the last treaty – only two countries blocked it, France and Holland.

With the "colleagues" bruised by the experience, and beset by problems of their own, the last thing they would want to do is open pandora's box with another treaty. They would go to almost any lengths to avoid it, especially as the constitutional treaty is still "on the table" – theoretically, at least. There would, therefore, be enormous resistance even to agreeing an IGC.

Should there be one, other member states would also tabling their own proposals, leading to enormous tensions. This would precipitate yet another major crisis, which is exactly what the Community would not want. And even, should a treaty be agreed, then the chance of all countries ratifying another treaty are probably nil.

Thus, on balance, Davis demanding a new treaty would almost certainly not succeed. He could create his "crisis", as he has promised, but, as the Community did with John Major over the beef ban, they would most likely close ranks and see him off.

In other words, a Davis-inspired crisis would be "trumped" by fear of an even greater crisis, so his tactics would get nowhere. To get through to the "colleagues", he would have to invoke the "nuclear option" and create an even bigger crisis by threatening to leave. This he refuses to do and thus, I believe, his current strategy is valueless.

That is my analysis – my expert opinion, if you like. It comes from all those years of study, analysis, discussion, writing and thought. What Davis is offering is indeed "fantasy politics".

Given that I believe he is offering the impossible, I don't know what worries me most – that he genuinely believes that it could work or that he is cynically offering the Eurosceptics in his Party something that looks superficially attract, in the hope of capturing their votes.

Either way, this is not a man from whom we can expect salvation. We will have to wait longer for grown-up politician. And that, it seems, is rather like waiting for Godot.

COMMENT THREAD

One way or another, things are stirring but you wouldn’t know that from our own esteemed media. The BBC World Service finally put the French riots at the top of its website yesterday but demoted the story again in favour of the anti-free trade demonstrations in Argentina. At least, it is there, as the lead European story.

From this morning’s newspapers you would not have guessed that serious riots are spreading around the capital of our nearest neighbour. Some of the American newspapers are covering the story and it has gone like wildfire, if I may use that expression, round the blogs.

It is only from the blogosphere (mostly American) that you can find out about the Danish events, if you do not happen to live in Denmark, though the Canadian media has picked the story up. The Daily Telegraph today did have a rather uninformative article by Kate Connolly, reporting from Berlin. Someone should tell Ms Connolly and her editor that the war ended sixty years ago, Denmark was liberated some time before that and Berlin is not the capital of western Europe. How long does it take to get to Denmark from Berlin and find out what is going on?

The article gave no details beyond that already available on the various blogs and a few interviews, clearly conducted by telephone, one with the Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a courageous lady of strong opinions, but not a Dane. It was not even clear from the article whether the riots were over or whether they were still going on and there was a definite feeling that Ms Connolly thought that the rioters had a point. Prime Minister Rassmussen’s stand for free speech was explained by his reliance on the support of anti-immigration groups. Nice to know journalists care about such details as freedom of the press.

Elsewhere in the media, Denmark was not even mentioned. A not so far off country, of which we know nothing.

Another story that seems to have escaped most of our journalists is the big demo and vigil outside the Iranian embassy in Rome that was protesting against Iranian threats to obliterate Israel.

The two night vigil has excited some debate in Italy on whether there was any point to it and whether this was the right way of dealing with the problem. But the fact remains: thousands of people went out in support of Israel and to protest the Iranian President’s statement. It has been reported in China and India but here only the Financial Times ran an article.

The demonstration and the vigil was organized by the right-wing newspaper Il Foglio and had the support of numerous politicians and public figures. Two ministers, Giancarlo Fini and Antonio Martini expressed their support but did not join it, for fear of making the life of Italians in Iran more difficult.

The official Iranian media immediately poured abuse at the demonstrators, labelling them zionist warmongers and threatening them with the annihilation as well. And, of course, a counter-demonstration went to the Italian embassy in Teheran.

Interestingly, Italy, as Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, is breaking the mould – a debate is growing in that country (as in Denmark) about freedom of speech.

Magdi Allam, the Muslim Deputy Editor of the Corriera della Sera, wrote a front-page editorial last week, in which he openly discussed the need for Arab states to recognize Israel’s right to exist in order to proceed with a peaceful solution to the Palestinian woes. In the teeth of Islamic and, one may add, a great deal of West European opinion, he made it clear that he did not think the problem was the fault of Israel alone.

This may not seem as important as whether banks have banned the use of piggy banks – the issue remains unresolved – but, surely, we must pay attention to the fight for freedom of speech, whether it happens in Denmark or Italy. And it might be of interest to the British reader that there are large demonstrations in Rome or riots in Århus.

COMMENT THREAD

Blogging over the last weeks has been a little trying. Mrs EU Referendum, after the best part of 15 years of (my) neglect, decided it really was time for some redecoration, which she decided should be combined with fitting central heating (in the wrong order, of course).

Writing and posting over the last couple of weeks, therefore, has been to the accompaniment of power saws, drills, clattering, banging and – it seems – the inevitable Radio 1, without which workmen are incapable of work.

The purpose of the note, however, is to refer to a thread currently on the forum complaining of a lack of "ideas" from this blog, and other posts complaining of "negativity".

This, if we may say so, it to miss the point. The objective of this blog is to bring to a wider audience two central ideas – one, that the rule of the transnational élites is undemocratic and destructive and, two, that the current political system seems incapable of dealing with the encroachment of these élites.

It seems to us that until a broader constituency recognise this, and share our sense of outrage at the depredations of the élites and the inadequacies of our politicians, very little is going to change. Hence, we will work towards making this blog entertaining reading, informative and wholly negative, in order to promote these ideas.

Comments, as always, will be treated with the usual disdain, especially when, I am (we are) in "snarl mode".

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to see a man about some floorboards.

COMMENT THREAD

In what was an unprecedented television debate, the two contenders for the Tory leadership came together last night on the BBC TV programme Question Time.

A quick straw poll carried out by this blog suggests that David Davis had the better of David Cameron, coming over as more decisive and knowledgeable, although Cameron's presentation was flashier. Certainly, of the early papers, The Independent seems to agree that Cameron came off worse.

The Guardian seems to reserve judgement but both papers home in on a voluble man in a tweed jacket who told Cameron, "I've listened to you, and you're good on your feet, I give you that - I used to lecture, and you're good, not as good as I was, but good. But you waffle. You don't tell us how you're going to do things!"

On the European Union, though, both were as useless as each other. Cameron, on the one hand, confined himself to clawing back powers only on employment and social legislation while Davis was much more comprehensive, excluding nothing other than the single market.

But the million dollar question was how would the achieve their aims. Would Davis leave the EU if he wasn't given what he wanted? That would not be necessary, he said. A refusal would create a crisis and, out of crises, things emerge. Cameron would do it all by negotiation, citing the Thatcher "handbag" ploy that she used in negotiating the British rebate.

But neither of the strategies is realistic. When John Major provoked a crisis in 1996 over the beef ban, the "colleagues" simply closed ranks, forcing him into a humiliating climb-down. And while Thatcher succeeded in her ploy, she could do so because the colleagues needed her agreement and she had a veto. When it comes to a treaty change, however, all the other member states have the veto and the UK would be the supplicant.

On this key issue, therefore, neither of the candidates impress. It is worrying that two politicians can climb so far up the Tory hierarchy yet still, apparently, have no idea how to deal with the EU. It does not auger well.

The programme can be watched on this link.

COMMENT THREAD

[By popular demand - well, at least two readers were interested - I am reprinting the article that was first published in the Salisbury Review in December 2003.]

We do seem to hear rather a lot about nostalgia for Communism or, at least, the old order in Russia, the rest of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Mind you, we hear it from mostly from western writers and journalists, many of whom are nostalgic for the old certainties themselves. Just occasionally, there is a sigh or two from the old artistic and intellectual establishment in the post-Communist countries.

It is fair to assume that the Left has not completely recovered from the body blow that the collapse of Communism has dealt to its assumptions, particularly as it did not collapse under a direct onslaught from the capitalist west but from its own people. It was not wanted by those whom it was supposed to benefit and that is hard to accept if one's entire world-view was built on the assumption that with all its faults Communism tried to provide what people were supposed to long for in life. And then it was all over. Communism did not and could not, as its opponents said, reform itself. It simply collapsed, leaving behind, it is true a horrible mess economically and, often, politically speaking. It did not even turn into socialism with a human face – it just went.

Surely that was a mistake. Perhaps, we could have a replay. Surely, the people who so thoughtlessly brought that supposedly good, though, alas, often misguided system crashing down are regretting it all. Surely, they must by now be tired of the tawdriness of Western "culture" which, as they have surely found out, consists of little more than McDonald's golden arches and pornography.

Alas, this does not seem to be true. For one thing, the people of the post-Communist societies seem no more disgusted or enamoured with McDonald's than people anywhere else and it is somewhat arrogant on the part of well-meaning Western intellectuals to assume that somehow East Europeans and Russians would be incapable of dealing with the problem of hamburger joints or Starbucks. They, too, can exercise their freedom to choose.

Then, again, it does not take many brains to work out that freedom means far more than just eating hamburgers or watching pornography. Interviews in the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe always seem to come to the same conclusion. Yes, people complain about difficulties, economic restructuring, understandable bewilderment, but all too often, to the almost audible disgust of the interviewer they add things like: "Yes, but it is good not to have to watch what you say any longer."

Or they talk artlessly about the pleasure of being able to buy what they want to buy when they want to buy it, not when the factory decides to produce it. These pleasures are incomprehensible and, even, unknown to Western intellectuals who have never had to go without anything much in their lives.

Of course, there is nostalgia. There is always nostalgia. It is part of the human condition that people always look longingly to the past when things were better, easier, more interesting, even purer. In the depths of one's nostalgia one knows that the picture painted by the imagination is not entirely accurate but that matters little. It is almost inevitable that the sort of economic, political and intellectual upheaval that Eastern Europe experienced in the last fifteen years should have left many people bewildered and with a feeling of fausse nostalgie, recently dubbed in East Germany or, at least about East Germany, as ostalgie.

I came across its first manifestation even before the upheaval truly happened, in about 1986 at a conference organized by PEN International in London on the subject of translation. Among the many different discussions and presentations there was one about the changes in the circumstances of East European translators as other conditions changed.

I remember an East German translator, whose loudly and extensively voiced complaint was that in the new capitalist culture he and his colleagues had to compete with West German translators who worked to contracts and, therefore, produced translations faster and more smoothly. The implication of his complaint was that these West German hacks were clearly inferior but he showed no evidence of this. The main problem was clearly that he could even then foresee a period when he would have to produce work in accordance with his contract or not get paid; he and his colleagues would have to say good-bye to their comfortable existence as salaried members of the Union of Writers and Translators. Creative freedom was all very well but a good flat, guaranteed holidays and a very acceptable regular income may well be more important.

I heard similar complaints when I went to the then Soviet Union a couple of years later. One writer (unpublished for reasons unknown) who lived in the second flat that his father, a high-ranking member of the Writers' Union had, suggested that I might like to translate his book. I pointed out that translations in Britain were paid for and if I did not get paid I could not live. He was clearly shocked by such capitalist mercantilism. He could afford to be then. One wonders whether he is now suffering from a Russian form of ostalgie or whether he has managed to come to terms with actually having to work for money rather than, as the old East European joke had it, to pretend to work for pretend pay.

It did not, therefore, surprise me when I first read about the latest supposed manifestation of ostalgie, Wolfgang Becker's film Goodbye Lenin. Critics fell over themselves to praise the elegance, sensitivity, political understanding displayed by the director and by the actors. I assumed that a diet of special effects and endless films about adolescents coming to terms with their sexuality had addled their brains to the point when any film that had a plot and a few serious points to make seemed like a work of genius.

I went to see the film fully prepared to come out declaring that if they want the Wall back, well, let them have it. But the film turned out to be unexpectedly better and worse than described. In the first place, I wondered whether I was watching the same film that the critics had seen. The one I watched showed no nostalgia for the old order at all. In fact, the shabbiness of life under Communism was made as clear as the general happiness about the collapse of the Wall, the improved living conditions and, even, the acquisition of "real" money, Western marks. The only people who grumbled about the changes were a few old curmudgeons, clearly well past retirement age, who, nevertheless, adjusted to the new conditions well enough to watch western TV and wear western clothes.

The plot of the film is well known: Alex, a rebellious East German teenager is arrested during the brutal breaking-up of a demonstration. This is witnessed by his mother who has a heart attack. The police are too busy carting youngsters off to the hoosegow to pay attention to a middle-aged woman collapsing in the street and by the time she gets to the hospital she is in a coma. There she stays for eight months while the world changes utterly. When she wakes up, the doctor warns Alex and his sister that she must not be subjected to any shocks. She had been an obnoxiously good Communist and Alex decides that to prevent her having a second heart attack he has to recreate the living conditions that she is used to. This necessitates all sorts of entertaining subterfuges, retrieval of old furniture, mock pioneer songs (sung by a couple of suitably bribed young boys), transference of new western goodies into old East German jars and so on.

As the film progresses it becomes clear that Alex has, indeed, recreated the Communist system in his own little enclosed world, not by using old East German pickle jars or making everyone dress in what his sister describes as "the crap we used to wear" but by building a system that is based entirely on a lie. His sister calls it creepy; his highly intelligent Russian girlfriend points the facts out to him: once you start lying it grows on you. And it does.

The lie gets bigger and bigger as Alex drags more people in by a combination of self-centred bullying and heavy doses of emotional blackmail. Outside, people rejoice while feeling a little scared but in Alex's little world obsessiveness and lying predominates. He no longer allows any kind of deviation. When his sister announces that she is pregnant and intends to move to another flat with her boyfriend and existing child he launches a vicious attack of the kind that would, in the real world, deserve a slap. Interestingly, he never manages to win a reasoned argument with the sister's wessie boyfriend, who shows himself to be a much nicer and more accommodating personality than the supposedly kind and sensitive Alex.

It is Alex who makes the derogatory comments about the ridiculous "benefits" of the reunification but when the film pans out into the world outside the flat the benefits are real. In fact, economic difficulties are not shown at all. Maybe the sister works at Burgerking but there is no indication that she ever liked studying economics and, in any case, what use is a Marxist economics degree anywhere except, maybe, a western university.

There is an interesting little vignette, not mentioned by the critics, but unlikely to have gone unnoted by Germans in the east of the country. Alex's sister, when pregnant, has an ultrasound scan. Her delight and amazement indicates clearly that she had had nothing like that with her first child a year or so previously. This is probably true. Standards of ante-natal care under Communism made one's hair stand on end. It is not only the golden arches that came to East Berlin once the Wall was no longer there.

In the end, the film remains unsatisfactory for a very ordinary reason: the plot goes nowhere after the first hour or so. Two thirds of the way through the film, Alex, his sister, his girlfriend and the sister’s boyfriend find out that the mother has a secret of her own: she knew that her husband was going to stay in the West and had intended to join him with the children. In the end she was too scared to apply for a visa. The world Alex was trying to re-create for her mother, the world for which he has forfeited his own soul and truth, turns out to have been based on a double lie even before his efforts: that of the system and that lived by the mother within the system.

Either the film should have finished there on a note of savage irony or it should have explored what the mother’s admission really entailed. It does neither but meanders on to an unlikely and sentimental conclusion in which Alex creates an artificial "alternative" reunification for his mother's benefit so she can die happy.

It is this "alternative" reunification that has appealed to so many critics in the West, who do not seem to like the reality of the true people’s power that swept away the Wall and all that it had entailed. There is, as it happens, a modicum of doubt in the film about the mother’s final attitude: does she believe Alex or is she going along not to upset him? This, too, remains unexplored. In the end, by taking Alex’s side and accepting his mutterings about how East Germany ought to have ended the film appears to create a lie of its own.

It succumbs to a certain ideological explanation in the teeth of its own evidence. Or maybe not. Could it be that Becker is now using the famous Aesopian language that writers, artists and film-makers employed to circumvent Communist censorship, to tell the truth but also to gratify those western critics who still dislike the truth about Communism and its collapse? After all, if Alex creates a more fitting end for the German Democratic Republic than the one that really happened then the conclusion is inescapable: the fitting end is one that is surrounded by lies.

As the country lived so it should die – not in an outburst of popular joy and songs of freedom but in a rather mean and shabby, distorted little claustrophobic world, created for possibly the best of reasons but built on untruth. If that is what Becker meant then his film is understandably popular in the east of Germany – the people there have always known and understood this. It is also understandably popular with the bien pensants of the West, who are less capable of reading Aesopian language.

And yet, who knows? Perhaps they are right and I am wrong in my interpretation. Perhaps, German film-makers are suffering from ostalgie to the point when they are ready to make films that start off as the truth but fall into a sentimental and untruthful trap.

COMMENT THREAD

The last place you would think of to find yet another example of the effects of an utterly absurd and crass EU regulation might be the sports section of The Daily Telegraph but, today, it provides us with just such an example.

This is the tragi-comedy of attempt to bury the three-time Cheltenham Gold Cup winner, Best Mate, on top of Haldon Hill, where he died two days ago after a suspected heart attack during a race.

What was a noble gesture, for a fine horse that had captured the imagination of many fans, became entangled in red tape when trading standards officers from Devon County Council refused a request from Exeter Racecourse to bury the steeplechaser near the spot where he died.

This means, says the Telegraph, that, unlike most great racehorses before him, who have all been buried at studs, stables, in their paddocks or, in Red Rum's case - by Aintree's winning post - at the scene of their greatest triumph, he will now have to be cremated.

This, as everyone knows, it not actually true because Best Mate could have been disposed of as waste by burial in a landfill approved under Directive 1999/31/EC, this being one of the options provided for by the 108-page EU Animal By-Products Regulation 1774/2002, which came into force on 1 October 2003.

Of course, there is an exemption under the regulations for pets and, according to the Telegraph narrative, officials at Exeter sought permission to respect owner Jim Lewis's wish to bury the great steeplechaser near the spot where he died.

This descended into farce as one government agency after another passed the buck and eventually, after the Environment Agency and DEFRA had had a crack at whether or not burying Best Mate would be “legal”, the question ended up with Devon County Council's TSOs in Exeter.

They had to decide on whether, as a racehorse, Best Mate was defined as a “pet” or "commercial animal." Though the definition of a "pet" is an "animal nurtured by humans but not normally eaten" – something, says the Telegraph, you'd imagine described Best Mate fairly accurately - because we are dealing with EU law, it "must" be interpreted in a "European context". As horses are eaten on the continent the Europeans would regard a racehorse as a commercial animal.

Said Roger Rivett, head of Trading Standards, said: "Since foot and mouth and BSE it has been illegal to bury any fallen stock. They must be disposed of in approved ways. We were not trying to be obstructive, just interpreting the law. We've suggested he be incinerated and his ashes buried. After all 50 percent of humans are cremated these days."

When asked what possible harm there could be in burying such a famous horse 10ft underground, miles from anywhere on top of Haldon Hill, Rivett pointed out the dangers of disease possibly being spread by carrion or seeping into a watercourse. "We're here to enforce the law, not bend it," he concluded. Exeter, it would seem, is plagued by crows with spades.

A day of wrangling with civil servants was just what Best Mate's owner, Jim Lewis, did not need, added the paper. "I understand they had to close various gaps in the law after foot and mouth," Lewis said, "but horses don't get or carry it. It's political correctness gone mad but we'll have to abide by their decision. Ideally I wanted him to be buried today but, to be honest, it's been another torrid day."

However, as anyone will be quick to tell our Jim, the law is the law and must be obeyed. So, denied the opportunity to bury him, Exeter are looking at some sort of permanent memorial. At Cheltenham a statue of Best Mate is likely to be on the agenda at their next board meeting. A suitable race will also be named after Best Mate.

One thing for sure, though, Jim Lewis will not be putting down the EU as his "best mate". I wonder whether the fragrant one will mention it on her blog.

COMMENT THREAD

I listened to the BBC World Tonight news programme on Radio 4 last night, to hear the obligatory headlines about Blunkett, and it was some way down the bulletin before we heard that prime minister Villepin was cancelling a trip to Canada in order to deal with the riots in Paris.

That was it. The main part of the programme was taken up with Claire Balderson in Washington gloating at Bush's approval rating being at "an all-time low" – the BBC's way of celebrating the first anniversary of the president's second term.

Yet, Paris is in its seventh night of riots, with violence now spreading to several suburbs, within a fifteen-minute car ride of the centre, and the police clearly unable to keep control. Last night alone, about 180 cars were set on fire in the greater Paris region and 34 people were arrested.

And, of course, this is immigrant violence, matched by the traditional response from the less than gentle French police, witnessed by Abdel Srhiri, 52, a Moroccan immigrant, whose account was reported by the International Herald Tribune.

Srhiri went for a walk with his family after dinner on Tuesday, when he witnessed riot police firing rubber bullets at local teenagers, who in turn hurled bottles at the officers. "Bullets were flying through the air and there was broken glass - it was war, right here," he said. In his 28 years in France - and in the same neighborhood - he had never seen anything like this. "There is real aggression in the air," he added.

A mere two days ago, my colleague reported on the strange disparity between the low key media reporting of 47 French politicians, 27 of whom can be described as senior, being found guilty of financial malpractice and receiving suspended sentences as well as rather high fines, compared with the orgy of coverage devoted to the indictment of Lewis Libby, former assistant to Vice-President Cheney.

And here we go again. Just imagine the coverage if this level of rioting was happening in downtown Washington. Just think of the commentary little Claire Balderson would be enjoying if, after a full six days of escalating riots, the president had to take time out to appeal for calm, as indeed Chirac had to do yesterday.

The TV would be full of it and the "Washington riots" would be front page of every newspaper, with ponderous articles in The Guardian and Independent about the failure of race relations and the inadequacies of the US capitalist model.

But, of course, this isn't downtown Washington, thousands of miles away. It is in Paris, only just over a hundred from our shores, a neighbour, ally and "partner" in the European Union - champion of the "social model" of which the Guardianistas and the Beebees so approve.

So, what do we get? Down page, down bulletin items and no comment. Ah, come on.

COMMENT THREAD

Just 18 months into their membership of the EU, and the Czechs are not happy bunnies, according to the Czech News Agency. In a survey carried out by the STEM polling agency, clear 41 percent of respondents believe that the European Union affects the life in the Czech Republic more than necessary.

In the 1990s, most Czechs said that the EU had a weak impact on their lives while, eight years ago, only 15 percent said that the EU affected events in the Czech Republic too much.

Mind you, a high number of Czechs also say that the ministers and legislators enjoy an inappropriately high influence in the country. Many Czechs would like to increase the influence of trade unions and municipal authorities, although two thirds of respondents are happy with the presidential office. We wonder why.

COMMENT THREAD

It never rains but it pours. Or whatever the German equivalent is. No sooner has Chancellor-in-waiting Angela Merkel heard of the disappearance of the Social-Democrat Chairman, Franz Müntefering, than she was told that the designated Finance Minister, Edmund Stoiber (left), has decided to remain in Bavarian politics.

In many ways this is quite a good thing, as his baneful influence has been seen in the watering down of all reform proposals that Merkel advocated at the start of her campaign. His replacement in the coalition, Michael Glos, though a senior member of the Christian Social Union (CSU) is unlikely to have the same influence or position.

Herr Stoiber’s immediate excuse was that with Herr Müntefering resigning, the SPD was no longer a predictable political force and could not be relied on to be a reasonable coalition partner.

Will the negotiations conclude by November 12? Will Merkel be formally elected to be Chancellor by the Bundestag on November 22? Can they find their way out of a paper bag? Who can tell?

COMMENT THREAD

The really interesting thing about the continuing "drama" of the Tory leadership contest is how uninteresting it has become – trivial even.

Today we get, according to The Guardian and others, a report that David Davis – whom I believe is one of the contenders – is pledging not one but two EU referendums if he becomes prime minister.

Since Davis is unlikely to become even leader of the opposition, this is largely an academic issue, but it is interesting to see a man offering a policy which, on current estimates would cost the best part of £10 million per go. Hasn't he heard of general elections and manifesto commitments?

Anyhow, for the first referendum – and £10 million - Davis would ask the electorate which powers should be returned from Brussels to Westminster. For the second – at another £10 million – he would ask the if he had delivered on the first.

Despite this, though, Davis insists that withdrawal is not on the agenda. The man simply wants a mandate which would "give us the authority to look the European commission in the eye and say this is the view of the British people".

Needless to say, the BBC immediately pulled Ken Clarke on to the Today programme, to denounce Davis and Mr “Policy Vacuum” Cameron, declaring the Eurosceptic stances of the two Davids as a "whip up our core vote" strategy.

In full flight, Clarke told the BBC listener that: "If the two Davids start competing on the Eurosceptic front, which there is a slight sign that they are, I hope it doesn't mean that the Tories are going to go back to the old, old 'Let's whip up our core vote with rightwing issues' approach to elections.

"Frankly," he said, "that is the way in which we will be choosing a leader of the opposition and no more."

In all probability Clarke is right on this one, althpough not for the reasons stated. Even with (or especially with) Cameron, few but the very optimistic believe that the Tories will win the next election. Even though the Labour government is beginning to look increasingly like the Major government in its dying days – especially with the forced resignation of Blunkett – there is no guarantee that disillusioned Labour voters will switch to the Tories.

We are, effectively, in new territory, where the main opposition part can no longer rely on the disaffected to sweep it into power, so the real political question is what are the Tories going to do when they lose the next election. Then, it will start getting interesting.

COMMENT THREAD

Let no one say we are not catholic in our tastes (that's with a small "c"), or that we don't give you variety. From the deeply disturbing news of selling out our last explosives factory, we now offer a beautifully written piece in Cumbria's Business Gazette about farming in the Lakes.

Called, "Clash of cultures that can really blight lives in real world", it is a variation on the theme of the EU schizophrenia we reviewed a couple of days ago, only in a rural setting. It starts softly, the anonymous author telling us a tale about a tractor:

Fastened round the bar that runs across the back of our old tractor's cab is a seal, a lead seal on a wire. Any farmer would probably recognise it, as it was put on by Defra during FMD to "seal" our tractor and stop it being used except for the licensed movement it was about to make.

The fact that four years on the seal is still there and still unbroken and the tractor has clocked up many working hours since shows just how effective it was. But whoever drafted the regulation hadn't a clue about tractors and the hapless official who was faced with the necessity of "sealing" a tractor merely shrugged and got on with the job knowing full well it was meaningless.

The Wall Street Journal Europe reports with some bemusement that the French Foreign Ministry, the Quai d’Orsay wants to create an “ethics committee” for its diplomatic services. No, it seems the story is not a leg-pull. They really are talking about it.

As the article [available on subscription only] says:

“Certainly the foreign ministry does have a huge PR mess on its hands. A former French ambassador to the United Nations, a former secretary-general of the French foreign ministry, nine other high-ranking Frenchmen as well as a plethora of French companies stand accused of profiting from the U.N.’s corrupt program. While on Saddam Hussein’s bribe-roll, many of these official were ouspokenly opposed to American-led efforts to depose him.”

“Even the most indulgent will wonder about the risks of a pro-Arab policy that was at times willfully blind.”

“If France preserves a pioneering role for the respoect of cultural diversity, if its voice carries in the great conflicts of the world, if our country continues to draw attention and to cause curiosity and admiration, she owes this recognition largely to our diplomacy.”

The German coalition negotiations may be in jeopardy and there are vague talks about the possibility of another election. They will vote and vote until they elect a government.

The latest crisis or possible crisis was caused by the president of the Social Democratic Party, Franz Müntefering, announcing that he would not run for the position again. His anger was caused by the fact that his nominee for the party’s general secretaryship, Kajo Wasserhövel, was defeated by the left-wing former leader of the youth wing, Andrea Nahles.

All in all, this shows a certain fractiousness within the party, with the older generation like Schröder, who is largely out of the game, and Müntefering being shouldered aside by the younger, more extreme left-wing sections. These oppose vehemently the rather tame reforms introduced by Schröder. They will certainly be against any possible reform agenda that the two big parties have to agree on.

The coalition talks are supposed to end on November 12 in time for Angela Merkel to be elected as Chancellor by Parliament. Müntefering had been expected to become Vice Chancellor and Labour Minister. Now all bets are off.

COMMENT THREAD

The only military explosives factory left in the UK is to be closed down, with production possibly moving to Bordeaux France, in a deal between the factory operator BAE Land Systems and the state owned French company Societe Nationale des Poudres et Explosifs (SNPE).

The unit to be closed is the former Royal Ordnance factory in Bridgewater, Somerset, now owned by BAE Land systems. It not only makes explosives for artillery shells, bombs and solid fuel for missiles, but also produces unique components for Britain's nuclear weapons.

The closure is one of two announced by BAE, the other at Chorley, near Preston in Lancashire, which produces ammunition, another facility vital to the security of Britain's defences.

This is part of what has been termed the "rationalisation" of the European missiles and explosives industry, which has already seen a partnership between BAE Systems and Paris based Giat Industries to produce the guns and ammunition for the next generation of British armoured vehicles.

Predictably, in view of the job losses, the move has been condemned by the engineering union Prospect, which said it threatened the supply of ammunition and explosives to the MoD, leaving the UK entirely reliant on foreign suppliers.

Concern has already been expressed by the House of Commons Defence Committee, which has already expressed its concerns over security of supply.

In 2002, it expressed its fears that if Bridgwater was to cease to manufacture then explosives would have to be imported from other suppliers, which would require a very large stockpile of explosives for production purposes.

There was, it felt, an increased risk in safety in transportation from terrorism and normal shipping and road accidents. But, crucially, it was concerned that only by keeping the only military high explosive manufacturing facility in the UK would the government be in total control of its foreign policy.

No foreign government, it said, would be able to interfere with the supply of explosives, as was seen in the Middle East conflict when Belgium refused to send Britain supplies.

Amazingly, though, the MoD has dismissed these concerns, saying of the Bridgewater and Chorley closures that they were "a matter for BAE Systems". Given the implications raised by the Defence Committee, we can only ask whether our government is completely mad?

COMMENT THREAD

A story to make your blood boil comes today from the New Zealand Herald, headed "English test makes NZ nurses sick".

The paper informs us that New Zealand nurses who want to work in Britain now face new hurdles, including having to pass an English language test. And, even though their training is equivalent to the UK regime, they must also complete a 20-day training programme of supervised practice.

The point, of course, is that these new rules apply to all nurses from outside the European Union, but anyone from within the EU, with the requisite qualifications in their own countries – even if they are from non-English speaking states - can apply for work in the UK, and their language skills are not tested.

To require citizens from member states to demonstrate their language skills, or undergo additional testing, would breach the "non-discrimination" rules of the treaties.

For NZ nurses, there is the additional problem that places on the mandatory 20-day courses were in short supply. Says the Herald, about 400 New Zealand nurses go to Britain each year to work and the changes are already deterring some. "It is causing people to reconsider their travel to the UK," says Josephine Wallis, chief executive of recruiting company Geneva Health International.

Associate Professor Judy Kilpatrick, of the Auckland University School of Nursing, said it was "ridiculous" to make New Zealanders pass an English language test.

It is, in fact, more than "ridiculous". It is deeply offensive. Under EU rules, we are required to make our kith and kin – native English-speakers – jump through hoops when someone from, say, Greece, Italy or Spain, with no English and no knowledge of our culture, can walk right in.

We met a similar crass stupidity in 1992 when the EU meat hygiene rules came fully into force, requiring qualified veterinary surgeons to supervise red meat and poultry slaughterhouses while they were operating – at enormous expense. With UK-trained vets in short supply – and unwilling to do slaughterhouse work - we were deluged with young Spanish vets, straight out of training, many of whom could barely speak a word of English (or tell a turkey from a chicken).

I remember one, a young female, who found her first day at a slaughterhouse so difficult that she retreated to the car park and spent the rest of the day, and every day thereafter, sitting in her car reading books – with charges of £60 per hour being levied on the slaughterhouse for her "services".

God, how I loath and detest the European Union, this mad, destructive organisation that forces us to do such utterly stupid things.

COMMENT THREAD