The ostrich strategy (European edition)

The European elections will be on us before we know it so it was pleasing to find a well produced leaflet from my MEP on the mat with the strap-line “reporting back to you in 2009″.  While not strictly a campaign leaflet, it’s timing cannot be accidental!

Unfortunately, the early promise is not sustained; the stories covered are:

• Saving post offices – MEP working with local campaigners and councillors to save them.
• Campaigning for investment – MEP again with a councillor and blaming the local Labour council for false starts on regeneration.
• Renewable energy and recycling – the new three-bin recycling is proving popular with residents in the flagship Lib Dem council in the area and is endorsed by MEP.
• Fighting a local landfill site – MEP represented residents after the site operator breached four of its operating conditions.
• Home heating – MEP says cavity and loft insulation should be a government priority to save energy and prevent climate change.
• Green jobs – our MEP has negotiated a Directive which will ensure that 20% of all EU energy comes from renewable sources by 2020.
• Standing up for consumers – MEP has reported EasyJet to the CAA after passengers complained the airline has not been complying with EU rules when flights are delayed or cancelled.

All good stuff no doubt but mainly relevant for a local council election.   The European dimension – where it exists at all - is extremely weak and confined to low level complaint handling or legislating that specified outcomes MUST happen by a safely remote future date.

Now I’ve no beef with the MEP concerned who is a thoroughly decent and hardworking individual and who recently circulated a newsletter to members in the region which actually mentions some European issues.   

What I DO have a beef with is a Party and a campaign that is afraid to speak its name; that succeeds in almost entirely avoiding Europe and which, when it does tangentially mention Europe, has no narrative whatsoever – no concept of how Europe fits into the scheme of things.   There not even a basic awareness that different tiers of government have different responsibilities – and that this matters.   Just how stupid do we think the voters are?

We have gone from the uncritical enthusiasm for all things Euro of a few years ago to a kind of embarrassed silence while hoping that no-one will notice.  Yes, it’s the ostrich strategy.

We do not support Labour simply because they are the government and we support democracy.  So why do we support everything EU however bad, however abusive of power and position, simply because we support the idea of a pan-European government to handle pan-European issues? 

I passionately support the concept of a European Union that is constitutionally mandated to take responsibility for those things (and only those things) that national or local government cannot effectively handle.   I reject the notion that the (socialist-inspired) gravy train version of the EU we now have is the only option.  What nonsense!

It’s not even as if there were any shortage of EU-relevant themes (some of which might even prove electorally popular) that we might usefully adopt, for instance:

• Democracy in Europe - bullying small nations to vote again until they get the ‘right’ answer is no way to behave.  Whatever its rights and wrongs the Lisbon Treaty is dead by the Irish vote.  Had Britain and France been allowed to vote, both countries would have massively rejected it.  This makes a mockery of any claim to legitimacy.
• Reforming the CAP – it should be ‘repatriated’ leaving each country to make its own arrangements.  I know this would cause apoplexy in Paris and be vetoed, but so what?  Silence can only be construed as tacit support for a scheme that taxes ordinary people to subsidise (mainly) large landowners.  From Antony Hook I learn that Labour has vetoed a limit on payments to rural oligarchs.   Brown should be made to pay for this at the polls.
•  Reforming fisheries – the EU regime was not actually intended to cause massive damage to both fish and fisheries – it just happens to work like that with (at times) simultaneous subsidies for new boats and restrictions to preserve fish stocks.  Clever stuff!
• Reforming Brussels – the nonsense of EU accounting (or lack of!) and its profligate ways is a target the size of a barn and Lib Dems actually have a good story to tell following good work to expose abuses.   So why keep quiet about it?

All this would be bad enough if it began and ended with Europe but it doesn’t;  there is obviously ‘cross talk’ between themes in Europe and themes in domestic politics.  How can anyone take Liberal Democrats seriously when democracy in Europe is not central to their agenda?  What are we to make of a Party that proclaims its commitment to fairness but in practice has nothing to say about oligarchs?

Others are not so confused.  UKIP have a perfectly clear, if entirely detestably, narrative.   Now Libertas has entered the fray as a pro-Europe Party committed to “creating a new democratic and open European Union. … A Europe for and of the people” – a far more liberal vision of European possibilities than any articulated by Cowley Street.

Europe should be a positive for us but we need some coherent leadership to get to that point.

Trouble with sheep

In difficult times it is good to know that all levels of government  are working tirelessly to help businesses both large and small.

I wish!

In reality it is all too often the exact opposite as the latest EU nonsense demonstrates.

The bEUrocrats have got it into their heads that all sheep should be electronically tagged so that they can more easily be traced when moved so helping prevent the spread of disease.

This may sound like a perfectly sensible plan – but it’s not.  There’s a perfectly adequate scheme already in place and the new EU regulations will add considerably to farmers’ costs for a system they say will not work on the ground.   EU officials have just been on a week long trip to Britain to consider the problems.   Yet, as the National Sheep Association (NSA), explains:

It is so frustrating that the EU officials when pushed are still not able to identify a single animal disease situation where individual recording of sheep identities would reduce disease spread. All we have shoved down our throats as a sheep industry is that this is all about coping better with disease outbreaks yet no one can tell the sheep farmers who will have to live with it how it will make a difference.

So there’s the plan:  impose a scheme that will cost a ruinous amount of money, will not work in practice and has no useful purpose. 

Great!

The NSA concede that Defra and the government are  not keen to see these regulations introduced but they are clearly not in the driving seat.  Other EU member states recognise that the regulations would harm some of their rural areas but do not have such an important sheep industry so this is not high on their agenda.

Now I have no connections to farming whatsoever so I have no personal axe to grind, but it stikes me that these sheep are like the proverbial canary in the coal mine – so to speak!   They are flashing us a warning.

Firstly, government has no business to be taking away someone’s livelihood (even if only by carelessness or negligence) without a strong overriding reason – usually that what they are doing is criminal, dangerous or similar.   In this instance it’s the EU in the frame but just as often it’s Whitehall or a local authority – for instance by imposing parking charges on the high street without at the same time imposing them on supermarkets and out of town shopping centres. 

Secondly, this is yet another example of the ‘big is beautiful/might is right’ philosophy that has taken over New Labour.  As we have seen, they can be very fast to act when it’s Big Banks, Big Oil, Big Auto etc. but who is to speak for the rest of us?  It may be ‘only’ sheep farming today, but tomorrow it will be some other sector, and another the day after, and …

Thirdly, it gives the lie to the promised principle of subsidiarity that is supposed to guide the EU (the idea that things should be done by the lowest practical tier of government).  If subsidiarity were indeed a principle then please someone explain why it is absolutely necessary for policy with respect to sheep to be made in Brussels.   Air pollution I could understand, but sheep!

Each of these points in its own way conflicts with every Liberal principle I know so that leaves a strong message for Lib Dems MPs and MEPs.

1. Wake up and smell the coffee. 
2. Stop this bad scheme.
3. If you can’t stop it then campaign vigorously against it and explain to the rest of us what you propose to do about the democratic deficit this would reveal.
4. If you can’t do (2) or (3) then expect to loose votes to UKIP.

For the avoidance of doubt I should perhaps explain that I strongly support the ideal of a European Union – but one that is devolved and democratic and actually puts people first which is very far from what we have now.

So, rather than cheer-leading for the existing nonsense, can we please have some constructive thinking on what sort of Liberal EU constitution we would like to see.  I don’t for a minute suppose that anything we might come up with would appeal to the conservative and socialist groups but you never know – if we have a plan and they don’t we are in a very strong position to push for it.

After the Referendum

As an ardent supporter of the ideal of the EU, I am delighted that the Irish have trashed the Lisbon Constitution (aka Treaty). In doing so, they have spoken for the many, including us Brits, who have not been allowed a vote.

For around 20 years I have been arguing that while I support the ideal of the EU, I could not in conscience, support this particular direction of constitutional evolution because it is, quite simply, fundamentally illiberal and undemocratic, centralizing and elitist.

Emerging reaction to the Irish vote only serves to underline this. As the BBC’s Mark Mardell notes in his blog:

But what will happen next? People are starting to back one of three options:

Ireland votes again;
Abandon Lisbon;
Move ahead without Ireland.

Luxembourg’s foreign minister has suggested that Ireland could be given assurances about defence and abortion: a clear prelude to a second vote.

The new Italian foreign minister, former commissioner Franco Frattini, said as he went in that the referendum was “a cold shower, but Europe does not stop for this”. Perhaps that is close to the third position.

Sadly, this is just as one has come to expect and continues a thoroughly ignoble tradition of carrying on regardless of public opinion, the rights of smaller countries and even the law.

The difficulty is that the EU has just grown like topsy from its beginnings as a very limited arrangement between just 6 countries in the 1950s. But the arrangements that its founders put in place back then are simply not scalable to a Europe of vastly greater ambitions and 27 members operating in the very different World of the 21st Century.

The EU establishment has simply not understood this ‘lack-of-scalability’ adequately, nor has it been able to suggest any alternative constitution to address it. (Arguably, the vested interests are such that they have little interest in alternatives which would inevitably upset their gravy-filled trough).

That is why they are so desperately trying to get the Lisbon Treaty adopted by fair means or foul – now mainly foul. But increasingly, I think the public does understand, albeit often in a confused way, that the EU is not working as it should, that it is too centralized, undemocratic and opaque. In short, it needs a restart with a radically different constitutional approach – one that is decentralized, democratic and transparent and which democrats of all stripes would be happy to support.

Those who cannot imagine any other plan, or indeed even that there COULD BE another plan, are in a terrible bind – soldier on in defiance of public opinion, law and common sense or give up on the whole European Project.

However, I sense that at long last there is a mood to think new and radical thoughts about Europe’s future. Am I right?