Eu

How a Polish coal mine risks derailing the EU’s climate strategy

Cracks are appearing in the EU’s climate strategy. An international dispute over the court-ordered closure of a coal mine on the Poland-Czech Republic border has thrown divisions over how to phase out fossil fuels into sharp relief, leading to the first ever environment-related lawsuit between two EU member states. The Czech Republic has taken Poland to the European Court of Justice to oppose the extension of a licence for the Turów coal mine on Poland’s south-western border with the Czech Republic and Germany. The Czech government said that continued operations at the mine constitute a risk to the health of Czechs living nearby due to air pollution and reduced groundwater supplies. The ECJ

Tim Martin isn’t a Brexit hypocrite

Heinz is expanding a huge factory in the UK. Tesla is reportedly scouting the north for locations for a new car or battery plant. Even the pound is bouncing to three-year highs.  It has been a difficult few weeks for some hardcore Remainers. Still, at least there is finally something to cheer them up. Tim Martin, the pugnacious founder of the pub chain JD Wetherspoon argued today that the government should relax immigration rules to ease a shortage of labour.  For the dwindling band of believers in the EU, it was a gotcha moment. At last, one of the leading backers of our departure from the EU was experiencing some ‘Bre-mourse’.

Wolfgang Münchau

Is the euro area at risk of an inflation surge?

If you like a snapshot of a bang-on target, this is it: headline inflation in the euro area for May came in at 1.99 per cent on an annual basis, which gives a whole new meaning to close to, but below 2 per cent. The number itself, however, is entirely meaningless.  As ever, the more important number is the core rate of inflation, which excludes energy, food and alcohol, and which shows no sign of breaking out its range of around 1 per cent. But even the core rate is subject to some noise. For example, the pandemic-related cut in the VAT rate during the second half of last year

Brexit Britain can capitalise on the breakdown in EU-Swiss talks

It is a leading player in finance, and it’s companies are giants in life sciences and consumer goods. There were already lots of similarities between the Swiss and British economies, except that they are quite a bit richer and more successful than we are. Now we have something else in common: we have both been frozen out of the European Union’s Single Market. But hold on. Isn’t there an opportunity there as well? In truth, this would be the perfect moment to offer the Swiss a deal that would work for both sides – a common market. The Swiss have always had a fractious relationship with the EU. It has

The EU is overplaying its hand on Northern Ireland

The EU’s decision to take control of the vaccine programme was hardly a roaring success. The eurozone’s economy remains stuck in recession. And the EU’s foreign policy is a mess, as events in Belarus have just made clear.  Still, despite the evidence that she isn’t very good at managing anything, no one can argue that the European Union’s president Ursula von der Leyen lacks self-confidence. Last night, she made it clear there could be no possible compromise over the Northern Ireland protocol. The trouble is that she could easily bring the whole trade deal between the EU and the UK crashing down. As so often, the EU is overplaying its

The Belarus hijacking reveals the West’s complacency

On Sunday evening an act of appalling state kidnapping took place over the skies of Europe. Four alleged KGB officers and a Soviet-era MIG-29 fighter jet forced a Ryanair flight, travelling between two EU capitals, to divert to Minsk. The hijacking was a carefully planned, outrageous operation. The Belarusian KGB (sadly not an anachronism) had claimed there was an explosive device onboard, but their real target was Roman Protasevich, a 26-year-old journalist. Protasevich is the founder of the NEXTA telegram channel, which supported and covered the anti-government protests that erupted in Belarus last August after falsified presidential elections. The journalist was arrested alongside his fiancée, with footage emerging late Monday

Israel, Palestine and the EU’s humiliating attempt at diplomacy

This week, Hungary defied Brussels and refusing to back a joint EU declaration on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The bland EU statement calling for an end to the violence was underwhelming in itself – but with Hungary rejecting the bloc’s ‘one-sided’ approach, Brussels has been left embarrassed by its inability to coordinate a unanimous response to the fighting. The proposed statement from the bloc’s foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell read, ‘the priority is the cessation of all violence and the implementation of a ceasefire’, and said that: ‘we support the right to defence for Israel and the right to security – also for the Palestinians – and we consider that security

Boris must stand up to farmers – and back the Australia trade deal

Farms will be devastated. The countryside will be ruined. And we will all be forced to eat weird food that will probably kill us. As the government tries to finalise a free trade deal with Australia, there are already reports of fierce rows over the future of agriculture played out against a backdrop of a angry backlash from the farming lobby.  It’s time for the government so face up to these critics. True, farming is not crucial to the future of the British economy, and neither, as it happens, is trade with Australia. But the principle is important – and if the UK doesn’t embrace free trade then leaving the EU

France needs Britain more than ever

‘What is grave about this situation, Messieurs, is that it is not serious’, was how General de Gaulle addressed his cabinet following the attempted putsch des généraux in April 1961. That could equally apply to recent Franco-British ructions over fishing rights in the Channel Islands. It is mere gesture politics, for all the French retaliatory threats to cut off the electricity supply to Jersey, the British dispatch of two Royal Navy vessels and the French countering with two patrol boats. Behind the facade France and Britain are serious military and diplomatic allies bound by important and wide-ranging security treaties that go beyond just Nato. But it is the French who have

Sturgeon can’t hide the economic costs of Scexit

Might the 2020s be the seismic decade in which the post-war consensus, that liberal democracies do not and should not break apart, is broken? Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon certainly thinks so. Her lifelong quest to break up Britain must feel closer than ever after winning last week’s Holyrood elections. But there are hurdles yet to be cleared. Sturgeon insists on an exact repeat of the process that took place after Alex Salmond won an SNP majority in 2011 – even though she did not manage to replicate his success, achieving instead another minority administration. As in the 2011 to 2014 period, she wants the referendum booked and in the

Watch: von der Leyen’s vaccine amnesia

How well has the EU dealt with the pandemic? According to Ursula von der Leyen, the bloc’s performance has been world beating. In an address yesterday, the Commission president lauded her own performance while claiming that the EU had proven its detractors wrong. During her so-called ‘state of the union’, she said: We all heard the nagging questions, especially in the first months of this pandemic: aren’t nation states better equipped to fight this crisis? Isn’t our union of 27 too slow to react? And our processes too cumbersome and our stakeholders too diverse? Today I am here to say: Europe has proven these claims wrong…Most importantly we decided to procure vaccines

Michel Barnier’s Brexit diary shows he needs a lesson in diplomacy

David Davis was ‘truculent’. Dominic Raab was ‘almost messianic’. Theresa May was ‘rigid. While Boris Johnson kept asking to borrow a tenner and whether it would be okay if Carrie joined the meeting.  Okay, I made that last one up, but the rest are among the startling revelations contained in Michel Barnier’s Brexit diary, published in France this week, and due to come out in the UK in the autumn.  Why is Barnier publishing a diary at all? After all, shouldn’t the negotiations have remained confidential? From the extracts so far, ‘The Great Illusion’, to give it is full-title, seems to be fairly standard Europhile stuff. Indeed, if you are

Why is Ursula von der Leyen still talking about Sofagate?

Almost a month has passed since the now infamous ‘sofa-gate’ incident where, during a meeting with Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan, Ursula von der Leyen was not provided with a chair. Instead she was forced to sit on a nearby sofa. And yet it is this event – rather than Europe’s ongoing vaccine woes – that seems to be at the forefront of the president of the European Commission’s thoughts. Von der Leyen used a speech given to the European Parliament to reiterate accusations of sexism over sofa-gate. The president did everything she could to drive home her feminist message, concluding that:  ‘I am the president of the European commission. And this

The EU will regret suing AstraZeneca

Well, that will teach them to go around manufacturing a vaccine against a global virus at cost price, and at record speed. The European Union has today said it is planning to take legal action against the pharmaceuticals conglomerate AstraZeneca for failing to deliver enough doses of the Oxford shot on time.  No doubt European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and her team are planning to be exonerated. They will finally be able to demonstrate that the whole vaccine debacle, for which the Commission has taken so much flak, and which has already caused thousands of unnecessary deaths across continent, was all the fault of the Anglo-Swedish company. No doubt the untrustworthy

The nationalists’ vaccine fallacy

The trouble with nationalism of any and every sort is that, in the end, it eats your brain. As evidence of this we may simply note Nicola Sturgeon’s assertions this week that the success of Britain’s vaccination programme should in no way encourage the thought an independent Scotland might have struggled to match this happy development. According to Sturgeon, there is ‘absolutely no evidential basis to say Scotland would not have vaccinated as many people as we’ve vaccinated right now’ if it were an independent state. This is, to use the technical term, bollocks on a tartan pogo-stick. It would be vastly closer to the truth to argue the contrary,

Beijing is quietly challenging Brussels

The new agreement between China and the US on climate change, announced this week, contained the usual worthy overtures. Both nations reasserted their commitment to fighting the ‘climate crisis’ by ‘co-operating with each other and with other countries.’ But can the West really take the Chinese Communist party at its word? Judging by Beijing’s activity in the Western Balkans, the answer is a resounding no. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chinese state-owned energy companies have built four coal power plants since 2010, with a further four planned – made possible by the Chinese Development Bank. Europe’s political elites haven’t yet grasped how Beijing’s growing influence in the region is being used

Wolfgang Münchau

The Brexit bounce is underway

The collapse in UK-EU trade after 1 January was widely reported. What has not been reported nearly as much is that UK exports have made a near-complete recovery. They were up 46.6 per cent in February after falling by 42 per cent in January. Imports are not there yet. They were up 7.3 per cent in February after a fall of 29.7 per cent in January. The one prediction I am happy to make is that they will recover too.  What these and other numbers are telling us is that even this bit of the Brexit scare stories will not come true. If you look at the latest IMF data

Juncker’s Brexit delusion

Regrets? It turns out he has a few. The former president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker does not seem too bothered by the EU’s miserable growth rate during his time in office, its geopolitical marginalisation, or indeed the growing power of corporate lobbyists in Brussels. But there is one thing that makes him at least a little sad. Not deploying the formidable force of his personality to swing the British referendum behind staying in the EU. Juncker now reckons the former PM’s judgement was a couple of bottles short of a full case In an interview this week, Juncker revealed that David Cameron told him to keep out of

The EU needs to stop playing politics with law

The Lugano convention – part of a tapestry of complicated international law agreements ensuring the courts of one country recognise the courts of another – has a dull name but it matters a great deal. Since the EU referendum, the convention has played a small role in the great internecine conflict between Britain and Brussels. Much energy has been wasted in this series of pointless bust-ups. And now, the EU is determined to use the Lugano convention – a playing field it claims to control – to ensure Britain pays a price for Brexit, by effectively blocking us from rejoining the convention. Why does this matter? Because without the convention,

The Northern Ireland Protocol is untenable

The process that delivered us the Northern Ireland Protocol already seems to have been rewritten in official memory. It suits most parties involved to pretend the outcome was inevitable. For Brussels, it helps them defend an arrangement designed to ‘protect the peace’ which is instead corroding loyalist support for the Belfast Agreement. For those in London, it is infinitely preferable to pretend that they were honouring the UK’s ‘obligations under the Good Friday Agreement’ rather than own one of the most abject episodes of British diplomacy in recent memory. It also helps to shift the blame onto preferred targets. So Boris Johnson gets execrated for lying to unionists about his