Europe

Monday

James Forsyth

The latest act in Europe’s comic opera

If it was not all so serious, the efforts to save the single currency would be worthy of a comic opera: the Germans could compose the score, the Italians could write the libretto, and the French could take care of the stage directions. The latest IMF-related effort is, perhaps, best described by the website ZeroHedge, which is required reading during these troubled times: “Germany will be responsible for €41.5 bn, France at €31.4 billion, and Italy will need to provide €23.5 billion and Spain another €15 billion. To, you know, bailout Italy and Spain” What is becoming increasingly clear, when you take this news combined with the comments of the

Peter Hoskin

Clegg sets out his stall for 2012

Under cover of discussing the Open Society and its enemies, Nick Clegg today set out his personal agenda for the next year of this government. Indeed, Clegg’s speech to Demos earlier was perhaps the purest distillation of his politics since the big set-piece number he delivered at the Lib Dem conference in 2008. It contained many of the same themes as that earlier speech: ‘social mobility’, ‘civil liberties’, and ‘democracy’. And it added a couple more for good measure: ‘political pluralism’ and ‘internationalism’. The Deputy Prime Minister described these five political impulses as ‘the source of my liberalism’. As for the specifics, there was Tory-baiting to be found in Clegg’s

Mats Persson

Rudd’s straw man argument about our EU membership

As the isolation hysteria over Cameron’s EU veto starts to fade, attention is now shifting to the more existential question of what kind of relationship the UK should have with Europe. In a piece for today’s Times (£), the chairman of Business for New Europe, Roland Rudd — who, incidentally, used to argue passionately in favour of the UK joining the euro — takes aim at those who want Britain to replicate a Norway-style model of European cooperation. Arguing that Norway endures so-called ‘fax machine diplomacy’ — no influence over EU laws that it must nonetheless accept — Rudd says that ‘the choice now is to do what Norway does,

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

Cable: Cameron put political gain ahead of national interest

While we’re on the subject of LibCon divide, it’s worth noting Vince Cable’s remarks to Andrew Marr this morning. The headline above is merely a paraphrase, but it’s pretty close to what the Business Secretary actually said: ‘It was largely political. Certainly the Prime Minister’s got a sort-of short-term boost from it, but it doesn’t actually deal with the long-term fundamental problems in Europe.’ Seems to me that there have been harsher words deployed this week, but few harsher sentiments. In the spirit of, erm, ‘getting on with my job as I always do’, Cable is going especially far in attacking his coalition partners. Vince, as always, remains One to

Saturday

James Forsyth

Another sign of coalition splits over Europe

Coalition tensions over Europe are again threatening to be the story this morning. Nick Clegg has told The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour that Britain has ‘signalled we are happy for them [the Eurozone plus group of countries] to use EU institutions’ to enforce any new treaty they agree between themselves. This is a striking claim given that David Cameron has not publicly said that he would accept this. If the Deputy Prime Minister’s summary of the coalition position is accurate, then Cameron will face criticism from eurosceptics that he is backsliding on his veto. But for all Clegg’s criticism of Cameron handling off the summit, he remains unconvinced by the plans

Friday

James Forsyth

Clegg rebukes French PM

Normally, ‘read-outs’ on telephone calls between members of the British government and their counterparts overseas are fairly bland affairs. But today’s one on a conversation between Nick Clegg and the French Prime Minister Francois Fillon is an exception to this rule. Clegg, we are told, informed the French PM that ‘that recent remarks from members of the French Government about the UK economy were simply unacceptable and that steps should be taken to calm the rhetoric.’ To be sure, there is some more diplomatic language before and after this (the full text is at the bottom of this post) but the willingness of the deputy Prime Minister to be quite

Jonathan Jones

Clegg tries to rebuild EU bridges

What are the Lib Dems up to? On Tuesday, Clegg, Cable, Alexander, Huhne and Laws met with ‘Business for New Europe’, a group of pro-European business leaders, in what the FT describes as as ‘a very public display of engagement with business over Europe’ and the front page of today’s Mail calls ‘plotting to rally business chiefs against Cameron over Europe’. It is, of course, not surprising to see senior Liberal Democrats talking to pro-EU business people and advocating more engagement with Europe. But it does highlight what will be a key goal of the Lib Dem leadership over the next few months: building bridges with Europe, particularly to reconnect

Peter Hoskin

A victory for Labour, but not necessarily for Ed Miliband

‘This result… is a victory for Labour that shows the progress we are making under Ed Miliband’s leadership; a vote of confidence in the way that Labour is changing…’ Or, rather, it isn’t. Whatever Labour’s winning candidate in Feltham and Heston, Seema Malhotra, says, this byelection result was little more than an unsurprising Labour victory in a Labour area. The opinion polls, as we know, show more comprehensively what people think of the ‘progress’ that Labour is making under Ed Miliband’s leadership. And it’s far from a vote of confidence. Which isn’t to say that Malhotra underperformed in her byelection victory, last night. Not at all. Labour actually increased their

Thursday

James Forsyth

The veto arguments rumble on

The Times has a very interesting story (£) today on page 17. It claims that David Cameron had agreed to inform Nick Clegg if it appeared that Britain was going to be isolated at last week’s European Council. The significance of this is that it suggests that the Lib Dems believed they would be consulted before the government vetoed anything. This news emerges after senior Liberal Democrats have privately questioned why their leader did not insist that Cameron only use the veto once he had Clegg’s explicit agreement. The Times also reports that this negotiating protocol did not envisage a situation where Britain was left in a minority of only

Wednesday

Mats Persson

26 versus 1 — really?

Judging from much of the coverage in UK media, you would be forgiven for thinking that Britain is on the fast track to becoming the North Korea of Europe — eccentric and completely isolated from the rest of the world. Indeed, the media narrative over the past couple of days has largely treated the agreement reached at the summit as concrete, supported in full by everyone apart from Britain. Or ‘27-minus’, as Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso put it. The reality, of course, is quite different. Leaving aside whether Cameron could have played his cards better (he could have), as Gideon Rachman pointed out in yesterday’s FT, ‘the picture of

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Polls Back David Cameron

Brother Korski is, as always, the voice of urbane reason on all matters european. I have little idea whther David Cameron done brilliant in Brussels lately or whether he’s blundered badly. Neither verdict seems satisfactory or sufficiently nuanced. There is this, however: in one respect he has done the rest of europe a favour: had he agreed to a new treaty he would have been forced to hold a referendum in Britain and it is hard to see how any treaty, be it ever so favourable to Britain, could have passed. Cue more diplomatic shenanigans and assorted other awkwardness in Brussels. By standing aside Cameron may have “isolated” Britain but

Peter Hoskin

Labour reach out to the Lib Dems (again)

Others have already been there, but it’s still worth noting Douglas Alexander’s article for the lastest issue of the New Statesman. Much of it, it’s true, is a predictable attack on David Cameron’s recent activity in Brussels. But slightly more surprising is the fact that, rather than criticising the coalition in toto, Alexander saves his ire for the Tories and reaches out to the Lib Dems. Here’s the relevant passage: ‘The roots of what happened on the night of Thursday 8 December lie deep in Cameron’s failure to modernise the Tory party. Just because he puts party interest before the national interest, there is no reason others should do the

Daniel Korski

Was the PM reasonable?

As the effects of last week’s European Council become clear, debate about the rights and wrongs of David Cameron’s diplomacy hinge on one question: were his demands ‘reasonable and modestly expressed’, as a source in No 10 put it to me? Everyone knows that there were chronic failures in the run-up to the meeting itself. I laid a few of them out in an earlier post, but, basically, they amount to a failure of prioritisation: the UK eroded the goodwill it needed by fighting tooth-and-nail on every issue beforehand, thereby blocking things that other EU states care about but which are not important, except symbolically, to the British. International —

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Where we are now

Reading through the paper’s this morning, it’s even clearer that we didn’t learn much from that marathon Europe debate yesterday. But here are my thoughts, anyway, on where it leaves us: 1) Ed Miliband lacked credibility from the outset. As Malcolm Rifkind put it, he’s had three days to work out whether he’d have signed that Treaty or not — and he still can’t make his mind up. God knows Cameron is vulnerable on this, but he won’t be hurt being attacked for indecision by a man who still cant make any decisions. 2) Clegg’s misjudgment, cont? First, Clegg backed Cameron after the veto. Now, he says he disagrees with

Monday

James Forsyth

Clegg ducks Cameron’s conciliatory speech

The text of David Cameron’s statement on the European Summit was clearly designed as balm for the coalition’s wounds. He devoted a large chunk of it to defending Britain’s membership of the European Union in a clear effort to reassure the Lib Dems about the future direction of European policy. But this effort was rather undermined by the absence of the deputy Prime Minister. This was, predictably,  the story of the session. In response to repeated Labour questions about where Clegg was, Cameron replied ‘I’m not responsible for his whereabouts. I’m sure he is working very hard.’ Nick Clegg has now given a TV interview in which he has escalated

Jonathan Jones

Good news from Brussels

While the debate over Europe rumbles on, it’s worth highlighting one bright spot in the OBR’s recent document of doom which has largely slipped past Westminster’s radar: by their forecasts, we will pay the EU £2 billion less this year than we were expecting to in March. Instead of the £9 billion ‘net contribution to the EU budget’ forecast for 2011-12 nine months ago, the OBR now estimates it’ll be £6.9 billion. That represents a 17 per cent real terms cut on the £8.1 billion we paid last year, instead of an 8 per cent increase: Why the reduction? The OBR gives a few reasons:  By themselves, each of these

Peter Hoskin

Cameron’s winning the popularity contest over Europe

It’s no surprise that David Cameron’s actions in Brussels last week appear to be popular with the voting public, but it is significant nonetheless. The Times is carrying a Populus poll today (£) which suggests just how difficult Labour and the Lib Dems will find it to recapture ground over the Continent. 57 per cent of respondents say that ‘David Cameron was right to exercise Britain’s veto’, against only 14 per cent who believe he was wrong to do so. And it turns out that 49 per cent of the folk who voted Lib Dem at the last election support the PM too. With one particular exception (which we shall

Sunday

Daniel Korski

The government’s Sarkozy problem (and other euro dilemmas)

This week’s European Council meeting has been analysed by diplomats and commentators alike, but a number of issues have not been brought out as clearly as they need to be. The first is that Britain will now achieve political advantage, at the cost of economic setback, if the euro collapses. Although the government insists both that it is still wedded to the success of the euro and that it will not be isolated in Europe now or in the future, the simple fact is that eurofailure will ensure that efforts to organise among the 26, rather than the full 27, will finish. The economic costs would be considerable — possibly

Peter Hoskin

The coalition’s latest anxiety attack

It is starting to feel like the build-up to the AV referendum again, if not worse. No longer the casual bonhomie of the coalition’s early days, but a great show of mutual distrust and loathing between the Lib Dems and Tories. There was Nick Clegg’s interview on the Marr Show earlier, of course, which James has already blogged about. There are rumours that Vince Cable is set to quit. And there is also Paddy Ashdown’s caustic article in the Observer, which he has followed by attacking, Major style, the Tory ‘bastards’ on Sky this morning. For their part, many of those ‘bastards’ are looking on at the Lib Dems’ pain

Saturday

Mats Persson

Ten myths about Cameron’s EU veto

The EU veto that Cameron pulled in the early hours of Thursday morning has been widely misunderstood on all sides. Here are the 10 most common myths: 1. Because of Cameron’s veto, Britain lost a seat at the negotiating table. Not true. The UK was never itself going to take part in the Merkozy pact (and potentially be subject to EU sanctions), and therefore not in the monthly, parallel EU meetings that will begin in January, either. Even if he had approved the Treaty changes, Cameron still would not have had a seat at the table. Wider political challenges aside, the veto didn’t change anything structurally in terms of UK