Eu

Von der Leyen’s latest diplomatic faux pas

Ursula von der Leyen isn’t particularly keen on diplomatic protocol. Earlier this year, in a bid to get EU hands on British bound vaccines, the Commission announced its intention to implement a hard Northern Irish border — without bothering to tell either Dublin or Belfast. (Naturally, that fit of international irreverence was blamed on a Brussels subordinate).  Then we had sofagate, which overshadowed what should have been a show of European strength in the face of Turkish President Erdogan. VdL instead decided to take the opportunity to make a fuss about a chair being offered to a man — despite Council President Charles Michel’s superiority to her in the EU’s order of precedence.  Now the haughty

Gavin Mortimer

France’s growing German scepticism

Britain’s favourite Frenchman, Michel Barnier, is in the Calais region today where he will address a conference about his part in Brexit and perhaps give a further indication as to his presidential aspirations. The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator was described in yesterday’s Le Figaro as the man who can ‘unite the right’ and in doing so present a credible alternative to Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in 2022. Barnier presides over a political initiative called Patriotes et européens and he explained its concept to Le Figaro: ‘Patriot and European, this means that I believe in the force of the nations, the respect of national identities and France as a country of

Letters: There’s nothing libertarian about vaccine passports

Taking liberties Sir: I feel that Matthew Parris is absolutely wrong about liberty (‘The libertarian case for vaccine passports’, 10 April). True liberty is that each individual has the possibility to live their life how they desire (within the law), taking full responsibility for any and all the risks they incur. I am not responsible for anyone else’s health. To say that we have to stay indoors, wear masks, observe social distancing or have vaccinations because we would be killing others if we did not is blackmail. If you use the logic that the individual is responsible for the health of all other people then everyone who owns a car

Mon dieu! Our French residency permits have arrived

For EU nationals living in Britain and wanting to legally remain after Brexit, a letter or an email was enough to clinch it. It would have been churlish then for France not to reciprocate by relaxing its almost hallucinatory bureaucratic requirements for the British in France, allowing them to do the same. And to the astonishment of all, it did relax them. Catriona made an initial attempt to obtain a residency permit three years ago. She went for an exploratory interview at the nearest prefecture. A long wait in a squalid, packed waiting room, followed by the vituperative rudeness of the functionary traumatised her. Never again, she said. Sod that.

Ross Clark

Britain is closing its trade gap with the EU

So it was just a blip after all. Remember those huge headlines last month revealing that exports to the EU had plunged by 41 per cent in January, leading frustrated remainers to bleat: we told you so? ‘Brexit – the unfolding disaster’ tweeted Lord Adonis for one, along with a graph showing the sharp fall in January. Now we have the figures for February, which has been reported rather less loudly, but which show just as strong a rebound. Exports in goods to the EU in February, records Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, were 56 per cent up on those in January. They are still down 11.6 per cent on February 2020, but

The West’s shameful Iranian capitulation

On a sweltering day in July 2018, German police pulled over a scarlet Ford S-Max hire car that was travelling at speed towards Austria. The driver, Assadollah Assadi, the third secretary to the Iranian embassy in Vienna, was arrested at gunpoint and taken into custody. Although unusual, there was a good reason for detaining the diplomat: Assadi had used his immunity to smuggle a bomb on a commercial airliner from Tehran to Austria, intending to carry out what would have been one of Europe’s worst atrocities in recent years. Once in Vienna, he had handed the device — codenamed the ‘Playstation’ — to two married Belgian-Iranian agents, Amir Saadouni and

EU commissioner says Britain’s vaccine success is down to Brussels

Europe’s vaccine rollout has been a chastening experience for many in Brussels with the World Health Organisation describing it last week as ‘unacceptably slow’. So Mr S was intrigued to read an interview in Der Spiegel today with Thierry Breton, the EU’s Commissioner for Internal Market, in which the top official appeared to take credit for Britain’s vaccination scheme. Both at home and overseas, the UK procurement and rollout of the vaccines been widely seen as a success, with credit mostly going to the taskforce led by Kate Bingham. Not so, according to a bullish Breton, who claimed credit for all the vaccines produced in factories which happened to be

Can Spain’s Europhilism last?

‘Suppose a man be carried, whilst fast asleep, into a room where there is a person he longs to see and speak with; and be there locked fast in … he awakes, and is glad to find himself in so desirable company, which he stays willingly in … I ask, is not this stay voluntary? I think nobody will doubt it: and yet, being locked fast in, it is evident … he has not freedom to be gone.’ Happy in a room he cannot leave, the man John Locke imagined during his musings on free will might almost be a metaphor for contemporary Spain in the European Union. Awakening from

The economic cost of the EU’s vaccine catastrophe

It didn’t order enough vaccines, spent too little money, dithered over authorisation and then lashed out at the companies making them. Over the last few weeks, the catastrophe of the European Union’s vaccine roll-out has become painfully clear to everyone. We are already starting to see the toll it is taking on the continent’s health, with a brutal third wave sweeping across mainland Europe as new variants hit an unvaccinated population, and with fresh lockdowns, overflowing hospitals, and death tolls still climbing as they fall dramatically elsewhere. And yet there is also a second stage to that crisis – an economic catastrophe – that is just getting started. The EU

John Keiger

What a Le Pen win would mean for Brussels

A Marine Le Pen victory in a year’s time can no longer be ruled out. Other than opinion polls regularly pointing to her place in the second round as a certainty, a few, such as Harris Interactive on 7 March, put her on the cusp of winning the second round with 47 per cent to Macron’s 53 per cent — a dramatic improvement on her 2017 score of 34 to Macron’s 66.  The traditional republican front against the radical right is crumbling and the stigma of voting Le Pen is diminishing. More of the electorate are coming round to the Rassemblement National’s views on national sovereignty, immigration, crime and security, and — with Brussels’s

Letters: The inconsistencies of Mormonism

A leap of faith Sir: I live not far from the ‘London Temple’ of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most summers, the local streets are trodden by American Mormon missionaries, polite teenagers who occasionally approach to ask if we know Jesus Christ. Some years ago, I read the book on which the new Netflix series Murder Among the Mormons (‘Latter-day sinners’, 3 April) appears to be based. So when I was accosted by a couple of missionaries, I was able to ask them why the practice of polygamy, so avidly promulgated by the founder of their church, Joseph Smith, had been abandoned. My interviewee explained that Smith

Salmond could spark a nationalist war over Europe

There was a Scooby Doo moment in Alex Salmond’s campaign launch on Tuesday. Something that made me think: ‘Ruh-roh’. The new leader of the Alba party was setting out his stall ahead of the 6 May Holyrood election and concentrating mostly on tactics. Voting for the SNP in the constituencies and Alba on the proportional list ballot, he contended, could elect a Scottish parliament with a ‘supermajority’ for independence. Thereafter — in fact, in week one of that new parliament — he would expect the Scottish government to open negotiations with Whitehall for the dismantling of the United Kingdom. He was not averse to another referendum like the one he

What should go in the Brexit museum?

Have you ever wondered what happened to Boris Johnson’s Brexit bus? One might think such a large, controversial item would be too conspicuous to vanish into the ether, but for the life of me, I have no idea where it is. Yes, I know, red buses aren’t exactly a novelty in the UK, being the favoured mode of transport of Liverpool footballers, the loud actor fellow who was in Lewis, and most of the city of London. Perhaps it’s decided to leave its infamy behind and hide in plain sight, and is currently ferrying people from Hammersmith to Chiswick. But that particular bus shouldn’t be left to a quiet, mundane

Boris has a trump card in denying Sturgeon an ‘illegal’ referendum

Amidst all the dry economic arguments, one of the more emotive fronts on which the 2016 referendum was fought was whether Brexit could lead to the dissolution of the Union. Some Remainers made the argument that dragging Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland out ‘against their will’ would turbocharge support for independence. Unionists such as myself – who ended up on the Leave side – saw it differently: EU membership was actually making it easier for the SNP to sell separation as a low-risk proposition. Shared membership of the EU would, after all, allow Scotland as a newly-independent country to enjoy relatively normal social and economic relations with England. While the SNP did its best to weaponise

Letters: Britain should hang on to its vaccines

Ticket to freedom Sir: While I sympathise immensely with the spirit of last week’s lead article (‘Friends in need’, 27 March), we cannot justify asking Britons to wait any longer than necessary while their ticket out of lockdown is exported to the EU bloc, whose level of freedom is on average significantly higher than the UK’s. How can we justify exporting vaccines to Finland and Sweden, for example, where there has always been the freedom to meet family and friends in groups, while we are still enforcing draconian measures here? Clarke O’GaraSalford The best of the church Sir: I was disappointed that Douglas Murray should base his view of the

Europe’s jab jibes at UK rollout

The last ten weeks have been a depressing time for those few believers in the EU’s lofty ideals. The saga of the vaccine procurement and roll out would be funny if it was not so tragic, beginning with Ursula von der Leyen trying to erect a hard border in Ireland in January and now culminating in Italy impounding meningitis jabs to America. You would have hoped such incompetence would have made some in Brussels reflect on their hubris. Not a bit of it, judging by the briefing of an anonymous EU official last weekend. Sounding like a menacing two bit Bond villain, the ‘senior diplomat’ told CNN: ‘You might feel very happy

The next stage of the EU’s coronavirus meltdown

Debts would be shared. The strong would offer a helping hand to the weak. Money would be raised at incredibly cheap rates to help countries recover from the impact of Covid-19, while at the same time building back a greener, tech-based economy. Last summer, as the epidemic engulfed the continent, the European Union took a massive step forwards towards a fiscal union, launching the ‘Coronavirus Recovery and Resilience Facility’ with £600 billion of common debt. The more swivel-eyed europhiles hailed it as a ‘Hamilton Moment’, a reference to the first Treasury Secretary of the United States who bound that fledging union together through the bond market. It would be a

Nick Tyrone

European nations are reasserting themselves

All but the most hardened Remainer will admit that the EU’s vaccine rollout has been poor. Up against the UK’s handling of the same feat — and in the face of the European Union’s aggressive response to Britain’s success — many are declaring Brexit a triumph. But the EU’s vaccine debacle demonstrates something more profound and worthy of deeper examination — the continuing importance of the nation state. As Europe’s vaccine rollout has demonstrated, nation state can often do things faster and better in a crisis than a multi-national entity like the EU Commission. Some will say this proves the nation state should be the highest form of governance, and

On vaccines, the EU is getting what it paid for

Remember when the EU was going to provide an antidote to the spectre of vaccine nationalism? While Italian authorities are raiding pharmaceutical plants for vaccines, the European Commission is pushing for measures to block vaccine exports to countries that do not ‘reciprocate’. Unfortunately, European authorities have it exactly backward. Instead of seeking to expand the existing supply, their ham-fisted policies risk having the opposite effect. The ongoing war on AstraZeneca is bound to make every pharmaceutical firm think twice before signing a contract with the EU. And with vaccine production chains spanning across numerous jurisdictions, including non-members of the EU, export restrictions increase legal uncertainty and can disrupt supplies further.

The EU’s vaccine grab breaches the rule of law

The EU is discussing confiscating and requisitioning private property. It is surprisingly brazen about this. The bloc is proposing both a ‘bespoke’ vaccine export ban and has identified 29 million doses in Anagni in Italy which it wants. The EU wishes to rectify its own error in vaccine procurement. That is a breach of the rule of law. The rule of law is very simple. It means that no one is above the law and there is one law for all. The EU asserts, regularly, that it has a legal case against AstraZeneca. I, and many other legal commentators, rubbished that assertion in January. But as I stated publicly eight