I was at a King’s College London European Society debate this evening on the future of the European Union. (Read my introductory remarks here.) I lost my temper, almost, at the remarks by one of the speakers on the other side, Sir Robin Williams, of the Campaign for an Independent Britain (not the Robin Williams, I point out).

Incidentally, he said that the CIB had been founded in 1976, i.e. a year after the referendum that confirmed British membership of the EEC. Bear this in mind the next time the anti-Europeans complain that the result of the French and Dutch referendums is not being respected.

Anyway, back to King’s College. Sir Robin proposed that Britain should leave the EU but retain some kind of association with it, on the Norwegian model, perhaps, or like Switzerland, which has “the best of both worlds”.

Next, he objected to the secrecy and bureaucracy of the EU’s decision-making procedures. Quite right, but how can he square these two positions?

For, in criticising the bureaucratic and secret way that the EU works, that is precisely the bit that he would keep. By shrinking from the incipient parliamentary democracy of the EU back to a set of diplomatic arrangements, the secrecy is what would survive. How can that be preferable?

All the complaints that the European Parliament lacks real powers (not true even now) or that the European Commission is unaccountable (tell that to failed Commission candidates Varujan Vosganian or Rocco Buttiglione) fall away in the face of proposals for European parliamentary democracy. Read Professor Vernon Bogdanor’s report for the Federal Trust and you will see what I mean.)

Think back to last week at Davos. Various political and business leaders gathered together to debate the state of the world and what should be done about it. The participation list was by invitation only, the meetings were in private, only open to the press at the convenience of the organisers. That's fine for a private conference, but in a Europe without the EU, that is how European-level decisions would be taken. We would be left grateful for the scraps of information and influence that might come our way. I don't think that's acceptable. The EU is not perfect - no-one reading this blog or this website could think that - but it is still much better than the alternative.

A marvellous report on the BBC today that the Scottish Executive is being sidelined in the making of UK policy at European level. (Read the report here.) Of course, such an assessment – which originated in the Brussels office of the Scottish Executive itself – is fuel for the forthcoming election campaign, where the SNP is arguing for Scotland to become a member state of the European Union in its own right, leaving the United Kingdom.

The complaint is that officials in London, at the UK level, do not understand the implications of devolution for the way in which they make policy or adopt positions in the Council. For very many areas of policy, the government in Scotland has its own competence: the old notion of a centralised United Kingdom is no more.

Quite what conclusions the Scots make of this is a matter for them. As an Englishman and a federalist, I think there are two conclusions to be drawn.

First, there is the implication of an English parliament. This is canvassed by some as a solution to the West Lothian question, in that at present Scottish MPs at Westminster can vote on English laws but not on Scottish laws, while English MPs at Westminster have no influence over Scottish laws. This is an imbalance in the constitution, which an English parliament is supposed to solve.

If only the MPs elected for English constituencies were permitted to vote on English laws, this imbalance would be corrected. It would, of course, create new imbalances. The introduction of two classes of MP would be one of them, but the imbalance between England and Scotland at UK level would be another. The problem of which the report complains – ignorance of devolution – would be replaced by another, more serious one.

Where the English MPs support a different policy from the Scottish Executive at European level, they would have not only ignorance but a specific mandate to override the Scottish view. In a federal system, if one state is so much bigger than the others, it tends to become dominant. The fact that England is something like four times as big as the rest of the UK put together means that English dominance is assured. In Germany, where the Länder have the competence on issues, even the largest Land is no more than 22 per cent of the total population: England is 80 per cent of the UK.

It is hard to see how the union between England and Scotland could survive if an English parliament were to be created. English regionalism would be different, but English nationalism is a threat.

The way to get round this threat – at least at European level – would be to reform the Council of Ministers itself. A simple solution offers itself.

The move to double majority voting in the Council contained in the constitutional treaty, whereby each proposal has to have the support of at least 55 per cent of the member states representing at least 65 per cent of the population of the EU if it is to pass, points the way. (55 and 65 are rather fussy numbers, by the way, but that’s what negotiations under the rule of unanimity sometimes produce. We’ll leave this for another time.)

What this amounts to is that the same votes are counted in two different ways. Each member state vote counts first at equal value and then secondly at population value. This is an expression of the idea that the Union is a union not of states but of states and citizens. Recognising the role of regions in the Council would give us two different sets of votes. The first vote would be cast by the member state as before – each worth the same – and 55 per cent support would be needed. The second vote would be cast by whichever level of government had the competence within the member state, and would be worth whatever the population represented by that level of government. Different countries might be represented in different ways, but that would be to reflect and respect their different national constitutions.

For example, on issues where the UK government has competence throughout the UK, its second vote would be worth 60 million. On issues which, in Scotland, were within the competence of the Scottish government, the UK second vote would be worth only 55 million because Scotland itself would have a second vote on behalf of the 5 million Scots.

This is a simple system that requires only a small change to the procedures (very often, ministers from the devolved governments attend Council meetings anyway) and would recognise the distinct responsibilities of different levels of government. It is simple, democratic and effective. From an English federalist, what else would you expect?

Amid all the debate about what the British government did and did not know about Iraqi WMD in the run-up to war in Iraq, a thought occurs to me. Let’s approach the question from the other direction: imagine the claim was that there were no such weapons, and that they had been found.

First of all, though, let’s review the original claims.

In the autumn of 2002, there was a general assumption among Western intelligence agencies that Iraq possessed some kind of WMD programme, despite Iraqi official denials.

The famous dossier of 24 September 2002, with the infamous 45 minute claim, laid out this assumption for the British public in lurid, tabloid tones. Now, it is in the nature of tabloid journalism to talk up crises and to play down uncertainties and to neglect contrary evidence altogether. That’s what that dossier was: tabloid journalism. In a sense, then, its failing was that it was printed in the wrong way: it should have had a screaming, sensationalist headline and picture of a bikini-clad model on the cover, and the latest rumours about Frank Lampard on the back page. We don’t pay too much attention to the detail of the stories in the tabloid press: we shouldn’t have paid too much attention to this.

And indeed the government itself didn’t. The 45 minute claim never surfaced again. Possibly that was because the government decided it was no longer an effective argument, more likely because an official said “Erm, excuse me Prime Minister, I’m not sure that it’s entirely correct to give the impression that Saddam Hussein could fire missiles bearing WMD warheads at the British bases in Cyprus within 45 minutes of ordered it be done.” However, having given up repeating the claim that these weapons existed, the government should have gone further and withdrawn the original statement to that effect. But that, of course, they never did.

In order to confirm this general assumption that Iraq possessed some kind of WMD programmes, Hans Blix and his inspectors were despatched to check. Their timescale was too short and their resources too limited to be sure one way or another, but he discovered nevertheless that the initial assumptions made by the intelligence agencies were all false. The feebleness of the Iraqi economy and military establishment precluded it. That it is not to say that Saddam Hussein had abandoned the wish to have them, but there are lots of things we might wish for but do not have and have no prospect of getting. Whatever its other flaws, the policy of containment was keeping Iraq disarmed.

For the next bit of the story, we need to leap forward to Tony Blair’s Labour conference speech of 2004 (read it here), the speech where he was spun as having dealt with the subject of the war without actually having apologised for it. Here’s what he said about the evidence for the possession of WMD: “such evidence was agreed by the whole international community,”

On 5 February 2003, in his presentation to the UN Security Council, US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented this evidence (a “slam-dunk”, as then CIA director George Tenet put it). But the experience of the inspectors was different. Indeed, at the end of February 2003, the French, Germans and Russians put forward a statement that: “While suspicions remain, no evidence has been given that Iraq still possesses weapons of mass destruction or capabilities in this field:”

So, by the time of the UN debates on a second resolution that might authorise war, and the parliamentary debates on the subject, there was no agreement on what weapons Iraq might turn out to possess. And it turned out, of course, that the image that Iraq possessed such weapons had been bluff.

And now for the thought experiment. What if the debate had been the other way round, that Iraq had been thought not to possess such weapons but had in fact, after an invasion, been able to wield them in war?

The consequences for the armed forces could have been very serious, if they had not been properly supplied with protective equipment and suitable counter-measures. And what would have been the public reaction? It would have slowly become apparent that the government’s blandishments about the absence of weapons had been thin. Officials had expressed doubts about the absence of such weapons, fearing that they really existed, but these doubts had been suppressed or played down in the interests of the political sellability of the war. To think that British servicemen had been exposed to needless risks in the name of political convenience: it is hard to imagine a bigger scandal.

And, back to the real world, that all really happened. Except that the needless risks were run by the people of Iraq, with the awful consequences they live with today. (This isn’t necessarily an argument against the war, but it is certainly an argument against the misjudgements that led to it.)

We conclude with Tony Blair’s 2004 conference speech. In it, he uttered the immortal words: “I only know what I believe”. Those words might belong in the mouth of a love-lorn country and western singer, but from the leader of a nuclear armed military power, they are very disturbing. Once belief trumps evidence, we are on shaky ground indeed.

Tony Blair’s speech on the role of the UK armed forces last week deserves some attention on this blog. (Read the speech here.) A lot of what he said was operational and not really of interest here, but his words on the purpose of the armed forces are interesting. As ever with Tony Blair, they are mix of the inspiring and the truly bonkers. I will try and sift the one from the other.

He starts by noting the difference between values and interests, and asserting that British foreign policy has been “governed as much by values as interests” and even that “it is by furthering our values that we further our interests”. There is a step further that he does not take, to say that our values are our interests.

The biggest single problem with the international system is that the system does not work properly. Attempts to steer the global economy or fight climate change will fail as long as the right institutions are not in place. Express our values in the global system and then it might further our interests, too. That’s the right way round, only he doesn’t put it that way.

He then moves on to the distinction between “hard” power and “soft” power. (He uses a different definition of hard power from that in Joseph Nye’s classic “The paradox of American power”.) His hard power is that expressed by the military – bombs, tanks and soldiers – and very hard it is too. His soft power is that wielded by the foreign office: fighting climate change, working for development in Africa, and so on. To Joseph Nye, that is also hard power. Soft power, to him, is not merely non-military but non-governmental. It is the things that gives a country influence because of what the citizens do rather than because of what the politicians do. The BBC is an extraordinary agent of soft power, portraying an image of the British view of the world around the world. Microsoft Windows is another (I am typing this article using it right now). Hollywood, hip-hop music, Wal-Mart: this is soft power.

It is intriguing that Tony Blair does not grasp the idea that a country can exercise international influence beyond the reach of its national government. Blair himself has tried to personalise foreign policy – his belief that he can fix the Middle East by act of personal concentration, as though he were Derren Brown or David Blaine – and does not realise that his approach makes things worse, not better.

He drops in the old, false canard that “No two democracies have ever been to war.” He should go back to Reiter and Stam’s brilliant “Democracies at war” and think again. (You can read a federalist take on this argument here.)

On the next bit, I can agree with him. He says that the military threats to the British people may well be present in countries far from the UK and need to be confronted wherever they exist (although he does not put it this clearly), which is a controversial but surely a correct way to address things. We have to defend our allies, for they embody our values (and interests, of course) as much as we do. I have no patience for the national sovereignty idea that we should only fight to defend ourselves and leave our friends to fight to defend themselves. No, the fight should always be collective, if those other countries are truly our friends.

But that’s enough agreement. The next stage of Blair’s argument is truly mad. He says, of the decision to invade Afghanistan and later Iraq, that:

“The notion that removing two appalling dictatorships and replacing them with a UN backed process to democracy, with massive investment in reconstruction available if only the terrorism stopped, could in any justifiable sense ‘inflame’ Muslim opinion when it was perfectly obvious that the Muslims in both countries wanted rid of both regimes and stand to gain enormously, if only they were allowed to, from their removal, is ludicrous. Yet a large part, even of non-Muslim opinion, essentially buys into that view.”

What’s “justifiable” got to do with it? Other people do not have to justify their opinions to Tony Blair, they are entitled to hold them come what may and Tony Blair has to react accordingly. Furthermore, possibly those other people actually have a point. Blair goes on to say:

“Global interdependence requires global values commonly or evenly applied.”

Absolutely. Why is why many people are asking how many civilians have been killed during the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq or, possibly more pertinently, why no count has been kept. Is that neglect of the duty of an occupying power really the expression of a global value “evenly applied”? It is hardly surprising that so many people have drawn the conclusion that, in the eyes of Blair and Bush, Muslim lives do not count. After all, Muslim deaths have not been counted.

Tony Blair claims that British as a nation are “proud champions of the causes of peace in the Middle East”, which may come as some surprise to the Lebanese who were bombed out of their homes back in August without protest from the British government. If the British people want to be seen in this light, they are going to have to change the things their government says on their behalf.

Finally, Tony Blair declares that terrorism is an attack on our values and should be resisted as such. He is critical of those countries that “say yes in principle we should keep the ‘hard’ power, but just not in this conflict or with that ally. But in reality, that’s not how the world is.” Aside from taking a lecture on reality from Tony Blair, that statement is truly jaw-dropping.

For what is the alternative to some kind of discrimination about which wars to fight? We can’t go round the world looking for fights to join in with. Of course, there must be decision-making over how and when to employ military force. Sometimes, regrettably it will be necessary, but Blair gives the impression that it should be the automatic reaction, the default option.

His fear is that “doing the right thing slips almost unconsciously into doing the easy thing”. Well, in other fields of policy-making, the objective is to align those two, so that the easy choice is also the right choice. That requires some imagination in the design of incentives and even more in the design of institutions. How to engineer policy-making so that it leads to the right outcomes? That is what a statesman would be thinking about today? It is missing from this speech, but that is what our interests and our values require.

It is the tradition at this time of year for the newspapers to be full of predictions for the year ahead. This blog refuses to follow suit, partly because it’s not a newspaper, but more realistically because there’s nothing to gain by it: if I get something right, no-one will remember; if I get something wrong, everyone will remember.

But there is a difference between prediction and thinking ahead. I am not going to guess who will be the next president of France, for example, but the issues at stake are worth examination.

In the blue corner, we have Nicolas Sarkozy, about to be adopted as the candidate of the centre-right UMP. His opponent will be Ségolène Royal, victor of the Socialist primary in November last year.

Ms Royal has acquired a reputation of having risen without trace, travelling without a heavy burden of policy or ideology. Perhaps that reputation has been taken up by the grand old men of the Socialist party, whom she beat for the electoral nomination to their considerable surprise and discomfort. Even if she has a weaker track record and a different approach to some of the others, maybe a new approach is what is needed.

It is not the place of this blog, however, to delve deeply into the issues of personality and policy as they apply to party politics; there is enough to examine on the narrow subject of Europe.

Nicolas Sarkozy told us all where he stood in a speech in September last year. (I reviewed it on the blog here, and you can read the speech itself here if you want to check up on me.

In brief, his view was that constitutional treaty should, in the wake of the No vote in May 2005, be broken into two parts. The first contains managerial reforms to the present institutions, which should be agreed by the national governments and ratified by national parliaments before the next European elections. The second part represents the fundamental constitutional nature of the treaty, which should be postponed until after the elections and considered by a new Convention convened for the purpose at the time.

As a proposal, it has the merit of being clear, even though it is not entirely to my taste. The pronouncements from Ségolène Royal, on the other hand, are the opposite. (You can find her comments on the Quotebank - click the country link for France on the left-hand side.)

Unlike Sarkozy, she is unwilling to give up on the idea of a constitution before the next elections. She suggests that a Convention should be reconvened to fix the problems identified by the French No voters two years. (As an aside, a number of those No voters are now part of the Royal campaign.) The conclusions of the Convention should then be ratified by all the member states, on the same day, each according to its own procedures. This where it starts to get complicated.

Does this mean a referendum or not? Different journalists attending the press conference came away with different answers, which is why the Quotebank cannot make up its mind.

Sarkozy accepts that a referendum might be suitable for the constitution, but sees no prospect that one might be won in the next few years. In any case, he is not willing to make the kind of concessions to the French left that might make such a referendum winnable. Royal, on the other hand, is ready to make those concessions: in many ways, in fact, she already has.

For example, she denounces his idea for a mini-Treaty as being disrespectful to the French voters who voted No. In effect, she says, he is sticking up two fingers to his “fellow citizens”. (Or whatever the French equivalent of two fingers is – see a demonstration of French gestures here.) This isn’t really a policy, rather it is a position.

But this is true more generally. Interpreting the various European statements by Ségolène Royal to try and understand the policy behind them is a fruitless and frustrating business. I suspect that the reason is that there is not a single coordinated policy to be understood. Instead, there are the shifting sands of an electoral platform designed to maximise appeal at any one moment.

Such an approach might be the best way to get into power – we shall see – but it hardly tells us much about how she will use that power if she gets there.

Sarkozy has put forward, for better or worse, a programme for government. Royal is still working on a platform for opposition. But remember this is not a prediction, only a look ahead.

I am not going to say anything about the death penalty in the case of Saddam Hussein – plenty of other people have already done so, and no-one better than Michael Hammer of the One World Trust (read his analysis here). I am more interested in the trial that led up to it.

The choice of an Iraqi court rather than an international one is telling. One of the major reasons put forward by advocates of invasion was that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the entire region: he had invaded two neighbouring countries and fired rockets at at least two others. However, the choice of an Iraqi court precluded those incidents being brought to justice. Kuwaitis who suffered during the occupation will have to enjoy the vicarious justice from Baghdad rather than any real justice of their own.

As Margaret Beckett said, Saddam Hussein has been held to account, but only partially.

The next significant feature of the trial was that the procedures were novel and rather strange. The case got through six judges, members of the defence legal team were assassinated and threatened throughout. The manner of the execution was in some senses a continuation of this.

But any “political” trial will be peculiar; indeed, one could go further and say that any trial of a famous person is going to be odd. Remember the difficulty of finding a jury that could sit in judgement of Michael Jackson.

John Laughland, a noted souverainist, raised this point in the Guardian. But the answer is clear.

If the problem is that the procedures were novel, let’s make them routine. Lift the burden from individual courtrooms and move major trials to a dedicated facility. The trial of a former head of state such as Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic needs to be normalised as much as possible. That way, people in those positions will come to learn that, like the rest of us, they are subject to the law.

I am happy to be dismissed as an enthusiast for “international justice”, well aware as I am of the limitations of international justice, because it is still better than being an enthusiast for international injustice.

A documentary on BBC4 last night about the debt that Britain racked up after the second world war borrowing money from the Americans. The presenter was Sir Christopher Meyer, former British ambassador to the United States: he made quite a good presenter, perhaps a better presenter than ambassador. (He was our man in Washington during the Iraq war.) However, I can’t be so complimentary about the programme.

At the risk of turning into a grumpy old man before I am old enough, the programme suffered from the current TV habit of inviting famous people to comment on events rather than people with expert knowledge. The heart of the story was John Maynard Keynes’s forlorn attempt to obtain a gift of $5 billion from the American government, in gratitude for the British war effort and in recognition that Britain was about to go bankrupt. You might have looked for comment from historians of the period: instead, we got officials from the administration of President Bush.

One of those officials was Karl Rove, Bush’s campaign strategist (boo! hiss! it is still pantomime season). He was asked to comment on where Keynes went wrong in putting the British case. What he said was that the argument should have been that it was in the American national interest to have acceded to the British request, rather than putting it in terms of the British national interest. Convenient for him, you might think. But let’s look at the history of the time a bit more closely.

Certainly the British had worn themselves out financially in the war, but the coming of the peace did not bring those financial exertions to a halt. A major war aim was to protect the empire, and protecting the empire remained expensive even after the war was over. In the late 1940s, of course, the Americans were rather unimpressed by the British desire to remain an imperial power. Why should they pay for that, they not unreasonably asked. They were against colonialism, after all.

Back to 2007, was George W Bush’s right hand man ever going to say that the British mistake was to try and imagine itself a global power rather than opting for a constructive role in Europe instead? A historian might have said that: the apparatchik did not.

In the end, the Americans made a loan to Britain rather than a gift as Keynes had hoped, but followed shortly after with a grant, too. That grant was the Marshall Plan. Here is my second gripe about the programme.

The Marshall Plan was described as a “free gift”, but there was more to it than that. The change in American policy – grants, not loans – was provoked by the Soviet takeover of central and eastern Europe in 1948 and a rising fear of communism. The idea that western Europe might also go the same way was a threatening one, and needed to be resisted. Hence the grant to prop up worn-out and war-ravaged economies. The additional condition was that the recovery plan should be “a joint one, agreed to by a number of, if not all, European nations”. The Soviet Union banned its occupied countries from taking part, but much of the rest of Europe took part. This means that there was no American grant to Britain: there was an American grant to the British part of Europe. But of this, from Sir Christopher, there was no mention.

British participation in European integration was an essential part of economic recovery, and American support for that integration was assured and important. Karl Rove could have said this, but he didn’t. (A central theme of this website is that the things politicians decline to say are as important as the things they do say. Here is an example.)

The concluding scenes of the documentary, attempting to explain the importance of the “special relationship”, give me complaint number three.

Sir Christopher Meyer’s argument is that Britain and America have a special relationship but that Britain should not subordinate its national interest in doing so. The American rejection of the request for a gift in 1947 shows that they will not place our interest above their own, but the American role in winning the second world war showed that they are our most important friends.

But, where does this leave the rest of Europe. If the British and Americans have a special bond because they both fought on the same side in the 1940s, the French can claim the same special bond, too. Both Britain and France were saved from the Nazis by American assistance; not only the British, but the French, too. But who talks of the French special relationship with America?

The idea that the second world war remains, or should remain, the foundation of our relationship with any other country is absurd. No-one would say that the British relationship with Germany should be based on that period. This part of the programme was just nonsense.

Sixty years ago, maybe, but not now. The whole point of a mortgage is that you can pay it off.