Federal Union

Odd position for a Eurosceptic

2009-07-03T16:49:00.001+01:00

Further to the previous blog entry about the calls for a general election, I find this further example, from the House of Commons on 16 June:

Mr. Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con): Following the crushing defeats experienced by the Government on 7 June, when the results of the European elections placed Labour even below the United Kingdom Independence party, what moral authority do they consider that they have to discuss any issue on behalf of the people of this country?

The answer of course is that the government won the general election in 2005. Is Nigel Evans really suggesting that European elections should take over from general elections in deciding who should be in the government of this country? That really would be an odd position to take, even for a Eurosceptic.

The fate of declining communities

2009-07-03T11:53:00.000+01:00

Jonathan Guthrie writes in the Financial Times about the problems faced by towns and cities once the economic reason for their prosperity goes into decline. Cities in the north of England, for example, once were ideal locations for heavy manufacturing industry but have now lost out to much lower wage competition in China. What happens to those cities now?

For federalists, the answer is probably a combination of action at national or European level to provide funds and know-how to support regeneration and action at regional or local level actually to regenerate. Experience shows that the health of a community, whether economic or otherwise, comes from the bottom and not from the top. An influx of money can help make things better, but it cannot does so on its own. Countries with an effective level of regional government are better placed to deal with economic change.

But how far can this process go? Can economic evolution be resisted forever?

Jonathan Guthrie writes rather brutally that “Any human settlement is ultimately only a location whose utility changes over time.” Traditional nationalism might have something to say about that.

Communities invest their land with a strange magic. How many folksongs and national anthems sing the praises of a territory? Nineteenth century painters expressed their national identity by painting landscapes of their local countryside rather than classical allegories set in made-up Mediterranean settings. And much of the continental resentment about British views of the CAP comes from people who have seen the East Anglian prairies and do not want to see the vistas of Tuscany or the Dordogne go the same way.

Think of the role that rivers, mountain ranges and islands play in shaping political communities and cultures. An investor siting a factory might think in terms of locations, but politics and human identity demand more than that.

That is not to say though that economic forces can be resisted, merely that the political determination to resist them is strong and understandable. Let’s put Jonathan Guthrie’s words into the mouth of a politician: “The United Kingdom is ultimately only a location whose utility changes over time.” Who, other than Alex Salmond perhaps, could say that?

Home truths about abroad

2009-07-01T15:51:00.002+01:00

The judgment by the German constitutional court approving of the Lisbon treaty has been broadly welcomed by pro-Europeans in Germany. (See a commentary by Hans-Jürgen Schlamp on Speigel Online here.)

One exception to this general rule, though, is that there has been some concern expressed about what was said by the court about the European Parliament. The German section of the European Movement, for example, thinks that its criticism is too harsh:

“Unless EM Germany is in favour that the national parliament is forced to take more commitment and responsibility in European Policy this should not lead to a weakening of the European Parliament.”

What the court said was that the EP is not able to replace national parliaments in filling the democratic deficit in the EU. (Read what the court said here.) It suggested that:

“The further development of the competences of the European Parliament can reduce, but not completely fill, the gap between the extent of the decision-making power of the Union’s institutions and the citizens’ democratic power of action in the Member States.”

I don’t think this is too harsh: it is a statement of fact. The EU is not a unitary political system but a federal one, in which the member states’ governments play a major role at European level. Those member state governments are accountable not to the European Parliament but to national parliaments, so the latter cannot be completely written out of the picture in favour of the former.

Furthermore:

“Neither as regards its composition nor its position in the European competence structure is the European Parliament sufficiently prepared to take representative and assignable majority decisions as uniform decisions on political direction. Measured against requirements placed on democracy in states, its election does not take due account of equality, and it is not competent to take authoritative decisions on political direction in the context of the supranational balancing of interest between the states.”

This notion of equality is important, particularly in Germany. A Maltese MEP represents 80,000 voters (5 MEPs for a population of 400,000) while a German MEP represents 10 times as many (99 MEPs representing 82 million people). This is something German federalists have raised themselves as a matter of unfairness: I am not sure how much I agree with them but they should not forget their own arguments now.

Where I disagree with the court is the statement that:

“It [the EP] therefore cannot support a parliamentary government and organise itself with regard to party politics in the system of government and opposition in such a way that a decision on political direction taken by the European electorate could have a politically decisive effect.”

It has not supported a parliamentary government in the past and does not look like doing so in the coming parliamentary term (although read my call that it should do exactly that on Euobserver yesterday), but that does not mean that it cannot. If European political parties were to organise in a manner recognisable at national level, the model of democracy described by the constitutional court could come about. At that point, and it is perhaps not so far away, the nature of European democracy and the European Union would change very much.

It will be interesting to see if the German politicians who object to the court’s interpretation of the role of the European Parliament will do anything to change it. German MEPs are more numerous than those of any other country, and one of them is leader of the Socialists, so they could, if they wished, bring to the EP a lot of what the court has said it is missing.

Who won the European elections?

2009-06-30T13:43:00.002+01:00

I have being trying to find out how the votes were cast in the European elections earlier this month. There is a provisional list of how the seats have been allocated (it can only be provisional until the new MEPs formally reconvene on 14 July) – you can read it on the official elections website here – but there is nothing about how many votes were cast. The section on the website on each country gives the percentage share of the vote by party, and the overall percentage turnout, but not the actual number of votes cast.

The reason I ask is that I was hoping to be able to say in my article about the Socialists and Mr Barroso (read it here) that the Socialist share of the vote had fallen by X per cent. As it was, I had to limit myself to saying that there had been “a swing away from the Socialists towards the EPP”.

There are several possible reasons why the data is not presented in this way. The European parties are not yet formally established – the Irish seats won by Fianna Fail have been allocated to UEN, their old group, whereas they have indicated that next time they will be in ALDE – so it is a little premature to make a formal allocation of the votes. However, a vote calculation could still be done on the same basis and with the same proviso that applies to the seat calculation that is currently posted on the web.

Another reason might be that there are different electoral systems in use in different countries, which means that the votes themselves might have a slightly different meaning. There is some truth in this – countries like Ireland and Malta that use preferential voting give more opportunities to smaller parties to gain first preference votes than the list system used in Great Britain – but nevertheless an aggregate total would still carry a lot of meaning.

The biggest reason against publishing such a list might be that it implies that voters are in fact voting for European parties. Most political parties contested the European elections on a largely if not exclusively national basis – all politics is local, after all – and so there is no reason to put all the votes acquired by different national parties together.

The answer to this one is easy: when it comes to the exercise of power by MEPs in the European Parliament, the voters actually are voting for European parties, even if they do not realise it. MEPs organise and vote on political party, not national lines, and aggregating the votes cast for the different party groups would make this reality clearer and more visible to the voters. It has long been a complaint of federalists that European politics is treated as something that the average voter should not be concerned with, and here is proof of that attitude. The European Parliament should take a step away from that way of thinking, and publish the full numbers.

¤ ¤ ¤

I remember working out aggregate numbers after the 1994 elections because they showed a mismatch between what was being reported and what really happened. In the overall total of MEPs, there was a swing from centre-right to centre-left, but this was actually skewed by the result in Great Britain. There, Labour gained 17 seats and the Conservatives lost 13, giving Labour 62 in total and the Conservatives only 18, but this was on the basis of a swing to Labour of only about 7 per cent. The huge gain in seats was the result of the first past the post electoral system that was used only in Great Britain (Northern Ireland uses proportional representation). The UK had 87 seats then, so Labour had 71 per cent of seats having won 44 per cent of the vote.

The consequence of this British peculiarity was that, as far as the allocation of seats was concerned, a swing in votes from left to right elsewhere in Europe was swamped by a swing from right to left in Britain. Those were the last European elections ruined by such an unfair electoral system in one member state, and the balance between seats and votes and thus public opinion is now much more closely matched.

Parliaments strengthened by the Lisbon treaty

2009-06-30T12:32:00.000+01:00

Another hurdle in the ratification of the Lisbon treaty was overcome today with the judgment of the German constitutional court that it is not incompatible with the German Basic Law. Some Eurosceptics had placed a lot of hope in the possibility that the courts in Germany might object to the treaty for some reason. This was always an unlikely hope given the solid commitment of the German constitutional court to the defence of democracy in its most fundamental form. Perhaps the Eurosceptic confusion arises because they simply do not understand that the EU is an extension of democracy and not the reduction that they often claim.

Read the press release here or read the full text of the judgment here.

The court judgment was not without its conditions, though, and these conditions deserve some recognition. They require greater scrutiny of the EU at national level, and Germany cannot ratify the treaty until the necessary national laws are in place. Presiding judge Andreas Vosskuhle said: “To sum up, the Basic Law says 'yes' to the Lisbon Treaty but demands a strengthening of parliamentary responsibilities at the national level.”

So, not only does the Lisbon treaty strengthen the European Parliament within the EU’s own institutional balance, it is also leading to the strengthening of national parliaments within their own domestic institutional systems. The requirement for the Council of Ministers to conduct its legislative business in public is one aspect of this: the German constitutional court judgment is another.

It will be interesting to see how other member states, while not of course directly affected by the German judgment, deal with the same issue of involving their national parliaments in the future development of the EU. It needs to be done in order to ensure the maximum possible support and the maximum possible accountability for the institutional system in Brussels. It is the conviction of federalists, I think, that those two – support and accountability – go together.

Keynesianism and the environment

2009-06-28T20:03:00.003+01:00

I was asked to give a short talk at a conference this weekend on environmental policy and the influence of Keynes. Now Keynes was a major, if not the major, economic thinker of the first half of the 20th century at a time when environmental policy was rather more modest in its scope than it is today, and his great contributions to economic thought lay in an analysis of the behaviour and role of government in the modern era and the limits to the classical assumptions of economics that the modern era exposed. What does this say about the environment?

The connection was made by Stephen Haseler, at the same conference, who used the term Keynesianism not as an economic concept but as a political one It describes the social democratic notions that dominated politics between 1945 and 1979, that the government has a right and a duty to intervene in the economy in the interests of society. The market should be made to serve the people, and not the other way round. In this sense, there is a strong connection with the environment, in a way that is a of great significance to federalists.

The standard narrative of federalism explains that economic interdependence, technological change and the discoveries of environmental science render national regulation increasingly ineffective and that supranational regulation is needed to replace it. This is opposed by interests and arguments that extol the virtues of the national state, its evident limits notwithstanding. But there is an additional opposing force to federalism, which is the argument against regulation as such. The increasing irrelevance of national regulation is welcomed by the supporters of anarcho-capitalism, and the potential of federalism to reinstate supranational regulation is a reason for them to reject it.

This contest is played out in the debate about the future regulation of the banking sector, for example. Should banks be brought under tighter controls, to prevent them from failing? Or should they simply be allowed to fail. There is a line of thought that says that recessions are inevitable and perform desirable functions and that the actions of the state in preventing bank failure prevents these functions being carried out and will make matters worse rather than better. Regulation is the cause of the problem and not the solution. I don’t agree with this, but there are plenty of people who do.

As part of this contest, the role of government is attacked. It was held to be too powerful during the immediate post-war period, and the crises of the 1970s were the culmination of this experience. Deregulation and the freeing up of markets under Reagan and Thatcher revitalised economic life. Government regulation was not just inefficient but also morally wrong.

To the extent that the European Union, for example, has a role in enacting regulation, it is considered to be inefficient and morally wrong, too.

As with the economy, so with the environment. The shadow banking system of credit default swaps that has grown out of all proportion to the credit default risk to which it relates (read Michael Lewis on the subject here) and that was completely unregulated has its parallel in the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Until relatively recently, no-one realised it was a problem and it was entirely out of any kind of control. These days, we know better, and are trying to limit the rate at which the atmosphere is polluted.

However, this kind of action to protect the atmosphere relies on regulation, which carries with it all the Keynesian baggage which has become so controversial. Not only must the case be made for environmental protection, the case must also be made for government action. This then is doubly difficult.

(It is noteworthy, is it not, that the most prominent Eurosceptics – Václav Klaus, Nigel Lawson – are also prominent opponents of policies to address climate change.)

For example, the fuel used in international air passenger transport is exempt from tax as a result of the Chicago Convention of 1944, an intergovernmental treaty that dates from a time when circumstances are rather different to how they are now. Other forms of travel are taxed, but not the most polluting one. This is perverse. However, to change this requires the institution of a European environmental tax, and that means three controversial propositions in one.

A European action is controversial in the eyes of those people who insist on national solutions, an environmental policy is opposed by those who see economic growth as the highest goal in politics, and a tax sounds bad to people following in the footsteps of Reagan and Thatcher. No wonder it is yet to be introduced.

From the point of view of federalists, though, regulation and government action is not routinely dismissed as a bad idea. It was correctly pointed out that the converse, that regulation and government action is always a good idea, is also not true, but that federalism opposes the rejection o government in principle. Federalism is a theory of government, not a theory of anarchy. In part it argues that there are things that governments should not do – economic protectionism, for example – but it also argues that there are things that governments must do. This is Keynesianism in its second, political sense.

I was careful in my remarks at the conference to distinguish between nationalisation and regulation – I don’t agree that the need for public regulation of an economic sector implies that there should be government ownership, contrary to what some of the left have been arguing during the banking crisis – but I don’t think that federalism is neutral on the subject of regulation as such.

Federalism is a theory of government – it takes sides on how decisions should be taken, not what decisions should be taken – but if the question of whether decisions should be taken is also raised, it is ready to take sides there too.

Credit where it’s due

2009-06-25T12:10:00.000+01:00

The Conservatives have now formed their new group in the European Parliament, having left the EPP to found the European Conservatives and Reformists, ECR. David Cameron has kept his campaign promise from his leadership election in the autumn of 2005.

A lot of words have been written examining the strategic intent behind this move: I suspect that the strategic intent was to win over some voters in the Conservative leadership context with a commitment that did not seem outrageously unreasonable: the Conservatives should not share a group with political parties with whom they did not agree.

It turned out to be harder to create a new group than it seemed at first. It was not a simple procedural matter as it might have been in Westminster, and the participation of parties from other member states was also necessary, but nevertheless it has been done. Daniel Hannan has hailed the new group as the creation of an official opposition in the European Parliament, and if the new group brings a new spotlight on the necessary choices that need to be made, then that certainly is a good thing.

But with the aim of saying the same thing in both Westminster and Brussels, the new group has some problems. First, the Conservatives and the Polish Law and Justice party are both against the Lisbon treaty whereas the Czech ODS party is in favour. If the fate of Lisbon is a crucial issue in the European political debate, then the ECR is divided at birth.

And then there is the issue of EU membership altogether. David Cameron never misses an opportunity to say that he is in favour of EU membership, but prominent members of his group in Brussels – Daniel Hannan, for example – are firmly against. His new group has merely replaced one inconsistency with another.

More powers for Brussels!

2009-06-20T11:31:00.000+01:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the European Union has too many powers. Politicians from across the political spectrum call for “reform” to reverse what they claim is an ever-centralising trend.

Of course, there is no logic in the argument that a test of whether the EU is up to date is whether it is giving up powers. The powers that the EU ought to have are those that the member states cannot exercise effectively on their own: no more and no less. Maybe the passage of time means that some of the powers of the EU can be returned to the member states, maybe not. There is no certain claim that they must be.

(That is not say that there are not aspects of individual policies that might be unnecessary at the European level, but that is not what our reformers are arguing.)

Given that the public climate of powers for Brussels is so hostile, how come powers ever end up there in the first place? Here’s an example.

I received a message entitled “Please support the right to free healthcare within the EU”. The message reads:

“I don't know if you will be able to assist but I have created a government petition requesting free healthcare for UK citizens resident in Spain. The wording of the petition is as follows:

“Many UK citizens, currently living in Spain are unable to obtain healthcare. This is because the reciprocal agreement is that healthcare will only be paid for a maximum of two years. There is "freedom of movement" within the EU so why is it that after paying into the NHS for many years there is not "freedom of healthcare benefits". At this time of economic crisis it is virtually impossible for British citizens to find work in other Member States and many are living below the poverty line.”

You can find the petition on the Number 10 website at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/expathealth/

Up until now, it has been taken as read that healthcare provision is a matter for the member states and not for the EU. The public health provisions in the Lisbon treaty are carefully and awkwardly worded so as to limit their effect to public health alone and not to impinge on broader health policy.

Article 168(7) reads: “Union action shall respect the responsibilities of the Member States for the definition of their health policy and for the organisation and delivery of health services and medical care. The responsibilities of the Member States shall include the management of health services and medical care and the allocation of the resources assigned to them.”

This seems to exclude an EU policy on who is eligible for healthcare and who can pay for it. But, as a result, we have an apparent mismatch between free movement and residence rights on the one hand and healthcare provision on the other.

Conventional wisdom says that it is wrong that there should be more powers for the EU. But conventional wisdom is often wrong.

No call for a general election

2009-06-16T09:43:00.002+01:00

Gordon Brown seems to have weathered the storm over his leadership of the Labour party, which has a positive consequence for the future of the Lisbon treaty. (Or rather, it avoids a negative consequence.) Specifically, the Conservatives have said that if they win a general election before the Lisbon treaty is ratified in Ireland, they will put the UK’s own parliamentary ratification on hold and call a referendum on the treaty instead. Given the state of British public opinion on Europe at the moment, there is a strong chance that such a referendum would vote No and kill the treaty.

Commentators have remarked that it would be a rather peculiar occurrence, a government calling a referendum of choice and then campaigning for a No vote. More than that, the rhetoric and escalation in public feelings that a No campaign might provoke could make it hard to rebuild relations in Europe afterwards. Populism has its risks.

I remember Anne Enger Lahnstein, leader of the No campaign in the Norwegian referendum in 1994, being rebuked by the other party leaders after she used harsh words about the other national government leaders’ foreign policies, for those countries remained Norway’s Nato allies after all. David Cameron, though, evidently has no fear of putting on a peculiar spectacle and is untroubled by the threat of populist nationalism, if it will help him kill the Lisbon treaty.

(The case against a referendum on the Lisbon treaty has been well-rehearsed on this blog, here for example.)

However, the possibility of such a referendum being held depends on when David Cameron can get into Downing Street. He has said that the referendum pledge only holds as long as the Irish have not held their own referendum, which is due probably in October. But as long as there is no general election, there will be no referendum, Labour being opposed to such a move.

And the prospect of a general election has itself been postponed. Gordon Brown’s team used the supposed need for an immediate general election in the event of a leadership change, and Labour wipeout that would surely follow an immediate general election, to deter potential challengers during the recent leadership turmoil. By clinging on to office by such means, Gordon Brown has given the Lisbon treaty a breathing space. If he can hang on to his job until after the Irish referendum, probably in October, he may turn out to be the saviour of Lisbon. This would make him an unlikely hero of the pro-European cause, but a hero nevertheless.

If this does not sound a particularly edifying position for the pro-Europeans to find themselves in, I think I agree. Hoping that a government that has made a thorough hash of the pro-European case can cling on bitterly to the last scraps of its right to govern is awkward and uncomfortable, but it may be that that is what the Lisbon treaty, and even British membership of the EU, requires. (The pro-European strategy has been so mishandled in recent years that nothing better is really deserved.)

It remains within the rules of British democracy, just. However, it is not unprecedented.

In June 1995, the then prime minister John Major resigned as leader of the Conservative party and called a leadership election within his own party. Labour, in opposition and well ahead in the opinion polls, demanded instead a general election. The Conservatives, for their part, justified their position by pointing to the resignation of Harold Wilson 20 years earlier and the fact that there had been no Labour calls for a general election then. (Read Hansard on the subject here - column 1086)

What Conservative MP Sir Anthony Grant chose to describe as the “monumental humbug” of the Labour party then might easily be said of his own party now.

What kind of society do we want to be?

2009-06-12T09:49:00.001+01:00

New Work and Pensions Secretary Yvette Cooper was on the radio this morning, discussing the new Child Poverty Bill. The aim of the bill is to pursue the government’s child poverty strategy by enshrining it in law which would oblige different government agencies to take it into account in framing their own activities. As Yvette Cooper asked, what kind of society do we want to be?

One particular set of organisations that would be affected by the bill are local authorities, but they are no ordinary kind of agency. They have their own democratic mandate from their own voters, and should not be treated in the same way as the pure creations of central government. If elected local government thinks that the priorities of the child poverty strategy are good ones, then fine, but if not (and these priorities would inevitably take the place of others that elected local government might prefer), then they should be free to set their own.

Going back to Yvette Cooper’s question, the answer appears to be: a centralised one.

Regional cooperation in Africa

2009-06-11T17:26:00.000+01:00

Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch-Brown was in Maputo, Mozambique, to speak about future prospects for political and economic development in Africa. (Read the speech here.) And he did so by talking about the need for greater development not at national level but at regional level. It is through cooperation, he said, that African countries will take the next steps towards prosperity and stability.

He calls for them to: “Use the opportunity of the crisis to speed up the process of regional integration: economically, in terms of trade and infrastructure, politically in terms of institutions and the African Union, and socially and culturally in terms of Africa’s impact on the world stage and its sense of solidarity at home.”

There are several ways in which these steps will help.

First, there is the economy. Regional cooperation can boost trade: apparently only 5 per cent of African countries’ trade is with other African countries, whereas in Europe or East Asia that figure is 50 per cent. There is a major opportunity being missed at the moment.

Trade can be boosted by reducing tariffs, streamlining customs procedures and improving transport infrastructure. Some of this requires financial investment, but some of it simply requires political determination. Reducing bureaucracy is not always easy because lots of underpaid bureaucrats use their positions to take bribes on the side, but in a way that makes it doubly important.

Lord Malloch-Brown is also enthusiastic about the role of regional cooperation in improving the standard of national democracy. It will make it harder to coups to succeed and prosper, and will help to establish stronger independent media and political parties. Democracy, as Paul Collier observed in his book “The bottom billion”, depends not only on electoral competition but on continual checks and balances, too.

The role of international courts is also important, in helping to secure human rights and also in settling disputes between states that might otherwise, or which already have, erupt into war.

He is careful to limit his horizons of what regional cooperation means or might lead to:

“if Africa is to deepen democracy to put sovereignty firmly in the hands of its people then it’s through a regional push that it will get there. But let me be clear that this is not a veiled call for a united states of Africa but rather like the EU using economic integration and regional institutions as the vehicles for national success.”

But nevertheless, the measures he describes would amount to welcome progress.

Gordon Brown’s constitution

2009-06-10T16:45:00.000+01:00

It may be safely said that Gordon Brown must have a strong constitution if he can withstand all that has been thrown at him and still remain prime minister. But can it be said that his latest proposals will strengthen the British constitution?

His statement to the House of Commons today (read it here) covers, of course, concerns about expenses and MPs’ behaviour, but it also moves onto more substantial territory, too. It is fair to say, indeed he says it himself, that these are rather more substantial issues to deal with, and one is left wondering whether the dying days of a government is the best time for initiatives such as these. The development of English regional government was killed by a referendum in November 2004, just before the next election rather than just after the previous one. Referendums have to be held quickly or not at all.

There were five main items in Gordon Brown’s statement, and there is quite a lot to be interested in from the standpoint of this blog.

First, there is renewed discussion of an elected House of Lords. Federal Union has pointed out the value in an indirectly-elected second chamber that finds a way to represent the interests of sub-national levels of government in the Westminster system. (Read the Federal Union proposal here.) The debate in the House of Commons seems to take the method of election as read, with only the percentage to be elected still to be decided. That would establish the upper house as little more than a clone of the lower. It is possible to be more sophisticated than this.

Secondly, Gordon Brown raised the prospect of a written constitution. This, he said, will define the rights and responsibilities of a British citizen. Good, says this blog. Power should come from the bottom and not from the top.

The third item on the list is the prospect of more devolution, to national assemblies and local government. This is welcome, as is the accompanying awareness of the need to “strengthen the engagement of citizens in the democratic life of their own communities”.

Fourth, there is electoral reform, on which there are strong views but where federalism has little to say.

Finally, there is “increasing public engagement in politics”. This is vital. All the other changes to the system of government will fail if they do not win the support and involvement of the people, both at the start and on a continuing basis. The experience of the European Union is salutary in this respect: declining electoral turnouts and decreasing interest do not speak well of an institutional system.

And, speaking of the European Union, why did Gordon Brown not mention it in his statement? The five points he raised relating to Britain pretty much apply there too. And, more importantly, because the EU is so important to Britain now, if the EU is not fixed on a democratic and participatory basis, British political life will continue to be weakened, too.

Analysis of the European election results

2009-06-08T12:43:00.000+01:00

The European election results were bad news for pro-Europeans. There’s no point trying to present it any other way.

One trick that party politicians sometimes try and play is to say that the turnout was down, which means that you can’t read so much into the result. Pro-Europeans can’t say that because a low turnout is in itself a problem. The fact that the European Parliament does not deal with such high profile issues as Westminster means that one would not expect the turnout to be as high – local elections have lower turnouts than Westminster elections, too – but it is still not something that the pro-Europeans can be particularly happy about.

And then, when one looks at how the votes were cast and not only how many, the news gets worse.

The parties whose share of the vote went up are all, with the exception of the SNP, Eurosceptic parties (at the very least), and the parties whose share went down, with the exception of the Scottish Socialists, are pro-European. (There are figures here.)

The pro-European share of the vote fell to 34 per cent of the vote from 41 per cent in 2004. More than that, the balance on the Eurosceptic side shifted slightly to parties that are explicitly opposed to EU membership. And more than that, the Conservative party, which is by far the biggest Eurosceptic party, is moving closer and closer to a position that is incompatible with EU membership, even if they do not say so explicitly. This may be deliberate, perhaps it is not, but nonetheless it is happening.

The result this weekend was historic and alarming. Up until now, elections have always confirmed broad pro-European support. Every general election since the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, every European election since the introduction of direct elections in 1979, and the referendum on membership in 1975 have all produced a majority in favour of British membership of the EU. It is arguable that, for the first time, a national election may have produced an actual majority against membership.

There will be more debate about why this has happened. It is a sobering thought for now simply to reflect on the fact that it has.

Conservative policy on Europe becomes clearer

2009-06-03T11:23:00.001+01:00

For some time now, the Conservative policy on the Lisbon treaty is to hold a referendum on it if it is yet to come into force, but if it has come into force by the time they come into power, they have said merely that they “won’t let matters rest”. Now we know more about what that means.

To convene an intergovernmental conference to revise the treaties requires a majority vote in the European Council: which 13 other countries want to restart all the agony and turmoil that has been Europe’s institutional lot for the last 9 years?

In a radio interview yesterday, David Cameron said that “There's an important negotiation coming up on the future funding of the EU and I don't want to see us increasing the funding at all, but it gives us enormous leverage in terms of making sure we get a good deal for Britain.”

So, that’s his route to a new negotiation. The budget has to be agreed unanimously, and Britain could simply refuse to agree a new budget until its demands on the institutions are met. Refusal to pass a budget was the strategy followed by Newt Gingrich after his mid-term election victory in 1994: the US government ground to a halt for a while as a result. The reaction of the voters to this stunt was negative, and the Republicans were damaged as a result.

John Major’s beef war also comes to mind. To get a change in EU policy on the export of British beef, introduced as a reaction to the emergence of BSE, John Major’s government set about vetoing or opposing every EU policy wherever it could. The result was humiliation for Britain. Working through the institutions got the changes Britain wanted, whereas working outside them simply failed.

Adopting a collision course with the rest of EU, tying a new round of institutional reform to the budget debate, doesn’t look likely to succeed. And even if it does, what does it do to Britain’s interests?

After all, Britain will remain in the EU – David Cameron is very clear on that – and has a finite amount of political capital. To spend it on reopening the institutional issue means that less can be deployed in the debate about the budget. Britain’s interests in the way in which the EU raises money and spends it will be less well-argued because of the Tories’ institutional diversions. Foreseeably, Britain will become less influential in Europe. Perhaps that is what they really intend.

Who pays for the rebate

2009-05-30T12:32:00.000+01:00

Conservative shadow foreign secretary William Hague chooses to attack Labour for agreeing to give up part of the British rebate. This is the feature of the EU budget whereby Britain gets compensated for the fact that, because of certain characteristics of its economy, it tends to pay more and receive less than would otherwise be considered fair. In the most recent negotiations, in December 2005, it was agreed that the British rebate should fall from an average of 7.7 billion euros per year to around 6 billion. (The BBC has a briefing on the issue here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4721307.stm)

William Hague’s complaint is that the government agreed to the reduction in the rebate in return for very little. (Read his article in the Spectator here.)
The demand for fundamental reform of the CAP, which he accepts was “not a wholly unreasonable position”, produced only agreement to a review. This shows weakness in defending Britain’s interests.

But there is more to it than this. In other ways, the budget rebate is quite harmful for British interests – individual co-funded spending programmes are denied to Britain because the Treasury would rather have less money but more freedom to decide how to spend it – and in any case, the question of how to pay for the EU needs deeper and more profound reform even than scrapping the CAP outright would deliver.

And, in the context of the Conservative party’s search for new allies, attacking the rebate reduction risks creating further problems. This is because the money that is no longer paid to Britain in the rebate is money that was coming from the countries that joined the EU in 2004. After years of suffering under communism, they were left very poor. It hardly seemed fair that they should be making transfer payments to Britain. William Hague disagrees. He wants the money back. Let us see whether he can make that a part of the programme of his new group in the European Parliament, composed as it will be largely of MEPs from the rural areas of eastern Europe.

The Conservatives are on the way out

2009-05-29T19:03:00.001+01:00

Caroline Jackson, a Conservative MEP who is standing down this time, has gone into print in European Voice to criticise the decision to leave the EPP after the elections. (Read the article here.) This was a commitment made by David Cameron when he was running for Tory leader, and there is a suspicion that he did not really know what he was taking on. Walking out of a group in the European Parliament is very easy, but creating a new one is rather harder. He said once that it would take months, not years. In the end, if he does it, it will have taken years.

Caroline Jackson’s complaint is that Conservative interests will be weakened if the British Tories are not part of the EPP group. In the future regulation of financial services, for example, she fears that the British ability to stave off regulatory threats to the City of London will be reduced if a lot of British MEPs are consorting with the right wing fringe rather than sitting firmly in the mainstream.

Her point about the fringes is a good one. Minor parties, particularly on the right, tend to do better in European elections that they do in national elections. This means that political parties from other countries that might look like good partners on the strength of their national political performance might turn out to be rather less useful partners when it comes to sitting down together in Brussels. The other parties on the right that might offer themselves as potential partners in the future all present difficulties in one way or another. After all, this is why their candidates and voters are not supporting mainstream EPP member parties in the first place. They have problems with issues like gender equality, or gay rights, or racism, or climate change. They are the very antithesis of the image that David Cameron has been trying to adopt for his own party back in the UK.

Given that David Cameron said that the Tories should leave the federalist-inclined EPP because they should not say one thing in Westminster and a different thing in Brussels, he will find it hard to sit down with the League of Polish Families, for example.

Caroline Jackson’s warning about the loss of influence is just as real, but less relevant. It is less relevant because David Cameron does not care. He does not value the role of the European Parliament in shaping legislation, and does not believe that it has shaped legislation in a way that suits Britain. He is a Eurosceptic, after all. The way he intends to defend British interests in Europe is using the power and influence of the national government, not through the activities of MEPs in the European Parliament.

It is not surprising if Conservative MEPs are unhappy with this attitude. Voters might consider whether they want to be represented by MEPs who want to make the most of the opportunities presented to them, or MEPs who would prefer not to have those opportunities at all.

Does Labour support joining the euro?

2009-05-28T16:24:00.001+01:00

The Vote Match website – which you can visit here - reveals some interesting facts about what parties think. One of the most interesting is Labour policy on the euro.

The statement that was put was “The UK should join the European single currency (Euro)”, with which Labour was understood to agree on the basis of the following quote in its policy document: “In principle we are in favour of membership of the single currency.”

The Labour party itself requested that it should be recorded instead as being “open minded” on the issue.

In one sense, a party’s view of the euro is irrelevant to the European elections. It is not up to the European Parliament to decide whether Britain can join the euro: that is a matter for the British government (to adopt suitable policies designed to steer the British economy in the right direction), the British parliament (which would have to support those policies and vote in favour of actually joining), the British people (who would have to vote Yes in a referendum), and the national governments of the other member states (with whom Britain would have to agree a suitable exchange rate around which exchange rate stability could be demonstrated). There might be a small role for the EP in its scrutiny of the actions of the European Central Bank and the European Commission, to the extent that those actions might help or hinder future British membership of the euro, but that is only at the margins. It might seem paradoxical, but decisions about Europe are not taken in European elections but in national elections.

In another sense, though, a party’s view of the euro is extremely important. What a party says about the euro is indicative of its vision of Europe, both in its substance and its clarity.

What Labour says about the euro is that certain economic conditions would have to be met – that’s why the policy document states support for euro membership “in principle” – but those economic conditions will not be met of their own accord. They will be met if membership of the euro is set as a deliberate goal, and economic policies are devised to meet it. Right now, the Labour government’s economic policy has other goals, and membership of the euro is not remotely under consideration.

If the debate about the euro is a constitutional one, then Labour is on the side of the angels: they agree that it is possible. But if the debate about the euro is a political one – whether the actions of one party rather than another will make euro membership more likely – then one’s view of Labour has to be rather more open-minded.

US-style senators

2009-05-28T12:39:00.000+01:00

Timothy Garton Ash, thinking about possible changes to the British constitution, writes of the House of Lords that “We can't have US-style senators because we don't have US-style states.” (Item 5 in his list here.) US senators are indeed powerful figures in the American political system, but what makes them so powerful?

First, and most importantly, there is the separation of powers. Being directly elected, the executive does not depend on the confidence of the legislature, which means in turn that members of the Senate are not subject to the same degree of party discipline as is required in a parliamentary system like Westminster.

Next, there is the fact that the Senate has some particularly important powers, greater than those of the House of Representatives. Notably, these include the power to ratify international treaties, but more useful is the power to approve or reject senior appointments such as members of the cabinet, ambassadors, and supreme court judges. Because these involve discussions of personalities, members of the Senate can acquire a high profile as a result.

Thirdly, there is the fact that the Senate is small. There are only 100 senators, which means that each of them can play a significantly more important role in American political life than if there were 646 in total.

A fourth factor is the sheer diversity of America itself. While the same two political parties nominally contest each election all over the country, in fact those political parties are very different in different regions. The Democratic party of the deep south is different from the Democratic party in New England, for example. Republicans of the religious Mid West are different from the Republicans of the urban centres. What this means is that central control of political parties is yet harder, giving senators even more independence.

Only the fourth of these factors is related to the fact that the US is a federal system composed of states rather than being a unitary political system. Prospective senators arise to prominence through the political systems of their home states: Barack Obama was a state senator in Illinois before being elected to the Senate in Washington DC in 2004. The lesson is that vibrant sub-national democracy is an important component in establishing vibrant national democracy, too.

In one respect, though, even the American system is not what it might be. As originally conceived, members of the House were elected by the people while members of the Senate were elected by the states. The 17th amendment to the US constitution in 1913 changed this, introducing direct popular election for the senators, too. As result, members of both houses in Congress have effectively the same mandate and the states of the United States have lost their direct representation in the US federal government.

Given that Timothy Garton Ash’s sixth point in his list is “Stronger democratic local government”, there is something that can be done here. British members of the upper house could be elected by members of local councils and regional assemblies (where they exist). They could play a role as a revising chamber for legislation, but not be required to provide a majority to support the government. There could be few of them.

Members of such an upper house would owe their place in political life not to the patronage of a centralised political party but to the support of people with political interests throughout the country. They would have a specific interest in preventing local government being further denuded of powers and might even serve as a motor for new decentralisation.

We don’t have US-style states, although it would be good if we did, but we can still have a reformed and more effective upper house.

Somewhere else

2009-05-25T22:57:00.004+01:00

David Cameron’s speech on reforming government on Tuesday morning includes the usual sideswipes at the European Union. He says:

“The EU and the judges – neither of them accountable to British citizens – have taken too much power over issues that are contested aspects of public policy, and which should therefore be settled in the realm of democratic politics.”

And it thereby follows that “a progressive reform agenda demands that we redistribute power from the EU to Britain”.

The alternative would be to settle these issues in the realm of democratic politics at European level. There are elections in two weeks’ time on exactly the issues that Europe deals with. If now is not the time to talk about European democratic politics, when is it?

He goes on:

“It's no wonder people feel so disillusioned with politics and parliament when they see so many big decisions that affect their lives being made somewhere else.”

You don’t need to talk about progressive politics to understand David Cameron’s attitude to Europe, you merely need to read that sentence. Europe is “somewhere else”.

If you look at a map, though, or if you look at our trading patterns, or our environmental problems, or our security interests, Europe is not somewhere else, it is where we are.

Is the European Parliament powerful or not?

2009-05-24T10:05:00.007+01:00

A combination of the expenses scandal in Westminster and the European parliamentary elections is producing a strange outcome in the newspapers. On the one hand, we are told that the European elections don’t matter much, that the turnout on 4 June will be low and deservedly so. On the other hand, we are told that MPs have been abusing expenses because they don’t have anything else to do, now that all their power has gone to the European Union.

(Read Will Hutton and Andrew Rawnsley today and see what I mean.)

The first argument has some merit. Some of the most important issues that politics deals with – the balance between public and private spending in the economy, criminal justice, education – are dealt with at national level and not by the EU. If those are the only things you care about, then there is no reason to vote.

But if you are interested in the way we work and earn a living, then the European Parliament is for you. It deals with the impact on the environment that our daily lives have, it decides on our rights as consumers and employees, it discusses our trade and agriculture policies and they way they affect the rest of the world. Everyone can have a say on these issues, if only they want to. It is as simple as going to vote on 4 June.

The second argument is simply wrong. Even if the main decisions about the regulation of economic and commercial life are now European decisions rather than national decisions, national MPs are not cut out of the picture. Those European decisions also have to be taken by national government ministers, who could be held to account in national parliaments if national MPs were so inclined. And after the directives have been agreed in Brussels, they then have to be implemented in national law, and there is often great scope for influencing the way that this is done. Plenty for national MPs to do.

(The Lisbon treaty will hand even greater powers and opportunity to national MPs for influencing EU legislation. Funny that the people who complain the most about the supposed loss of powers by national parliaments are the same ones opposing a treaty that would increase those powers.)

The truth is that looking at the balance of power in the EU between national parliaments and the European Parliament does not get you very far. One also has to think about the power of national governments, exercised both in the national capitals and also behind the scenes in committees in Brussels. It should be the joint project of parliaments of all types to hold those national governments to account.

Small economies can ride out the economic storm

2009-05-22T11:11:00.000+01:00

The Financial Times reported on an interesting study by the Lausanne Institute for Management Development yesterday, looking at the resilience of national economies, large and small. Read the report here.

The study found that, on the whole, smaller countries were better able to adapt themselves to the financial crisis and prepare for recovery. Political and business systems were more in touch with the needs of the people and the economy, and could implement changes more easily. Small is beautiful. (This blog commented on the economic benefits that flow from regional government earlier in the week.)

But before anyone gets too excited, there is an important additional factor to consider. This was a study of the ability of countries to prepare for economic recovery, when it comes. But when it comes is not an independent fact of nature. It too is susceptible to political intervention.

And the political intervention that will bring recovery sooner will come from the large economies, not the small ones. These are the countries whose decisions have repercussions all around the world. Major exporters like Germany and China and major importers like the United States and the UK are the countries whose economic policy decisions set the trend for the global economy.

Those economic policy decisions will be more effective if they are taken and implemented jointly. The coordination of fiscal stimulus packages will make all of them more effective: there is no national solution to global recession.

The ideal package therefore seems to be small scale government for industrial and enterprise policy but large scale government for macroeconomics. Different levels of government for different functions: whoever thought of that?

An end to parliamentary sovereignty

2009-05-21T09:36:00.002+01:00

A regular argument put forward by anti-Europeans as grounds for opposing the EU is that parliament should be sovereign. Nothing should override the powers of the elected MPs sitting at Westminster.

We federalists have said, in contrast, that it is not parliament that is sovereign but the people. The institutional arrangements that govern them, or rather by which the people govern themselves, can be changed as and when it suits the people to do so. The legitimacy of British membership of the EU is therefore sealed by the fact that the people have approved it: in the referendum on membership in 1975 and in every general election since the late 1950s.

We are now seeing, in the form of the House of Commons expenses rules, where the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty leads us. If an MP wants to spend money on a floating island for his ducks, or on cleaning out his moat, or on a plasma screen TV, then that’s fine. MPs can write rules to permit that. Anyone who professes to believe in parliamentary sovereignty has no recourse other than to vote for a different MP at the next general election. And where the MP sits in a safe seat with an enormous majority, that might not be very successful.

On the other hand, those of us who have long been suspicious of the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty have seen our doubts confirmed. The interests of national parliamentarians are not necessarily synonymous with the interests of the nation as a whole. It is a pity that it has taken such a financial scandal for this principle to come to wider attention.

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Thomas Jefferson, in the US declaration of independence, put it like this:

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Centralised states bad for economy

2009-05-18T22:55:00.000+01:00

It has long been an argument of Federal Union that a federal United Kingdom would be economically more successful than the centralised version we have at the moment. During the halcyon days of the Blair/Brown bubble, people used to ask how the British could have been more successful than it appeared to be at the time. In these more recent and more realistic times, those people have their answer.

Regional government puts effective powers into many more hands, hands that are closer to the problems that need to be solved. But for the mess caused by John Prescott over the referendum in the north east, we might be some way towards such a system. Regrettably, the case for regional government is as discredited as the man who was supposed to champion it, but maybe regional government will bounce back first.

A study commissioned by the Assembly of European Regions suggests that it might. Countries where the regions have powers over taxation, legislation and education do better than countries where the regions do not, on the whole. It is no longer just an argument of Federal Union, it seems.

A further point is a reflection on the case for an English parliament. It could be part of a federal United Kingdom of a kind, and would solve a number of the problems posed by the current system of asymmetry in the British constitution. On the other hand, it would still represent 48 million people, the population of England. It could hardly to deliver the benefits of true regional government demonstrated by the AER study. An English parliament would itself have to set up some kind of regional system if it were truly to provide effective and democratic government of the kind the English are looking for.

Following the rules

2009-05-17T10:17:00.000+01:00

The recent revelations about MPs’ expense claims had led to a series of newspaper articles now questioning the whole function of having rules as such. Conservative columnists such as Iain Martin and rational liberals such as A C Grayling are finding routes to the same argument that individuals equipped to act ethically will behave better than individuals tasked with following rules.

A C Grayling writes that a “rules-based society is by its nature a rule-bending society” and that the rules thus will inevitably fail. The act of compliance will be accompanied by an act of rebellion, seeking to get round the rules rather than meekly submitting to them. The rules need to be followed in the spirit as well as in the letter.

Federalism is fundamentally a rule-based approach to relations between states – law should replace force as the means of settling their disputes – so naturally federalists should be concerned if there is a revival of the argument that rules are the wrong approach.

The significance of rules in relation to the power of the state is that they constrain that power. It is necessary for a citizen to obey the law, but it is also sufficient. The state does not have the right to compel actions in ways that are not laid down in statute. A citizen who pays the proper taxes should live in no fear of further expropriation. If there are no rules and merely ethics, when can somebody know that that they have given enough?

Furthermore, the political process is a collective means of deciding upon collective action. Citizens as a whole know that an extra financial contribution from any one of them would achieve little in terms of providing further resources for the state, but the guarantee that the same extra financial contribution will be provided by all of them will achieve a great deal. This is the advantage of taxation over charity: you know what you are going to get.

Let’s go back to MPs’ expenses claims. The present system of a few rules and the expectation of honourable behaviour has failed. The rules were too few to control what might and might not be permissible expenditure, and the expectation of honourable behaviour has not been met. To blame this failure on the presence of the rules, because they degraded the importance of the behaviour, is wrong. Better to blame the inadequate rules.

Similarly with the collapse in the banking sector. It is no good saying that the City was fine when everyone working in it was a gentleman. The truth is that it wasn’t fine – it was rife with insider trading and exploitation of the innocent investor. Trading practices have to be controlled. The incentives offered to traders have to be consistent with the long-term interests of the banks and of the wider financial system. This is the role of regulation.

This is not to deny the role of ethics, for there are places where the rules cannot go. The libertarian dream that every relationship can be reduced to a contract is mistaken. There is such a thing as society that needs more regulation and control than the law can provide. There is a place for following rules in the spirit as well as to the letter, whether we are thinking about MPs’ expenses or the treaties and institutions of the European Union.

Society is held together by more than just what is written down. It also depends on what must remain unspoken. If the Conservatives should benefit from the present crisis of public confidence in politicians and their behaviour and form the next government, they should remember this in their foreign policy as well as at home.

No need for a tunnel

2009-05-15T10:35:00.001+01:00

A truly insane news report caught my eye in the Financial Times today, proposing a tunnel from Bolivia to an artificial island in the Pacific. (Read the story here.)

Bolivia is a landlocked country, and this tunnel plus island combination would restore access to the sea lost in 1884. The land under which the tunnel would go was lost to Chile in a war and relations between the two countries on this issue are still sensitive to this day.

(The 19th century history of South America is littered with wars over territory on the European model, and North America might have gone the same way had it not been for the success of the constitutional settlement agreed in 1787.)

It is absurd, though, if the dictates of national sovereignty, understood as it still is in this 19th century sense, lead to such a ludicrous waste as this Bolivian tunnel. It would be a much simpler matter to conclude a treaty with supranational enforcement to provide for trading and transport links: in fact, it was the revocation of such trading privileges that led to the outbreak of war in 1879.

It makes more sense for the different nations of the earth to learn to share it, rather than to dig expensively and wastefully underneath it.

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We have been here before. W B Curry, in a memorable passage in “The case for federal union”, wrote this (he was writing in 1939 at the time of the dispute between Germany and Poland over Danzig and the so-called "Polish corridor"):

“Do Northumberland and Durham squabble about who shall control the mouth of the Tyne? Does Wiltshire want a corridor through Hampshire to Southampton in order to have free access to the sea? Do we hear of the sad fate of such inland States as Illinois, Kentucky, and Kansas, depending as they must for access to the sea upon routes assign through other States? How is it possible that Connecticut and New Jersey tolerate the fact that New York dominates the mouth of the Hudson? Surely the States of Missouri, Tennessee, and Mississippi find it altogether intolerable that Louisiana should control the delta of their great river? All these are situations that would give rise to “tension” (diplomatic language for intention to provoke a quarrel) if the areas concerned were sovereign States. When they are not sovereign States, and do not therefore menace each other, either immediately or potentially, the problem simply does not arise.”