Spanish article on neo-antisemitism

This article appeared in the Spanish paper ABC (Madrid)

El regreso del antisemitismo

28 October 2009

En el Royal National Theatre de Londres hay en cartel una obra, «Our Class» (Nuestra clase), que está atrayendo mucho público. Narra la masacre de 1.400 judíos en la ciudad polaca de Jedwabne, en el noreste de Polonia, en 1941. Estos judíos no fueron víctimas de los nazis. Fueron asesinados por polacos en un arrebato de locura antisemita desencadenado por los horrores de la ocupación germano-rusa de Polonia después de 1939. La obra gira en torno a la vida de 10 polacos católicos y 10 polacos judíos que estaban juntos en la misma clase, hasta que un grupo se volvió contra el otro.

En la historia del Holocausto, la matanza de Jedwabne es un incidente secundario. Pero después de 1945, el Gobierno comunista polaco la ocultó durante décadas porque no podía soportar la incómoda verdad de que los polacos hubieran exterminado a judíos, y no sólo a nazis. En 2001, el entonces presidente de Polonia Alexander Kwasniewski fue a Jedwabne a pedir perdón por lo que se hizo a los judíos de la ciudad en 1941.
Fue atacado por políticos locales liderados por el ultranacionalista Michal Kaminski, que había sido miembro del antisemita y racista Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski (Renacimiento Nacional de Polonia) antes de pasarse a una política más convencional, pero todavía de la derecha dura.
A Kaminski podría considerársele uno más de los muchos políticos de derechas de ideología antisemita si no fuera porque ahora lidera una agrupación política en el Parlamento Europeo que incluye al Partido Conservador británico. Los colegas parlamentarios de Kaminski son invitados habituales de Radio Maryja, la emisora de radio católica de Polonia que el Vaticano ha tratado de cerrar debido a su propaganda antijudía. Hungría ha enviado a tres diputados del Partido Jobbik, que es abiertamente antisemita. Se han unido al amigo de Kaminski que milita en el Partido de la Libertad letón, Robert Zile, cuya política incluye honrar a los voluntarios letones de las Waffen SS, cuyo historial era igual de malo que el de los alemanes nazis en lo que a matar judíos se refiere.
De ahí el nuevo panorama del proceso parlamentario europeo, en el que se da al antisemitismo un carácter banal y se considera una política tolerada. El Partido Nacional Británico se ha asegurado la elección de su líder, Nick Griffin, al Parlamento europeo. Griffin es conocido por negar el Holocausto y en su granja tenía dos cerdos a los que llamaba «Ana» y «Frank». La única obra suya que se ha publicado se titula «Quiénes son los que doblegan las mentes» y en ella afirma que un grupo de presión judío secreto controla los medios de comunicación británicos.
Los sindicatos británicos han instado a boicotear a Israel aunque en Israel se critique lo que hacen su Gobierno y su ejército más que en cualquier otro país del mundo. A estos mismos sindicatos jamás se les pasaría por la cabeza pedir que se boicotee a los Estados árabes represivos, pero cuando se trata del único Estado judío en el mundo se aplica un doble rasero.
Muchos políticos europeos siguen sin frenar o cuestionar el clásico antisemitismo estatal que expresan los discursos del presidente iraní Ahmadineyad o el que los saudíes financien una red de mezquitas wahabíes en Europa en las que se predica el odio contra los judíos e Israel.
Apenas se ha dado publicidad a la lluvia de miles de misiles que los matajudíos de Hamás lanzaron sobre el sur de Israel. Cuando un número mucho menor de misiles V1 y V2 cayeron sobre Londres en 1944, la respuesta británica fue bombardear Hamburgo, provocando 50.000 víctimas civiles, y más tarde envolver Dresde en llamas, causando la muerte de 35.000 niños, mujeres y no combatientes.
Pero cuando los soldados israelíes tratan de poner fin a los ataques de misiles contra sus mujeres y niños, el mundo se apresura a condenarlos y se traga la propaganda de Hamás, ya que la nueva ideología antisemita sostiene que los judíos de Israel no tienen derecho a la defensa propia.
Una forma más perniciosa de antisemitismo es considerar a todos los judíos responsables de lo que sucede en Israel y retratar al Estado judío como una entidad nazi o partidaria del apartheid. A los católicos irlandeses en Gran Bretaña no se les culpa del terrorismo del IRA y a los ciudadanos vascos no se les mira con desprecio debido a las matanzas del grupo terrorista y fascistoide ETA. Pero a los judíos se les hace creer que, a menos que denuncien a un país por el que sienten una afinidad natural y normal, son responsables en conjunto de los excesos, errores y crueldades que efectivamente tienen lugar en los territorios ocupados.
Estas fuerzas componen un nuevo antisemitismo, con sus diputados, su moderna paranoia de la conspiración sobre un lobby judío secreto que maneja todos los hilos, sus ataques contra los judíos en las calles de su respectivo país, y el apoyo a Estados poderosos con dinero para despilfarrar en la promoción del odio antisemita.
Éste no es el antisemitismo nazi o de los pogromos en el imperio ruso, o el omnipresente fanatismo antijudío del comunismo soviético. Pero la ideología, la teoría y la práctica del antisemitismo del siglo XXI es ahora parte de la política europea actual. ¿Cuándo se plantarán los políticos europeos y adoptarán medidas para derrotar a los antisemitas antes de que adquieran todavía más fuerza?

Book review: Victor Sebestyen's Revolution 1989

This article on the 1989 revolution was published in Tribune
"Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire" by Victor Sebestyen (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £25)
16 October 2009

The 1989 revolution lays claim to be the world’s greatest revolution precisely because it was peaceful. Perhaps it would command more attention if blood had been shed as in all previous revolutions – think the English Civil War, the Terror and the guillotines of France after 1789, the deaths in America between 1776 and 1865 when American politics finally turned away from violence, or the ghastly revolutions of the 20th century from the Bolsheviks in 1917 to the Ayatollahs in Iran in 1979. But Victor Sebestyen’s book is worth a dozen rehashes of World War II by Andrew Roberts and his clones.

Because 1989 was different. An empire overthrown. People able to speak, travel, write and have sex as they pleased. The camp of democracy massively enlarged with only the killing of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu blotting what was a victory for non-violent politics. Similar movement was taking place in Latin America, in South Korea and, above all, in South Africa. Their success also lay in turning away from violence. The Latin American and Irish terrorists of the 1970s only made matters worse as did the pin-prick attacks of the exiled ANC Marxist militia.

Sebestyen’s record of the 1980s is a compelling, page-turning read. Finely edited by his publisher, his book is a precise step-by-step account of the high politics and the big-name political players in the years between the August 1980 strikes in Gdansk and the crumbling of the Berlin Wall nine years later.

There are absences – the people of the Baltic states who actually had to escape from being fully incorporated into the USSR in 1940 strangely do not get a mention. Sebestyen has all the virtues of a traditional Fleet Street journalist – a brisk style, revealing tales of personalities, and a steady narrative pace – and all the faults of London journalism with its comprehensive indifference to ideology, as well as social and economic currents.
He says no one saw the changes coming. Eh? I was in Prague meeting Charter 77 leaders in 1978 and was in Poland regularly in 1980-1981 and even wrote the first book on the Polish union, Solidarity, which ended on an optimistic note. Others who examined the rejection by the masses of "real existing socialism" noted that change was coming. Stalinism could only preside with terror tactics over a largely peasant society. The urbanisation and industrialisation of Russia and Eastern Europe, which accelerated from the 1960s onwards, brought into being a working class which had its own needs and its own form of extra-party organisation – the trade union.
Most of the organisers, writers and theoreticians of the different movements that toppled communism were trained in dialectic and thus were able to guide their different movements away from an excessive religious nationalism. Sadly, this is back in business as we see in the Tory alliance with right-wing Polish nationalist politicians with unpleasant views on Jews, gays and Barack Obama.
Sebestyen repeats the tired old neo-conservative arguments that the CIA financed the democratic opposition via the Vatican. He fails to mentions the entire European and world democratic trade union movement that offered support, money and a platform to Solidarity both during its early period of legal existence and then as it led a half-life in the 1980s. Norman Willis, the TUC general secretary, deserves a mention and it is bizarre that Sebestyen seems to know nothing of the role of the ILO where Solidarity and other democratic unions in the communist world had a platform and support.
Nor does he acknowledge the role of the exiled Poles, Czechs and others like Jan Kavan and his Palach Press in London or the Smolar brothers in London and Paris who channelled books, money, printing equipment and people into communist Europe. The 1980s saw the rise of the strength of the European Community. The West was no longer defined by NATO but by European integration to which all the nations of Europe could aspire. But Sebestyen ignores the magnetic pull of the EU. Europe could no longer be painted as plagued by capitalism and clerics and cartels as in the old communist propaganda lines of the 1950s and 1960s.
He is honest in describing the massive errors of judgement of the CIA. The role of Conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in creating, financing, and arming jihadi terrorism in the 1980s – which culminated in 9/11 and in today’s death tolls in Afghanistan – needs much harsher examination and judgement.
This is a book in the big men school of contemporary history. It is none the worse for that but we are still waiting for a definitive account of a revolution that was glorious and, in a short period, brought more freedom and democracy to more people than ever previously achieved.

Book review of Denis MacShane's latest book on "Globalising Hatred. The New Antisemitism"

"Globalising Hatred", By Denis MacShane

Reviewed by Boyd Tonkin (Independent)

16 October 2009

The German social democrat Bebel wisely called anti-Semitism "the socialism of fools". This bracing, combative account of its modern resurgence finds much nasty new evidence among pro-Islamist leftists.

Yet the author would agree that a hatred of Jews still counts as the conservatism of morons too. MacShane, as a Labour MP, turns his unblinking gaze on the left - "my political community" - in order to guard against the spread of bigotry under the cloak of pro-Palestinian or anti-war activism.
However, events in the European parliament show that the foul old swamp of reactionary prejudice that bred anti-Semitism still sucks in right-wing idiots. Some of the polemic here has a scattershot air that will date. But the warning to progressives - to purge their thinking of all trace of a vile ideology - rings out clear as a bell.

On the importance of diplomats and the Foreign Office

The Duty of Diplomacy
Introductory remarks at the launch of the new edition of Satow’s Diplomatic Practice
edited by Sir Ivor Roberts KCMG, President of Trinity College in Oxford.
Locarno Room, FCO
19 October 2009

I had the pleasure of working with Britain’s diplomats as a PPS and then a minister at the FCO between 1997 and 2005.

Unlike some, I have nothing but admiration for the practice and profession of diplomacy. And for its professionals and practitioners.

If we want to build bridges between peoples, swerve round the stone walls that national leaders erect in the false belief that Lord Salisbury’s splendid isolation of a century ago or today’s miserable insulation advanced by Lord Rothermere or Mr Murdoch’s minions will somehow advance national interest, or just oil the wheels - so they turn instead of grating - then diplomats are the bridge-builders, advisors to get politicians to go round walls instead of crashing into them, and carry an oil can in their trousers.

So let us hear it for dips. This new guide produced by a team of them guided by Ivor Roberts will be invaluable. I am especially impressed by the chapters on NGOs, and the use of private envoys.

As a minister I regarded private envoys as irrelevant. A good ambassador, an independent-minded official, and anyone who cared about the job was more than enough for me.
I am worried today that the Government has downgraded the role of diplomats and embassies and the Foreign Service generally. We have moved from state-craft to aid-craft or soldier-craft as the money has poured into development aid, into the military and into the agencies.
A friend high in today’s service told me that the FCO was proposing to require its ambassadors and officials in economy class for transatlantic flights. Turning right as you get on the plane may please our new Salem Puritans for whom travel conditions which do not half-kill you are an unspeakable luxury.
On the contrary, I believe that if you get off a plane cramped, unslept, and tired you will not serve the nation’s interests well.
How long before our officials are required to hitch-hike to Brussels to save money and appease the columnists who hate public service especially the high calling of public service to defend and advance the vital interests of the state?
I also think our diplomats have a duty of loyalty that extends a little beyond their retirement date. I resent reading the comments from men who took everything the Service had to offer – gongs, pensions, perks and retirement jobs - and then turn round to criticise the elected leaders they served.

I respect anyone who resigns on principle because a decision on policy is unacceptable or who feels that the elected leadership of our country was taking a disastrously wrong course. I am not impressed by those who discover their conscience or contempt for a PM or other ministers once the index-linked pension is being paid out.
To work in the FCO at all levels is to have an immense privilege of access to information that the newspapers rarely invest in. It is to witness very able men and women worry their way through big problems and try and find not just the right answer but the good answer. It is to be part of five centuries of service to our country. Just read Hilary Mantel’s fine Booker prize winner, Wolf Hall, about the beginnings of the English state under Henry VIII and you have pages devoted to the centrality of foreign relations and the diplomacy needed to advance the national interest.
So I congratulate Sir Ivor on this work. At a time when MPs are the lowest of the low I am very proud that the we have the FCO and the diplomats we have and long may they serve the nation and its elected leaders to the best of their abilities, wit, and sense of joie de vivre. And preferably in business not cattle class.

Russia and the Council of Europe

This article appeared in The Moscow Times

Russia's Values Aren't Europe's

8 October 2009

The continuing bitter feud between Russia and the Council of Europe reflects a major problem about Russian engagement with the rest of Europe.

Most contacts that Russia has with other European nations are state-to-state, business-to-business or other bilateral relations ranging from culture to tourism. At the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, hundreds of delegates come together.

The Strasbourg-based Council of Europe was set up after World War II to oversee the European Convention on Human Rights. Its main agency is the European Court of Human Rights. But it also is supervised by a Parliamentary Assembly where experienced members of parliament and former ministers who care about democracy and human rights come together to debate and decide policy.

World leaders such as President Dmitry Medvedev or German Chancellor Angela Merkel play no role. This is raw parliamentary democracy with clashes within delegations as much as disagreements between representatives of different countries. Unlike the European Union, the 47-member Council of Europe includes Turkey and Serbia, Norway and Azerbaijan. There is a side spectrum of political views represented, from right-wingers to Communists, from liberals to ultranationalists.

Russia’s fundamental problem is that it wants to be a member of the Council of Europe, but it doesn’t want to abide by the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights or conform to the norms and values of the European vision of what democracy and freedom entails. And what is puzzling to all other delegates is the extent to which all representatives of the State Duma and Federation Council always toe the official Kremlin line in the positions they take during Council of Europe sessions. Russia is the only member of the council whose delegates act and speak as if they were government spokesmen or diplomats.

With other member countries, different views are expressed among delegates and issues are debated fully. One vivid example: When the Council of Europe produced a hard-hitting report on extraordinary rendition, there were differences in the Polish, British and Romanian delegations over how their governments had cooperated with the United States in detaining al-Qaida suspects.

Russia has already had its credentials suspended over the refusal to cooperate with the Council of Europe over investigations into the deaths and disappearances of thousands of citizens in Chechnya. As of today, Russia has refused to accept 115 rulings from the European Court of Human Rights.

After the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, there was great concern among delegates that despite Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s provocations, Russia mobilized its military power to go well beyond the contested regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Today, Russian troops de facto occupy a fifth of Georgia. The Kremlin has refused to allow EU or Council of Europe missions to examine the problem on the ground. The recommendations of Council of Europe commissions have been rejected.

How should the Council of Europe respond to this conflict? Everyone wants better relations with Russia, but if Russia wants to join and be active in the Council of Europe, then a new approach is needed. If you are in a club, then you should live by its norms, values and rules.

Post-German elections analysis on social-democracy in Europe

This article was published in the German daily newspaper Die Welt on 6 October 2009

Gastkommentar: Europas Sozialdemokratien sind in der Krise
Wir Armen!


Lieber Gott, was tun, um die Sozialdemokratie wieder zum Leben zu erwecken?Deutschland macht es wie Frankreich und Italien und Österreich und bald womöglich auch Großbritannien; überall heißt es jetzt "game over" für die Sozialdemokratie des 20. Jahrhunderts. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero ist in der letzten Woche zum Labour-Parteitag gekommen, um Gordon Brown aufzumuntern. Doch sogar in Spanien zeigen die Umfragen, dass die konservative Partido Popular ihrem Namen alle Ehre macht und populärer als die Sozialisten wird. In Großbritannien sah eine aktuelle Umfrage die Labour-Partei nur auf Rang drei, noch hinter den Liberaldemokraten. Auch wenn es erst ein paar Jahre her ist, dass Gerhard Schröder, Tony Blair, Lionel Jospin und zehn weitere Sozialdemokraten in Europa regierten - die sonnigen Zeiten für die Sozialdemokratie sind lange vorbei.

Wie konnte es so weit kommen? Historiker werden bemerken, dass die sozialdemokratische Vorherrschaft nicht ganz so stark war, wie manch einer meint. In Deutschland dauerte es bis 1969, bevor eine sozialdemokratisch geführte Regierung zustandekam. Frankreich wählte erst 1981 einen sozialistischen Präsidenten. Italien wurde Jahrzehnte von den Christdemokraten regiert. Und in Großbritannien hielten sich Labour-Regierungen stets nur eine Amtszeit - bis Tony Blair kam und Labour beibrachte, es mit Macht und Regierung ernst zu meinen.

Jetzt ist die Sozialdemokratie eingeklemmt zwischen einer Arbeiterklasse, die sich betrogen fühlt, weil ihre Kaufkraft sinkt, und der neuen Religion einer grünen Politik mit ihrem antiwissenschaftlichen Glauben. Wie die alte Kommunistische Partei Frankreichs, die den französischen Sozialisten über Generationen den Weg zur Macht verbaute, stiehlt die Linke der SPD entscheidende Stimmen. Unterdessen klauen die Konservativen die besten sozialdemokratischen Parolen. Bundeskanzlerin Merkel bietet Magna massive Staatshilfen, um die deutschen Opel-Werke am Leben zu halten. Präsident Sarkozy macht schwarze und muslimische Frauen zu Ministern, während für die Parteien des linken Spektrums weiße, bourgeoise, akademische Fachleute stehen.

Eines Tages kommt die Linke bestimmt zurück. Auch die Konservativen währen nicht ewig. Doch wie viele Jahre wird die Sozialdemokratie in der Wüste bleiben? Wann wird ein neuer Brandt, González oder Blair erscheinen?

On Kaminski and the Tories

This article was published on the Guardian's Comment is Free website

The curious case of Michal Kaminski

6 October 2009

At the National Theatre in London, the play Our Class is pulling in crowds. It examines the massacre by a small group of antisemitic Poles of hundreds of Jews in Jedwabne in north east Poland in 1941. No Nazis were involved. The massacre was covered up by the communist rulers in Poland after 1945. Not until well after the end of communism did the facts come to light. The inconvenient truth that some Poles had taken part in a massacre of Jews caused fury in the rightwing circles in Poland associated with Radio Maryja, the anti-Jewish radio station, and among many Polish politicians who felt their nation's honour had been besmirched.

In 2001, Poland's president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, went to Jedwabne to apologise. Like Willy Brandt kneeling at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970, Kwasniewski felt atonement was needed. As Anita Prazmowska has related here, his gesture was criticised by many rightwing Poles, including the rising star of Polish Catholic nationalist politics, Michal Kaminski. His language was lurid and vivid. It upset many Jews. He tried to backtrack but his remarks had been taped.

“Mr President should not take the guilt on the Polish nation, the whole nation that he should represent for what happened in Jedwabne and apologise in its name. I am ready to say the word: I am sorry but under two conditions. First of all, I need to know what I am apologising for. I apologise for a handful of outcasts. Secondly, I can do that if I know that someone from the Jewish side will apologise for what the Jews did during the Soviet occupation between 1939 and 1941. For the mass collaboration of the Jewish people with the Soviet occupier, for fighting Polish partisans in this area. And eventually, for murdering Poles,” declared Kaminski.

Michal Kaminski has now come to prominence after David Cameron ordered Tory MEPs to serve under his leadership in the European Parliament, as part of the Conservative policy of breaking links with mainstream centre-right parties in Europe.

I do not believe that Kaminski is a dedicated antisemite, any more than I believe Ken Livingstone is – despite the grave upset the former mayor of London caused with his offensive remarks to a Jewish journalist or his outspoken attacks on Israel. But if politicians of the left are to face examination of their statements on Jewish questions, then politicians of the right also have to face scrutiny. Michael Schudrich, Poland's Chief Rabbi, got it right when he issued this carefully worded statement about Kaminski when journalists started investigating the Polish MEP's alliance with the Conservative party:

“I do not comment on political decisions. However, it is clear that Mr Kaminski was a member of NOP, a group that is openly far right and neo-nazi. Anyone who would want to align himself with a person who was an active member of NOP and the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne (which was established to deny historical facts of the massacre at Jedwabne) needs to understand with what and by whom he is being represented,” said Poland’s Chief Rabbi in July.

Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, takes a different line. In a harsh personal attack on the foreign secretary, David Miliband, Pollard accuses him of being "disgraceful" and "shameful" because at the Labour party conference he mentioned the background of the Conservatives' new ECR partners from Latvia and Poland.

I have spoken to many Poles – journalists, ambassadors and politicians – about Michal Kaminski. He is described as someone who shoots his mouth off without thinking. He is not a roaring antisemite, but his intervention over Jedwabne troubled many. Pollard proclaims Kaminski a hero of the anticommunist struggle. But every young Pole in that era was anticommunist. Most supported the underground Solidarity trade union. Only a fringe minority like Kaminski signed up to a party which was linked to the darkest days of Polish antisemitism and affiliated to the neo-fascist European National Front.

Conservative press officers have been briefing heavily in an effort to clean up Kaminski's British image. A decent Tory MEP, Timothy Kirkhope, was wheeled out to justify the expulsion of the true blue Yorkshire Conservative MEP, Edward McMillan-Scott, after that latter protested about the rise of "respectable fascism" in the European parliament. Kirkhope wrote an article in the Yorkshire Post, which uses strikingly similar language and arguments to Pollard.

My perspective on this derives from the fact that I chaired an all-party commission of inquiry into antisemitism, and I appreciate the support David Cameron and Tory MPs give to the common fight against antisemitism, as well their support for the Jewish community in Britain. I also chair the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. The accusation of antisemitism is too easily sprayed about. But I have no doubt that antisemitism in east European politics remains a major problem.

I find it disturbing, then, that the editor of the Jewish Chronicle does not share the concerns of many about Kaminski, who is due to speak at the Conservative party conference. I am disappointed also that the Board of Deputies of British Jews has claimed to find nothing "objectionable" or "sinister" in Kaminski's previous remarks; this seems complacently incurious.

I hope that Kaminski uses the opportunity of addressing the Conservative conference to distance himself from Radio Maryja and make clear that the racism and homophobia should have no place in European politics.

The Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty and its consequences on British politics

This article was published in the Yorkshire Post

Irish verdict strands the Europhobes in no man's land

5 October 2009

IRELAND has spoken. Europe is back in business. The fall-out from the Irish referendum is already shaking British politics. Hard-line Tories who admired the Irish when first they said No are now stumped by the huge Irish Yes. UKIP poured money into the No campaign, distributing lurid propaganda to all households in Ireland. As so often in the past, the Irish did not take kindly to superior Brits telling them how to vote.

Will the Czechs now check-mate Lisbon? Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, has two firm beliefs. First, global warming is a myth. Second, the EU is a bad thing. He has yet to put his signature to the treaty. But the Czech Parliament has approved it and his own party supports Lisbon. So the treaty is likely to become law.

For pro-Europeans, there is a palpable sigh of relief. For Europhobes, a fury of frustration. Both need a sense of proportion. Even had the Irish voted No, the EU would have continued as before. The biggest transfer of power or sharing of sovereignty happened under Margaret Thatcher with the Single European Act, and under John Major with the Maastricht Treaty.

John Redwood famously said that the 1998 Treaty of Amsterdam – anyone remember that one? – signalled the end of Britain's independence. We are still here. William Hague famously announced in 2001 that if the pro-EU Labour government was returned Britain "would become a foreign land". Yorkshire remains Yorkshire.

This hyperbole actually does the Eurosceptic camp a disservice. There are problems with Europe that need fixing. But the "Just Say No" line of UKIP, the BNP, and the Better Off Out Conservatives headed by the Shipley MP, Philip Davies, leaves Britain without influence or friends in Europe.

While Gordon Brown, who insisted on a parliamentary ratification of Lisbon, can take some pleasure in the Irish Yes, the Conservatives have a major problem. Will David Cameron now honour his pledge to have a referendum? But on what? Once a treaty is ratified, it becomes law between the signatory parties.

If David Cameron wants to undo the treaty, it means Britain pulling out of the EU. He can seek to renegotiate as much as he likes. But 26 other nations also have problems with Lisbon and have had to swallow difficult, messy compromises. They will give Britain short shrift if a Prime Minister Cameron comes along and asks for a new treaty.

The anti-American Left and anti-European Right are combining in their dislike of Tony Blair as a possible candidate for the new post of President of the European Union Council. In France, Left-wing intellectuals who hate Blair over the Iraq war are denouncing him. In Britain, William Hague heads the Stop Blair campaign. In the summer, David Cameron wisely let it be known that he was relaxed about a President Blair. Hague takes a different line and has even started threatening Europe's leaders with dire consequences if they opt for Blair, which is far from a certainty.

Cameron has burnt his bridges with the Conservatives' sister parties in Europe by creating his new alliance with hard-line nationalist Right-wingers from Poland and Latvia. The newly-elected German Chancellor Angela Merkel has withdrawn her party's representative in London in dismay at Cameron's embrace of anti-German rightist politicians in East Europe some with dubious records on Jewish massacres in the Second World War.

So William Hague's boorish bluster telling Mrs Merkel and other EU leaders to reject Tony Blair is likely to fall on deaf ears. The Lisbon Treaty does not alter the fact that the EU remains a grouping of sovereign nation states. The total income of the EU is one per cent of the combined national incomes of 27 member states. The other 99 per cent is earned, spent, taxed or allocated according to national preferences. The Conservatives have been convulsed by Europe for two decades ever since Mrs Thatcher said "No, No, No" to Brussels.

Cameron has to decide whether to allow those convulsions to dominate his party. If he appeases the UKIP and BNP anti-European vote he will need to offer the red meat of a referendum heading towards withdrawal. If he does that, will business leaders want to see Britain excluded from the single market and London losing all influence in shaping trade and labour market rules in Europe?

In the 19th century, and again and again in the 20th century, what happened in Ireland caused convulsions in British politics. Once again, the Irish have inserted themselves into British politics by saying Yes to Europe. After an unhappy end to Labour's conference Gordon Brown can smile as his opponents wriggle on the Irish Yes. What will David Cameron's response be?

Book review : Humphrey Hawksley's Democracy Kills

This review was published in the Financial Times

No vote. Democracy comes under fire

3 October 2009

Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About Having the Vote?
By Humphrey HawksleyMacmillan £12.99, 356 pages

In my adult life, democracy has done rather well. When I was at university, three nations of Europe – Spain, Portugal and Greece – were all undemocratic. So were South Korea, South Africa, Indonesia, Pakistan and much of Latin America and eastern Europe. Even in France, General de Gaulle dictated the nightly television news bulletins.

The springtime of democracy in the last quarter of the 20th century will be noted by historians as a moment of hope and advance without precedent in world history. Democracy is difficult, messy, uneven and contradictory. But it’s also about hope, and the liberation of the human spirit to write, speak and organise economic and social relations as intelligently as possible.

It was too good to last, of course. The doomsayers of democracy are now gaining ground. Among them is Humphrey Hawksley, a model of liberal BBC journalism. He has reported from all over the world. He has poured his worries and fears about global affairs into a series of fine thrillers. Now he moves from fiction to fact.

His book has a dramatic title, Democracy Kills. But its contents do not ultimately make that case. His thesis plays into the growing conservative realpolitik pessimism that wants to turn its back on the intractable areas of the world where the act of casting a vote does not usher in peace, prosperity and progress – parts of Africa, Afghanistan, the Middle East or, increasingly, Russia.

Did it ever? Hitler, after all, won a majority of votes in Germany. Robert Mugabe was handsomely re-elected well before he began rigging ballots, as was Slobodan Milosevic even as he unleashed his killers to murder European Muslims at Srebrenica or in Kosovo.

So voting is a necessary but far from sufficient element in creating democracy. Hawksley’s book covers the many countries he has reported from. The BBC allows foreign correspondents just a few minutes to explain why, for example, despite the billions in development aid poured into Sierra Leone, the country has no paved roads or functioning hospitals.Television is good at doing the what and the who of world problems, but never the why.

Democracy Kills contains too much colour about how hot he felt or the office decor of people Hawksley has interviewed, however, and not enough explanation of why it’s so hard to move from the ballot box to the fullness of a fair democracy. In the late 19th century, Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury famously noted that he “would no more give the vote to the Irishman than to the Hottentot”. This pessimism, that some folk are just not able to handle democracy, informs too much of this book.

The biggest killer of Muslims worldwide, as well as his own people, was Saddam Hussein. To be sure, Iraqi democracy is imperfect but so was George W Bush’s election in November 2000. Pakistan’s imperfect democracy has seen the defeat of Islamist extremist parties. India’s 60 years of democracy is much feted – but there are still more poor people there than in sub-Saharan Africa and it has more illiterates than its neighbours, though it has more millionaires than Britain. Yet India’s democracy is preferable to any authoritarian alternative.

Better the mess, muddle and mistakes of democracy than the smooth, silky voices explaining why some people just aren’t fit for it. To be sure, promotion of democracy should also support free media, rule of law, non-protectionist economics, and, above all education, education, education – especially girls and young women.

But if the 21st century sees as much victory for democracy as the second half of the 20th century, the world will be better for all to live in.

Polanski should be extradited to the US

Press release: Council of Europe Urged to Support Rape Victims by Sending Polanski to Face Justice

30 September 2009

Britain’s former Europe Minister Denis MacShane MP has said the Council of Europe should support the extradition of Roman Polanski as part of its campaign against rape. On Friday (2 October), the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly will debate a report on rape and violence against women. MacShane has called on fellow-parliamentarians from 46 European states to support the decision of the Swiss authorities to detain Polanski.

“Rape is now the world’s most serious violent crime after murder. Polanski took a 13 year-old girl, gave her drugs, and then had anal sex with her. Sodomising a child is rape. It is a violent crime and arguments about the passage of time or how much money was given to Polanski’s victim cannot remove the fact that he fled from justice like any other violent criminal. Rape in too many Council of Europe countries is not properly investigated as women are afraid to report rape and male-dominated police and judicial systems do not take the violence of rape seriously.

“Now soldiers and militia are using rape to terrorise women in too many conflicts in the world. Modern democracies can ban smoking but do not do enough to ban rape. Polanski committed an act of paedophile rape and should be held accountable for this violence in order to send a message that sodomising a little girl is not to be excused because of his genius as a film-maker. We expect justice to reach back years for other crimes which at the time they were committed those responsible believe they were doing what was permitted. Rape and the sexual trafficking of young girls is a 21st century scourge and finding excuses for a child-rapist like Polanski is not acceptable,” MacShane told Council of Europe delegates today.

Irish Times article on the Lisbon Treaty: who is behind the no-vote

This article was published in the Irish Times

Voters should beware the advice of false friends across Irish Sea

29 September 2009

OPINION: The Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty is a good one for British Eurosceptics only if it is a No vote

IT WAS British Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury who grandly announced in a debate in the London parliament at the end of the 19th century that he would "no more give the vote to the Irish than to the Hottentot". That vulgar imperial Old Etonian racism has today been replaced by a crude Old Etonian anti-Europeanism in the ruling circles of the English dominant classes and especially in the Conservative Party.

Far from thinking the Irish unfit to vote, much of England’s elite think the Irish people’s vote is a capital thing – provided of course they use it to vote down the Lisbon Treaty. In London’s club land, in the editorial offices of many newspapers and in the massed ranks of the Conservative Party, there is a fervent hope that the Irish will do the right thing for their long-gone rulers and vote No to Europe.

If the Irish vote No, they will be the heroes of the hour for Rupert Murdoch, for former pornographer Richard Desmond, who owns the Daily Express , and for the Barclay Brothers, the offshore owners of the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator. The Daily Mail and the Sun , whose rabid anti-Irish columnists and cartoons have been a feature of British "journalism" these last decades, will find nothing but praise for the sagacity of the fine men and women of Ireland if they vote No.

Once such hostility to Europe was the property of the hard Powellite right of the Conservative Party. Not any longer. Half of the candidates selected by the Conservatives to fight the next election believe that Britain should completely renegotiate its relationship with other EU member states, or withdraw from the EU. William Hague famously said before the 2001 election that if people voted for the pro-EU Tony Blair, "Britain would become a foreign land". The top Tory, John Redwood, said the passage of the Amsterdam Treaty in 1998 – remember that one? – meant the abolition of Britain as a sovereign state.

Little matter that the EU takes just 1 per cent of Europe’s income to spend on commonly agreed policies, leaving the other 99 per cent to be spent, taxed, allocated or used according to national priorities. Little matter that the independent researchers at the House of Commons library can find fewer than 10 per cent of all the laws agreed in Britain coming from Europe. Little matter that the Lisbon Treaty strengthens the role of the Dáil, or the House of Commons, or the Bundestag in determining future EU policy. Little matter that Britain, like 25 other member states, has ratified the treaty after lengthy debates in parliament.

None of this counts in the eyes of Britain’s anti-Europeans who portray the EU as some kind of monster from the deep with tentacles strangling the life out of Europe’s nation states. By that they mean Britain has to pay attention to the views of other governments if it wants to get things done in Europe. For the first time in seven centuries, London has had to talk as an equal to Dublin because the voice and vote of an Irish Minister or commissioner is as good as that of his or her British counterpart in the councils of the EU.

The Conservative project is to unwind the EU into a competing bunch of elbow-jabbing nation states. That, in the view of the anti-EU elite in London, will allow again Britain to emerge as a top dog, relegating the smaller countries of Europe to subordinate status. Defeating the Lisbon Treaty would be a crucial breakthrough for this Tory project. Already the senior Tory anti-European MP, David Heathcoat Amory, has said that even if the Irish vote Yes, the Conservatives should organise their own referendum to scupper Lisbon retrospectively.

So the Irish vote is only a good vote if it is a No vote in the eyes of the Britain’s Eurosceptics. David Cameron has already taken a decisive step by breaking links with the ruling centre-right parties in Europe including President Sarkozy’s UMP, Chancellor Merkel’s CDU as well as Fianna Fáil. Instead he has formed an alliance with ultra-nationalist east Europeans, including homophobic Poles accused of anti-Semitism and Latvians who celebrate the Waffen SS as heroes.

Ambassadors are privately expressing deep concern that the adoption of such stark hostility to the EU by what many see as the incoming British government will provoke a crisis in Europe. As the pound sinks to parity or even below the euro, the failure of successive governments to make the case for the EU with vigour and confidence in Britain has opened the door to those who want a very different Europe in which the common rules, especially on social question, are dismantled.

Despite the warning from President Obama’s newly-arrived ambassador in London that Washington wants to talk to Europe as a whole, with Britain inside the EU, the proponents of a so-called "Anglosphere" foreign policy dislike the obligation under the Lisbon Treaty to work with Ireland and other EU nations to develop common foreign policy positions.

Reading the London papers or listening to Conservative shadow ministers or looking at the websites of the well-heeled anti-European propaganda outfits like Open Europe, this desire to see the EU weakened by an Irish No vote is palpable. The decision taken by millions of Irish voters in the secrecy of the ballot box this week will turn on a multitude of factors. Giving a pop on the nose to the Eurosceptic swells and Tory millionaires who are braying in public and praying in private for an Irish No should not sway any votes. But I hope this time, the Irish can say Yes to Europe and No to their false friends across the Irish Sea.

Press release on the need to understand the Muslim world and to condemn islamism

This was carried on Associated Press Pakistan news agency.

MP Urges Greater Understanding of Pakistan and Muslim Issues

25 September 2009

By Fawad Hashmey

LONDON, Sept 25 (APP): A British member of Parliament has urged the Western media for a greater understanding of Pakistan’s difficult internal politics and said it was the extremist ideology of militant Islamism that was responsible for much Islam phobia not the nation and people of Pakistan.

Denis Macshane, who represents Rotherham, north east England, in the Parliament, also called on the broadcasters and newspapers in Britain and Europe to make more effort to understand the religion of Islam.

The MP, a former Minister at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, is an outspoken defender of Kashmiri issues in the British politics.

Macshane told delegates in Berlin at a conference on Muslims and the Media in Europe Thursday that his many thousand Muslim constituents in South Yorkshire were tolerant and peace-loving men and women who simply wanted respect for their religion and the right to lead a decent family life.

He also urged editors in Germany and France as well as Britain to reach out to the broader Muslim community rather than rely on self-appointed spokesmen.

"It is quite wrong to brand Muslims because a number of ultra-ideological fanatics chose to invoke their faith to do bad things. It is like condemning Catholics for what the IRA did when it killed innocent people or blaming Nazism on the German people. We need to separate Islam the religion from Islamism the ideology which in its most violent and extreme form is destructive.

"That is why I welcome the lead British newspapers and television have taken in employing Muslims as journalists and broadcasters. They work as good journalists and TV presenters not on account of their religious background but it is important their contribution is acknowledged," said MacShane.

Thirty years ago the senior Labour MP was the youngest-ever President of the National Union of Journalists. Then he wrote a pamphlet for the NUJ criticising media coverage on race issues and calling for more journalists to be recruited from Muslim and BME backgrounds.

"We have come a long way since then but more needs to be done. There is a great deal of xenophobia, dislike of Europeans, Islam phobia and anti-Semitism in politics and on the web. I am concerned at the anti-Pakistan tone of much reporting in the West. Pakistan for all its problems has an independent press and independent lawyers as well as competing political parties that defeat the fundamentalist Islamists in open elections."

He urged more journalists to visit Pakistan and see that it is ideological extremism not the people or the politicians of Pakistan who want to support jihadi murders.

"Pakistan needs more trade, more jobs and more support from Britain and EU especially on asking India to contribute to a solution of the Kashmir problem," MacShane added.
This article was published on the Guardian's Comment is Free website

German lessons for Labour

The demise of Germany's left wing reflects an existential crisis across Europe that Labour should be mindful of this week

28 September 2009

The depth of the European left's existential crisis is revealed by the catastrophic defeat of the Social Democrats (SPD) in Germany.

The re-elected chancellor, Angela Merkel, is the new dominating force in Europe. Germany now has a gay foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, at a time when Germany will have to reconsider its relations with the regime in Iran, which has put gay people to death, as well as other homophobic politics in the Arab world.

The political blunder David Cameron has made in forging an alliance with the homophobic Polish nationalist, Michal Kaminski, will now face scrutiny as Kaminski's party is also notoriously Germanophobe. Merkel has signalled her displeasure at Cameron getting into bed with east European and Baltic extremists by withdrawing the representative of her party, the Christian Democrats (CDU), in London. The news was big in Germany but not reported by a British media in thrall to Cameron.

The new Merkel-Westerwelle government in Berlin will have little time for the neo-isolationism of UK Conservatives. That is bad news for Britain if Cameron becomes prime minister but has already been discounted as all European governments, as well as Washington, are coming to terms with Britain's self-marginalisation if William Hague becomes foreign secretary.

The key question is who will Merkel work with? Can President Sarkozy drop his chippy condescension towards her and shape a new Paris-Berlin axis to drive the EU forward? The vote in Germany was in favour of a more not less economic liberalisation, which the Free Democratic party (FDP) – which won 15% of the vote – stood for. The social protectionism of the SPD, the appeal to statist syndicalism of Die Linke and the anti-science emptionalism of the Greens were rejected even if together with the racist right their combined vote was 50%.

But the lessons for the democratic left are grim. The economic crisis and the failure of global banking is not producing a shift to the left. The proportional electoral system in Germany is dividing the left, not forging a common progressive politics.

The SPD's claim to harness green politics failed to convince as Germans know that wind power alone means massive power cuts. The party's finance minister denounced Gordon Brown's "crass Keynesianism" and brought in an amendment to the German constitution imposing balanced budgets as law. The anti-Keynes law was meant to reassure those worried about debt (the German word for debt, schuld, is the same as guilt) but earned the SPD no extra votes.

The SPD has consistently opposed measures aimed at increasing demand by loosening up Germany's economy and labour market, which has remained largely unchanged since the fall of the Berlin wall. Germany insists on its divine right to export but not import. Working class wages were held down as employers and unions collaborated to strengthen the capital base of industrial firms. Workers not unreasonably turned away from supporting the SPD ministers who thus cut their purchasing power.

The German left's crisis joins that in France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and most of east Europe where the classic 20th century forms of democratic left politics can no longer command electoral majorities. The Spanish socialists have also sunk below the conservative PP in opinion polls for the first time in five years. In Portugal, just, and hopefully in Greece this weekend where a reformist New Pasok is looking good, there are left governments. But the general picture is bleak. The Compass-Guardian view that Labour needs to be more leftwing, as the challenge of the recession brings opportunities for the left, is not happening. Gimmicks like PR and primaries as cure-alls for the left are not bearing fruit.

At Labour's conference this week there is barely a reference to what is happening outside the Westminster bubble packed with its District 9-type prawns which has descended on Brighton. No one would know that a massively significant election had taken place in Europe's biggest country with important implications for both Conservatives and Labour. But the European left as a project for state power is now facing its most testing time since social democratic, socialist and Labour parties were founded more than a century ago.

Newsweek article on the election of the European Commission's President

This article was published in the American magazine Newsweek The Accidental Head of Europe
21 September 2009
Who wants to be President of the European commission? In theory it's one of the most powerful jobs in the world. You head the world's biggest economic bloc, receive an automatic invite to G8 meetings, and your calls get taken by prime ministers and presidents the world over. In normal politics, -everyone would be fighting for the gig.
But this is Europe, where the normal rules don't apply. Thus there is currently just one declared candidate in the contest, which will be decided this Wednesday: the current president, José Manuel Barroso. The 53-year-old Portuguese, who entered politics as a youthful Maoist during his country's 1975 democratic revolution, is now a staunch right-wing reformer. -Fluent in French and English as well as Spanish and Portuguese, -Barroso slid into the EU's top job in 2004 as the lowest--common-denominator candidate, and he's had an unhappy time of it ever since. Europe has become bogged down in endless, unedifying votes and fights over its constitution (another round of which is now underway). The Iraq War divided Europeans, as has the rise of an assertive Russia. The glory days of European economic growth are long over, with the continent now being outpaced by China, India, and, in most years, the United States.
This is not all Barroso's fault. His most famous predecessor, Jacques Delors, had to deal with a Europe of just nine, and then 12, nations. Delors also enjoyed support from François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl, and, before she drifted into Euroskepticism, Margaret Thatcher. In his glory days, Delors was able to talk left by invoking social protections while acting right; by introducing the single market; by upholding tough competition rules; and by laying the foundation for the euro and an end to national control of monetary, exchange, and interest-rate policy. He also enjoyed good timing: the wall fell and Europe was reunited on his watch.
Barroso hasn't been nearly so lucky. He's had to try to herd 27 governments into line even while being bad-mouthed by Nicolas Sarkozy, who has tried to delay his renomination. -Angela Merkel has reacted furiously when Barroso has dared to criticize dodgy German policies, like state aid to the auto industry or the protection of regional banks. The Poles and the Baltic states have demanded he get tough with Russia, while Berlin has refused to tolerate a word of Kremlin criticism. The free movement of EU citizens has sparked a revival of extremist politics. And ordinary Europeans have gotten so disillusioned with the whole project that voter turnout for the last EU parliamentary elections, in June, fell below 50 percent for the first time ever.
And then came the crunch. Even as many Europeans smugly blamed the economic crisis on "Anglo-Saxon capitalism," it quickly became clear that German banks and Spanish construction firms had made as many wrong bets as Lehman Brothers. Yet Barroso proved unable to offer a vision for how to get out of the credit disaster or to restart economic activity. It fell to Gordon Brown and other national leaders to propose solutions at the G20, where the European Commission barely played a role.
Given such a dismal record, there should be many wannabes vying to replace Barroso. Yet so far he remains basically alone—but even so, his victory isn't guaranteed. Unlike Delors, who was appointed by Europe's national leaders, the EU president now has to be endorsed by the European Parliament. Barroso is the candidate of the center-right group of parties, but they do not command a majority. Five left-led European governments—of Britain, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, and Slovakia—have endorsed him, but socialist M.E.P.s have denounced him, as have many of the 120 new members of the Parliament who are Euroskeptics or extreme nationalists, xenophobes, or anti-Semites. Now Paris has announced that Sarkozy's prime minister, François Fillon, will offer himself for Barroso's job if the Portuguese fails to get a majority in the Parliament vote. With friends like this, Barroso hardly needs enemies.
As for Europe, the probable outcome is more incoherence. Barroso speaks many languages, but he is no orator and has never been able to define a clear message. Now, even if he is reelected, it seems less likely he'll have the confidence to set out decisive new policies. European politics have always been tricky. Now they are a complete mess. And with Barroso likely to become a lame duck from the first day of his new term, it's hard to imagine how they'll get better any time soon.

Missile shield: Obama's foreign and defence policies

This comment appeared in the Daily Mirror

Analysis: Is Barack Obama right to scrap missile defence shield

18 September 2009

Barack Obama has shown bold global leadership by withdrawing George W Bush's provocative defence shield.

Bush wanted to reignite the Cold War by stationing US missiles on the doorstep of nervous, nationalist Russia.

Obama has sent out clear messages. He is unclenching his fist and inviting Iran to pull back from the ayatollahs' quest for a Jihadi nuclear weapon.

To Russian strongman Vladimir Putin he's saying: "I hear you." Russia should respond to this unilateral disarmament and make it clear that its neighbours can play a full part in Europe.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband has consistently argued for a new relationship with Russia.

The problem for Britain is that David Cameron is turning his back on Europe just at a time when
Barack Obama is thinking constructively.

Barroso's reelection as president of the European Commission

This article was published in the French newspaper Le Figaro. An English translation is below it.

Right and Left Should Support Barroso for a Strong Europe

18 September 2009

Maintenant que José Manuel Barroso a été réélu à la présidence de la Commission européenne, les dirigeants européens le laisseront-ils faire son travail ?

Sa reconduction ne fut pas édifiante. En dépit de sa qualité de candidat officiel du groupe de centre-droit au Parlement européen, Monsieur Barroso a reçu un soutien plutôt tiède de la part des responsables nationaux de ces partis. Le Président Sarkozy a demandé un report du scrutin. Le week-end dernier encore, Paris laissait planer l’idée que le Premier ministre François Fillon pourrait jouer les remplaçants dans l’hypothèse où Barroso n’emporterait pas la mise devant les eurodéputés. La Chancelière Merkel avait quant à elle du mal à contenir son irritation face à une Commission très critique des aides injectées par Berlin pour venir au secours des industries bancaires et automobile allemandes.

Paradoxalement, Monsieur Barroso a trouvé plus de réconfort chez les premiers ministres du camp politique opposé. Les travaillistes au Royaume-Uni et les socialistes en Espagne et au Portugal ont rapidement et clairement endossé la candidature de Barroso. Ils furent suivis par les gouvernements de gauche en Hongrie et en Slovaquie.

Les eurodéputés socialistes, qui n’apprécient guère le credo barrosien en matière de libéralisation des marchés, ont tonné leur désapprobation et attaqué le candidat. Mais c’était oublier une règle élémentaire de la politique : « you cannot beat someone with no-one » (on ne peut pas battre quelqu’un sans personne). Le groupe socialiste n’avait pas de candidat alternatif et la dernière chose dont avaient besoin les sociaux-démocrates allemands à la veille des élections législatives du 27 septembre était de voir leurs députés européens provoquer une crise politique en Europe par leur refus de reconduire Barroso.

Barroso n’est pas un homme de gauche. Mais il partage des valeurs chères à la gauche. Pendant sa jeunesse, il a participé à la révolution des Oeillets qui consacra l’avènement de la démocratie dans son Portugal natal. Son engagement en faveur de la démocratie et des droits de l’homme est né de cette expérience vécue d’une dictature au cœur de l’Europe. S’il est très libéral dans le domaine économique, Barroso n’est pas l’homme de main de la droite dure que l’on décrit parfois.

Le véritable problème de cet homme, -qui était en cela partagé par ses deux prédécesseurs immédiats, Romano Prodi et Jacques Santer-, est celui de vivre dans l’ombre pesante de Jacques Delors. Les années Delors furent les dix glorieuses de la construction européenne. Croissance et justice sociale étaient au rendez-vous. On enterrait le communisme. La Communauté européenne étendait ses frontières pour inclure l’Espagne, le Portugal et les Etats nordiques. Même lorsque Margaret Thatcher dériva vers l’euroscepticisme et que le Royaume-Uni entra dans une longue phase de désenchantement européen, Delors pouvait compter sur l’appui solide de François Mitterrand et d’Helmut Kohl.

Barroso n’a pas cette chance. Le contexte communautaire a radicalement changé et se caractérise notamment par l’absence d’un nouvel axe Berlin-Paris, puisque Monsieur Sarkozy et Madame Merkel, loin de manifester l’enthousiasme européen de couples franco-allemands précédents, trouvent difficiles de s’entendre. En outre, le Président de la Commission se doit de concilier les vues de vingt-sept nations qui jouent du coude plus que jamais et ne cachent pas leur mécontentement. Les transferts vers les Etats membres les plus pauvres de Europe orientale ou de la Mer Noire laissent peu de marge pour financer des projets dans l’Ouest ou le Nord de l’Europe. Ainsi par exemple la France, et plus récemment l’Espagne, ont-elles du opérer des ajustements douloureux en devenant des contributeurs nets au budget européen. Dans le même temps, la crise financière et la récession mondiale ont fait exploser les règles budgétaires en vigueur dans l’Union. Les Etats ont tous eu recours au protectionnisme national pour sauvegarder des emplois ou des industries menacés. Sans compter que la première présidence Barroso a été consumée par les marchandages constitutionnels. Cela cessera peut-être avec l’entrée en vigueur du traité de Lisbonne, mais pour l’instant les Irlandais et les Tchèques font de la résistance.

Dans ces conditions, Monsieur Barroso présente un bilan mitigé mais a réussi à maintenir un cap européen, en poussant par exemple à la définition de politiques ambitieuses de lutte contre le réchauffement climatique. Certes, les sujets de discorde restent très nombreux. Par exemple, aucun accord n’a été obtenu sur la politique énergétique et la position des pays européens vis-à-vis de la Russie, et la question du Kosovo continue de diviser les nations du continent. Mais les Européens ont peut-être de la chance d’avoir un président de Commission qui, dans un anglais, un français ou un espagnol sans faute, sait expliquer les dilemmes de l’Europe et tente de proposer des solutions.

Maintenant qu’il a été réélu, les dirigeants européens devraient se rallier à lui et permettre à la Commission d’exercer pleinement son pouvoir politique, en collaboration avec le Parlement européen. Car les citoyens sont fatigués de l’Europe. Plus de la moitié d’entre eux ne se donnent pas la peine de voter aux élections européennes et ils ont envoyé à Bruxelles quantité de députés eurosceptiques. Dès lors que le Président de la Commission a reçu un vote de confiance de la part d’une majorité des eurodéputés, il serait bon, pour insuffler à la construction européenne le souffle qui lui manque, que la même confiance soit exprimée par les dirigeants nationaux. Une présidence forte de la Commission est une bonne nouvelle pour l’Europe et pour ses citoyens. A Barroso d’y travailler pendant les cinq années à venir.

English version

Now that José Manuel Barroso has been re-elected President of the European Commission will Europe's leaders let him do his job?

His re-election was unedifying. Although the candidate of the centre- right group of ruling parties in the European People's Party Sr Barroso has received at best luke-warm endorsement from its chiefs.

President Sarkozy openly called his the election to be delayed. At the weekend Paris floated the idea that France's prime minister, Francois Fillon, would be a good replacement for Mr Barroso if he failed to win support from MEPs. Chancellor Merkel has barely contained her irritation at the Commission's insistence that the massive state aid Berlin has been pouring into its banking and automobile industries might not be compatible with EU rules.

If anything Barroso has had stronger support from prime ministers of the left. Labour Britain and socialist Spain and Portugal came out early and clearly for his reappointment. They were followed by the left governments in Hungary and Slovakia

Socialist MEPs who dislike Barroso's liberalising credentials thundered disapproval and attacked his re-election. But the Socialists forgot the first rule of politics: You cannot beat someone with no-one. They had no alternative candidate and the last thing Germany's social democrats needed ahead of the election on 27 September was their MEPs forcing a crisis in Europe by refusing to confirm Barroso.

Moreover as a young man Barroso took part in the peaceful revolution that ushered in democracy in his native Portugal. His personal engagement to democracy and human rights is based on lived experience of a European dictatorship. So while in economic terms he is a confirmed liberal Mr Barroso is no hatchet man of the right.

His real problem is that he, along with his two immediate successors, Romano Prodi and Jacques Santer, live in the long shadow of Jacques Delors. The Delors years can now been as the anni mirabli of European construction. Growth and social justice were delivered. Communism was buried. Europe expanded to include Spain, Portugal and the Nordic states. Even when Mrs Thatcher drifted into Euroscepticism and Britain began its long disenchantment with Europe Delors could count on the solid support of Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl.

Sr Barroso has not such luck. Herding kittens is easier than getting 27 elbow-jabbing states into line. The transfers to poor EU member states in east Europe and the Black sea region leave little cash for projects in west and north Europe. France and now Spain have had to make the painful adjustment to being contributor not recipient nations. The credit crunch and world recession have blown apart EU finance rules. States have done their own thing and boasted of national protection for threatened industries or workers.

Barroso has done well to keep the show on the road with major breakdown. His presidency has been consumed by the EU's constitutional wrangling. This may end if the Irish vote Yes to the Lisbon treaty but the Czechs are now saying they may not sign the Lisbon Treaty until next spring in the middle of Spain’s EU presidency. Barroso does not enjoy the unqualfied support of a new Berlin-Paris axis as Mr Sarkozy and Mrs Merkel find it hard to get on let alone show the enthusiasm for European construction.

Barroso has helped steer Europe to clear policies on global warming but cannot secure agreement on a common energy supply policy in relation to Russia. Europe cannot even agree a joint line on Kosovo even as its proclaims to be a player in global policy making. If anything Europeans are lucky to have Barroso who in faultess English, French and Spanish explains Europe's dlemma and proposes solutions.

Now he is re-elected Europe's leaders should rally around him and start allowing the Barroso commission to exercise power and use its competences.
Europe's citizens are bored with Europe. Fewer than 50 per cent could be bothered to vote in the European Parliament elections and they elected scores of Eurosceptic MEPs. Now that Barroso has been given a vote of confidence by MEPs he should be given a vote of confidence by Europe's national leaders. A strong president of the Commission is good news for Europe. Barroso should now get down to work and be supported in his 5 year term.

Yorkshire Post article on the need to make wise cuts

This article was published in the Yorkshire Post

To cut or not to cut... that is the pressing question for Labour

16 September 2009

WHAT is it with the C word? Politicians have been dancing around the word "Cuts" as if pruning a budget was the great unmentionable.
At last Gordon Brown, following on from Alistair Darling and Peter Mandelson, has used the "C" word in his TUC speech yesterday.

Can this open the way to an adult discussion about how we are going to manage our public spending over the next political cycle? Because, as always, the public is far ahead of the political class.

Every family, every business and every voluntary outfit lives with cuts in the sense that money that was once available is no longer there. Cars are kept longer, holidays are cut to one a year, Marks & Spencer food is replaced by Lidl and Netto.

In my constituency, every business is cutting budgets and laying off staff. If the order book is down or banks dry up credit, what else can a business do?

The public sector is not exempt. Rotherham Council is sensibly holding down council tax increases by withdrawing some services. These cuts hurt but life goes on. When Margaret Thatcher cut the supply of those tiny bottles of milk served from metal crates to school-children, she was denounced from every political pulpit. But why, in the affluent 1970s, should the taxpayer have supplied free milk when parents were perfectly capable of feeding their children?

The Essex police have shown the way by filling up at Morrisons' service stations with a big discount, and cut the expensive provision of petrol in police stations. Why not go further and close down police station canteens and ask officers to eat in local cafés and be in the community?

When I was a Foreign Office minister, I asked why we could not fly easyJet or Ryanair? Fellow ministers and mandarins looked at me as if I had said something very rude and unpleasant. But every government department can cut waste if they set their minds to it. Taking money from hard-working citizens via the tax system places a moral responsibility on ministers to spend that money wisely.

The Ministry of Defence is moaning that the Treasury now wants to see any project that costs more than £100m. Hooray for the Treasury! We need more tough questions and more transparency on public spending.

Cuts do happen. The Foreign Office has suffered under Labour and had to close down embassies as money has been switched to development aid – as well as to the intelligence agencies – to counter the 21st century threat of ideological jihadi terror.

Aidcraft has replaced statecraft as the principle of British foreign policy. But the development department does not know how to spend the money. It has paid billions to accounting firms, corporate consultants and outfits like the Adam Smith free-market institute to do overseas development work. Certainly the well-paid employees of these firms have had their incomes grow and develop thanks to the taxpayer.

A major cut would be to banish these billion-earning consultant firms from government and oblige ministers and senior civil servants to take their own decisions and manage their departments instead of paying consultants a fortune in taxpayers' money.

But it is too late. Already the big consultant firms have infiltrated the Conservative front bench, seconding their staff and donating hundreds of thousands to Tory shadow ministers. If there is a change of government, once again you and I, as taxpayers, will be boosting the profits of the corporate consultancy world.

In fact, the biggest mouths on the nipple of taxpayer cash are some of the richest in the land. The Queen and our aristocratic land-owners are the biggest beneficiaries of the Common Agricultural Policy payments.

When Peter Hain and I, as ministers, tried to argue that we should top-slice the massive CAP cheques to the richest of landowners and instead support smaller farmers, the NFU lobby swung into action to ensure that the taxpayer would keep making the rich landowners even richer.

In Yorkshire, there are thousands of firms which train, build and provide services to hospitals, schools and local government. The men and women who run these firms believe they are sturdy private sector entrepreneurs. But they depend on the taxpayer and have an interest in the shape and scope of any cuts.

There is a debate which now needs to take place. But it is no longer about cuts – or no cuts – but how we guide the economy over the next period. The choice is clear. A Keynesian boost to the economy which keeps businesses afloat and shields the vulnerable from the kind of simplistic public expenditure cuts we saw in the 1930s or under the monetarist experiments of the 1980s. The paradox of the Thatcher cuts is that public expenditure actually increased as the state had to pay out more in social benefits as a result of millions losing their jobs.

So the best way to cut the share the state takes is to grow the economy and that, today, means investing. So the argument turns on what the state can do to support value-adding activity and where the state has to turn off the taps.

Certainly, when I became a South Yorkshire MP 15 years ago, parts of the region looked like they belonged in eastern Europe, with rotting infrastructure, poverty pay, schools dating from the 19th century and people driving Ladas and Morris Marinas.

Do we want to return this region to that level of poverty? The nature of cuts and economic management will provide the answer.

Let the debate be joined and the pain shared, but if we want new roads, new rail links, good hospitals, and new green industry to grow in Yorkshire, then those who demand massive instant cuts in spending should be careful. They may get their wish granted.

ES article on why Britain should join the euro

This article was published in the Evening Standard


Never mind the politics, it's time to join the Euro


7 September 2009


Back from summer holidays and the anxious wait for the Visa and MasterCard statements begins.

Europe, from rainy Ireland to sun-soaked Greece, has suddenly become frighteningly expensive, as the massive devaluation of the pound against the euro hits home. The jug of sangria, the pottery and wines to bring home now cost us so much more.

The saddest sights in south-west France and on the Spanish Mediterranean costas are British citizens handing back to estate agents the keys of the houses they bought but can no longer afford to keep, as their pounds from back home don't cover the bills.

For more than a decade we have been told that the euro was a terrible idea, while the good old pound sterling would protect the British economy from the wily ways of the Europeans.

Now more and more people are asking why the pound is letting us down - and whether treating it as a shibboleth that cannot be questioned makes sense any more.

All the old arguments against the euro have fallen away. There is no European super-state emerging with its adoption. There is no dictation of economic policy from Brussels.

The EU takes just one per cent of Europe's gross national income to spend on policies agreed by 27 cantankerous, ever-arguing member states.

The other 99 per cent of what European nations earn, make, save, tax and spend stays under national control.

Meanwhile, devaluing the pound was meant to improve exports - but trade figures show Britain's trade balance with euro-zone countries has worsened as the pound slumped.

Each European country is suffering from the agony of the world recession in its own way. The low-tax tiger of Ireland or the housing-bubble Spaniards have been hit.

So have the export-obsessed Germans. But the worst hit major European economy - Britain - is the one outside the euro-zone.

The Left's dislike of the euro was based on the notion that the Maastricht criteria would limit the state's ability to borrow and spend.

Yet France and Italy - and indeed most in the Euro-zone - are ignoring the Maastricht rules as they increase public debt to stave off further business closures.

President Sarkozy is proposing un grand emprunt - a giant loan - to increase French public debt as his way of combating the crisis.

Worse, as we plan for recovery, Britain is hobbled by its hostility to the euro. Take the fate of the City.

It is vital to our economy, and the UK financial sector, warts and all, adds massive value to the EU as a whole.

But our contempt for the euro means that no one listens when Britain protests about regulation from Brussels aimed at weakening the finance sector.

Sending Boris Johnson to plead for the City in Brussels last week was like sending a devout atheist to the Vatican to ask the Pope to change his line on birth control.

All that Europe knows about Boris or David Cameron is that they have spent their entire political lives rubbishing the euro and pouring scorn on the EU.

Labour does little better. In 1997 there were perfectly good technical economic reasons to explain why the pound should not dissolve into the about-to-be-born euro as did the Deutschmark, the French franc and the rest.

But Gordon Brown's famous five economic tests were always a red herring as the sixth test was, and remains, the certainty that the British would say No to the euro in a referendum - unless the case was properly made to them.

That is still the situation today. The kite flown by Peter Mandelson in June about us aiming to join the euro was quickly shot down. But in the end, Britons prefer reality to prejudice. The pound no longer walks tall against the euro.

The euro is not going to collapse because of wide variations in the economic profile of different regions using it any more than the US dollar fails because its external value and the interest rates set by the Fed do not suit Michigan and California at one and same time.

There are other ways of managing such imbalances. If low interest rates heat up housing, then banks could simply require a 10 per cent deposit before issuing mortgages.

Outside the euro, Britain will never be in the driving seat of Europe. We need to be. If the euro were used here as it is without fuss in countries we are close to, including Ireland and the Netherlands, then the next Governor of the European Central Bank could easily be a Brit.
To be sure, British entry into the euro is not even at the starting gate of current political debate. Tony Blair showed some early enthusiasm.

But relentless anti-Euro briefing from Labour's Treasury team after 1997 poisoned the well of rational discussion: it became near impossible to make a case for the merits of a stronger engagement in Europe.

Ministers just gave up making any positive case for the single currency or EU partnership.
It will need forces from outside the political laager to raise again the question of joining the euro.
The leader of one of our top business organisations told me recently that he listened to CEOs pleading for a level playing field in Europe, and for Britain to have more weight when EU financial regulations drawn up by the European Central Bank and the euro-zone finance ministers are discussed.
"I say to them they are making a case for the euro and immediately they blow up and start ranting about politics," he sighed.

For in the end, joining the euro is about politics. Labour forfeited the chance to make the argument.

And history tells us that the party that takes the boldest pro-European moves - that took Britain into Europe, and then agreed the single market sharing of sovereignty and the Maastricht Treaty - is the Conservative Party.

Today, with William Hague, Daniel Hannan and 99 in 100 Tory MPs firmly Eurosceptic, the idea that the Tories might again be a pro-Europe party seems further away than ever.

But if British voters are no longer going to feel like poor relations whenever they holiday in other

European countries, then before long someone is going to have to begin making the case that like shillings and pence, the pound may now have had its day.