Never let it be said the French are not perceptive people:

PARIS (Reuters) - The French dislike themselves even more than the Americans dislike them, according to an opinion poll published on Friday.

The survey of six nations, carried out for the International Herald Tribune daily and France 24 TV station, said 44 percent of French people thought badly of themselves against 38 percent of U.S. respondents who had a negative view of the French.

Well, I've read David Cameron's remarks in Brussels, and credit where it's due. It's superb stuff - spot on in most respects:

Last year the EU made helping lift Africa out of poverty a priority. But many of the EU's policies are making poverty in developing countries worse. The EU remains committed to a largely unreformed CAP, an economic and humanitarian disaster which pushes up food prices for the poorest people in Europe and helps lock the developing world in poverty. And the EU still has higher trade barriers against poor countries than it does against rich. That's not good enough and it needs to change.

...In 2000 Europe's leaders said they would make the EU the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. EU politicians repeated their call for economic reform in 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005. But since 1998 new EU regulations have cost business £37 billion.

I've said before that every time he opens his mouth I'm a little - sometimes a lot - less likely to vote Conservative. Well, I stand corrected. His remarks are exectly what needed to be said.

And this earlier pledge to pull out of the Social Chapter is in the same mould:

When we talk about regulation, it's impossible to avoid the role of our principal regulator, the European Union. In particular, we need to look at the Social Chapter. No British government will ever build an environment in which enterprise can truly thrive unless it controls the power to legislate in this area. That's why Britain must not stay in the Social Chapter. I know this is controversial. But I will be guided not by dogma - either Europhile or Europhobic - but a hard- headed assessment of what works for Britain. And it is obvious to anyone who knows anything about business that the Social Chapter doesn't work.

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The Observer has realised at last that Parisians aren't human:

The first part of the trial involved testing the vaccine in different doses on 300 volunteers in Paris and the results of two of the doses were particularly promising. The second stage is now concerned with looking at the different responses in humans to those two doses - one of 7.5 micrograms, the other of 30 micrograms with an adjuvant, a chemical which enhances the immune response.

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Anthony Browne has an excellent survey in today's Times on the protectionist antics of EU governments. It's well worth a read.

The circumstances of Angela Merkel's accession to the German Chancellorship led many to think that she will be a weak, ineffectual leader. There's clearly a long time to go before a judgement can be reached, but the early signs are very encouraging.

First was the way she breezed into the Brussels summit in December, her first international experience, and took over - confounding those who thought she would place maintaining the Franco-German axis at the top of her priorities, and acting instead as an honest broker between the 25 Member States. I heard glowing reports from friends who witnessed her performance - friends of very different political persuasions.

Domestically, too. she has started well. Part of the deal with the SPD was, for instance, that the health care portfolio would remain with the social democrats - a disaster, given Germany's desperate need for bold reform. But my German freinds tell me that Merkel has demonstrated the canny politics which bought her to the top of the CDU. Nominally the SPD still has healthcare, but in fact Merkel herself is running the show, with all the key reform decisions being taken in the Chancellor's office. Deciding what to do and then securing passage into law is another matter, of course, but the signs are good.

Today, the Sunday Times reports some very sound and thoughtful comments on Iran:

Looking back to German history in the early 1930s when National Socialism was on the rise, there were many outside Germany who said, ‘It’s only rhetoric — don’t get excited'...There were times when people could have reacted differently and, in my view, Germany is obliged to do something at the early stages...We want to, we must prevent Iran from developing its nuclear programme.

...Iran has blatantly crossed the red line. I say it as a German chancellor. A president who questions Israel’s right to exist, a president who denies the Holocaust cannot expect to receive any tolerance from Germany.

David Cameron has been deliberately vague about his plans as Tory leader. But he has made one clear commitment: to pull Conservative MEPs out of the European People’s Party (EPP), the self-described “mainstream Centre and Centre-Right” group of the European Parliament.

The received wisdom is that it is not just his first commitment; it is also his first mistake. According, for instance, to the commentator Andrew Rawnsley, the pledge is simply a bone Mr Cameron has thrown to the right of his party — “a step too Europhobic even for Iain Duncan Smith”.

It never takes long for the accusation of Europhobia to emerge when someone dares to question mushy bien pensant opinion over Europe.

But there is a rule of thumb when dealing with EU issues: that whatever the ranks of the commentariat recommend, the opposite is almost always the most sensible course of action. Opponents of ERM membership were, for example, depicted as Europhobic cranks. Once the Government had done as the chattering classes demanded and joined, it soon became clear who were the real cranks.

Far from being a mistake, and still less Europhobic, Mr Cameron’s pledge is both principled and politically sensible. The Conservative Party now has a settled position on Europe, at one with mainstream public opinion — in Europe but not run by Europe, as William Hague put it.

The EPP also has a settled position: in favour of a European army and police force, the single currency, tax-raising powers for MEPs and a single EU seat at the UN. It remains determined that the EU constitution be adopted as it stands.

The mistake is not pulling out of such a group, it is to even consider remaining in it. As Lance Price reveals in his diary as a Downing Street spin-doctor, Tony Blair was wise to this, and planned to use the party’s membership of the EPP as a weapon in any referendum on the single currency.

Instead of remaining in an abusive arranged marriage, Mr Cameron is right to seek a divorce, and to build a new marriage with MEPs from other countries who believe in self-government rather than ever increasing powers for the EU. If for no other reason than that the wiseacres tell him not to.

Have you ever filled out a tax return and left blank the boxes in which you are supposed to spell out your income?

Of course not. If you tried, the tax inspector would take one look at your form and demand that you gave him the figures.

Imagine if you then told him that, not only had you not got the slightest idea how much money you had received, you had no idea how you had spent it, couldn’t care less where it went, and couldn’t be bothered to co-operate with his attempts to find out.

And then imagine that you had said and done the same thing for each of the past eleven years.

You would, by now, be behind bars.

Not, however, if you are one of the EU officials responsible for keeping track of the £70 billion annual EU budget which, as taxpayers, we hand over every year.
Not once since 1994 has the European Court of Auditors, the body appointed to oversee the EU’s accounts, been able to sign off the previous year’s figures as being accurate.

Indeed, questioned at the publication of the last report, the chief auditor said, matter of factly, that he could only properly account for five per cent of the total EU budget.

Yesterday, the auditors published - for the eleventh successive year - a report bemoaning the EU’s lax accounting procedures and inaccurate figures.

With accountants’ understatement, the report says this: “As in the past, in 2004 the accounting system cannot ensure that all assets and liabilities are recorded…For the remainder of payments' budget - agricultural spending, structural measures, internal policies and external action - the Court is again not in a position to provide an unqualified opinion on the legality and regularity of underlying transactions”.

Translated from the jargon into reality, what that means is that the EU is so riddled with corruption that the auditors can’t even begin to say that they know where the money’s gone. Since the UK’s annual contribution to the EU budget is around £11 billion pounds, that means that a lot of the stolen money comes from UK taxpayers.

Dig into the pages of the past eleven years’ reports and the scale of the fraud becomes truly shocking.

As they reveal, the Italians’ favourite scam – claiming money for non-existent olive farms (there aren’t enough olive trees in the whole of Italy to cover a fraction of the subsidies claimed) – is spreading: “In Austria, the extent of eligible Alpine pasture was overestimated by more than 60 per cent”. Thirty per cent of Greek subsidy grants are for maize which has never existed.

On and on it goes, paragraph after paragraph of mind-bogglingly brazen fraud.
On the rare occasions when ‘on the spot’ checks were carried out by inspectors, they found fraud or error in 25 per cent of farm aid in Italy, 23 per cent in Greece, 21 per cent in Spain and 14 per cent in France. And that, of course, was merely those they could inspect.

Here’s a suggestion. If it looks like being an expensive Christmas, don’t worry: there’s an easy way to pay for it. There’s free money available, no questions asked (literally) from the EU taxpayer. All you need to do is pluck an imaginary name out of thin air, dream up an imaginary farm, conjure up some imaginary produce, and heh presto. Fill out a few forms, work out how much subsidy you want and the money is yours.

Oh, and if you think it’s just foreigners who are on the take, here’s what the auditors had to say in the agriculture section last year: “The errors found by the court…chiefly involved discrepancies between, on the one hand, records kept by the farmer and, on the other hand, the declaration on which premiums had been paid. The largest errors of this kind related to payments made in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.”

You might think that the Eurocrats responsible for this would feel, at the very least, ashamed. It is the European Commission, after all, which is charged with overseeing the efficient running of the EU’s structures.

Think again. Instead of shouldering responsibility, they argue that because the report shows that 80% of EU spending is conducted by national and regional authorities, it is Member States which should shoulder responsibility for this giant financial free for all, not the Commission. It is not the EU itself which is to blame, they say, but the governments which comprise it.

Up to a point, they are right. The Commission can only do so much. It is governments which authorise and hand out these corrupt payments and are happy to turn a blind eye to theft.

But only up to a point. The fundamental problem is that the Commission encourages, by its behaviour and ethos, precisely the corruption which needs to be stamped out. One need only look at the behaviour of Neil Kinnock, the former Vice President of the Commission, to see that.

Lord Kinnock, as he is now, was previously the EU Commissioner charged with stamping out corruption.

If his record in that job is anything to go by, one can only thank heavens for the sagacity of the British electorate in twice rejecting his attempt to become Prime Minister.

As the Commissioner responsible for taking action against EU corruption, he certainly acted decisively. He sacked two high level employees: Marta Andreasen, the Commission’s own chief accountant; and another employee, Paul van Buitenen, whose revelations of corruption within the Commission itself led to the scandal which forced the mass resignation of the Commission and its then President, Jacques Santer, in 1999.

Just one problem: Ms Andreasen and Mr van Buienen were not the fraudsters. They were the whistleblowers.

Ms Andreasen discovered within months of starting her job that the Commission’s book-keeping was “out of control” and “shambolic” - as bad as Enron’s, as she put it.

The Commission knew exactly how to react to such a finding. First, Lord Kinnock transferred her to the EU’s Siberia, the personnel and administration department; then he suspended her. Mr Buitenen had similar treatment.

To date, the only two people to have lost their jobs as a result of the widespread EU fraud are Ms Andreasen and Mr van Buitenen. That was Lord Kinnock’s strategy for dealing with fraud: sack the whistleblowers.

Every year we go through the same farce. The auditors publish their report, and the Commission responds by saying that things are getting better, and will be better next year. Next year comes, and the same thing happens. On and on it goes.

The damning truth is that ending EU fraud is like removing wood from trees. They are two sides of the same coin. From Commissioners who see their job not as rooting out fraud but as defending the indefensible, to farmers who milk the EU taxpayer for as much as they can get, the whole edifice of the EU is built on the understanding that there will be a free ride for those who know how to play the system.

But whether it’s subsidies for growing real food and then letting it rot, or the fraud highlighted in the auditors’ reports, someone has to pay.

There is, of course, no such thing as a free ride. The someone who ends up paying for all of it is you.

In all the long, glorious history of Hampton Court, there have probably been few more pointless meetings than yesterday's EU leaders' summit, which has done precisely nothing to aid the vital process or EU reform.

Tony Blair has been in power for over eight years, but the story of his time in office is perfectly encapsulated in the past four months - the months that have elapsed since Britain took over the presidency of the EU.

His handling of the EU leadership exemplifies his behaviour more generally in government. It's the Blair story writ small: a great start, with all sorts of welcome promises, and then a near-total failure to deliver. Instead of making progress, we go backwards.

When the Prime Minister set out the aims of the UK presidency back in June, he warned, quite rightly, that the EU faces a "crisis in political leadership - only by change will Europe recover its strength, its relevance, its idealism". At a press conference on the first day of the British presidency, he elaborated on the changes which would be needed, such as "the need to make sure that the regulation that comes out of Europe does not impede competitiveness of our economy, or interfere unnecessarily with the lives of our citizens." He continued: "We also want to make progress on the Services Directive and the Working Time Directive" - EU jargon for measures to achieve a more competitive labour market and economic climate.

It was all good - and necessary - stuff. When Baroness Thatcher was ridding
us of the 'British disease' and putting our economy back on track, the French and the Germans sat back and sneered that their model was superior.

How wrong they were. Today, they are feeling the ever-worsening effects of their failure to reform their economies. But when Mr Blair was setting out his agenda, he was making it clear that we could not afford to sit back and take our turn to sneer at them. The ever-deepening, ever-expanding influence of EU rules means that an uncompetitive EU inevitably causes an uncompetitive UK. And with most of our trade now conducted with other member states, it is in our direct interest, too, that they are prosperous.

So here at last, it seemed, was an EU leader who was prepared to face up to the need for the EU to reform, and for the world's largest trading bloc to place competitiveness at the heart of those reforms.

How naive we were. I spend much of my time in Brussels, and the British
presidency is now widely regarded as a busted flush. In four months, it has achieved almost nothing, and certainly nothing of lasting importance. Reform has been non -existent. Given Mr Blair's record so far, there is more chance of Jose Mourinho resigning from Chelsea to become a goat herd than there is of anything worthwhile emerging from the remaining two months of his presidency.

In fact it's worse even than that. Compare Mr Blair's speech to MEPs in Strasbourg on Wednesday with his words to them back in June and it's difficult to see how it could have been the same man speaking. In June, he set out his reforming stall, talking tough and pointing out how much needed doing. This week he lay down on his back and asked to be tickled on the tummy by the Euro-fanatics as he caved in on a series of critically important issues which go to the heart of both the EU's competitiveness and, indeed, of the very principle of self-government.

Take tax. It has long been the ambition of the European Commission to grab
control of tax rates from national governments. As is its habit, it produced a paper for yesterday's Hampton Court summit calling for a "more co-ordinated approach [to taxation] at the EU level".

Leave aside the implications for self-government of effectively ceding such powers to Brussels. Concentrate instead on what that means in reality. The EU now has member states such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland which, because of their bitter experience of communism, are now firm believers in competition and capitalism. Many of their leading politicians were educated in the US and have been imbued with ideas of the free market and liberty. They are now growing at an astonishing rate, making up for lost time and prospering as a result of their low taxes and competitive economies. In large measure their prosperity is due to adopting the flat tax (an idea with which the Conservative Party is now toying). Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia and, soon, Poland all have it.

The sensible response of a country which wants similar growth is to reduce
its own taxes, or even to adopt its own flat tax. But when has sensible economics ever been part of the EU strategy? The response of the Germans and the French was to complain to the European Commission that the flat tax countries were stealing business while at the same time benefiting from EU payments, and that tax competitionshould be prohibited.

The rationale behind the Commission's plan for tax co-ordination is thus the precise opposite of competitiveness: it is to ban countries from reducing taxes below the high levels in Germany and France, and thereby protect their sclerotic economies from competition even within the EU, let alone from the rest of the world.

If Mr Blair had the least intention of tackling the EU's lack of competitiveness, he would denounce such a plan as the very opposite of what is required.

Instead, in his speech to MEPs, he actually urged that the EU's leaders support the Commission's plan. It is a breathtaking piece of cravenness.

Across a whole range of areas, Mr Blair has now caved in and adopted the mainstream EU approach, from a common energy policy, to a common university policy and a common research policy. The EU constitution might have been defeated by the French and Dutch voters, but what do mere voters count for? Far from leading the cause of reform, the Prime Minister appears now to be a fully signed up member of the Old Europe club.

Not that we should be surprised. For all his fine words at the start of the UK presidency, Blair and his government have spent the past eight years consistently undermining the cause of self-governance. It is just business as usual.

Remember the Lisbon Strategy? In March 2000, the EU agreed a ten-year strategy to make the EU the world’s most dynamic and competitive economy. Key to that strategy was the reinforcement of science.

Yet today, not only has the Lisbon Strategy disappeared into the usual Brussels fug, but the European Commission has come up with a new strategy, one which seems designed to drive away what is left of one of our remaining innovative industries.

So bad is the environment in the EU for research-based companies that Novartis, the healthcare company, recently moved its research facilities to the United States and GlaxoSmithKline now has its research base in Philadelphia. From 1990 to 2001 the number of research employees in the German drug industry fell by 36 per cent. Scientists are talking with their feet: the Commission’s survey shows that 400,000 European science and technology graduates have emigrated to the US.

Far from altering the landscape to entice such companies to stay, the Commission’s desire for ever greater control has led it to come up with a new regulation which effectively tells pharmaceutical companies to go to hell.

Member states are, under existing rules, in charge of policing the EU ban on advertising of medicines. Under Regulation 726/2004, however, the Commission has demanded that it be given central control, despite there being no evidence that the system is not working.

And the proposal comes with a killer clause. The Commission is demanding arbitrary power to impose fines of up to 10 per cent of a company’s entire global turnover if it determines that it is at fault.

Clearly, if companies are in breach of the rules they should suffer the consequences. But even if there were no pressing need to make the EU environment more conducive to pharma companies — and there is — the level of the fine is out of all proportion.

Take Novartis. Its global turnover is $28.2 billion. Compare a possible $2.82 billion fine with the maximum fine that the Commission seeks to impose on counterfeiters: €300,000. Both offences are designed to protect public health. But clearly counterfeiting is more damaging than advertising.

This is the regulatory cancer at the heart of the EU’s ills. Far from promoting competitiveness, it treats business as an evil that needs to be stamped on.

When Peter Mandelson was appointed by Tony Blair - the man he calls 'my friend' - to be Britain’s EU Commissioner, the Prime Minister promised that we would see the calibre of the man.

Well, we have. But not, I think, in the way the Prime Minister meant.
Our disgraced former Northern Ireland and former Trade Secretary has not even been in his post for a year, but he has already managed to turn himself into one of the most unpopular men in Brussels, with a soaring reputation for incompetence, bluster and spin.

Uniquely, he has become a bogey figure to pro and anti-Europeans while triggering trade disputes between the EU, China and America.

I have worked in Brussels for nearly five years and I happily describe myself as pro-European. But I am critical of most aspects of the EU as it now conducts itself. And the behaviour of Peter Mandelson as Trade Commissioner typifies what is wrong with the existing EU.

It is run by and for an arrogant elite which has at heart not the interests of the public but the furtherance of its obsession with ever closer union and the defence of an outdated, uncompetitive, inefficient economic model.

The latest row - the so-called 'Bra Wars' - over the importation of cheap Chinese textiles into Europe, is a case in point.

When he took up his new postion at the beginning of the year, Mr Mandelson stressed his life-long commitment to free trade. As recently as May, he wrote that 'open markets are a precondition for growth, and growth is essential to development.'

In that spirit, he rightly acted in January to lift the restrictions which the EU had long had in place on imports of textiles manufactured in China.

The consequence was entirely to be expected. European retailers hired Chinese manufacturers to make the clothes which are sold in the high street at dramatically reduced cost. That is the very point of free trade - the most efficient manufacturers benefit, and the less efficient businesses have to reduce their costs, find an alternative market or close down.

Yet within a matter of months, the supposedly pro-free trade Mr Mandelson had re-imposed a series of quotas on precisely those imports, for no other reason than to protect inefficient and costly European - for which read, in the main, French - clothing manufacturers which found they were suffering the consequences of their inefficiency.

To make matters worse, Mr Mandelson has responded with his trademark insouciant arrogance to the growing outrage from retailers - including Marks & Spencer, John Lewis, Debenhams, BHS and many smaller businesses - some of whom face catastrophic consequences if they cannot get their hands on the stock they've ordered from China, Speaking on the BBC yesterday, he dismissed the seizure by customs authorities of 48 million sweaters,17 million pairs of men's trousers, 3million bras and 4m T-shirts as 'a glitch'.

The fact that Mr Mandelson was prepared to venture onto the BBC to make a comment, could, I suppose, be viewed as progress. As his decision to impose quotas has blown into a full scale crisis with a series of angry meetings between EU and Chinese officials, he has spent the past fortnight sunning himself on Italy's Amalfi coast. He has ignored all requests from the representatives of those firms facing financial hardship to meet with him.

Indeed, Sunday newspapers showed him relaxing at an outdoor concert in Pompeii, seemingly unconcerned that his actions have plunged retailers into the 'worst crisis since the Second World war.'

Today he returns to work in Brussels, and is expected to reveal his proposals to deal with the problem. But there is a further crisis pending and one whose impact threatens to dwarf the row over the import of Chinese textiles - a trade war between the EU and the US.

Again it is of Mr Mandelon's making. Since long before his arrival on the scene, the two trading blocs have been in a bitter dispute over the level of subsidy given to Airbus, the European aircraft manufacturers. Mr Mandelson’s job is to try to settle it. Instead, he has made things far worse.

The former US Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick (now US deputy secretary of state) claimed that Mr Mandelson had, typically, not been frank with him in conversations about the EU’s subsidies to Airbus.

In one conversation, Mr Zoellick said to Mandelson 'You don’t have to spin'
- before slamming down the phone.

It is one thing not being frank about a home loan. Not being frank in the midst of delicate negotiations about international trade is, however, of a different order of magnitude.

Mr Mandelson must, of course, take responsibility for his own actions. But it must also be remembered why it is that we are stuck with him as Trade Commissioner - and that is because of Tony Blair’s loyalty to his disgraced ex-minister.

Loyalty is usually to be commended - but not when it is as misplaced as this.

This is simply glorious:

Roger Helmer, the Conservative Euro-MP for the East Midlands, obtained the funds from the parliament's information budget to print car bumper stickers saying: ''Love Europe. Hate the EU'' next to a picture of a crossed-out EU flag.

...Parliamentary officials tried to stop Mr Helmer gaining access to the budget but gave in after he argued that the words on the sticker were an accurate description of his political views. All Euro-MPs have the right to funds to get their message across.

Every cloud has a silver lining:

An impartial servant of the public, Louis Michel (the EU Development Commissioner), was interviewed yesterday by the Flemish magazine Knack about the recent referendums:

“It is said that the citizens are always right. Why do they have to be always right? Even I am not always right! But I am prepared to admit this. Why would the citizens not admit it? Politicians should not follow the citizens blindly, they should go in front of the people and show them the way.”

That's the EU elite mindset in its full glory.

And what does the man who is showing us the way think about the recent summit? Go on, have a guess.

Yup. Everything would have turned up trumps if it hadn't been for those bloody Brits:

“I only know that the British did not want the summit to be a success..[The British] have a different kind of roadmap. They want Europe to be a purely economic space. If we follow them we risk turning the EU into a miniature copy of the United States. If we restrict the EU to a free market association without common rules, without this constitution, without shared political values, then Europe will no longer be able to make the citizens dream.”

(via Brussels Journal.)

All hail, Tony Blair. Champion of a looser, flexible Europe, defender of the national interest and all-round seer, Mr Blair would have us – and the rest of the European Union – believe that we must follow him or be damned.

Speaking to the European Parliament yesterday, the Prime Minister introduced his presidency of the EU’s Council of Ministers by warning that the EU faces a “crisis in political leadership…Only by change will Europe recover its strength, its relevance, its idealism” - and so regain public support.

Well, yes. But there is just one problem with Mr Blair’s analysis of the EU’s woes and its possible solutions. Almost all of the most fundamental problems which now beset the EU have developed on his watch as Prime Minister. Worse, they have happened not in spite of Mr Blair but with his enthusiastic backing.

There are few politicians with worse credentials than Mr Blair on matters of European policy.

Take the euro, which was foisted on hundreds of millions of Europeans without their say-so, and is locking them into a downward spiral of stagnation and unemployment. Who was it who committed the British government to joining the euro in principle, as one of the first decisions of his time in office (even if the practical downsides have been such as to make membership all but impossible)? Step forward, Tony Blair.

Those of us who argued from the start that the single currency was misconceived, and that membership would be a disaster, were dismissed by the Prime Minister as xenophobes who were living in the past. It was, he told anyone who would listen, his destiny to take Britain into the euro. Indeed, he has spent his entire time as Prime Minister attempting to rearrange the political furniture so that he could one day achieve his aim.

Thank heavens he has not succeeded and that we didn’t listen to him. Wiser heads – as well as economic reality – prevailed. So great has been the ‘success’ of Mr Blair’s beloved euro that today, six and a half years after its introduction, Italian ministers speak openly about their desperation to return to the lira. So much for Mr Blair’s sagacity.

The “ever closer union” which has been the EU elites’ mantra since the Maastricht Treaty of 1991, has also been one of Mr Blair’s most passionate causes, as he has struggled to find a legacy. It is the Prime Minister who has been amongst the most eager to bring about deeper integration between EU Member States, across a vast swathe of areas.

To that end, he was insistent upon the need for the new constitution, so humiliatingly rejected by the French and the Dutch. He branded the objectors, who pointed out that it would further cement the end of self-governance, as Little Englanders. He could barely conceal his contempt for those who dared to question the Eurofanatics.

And never forget why he promised a referendum. It was not because he believed for a second in the electorate’s right to a say in how we are governed. It was for entirely base political motives. Had he stuck to his guns and denied us a referendum, the constitution would have been the biggest issue by far in the election campaign. With Labour’s support already haemorrhaging, the election itself could have become a de facto referendum between a Labour government committed to ratification, and a Conservative Party pledging rejection. And given the strength of popular opposition – the polls have consistently showed between 70 and 80 per cent against the constitution – that alone could have handed Michael Howard the keys to 10 Downing Street.

The referendum was a political fix, which got the Prime Minister out of a large election hole.

To give him his due, Mr Blair has at least – unlike many of his EU colleagues - heeded the lesson of the French and Dutch votes. He has realised that the constitution, as it stands, should be deemed dead and buried.

But the Eurozealots never give up. The latest plan to subvert the voice of the people is to ‘rescue’ parts of the constitution and enact them by diktat without a new treaty.

As he showed yesterday, Mr Blair is above all a brilliant political chameleon. For the past eight years, since taking office in 1997, the Prime Minister has been doing one thing consistently well: being wrong about the most basic and important matters of European policy. On the euro and the need for deeper integration, he has spent years campaigning for policies which have been rejected out of hand whenever the public has been given a voice.

Now he stands before us, and the European Parliament, with the gall to pretend that he is the lone sane European, telling it as it is.

Come off it! He and his government have spent the past eight years consistently undermining the cause of self-governance. If, instead of pushing for an “ever greater union”, Mr Blair had pushed the idea that Member States should be in Europe but not run by Europe, the EU would not be in today’s chaotical crisis.

It is not as if Britain is a lone voice, or a marginal force. The truth of the matter - which the Europhiles deem too impolite to be mentioned – is that Britain helps bankroll the EU. In 2003 (the last year for which we have figures) Britain paid 9.97 billion euros into the EU budget, but received only 6.22 billion euros in return – a tribune to the EU of nearly 4 billion euros.

Despite the recent posturing over the rebate, that gives enormous bargaining power to a Prime Minister prepared to do what Mr Blair has spent the past eight years avoiding – leading the battle for a slimmed down, more efficient, more flexible EU.

The truths which Mr Blair outlined yesterday are welcome, even if it has taken him eight years to reach them. Maybe he really will use his time in the presidency to help shape a more sensible and worthwhile EU. The new Member States who were, until very recently, under the control of the Soviet Union, certainly do not want to exchange one empire for another, and share the traditional British vision of more flexible labour markets and enterprise.

But when the Prime Minister says that “The people of Europe are speaking to us. They are posing the questions. They are wanting our leadership. It is time we gave it to them”, we should look closely at his dreadful track record in Europe. The chances of his words amounting to more than hot air look slim indeed.

When Peter Mandelson announced on Monday that Britain should be prepared to renegotiate the annual £3.2 billion rebate which we receive from our EU payments, he knew exactly what he was doing.

He was not floating an idea which had suddenly occurred to him. He was not dropping a thought into the river to see how large would be the ripples.

On the contrary. He was making a carefully considered statement, which he well knew would be explosive in its implications.

At the very time when Tony Blair is battling to resist pressure from the rest of the EU to scrap the rebate, Mr Mandelson decided to weigh in with his own comments – words which have undermined the Prime Minister’s already delicate task in holding off the pressure from President Chirac. On the face of it, Mr Blair must be livid at his former Cabinet colleague’s interference.

But when it comes to Mr Mandelson, one always has to preface things with ‘on the face of it’. Nothing he says or does is ever straightforward. When Peter Mandelson speaks, he not only means what he says; he implies a lot more. As Prince Metternich is said to have remarked when learning of the death of the wily French diplomat, Talleyrand: “I wonder what he meant by that”.

As his speech on Monday showed, he is clearly not content to stick to his job in Brussels. Forays into British domestic politics are, to an inveterate schemer such as he, irresistible. Indeed, far from his meddling being uninvited, there are plausible suggestions that his words on Monday were in fact spoken with the support of the Prime Minister, and were part of Mr Blair’s broader fight with Gordon Brown.

It is, after all, the Chancellor – not the Prime Minister - who has been unambiguous in his defence of the rebate. Mr Blair has been far less clear than Mr Brown that he would defend the rebate come what may. As the Prime Minister put it on Friday: “If you have a fundamental review of how Europe spends its money then of course everything then is open to debate”. It was Gordon Brown’s stubborn determination not to countenance negotiation of the rebate which was Mr Mandelson’s real target. As the tensions between the Prime Minister and Chancellor re-emerge, and with Mr Mandelson’s penchant for high level political scheming, it is likely that Mr Mandelson grabbed at the possibility of influencing domestic politics once again.

Whatever the motive underlying the European Commissioner’s remarks on the rebate, however, his speech was a classic of its kind. It dripped with Eurocrat superiority, its every sentence a lecture to the reprobates who were not fully signed up to the European project to mend their ways - or else.

As he put it: “In Brussels, Britain has sounded neo-Thatcherite, as though nothing has changed from the 1980s”. For Mr Mandelson and his fellow Eurofederalists, that is the ultimate crime – daring to stand up for the national interest; refusing to bend the knee to the dictates of the Eurofanatics.

Do these people never learn? It is precisely this Eurocrat mentality which was so angrily attacked by French and Dutch voters in their recent referendums.
Not that they care what the hoi polloi think. Mere voters are ignorant of the importance of the European project, and as such not to be taken seriously.

Indeed, set foot in Brussels for any length of time and you see why it is that the likes of Mr Mandelson behave as they do. I have spent much of my time in Brussels in the past few years. Nothing prepares you for it. The atmosphere feels as if a cult had taken over an entire city - a cult which knew that it alone held the key to the future, and that anyone who rejected it was damned for ever and morally wrong.

For those at the top of the pile, life could scarcely be more wonderful. You are surrounded by worshippers, all of whom support what you are doing, and all of whom agree that they hold the future in their hands.

For those who are already signed up to the EU credo of ‘ever closer union’ (such as Mr Mandelson, whose Eurofanatic track record is long), appointment as a commissioner is as good as it gets.

You are surrounded by fellow believers, none of whom would ever challenge your wisdom. After all, as a believer in the ‘European destiny’ (yes, they really do talk like that) your rectitude is, by definition, unquestioned.

So the fact that you live a life of luxury, followed by an exorbitant pension, is not an outrage but your right. You are shaping the future. You are entitled to it.

That is why, when they venture out of the Brussels cocoon and are forced to talk to ordinary people – people who do not accept the thoughts of Peter Mandelson as holy writ – the Eurocrats behave with such condescension to the rest of us.

Look at Mr Mandelson’s predecessors. Chris Patten, who before he was despatched to Brussels was a well liked minister with a popular touch, turned as a Commissioner into the very personification of pomposity. Neil Kinnock, who suffered two humiliating election defeats from British voters, now lectures us as if the mere fact of his having been a Eurocrat gives him the authority to instruct us on how to behave. Leon Brittan spent the years of John Major’s Premiership laying down the law on the euro.

That is what Brussels does to people. Surrounded and embraced by their fellow ‘visionaries’, they forget how to speak to the rest of us – let alone how to react when challenged. All they can do is tell us that, by daring to question the project, we reveal ourselves as unworthy of serious consideration. Appointment as a Commissioner acts like an injection of smug EU superiority into the bloodstream.

The notion that, as Commissioners, Mr Mandelson and his colleagues are technically civil servants, and have no business telling elected politicians how to behave, strikes them as laughable. Whatever the proprieties, these people believe – more than that, they (ital)know(ital) – that they have a higher calling.

As holders of the revealed truth – that Europe is the future and the nation state a dangerous past – they see it as their duty to tell us how to behave. And when mere voters dismiss their projects, they know that they must ignore their views, for the sake of Europe.

Nothing must interfere with Europe. That is what Mr Mandelson’s real message is. Whatever we, the British public, might think, it must be he, and his fellow Eurofanatics, who make the decisions.

First class piece by Dan Hannan on the British EU rebate:

The British Abatement kicks in only when we are paying in more than we get out, providing for a percentage of our net contribution to be returned. It does nothing to correct the underlying bias against us. In the 20 years since Margaret Thatcher's deal, we have remained the second largest net contributor, paying £170 billion gross (£50 billion net) into the EU budget. A billion here, a billion there: pretty soon it starts to add up to real money.

Only once in 32 years of membership have we run a surplus. Indeed, in almost every year since we joined, we and the Germans have been the only two states to make any net contribution at all. At the same time, far more affluent nations - including Luxembourg, which has the highest per capita GDP in the EU - were receiving handsome dividends. In other words - pace, Margaret - we never really got "our money back"; all we did was slightly reduce our tribute. The sums involved are larger than many people realise. Last year, according to the Treasury, we paid £11.7 billion gross (£4.2 billion net) to the EU.

...I have never understood why commentators tend to cite the net rather than the gross figure. They do not do so in any other field of government activity. No one argues, for example, that income tax is not really 22 pence in the pound but zero, because the entire sum is "given back" in roads, schools and hospitals. So what if £8 billion or so is spent in the UK? It is not spent on schemes we should have chosen for ourselves; indeed, it is often allocated to projects whose chief purpose is to advertise the EU.

There is no such thing as an "EU grant". When people talk about European money, what they really mean is British money that has been sloshed through the various tubes and compartments of the Brussels machine, leaking all the way, before dribbling back to these shores.

...Let us for once respect the voters' verdict. Let us scrap the corrupt schemes that the EU is paying for: the foreign aid boondoggles, the bogus structural grants, the grotesque agricultural regime. If we can't make the budget sleaze-free, let us at least make it smaller.

If Tony Blair had the cojones, he would appeal over the heads of the French and German leaders to their peoples. Your own politicians may be determined to ignore your wishes, he would say, but I shall respect them. I shall use the British presidency of the EU to propose a wholesale repatriation of powers to the national capitals. And, in doing so, I shall reduce these bloated billions that Brussels keeps sucking in to no very good end. Then everyone, not just the Brits, could have their money back.

Hilarious - your government has just been given the mother of all kickings for being out of touch and putting elite opinion above that of the ordinary citizen. So what do you do? Appoint as PM the ultimate ENArc...

It's that finger on the pulse of popular feeling that has served Jacques Chirac so well of late...

Brilliant, Jacques. Just brilliant.

There's been a lot of commentary today about just how lucky Blair is, having been let off the referndum hook by the French.

But that's looking at it the wrong way round. Blair is without a doubt the most politically brilliant PM, whose strategic vision is so deft that most obervers don't even see what he's up to. Don't forget that Chirac had initially rejected the idea of a referendum (as had Blair). Blair's 'luck' is, rather, brilliant strategy. Why did Chirac change his mind? Precisely because Blair pldged a referendum. Iif Blair, who faced a public which was clearly anti, could be so bold, how could Chirac, who faced only the 'engine room' of the EU, not do the same?

As a sportsman once put it (I forget who): I find that the more I practice, the luckier I get.

UPDATE: It was Gary Player who said that.

If I hear another smug British Eurofanatic - such as Nick Clegg, the newly elected LibDem MP and now their Europe spokesman - tell us thickie Eurosceptics in a tone of exasperation at our stupidity that we shouldn't take heart from the French result since - duh - the French voted no because they thought the treaty was too Anglo-Saxon, and we think it's not Anglo-Saxon enough, I will SCREAM.

Can I explain it simply enough so that even you can understand it, Mr Clegg? If the French want to preserve their youth unemployment, their sclerotic economy, their bizarre labour laws and their bankrupt welfare state, that is their right. And if we don't want to have even more decisions taken by Qualified Majority Voting in Brussels, that is our right. Neither position is in any way contradictory. It's what's called democracy, and it's the fundamental point which both the French and the British no campaigners have in common.

What a great day for democracy. David Carr speaks for England:

To all French cryto-communists, syndicalists, marxists, trotskyites, leninists, stalinists, national socialists, socialist nationalists, primitivists, Trade Union dinosaurs, student activists, greenie nutters, neo-fascists, old fashioned fascists, quasi-crypto-troglodyte-Pol-Pottist-year zero-flat-earthers, looney tunes and enviro-goons....Merci Beaucoup!!!!

There is something truly wonderful about watching the Eurofanatics squeal. The BBC has wheeled out the familar representatives of the patronising political elites, typified by the ever-present Dominique Moisi, and it is sheer joy watching them try to explain away the result - 56% to 44% at the time of writing! - as being nothing more than the ill-formed, worthless opinions of a few ignorant extremists.

M Moisi has been sharing with us his conclusion: that the result proves that President Chirac was wrong to put the ratification to a referendum, since the population is unable to grasp the complicated issues involved.

It is, of course, precisely that sod the public Euro-elite mindset which is responsible for the thumping rejection of the constitution. And that is a thought which M Moisi and his fellows are clearly unable even to think, let alone learn from.

And now I have just listened to Louis Michel, speaking for the Commission, inform us that 'we should be honest in analysing the 55 per cent who voted no'. By 'honest', he explains, he means that we should recognise the contradictions in the no coalition, including - heavens! - 'nationalists', who reject European integration in principle. In principle! Have they no shame?

To creatures such as M Michel, a man who managed the near impossible in lowering the reputation of the Belgian government (and has been rewarded with a key job as a Commissioner), the views of such 'no' voters render them invalid ab initio, and ought not to be allowed to put any brake on the European project.

There are two possible outcomes to this: either the voice of the people will be listened to, and there will indeed be a brake. Or the likes of M Michel will prevail, and it will be ignored - in which case, God help the democracy which we ought today to be celebrating.

Well, at least he's honest. This is Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg PM, on how things will change on Monday, given a yes or a no vote in France:

If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'.

The EU elites' world view, in one sentence. Sod the public.

...to your nearest branch of Civitas, the think tank, who today publish a pamphlet of mine.
It's a debate with Lord Pearson over withdrawal from the EU. He argues for withdrawal, and I put the eurosceptic case for staying in.

Here's how the press realease summarises it:

Writing in Should We Stay or Should We Go?, Stephen Pollard of the Centre for the New Europe argues that the forthcoming referendum on the European Constitution offers 'the opportunity of a generation to mould the EU in the direction which the British have been advocating for decades… [and] places the power to force change in the hands of the electorate, who will have the opportunity to say what they think, and to say it in a way that can't be ignored' (p.25).

Pollard sees the conflict over the Constitution as a battle between the forces of Old Europe, led by France and Germany ('statist, tax-devouring… old, sclerotic' pp.28 & 28) and New Europe ('more market-flexible, politically loose and sovereignty-respecting' p.26). New Europe is led by Britain, but with the very important fresh allies of Eastern European countries that have recently joined the EU, and which are more drawn towards the British and American political model - 'the EU did nothing to free Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia and Hungary from the Soviet empire' (p.27).

Pollard cites the appointment of José Barrosa as President of the European Commission as a sign of the new outlook in Europe, an outlook that owes much to British influence:

At a time when the possibility now exists of sending so severe a shock to the EU's system that change is unavoidable, it would be crazy, now of all times, to consider withdrawal (p.26).

Pollard warns that the Blair government wants to portray the referendum on the European Constitution as being about whether we should be in or out of the EU. This should be resisted, as he believes there are many who share his own Euro-scepticism, and who will vote to reject the Constitution, but who want Britain to remain in the EU. If the referendum is allowed to turn into a vote for or against EU membership, it will let the Euro-federalists off the hook:

The withdrawal issue is thus political stupidity of the highest order, given the opportunity for a resettlement of the EU's foundations which would be presented by a "No" vote (p.31).

According to Denis MacShane, the former Minister for Europe, the government is guilty of a terrible thing:

In the late 1980s, Margaret Thatcher spent £25 million on a pro-European government information campaign. In my last year as Europe Minister, the budget for explaining Europe to the British people was slashed to £200,000 and offers from the European Commission to distribute purely factual information were spurned.

How fantastically Orwellian! The government has not taken enough of our money to spend on propoganda so that we have our minds changed. We are wrong to reject the constitution and to be sceptical about the inherent merit of anything which has the label 'EU' attached. And we should pay to have our minds put right.

It's actually rather frightening that this is the mindset of our rulers.

There's a typical piece of Guardianista Eurofanatic arrogance by Peter Preston today. Writing about the constitution, he says:

The French don't like it because they think it an Anglo-Saxon sell-out. The Tories don't like it because - like the Sun and the Mail - they haven't read it, let alone tried to understand.

There you have it, in a sentence. Clearly, anyone who opposes the treaty is plain ignorant. (Unlike, I assume Ken Clarke, who infamously remarked that he hadn't read the Maastricht Treaty.)

Well, Mr Preston, I have read it - indeed, I have a pamphlet out any day on the subjecy from Civitas - and I urge anyone who hasn't to do so. (You can download it here.) Read it, and weep for the further erosion of self-government.

Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic and one of the great men of the late twentieth century, has a new book out, On The Road to Democracy.

I've yet to read it, but judging from Pete du Pont's piece in the WSJ yesterday, it looks like a must-read.

"Ten years ago," Mr. Klaus writes, "the dominant slogan was: 'deregulate, liberalize, privatize.' Now the slogan is different; 'regulate . . . get rid of your sovereignty and put it in the hands of international institutions and organizations.' "

"The current European unification process is not predominantly about opening up," he continues, "It is about introducing massive regulation and protection, about imposing uniform rules, laws, and policies." It is about a "rush into the European Union which is currently the most visible and the most powerful embodiment of ambition to create something else--supposedly better--than a free society."

...So what is making President Klaus "more and more nervous" about the Czech people's future? His conviction that the authors and enforcers of the new EU Constitution believe:

That "competition is not the most powerful mechanism for achieving freedom, democracy and efficiency, but rather an unfair and unproductive form of dumping."

That "intrusive regulation, ruling and intervening from above are necessary because market failure is more dangerous than government failure."

That "the premise that government is ultimately a benevolent force, obliged to guarantee equal outcomes by redistributing benefits and privileges between individuals and groups."

A nice piece of unbiased reporting by the Grauniad:

Jacques Chirac yesterday called a snap referendum on the European Union constitution amid increasing concern that France's voters will turn against the proposal and effectively kill the treaty.

Increasing concern, eh? God forbid that those pesky frogs derail the sacred project by - as if! - deciding they'd rather not have their politics run from abroad.

Should you be at a loose end, I'm chairing an ICA discussion - Why Believe In Europe? - on Monday 7th March.

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Google 'swivel-eyed loons'. I wonder what comes top...

Go on - do it now.

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The thought that we are probably less than fourteen weeks away from a general election is hardly one to set the pulses racing. Unless the polls prove to be spectacularly wrong, the only imponderable – the ‘known unknown’, as Donald Rumsfeld would put it – appears to be the size of the Conservative defeat.

The only possible salvation for the Conservatives would be if, over the next few weeks, there emerged an ‘unknown unknown’; an explosive issue which could shake the country’s political foundations and upset the predictions. What Michael Howard would give to be able to campaign on a subject on which he and the Conservatives were, alone in British politics, in tune with the public will. How he must dream of a deus ex machina arriving centre stage to present him with a cast-iron popular vehicle. Imagine if he could find a theme on which he had the support of over two thirds of the public.

It has arrived. He has that theme.

This week a wild card was introduced into British politics, with the potential to transform its dynamics and give momentum to the moribund forces of the centre-right. On Wednesday, Jack Straw published the European Union Bill, which enshrines in law the forthcoming referendum on the proposed EU constitution.

The election result may seem cast in stone, but the impact of the referendum campaign could, in the medium term, be transformative on British politics.

In today's Telegraph, Anthony King analyses the first poll based on the government's newly announced referendum question, which shows a two to one 'no' majority. As he puts it: "the Yes camp has a far tougher fight on its hands than it did three decades ago".

The political dividends to the Conservative Party should be immense. The divide between the parties is stark. On one side are Labour and the Liberals. Labour is, in the public mind, the clear villain, having agreed to a constitution which less than a quarter of the country wants. With them are the Liberals, who simply say yes anything with the prefix ‘EU’ attached.

On the other side is the Conservative Party, which now has an issue – indeed, has been handed it on a silver platter by the government - on which it speaks for the majority of the country. As if that was not enough good fortune, Tony Blair – the great hoover of Conservative causes and natural Tory territory - is, on this most fundamental of subjects, merely the voice of a small sect of committed ideologues.

The Conservative Party has been looking since the 1992 election for a thread to bind itself together, and to attach itself to public support. For the first time, it now has just that. The debate over the constitution is no longer (just) a theological dispute. It is a live political issue, and the Conservatives’ stance is supported by a two to one majority of the public, by most entrepreneurial businesses and by most newspapers.

It is almost impossible to imagine a more propitious political outlook for a party needing to re-establish its credentials as the voice of middle Britain.

And yet. Given its recent history, the chances are that the Conservative Party will prove incapable of recognising the gift horse which the government has planted squarely in its mouth. It is a damning commentary on the state of the Conservative Party that few wise gamblers would back the Tories even in a one horse race. The referendum campaign could well be a walk-over for the ‘no’ campaign. But does anyone really imagine that it will provide the springboard for the Conservatives’ revival? The evidence of recent years suggests that, given the opportunity, the party relishes any opportunity to mess up.

If, for once, the party can break free of its introspection, its factionalism and its self-immolation, it has the opportunity once more to speak for Britain. We are listening.

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...and so the swizz begins. Today's FT reveals that the FCO is spending £40,000 of our money hiring a PR firm to push the 'benefits' of a yes vote in the forthcoming EU constitution referendum:

A Foreign Office memo, obtained by the FT, reveals that the government is embarking this month on an “extensive communications campaign” before the referendum on the constitution, expected next year. As part of the offensive, it has hired Geronimo PR a London-based firm which has handled previous government campaigns to increase awareness about the “benefits” of EU membership and the “facts” about the constitutional treaty.

Outlining the brief for the agency, which has been given a £40,000 budget, the Foreign Office asserts that it is to inform the public rather than “persuade” people to vote for the constitution. But the memo goes on to reel off a list of the constitution's merits, calling the treaty a “success for Britain” which will “confirm” the UK's “position of strength in Europe” and enable the enlarged Europe to “work more effectively”. Rejecting the constitution, it says, would “jeopardise our position in the EU . . . weaken Britain's influence in Europe . . . . It would marginalise and isolate us”.

That is a perfectly valid point of view, of course. I happen to think it is wrong. But what is not valid is using my money - taxpayers' money - to push that line (at the very least without ensuring that the no campaign is given exactly the same amount of money).

As always, the eurofanatics are using our money to push their own nefarious ends. Duplicity barely begins to describe it.

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There's a very good piece by George Trefgarne in the Telegraph on how the supposedly guaranteed 'no' vote in the referendum on the EU constitution could go wrong.

One of his plausible predictions caught my eye:

By November, things look pretty serious for the No campaign as it becomes infected with the splits within the Tory party. This referendum is about Europe in or out, says Blair (lying through his teeth). Quite right, replies the Euro-sceptic Right, let's pull out altogether. At this point more than half the FTSE 100 chief executives, the CBI and Blair's new friends at the Institute of Directors announce that it would be against Britain's economic interest to withdraw from the EU.

It is just that tactic which worries me. The more the argument coming from Eurosceptics turns to Europhobia, and to withdrawal, the easier - and more convincing - it is for the 'yes' camp to argue that it is, indeed, about 'in' or 'out' rather than 'yes' or 'no' to a specific constitution. And there is almost no evidence to show that withdrawal is a realistic electoral option (quite apart from it being the wrong thing to do).

As the Duke of Wellington put it: "I don't know if these men will frighten the enemy, but by God they frighten me".

I have just finished a debate pamphlet with Lord Pearson, shortly to be published by Civitas, in which he argues for withdrawal and I argue the eurosceptic case for staying in. I'll let you know when it's out.

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Never let it be said I don't admit when I'm wrong. Having nominated Tim Garton-Ash for my wrong-headedness award, I'm going to flag up a superb piece of his in the Guardian on Ukraine - or, rather, on the attitude of some in the West to the current situation.

Here's the gist of it:

Why are so many west Europeans being such lemons about Ukraine's orange revolution? Every day brings a new example of some feeble, back-handed or downright hostile reaction.

Yesterday, it was Simon Jenkins in the Times describing the crowds in Kiev as a "mob". (Dictionary definition: "a riotous or disorderly crowd of people; rabble".) Last week, it was Jonathan Steele in these pages, responding to my enthusiastic column about the Kiev events with such arguments as this: "Nor is there much evidence to imagine that, were he [the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko] the incumbent president facing a severe challenge, he would not have tried to falsify the poll." Unpick that contorted hypothetical if you can.

...For 25 years, I have heard these same old arguments against supporting the democratic oppositions in eastern Europe. Those oppositions, we are told, threaten European "stability". Behind or beside them are nasty nationalists and/or the CIA. We must respect the legitimate security interests of Moscow (an argument originally used to justify the continued existence of the Berlin Wall). A ghastly Pandora's box will be opened by ....... (fill this space with: Poland's Solidarnosc, Charter 77, the Leipzig demonstrators - sorry, mob - in 1989, anti-Milosevic students in Belgrade, Georgian rose revolutionaries, or now Ukrainians).

Behind all these contorted reservations, we hear an inner voice which says, in effect, "Why won't all these bloody, semi-barbarian, east Europeans leave us alone, to go on living happily ever after in our right, tight, little west European (or merely British) paradise?" And, quite often, "Why are those bloody Americans stirring them up to disturb us?" For this is not a simple left-right divide. It's a divide between, on the one side, central and east Europeans inside the EU, together with Americans of left and right, and, on the other, west Europeans of both left and right. Not all west Europeans, to be sure. In fact, the EU has spoken out remarkably clearly on the election fraud, through its Dutch presidency and Spanish foreign minister. But many west Europeans.

(To be fair to myself, his writings in the 1980s and just after the collapse of the Soviet Union on Eastern and Central Europe were always superb, and it's good to see that on this subject he's as clear as ever.)

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Here’s a small test. What do the following names have in common: Pauline Green; Enrique Barón Crespo; Leo Tindemans? Never heard of any of them?

Ok, here are two more: Hans-Gert Pöttering and Martin Schulz.

Any ideas?

If you got the answer after the first three, then I have to tell you that you are a rather sad individual. Clearly, your life has been spent studying the minutiae of politics. And yes, I am aware it takes one to know one.

If the last two names gave the game away then you need not feel quite so ashamed of yourself. You have been paying attention to the ongoing drama over the appointment of a new European Commission.

The five names are past and present leaders of the European People’s Party and the Party of European Socialists, the main blocs within the European Parliament. The latter two are the current leaders of those respective groups.

Until recently, there is no reason why anyone with a life beyond politics should have been aware of the existence of any of these people. The contribution made by Ms Green, for example, to the sum of human achievement has been somewhere close to zero. I am being unfair to Ms Green; the same could be said of any of her MEP colleagues, in any party, in the past. The European Parliament was dismissed as a talking shop and then ignored for the perfectly valid reason that it was indeed a talking shop, albeit one lavishly funded by European taxpayers.

The main lesson of the current imbroglio over the non-appointment of a new Commission, however, is that in future we are going to have to pay attention to the likes of Herr Pottering and Herr Schulz. The unpleasant truth is that they and their fellow MEPs now matter.

On Wednesday I spoke to a usually well informed British eurosceptic.
‘Isn’t it wonderful!’, he exclaimed, referring to the chaos unfolding in Brussels and Strasbourg. ‘This is such good news’. In expressing his unalloyed joy at the mess into which the EU has got itself he was merely echoing a sentiment which appears to be shared by most British eurosceptics. If Brussels is in turmoil, the received wisdom has it, then it is good news for self-government.

Since I started to live in Brussels three years ago, I have come to realise that there are few things more alarming than the unerring ability of British eurosceptics – of which I count myself one - to grasp the wrong end of the stick of what happens here. The reaction to the Buttiglione affair is typical. Far from being good news, the real story of the events of the past few weeks should cause those who believe in national self-governance to be worried.

In the short term, yes, the EU is now in chaos. The existing Commission has had to extend its life until the mess can be sorted out and a new Commission approved. But we know one thing for certain: a new Commission will be sworn in at some point, relatively soon. The chaos, even if that were a good thing, will not last long.

But look at what has actually happened: a bunch of non-entity, disparate parties and politicians in the European Parliament have joined together and started to behave with a clear purpose. They have begun to use their latent power.

The notion that the European Parliament is just a talking shop – a Babel for the twentyfirst century – should have died out with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and then the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997. It is, rather, a full-scale legislative body, equal in constitutional importance to the Council of Ministers and responsible for passing the majority of European laws.

The Parliament now makes law jointly with the Council. The Maastricht Treaty introduced “co-decision”, which gives the Parliament the right to amend and to veto legislation, a procedure which was hugely expanded by the Amsterdam Treaty. Although the Parliament cannot propose legislation – that power remains with the Commission – it can nonetheless demand that the Commission does so. Add to that its powers over the EU budget, through its ability to decide the final balance of spending priorities (other than for the Common Agricultural Policy) or to reject the whole budget, and the “assent procedure”, by which the Parliament can approve or reject all agreements (such as trade) concluded between the EU and third countries, and it should be clear to even the most insular Eurosceptic that the Parliament is a real force.

Until this month’s events, that power has been masked by the inept behaviour and sub-standard calibre of many MEPs and parties. The row over Buttiglione’s appointment has, however, galvanised them to act as real political parties. The various groups within the parliament are becoming focused and leadable. The Socialists’ President, the former Danish PM Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, is a serious man. The Liberals (the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe) are making a co-ordinated case for still greater powers for the Parliament and for greater EU integration than even the new Constitution, signed today in Rome, details. Even the Greens are moving from a loose association of bonkers MEPs to a coordinated transnational bloc of bonkers MEPs.

The only group which might act as a brake, the centre-right European People’s Party, is weakened by being split between Christian Democrat types, who are as integrationist as their political opponents, and a looser alliance known as the European Democrats, comprised of MEPs from the UK, some Scandinavian countries and those from the former Warsaw Pact.

So far from jumping for joy, Eurosceptics should be deeply concerned by the maneuverings in the European Parliament over the new Commission. The existing constitutional arrangements already give the Parliament real power. If, as the crisis shows is happening, its members are starting to focus themselves and to use those powers, it is not a cause for eurosceptic rejoicing but fear.

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It is unlikely that, unless you have a special interest in Italian politics, you will have heard of Rocco Buttiglione, the Minister for European Union Policy in Silvio Berlusconi's government. Unlikely, that is, until this month, when Mr Buttiglione testified before two committees of the European Parliament, prompting a row which threatens to snuff out the new European Commission's existence before it has even taken office.

The views on homosexuality and single mothers that the European Union Commissioner-designate for justice, freedom and security - to give him his full title - outlined in his testimony have sent the European Parliament into a flurry of activity and muscle-flexing. MEPs have sensed an opportunity to show who is boss. On Wednesday, they will vote on the proposed new Commission. Since they cannot reject individual nominees, only the entire group, their threat is that they will vote down the whole caboodle.

Mr Buttiglione's crime is to hold views which do not neatly fit into the EU establishment mainstream and to have tried to bring intellectual discourse into a deeply political arena. Asked by a member of the Parliament's Justice Committee whether he regarded homosexuality as a sin, Mr Buttiglione confirmed that he did. He went on to say that traditional marriage allows "women to have children while having the protection of a man". As if that was not enough to offend liberal sensibilities, he added that "single mothers are not very good people".

As it happens, I do not share his views. But the fact that reaction to his testimony has focused exclusively on the rights and wrongs of his beliefs is itself a demonstration of the difficulty of introducing intellectual subtlety into politics, and shows why the affair has deep connotations.

Mr Buttligione stressed as he answered the MEP's questions that he made a "Kantian distinction" between his private views and his public policies. As he put it: "Although I may think that homosexuality is a sin, this has no effect on politics, unless I say that homosexuality is a crime. Many things may be considered immoral which should not be prohibited. The state has no right to stick its nose into these things. I believe in freedom, which means not imposing on others what one considers correct."

That difference between private morality and public policy, and the inability of many MEPs and commentators to comprehend such a distinction, is clearly an important issue in itself. But there is a deeper theme raised by Mr Buttiglione's words. To the northern, liberal European mindset - that of the Scandinavian countries, of France and of the UK - his comments are starkly shocking in the bluntness of their moralising.

Yet for much of the EU - to many Italians and Spaniards, to the populations of the new member states and to those of the aspirant countries, for instance - there is nothing in the least bit unusual about his sentiments. To them he would merely have been stating the obvious.

In speaking his mind, Mr Buttiglione demonstrated that there are fundamental splits within the EU. Indeed, on the very day on which he was testifying, the outgoing Commission published its recommendation that Turkey should be admitted to the EU. Turkey! One would be hard pushed to find a Turk who disagreed with Mr Buttiglione. To many Turks, it is not merely homosexuality that is a sin, it is European liberalism itself.

Europe is not alone in such divides, of course. The religious fundamentalists who exercise such influence in some US states view the East and West coasts as cesspits of vice. But there is a critical difference. In the US, the people themselves are able to decide how and when their own morality should be applied in government.

If the proposed EU constitution is adopted, it will not matter what Mr Buttiglione, or anyone else, thinks. Most areas of morality and fundamental policy would no longer be amenable to democratic decision making; they are dictated in the text of the constitution. US states will be freer than EU member states to legislate as their populations see fit. US states can decide, for example, whether to have the death penalty. The new EU constitution says: "No one shall be condemned to the death penalty, or executed."

Even under existing arrangements, the demand within the EU is that sovereign nations submit themselves to intellectual and political uniformity. The Buttiglione affair shows that the drive within the EU is indeed towards ever closer union.

A union, that is, which is not merely political and economic but something far more fundamental: intellectual, religious and moral. On Thursday's Question Time on BBC1, Peter Tatchell said that a man with Mr Buttiglione's beliefs could not, "by any reasonable democratic standards", be a Commissioner. A more inverted statement of the truth would be hard to imagine. Neither I nor Mr Tatchell might care for Mr Buttiglione's views but public opinion in many parts of the EU back them fully. It is the attempt to exclude such views from acceptable public discourse that is anti-democratic.

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There are few things more frustrating than being a British Eurosceptic in Brussels. Not, I hasten to add, because of the behaviour of my fellow Europeans. The frustration begins and ends this side of the Eurostar terminal at Waterloo.

When I return home to London, I meet and talk with other Eurosceptics. Invariably the same thing happens: as they open their mouths, words come out that bear little relation to reality. As they speak, they talk about a caricature European Union, stuck with a timewarp impression that has not been updated in the past 20 years. The Europe they have in mind is, as Nick Ridley put it in 1990, “a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe”, with the French “behaving like poodles to the Germans”.

They seem wholly unaware that the EU is changing. It has enormous problems — such as the push towards a federal state inherent in the proposed new constitution — but the dynamics of the realpolitik which governs the EU are already in flux. Two critical developments mean that the Franco-German axis is no longer the dominant force.

First, the statist, tax-devouring continental economic model is falling apart. Reality has ensured that even the inept German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, has started — however limply — to realise that reform is necessary.

Secondly, and more fundamentally, the accession of the ten new member states this year has changed the ambience of the EU. The union has taken into its bosom countries which, far from wanting to form an alliance to take on the US, look to America as their saviour. The EU did nothing to free Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia and Hungary from the Soviet empire. They owe their freedom to the US. Indeed, many of their leading politicians were educated in the US and have been imbued with ideas of the free market and liberty.

When Donald Rumsfeld spoke of Old and New Europe, he was spot on. These new countries’ economies are light years away from those of Franco-German Old Europe. Estonia, for instance, introduced a stunningly successful flat tax rate of 26 per cent in 1994. In order to remain competitive with their neighbour, Lithuania and Latvia then introduced their own, which has prompted Estonia’s plan to reduce its rate to 20 per cent within the next three years. Latvia is now reducing its corporate income tax rate to 19 per cent and Slovakia has brought in a flat 19 per cent rate for individuals and corporations.

In contrast, the Czech Republic has tried to ape Old Europe and has raised taxes and widened its welfare state. It is easy to see what will happen next: people and businesses will move to Slovakia and its economy will suffer.

The typical British Eurosceptic’s response is to argue that this is all very well but irrelevant. The EU itself is the problem. And up to a point, yes. The proposed constitution is a damaging distraction that has to be defeated. But there is a further positive sign which comes from the heart of the EU.

The appointment this week of José Manuel Durão Barroso as President of the Commission is indicative of a new outlook. It is inconceivable that a man with his views could have been given such a job — by, remember, France and Germany — as little as five years ago.

Barroso is certainly a convinced supporter of the EU. But he is also an Atlanticist, hosting — at considerable domestic political cost — talks between George W. Bush and Tony Blair in the Azores before the Iraq war, of which he was a supporter. He is a Portuguese version of Margaret Thatcher, ignoring uproar from the unions and less far-sighted colleagues to push through labour market and other free-market reforms.

It would be the ultimate in self-defeating irony if Britain turned its back on the EU, as many Eurosceptics seem to want, at the moment when the New Europe mindset is beginning to hold sway over Old Europe. It is, after all, the fruit of our success; it was British policy to widen the EU.

The real debate across the EU is much wider than Britain’s exclusive focus on the constitution. It centres on whether the old sclerotic EU needs to change and introduce, albeit 20 years after Thatcher, market-friendly reforms. New Europe is winning, Old Europe losing, as Barroso’s appointment shows.

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Paddy Power are now offering odds on the next President of the EU Commission. They make Bertie Ahern the 6/4 favourite.

I may be proved very wrong quite soon, but I've not heard Ahern's name mentioned in Brussels by anyone other than fellow hacks. The two names which do crop in conversation beyond the meejah are Peter Sutherland (6/1) and Javier Solano (8/1). For what it's worth (not much, given by betting form of late) I'm having a small bet on Sutherland.

My favourite example of 'political' (in the widest sense) betting at the moment is Betfair's odds on the Papacy (you get there by clicking on Special Bets, the General). I have no idea who most of the runners and riders are, but the favourite (2.15/1) is a Nigerian, Francis Arinze. Cormac Murphy O'Connor is 21/1.

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I have been Kammed.

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Just to point out that - as I should have made clear - in the post below, all the E
U figures refer only to the 15 Member States up until May. They do not include the 10 new members.

You might not have realised it, but Thursday’s elections to the European Parliament are in theory about the direction of the EU. The debate, if that word can be applied to a campaign which has centred on the remarks of various F-list celebrities, has barely even scratched the subject.

But there is a pressing issue which goes to the very heart of the European Union: economically, it is failing. Not just in the odd sector or country but across the EU as a whole.

The drive behind the single market was sensible: to create a market so vast that it would dwarf even the United States. Putting that into practice has, however, been a perfect illustration of how the EU is failing. Instead of concentrating on what matters — ensuring that member states’ economies are as competitive as possible — EU leaders have insisted on constitutional reforms dressed up as economic reforms, such as the euro.

A report published last week by the Swedish think-tank, Timbro, shows that if the EU was an American state, it would be poorer than almost all its 50 neighbours. Not only is the EU’s GDP per capita lower than in most of the poorest US states, but even the most prosperous EU countries (France, Italy, Great Britain and Germany) have lower GDP per capita than all but four US states. Luxembourg is the only EU country with a higher per capita GDP than the average US state. When America’s annual growth fell to 1-2 per cent during the recession, it was still higher than the average growth rate in most EU countries over recent decades.

None of this should surprise anyone. As the European Council of Ministers itself put it at the Lisbon Summit in March 2000, when EU leaders agreed on the “Lisbon strategy” to introduce structural reforms: “More than 15 million Europeans are still out of work . . . Long-term structural unemployment and marked regional unemployment imbalances remain endemic in parts of the Union. The services sector is underdeveloped . . . There is a widening skills gap.”

There was thus to be “a ten-year strategy to make the EU the world’s most dynamic and competitive economy”. Four years later, the results are almost non-existent. Instead, we have seen more of the same high-tax, over regulatory policies. But muddling through is not an option. Leave aside the economic impact of an ageing population which will impose increasing strains on existing tax-funded welfare and public service arrangements. There is a more fundamental problem.

If economies are not efficient, then resources are not properly deployed and do not expand as they could. Companies operate with one hand tied behind their back, lose business, cannot afford to operate and close. Workers lose their jobs, reducing the tax base and thus the revenue with which to pay for public services — and denying the unemployed the income with which to purchase goods and services.

Today, the average American spends 77 per cent more on consumption than the average EU citizen — not only because US GDP is higher but also because taxes are about 12 per cent lower. The larger the public sector, the smaller the role of private decision-making and the entrepreneurial spirit which create growth, and the smaller the share of the economy open to competition. With trade across national borders growing all the time, those countries with economies not primed for competition will suffer.

Instead of focusing on the popularity or not of Robert Kilroy-Silk and Joan Collins, we should have had a sensible debate about how we are going to deal with this mess.

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I hadn't realised that Pascal Lamy was working for the No campaign. He surely is, given his 'threat' yesterday that the worst thing which could happen if we voted ‘no’ would be that we would have a similar status to Switzerland: freedom, properity, the ability to make our own laws, access to the EU market and the best health system in the world.

If that’s the worst thing which would happen, what possible reason could there be to vote ‘yes’?

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I've had an enormous response to my Times piece about the ban on the Vlaams Blok. I've had to excise some of the more libellous and outrageous comments, which accused me of everything short of paedophilia. (I can't imagine why that word came to mind when I thought about the Belgian establishment.)

I've kept most of the critical comments which all coalesce around the notion that I am either a supporter of the VB or a propagandist, and utterly wrong in my outlining of the facts. I tried to make clear in the piece that I am neither, and would vote against the VB - if, that is, I had the option, since when the VB loses its appeal it will be banned as a criminal organisation.

Because I have written something which supports the VB's right to exist, and Belgians' right to vote against it, to many minds I must therefore be a supporter. Is it really that difficult to understand that that is a non-sequitur?

Not one of the commenters who supposedly take my piece apart has been able to contradict me on the basic fact, which is that the courts have decreed that a party has views which may not be lawfully represented in Belgium. It may be that those views are foul. It may be that they are thoroughly sensible. But the question which matters is this: who should decide that - voters or judges (and thus, by extension, other parties who push through the laws which the judges then implement)?

I stand by my assertion that the VB's 'racism' is a chimera, and that the real reason it has been banned - and yes, it has been banned in any meaningful sense of that word, in that its literature may not be distributed by the monopoly postal service or its politicians appear on state TV, and it is soon to be declared a criminal organisation and disbanded - is because it advocates secession.

Whether that is indeed the motivation is a matter of judgement - unlike the more basic facts which are, quite simply, facts.

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The Left's penchant for using 'society' to excuse certain behaviour is gloriously, if unintentionally, parodied by Will Hutton:

Euro-scepticism, not just in Britain, is fed by the new sense of nationalism and the confluence of ugly sentiment around asylum-seekers, immigration and race; instead of confronting and moulding it, Blair has again chosen to accommodate and thus legitimise it - so helping to create a culture in which Express proprietor Richard Desmond feels able to make the remarks he did about Germans being Nazis.

Both Bob Geldof and Harry Enfield are Eurosceptics. And lets not forget Joan Collins and Andrew Lloyd-Webber. According to Mr Hutton's reasoning, they are all directly responsible for Richard Desmond's outburst last week.

I think the word is 'barking'.

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The Prime Minister makes much of the “scare stories” and “myths” which opponents of further deepening of the EU supposedly propagate. They are based, apparently, on paranoia, and are products of not-so-latent xenophobia.

Well here’s a very scary story which is not speculation but fact. This week democracy — the right to vote for the party you wish to support — ended inside one EU member state.

On Wednesday, the Belgian judiciary banned a political party from operating in Belgium. The reason? The country’s political establishment dislikes its views. The party it banned is not some obscure fringe organisation but one which has 18 MPs in the 150-seat Belgian parliament, many local councillors and two MEPs. The opinion polls were predicting that it could win the most Belgian votes at the European and local elections in June.

The banned party is Vlaams Blok (VB). The Court of Appeal in Ghent — notorious for its left-liberal bias — deemed it to be an “undemocratic and racist” organisation because of its policy that immigrants should be given only two choices: “to assimilate or to return home”.

Maybe such a policy is indeed racist; maybe it isn’t. The VB itself, which has much in common with the Fortuyn List in the Netherlands, has been accused of this. But in a democracy, surely, that is a decision which voters should make, not judges. But the VB’s racism was merely an excuse. The real reason why the Belgian authorities have been bent on banning the VB for years has nothing to do with racism and the rights of immigrants. It is that the party advocates secession from Belgium and the establishment of a Republic of Flanders. Worse still, as Belgium’s only conservative party it upsets the country’s cosy political applecart. The Belgian Establishment has responded not by defeating it in argument but by banning it.

After Wednesday’s ruling, it is now illegal to distribute VB publications and its politicians are barred from state radio and television. The party is appealing against the ruling, but the Belgian judiciary’s predisposition to do the bidding of the political class means that the appeal has almost no chance of succeeding. When the ban is confirmed, the VB will be proclaimed a criminal organisation and disbanded, unable to exist, let alone to field candidates and argue its case.

I hold no brief for the VB; were I to have a vote in Flanders, I would not vote for it. But that is not the point. What happened in Ghent on Wednesday is a frightening but classic demonstration of the political mindset which lies behind the EU’s “ever-closer union”: if you do not sign up to certain beliefs then your politics are, by definition, beyond the pale and thus illegitimate.

The ruling was merely the latest in a series of attempts to destroy the VB because of the threat it posed to the Belgian status quo. In 1999, “undemocratic and racist” parties were banned from receiving state funding (private donations of more than 125 euros are illegal in Belgium). This decision was immediately followed by an action against the VB on those grounds. When a Flemish judge refused to issue a judgment, arguing that these were matters for the electorate rather than the courts, the head of the Centre for Equal Opportunities, the quango which had brought the case, said that he would continue appealing until he had found a judge who would find against the VB. This week one emerged: Alain Smetrijns, who happens also to be the chairman of the Lions Club in Ghent, a francophone pro-Belgian group.

Belgium is in many ways a mini-EU: an artificial state created (much like Europe’s three former such states, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) as a result of political ideology rather than any sense of national unity, and held together by a political class which is prepared to subvert democracy to achieve its ends. Add to that a judiciary which, far from being independent of the political establishment, is an important part of the problem, and you have a recipe for what took place in Ghent this week: democracy, Belgian-style, in which you may vote only for a party whose views are approved by the elites.

The actions may be specific to Belgium, but the lesson is of wider import. The EU is in the process of becoming just such an artificial state. The fate of the Vlaams Blok shows that worries about the future of democracy are not scare stories. They are real dangers and they are with us today.

UPDATE:
Yesterday (Friday), the Flemish state television authorities decided to impose only a partial ban on VB politicians, pending the verdict of the Supreme Court. The Francophone Belgian TV authorities have, however, banned the VB completely.

And to be technically correct, it's not the VB itself which has been banned but its constituent parts. In Belgium, parties have no corporate existence but are rather comprised of a series of groups and organisations. It is those groups which have been labelled racist and undemocratic. As a consequence, anyone who has dealings with them is guilty by association. When the Supreme Court upholds the ban and the VB's constituent bodies are declared criminal organisations then people who have any association with them will themselves be criminals.

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Here’s my take on why Blair has decided to go for a referendum (and none of this is with hindsight – I’ve spent the past fortnight trying to interest papers in a column saying that he’d go for one; no one, of course, was interested!).

Given his difficulties over Iraq, people seem to have forgotten just what a political genius Blair is; what a master tactician; and just how much and how often he is prepared to gamble when the stakes he has been dealt look awful. He is far more capable than any previous PM of turning a non-existent hand to his total advantage. Look, for example, at how in opposition he made Labour – Labour! – the most trusted party on crime and the economy.

As for gambling, there’s the example of Iraq itself. And remember his first act as leader? Announcing at the 1994 Labour conference the abolition of Clause IV, which went to a vote which for most of the preceding months the commentariat were assuring us he would lose (I remember in particular a Guardian analysis of the likely voting which showed how he couldn’t possibly win the vote).

His reputation is now severely damaged as a result of Iraq and the failure of any significant public service reforms. So he has two options for the constitution: try to force it through (which he may not even be able to manage in the Commons, let alone the Lords) and then leave office despised on the three fronts which matter to him (EU, reform, and Iraq); or adopt the ‘with one bound, he was free’ tactic, and allow a referendum.

(Don’t forget that there are likely to be more Tories and fewer Labour MPs after the next election. Add to that the fact that the safest seats are in the hands of Old Labour types who are more likely to rebel than the careerist Blairites, and there is no guarantee that he could win a vote in the Commons. A referendum will thus, paradoxically, make ratification more likely, since a ‘yes’ vote would not be overturned in the Commons.)

The downside for him – of course - is that he might lose a referendum; but then he might lose without one, too.

The upside is that the moment he announces it, he gets 10/10 from the media and the chattering classes for doing the right thing; he opens up the possibility of regaining trust and goodwill from ‘the people’; and – crucially for him, given his Europhilia – he makes possible the final settlement of the European question for this generation. And he does it by a mechanism in which the odds are stacked in his favour.

There's a further factor: the chances are that this is all academic. First, there's no guarantee of a deal at Brussels. But even if there is such a deal and the constitution is agreed, there's every possibility that one of the other countries which is having a vote will throw the whole thing up in the air by voting 'no', which would mean Blair gets all the credit for offering a referendum and 'listening' - I guarantee that we'll here that No10 buzzword in the statement announcing a referendum - without having to have the actual thing.

All of the above notwithstanding, I still think – and hope, if the constitution is much like the existing document – that there’d be a ‘no’ vote here. Just because the poltics make sense doesn't mean he'll get the result he wants.

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Superb piece by Therese Raphael today on the half-hearted reforms across Europe which are provoking so much angst.

The following are among the most radical reform programs to be found anywhere in Europe today.

• A plan to save British universities from decline caused by massive funding deficits -- by allowing modest tuition fees, covered by government loans and repayable only when the student earns a minimum income after graduation.

• A plan to overhaul Europe's most dysfunctional pension system -- through reforms that start in 2008 and hinge on raising the contribution time to 40 years from 35.

• A plan to reduce one of Europe's most complex and onerous tax systems and one of the continent's most employment- and growth-stifling welfare systems-with a modified, less drastic version of an earlier reform plan.

• A plan to reduce France's unemployment rate -- by, it appears (but isn't clear), allowing more flexible employment contracts and lessening some other labor market restrictions.

Make no mistake: Tony Bair's proposal for university "top-up" fees, Silvio Berlusconi's nip-and-tuck pension reform, Gerhard Schroeder's welfare and tax cuts, and Jean-Pierre Raffarin's reforms to tax and labor market policies are all, to varying degrees, departures from the social market consensus that has dominated European politics for much of the postwar period. It's progress. Possibly, they are the thin edge of the wedge, if we're being optimistic.

But if we're honest, we'll admit that as reforms go, these are mostly wimp-outs. What is really remarkable here is not that they are happening at all, but rather how ultimately skimpy they are.

...Opposition to change is a given in politics. What distinguishes the domestic successes from the disappointments isn't so much the limits on what is possible but a deficiency of imagination, and often courage. The only European leader who stood tall and on principle both at home and abroad, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, delivered reforms that lifted Spain's economy to the big leagues. Each country has its own peculiarities of course, but Mr. Aznar's example demonstates the potency of focused, visionary leadership. The lesson from Spain -- indeed from all truly reforming governments -- is that it is necessary to aim high, move quickly and risk everything to get results.

...While we can, if we're lucky, look forward to a continued dribble of half-hearted reforms from the current crop of leaders, the real work will fall upon those who come after Silvio, Tony, Gerhard and Jacques -- the reform weenies -- have left the stage. Those who would replace them, and do better, will need to be armed with more than just good PR skills and the pragmatist's penchant for splitting the difference. They must be prepared to wage a war of ideas.

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I've just read a truly wonderful piece by Peter Oborne in the Speccie - an 'interview' with Lord Marshall, which takes the pompous 'booby' (as Oborne calls him) and his awful organisation, Britain in Europe, apart.

Have a read. You'll enjoy what is a classic piece.

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I have discovered the woman I want to marry, on Andrew Sullivan's site:

While having a beer at a neighborhood bar/restaurant in NYC's West Village last weekend, I was party to a situation that I think you'll find directly on point.
Three mid-50's liberals were going on about the capture of Saddam; how it was a conspiracy, that the president knew where he was at all times and picked a politically opportune moment to capture him, it was all about the oil, etc.
The mid-20's girl sitting next to them broke from her conversation to chime in with the following, "I wish 60's sensibilities had stayed there. Someone points a gun in your face and you think 'My Fault', when you should be thinking 'You just picked the wrong fight'. Get your heads out of your asses".
They responded with dismissive claims about Republicans and tourists from the midwest.
She replied with, "One, I've grew up in Brooklyn. Two, I voted for Gore -- but I'll sure as hell take W. over someone who thinks the French are the height of moral authority and without ulterior motive."
I asked her out on the spot, and have a date for this Friday. Foxy, Cunning, and Fearless -- wish me luck!

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You get a better class of fan at a rugby match. Witty, too.

(via Andrew Stuttaford.)

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I love it when Euroweenies hang themselves by their own words.

The European Commission is often pilloried for its attempts at harmonisation and standardisation across the EU. However, even Brussels seems to have recoiled in horror at a suggestion from a senior member of the European Investment Bank (a Briton, as it happens) that British place-names might be changed to avoid offending Continental sensitivities.

Francis Carpenter wrote in the French newspaper Le Figaro that it would be in the interests of European harmony if "offensive" British names commemorating battles lost by the French were eradicated from places such as Waterloo Station. Mr Carpenter suggested a "more European theme" was required. "Gare de Londres" perhaps? Or "William the Conqueror Integrated Transport Facility"? Alas, poor Mr Carpenter is ignorant of European history, for the French adventurer Napoleon was beaten at Waterloo by a European Rapid Reaction Force sent by the forerunner of the EU, the Congress of Vienna.

Indeed, Napoleon might have carried the day against the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo were it not for the arrival in the nick of time of Marshall Blücher and his Prussians. It is high time Europe started concentrating on serious matters like economic reform rather than cosmetic name changes.

And, yes, of course I realise that it's only a newspaper column, not a decision by the Council of Ministers or a Commission proposal. But believe me, this is how they think in Brussels. I know. I live there. (I love saying that. It completely disarms the accusaitons that Eurosceptics are crazed little Englanders.)

(via Harry Hatchett)

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