Nosemonkey's EUtopia

In search of a European identity

June 25, 2009
by Nosemonkey
3 Comments

Increasing disquiet surrounds new centre-right EP group

After yesterday’s confusion – with one MEP leaving and another joining, exposing this new British Conservatives-led group as a fairly fragile alliance – now we again have renewed concerns being voiced: This time from among the British Conservatives themselves.

Many Tory MEPs were decidedly unhappy about David Cameron’s pledge to pull out of the EPP – knowing, as they do, that being a sizable part of the largest bloc in the European Parliament (partnered with various sensibly mainstream parties, such as those headed by Sarkozy and Merkel) gave them significantly more influence than being the largest part of a far smaller grouping (partnered with various less than loveable minor parties).

Indeed, just about the only Tory MEP to be vocally supportive of ditching the EPP was the strongly anti-EU Daniel Hannan – the eloquent internet celebrity, whose verbosity and intellect masks an attitude towards the EU that wouldn’t look out of place in UKIP. Why was Hannan so keen to ditch the EPP? Well, they’d already ditched him – he was effectively forced out in February 2008 after (fairly admirably, to be fair – though he certainly milked it) standing up to a point of principle over parliamentary procedure. Plus, of course, the staunchly anti-EU Hannan tends towards the withdrawalist take on the EU, and so even the relatively mild acceptance of European integration shown by the EPP was a bit much for him.

Hannan, however, would seem to have the ear of similarly strongly eurosceptic Shadow Foreign Secretary and deputy Tory leader William Hague – him of the ill-chosen “Ten days to save the pound” campaign back when he was Tory leader in 2001 – and it would seem to be Hague who is the guiding hand behind Tory EU strategy. In the last few weeks, Hannan was even sent off around the various member states to talk to (and campaign for) potential partners for the new group. The other Tory MEPs appear to be almost entirely ignored by the Cameron/Hague leadership.

Had they listened to the concern of the majority of their MEPs at the time rather than just Hannan, however, perhaps the Conservatives wouldn’t now be in such a pickle. Not only has the party already come under attack for the unsavoury nature of some of its new EP allies, but now even its own MEPs are starting to voice their concerns in public:

“Despite what David Cameron has said there are already indications that some of the members have links with extremist groups and I feel very, very uncomfortable with that,” [Conservative MEP Edward McMillan-Scott] said. “I know the party has made inquiries but I will make my own investigations into the background of these people.”

The other Tory MEPs are currently giving every indication of continuing to back the leadership in Westminster, and to be prepared to push ahead and make the best of this new group. But for how much longer? Rumours are already circulating of deep disquiet within the Tory ranks in Brussels – while outside observers continue to look on in amazement, scratching their heads at the reasoning of a major political party from one of the EU’s largest and most influential member states, that’s near certain to be in power domestically within a year, which has decided to make friends with small opposition parties with extremist views and a bunch of random individual MEPs, when it could be hobnobbing in the EPP with the most influential political leaders on the continent.

On a diplomatic level, this Tory strategy still makes no sense to me. What exactly are they hoping to achieve by teaming up with this bunch of suspect no-marks? Or is it as simple as the Tories have given up on the EU, and are prepared to sacrifice influence and friendships on the continent to try and win back the floating eurosceptic voters they need if they are to have any hope of securing a decent majority in a domestic general election? Because although it’s true that they can achieve nothing unless they’re in power, in the current global economic climate they’re also going to have a tough time achieving anything substantive without strong and willing European allies.

June 24, 2009
by Nosemonkey
5 Comments

The Conservatives’ new European Parliament Group: On the brink of collapse already?

Only a couple of days after its formation, and already David Cameron’s new European Parliament political grouping (the brilliantly-named Conservatives and Reformists) have lost a member. Considering that you need MEPs from seven member states to form an EP group, and this new one is relying on no fewer than five individual MEPs from various member states to make up the numbers, I reckon we should set up a sweepstake on how long this lasts.

It is, after all, basically just three parties from three member states (the Conservatives from the UK, Law & Justice from Poland and the Civic Democrats from the Czech Republic), of which the Tories massively dominate (and seem, from what I can tell, to be the most sensible and successful of the lot – both the Poles and the Czechs have some rather odd views, to put it mildly, and seem to be on the wane in their respective countries while the Tories are on the rise).

Relying on a bunch of individual MEPs to make up the requirement for multiple member states was always going to be a risky strategy – but how far are the Conservatives, as by far the dominant force in terms of numbers, going to be prepared to pander to individuals to hold the group together? Today we’ve learned that one member – Hannu Takkula of the Finnish Centre Party – has already decided to jump ship. He may well swiftly have been replaced with Waldemar Tomaszewski from Lithuania (although I’m not sure of the details here as yet), but that’s still taking the new group perilously close to the bare minimum spread of member states for group qualification.

And at the same time, there’s a whole bunch of eurosceptic/anti-EU right(ish)-wing parties knocking around in the large unaligned part of the European Parliament – not just the likes of the UK’s BNP and other far-right nationalists and fascists, but also the leftovers from the recently collapsed Independence/Democracy group (the one headed by UKIP’s Nigel Farage until the elections, when the collapse of support for the group’s Polish contingent spelled its doom).

Farage is a canny operator, and certainly not stupid – I wouldn’t put it past him to be able to paint Cameron’s Conservatives as far too wishy-washy (which is, after all, the entire UKIP strategy in the UK) in an effort to steal away some of those individual MEPs from this new group to an Ind/Dem successor. He may even get somewhere. And with the numbers Cameron’s new group is relying on, this split between the *quite* eurosceptics and the *very* eurosceptics could roll on and on – all the while with the balance of power being determined by a small group of individual, more or less independent MEPs, most of whom will have entirely their own agendas.

I can only see this as turning out badly – either they give individuals (many of whom appear to have rather, shall we say “unusual” views?) various positions of influence to keep them on board and so hold the group together, or they go for their original plans (in Cameron’s case, unknown, and in Farage’s case, an all out anti-EU nationalism – albeit one that’s not quite as extreme as it is often made out), and risk alienating the individuals on which they will both be entirely reliant for the committee places and funding that EP group status affords.

In other words, the two pretenders to the title of official European Parliamentary eurosceptic group have the option of either sacrificing their ideals and handing power over to mavericks or risking obscurity in the nonaligned sidelines.

June 22, 2009
by Nosemonkey
5 Comments

New centre-right political group

David Cameron’s Conservatives have done it – just… Splitting from the EPP was always a gamble – but with the near-certain collapse of the Independence/Democracy group (headed up by UKIP leader Nigel Farage) after a poor election showing from some of its constituent parties (Ind/Dem MEPs were wiped out in Poland, for example), Cameron may just have landed on his feet.

The membership of the new group is as follows – with individual MEPs most certainly worth investigating further:

The 55 MEPs at the moment are (according to Conservative Home):

* 26 British Conservative MEPs
* 15 Polish MEPs from the Law and Justice Party
* 9 Czech MEPs from the Civic Democratic Party
* 1 MEP from Belgium’s Lijst Dedecker – Derk Jan Eppink, a Dutchman who is a former senior European Commission official
* 1 MEP from Finland’s Centre Party, Keskusta – Hannu Takkula (who has left the Liberal Group where the rest of his party sits)
* 1 MEP from the Hungarian Democratic Forum – Lajos Bokros, a former finance minister
* 1 MEP from the Latvian National Independence Movement – Roberts Zile, a former finance and transport minister
* 1 MEP from the Dutch Christian Union – Peter van Dalen

Yep – that’s five individual MEPs that the new group has to keep sweet in order to maintain the requirement for all groups to have members from at least seven member states. They can afford to lose one, and that’s it. Any more and their new group is kaput.

More on this, no doubt, to come…

June 22, 2009
by Nosemonkey
5 Comments

The Speaker elections: Some perspective

The MP expenses scandal has rocked Westminster for over a month now (with more revelations *still* emerging). Many MPs have found their careers cut short – among them Speaker Michael Martin (a man who never should have got the job back in 2000, but that’s beside the point).

As is the way of things these days, public and press outrage over the perceived piss-taking by MPs of all parties has led parliament to jump to entirely the wrong conclusion. In hunting for a scapegoat, they picked on Michael Martin; in the process, they tarnished the office of Speaker itself with smears designed primarily to hit this man they had collectively decided to blame. “Oh,” they said, “If only we had someone like Boothroyd or Weatherill this never would have happened!” Yet despite professing that it was the man, not the office, which had been found wanting, it looks as if the next Speaker is intended to “update” and “make relevant” an institution that has doing very well, thank you very much, without any meddling from mere gadfly politicians.

Altering the office of Speaker is not what is required. That way lies failure and recrimination down the line. Because we cannot do constitutional reform – not when it’s hasty; not when it’s carried out by politicians; and most especially, it would seem, not when it’s carried out by the lot we’ve got at the moment. (Remember the half-arsed attempt to reform the House of Lords, that has left us in an arguably worse situation than we had before? The dismal attempt to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor? The various residual angers and squabbles over devolution? The back-of-an-envelope creation of a supreme court? The constant renaming of government departments, often at vast expense and with no discernible impact? The gradual downscaling of both the Cabinet and parliament, hand-in-hand with the politicisation of the previously stringently impartial civil service?)

The office of Speaker has been brought into disrepute? One Speaker’s failures over a nine-year period is enough to destroy the respectability of a position that has existed (more or less) since the 14th century? By the same logic, shouldn’t we abolish the office of Prime Minister about now?

What we need is not to alter the office of Speaker and “make it more relevant”, as seems to be the buzz phrase at the moment. We need someone respectable, unimpeachable, with an intricate understanding of the rules of parliament (something Martin never had), a sense of the history of the place, and an ability to stand up for what’s right in the face of overwhelming opposition from a chamber full of shouty, petulant MPs.

Few of the candidates can live up to this:

– Margaret Beckett is a party animal through and through, heavily implicated in the expenses scandal
– Sir Alan Beith is another party man – and to have former deputy leader of any party take over such a high profile position at this stage is just silly, even if he is only a Lib Dem
– Sir George Young is a former Secretary of State, and therefore he too has too much of the party man about him
– John Bercow is both incredibly smug and, with only 12 years in the Commons, too inexperienced
– Parmjit Dhanda only entered the Commons in 2001, so just cannot be taken seriously no matter how intelligent and earnest he may seem
– Anne Widdecombe is more a TV personality than a politician these days, and is stepping down at the next election anyway, so really – what’s the point?
– Sir Alan Haselhurst put £12,000 on his expenses for gardening over four years, based on a figure just £1 below the receipt threshold every month throughout that time, so surely can no longer be a contender
– Richard Shepherd is a man of principle, no doubt, but with the ongoing difficulties over the positioning of the UK within the EU I can’t see the Commons going for one of the most fervent of the Maastricht rebels (plus he’s a friend of Robert Kilroy-Silk, which must show poor judgement, surely?)

Which leaves us with two genuinely decent candidates: Sir Michael Lord, and Sir Patrick Cormack. Both Tories? Yes. Both with Knighthoods? Yes. Between them, they have 65 years in the House (39 of those Cormack). Lord, like Shepherd, was a Maastricht rebel – but I wouldn’t discount him for that, as it does, after all, show some independence. More impressively, however, Cormack was a Poll Tax rebel – one of the very few Tories to refuse to support that most unpopular of policies, and was also the first MP to force a debate on the Yugoslav crisis in the 1990s – much against the wishes of the then government (which was, yes, Tory again).

Yes, I’m biased here – I used to work for Cormack. This does, however, also mean that I’ve seen his character up close and know him to be a man with a genuine, passionate belief in doing the right thing. The Telegraph’s Ben Brogan seems to see much of the same in him that I do.

If you want to return a sense of decorum to the Commons, what better than someone who knows the place inside out, with four decades’ experience? What better than someone who’s been through ten general elections and seven Prime Ministers, who’s seen countless MPs come and go – and yet has, throughout, watched the institution of parliament endure, despite all the scandals, all the infighting, all the failures and ill-considered reforms?

We don’t need a big media star – the Speaker should never *be* high-profile, that was part of the reason Martin had to go – we need someone who can command quiet respect. We don’t need rapid reform – we need someone with a sense of perspective who can take a step back and calmly assess, because that is what the Commons has been lacking above all during the last few weeks. Cormack would be ideal.

Which is, of course, why he almost certainly won’t get it. When was the last time MPs voted for something to do with the running of parliament that actually makes sense?

June 19, 2009
by Nosemonkey
6 Comments

“Becoming EU-sceptic”

Prolific Euroblogger Julien Frisch – “a convinced European citizen and glad to be a citizen of the European Union” – is approaching his first anniversary of blogging. During that time, his coveraged has been both eclectic and entertaining, informative and interesting. (If you’ve not been reading him anyway, you really should be…)

But now, after a solid year of blogging about the EU from a pro-EU perspective, the sheer incompetence and bloody-mindedness of the political elites that oversee the frequently useless manner in which the EU functions has seemingly forced him to radically shift his opinions:

“I think I am becoming an absolute EU-sceptic…

When I look at all this, I more and more get the impression that the EU has failed to be the project of Europeans.

The EU is the project of power games, mostly between old, worn-out men who try to compare the length of their penises instead of caring for the interests of the continent. In one of these contests, an old Pole now has apparently won the EP presidency over an old Italian guy.

On the one side, the EU is a PR project of technocrats who have no interest in supporting a common European identity and a genuine European democracy, and on the other side, it is the ideal supranational playing field for nationalists who always fight for “the best” of their countries instead of promoting the best for Europe as a whole.

They all lack European ambition, they all lack spirit, and they all don’t have any idea where they want this Union to be in 10 years.

The more I watch them doing this, the less interested I am in what they do. The more I listen to their heartless speeches, their superficial declarations, their diplomatic compromises, the more I am convinced that nothing will change.

I know how he feels.

This is a vital, fundamental problem that the EU seems repeatedly unable to address – it is excruciatingly hard to be enthusiastic about the European Union. No matter how much you try, the more you look into it, the more you see its flaws. The more you look for sensible ideas for its future purpose and reform, the more you see the tsunami of inadequates that tend to gain positions of power in the damn thing rise up and threaten to swamp the whole project in a deluge of tedium, petty squabbles, meaningless jargon and total lack of vision.

This is precisely why I maintain that genuine europhiles are a very rare breed indeed: The EU is simply not loveable. It has the potential to turn into something truly great, and I still maintain that it is more good than bad, but it is deeply flawed – and that flaw stems from the people in charge of the damned thing: a never-ending rota of short-term losers, none of whom have anything personal to gain from looking to the EU’s long-term success, only from securing short-term advantages pursuit of positive PR (usually aimed at their national publics for national electoral reasons, rather than a European public for altruistic reasons).

As I’ve noted many times over the 6 years that I’ve been blogging about the damned thing, the fundamental question that remains unanswered is what is the EU for? The people who run the thing don’t know – nor do they seem to care. Little wonder, then, that those of us – like Julien, like me, like those British eurosceptics who want it to be just a trading bloc – with a clear vision of what we think that the EU should be about… Little wonder that, well, from time to time we all just get so damned pissed off with the whole thing.

The EU represents a good idea, executed with varying degrees of success. As with any hit and miss project, it’s largely a matter of perception whether you think the hits outweigh the misses. But when the people running the thing are so useless – and when it looks increasingly likely that Barroso is likely to return as Commission President despite having singularly failed in every important task with which he was faced during his term in office (passing the Constitution, passing the Lisbon Treaty, negotiating reform of the budget, starting to reform the CAP, etc. etc. etc.), well… Little wonder that what enthusiasm you do have starts to wane.

Nonetheless, I remain optimistic – precisely because of the ongoing stalemate, stagnation and incompetent management that has dogged the EU for the last decade. There’s only so much longer this can carry on before *everyone* gets thoroughly pissed off. And when that happens – finally – we may see some serious reform.

I’d give it another few years, though. Around about the time of the next budget negotiations in 2013, most likely – though possibly sooner if the Lisbon Treaty somehow ends up getting scrapped. (They used to say that a week is a long time in politics – when it comes to the EU, time works differently again, and a year is like a week in any other organisation. It takes a long time for these things to happen. A very long time. Patience… Patience…)

June 18, 2009
by Nosemonkey
6 Comments

Why is there a misconception that the EU has done the UK no good?

Following our ongoing discussions about the EU’s economic costs/benefits (as part of this apparent series – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 – trying to cut through the spin about the EU and get to the facts), from a letter in today’s European Voice, four points I hope to return to in more detail soon:

Regional policy was introduced to benefit the UK when it joined the EU and, in general, it did a good job of cushioning the UK’s conversion away from heavy industry. So why is there a massive misconception in the UK that the EU has done it no good?

Firstly, EU money has very often been spent without advertising it as EU money.

Secondly, the English seem to think the country’s growth since the early 1980s was all down to Margaret Thatcher. But all EU countries enjoyed a boom of sorts for about ten years after accession. If the UK’s growth is down to anyone, it is down to Ted Heath, who took it into the EU.

Thirdly, people overlook the ‘single-market effect’: outside companies wishing to reside in the single-market area frequently prefer a location where English is spoken.

Fourthly, UK politicians’ excessive use of spin has robbed the EU of credit and, worse, has often unfairly blamed it for problems.

The second point is poorly put and hard to justify, but the rest succinctly outlines some of the fundamentals. The first and fourth points in particular are vital in understanding why people have such a low opinion of the EU. More on this soon, I hope…

June 17, 2009
by Nosemonkey
12 Comments

The dishonesty of the EU debate

Over at his Economist blog, Charlemagne asks “Why it is anti-EU to suggest that the European Parliament does not work very well?”

Herein lies one of the most fundamental problems of the EU debate – something to which I seem repeatedly to return.

The EU is an incredibly complex socio-economic political experiment – a type of regulatory/governmental body unlike anything that has ever been tried before. It is made up of myriad institutions and semi-official bodies, many of which have vast areas of overlap both with each other and with national governments. Good chunks of the EU machinery work only through sharing staff with the agencies, civil services and governments of the member states (the Council being made up of ministers from the member states, the Commission relying on the law-drafting powers of civil servants from the member states, and so on).

At the same time, the EU works across a vast array of policy and regulatory areas – agriculture, fisheries, monetary policy (in some member states, at least), migration and immigration, trade, security and justice, competition and business, aspects of education, sporting and cultural events, and on and on and on.

And yet, whenever the merits of the EU are discussed – especially in the mainstream media – it is presented in simple, confrontational black and white terms. You are either for the EU, or you are against. A eurosceptic or a europhile. Pro-EU or anti-EU.

Like Charlemagne, I’ve been accused of being both a eurosceptic and a europhile in my time – I describe myself as loosely pro-EU, so to some of those in the anti- camp, that makes me a europhile; yet I frequently criticise the EU, so to some of those in the pro- camp I am a eurosceptic.

Yet both europhiles and eurosceptics (and especially their most fervent elements, the withdrawalists and the superstatists) represent the extremes of opinion on the EU. It’s like presenting a jury in a trial with only two alternatives – either let the accused off Scott free or execute them, with no option for fines, community service, rehab or prison sentences. (To make matters worse, although there is a sizable minority of eurosceptics who are actively anti-EU and advocate either withdrawal or its abolition, I have come across very few uncritical europhiles – an imbalance that distorts the debate yet further.)

The presentation of the arguments about the EU in such a manner is not just misleading – it is also dishonest. The choice is not between a federal European superstate and complete withdrawal – yet it suits the extremes on both sides to play up this false binary choice. The europhiles warn of the dire consequences of international isolation should we not back further integration, while the euroscptics warn of a loss of sovereignty and national identity should we continue to allow the EU to expand its influence.

Neither option has to be the case – nor is either option likely in an organisation made up of 27 member states where vetoes and unanimity ensure that almost all decisions are watered-down compromises. Yet these extremes are pretty much all we are ever told about – the dire danger of passing the Constitution / Lisbon Treaty is to move ever closer to the superstate; the dire danger of not passing it is the breakup of the EU itself and a descent into the bad old days of national rivalries and protectionist squabbles. This is nonsense.

Yet in the public debates about the EU there seems to be no room for any shades of grey – indeed, in my experience of doing media punditry about the EU, extreme views are positively encouraged to “liven up” a subject usually (and correctly) considered rather dull.

The idea of a political system that works pretty much entirely via compromise and cooperation, as the EU does, seems anathema to a press that’s always keen to play up political differences and conflict. When faced with a political organisation that, on the surface, seems more or less monolithic (“the EU” being shorthand for the European Parliament, Council, Commission, Court of Justics, or any of its other institutions and agencies depending on the context – sometimes even individual Commissioners and MEPs, and occasionally even institutions that have nothing to do with the EU), the press – and in turn the extreme pro- and anti-EU groups who find such a situation to their advantage – has created a conflict between two artificial extremes in order to force the debate to conform to anachronistic preconceptions about how political discourse is conducted that are entirely inappropriate when approaching something as innovative and unique as the EU.

I remain convinced – and the continued falling turnout at EU elections tends to support this – that the vast majority of people neither really know nor care about the EU enough to form an opinion one way or the other, and that this artificial binary choice between pro- and anti- is serving only to put more people off. But at the same time, anyone who starts looking into the EU with an open mind – as I like to think I have tried to do – will end up (if they are not tricked by the vast amounts of disinformation that seems to swamp all EU debate into believing things that are simply not true) somewhere in the grey middle ground, neither supporting it entirely, nor wishing for it to be done away with. One of the reasons for the continuing decline in turnout at EU elections, I’d suggest, is precisely because voters feel they have to decide whether they are pro- or anti-EU, yet mostly feel neither.

These people, wavering halfway between supporting the EU and thinking it’s a bit rubbish in places, seem to lack a convenient moniker. They are neither europhiles nor eurosceptics. But there is a perfect term for them – they are the majority.

June 14, 2009
by Nosemonkey
19 Comments

What are the economic costs of the EU?

You can work out the likely impact of a law liberalising the market for product category x on related industries a, b, c, (etc.) and even make an educated guess about the overall impact that this law may have on the economy as a whole.

But when it comes to the economy you can never understand everything – if we’ve learned nothing else in the last 12 months, we’ve learned that. Hell, with something as complex as a continent-wide economic system, there are so many other factors at play, though it may be possible to make an educated guess about the impact of a piece of legislation (enough to judge if it’s going to be beneficial, at any rate), you’ll never be able to track *all* of its effects – countless other things will be affecting individual parts of the economy in countless different ways, from other bits of EU and national legislation (which still often overlap) through local levels of trades unionism, consumer spending patterns, passing fashions, local infrastructure, and so on and so on.

In other words, to be able to put an actual monetary figure on the costs/benefits of EU legislation *as a whole*, you’d first need to work out a system for tracking all the workings of the entire European economy (or, at the very least, the entire economy of the individual member state you want to study). Because without complete understanding how an economy works both at macro- and micro- levels, it is impossible to judge how introducing variable x might affect it – because who’s to say it’s not actually variable b, h or z instead if you haven’t also studied their influence?.

So even more than with claims about the percentages of laws coming from the EU, *any* claims about the costs OR benefits of the EU must be nonsense. Because the only way we could actually tell is if a) we understood the economy of Europe inside-out (which we don’t), and b) we had a control sample of a Europe in which the EU never came into being to which we could compare our findings. We can put a figure on how much we pay in to the EU in the form of taxes, therefore, but we can’t sensibly do the same for the wider economic benefits or costs.

So although I feel that the EU has done more good than harm to both the British economy and the economy of Europe as a whole, there is no way that I can prove that. There’s also no way that anyone of a more eurosceptic bent can prove that the opposite is true. I could point to individual benefits, they could point to individual costs – we could add up more and more of each until we have a wealth of evidence and can start chucking around figures like 200 or 600 billion. But we’d still have only scratched the surface.

This is not a flaw in the way the EU works, it is just a consequence of the EU’s continent-spanning economy (which exists in a world that has become increasingly globalised, and so increasingly economically complex and volatile over the last fifty years) being an incredibly, vastly, inconceivably complicated system that no one can ever fully understand.

It does, however, mean that arguments about the benefits and costs of the EU are always going to come down to subjective feelings, not objective truths. Chuck onto that the fact that most EU legislation is by its nature quite vague (being in the most part a compromise between disparate interest groups from 27 member states, compromised upon yet further during discussions between the European Parliament, Council and Commission), and is often implemented in vastly different ways from member state to member state, depending on the whim of the local authorities, then proving that the EU is beneficial to those who feel that it is not is, therefore, just about an impossible task.

(Modified from a comment left on this post at The Devil’s Kitchen.)

June 9, 2009
by Nosemonkey
19 Comments

Nosemonkey on the telly (again)

For those that missed the Twitter heads-up, I was back on BBC World News Today last night discussing the European election results. The programme itself can be watched on the BBC’s iPlayer here for a short while – the segment I’m featured in starts around 17 mins and 29 secs in – and I’m working on getting an alternative version up for non-UK types, which I’ll add as an update to this post as and when I can.

Update: Below the fold – an alternate video source for international readers.
Continue Reading →

June 8, 2009
by Nosemonkey
2 Comments

UK EU election results: By the numbers

In terms of change in share of the vote (which dropped in turnout from 45% to 43%), taking the major parties:

Conservatives +1%
Labour -6.9%
UKIP +0.5%
Lib Dems -1.2%
Greens +2.4%
BNP +1.3%
SNP +0.7%
Plaid Cymru -0.1%
English Democrats +1.1%
Christian Party +1.6%

And in terms of absolute number of voters:

Conservatives -198,696
Labour -1,336,923
UKIP -152,542
Lib Dems -371,714
Green +190,210
BNP +135,398
SNP +89,509
Plaid Cymru -33,087
English Democrats +149,437
Christian Party +192,722

And so the big four (Conservatives, Labour, UKIP and the Liberal Democrats) between them lost 1,907,333 voters – 70% of which is accounted for by Labour’s huge plunge in popularity.

In terms of absolute voter numbers, therefore, the Tories lost 4.7%, Labour lost 36.2%, UKIP lost 5.8%, the Lib Dems lost 13.3%; meanwhile the Greens gained 18.3% and the BNP 16.7%.

Based on data from Wikipedia (2009 results, 2004 results)

To get an idea of the EU-wide picture, the best I’ve found so far is this interactive map from the Financial Times.

June 8, 2009
by Nosemonkey
11 Comments

The European elections and the anti-EU case

If so many people in Britain (80% was the usual figure quoted) wanted a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, how come only 43% bothered voting?

If the anti-EU cause is so overwhelmingly popular, how come only around half of those voted for an anti-EU party? (And that’s only if you include the Tories as anti-EU.)

Let’s number-crunch: 28.6% Tory, 17.4% UKIP, 6.5% BNP, Socialist Labour c.1%, English Democrats c.2%, Jury Team/No2EU/Libertas all <1% – so that’s c.55.5% of the vote for anti-Lisbon parties, and only around 27% of the vote for explicitly anti-EU parties (the Tories are more hard eurosceptics than overtly withdrawalist, after all).

I make that, with a 43% turnout, just 24% of the electorate supporting an anti-Lisbon party, and just 11.6% of the electorate supporting a party that advocates pulling out of the EU.

Update: Sorry – forgot that the Greens are anti-Lisbon. So that’s another 5.8%, so 61.3% total for anti-Lisbon parties, or 26.4% of the electorate. But still only 11.6% in favour of withdrawal.

June 7, 2009
by Nosemonkey
2 Comments

Twittering the European elections results

I’m on Twitter at the moment, blathering away more or less incoherently with a bunch of other Eurobloggers (@JonWorth, @JulienFrisch, @kosmopolit, @citizeneurope, @EuropeanCitizen and a bunch of others) as the results and rumours come in.

Follow along via the hashtags #eu09 and #ep09 – your best bet is probably to use Twitterfall to follow the various tweets live. It’s fairly simple to use, it must be said – just add a bunch of searches into the “Custom” field in the left-hand column (I’m using #ep09, #eu09, EU, Europe and elections), and get real-time commentary from all over the shop. Some of it’s rubbish, naturally – this is the internet – but some is surprisingly good.

Current trend – at 8:45pm UK time, so 15 minutes from the results – seems to be a surge in support for the right (both centre right and far right), with mostly falling turnouts yet again, though ranging member state to member state from c.20% to c.80%. But with national issues likely to dominate everywhere, working out Europe-wide reasons for any apparent trends is something to be treated with great caution.

Below the fold – my Twitter contributions from the night (in chronological order, starting c.8:45pm UK time, ending c.2:30am UK time – and for Twitter newcomers, “RT” indicates where I’m quoting someone else):
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