Nosemonkey's EUtopia

In search of a European identity

November 28, 2008
by Nosemonkey
1 Comment

The EU after the credit crisis

Journalists seem to be contacting me almost daily at the moment. Below the fold are my full answers to the following questions from the UK Correspondent of Brazil’s biggest newspaper O Global about the EU’s response to the current financial woes. All largely off the top of my head…

1) Has the financial crisis exposed the EU’s institucional limitations in your opinion?
2) How tempting it will be for eurosceptics to pounce on the keep the pound motto in terms of the so-called sovereignity?
3) In a year where the Lisbon treaty collapsed, is there a need for a lot of soul searching within the EU?
4) What can be done in regards of more integration within states?

If any of my fellow Eurobloggers and/or readers fancy having a bash at answering some or all of these, I’d be intrigued to see the results. The short version of my approach?

This recession is going to be the major test of the idea of the Euro – if it fails that test, it won’t just be the UK that gets cold feet.

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November 26, 2008
by Nosemonkey
7 Comments

“Under the illusion that the borders are disappearing, they are actually rapidly growing”

Interesting report over at Kosmopolito on a recent lecture by frequently controversial Slovenian lefty intellectual Slavoj Zizek. For followers of the post-Marxian philosopher, there’s probably not much new – but some of his ideas are well worth pondering at greater length, not least for those of us interested in the future of Europe. As Kosmopolito’s Tanchi notes Zizek as commenting,

“Under the illusion that the borders are disappearing, they are actually rapidly growing.”

These borders need not be the traditional lines on maps – they can be cultural as much as any kind of arbitrary physical boundary. Indeed, Zizek has much pondered the concept of multiculturalism, now gradually falling out of favour, as in this interview from back in August. Anti-multicultural right-wingers may be surprised at just how much they find themselves agreeing with this self-professed communist:

I think here we had enough of this multicultural ideology, which for me at least is often an inverted racism – namely for example when people come here – typically multiculturalists would say: “Oh I want to understand how you are different.” No… We need today codes of discretion, not more understanding. I think we should totally object to this liberal blackmail; we should understand each other – no the world is too complex we can not – I hate people, I don’t want to understand people. I want to have a certain code where I don’t understand your way of life and you don’t understand mine but we still can coexist.

Yet it’s not just a racial or national lack of understanding or rivalry that can be the problem – it can also be political. When the people become alienated from the political class, resentment can arise just as much (if not more so) than when fear or mistrust of “the other” leads to rising ethnic/cultural tensions. And it all stems from a lack of understanding on both sides – often coupled with a patronising tone from one or the other. The same tone that tells us that British National Party supporters join through resentment at lack of opportunity and personal failure is used to explain away the “No” votes to the European Constitution in France and the Netherlands (and subsequently the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland). As Zizek noted three years ago, after the French referendum,

The elite proposed to the people a choice that was effectively no choice at all. People were called to ratify the inevitable. Both the media and the political elite presented the choice as one between knowledge and ignorance, between expertise and ideology…

Patronise the people – even if they deserve it – and they will turn on you. Witness the recent kerfuffle in the UK on reality TV show Strictly Come Dancing, where the most useless contestant was repeatedly kept on by the public vote seemingly just to spite the expert judges.

Perhaps thanks to the weapons of mass destruction that never were, though the trend started long before that (Watergate, perhaps?) the world has become a more cynical, distrustful place – and politicians are among the least trusted of the lot. If a politician tells us that something is the case, we the people tend to believe the precise opposite. If a politician – sitting comfortably in their plush houses on their vast, taxpayer-funded salaries – tells us that they understand our concerns, our first reaction is to snort in derision.

And so the borders go up between the political elites and the people. Turnouts at elections drop year after year. More votes are cast for the winner of Big Brother than in general elections. Party membership tails off as even the most politically engaged lose faith and interest. Resentment grows along with populism, as politicians desperately try to re-engage with the public to the extent that Cabinet ministers feel the need to comment on The X Factor in parliament, or simply follow whatever mindless witch-hunt the tabloid press are up to this week.

If we’re alienated from our national politicians, what hope for those EU level politicians, about whom we know nothing?

And then, of course, there’s the psychological borders rising between the people themselves as opinions and resentments become entrenched and no amount of debate can change minds. Non-geographical borders along the purple America model, where resentment grows, and two ideologically wildly different nations live – literally – side by side in the same geographical territory.

Ignore the obvious race and religion based forms of multiculturalism – what happens when mutually-exclusive political cultures begin to arise within a democratic society?

But this post is already overlong and rambling, so perhaps that’s one for another day…

November 22, 2008
by Nosemonkey
2 Comments

A bit of weekend reading

A few bits and bobs that have caught my eye over the last week or so:

Robert Amsterdam on Donald Rumsfeld’s legacy to Europe:

he was the original master artist of disaggregation – a man who saw and skillfully exploited the very fissures of the contemporary European Union which today threaten its purpose and continued existence as an alliance of nations… And this week, the Rumsfeldian conception of “old and new Europe” is making a comeback in the debate over how to handle Moscow’s threat to put missiles in Kaliningrad”

It’s not just over Russian missiles – old vs. new Europe seems to be an emerging theme in the ongoing confusion over how to tackle the growing economic storm, according to Eurozine:

Even if a common set of regulations and measures were to be reached, differences would be manifest between member states, and above all between West and East: unemployment, inflation, budgetary deficits would affect each country differently. The problem is that a recession would have more severe consequences in the fragile and unpredictable eastern European countries, including at the political level.

Also on the economy, Obsolete is (as ever) really rather good on the bizarre collapse of the Tory poll lead during the current crisis:

The man who promised an end to Tory boom and bust has succeeded in abolishing boom, while the prospects for the bust look increasingly ominous. The economy which he boasted was among the best placed to deal with the global downturn is in actual fact one of the worst placed to deal with it, according to the IMF and the European Union. Unrelenting, the Labour party believes that the solution is to borrow more to fund the tax cuts to stimulate the economy. As Larry Elliot has pointed out, this is a direct contradiction of what Gordon Brown formerly believed. At the weekend the same man attended a conference which he claimed would back up his solution to the downturn; it did nothing of the sort, and predictably only agreed to more or less meet again. Gordon Brown, by rights, ought to be finished.

Elsewhere, Jon Worth asks do you think Barroso is rubbish? With more in a similar vein from Jean Quatremer:

Si, jusqu’à présent, les voix critiques étaient rares, elles commencent à se faire entendre, ce qui montre que la campagne pour le renouvellement de la Commission a bel et bien commencé.

Complementing Quatremer’s overview, the Financial Times’s (new look) Brussels Blog asks

why are political parties of the left in such poor shape across much of Europe? It’s the worst financial crisis since the early 1930s, the worst economic recession since the early 1990s, if not the 1970s – and where is the left?

And finally, a very promising signal from the European Parliament:

MEPs today overwhelmingly backed calls to strengthen the EU’s anti-fraud unit OLAF to enable it to tackle fraud more effectively…

[report author Ingeborg Grässle MEP] said that the Parliament’s zeal to strengthen OLAF and how it worked was not shared by the member states. “The Council [of Ministers] doesn’t want to strengthen OLAF,” she said… She said the Council did not want awkward discussions about the fight against fraud.

Once again, one of the EU’s biggest problems and PR disasters can be blamed nice and neatly on the reluctance of the Council of Ministers – on the governments of the member states – to press ahead with reforms to increase both efficiency and transparency.

November 21, 2008
by Nosemonkey
4 Comments

A distinct lack of transparency

Following the progress made on Common Agricultural Policy reform the other day (and it was progress, even if not as much as many would have liked), there remains much confusion. As CAP Health Check asks, who voted for what?

Common Agricultural Policy budgetThe same (invaluable) blog has all kinds of details on the fall-out from the deal – a deal in which, once again, France appears to have acted the petulant child and, from pure selfishness, scuppered reforms that the EU sorely needs. Because it wouldn’t be fair for France to get any less than 20% of the single largest chunk of the EU budget, would it?

And so, once again, a much-needed serious overhaul of one of the fundamental aspects of the modern EU is put off for a few more years. Instead we get yet another compromise that pleases no one. Just as with the last attempt to reform the CAP back in 2003. Just as with the Constitution. Just as with the Treaty of Nice.

Am I a cynic to think that the reason the big decisions keep being put off by a few years every time (the next attempt to reform the CAP will come in 2013) is that our dear politicians are aware of their short terms of office, and are hoping that come the next round of negotiations it’ll be somebody else’s problem?

November 21, 2008
by Nosemonkey
1 Comment

EU initiative in “overwhelmingly popular” shocker!

Europeana holding pageThat’d be Europeana, the EU’s digital cultural history portal, whose purpose is “bringing you digitised books, films, paintings, newspapers, sounds and archives from Europe’s greatest collections” (with more info on the development site).

The project went live yesterday – and, as you’ll already know if you’ve clicked the first of those links, attracted so much interest that it immediately broke under the strain of visitors (the holding page on the site currently claiming “10 million visitors an hour”, which by my reckoning would either make it the most popular website launch in history, or be somewhat of an exaggeration…)

I’ve long been of the opinion that the EU’s best bet for getting people on board is to give them things they can actually appreciate – be it movies and film festivals via the little-known MEDIA Plus programme, music festivals or sporting events. To put it cynically, follow the old Roman tradition of giving the people circuses and spectacle to get their support. This should, in theory, be a relatively cost-effective alternative – and as such should be applauded (probably – it’s hard to tell as the site’s down…). The fact that it has apparently been so popular on its first day is a heartening sign – not least because projects with a focus on the arts rarely appear to attract that much attention these days. (But perhaps it’s because of all the porn?)

(The anti-EU alternate version of this post, by the way, is headed “EU so rubbish it can’t even launch a website” and goes on to rant about Brussels bureaucrats wasting our taxes on projects that are a) designed to culturally brainwash us all, and b) wouldn’t be able to survive commercially. There’s a surprisingly large cross-over between anti-EU types and those who argue that there should be no public funding for the arts, you’ll find. Which in my books means that there’s a surprisingly large cross-over between anti-EU types and philistines…)

November 14, 2008
by Nosemonkey
22 Comments

The state of EU debate

A subject worth another look every year or so – especially with EU elections looming in 2009 – is what sort of discussion (if any) the European Union is inspiring among its citizens. After all, I remain top Google result for “EU debate” (and second only to the EU’s own Debate Europe forum without the inverted commas), and the nature of political discourse surrounding the EU was one of the reasons I first started blogging about the whole thing. (Largely to slag off some of the nuttier anti-EU types, at first, but I’ve expanded a bit since then…)

I last had a look at EU debate nine months ago, which provides a fairly handy overview of how nothing much has changed during the time I’ve been blogging (Don’t believe me? Here’s a post on the subject from four years ago) – and that followed an intensive series of posts on the possibilities for building a genuine European demos that I did for openDemocracy (that’s the thing that I got shortlisted for that Reuters award for).

As such, for me to do another post on the subject is largely redundant. Thankfully, however, the newly revamped Kosmopolito (at an all new address and with an extra vowel) has had a stab, and brings a different, yet complimentary, take to the whole thing. One point in particular that stands out, however:

It is still cumbersome for non-experts to monitor the EU decision making process. Especially the internet and new online tools have the potential to make it easier to monitor and control EU decision making processes. Even though the europa.eu portal contains most of the information, it needs a serious relaunch. A new EU portal needs to be transparent, with a focus on policy processes that makes it easy to follow documents, combined with some interactive elements.

This cannot be stressed enough. I’m actively interested in the EU. I’ve been blogging about it for five years. I know my way around most of the sources of EU information available online, and I know (roughly) where to start looking to delve deeper into particular subjects. Yet even I still find it difficult to find what I’m looking for sometimes. (Where is an EU equivalent of TheyWorkForYou or The Public Whip? The only thing similar is Brussel Stemt, a Dutch-language site tracking the votes of Dutch MEPs – as far as I’m aware there’s nothing else out there.) The Europa portal has a near impossible task in trying to provide so much information in so many different languages, certainly, but it remains one of the most confusing, unintuitive sites on the web.

One of the major reasons why Euromyths spread so quickly – and also why the Lisbon Treaty has sparked so much opposition – is that the people find it impossible to find out information about the EU for themselves. (As noted the other day, to argue against the classic straight bananas Euromyth necessitates hunting down an obscure EU regulation and then trawling through and attempting to understand seven pages of legal jargon. Far easier just to believe what your newspaper tells you.)

If information is hard to come by or hard to understand, the power of the press and other self-professed experts to influence public opinion is massively increased. When the experts and the press are themselves ill-informed (as most journalists writing about the EU and many national politicians commenting on it sadly are) or biased (as is certainly often the case in the UK), the public is – intentionally or otherwise – going to be misled and misinformed. A misled and misinformed public in turn leads to misinformed debate, and that to an ineffective democracy. (Indeed, it’s arguable that part of the reason the public are so uninterested in the EU is that they’ve been consistently misinformed about just how important it is to their daily lives – if only they knew, claim some eurosceptics, they’d be up in arms.)

I’m afraid I can’t see this situation changing any time soon. EU debates outside the Brussels beltway remain largely non-existent, dominated by lack of solid factual knowledge and understanding (by both sides) and a lack of interest from anyone bar obsessives (as Jon Worth noted is still the case as recently as June, and as I’ve been saying for years). Hell, sometimes even the obsessives aren’t that interested.

Continue Reading →

November 12, 2008
by Nosemonkey
16 Comments

Bananas, euromyths and ridiculous regulations

BananasAnd so yet more silly EU regulations bite the dust, as a bunch of rules on the physical appearance of fruit and vegetables are set to go the way of the Dodo. The most famous of these, of course, being the infamous “straight banana” euromyth that has been doing the rounds of the UK tabloids for years – “Brussels bureaucrats ban bananas!” and suchlike.

With today’s announcement of the scrapping of lots of similar regulations, of course, some anti-EU types are feeling entirely justified in claiming that anyone who said the straight bananas story was a myth was a liar.

But the bananas one WAS a myth (at least, the original one about straight bananas being banned). Regulation (EC) 2257/94 – a great read, by the way – stated that they must be “free from malformation or abnormal curvature of the fingers”, but failed to specify what this meant, and said nothing about straightness. It also didn’t actually ban anything. There was a fun bit about “the grade, i.e. the measurement, in millimetres, of the thickness of a transverse section of the fruit between the lateral faces and the middle, perpendicularly to the longitudinal axis” though…

Bendy cucumbers, however? They were a bit less keen on those – under regulation (EEC) No 1677/88 they are only allowed a bend of 10mm for every 10cm of length. So had the tabloids gone mental with BRUSSELS BANS CURVY CUCUMBERS! headlines, it would have been rather harder for EU apologists to make a comeback.

Yes, the level of detail in these regulations is silly and unnecessary – of that there can be no doubt. That’s precisely why they’re scrapping them.

Yet still we get the outrage over regulations that will soon no longer exist. How dare the EU see the error of its ways and listen to reason!

It’s just like it was a couple of years ago when another bit of deregulation was announced – despite the EU doing what the anti-EU types want, and scrapping some of its interfering rules, it gets attacked all over again. The EU just can’t win with some people…

Nonetheless – and though I entirely support scrapping silly regulations (who doesn’t?) – standardisation of product qualities is arguably as necessary to a well-functioning market as standardised weights and measures. Otherwise how can consumers in country X be sure that they are getting the same quality and value as those in country Y?

With most EU agricultural produce consumed within the EU itself, it also makes sense to try to harmonise standards EU-wide so that farmers don’t have to mess about trying to ensure that their produce meets 27 different quality standards.

Because, lest we forget, all EU member states had their own food regulations before the “Eurocrats” got involved. The EU’s ones may be too detailed and rather silly, but it’s surely better than trying to cope with umpteen different standards for umpteen different countries?

Or has the UK suddenly become self-sufficient in bananas and oranges, rendering external trade unnecessary?

November 12, 2008
by Nosemonkey
7 Comments

Ahhh… Robert Kilroy-Silk…

Robert Kilroy-SilkRemember him? Silver-haired former daytime TV presenter (forced to quit over racist comments) turned ranting political fanatic who was so loopy even UKIP didn’t want him – so bonkers, in fact, that even the anti-EU party he founded himself, Veritas, soon decided that it didn’t want him either.

Believe it or not, he’s still an MEP. And despite being an elected official with a duty to serve his constituents, he’s also being shipped off to Australia to take part in mindless (and stupidly-punctuated) TV programme I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!.

His constituents shouldn’t worry too much about losing his selfless public service in Brussels and Strasbourg, however. He’s hardly known for being a hard-working politician – and still appears to have made no speeches in the parliament since October 2005… (Surely even he’s not that bad?) Though, to be fair, he has been asking an interminable series of written questions, mostly on subjects that have nothing whatsoever to do with the East Midlands, and many of them repetitive rewordings of themselves.

And hell, it’s not like he’s going to be out in the jungle getting tortured for our pleasure for long – the bookies already have him pegged as the most unpopular contestant before it’s even started, so he’s likely to be the very first “celebrity” to be voted off the show.

If only it were that easy to get rid of our politicians, eh?

November 11, 2008
by Nosemonkey
Comments Off on Just upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 Beta 2

Just upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 Beta 2

If you spot anything weird, let me know – I’ve been long overdue an update on this place, as I was running it on Wordpress 1.3 up to now (Wordpress 2 used to break some of the fancier bits of this theme). As it’s been so long, I’ve almost certainly broken something…

November 5, 2008
by Nosemonkey
5 Comments

On not getting too excited

I was up all night, drinking vast quantities of beer and vodka, finally getting to bed around 11am UK time. It was certainly worth it – even though it was all over by 4:30 (CNN called it for Obama at 4am, with McCain’s concession speech starting just 20 minutes later) and even though I now have the kind of hangover I haven’t experienced since my student days after grabbing about 4 hours sleep.

Obama’s victory speech was pretty much note perfect (while McCain’s concession speech was of the kind that reminded me why I always used to like the guy) – referencing past epoch-making speeches from everyone from Martin Luther King through Kennedy, Lincoln and Disraeli. It was so good I had to listen to it again, and again, and again to try and pick holes in it, without a great deal of success. He’s a hugely impressive public speaker of the kind I thought we might never see again. An almost 19th century feel to his seemingly effortless delivery.

But, though a little bit of excitement and hyperbole is more than permissible on such an undeniably historic day, us non-Americans – perhaps especially us Europeans – shouldn’t get too excited by President Obama.

He’s got a massive challenge ahead of him – and though I hate the exaggeration over the current credit crisis as much as the next man (exaggeration that Obama himself succumbed to in his speech, referencing the worst financial crisis in a century, when it’s simply not) it’s not over-the-top to say that Obama faces the most serious domestic challenge since FDR in 1932.

If Obama is to do his best for his country – and for the world – he must fix America’s domestic woes before he starts to look overseas. He needs to be sensible and not try to do too much, caught up in all this talk of history and destiny, when every African-American from Spike Lee to Condoleezza Rice has been cropping up on the telly with tears in their eyes. And us non-Americans need to be patient and always remember that he’s THEIR president, elected to serve HIS country first, not ours. Relations with the US will almost certainly improve – they would have done no matter who was elected this time around – but though the image of America has shifted dramatically overnight, we cannot expect a change in American foreign policy anywhere near as swift.

November 3, 2008
by Nosemonkey
Comments Off on Pre-US election links and the like worth a look

Pre-US election links and the like worth a look

– As that all-important US election looms ever closer, EU foreign ministers are meeting today to discuss how to rebuild those battered ties between Europe and America that conventional wisdom sees as having been so badly damaged during the Bush years. Across Europe – hell, across the world – everyone is waiting for Wednesday’s result. But pretty much every prediction is just speculation.

– Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, is Barack Obama (a half-Kenyan, half-American born in Hawaii and raised in Indonesia) just too European? Well, according to (some) Americans, perhaps.

– For Europeans there are a number of signs that Obama may not be quite as sympathetic to this continent as his famous trip here a few months ago might suggest. These are also hardly new concerns – and despite some promising signs that Obama realises the EU’s potential importance, there remains much we don’t know. So why is Barack Obama so popular in Europe?

– Shifting off to random bits and bobs, via Pubic Affairs 2.0, a long-overdue and most welcome addition to the European Parliament website: a handy range of RSS feeds. (Ignore the podcasts for now, though – they don’t seem to be overly regular…)

– The old straight bananas row seems to be back:

A leading supermarket has been forced to ditch a healthy eating campaign at the eleventh hour after discovering its staff could be individually prosecuted under EU regulations.

This, methinks, is worth looking into in more detail, especially as the Commission is set to rethink various fruit and veg regulations later this month.

– Will the credit crisis see the Eurozone expand, rather than contract? It may look attractive at the moment – but is the single currency a sensible option?

October 29, 2008
by Nosemonkey
14 Comments

Thatcher, Bruges and future Tory EU policy

Still catching up, but it would be churlish not to mention the 20th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s celebrated (in some circles) Bruges speech, which passed the other day with the usual guff from withdrawalists. The BBC’s Nick Robinson has a fun piece on the anniversary celebrations and the Tories’ Europe problem which is well worth reading, considering the fact that they’re likely to be in power at some point within the next couple of years.

David CameronBecause the Tories under David Cameron still have no EU policy. I’ve been hunting for one for a while now (March 2008, July 2006), and they still seem no closer to working out what they even think of the thing. (It’s not just the Tories, of course – Labour are just as bad…)

The thing is, Thatcher’s near-infamous Bruges speech remains a great starting point for the Tories to set out their position on Britain’s involvement with the rest of Europe. An odd thing for someone who labels himself loosely pro-EU to say? Not really…

The speech is well worth reading in full – because it’s now become this near-mythical anti-EU manifesto for British withdrawalists (notably anti-EU “think tank” the Bruges Group, named after the speech – a think tank not afraid to associate itself with some of the more hysterical anti-EU crowd).

With such a massive reputation to fight through, it’s very easy to make assumptions about what Thatcher actually said. Listen to the anti-EU lot and you’d think that the speech was a blistering attack on the very idea of a common European future, delivered in the kind of foaming-at-the-mouth style that anyone who’s been knocking around EU-related internet forums has come to associate with British euroscepticism. (Seriously, British anti-EU types – you’re embarrassing me here… I want to feel proud of being British, and you’re making us all look like arseholes – same as those drunken tits on the Costa del Sol. Whatever happened to the old British virtues of decency, restraint and politeness?)

Yet it actually contains much that is positive towards a European Union, and fully supports continued British engagement at the heart of the process. It’s just that it doesn’t support the direction the current EU has been heading for the last 30-odd years towards greater centralisation and uniformity. Pretty much all of Thatcher’s suggestions back then are still being made to this day – and not just by eurosceptics.

Sadly, though, Thatcher’s Bruges speech is more referred to than read – and thanks to its current associations with flag-waving anti-EU nutters it is mostly ignored. Yet its overall vision for Europe remains a sound alternative to the current model, while in the details are identified many of the key problems with the current set-up, none of which have really changed in two decades. It’s got its problems, certainly – I don’t advocate everything that Maggie said by any means – but as a starting point for creating an alternative vision for the European Union, it remains both simple (if occasionally overly simplistic) and compelling. Check out the Wordle-generated word cloud of the speech (with only Europe, Community, European, Britain, British and removed – the five most commonly-used words, and in that order) – there may be a slight tilt towards an economic vision of European co-operation, but she covers a lot of ground:

Thatcher's Bruges speech word cloud

Most satisfying, though, is that it provides a healthy supply of quotes defending and advocating Britain’s close involvement with the rest of Europe (even to the point of advocating greater use of a European single currency) which can be thrown at any British eurosceptics that happen by…

“We British are as much heirs to the legacy of European culture as any other nation. Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history…

Too often, the history of Europe is described as a series of interminable wars and quarrels. Yet from our perspective today surely what strikes us most is our common experience… It is the record of nearly two thousand years of British involvement in Europe, cooperation with Europe and contribution to Europe, contribution which today is as valid and as strong as ever…

Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.”

What are the chances of David Cameron ever making a speech containing that kind of rhetoric? The old Tory squabbles over the EU that dominated the 1990s may well have subsided, but the party leadership are still worried that they’re bubbling away under the surface. The recent campaign for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty showed how powerful anti-EU populism can be. Though the campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, it did demonstrate one thing – euroscepticism remains a danger to the Conservative party. Perhaps its biggest danger.

These people will be in charge of the EU’s second largest economy – and yet even they don’t know what they are going to do once they come to power.

(On a related note, Richard Corbett may be a decidedly pro-EU Labour MEP writing in the left-wing Guardian, so just about as biased as they come on this topic, but his recent look at current Tory attitudes towards the EU is essential reading.)