Nosemonkey's EUtopia

Easyjetsetter has some interesting observations on Angela Merkel and the EU which are well worth a look.

1) If you have to spend more money (say, �1,000-�3,000 a year) you need to earn more money to pay for it.
2) If you have more demands on your time you are able to concentrate less intensively on specific tasks, potentially leading to a fall in performance.

Well there’s a surprise…

Ooooh! A really rather good anti-Kilroy rant over at The Sharpener. I do enjoy slagging off Kilroy. Unchallenging, perhaps, thanks to the sheer vastness of his manifold flaws – but great entertainment nonetheless.

Note to the Metropolitan Police: Randomly increasing police presence on the streets at rush hour is most decidedly NOT reassuring. Coming in to work and seeing upwards of fifty policemen ambling around in day-glo yellow jackets down the length of the Kings Road merely makes everyone in the area rather freaked out, as they assume you have some intelligence of an imminent terrorist attack on Chelsea. Or something. Please tell them to bugger off and arrest some thug teenagers for sniffing glue. Or something. Cheers.

5,200 extensions to pub/bar licenses approved in London, taking effect from midnight tonight. Of this, I generally approve – the 11pm closing being a prime example about how silly legislation can end up staying on the statute books far longer than necessary (it was only put in place to help the war effort 90 years ago, after all), and thus why governments – especially the current government – shouldn’t be hasty to instigate new laws. But are the emergency services going to get the additional support and funding they will need to cope with the concurrent, inevitable rise in drunk people collapsing and/or beating each other up? Yeah… Right…

Oh yes, forgot – you really ought to watch this, the latest production from our Tim. Deserves to go viral and stuff just by dint of being quality – and if people actually pay attention, could do some good to boot.

Prime Minister’s Questions today:

“The DUP’s David Simpson kicks off by drawing an immediate parallel with the tragedy in Bradford: would the prime minister grant an amnesty to her killers, as the Northern Ireland (offences) bill will do for killers on the run for offences before 1998?

“Mr Blair says he is meeting the widows of RUC officers this afternoon, at the request of the unionist parties, but says the bill is something ‘that has to be dealt with’ in the context of the peace process.”

In other words, known (if unconvicted) terrorists are being let off the hook and allowed to get away without blame/court cases for fear of stirring up more anger and violence.

So how can this be reconciled with this little exchange from the end of the session?:

“Labour’s Dan Norris complains that a Lib Dem council will be adopting a ‘no-blame’ approach to bullies during national no bullying week. ‘I’m shocked,’ replies Mr Blair.”

Terrorists should be allowed to get away with it (presumably as long as they aren’t brown Islamic terrorists); bullies shouldn’t. Nice to see they’ve got their priorities right…

From today’s EU Politix morning briefing:

“[Justice and Security Commissioner Franco] Frattini proposes a decision for the council of EU governments on the exchange of data held on Europe�s Visa Information System.

“National police forces, Europol and other ‘authorities of member states responsible for internal security� will be able to access the data collected by visa issuing agencies across Europe.

“Alongside this proposal, Frattini sets out some ideas to boost the effectiveness, exchange and �interoperability� of various EU crime related databases.

“Some of his ideas � for EU-wide access to identity registries or DNA databases � will alarm some MEPs, civil liberties and privacy campaigners.”

“Alarm”? Too bloody right.

The really odd thing is that these proposals (and that is all they are at this stage – they haven’t even been adopted by the Commission yet) come just a couple of days after the EU advocate-general declaring transfer of airline passenger information between the EU and US to be illegal:

“Philippe L�ger, the Advocate-General of the European Court of Justice, the EU�s supreme court, called for the annulment of an agreement requiring EU airlines to give US authorities access to a wide range of confidential data on passengers before they travel.”

Which earns M. L�ger a place in my little book of heroes.

Sadly, however, it is L�ger’s opinion which is getting all the press – not the Commission meeting today at which even more invasive EU-wide data transferrals are going to be proposed.

The big fear is not necessarily that such data transferral would be misused (it’s certainly not as obviously invasive of privacy as the earlier data retention proposals, and is arguably essential in some form if trans-EU counter-terrorism operations and policing are ever going to work), but – once again – what it could be used as an excuse for.

Such a decision by the EU can only help Blair’s case for UK ID cards and the UK central database. After all, if all 25 EU member states are swapping information with each other all the time, there will soon emerge a need for some kind of standardisation of the information held on member states’ citizens. Standardisation – in the UK’s case at least – will mean the state having to hold more data about its citizens to get up to the level of those EU members which already have ID cards and the like.

It might be time to think about contacting your local MEPs (click on your country, then region – pretty much every MEP will have emails, phone numbers, addresses and faxes listed).

Update: Sorry, forgot to mention. Yes, yes this was all an initiative of Blair’s EU presidency – as covered by me before, they’re trying to use the EU to bypass the British parliament on this one – something we might see more of now Tony’s suffered his first Commons defeat…

A quick HTML/CSS/Blogger question: I recently fiddled with this site’s template – shifting the archives around a bit, altering the title text etc. As far as I understood it, if I alter the template, that should affect every page on the site – including archived pages.

So why, when I click on archive pages, do they still appear with the pre-fiddled-with layout? Shouldn’t that be impossible, if the template no longer contains the information that is being displayed on those archived pages? It shouldn’t be a cache issue, as some of the pages I’ve just checked this on I’ve never previously looked at on this computer. Very confusing…

I fully accept that I will never make a web designer…

Tony Blair will end up a “serious loser” if he doesn’t sort out the EU budget according to his old buddy Peter Mandelson, who it would appear is a reader of this blog…

To be fair to Mandelson (which is something that goes against my better instincts) he does genuinely appear to be striving for everyone’s best interests here. Because, as French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy puts it,

“Either [the UK presidency] presents a balanced proposal in the coming days with a just distribution of the costs of EU enlargement or it condemns us all to failure”

– and Gordon Brown, albeit for different reasons, agrees:

“Failing to break the deadlock will mean a huge price � for reform of Europe, for prices, for consumers, for our competitiveness, and for the world�s poor”

They’re both right. No agreement will mean failure. It will mean an all-round fuck-up.

But we’re still not going to get an agreement, because neither Britain nor France – despite what their leading politicians may say – is going to back down. It’s hard not to agree with Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht’s assessment of this whole thing,

“We are sitting here wasting our time.”

Gordon Brown may be spot on when he says that

“It is simply wrong to say that tariffs are essential to advanced industrial societies and wrong to say that big cuts in farming tariffs would not help a solution to poverty”

but sadly being right means nothing when it comes to this sort of thing. Because, as pointed out yesterday (for the umpteenth time – see also here, here and here for starters) there’s no way in hell France will back down on this one.

Blair has offered to give up the rebate, the US has offered to cut their farm subsidies to make the loss of CAP cash less hard. But French parochialism has already blocked both of these really quite incredibly generous offers.

So, once again, Blair will be a loser – and his EU presidency (as predicted right at the start) will be a failure. Which would normally be something to celebrate – unfortunately, however, the longer the CAP remains in its current state, the more poverty-stricken and screwed will be the third world farmers who are always going to be the biggest losers as long as France continues to act in its national interest rather than in the interest of the world.

Nation states, you see? It always comes down to nation states. Source of all the world’s ills.

Hero of the day – good work!

Ha ha ha! More EU budget negotiation nonsense from the government:

“”We are in no way underestimating the difficulties of doing a deal, but equally nobody should underestimate our determination to try to see if a deal is possible”

Translated, that roughly means that they’ve given up on sorting the budget entirely.

It seems that for once Blair was entirely right when he said that the EU was facing “not a crisis of political institutions, [but] a crisis of political leadership” back in June. After all, that quote comes from a speech made just a week before he took over the EU presidency. Based on his “achievements” over the last five months, if this hasn’t been a crisis of political leadership, nothing has.

Bloody hell – I told you European Tribune keeps getting better. This “week in preview” idea’s not only got legs, but has also been insanely well put together. Grrr. Envious now – wish I’d thought of it. (Then again, looks bloody time-consuming – maybe I’m better off carrying on as I am…)