Udate: Time for David Cameron to change

It is good to see that the UK is at least going to take part in “technical discussions” over the proposed EU fiscal pact (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-16209414).

Time for David Cameron to change

Intoxicated by the toxic praise of the Eurosceptics of both the right and the left, prime minister David Cameron cannot stop trying to undermine the rest of the European Unions’ attempts to solve the Eurozone crisis. There are at least three reasons of self-interest why the prime minister should stop now and start rebuilding bridges.

First, if the Eurozone debt problem is not solved soon, the UK’s economy will be fatally damaged. British banks hold a large proportion of Eurozone countries’ debt. Any default would cause a banking crisis greater than the last one and demand much greater public spending cuts than this country could sustain.

Second, just as the Eurozone needs the UK’s support to solve its crisis, the UK needs the support of the rest of the EU in solving ours. It is unhelpful for Christian Noyer, the chairman of the French central bank, to have responded to the prime minister’s shenanigans by calling on rating agencies to downgrade British debt before France’s and to set out the ways he sees the UK’s economy being the weaker (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16207748). This, on the day when the UK’s Debt Management Office reported the latest sale of UK bonds achieved the lowest level of cover for over six months (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/15/eurozone-crisis-live#block-17). What if this sale prompts the ratings agencies to listen to M Noyer?

Third, last year the prime minister negotiated and signed two new defence agreements with president Sarkozy of France. These cover sharing aircraft carriers and regiments and pooling other resources. The agreements enabled each country to make deep defence cuts and provided cover for the foolish scrapping of HMS Ark Royal and the entire fleet of Harrier jump-jets. The agreements were hailed as major achievements for the prime minister and the president. If Mr Cameron does not change, he may find these agreements are inoperable.

Veto! 24+ hours on

The only honourable course for prime miniser David Cameron, chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne and foreign secretary William Hague is resignation: resignation by morning. Let people who do not hate this country and Europe take their place to try to repair the damage they have done as Eurosceptics. It will be a slow and humiliating road, but it must be taken by people of goodwill to replace these three narrow minded bigots.

Since they seem to hate this country so much, messers Cameron, Osborne, Hague and all the Eurosceptics should go and live somewhere else – Zimbabwe, perhaps.

It is good to read that deputy prime minister Nick Clegg is now turning on the prime minister over his “veto”: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/dec/10/nick-clegg-david-cameron-europe-veto. It would have been better if he had done this before the event, but it is better late than never.

Veto!

Prime minister David Cameron’s veto at the EU summit in Brussels leaves the UK isolated in a way that has no precedent. His “veto” is a refusal not to take part in discussions which are going to go ahead without the UK. He was not there to sign – signing treaties (as I’ve said before) is above his pay grade – but to begin negotiations to lead to a treaty. So he has not vetoed anything. He has made the UK unimportant in solving the Eurozone crisis and any wider problems in the EU. He has refused to discuss matters. That is no way to defend or promote national interests.  He should have been shaping the proposals with other EU leaders before the summit, not keeping away. David Cameron’s experience has not taught him this.

But, now he is the darling of the Eurosceptic right – the football hooligans of politics, where his heart lies. For their praise he has done incalculable damage to this country and its interests.

What happens if the UK needs the rest of the EU to help with the UK’s economic problems, to agree to state aid, to support the UK over the Falklands or with some other issue at the United Nations, or to back the UK in many other ways as yet unforeseen? How will businesses in the UK deal with EU rules that David Cameron has decided not to discuss but that will bind everyone trading with the EU, member state or not?

What was this national interest he wanted to defend? It was the banks. The banks who created the crisis are the organisations David Cameron has sold the UK to defend. He wanted to save them from a financial tranasactions tax – the Tobin or Robin Hood tax – but has said previously that his government’s bank levy has the same effect and brings in more. So, what was the point?  He wanted to secure the position of the City of London, but by walking out, he has ensured that the City cannot be the financial centre for the Eurozone or the whole EU (with or without the UK), which are bigger and more lucrative markets than the UK alone. He said he alone was protecting the Single Market – against the rest of the Single Market. If he was leading a bloc of, say, a third or half the member states and there was an argument to be won, his position would have some sense. But he is not.  He is alone and his actions endanger the UK through his Eurosceptic hubris.

Mostly disappointing of all is deputy prime minister Nick Clegg’s endorsement of David Cameron’s “veto”, betraying the Liberal Democrats’ historic commitment to the EU with the UK at its heart.

These are dangerous times for the EU and the UK. We need statesmen, yet in the UK we have parochial politicians in thrall to the Eurosceptics. God help us all.

3rd Update: The United Kingdom and the Eurozone crisis

As he heads to the EU summit in Brussels, will the UK prime minister, David Cameron, be thinking about the London Conference nearly 80 years ago, also called to resolve an international financial crisis and avoid a further recession? That conference was wrecked by the US pursuing narrow national self interest. The result was economic depression in America, Europe, the British Empire and the rest of the world. It stoked up nationalism and contributed to the causes of the Second World War. The American President was expected to be the deal maker but instead was the deal breaker, to the despair of many of his own people.

The Brussels conference carries the same hopes – and the same risks.

David Cameron is going determined to be the wrecker, but will he instead do the right thing for the UK, the rest of the EU and the world and put narrow Eurosceptic nationalist self interest aside and be the deal maker? Can he be a statesman? For all our sakes, let’s hope so.

2nd Update: The United Kingdom and the Eurozone crisis

Here is common sense and leadership from justice secretary Kenneth Clarke in today’s Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5606a946-201a-11e1-8662-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1fomGwuZY. (You may have to register to read it, but registration is free). He was a good minister to work for, as I recall.

Also worth watching on the BBC News is North Smith’s interview on College Green outside Parliament with Mark Pritchard MP, a Conservative Eurosceptic, and Denis McShane MP, former UK minister for Europe. Asked what powers Eurosceptics wanted to repatriate, Mark Pritchard said “The financial transactions tax” and refered to the damage it was doing to pension funds. Norman Smith and Denis McShane pointed out that the tax (usually called the Tobin tax or Robin Hood tax) didn’t exist and was just a proposal. The question was put again and again Mark Pritchard went on about the financial transactions tax. So again he was told the tax didn’t exist and again the question was put and after floundering he said, “The Working Time Directive”.

Speaks for itself really. The Eurosceptics canot distinguish between what is real and what isn’t; and they want us all to work till we drop. They want to take us back to the days of hospital doctors working for days without sleep, of truck drivers falling asleep at the wheel and of employers forcing unpaid overtime on the lowest paid. The Eurosceptics don’t like this country, do they?

Update: The United Kingdom and the Eurozone crisis

David Cameron’s threat today to veto any new EU treaty (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-16048131) confirms the worst.  Of course he is right to defend the United Kingdom’s interests and not to sign any treaty that does not accord with our interests (although as he is not a head of state, signing is above his pay grade), but that is what each of the 27 EU heads of government will be doing.  No head of government would negotiate against their national interest.  So, there was no need for the UK’s prime minister to issue his threat today and making threats always makes it harder to ahieve what you set out to achieve.

David Cameron is not naive and will know he places the UK in danger by making his threat.  Does he have another purpose, to wreck the negotiations from the outset and prevent the resolution to the Eurozone crisis proposed by President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel in Paris yesterday?  It seems likely.  Doing that, he is placing this country in great peril and should resign.

The deputy prime minister should be exercising the restraint on the prime minister that the Tory right wing is frothing at the mouth about.  The Liberal Democrats are the party that best understands the EU and has most faith in Britain’s future within it.  It’s time for Nick Clegg to take the lead.

The United Kingdom and the Eurozone crisis

Why is the UK taking no part in solving the Eurozone crisis? Why was the UK prime minister not at the summit in Paris yesterday, when President Sarkozy of France and Chancellor Merkel of Germany met?

The financial crisis affects us all and if the problem is not solved in the Eurozone the UK will be damaged. There will be more cuts, more job losses and lower living standards. It will take us longer than ever to get out of the crisis and if we do recover in my lifetime (I hope I’ve got a good way to go yet!) we will be changed utterly in character, just as we were with the crisiof the 190s, 80s and early 90s.

David Cameron, George Osborne and William Hague stand aside, saying it is the Eurozone’s problem. When they do turn up they are detached. Just look at their body language in the photographs in the press. They sell the UK short.

The financial crisis started in the US, but no one – least of all David Cameron, George Osborne and William Hague – said “This is an American problem. Let them sort themselves out,” because what started there was dragging the UK and the rest of Europe down.

Instead the dullard three are in thrall to the Eurosceptics and talk about holding the rest of the EU to ransom to repatriate unspecified powers from Brussels. Brussels, it should be remembered is ultimately the Council of Ministers, so the Eurosceptics are too foolish to see that they are really complaining about their own ministers’ performance in the Council. A hint of the target was given in the Autumn Statement when the Chancellor said TUPE would be reviewed. TUPE enacts EU law giving protection to employees in outsourcing government work and other circumstances. So it is the rights and protections of ordinary people, as ever, that the Conservatives want to remove from EU protection so that they can press home their attack on ordinary hard working families.

With the decision at the Paris summit yesterday of a new treaty to strengthen the Eurozone, the implied threat is that the UK’s prime minister will hold it up to get his way, no matter what the damage to the Eurozone and the UK.

How different from the predecessor he idolises. Lady Thatcher, for all her Euroscepticism and other faults, would have forced a solution on the EU and resolved the crisis. She would have been in Paris yesterday. She would never have been detached like David Cameron, George Osborne and William Hague. Strangely, she would have kept the Eurosceptics in check.

Yet, if David Cameron will not ensure the UK’s best interest in the EU, why is the deputy prime minister not doing it? What a tragedy it would be if the first government containing Liberals since the war was the one that did the greatest damage to Britain in Europe!

Immigration

Is it not a delicious irony that it is a Conservative home secretary on whose watch immigration checks were scaled back apparently without ministerial sanction so that she does not now know how many people were let in improperly? We live in an historic age of migration, like that which brought the ancestors of the English here. Why shouldn’t people look for a better life? Why shouldn’t people flee from persecution? Why shouldn’t this country continue to to be enriched by the skills and presence of newcomers? Instead of the Conservatives and Labour continually trying to outbid each other in hysterical nastiness to immigrants to appease the right wing, why doesn’t the minister in charge just ensure the system is just and is administered as fairly, humanely and efficiently as possible, so that we can be the humane open people that we really are?

Greece and the Eurozone crisis

Just when I think I understand what is going on, I don’t.

There was a deal to resolve the Eurozone crisis, which meant solving the Greek crisis.  Then there wasn’t because the Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, called a referendum on the deal. Politically this was right, because Greece is in turmoil over enforced austerity measures and a referendum might have got some public acceptance of the further cuts required under the Eurozone deal. Suddenly the deal was off the table and voices outside Greece, it seems, have decided the referendum question would be about remaining in the EU, rather than about austerity. The Greek cabinet started to split and the prime minister cancelled the referendum and now faces a confidence vote tomorrow while trying to build a coalition and having to go to the G8-G20 summit in Cannes to try to save the deal.

Have I left anything out?

If Mr Papandreou got the domestic politics right by calling the referendum, he got the international politics wrong. More than ever it is international politics that determine what sovereign states can do, but these don’t connect with the domestic politics of ordinary people trying to do their best for their families.

Connecting with no reality are the credit rating agencies who are unaccountable oligarchies that should have their power removed.

What I understand least, is that Greece seems to be a bit player in its own tragedy, responding to solutions hammered out by bigger countries. That would be unacceptable to any country and we in Britain still resent the IMF coming in to tell us what to do in the 1970s (and I blame the party in government at the time). Surely it is for Greece to find the solution to its problem and negotiate the help it needs from others, not the other way round. Or, is that something else I don’t understand?