UKIP London Assembly

Good bye to UKIP

2005-02-02T17:58:00.000Z

UKIP at London Assembly has now officially transmogrified itself into Veritas at London Assembly. We shall still be led by the Dear Leader and Voice of Reason, now also known as the Deputy Leader of Veritas (so he is going to be kind of DL squared). The new blog will still be reporting on his doings, on the doings of the other Veritas London Assembly member, Peter Hulme-Cross.

We shall report on events in the Great Glass Egg and on the doings of Hizonner the Mayor. And last but very much not least, we shall go on reporting on events in the dreaded European Union and analyzing them as well as developments in the campaign back home.

So, thank you for supporting and reading this blog and, please, read the new one and tell other people about it. The URL is: http://www.veritaslondonassembly.blogspot.com

Elections and constitutions

2005-02-01T17:03:00.000Z

Possibly the most extraordinary and, indeed, the most reprehensible of all the extraordinary and reprehensible reactions to the successful Iraqi election this week-end was the sight of a demonstration in Spain protesting against it. Cannot have an election under American occupation, they said; American money is being used to pay for something or other.

What these people were really saying – and how often have we heard it – was that, somehow, Iraqis and Arabs in general are different from thee and me and do not deserve freedom and democracy. They do not really want it. They want stability even if it means rule by bloodthirsty dictators like Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic family.

Very nice, too, and would be even nicer if the people of Spain (or Britain for that matter) paid a little more attention to what is going on in their own superior political systems: a wholesale surrender of democratic rights and liberties to the great managerial dictatorship of the European Union.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi people confounded the nay-sayers and have turned out in large numbers to vote in the first free election for a couple of generations at least. It seems that the turn-out across the country, despite the terrorist attacks and the threats of more, despite the troubles and the murders (though, let’s face it, only in four regions) was 55 per cent. In some regions it was considerably higher.

How does this compare with the turn-out across Europe for that democratic fig-leaf for the system, the European Parliament? How does this compare with the ever falling turn-out for the British General Election or for any other elections in the superior democracies of Europe?

The Spanish government will soon have to answer that question for the first of the Constitutional referendums is about to take place on February 20, in Spain, and some worry has been expressed.

Oh not about the vote – that is a foregone conclusion. Spain, as Prime Minister Zapatero keeps telling us (having won an election in which the electorate showed itself to be far more afraid than the people or Iraq), is one of the most pro-European countries.

What he means is that Spain gets an extraordinarily good deal and its politicians scream blue murder whenever that deal is threatened, so they are in favour of the Constitution as they assume it will be more of the same.

No, what Zapatero and the others are worried about is the turn-out. Apparently, only the most optimistic commentators predict more than 50 per cent. Something to be proud of, given how important the Constitution is going to be.

Oh and by the way, I hope all our readers know what the Iraqi vote was about: to elect a commission that will debate and write a constitution. Ahem, I do not recall M Giscard d’Estaing’s Convention being elected. You cannot ask the people to decide such matters. Well, not in Europe, anyway. In Iraq, maybe.

Who is backing the bid?

2005-01-27T18:58:00.000Z

Not the readers of This is London, the Evening Standard’s website, that’s for sure. The last time I looked (about two minutes ago) their question “Do you support London’s bid for the 2012 Olympic Games?” had the following result: 38 per cent voted yes and 62 per cent no. Perhaps Hizonner should get his minions to get in there and vote. But then, we can play that game as well.

After all, UKIP at the London Assembly was the first political organization to oppose that useless and expensive bid. Make Britain proud, indeed! Britain has plenty to be proud of without a ridiculous extravaganza that will mortgage Londoners' income for decades to come. (Membership of the EU is, of course, not one of those things.)

Still no improvement in London's transport system

2005-01-27T18:34:00.000Z

There is one thing about Hizonner the Mayor. He is really rather old-fashioned. He may be a socialist (some days of the week) and an old-time supporter of trade union rights (until he has to negotiate with them himself, but it was ever thus); he may be Europhile who thinks that entering the euro is on par politically speaking with adopting summer time on a permanent basis; but when it comes to trying to find someone he thinks might be efficient, where does he turn? To the United States.

That’s right. Just as in those old Ealing comedies, efficiency and achievement means “get a Yank”. Unfortunately, he got the wrong Yank. New Yorkers could not believe their luck when Bob Kiley left their rather benighted subway system for the greener pastures of London.

At the time Hizonner explained the Bob Kiley was worth every penny of his inflated salary because he was the man who had turned the New York subway system round and will do so with the London underground. And another thing, Kiley was described as a former CIA agent. Must be efficient.

Well, it is sad to destroy such old-fashioned illusions, but I fear, I do so fear, Mr Kiley has turned out to be a dud. Presumably, Hizonner persists in his habit of not using London transport and his staff may do likewise. Otherwise, somebody would have noticed that the tube is shambolic, the new buses are relatively useful but add to the congestion on some inappropriate routes, and Londoners are beginning to get rather restive.

Maybe Hizonner should read some history or watch some Shakespeare. He would then realize that the London mob can be a fearful thing.

The truth is that anyone can say they used to be in the CIA. Who is to contradict him or go into any detail as to what he might have been doing there?

Another truth is that while Kiley took over the New York subway system when a large dollop of money had just been allocated, he did not manage to introduce any lasting improvements. The subway system is just about the one thing in New York that does not work satisfactorily.

Under Kiley’s management it became more dangerous than it used to be, while the rest of New York City is considerably safer now than London. His stewardship had also been embellished with a gubernatorial enquiry into allegations of cronyism and fat-cat salaries. Clearly, just the sort of man to bring in at the head of Transport for London.

Well, the questions are beginning to be asked here but our own Mayor does not seem to share Mario Cuomo’s courage: he is not about to investigate Mr Kiley’s operations, even though the London Assembly is beginning to complain about the man’s behaviour. (One fight with the Assembly at a time, presumably.)

So, what has Mr Kiley achieved? Well, he was paid £700,000 last year, well above what his contract stipulates. The number of his executives earning in excess of £100,000 has risen from 12 to 22 and the number of those on more than £50,000 has doubled. Several of the higher paid ones are his old mates from NYC.

All this is detailed in a somewhat chaotic article in the Evening Standard, which also quotes various complaints from pre-Kiley employees of the transport system and its management. That, I have to say, leaves me cold: the system was appallingly badly run then, as well.

In the meantime, Hizonner is threatening to raise fares again (they have just gone up as is normal in the new year, well above the level of inflation). His threats are tied to the uppity behaviour of members of the London Assembly. However, if this were a real democracy, the demands voiced by said members, that Hizonner should close down his propaganda rag, The Londoner, would hold. Instead, the money will be taken out of the transport budget.

Then there is Kiley’s threat to extend the congestion charge throughout London, thus making Londoners prisoners in their own homes without any terrorist charges. To be fair, Hizonner is distancing himself from that plan but is insisting on extending the unsatisfactory, inefficient and harmful system to Kensington and Chelsea, despite almost unanimous opposition.

Will Mr Kiley explain? On present record, no. But, presumably, even his contract is not written in tablets of stone.

Shock, horror! The BBC is unprofessional

2005-01-27T01:26:00.000Z

It is the contention of this blog that the dear old Beeb, the solace of our childhood and the standard bearer of British supremacy in broadcasting quality, is actually a bloated bureaucracy with its own agenda, that just happens to be seriously anti-American, anti-western, pro-EU and, generally soggy left.

Added to that is the undeniable fact that the BBC is an anomaly. It lives off public money, to wit a poll tax on TV ownership and using that money advances its own ideological agenda and “competes” in the world of broadcasting on completely unfair conditions.

There is, however, another indictment: it has become completely unprofessional. Let me relate an interesting tale.

Yesterday morning I received a phone call from BBC 24 hours, asking if I would agree to be interviewed as the Bill to implement the constitutional treaty has been published together with the proposed question for the referendum. I was invited in my guise as the Research Director of the Bruges Group, a reasonably well known organization even in BBC circles.

As usual I was asked a few questions about my precise opinions about the referendum, the constitution and the EU itself and was told that my interview will follow immediately after Mark (surname unfamiliar and therefore unmemorable to me) from the Forum for Social Europe.

As the pleasant young man who was talking to me admitted that he had never seen a copy of the Constitution for Europe, I offered to bring one and took with me the invaluable British Management Data Foundation edition.

When I arrived at Television Centre, I was rushed in to the studio, barely pausing to discard my coat and bag. I was placed next to the man who was to interview me and discuss the particular item. He turned to me and said somewhat accusingly: “You are not Mark.”

“Um, no,” – I admitted. It was useless to deny this. The fact that I was not Mark was entirely obvious. “Well, who are you?” – he continued, feverishly looking through his briefing notes on the laptop. It seems that paper and pencil no longer figure in the average BBC interviewer’s life.

I explained who I was and had to repeat so often and so loudly that I was from the BRUGES GROUP that my chap’s colleague had to glance at us reproachfully. We were, indeed, interfering with her feed.

Any reasonably experienced political journalist should have heard of the Bruges Group, whether they agreed with its euroscepticisim or not. This one had not, and introduced me eventually as being from that group of eurosceptic MPs. We do have the odd MP as a member and a few have addressed meetings. But it is not primarily a group for parliamentarians.

Furthermore, I had to explain hastily and in whispers that no, I was not in favour of Europe, whatever that might be. My interviewer had the hazy notion that the other chap, Mark, who was, in any case, in the Westminster studio, may have been against the constitution and in favour of Europe. So I must have been in favour of both. The idea that anybody might not be all that keen on either clearly had not occurred to him.

He was not interested in my copy of the constitution, having only the word referendum in his mind and not really knowing what he was talking about. Eventually I was asked whether I thought the proposed question was fair, and when I said that it was inaccurate but reasonably fair, I was allowed to explain why we had certain problems and worries about the way the referendum would be run.

Then I sat back, waiting for the questions on the constitution itself to follow. They did not. I was thanked politely and Mark was brought up on the screen. Presumably, he, too, was somewhat bewildered about this emphasis on the referendum.

As far as I could tell he was not given much time to present his case whatever it may have been either, since the only thing the particular news programme was interested in was the return of the Guantanamo four, who had quite unjustly been imprisoned for taking a walking holiday in the mountains of Afghanistan heavily armed with AK-47s, handgrenades and other suchlike hikers’ luggage.

Well, there we are. A conspiracy to keep an important subject under wraps or a completely shambolic inefficiency, unprofessionalism and ignorance?

Will Emperor Ken prove the London Assembly has no clothes?

2005-01-26T20:16:00.000Z

We have already written about the farce of the London Assembly attempting to hold Hizonner the Mayor to account in any way that can be called meaningful. Well, here is the latest instalment of the saga:

For the first time in its five-year life, the London Assembly today (Wednesday) bared its teeth and rejected Hizonner the Mayor's budget. The Tory, Lib-Dem, Green and UK Independence Parties combined in a two-thirds majority to call on the Mayor to cut the proposed council tax precept increase, scrap his propaganda sheet The Londoner and cut other unnecessary expenditure.

However, council tax payers should not crack open the champagne just yet. Under GLA rules, Ken has until St. Valentine's Day to force his spending plans through by picking off off two Assembly members from this unusual coalition of diverse interests.

Will Hizonner support Green plans to cover London in parks, or reveal his secret ambition to get Britain out of the European Union in order to tempt the two UKIP members to back his budget?

There may well be a massacre on St Valentine's Day, but Ken will pull out all the stops to make sure that it is the Assembly that is looking down the barrrels of the tommy guns.

No difference between us

2005-01-25T18:06:00.000Z

The recent pronouncement on the part of the Commission about the Conservatives’ proposal for an immigration policy raises a few interesting points.

The most obvious one, asked by David Rennie in the Daily Telegraph is:

“How did Britain end up binding its immigration policy to the European Union, so tightly that - to hear the European Commission talk - it is already too late for Michael Howard to throw the process into reverse, even if he is elected prime minister?”

Well, how, indeed. It all started in 1999 with the Tampere Summit at which various maters of justice and security were agreed to and the media paid not attention. When eurosceptics tried to raise the subject, their comments were dismissed and jeered at.

All of a sudden, it is turning out to be true. Just as the fact that the duly elected Chancellor of the Exchequer in a duly elected government with the largest majority in the House of Commons in modern history, had to go begging to the Commission in 1997 to be allowed to lower VAT on fuel, that is, too fulfil a manifesto obligation. His plea was refused. Nobody much noticed.

And has anyone noticed much the various agreements of Tampere II, that is the Hague Protocol agreed to in the autumn of 2004? Well, no, not really. This document, too, concerns a far-reaching plan for various policing, justice and security matters, including the final transformation of Europol into an operational force. It is one of those ten-year plans that will go on unrolling, regardless of any election or referendum in Britain, any other member states or the European Union.

Even a directly elected Commission, a panacea proposed by some misguided individuals would not alter the fact that the governance of the EU is managerial not political, or that it is not a project that cares much about democracy or accountability.

Yes, we find it all rather frustrating. But there is another organization out there that is just as frustrated, and that is the Commission. They, too, would like to have the role of the European Union acknowledged in various ways and find themselves thwarted in this laudable exercise by national politicians. They cannot understand why this should be so.

The answer is very simple – politicians have elections to win, even if their real power is reduced with every month, every year, every European Council. They still like the trappings and kid themselves that maybe this is all a bad dream. Any minute now they will wake up and the whole European mess will simply melt away.

The Commission and its denizens, on the other hand, have no such problems. They do not stand for elections and do not consider that to be a good way of running anything. Accountability? Who needs it?

They do, however, believe fervently in the project and its essential goodness. Therefore, they want to publicize it. They want the people of Europe to know that the benign EU is looking after them and stopping the national politicians from making a muck of things. Hence the apparently crass intervention in British domestic politics over immigration.

In other words, they are like us – the opposites converge. We, eurosceptics, want to highlight the role of the European Union in domestic matters, and so does the European Union, particularly the Commission. It is the rather woolly-minded individuals in between that annoys us both.

Wimps past and present

2005-01-24T17:45:00.000Z

Last week there were two rather hard-hitting articles about the EU and its strange lack of courage or far-sightedness in the Wall Street Journal Europe. Neither was written by a dedicated member of the international eurosceptic fraternity, though one of the authors, the eminent Polish economist, Professor Jan Winiecki, being a convinced free-marketeer, is not precisely a huge supporter of the project. His article was called Wimps, which seems to be a very precise way of describing the EU

Professor Winiecki, a professor and chair of International Economics and European Studies at the Rzeszow School of Computer Science and Management and president of the Adam Smith Centre in Poland, made as the starting point of his article an interesting little story about the President of the Toy Parliament in Strabourg, the Spanish socialist Josep Borrell.

It should, first of all, be noted that Señor Borrell, a newly elected MEP was chosen to be the president as part of a particularly unpleasant bit of pork barrel politics between the two main groups: the Socialists and the European People’s Party, to which our own dear Conservative MEPs are attached.

(Incidentally, what happened to his intention to reform the Toy Parliament, especially with regards to the payment and expenses system? A toy it may be, but it is a very expensive toy and we seem to have no right to to take it back to the shop and demand a refund.)

As our readers may recall, the two countries that became closely involved with attempts to sort out the Ukrainian problems after the first, rather dubious presidential election, were Poland and Lithuania. This was not surprising, as they are countries, whose history has been closely intertwined with that of Ukraine. Furthermore, like the other post-Communist states and unlike the older members of the European Union, they are well aware of the need for a transparent and accountable political system and a free media.

The EU itself, on the other hand, played a somewhat ambiguous part. Javier Solana did run around from one important actor in the drama to another, but his aim was to achieve stability. Not the same thing as freedom, democracy and accountability at all. Above all, he and Chancellor Schröder did not want to upset President Putin who was trying to use the Ukrainian election as a stepping stone in his own ambitious power game.

It all reminded some of us with longer memories of the EU’s insistence in the early nineties that no matter what and no matter how but Yugoslavia must stay together, thus, in effect, giving Slobodan Milosevic a go-ahead for some of his most unpleasant policies.

Well, we know what happened in Ukraine and are now waiting eagerly to see what will happen next. Not all of us, it seems. Mr Borrell made some rather curious remarks to the leading Warsaw newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza.

The outcome in Ukraine, according to Mr Borrell, was “a great success for the EU in avoiding a crisis”. Presumably, had Yanukovich managed to push through a fraudulent vote, that, too would have been a success in avoiding a crisis. Nothing could be worse than a crisis for the structure-obsessed EU politicos, not tyranny, not oppression, not cheating in elections.

This success, unnoticed by most people in Ukraine, was achieved despite the intervention by the uppity new members who were clearly acting “under US influence”. Gasp! Hiss! At least, he did not repeat President Chirac’s bêtise about the new members losing a good opportunity to keep quiet.

It seems that one cannot possibly be in favour of free and fair elections. Anyone who says that must be an American agent. And what could be worse than that? Reminds one of the dear dead days of the old Pravda newspaper.

Alas, those uppity new members refused to be lectured to in this way and Mr Borrell, who could not blame his advisers, blamed the translators. It’s a set-up Youronner, he said, I was mistranslated. In return he heard the Polish equivalent of yeah, right.

Professor Winiecki, however, has gone beyond blowing a raspberry in the direction of the tired old socialist at the head of a toy parliament. He sees this rather silly story as the epitome of what is wrong with the whole EU mentality.

“No matter the exact wording, Mr Borrell expressed an obsessive anti-Americanism common in today’s Europe. And that, in turn, reflects the mental state of the Continent whose main characteristic is fear. Fear of nearly everything.”

It is afraid of getting involved in and helping the countries that lie between the EU and Russia and would not even have uttered a squeak of protest but for the new members, who know a thing or two about what goes on behind those borders.

It is afraid of the market. It is against

“… a work ethic, competition, and all the paraphernalia of the market regime”.

It is afraid of Islam and tries “to make a virtue of its fear”.

“On the bigger international stage, the obsessive invocation of ‘rule of law’,of ‘multilateralism’ as opposed to ‘unilateralism’, comes down to a search for an excuse not to act.”

Nor is he, unlike certain American commentators, well-protected by that uncouth American power, impressed by what is now more and more often described as the “soft power” of Europe or, rather, the European Union.

“Europe’s invocation of ‘soft power’, i.e. the preference for economic assistance as the solution to violent conflicts, raises psychologically interesting questions. How much does that reflect socialist mythology that throwing money at the problem will overcome obvious obstacles to success? And how much, simply, is it an aversion to risk, a fear of engagement in the world’s problems. The EU’s reluctance to act anywhere, and its instinct to fall back on the least imaginative approach, was most recently on view in its response to the masssacre in Darfur.”

They are, in other words, wimps, scared of their own shadows and hoping against hope that if they shut their eyes all those internal and external problems will go away. Failing that, the despised Americans will deal with some of them.

Oddly enough, there had been a similar despairing article in the Wall Street Journal Europe on the previous day. This one dealt largely with economic and social issues and cut a swathe across the frozen, terrified European political outlook.

In particular, it cut across the whole ridiculous nonsense of the Lisbon Agenda (already on the dust heap of history):

“This overloaded agenda has suffered from conflicting priorities, inadequate political will at the member-state level, poor co-ordination and inadequate delivery. Each spring the European Council, with a marked improvement in content this year, has produced excessive and flatulent conclusions by way of annual review that said so much as to amount to saying virtually nothing of substance.”

Well, yes. And who is the author of this imprecation? None other than Señor Borrell’s predecessor, Pat Cox, who seems to have become a vociferous supporter of free market economics and freedom in general.

“Meanwhile, in spite of twin budget and trade deficits, the American eagle continues to soar. The Chinese dragon behaves as if performance enhanced. India is finding its economic feet and Japan is turning the corner. But Europe’s stars are failing to shine, marking a relative economic decline. It would be tempting to ascribe Europe’s economic problems solely to forces beyond its control – a global slowdown, the weak dollar, higher oil prices or even the unique challenge posed by the low-wage, high tech countries in Asia. Tempting but wrong, that.Europe should not blind itself to the fact that its economic problems are very much of its own making.”

Mr Cox’s article calls for greater freedom in economic and social terms: less regulation, greater tax cuts. He points to his own country, Ireland, as the great example of a successful low-tax economy but, unfortunately for his argument, a country that has such a high inflow of subsidy cannot be used as a text book case of the Laffer curve.

Still, one cannot argue too much with the following conclusion:

“I believe that the root cause of Europe’s lack of dynamism lies not in its procedures, although these can and should be greatly reformed, but rather in its core beliefs. More specifically, it lies in our unwillingness to acknowledge the contemporary failure of the postwar experiment in high-tax,regulation-intensive, dependency-inducing welfarism and the success of free-market liberal reforms in the US in the 1980s and elsewhere in the 1990s.”

You go man! One thing puzzles me about all this outspokenness. I may be suffering from a memory failure but I do not remember similar pronouncements from Mr Cox in his days of glory, that is, his presidency of the European Parliament.

In those days he seemed to support the “postwar experiment” and derided all attempts to free up economic and social activity. In fact, he presided over a Parliament that did its best to tighten even further the various detailed and inappropriate regulations, proposed by the Commission and negotiated by the Council of Ministers.

In those days, Mr Cox could have been described in Professor Winiecki's succinct way as a wimp. Still, as far as Mr Cox is concerned, the light has been seen, the truth sighted and salvation glimpsed. Much in his future pronouncements, one assumes, will depend on what he will do now that he is no longer presiding over that toy parliament in Strasbourg.

One wonders what Commission President Barroso made of the following slightly sarcastic imprecation:

“If the EU is to prosper, my dear President Barroso, this is not the time for you to be the conservative leader of a cautious continent.”

All this can be summed up in a very simple phrase: Europe is afraid of freedom. The continent that invented the concept has abandoned it and rails against anyone who tried to invoke it. In so far as there is a European identity, the EU and its wimps are busy destroying it.

What a shame

2005-01-24T17:00:00.000Z

On the BBC World Service I espied the following headline: Mars launches Europe-wide review. And why not, thought I. There have been plenty of Mars probes sent from earth. Clearly, those clever little Martians noticed the fact that there is a peculiar new political constellation on earth and thought they would have a look-see, probably in order to avoid making the same mistakes.

Alas, no little green men to be seen anywhere. It is merely the large confectioner Mars re-examining its European, particularly British operations. As things stand, there may well be rather large cut-backs. But no Martians.

By the way, would it not be good idea to rename the Field of Marathon, so nearly flooded by the Greeks in their pre-Olympic eagerness, to the Field of Snickers? I am told one confectionery has now replaced the other.

Kilroy runs up the South Carolina flag

2005-01-21T18:41:00.000Z

Or the Slovenia flag, or the Ukraine flag, or the Bosnia flag. Anyway, he has, as all our readers, undoubtedly know, declared independence and has announced his intention to form another party (yes, thank you, we have already cracked that joke about the name).

Roger Knapman, the Leader of UKIP (not to be confused with the Dear Leader and Voice of Reason, whom we obey, sort of, in our section of the Great Glass Egg) told the BBC this morning that he was opening a bottle of champagne. Indeed, I believe, he was recorded as doing just that.

We do hope that the Leader of UKIP does not become one of those louche heroines, so beloved by writers of the thirties, who insisted on starting their days with champagne and, possibly, boxes of chocolates. If memory serves, they tended to do so a little later than eight o’clock in the morning.

One does, however, wonder, whether there really is anything to celebrate in this new development. Let us add up the consequences:

UKIP loses its main attraction as far as the media is concerned and possibly a number of members, activists and supporters, not to mention potential voters in the General Election.

Kilroy himself would have made a point, created a new party, which might gain some support from disgruntled UKIPites and, crucially, from dissatisfied Labour supporters. But it is unlikely to gain enough to manage a seat in Westminster.

This should make the main parties quite happy. Gone is the threat from that pesky entity, UKIP. Well, no, I don’t think so.

Take the Conservative Party. (All right, I’ll take the Conservative Party but not for long.) They, too, are over the moon, though champagne seems to be in short supply. But, in fact, a lot of potential UKIP voters are more interested in the inadequacy of the Tories than in any goings-on in any other party. In other words, they are not going to go back to the fold and with two parties to vote for, may well take away enough votes to cause serious inconvenience in a seat or two.

The Labour Party, almost certain to form its historic third government in a row, are worried about the turn-out and the stay-at-home supporters. In the past none of these would have been lost to UKIP, perceived as full of disgruntled Tories. Now, there will be a new anti-EU party, led by a former Labour MP and a man, who is, roughly speaking, on the left of the political spectrum. It may well attract crucial votes in a seat or two.

I shall not bother to write about the Lib-Dems as there is very little I can think of saying about them.

Then there is the referendum, probably to be called in March 2006. What will be the Invisible No-man's a.k.a. Vote-No campaign’s attitude to this development? Having taken the rather confusing “yes to Europe, no to the constitution” line and the more understandable one of not discussing actual membership of the EU during the campaign, they have always tried to pretend that UKIP with its growing support was really just a bad smell. Now they will have two parties to offend their olfactory senses and, inevitably, more talk on the media about actual membership and effects of the vote on the constitution. They will not like it, but on present count, we shall not know that, as they will not be seen above the parapet.

Of one thing our readers can be certain: the mischief-making capacity of the Dear Leader and Voice of Reason in the Great Glass Egg will not be impaired by this development.

A couple of good reasons

2005-01-20T18:36:00.000Z

At yesterday’s meeting in one of the committee rooms in the basement of the Great Glass Egg, at which Lord Pearson of Rannoch spoke (of which more in another posting), a former member of the Metropolitan Police (now called for reasons best known to the Commissioner, Assistant Commissioner and other suchlike individuals, as Metropolitan Police Service or MPS) pointed out that over 80 per cent of his former colleagues think ID cards are a very good idea. How can he counter their arguments, he asked despairingly.

Well might one despair. Given the magnitude of change that internal passports a.k.a. ID cards will bring to our society and given the expense and inconvenience their introduction will entail, surely it ought to be the proponents of the idea who must justify their point of view.

Alas, that is not how public discourse works any more. Once something has been put forward as a “good idea” and one that will prevent social security fraud, make catching criminals easier, prevent terrorism and probably abolish original sin, there is no need to justify it. The opponents are the ones who have to explain their position.

Given that the MPS is not over-bothered by the notion of civil rights, liberties and such outdated notions of innocent until proven guilty, what can one produce as good arguments to convince them?

How about pointing out that this will be an extremely expensive and probably cumbersome and inefficient system (think of what happened with previous government IT efforts) that will be simultaneously oppressive and unworkable? Furthermore, it will make the relationship between members of the MPS and the general public, already at an all-time low, even worse. And, to top it all, there is no evidence whatsoever that those heavy disadvantages will be outweighed by any noticeably greater ability to prevent crime or terrorism.

Nor, as it happens, will internal passports get us anywhere in the eternal battle to overcome original sin.

Ahem, what happened to the Lisbon agenda?

2005-01-19T22:45:00.000Z

Well you may ask. The Lisbon agenda was adopted at the Lisbon summit in 2000, its purpose being to make the European economy the most competitive and knowledge based by 2010.

We are half-way there and the mid-term review is due on February 2. Still, we are nowhere near that aim and are, indeed, slipping back in the world-wide competition. The new President of the Commission, Barroso, announced that reviving the Lisbon process (beware of that word) will be the main aim of his term.

Mr Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, that now holds the presidency of the EU, confirmed the importance of the Lisbon agenda, though he seems more interested in ensuring that he gets a bigger budget through for the period starting from 2007.

What do we find now? An internal and poorly publicized Commission paper drops the Lisbon targets and suggests instead that the economic goals should be simplified.

The paper sets out as top three priorities: creating more and better jobs, boosting knowledge and innovation, and ensuring the EU is an attractive location for business.

Simplified that may be but, frankly, comprehensive it is not. What does any of this mean and how can it be achieved through government or political diktats? Ah yes, our readers have, no doubt, guessed the answer: a co-ordinator of the national activity a “Mr Lisbon” or, perhaps, a “Ms Lisbon” will be appointed. I expect the Americans, the Indians and the Chinese are shaking in their shoes.

They seek him here, they seek him there, those journos seek him everywhere

2005-01-19T16:58:00.000Z

What is the Dear Leader and Voice of Reason going to do in the great UKIP bust-up (oh do keep up, of course, there is another UKIP bust up going on)? We have referred to the threatened secession of one particularly prominent MEP as the Croatia and Bosnia to the leadership’s Yugoslavia.

Media opinion seems to differ. Yesterday’s Mirror told its myriads of readers (well, almost myriads) that the DL was definitely going to stay with UKIP even if the certain prominent MEP will go ahead and found his own party, provisionally entitled Veritas.

On the other hand, yesterday’s Standard, the voice of London (umm, several thousand readers have been known to buy copies) announced that the VoR had given the broadest possible hint that he would follow the prominent MEP into the new party.

Other newspapers and media outlets divide every which way they can. And the Dear Leader himself? What does he say in his voice of reason? Need you ask? He smiles enigmatically and refuses to divulge.

Perhaps, he will found yet another party, called In Vino …

Interesting use of advertising space

2005-01-18T17:55:00.000Z

Most of our readers, I imagine, travel on London Transport. And, no doubt, they have noticed the proliferation of large posters on buses, underground platforms and general Transport for London (TfL) property that showed various athletes doing various athletic things over various well-known London landmarks.

On top of which the words Back the Bid have been adorning buses and trains everywhere. Now, it is fair to say that just as there is no such thing as a free lunch, so there is no such thing as a free advertising space. Neither the Back the Bid Campaign, nor Hizonner the Mayor through his office have paid for any of this advertising. Which means that TfL has been denied large amounts of advertising revenue.

UKIP at the London Assembly has raised this subject. The response from TfL was that none of the space donated to the campaign had been intended for advertising but for internal TfL use to be filled with TfL messages.

Well, goody, goody. Nice to know that the powers that be at TfL (would that be the grossly overpaid Bob Kiley or one of his equally overpaid minions?) know all about advertising and finances. If this is true then one must admit that an unconscionable amount of potentially valuable advertising space is being wasted. What sort of internal information could be so vitally important? And if it is all of that, how can we, users of London transport, manage without it, while we stare at all those Back the Bid posters and mobile messages?

Then, of course, it may not be true. But surely TfL would not tell porkies to members of the Great Glass Egg?

London is honoured

2005-01-18T17:19:00.000Z

Guess what has just come through on the internal e-mail service in the Great Glass Egg from Hizonner’s office. You can’t? Well, here is the text:

To All Staff & Members,

This afternoon the Red Army Choir, also known as the Alexandrov Military Choir, will be holding a short performance in the scoop for the benefit of the media to promote this weekend's Russian Winter Festival in Trafalgar Square. The performance in the scoop will be the first appearance of the Choir in Britain since 1967. The Mayor has asked that staff be invited to come down to the Scoop at 4pm to take this opportunity to see them perform a short piece here at City Hall.

Simon Fletcher
Mayor's
Chief of Staff

Good to know that the traditional and old-fashioned (or perhaps forward looking) members of Hizonner’s staff do not get taken in by all that nonsense about the Alexandrov Military Choir. Oh dear me, no.

This is the Red Army Choir. Fresh from performing in the one remaining building (if there is one) of Grozny, formerly known as the capital of Chechnya.

Puffed up with self-importance

2005-01-18T17:08:00.000Z

I cannot resist this one. In today’s Daily Telegraph article by Mark Steyn, otherwise not entirely relevant to the blog, he quotes from one of my favourite authors, P. G. Wodehouse.

Why Nazism or Fascism, Steyn says (with rather more optimism than I would display, but let that pass) was impossible in Britain or any other English-speaking country because it seemed inherently ridiculous. The whole attitude could be summed up in Bertie Wooster’s famous attack on the preposterous Sir Roderick Spode, clearly based on the egregious Sir Oswald Mosley:

"The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting, 'Heil, Spode!'and you imagine it is the Voice of the People.

"That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: 'Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?'"

Substitute the name of any politician, would-be politician, official, would-be official, regulator, would-be regulator for Spode and you will not be too far off the mark.

Unfortunately, as Steyn himself points out, all this goes for the upfront, uniform-wearing, salute-exchanging, slogan-shouting type of tyranny. They can be made to look and sound ridiculous. But there is a more insidious form of political oppression, what Steyn describes as

“… the soft, supple, creeping totalitarian inclination of our present-day rulers”.

This, as he rightly says, is much harder to mock, resist or even to identify and define. But we must do so or we cannot win the battle.

The one sacred entity?

2005-01-18T15:25:00.000Z

There were several rather interesting and, even, amusing moments during the debate at the conference in Vienna that I took part in. The discussion was whether the European Union was a democratic entity or not. (I hope all our readers can work out which side I was on.)

My opponent, a charming French Research Fellow at the Centre for European Reform, the leading perestroika institution in this country (they are for it but acknowledge that a few, very few, things need to be changed and, possibly though not necessarily, improved) maintained that the democratic nature of the Union displayed itself in the multiplicity of political layers through which decisions had to be filtered.

The idea that multiplying political layers to the point where nobody understand how decisions are taken or implemented should be a definition of democracy is rather an odd one, but even odder was her assertion that national parliaments or some other political bodies – she seemed a little vague – can reject EU legislation.

The audience consisted largely of people who either came from the new member states, whose aim was to prove that these states were doing extremely well and being trés communautaire, and representatives of various financial firms and banks, interested in investment in those countries, but mostly (especially if they were American) worried by the economic non-development of the EU.

Few of them had given any thought to the democratic accountability or legitimacy of the whole project. During the discussion one European member of the audience stood up and said to me in tones of horror that if one did not have all these rules, regulations and institutions the EU could not exist.

There was an almost relieved laughter when I said that the end of the EU would not mean the end of the world, though, clearly there was a great deal of horror at such a suggestion.

The EU is, after all, merely a political institution that is trying to turn itself into a state. It is quite extraordinary that people who could blithely dismiss states, nations and countries that have existed for centuries as being irrelevant, whose time had expired, should get so shocked at the thought that the blessed Union, too, is mortal and can pass any minute (well, within the next few years). Not very logical, these Europhiles.

Return of the blog

2005-01-18T01:17:00.000Z

Yes, yes, just as you thought it was safe to enter the blogosphere water, back comes the UKIP London Assembly blog.

Then again, no sooner does the scribe disappear from the Great Glass Egg for a short period than the simmering civil war in UKIP breaks out into the open with threats of secession, a Bosnia or Croatia to the party’s Yugoslavia.

More of that, we hope, in another posting. In the meantime I want to consider flags. Flags do not fly in this country much, because the British, by and large, consider them an embarrassment.

Much was made of the fact that post-Diana, the Queen agreed to fly the Union Flag on Buckingham Palace when she is in residence rather than the Royal Standard. Nowadays, nobody mentions that great “victory for popular feeling”. Everybody is rather ashamed and embarrassed by the stupidity of it all. In truth, what was achieved by that rather peevish demand on the part of the self-appointed spokespersons of the people: journalists in one or two particularly unattractive newspapers?

On the Continent flags fly a great deal more and national flags have a long, usually bloody, but important history of their own.

In Budapest, where I have just been, the Hungarian flag flies proudly everywhere. The red-white-green is a symbol of the country’s difficult and complicated modern history.

This time, however, there was another flag flying: the blue one with the ring of stars. It flies, as in various other countries (though not France, as it happens) on many official buildings, particularly in the centre of the city.

It also flies, quite unnecessarily on the Parliament and two buildings that are symbols of Hungarian nationhood: the Opera and the Academy. Each has important parts of national history attached to it and each is cherished. The EU flag is redundant on them.

The question is what has prompted the Hungarian authorities to insist on this quite unnecessary display of obsequiousness. Is it another manifestation of something the Hungarians have been accused of before: a tendency to go too far, to be, so to speak, more Catholic than the Pope?

Or is it a subtle but determined sign to those who can understand that Hungary has once again surrendered its independence?

Time alone will tell which one it is and what the populace’s reaction will be in, say, five years’ time. On past experience, it is unlikely to be pleasant. There is another flag in Parliament Square: by the new memorial to those who had fallen there in October 1956 there is Hungarian flag with a hole cut out in the middle. Many will remember the pictures of that doomed revolution with hundreds of flags, from which the hated socialist emblem had been cut out or burnt out. Another flag, another symbol.

Bad news (we think)

2005-01-10T08:54:00.000Z

Just as the Dear Leader and Voice of Reason makes his way back to the Great Glass Egg, an interruption to this service looms. Oh not for long, but the chronicler of UKIP at the London Assembly has to leave the said Great Glass Egg for a week. Technology being what it is, that does not mean a complete interruption, merely a certain irregularity. However, full and prompt service of news, views and analysis will be resumed next Monday.

Good news (we think)

2005-01-08T23:20:00.000Z

The Dear Leader and Voice of Reason has returned from his exile, otherwise known as a holiday in the sun. Actually, he has not been sighted yet, but we think he must be back in the country, though not in the Great Glass Egg. Our readers can expect some entertaining postings about his doings in between the gloomy political ones.

Whom do we trust?

2005-01-07T16:07:00.000Z

According to a tiny little item in the Evening Standard, the Home Office, having all the time in the world, has just conducted a survey into the perennially exciting question of public trust.

We do not know where Home Office panjandrums or even minions come on the list, but to everybody’s astonishment, 43 per cent of the public trusts the Greater London Authority (GLA), five per cent more than trust MPs. Another thing we do not know is what proportion trusts journalists.

Several questions can be asked. The most obvious one is how is it that 38 per cent still trust MPs, despite their reluctance to tell the truth about who actually legislates in this country. (Clue: they are in Brussels.)

Even more interestingly, how did 43 per cent manage to hear of GLA or find out what it really does. Of course, it is possible that public trust has gone up since UKIP has stormed the citadel, a.k.a. the Great Glass Egg and has been making its mark on the proceedings.

Well, what does Bob Kiley do?

2005-01-07T15:42:00.000Z

As our readers or, at least, those of them who travel on London Transport with any regularity (that word does not apply to the way trains and buses run, by the way), recall, Bob Kiley, the Transport Commissar, imported by Hizonner the Mayor from New York, whose inhabitants were overjoyed to hand him over, was given a whopping salary rise just before Christmas.

His basic pay is now £318,000 with a possible annual bonus (for what, precisely?) of £285,000. And to anyone who wishes to remind me that high-powered managers and directors in the private sector get more than that, I can only say that in one of those positions Mr Kiley would long ago have been out on his ear.

So what does Mr Kiley do for all this money? The one thing he does not do is turn up to meetings of the London Assembly Budget Committee. The first get-together of the year, appropriately on January 6, when, according to tradition, the gift-bearing magi came, was there to discuss the Mayor’s 2005/06 Consultation Budget with the functional bodies: Transport for London (TfL), London Development Agency (LDA), London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA) and the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA). Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed the proliferation of authorities and of initials. The work of the Greater London Authority (GLA) resembles an alphabet soup.

As we have already pointed out, the GLA committees, though they nominally oversee the spending of taxpayers’ money, do not actually have all that much power. They can express dissatisfaction and they can, if they so desire, cut back on the budget as a whole. They cannot, however, tell the functional bodies or, for that matter, Hizonner, how to spend or mis-spend the money they have allocated to themselves.

Still, they can quiz the functional bodies or their functional bosses, all of whom turned up for the meeting. Errrm, all but one. Bob Kiley, the Commissar for TfL (oh do keep up with those initials!) did not. Only one person came to represent that organization, Stephen Critchley, the Chief Finance Officer.

He, of course, found it impossible to answer any questions that had even a modicum of political content. Actually, he was not all that good even on the financial questions.

When asked by Peter Hulme-Cross, the UKIP Assembly Member who was representing the group on the Committee why TfL was planning to raise operating expenditure for London Buses by 10 per cent (£132 million) in 2005/06, Mr Critchley was at something of a loss.

Mr Hulme-Cross also asked him about a rather curious transaction, whereby TfL borrowed £200 million through the capital markets. They did not go through the Public Loans Work Board because they wanted a sustained AA Rating. Whether they got that or not, remains to be seen. They did, however, pay more money this way. The question is how much more. According to Jay Walder, Mr Kiley’s second in command, who was not at the meeting either, it was £270,000 per £100 million more (i.e. £540,000). According to Mr Critchley, it was £390,000 per £100 million (i.e. £780,000).

The reason for Mr Kiley’s non-attendance may be quite an obvious one. He was not going to be the one to answer awkward questions. Not nohow. Not even for the £600,000 or so a year that he receives.

Politics and the uses of enchantment

2005-01-06T23:36:00.000Z

The rows and jockeying for position that have accompanied genuine success in speedy delivery of useful aid after the tsunami are further proof, if that were needed that next to poverty, what kills is politics. Natural disasters come a distant third. Of course, politics is not separate from poverty or from the inevitable conclusion that the worst natural disasters (and the not so bad ones) always hit poor countries with corrupt, oppressive rulers hardest. All these matters are linked.

The jockeying for position has been done largely by those wonderful transnational organizations: the UN, the EU and the many and assorted NGOs. The UN, by all accounts, has been busy sending out co-ordinators, setting up conferences and producing endless assessments, in between claiming credit for what individual countries have done and shrieking that more aid is needed. Actually, as anyone who has looked at the situation even at one remove can say, it is the distribution and delivery that is difficult, not least because of the patent inefficiency of the NGOs and the superfluity of international co-ordinators who commandeer the best hotels and divert resources for their own agenda.

The EU is also organizing donors’ meetings, ministers’ meetings, officials’ meetings, what have you. It is also claiming to co-ordinate all sorts of efforts that are quietly going on without the Commissars and it has added one extra twist of its own: the three-minute silence, which has annoyed a surprisingly large number of people. Commission President Barroso has even managed to claim that all the aid collected and delivered by individual member states was actually EU aid.

Meanwhile individual countries, led by the United States and Australia are sending in frigates, helicopters, trucks and other forms of transport, laden with the required goods and accompanied as likely as not by engineers and constructors. The structures built up by these people will do for infrastructure later on, when the aid machinery will finally leave the unfortunate victims alone.

Individual European countries have been taking part in the effort as well. The UK, France, Spain, the Netherlands have all sent frigates or helicopters. Others have boasted about collecting money, which is still hanging around presumably, before ending up in numbered accounts. But we shall not talk of it now. Time enough for that when the scandals start erupting.

Some rather serious political problems have emerged, not least in Burma, where the military rulers have effectively refused to acknowledge the scale of the country’s losses, material and human, and in Sri Lanka, where the Tamil Tigers have refused to accept help either from the Americans or the Indians. (India has, incidentally, sensibly announced that it did not need the various NGOs that were salivating at the thought of getting in there, has coped with its own problems and has provided help for other countries. Oh what it is to have a strong and genuinely developing economy.)

The Tamil Tigers explained their decision by their supposed fear that the Americans and the Indians would use aid distribution as an excuse for spying for the Sri Lankan government. Certainly, aid distributors would see the truth of what was going on in areas controlled by the Tamil Tigers and the truth is probably extremely unpleasant. So much for how the disaster brought together the warring Sri Lankan authorities and Tamils, sentimentally written up by the media. It is clear that the Tamil Tigers care very little for the people under their control and a great deal for their own political authority. If thousands more will die in order to protect the latter, well, so be it, as far as they are concerned. So many have already died in that civil war, what’s a few thousand more?

Then there are the children. Whenever heartstrings need to be wrung and wallets opened, we hear about the children. Suddenly UNICEF has become very vociferous, announcing that there were dangers that children in the stricken areas might be kidnapped. Furthermore, the same children will need counselling because of their traumas. Some people might suggest that putting them into the hands of unscrupulous counsellors is tantamount to kidnapping but it is reasonable to suppose that there will not be enough money or organization to set up hundreds and thousands of children’s couselling services.

The Indonesian and Malaysian governments have responded by saying that they will protect the orphans from potential kidnappers, which is very sensible. Undoubtedly, many children have died and many more have been left orphan, perhaps losing their entire families. It will take a little while to sort out the real situation.

Historical experience tells one that children usually get over traumatic experiences, particularly if they are not prolonged ones, better than adults. And even if they do not, it is reasonably well known that the best thing for them is to go back to as much of the family as can be found, rather than be looked after by government or international officials. Many of the areas hit by the tsunami still have functioning extended families. Before they let UNICEF in on the act, the governments in question may well decide to try and place orphaned children with distant aunts and uncles.

If UNICEF is really worried about traumatized children, it might like to take a look at the ones who have gone through extended and repeated horrific experiences in DR Congo. In particular, they might like to deal with those young girls who had been rounded up and raped by UN soldiers.

I could not help thinking about the Austrian born, American child psychiatrist, Bruno Bettelheim. Many of his theories about autism have been attacked and disproved. But he had also dealt with the subject of trauma in children.

Himself a survivor of Nazi concentration camps, he worked with children who had come out of them after the Second World War. These children had been far more extensively traumatized than the victims of the tsunami, though it may sound invidious to make comparisons. Bettelheim found that the most effective method was not endless analysis or discussion of what had happened but a sublimation through traditional fairy tales.

In his book The Uses of Enchantment Bettelheim analyzed many of the best known fairy tales and talked about the way he had used them on the children from the concentration camps, many of whom had lost their entire families having also witnessed horrors of the kind we cannot even imagine. Subsequently he used those tales with seriously disturbed adolescents in Chicago.

Alas, he himself never got rid of his demons. In 1990 he committed suicide on the anniversary of Anschluss and the Nazi take-over in Austria. But many of the children he had worked with survived and flourished. Is there not something to be learnt from that? The myths and tales of South-East Asia are intriguing and enchanting. But I doubt if self-important UNICEF officials or ideology-ridden counsellors know much about them.

Really, one does despair

2005-01-06T17:51:00.000Z

GQ Magazine, the leading lad mag, which, as it happens, is seriously infected with the anti-Bush bug, has conducted a survey on who are the most powerful men in Britain. Setting aside odd decisions like Wayne Rooney at number 14 (a good footballer but how powerful is the lad?), let us look at the top runners.

At the very top are Tony Blair and George W.Bush, who has, according to the magazine, “inveigled himself into British life like no other world leader”. Really? Have these people not heard of Commission President Barroso? Not a household name, perhaps (though his predecessor was, sort of) but with a great deal more power in Britain than Bush has, what with about seventy five per cent of our total legislation coming from Brussels and Parliament having no right to reject any of it, not to mention the many Regulations that do not even get there.

Number 3 is Alan Milburn, the former Health Secretary, present Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (an all-purpose title), who is expected to run the Labour elections campaign and, possibly, be Blair’s successor in the sometime future. (Milburn’s appointment did raise one or two questions. After all, he has been brought back into the Cabinet and given a good salary as a Minister to do party political work.)

Number 4 is Gordon Brown, who was top last year. I doubt if Gordy is all that upset by such an inadequate survey and its results.

The Daily Telegraph quotes the reasons for GQ’s elevation of President Bush in British life:

“He now has the power to control our troops in Iraq, change the course of our foreign policy and impact upon our policing and attitudes towards terrorism, for where Bush goes, Blair surely follows.”

Which planet do these people live?

Our troops in Iraq are controlled by our own MoD (and a right mess they make of things from time to time), though, clearly, in a coalition joint decisions are taken. Incidentally, the Hoon “reforms” that will change the whole course of British defence have little to do with the United States or President Bush and a great deal to do with the building of “European defence”.

Attitudes or no attitudes, policing and security policy in Britain is steadily becoming more integrated with the EU, what with the growing and changing nature of Europol and Eurojust, the European Arrest Warrant and other suchlike delightful matters. Has all of this passed GQ and its readers by?

Perhaps some of our readers would like to write to the editor of GQ and suggest that he or his staff took an occasional peek at the UKIP London Assembly blog.

Football is once again put at the EU's disposal

2005-01-05T15:37:00.000Z

Spain will be the first country to hold a referendum on the European Constitution on February 20. The vote is expected to be a resounding yes. Nobody can accuse the Spaniards of having any doubts about a system that provides the country with enormous funds and about which they, actually, know very little.

The government is a little worried about their ignorance. It seems 90 per cent have said that they know nothing about the Constitution. Why that worries the government is a mystery. Surely, the less people know about it, the more likely they are to vote yes.

In an effort to combat this deplorable (or admirable) ignorance the Spanish government has launched a concerted campaign to “sell” the Constitution. This exercise will be done mainly on TV by various celebrities, pop singers, sportsmen and other assorted luvvies. This will add a completely new dimension to the concept of ignorance being bliss.

Then there is football. There usually is. Apparently, every fan attending the Real Madrid match this week-end will be given a copy of the Constitution. What fascinating ideas that raises. Why Real Madrid only? Do other fans not vote or are they beyond the pale? Then again, will those who support the team’s opponents be given a copy of this wondrous document?

Will the footballers be expected to read it and chant various articles during their warm-up session and as they run onto the pitch? Is it, in fact, wise to hand a large group of football fans, a notoriously volatile group of people, such a heavy tome? What if they decide that the referee is as blind as a bat and should, therefore, be put out of his misery with a well-aimed 300 odd pages of the European Constitution?

Let us hope our own government will not think of anything quite so silly. Then again, maybe they should. After all, I cannot imagine a better way of alienating large sections of the population than insisting that they carry a heavy tome like the European Constitution to a football match, unless it is the prospect of listening to mindless participants of I am a celebrity… wittering away about the joys of further European integration.

Whom should we blame for fly-tipping?

2005-01-05T15:15:00.000Z

Today’s Evening Standard has a news story with some rather unpleasant pictures and an editorial about it. Must be a big story. Yes, it is. Our old friend fly-tipping. All round London people are dumping their unwanted rubbish, not knowing quite what to do with it.

Some councils are threatening fines; magistrates are threatening imprisonment but the problem just goes on and on. Brent Council is, according to the editorial, making recycling compulsory on pain of severe fines. Some things one can recycle, though we are still waiting for the evidence that all those bags of supposedly recyclable material collected by council workers are actually recycled. But what is one to do with old sofas, let alone fridges?

Oddly enough, there is no mention of the fact that the whole problem has been made considerable worse by several EU directives. As UKIP at the London Assembly has pointed out before, expanding the term hazardous waste to include all sorts of hitherto non-hazardous material while cutting down on the number of landfills (two separate directives and that is not even covering the problem of fridges, car batteries etc etc) is a policy that is likely to lead to disaster.

Disaster has come but the culprits are not named. Well, we shall name them: much of the blame has to rest for those wondrous commissars in Brussels who keep inflicting ever more rules on us, without once asking themselves how they are to be put into effect or whether they might not actually make the situation worse. The Great Glass Egg may be a bubble but it is as nothing compared to all those monstrous buildings in Brussels whose denizens never see even a glimpse of real life.

Is this the best they can do?

2005-01-04T22:49:00.000Z

We in UKIP at the London Assembly have on occasion been accused of being rather obsessive. It would appear that compared to some journalists and, indeed, officials of the European Commission’s London office, we are paragons of broad-mindedness.

There are times when the International Herald Tribune sees itself as the cheer leader for the European Union. They do not always get it right, frequently managing to muddle Europe and the EU and describing what Europeans do or do not do as being the achievement of the Union. Then again, a lot of the time they manage to talk sense.

Today they ran a very odd article, entitled Truth, or another media Euromyth? Yes, you guessed it: here was our old friend the eurosceptic British media producing those terrible myths about the EU.

First off was the Daily Mail, which blamed the EU and its rules for the shortage of Brazil nuts. To be fair to James Marsh, the press officer interviewed by Graham Bowley, the journalist, he was not too sure whether the article was accurate or not.

Then came all the others:

“Today it is Brazil nuts; on other days the EU is accused in Britain’s tabloid press of banning fake snow, rocking horses and even children’s playtime.”

The rocking horses, as I recall, were not so much banned but made difficult and expensive to produce and impossible to sell by various unnecessary health and safety rules. But why spoil a good story with facts?

The EU’s name is blackened by lies, though occasionally they are true, when it obviously has been acting on scientific evidence. All a bit muddled. But the most interesting question is: who cares? The subject of euromyths is trés passé. Few eurosceptics are interested in it, there being far more important issues to worry about.

Some years ago I was asked by a journalist to provide him with a few choice horror stories about EU lunacy. I offered the common fisheries policy. He displayed a remarkable lack of enthusiasm. Yet, that is the real monstrosity and it is not a myth.

Then there are other horrors: the fridge mountain, making proper waste disposal impossible, the rules and regulations imposed on electricians, the care homes that had to be shut down – the list goes on.

The notion that it is these pathetic little arguments about newspaper articles that the referendum vote will be about can exist only in the minds of eurocrats and their cheer leaders, who cannot quite believe that the electorate is intelligent enough to see what the main issues are: whether this country retains the last vestiges of its independence, starts to regain the rest of it and goes on to restore a liberal, constitutional, accountable democracy.

The European Union, too, is after bigger game: integration of defence and security, the creation of a common police force and defence force (whatever it is called at any given time); it persists in running a protectionist policy that, coupled with its aid policy, destroys whole communities. We can go on indefinitely. Euromyths? Pah. These do not even qualify as fairy tales. Why bother with them? Are there no bigger problems in the world to worry about?

Is this quite the time?

2005-01-03T14:24:00.000Z

One of Hizonner’s most publicized acts last year was a visit to Moscow, in order to investigate the possibilities of opening up an office to represent London or GLA or, simply, the Mayor’s office in the Russian capital. This would allegedly create more business links between London and Moscow and bring more Russian tourists to London.

Since London, as anyone who actually lives here knows, is already full of Russian visitors of various kinds (and I stress the variety), the latter seems unnecessary. As for the former, somehow I do not think that business relations depend all that much on the presence of Hizonner’s apparatchiks in Moscow. Businessmen are much more likely to look at what is going on in Russia in general. The words Yukos, imprisonment, Khodorkovsky, illegal auctions, Rosneft and Gazprom spring to mind.

The great friendship is to be sealed in a great Russian Winter Festival on January 15, presumably funded by the long-suffering taxpayers of London. It promises all “the romance and mystery of a Russian winter wonderland”, an unlikely proposition, since no London winter is ever as cold and snowy as the average Moscow one. Nor is the vodka as cheap.

Then there is rather dreamy talk of balalaikas (nobody in Russia actually listens to them any more), borsch (beetroot soup), bliny (yeasty panacakes) and piroshki (pies). All quite entertaining in its own way, but is this really the time to promote the image of some fantastic, unchanging, dreamy Russia?

The lack of realism does not matter. Festivals of this kind are rarely realistic, though it is a little disturbing that there is nothing new in the catalogue of delights. But should we not pay some attention to what is really going on in Russia?

Should not Londoners, so often exhorted to do all sorts of things by Hizonner, pay a little more attention to the growing control of the Russian media by the state? The fact that not only TV, the main newspapers but even small magazines and websites are being hounded out of existence unless they toe the party … woops, sorry … “Russian” line? The fact that journalists who refuse to do so are fired, attacked, imprisoned, murdered?

Should we not stop and worry about Putin’s blithe abolition of free elections both on the regional and the national level? Or the fact that teenage members of a rather small nationalist party have been arrested and imprisoned? Or that people who try to enquire too closely into various developments are imprisoned on trumped-up espionage charges? Or that a new law that is now going through the Duma will allow the government to refuse visas or deport any foreigner who “insults Russia, its culture or its leaders”?

Russia is the one country of the post-Communist world that is actually moving backwards in terms of freedom and democracy. Is this really the time for Hizonner the Mayor to become particularly friendly with the somewhat dubious Mayor Yury Luzhkov (whose wife, incidentally, is one of the richest of the new Russian rich)?

New Year wishes

2004-12-31T18:49:00.000Z

UKIP at London Assembly wishes all the blog's readers and supporters a very happy euro-free 2005 (except when you want to go to all those silly countries to have some nice food and bring back nice wine and cheap cigarettes).

We hope next year there will be many more of you and we promise to bring you many more stories, news items, interesting gossip and, even, the odd bit of analysis.

May the force be with us all.

Those ID cards again

2004-12-30T23:33:00.000Z

It is somehow assumed that the days between Christmas and the New Year, which have become an assumed holiday in this country, should be filled with joy and revelry, or, alternatively, peaceful contemplation of the past year and happy forecasts for the next one. Come to think of it, does anyone believe this?

Even without the horrific news from South-East Asia and the undoubted recriminations and misdirected funds that is the news to come, this is not the time to feel anything but depressed. I have always found it very sad that a country that has been the by-word of liberty in the past, a people who have proudly proclaimed the joys of individual liberty, should now equally proudly proclaim that Britain is the place where every single rule, however stupid and harmful, is obeyed implicitly. Whether that is true is irrelevant. The problem is that blind obedience has taken the place of freedom as a matter for self-congratulations.

That sad little threnody brings us to the whole subject of internal passports (a.k.a. ID cards). As it happens, the Wall Street Journal Europe on Tuesday of this week carried a long article about the problem of terrorism in Europe. Its main theme was not quite as new as the two authors, David Crawford and Keith Johnson thought: there is a serious problem in all the western European countries with a few people who have lived in them for two or three generations, who were born and brought up in them, and who should, therefore, feel their immediate loyalty to those countries, actually deciding to join various terrorist organizations.

We knew this when young Britons were found fighting with the Taleban in Afghanistan or among homicide bombers in the Palestine. The Dutch found this out when a young man of Moroccan descent, one who had never lived in Morocco, brutally murdered Theo van Gogh, the film director. The Spanish are learning to live with the fact (though they are still finding it hard to accept that they threw away an election) that the Madrid bombs were placed there by inhabitants of Spain who had formed themselves into terrorist groups and had links with Al-Quaeda before 9/11. Other terrorist groups, also mostly made up of second and third generation inhabitants of Spain have been arrested.

There are groups in France, in Belgium, in the Netherlands. In other words, in countries that already have ID cards. And, furthermore, all these young men would have had them. The idea that somehow, the introduction of ID cards in Britain would be an adequate substitute for intelligence work is being blown apart (if I may use what can sound as an unfortunate phrase in the circumstances) by the unravelling of the existing groups.

While we are on the subject, let us remember some of the other unnecessary measures being put into place by the EU: the operational Europol force, whose officers will be immune from ordinary rules and prosecutions and whose offices will have diplomatic protection; the single police college CEPOL, also subject to the same rules and privileges; Eurojust and probably a European Public Prosecutor, which will introduce different, Continental systems of judicial behaviour to Britain. There are other proposals, of which we shall write on this blog, all of them having been put into British law through secondary legislation, that is Statutory Instruments, without any debate or discussion.

In the end, two things will defeat terrorism and neither of them requires the sort of destruction of civil liberties that all these new structures propose: good old-fashioned intelligence, which can be exchanged between police forces through bilateral links or Interpol; and the attitude, which states firmly that yes, indeed, we are fighting a war against terrorism. But not against ordinary law-abiding citizens, whose lives will be made extremely difficult by internal passports. No terrorist act will be stopped by them.

Christmas service

2004-12-24T01:40:00.000Z

Frantic last minute Christmas preparations and the eventual celebrations mean that this service will be interrupted until Boxing Day. But do not despair, UKIP London Assembly blog will be back, covering politial issues, the fights in the Great Glass Egg, pronouncements by Hizonner the Mayor and the goings on within the group itself (the last three in the new year, when the Great Glass Egg will once again resound to the cut and thrust of ... errm ... discussions about how to divvy up the budget.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas to all our readers.

Luxembourg throws its weight around

2004-12-22T16:51:00.000Z

Hands up those who knew that the next EU Presidency is Luxembourg’s. Well, it is and its Prime Minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, is beginning to throw his weight around. And why should UKIP at the London Assembly be interested in it, with all the fights it is waging inside the Great Glass Egg? Well, as I have explained before, occasionally we do put our noses outside the ecologically sensitively air-conditioned (i.e. it doesn’t work) office. It is time to look at that rather peculiar institution of the European Union, its rotating presidency. (Incidentally, the idea of a rotating member state presidency was invented in Yugoslavia after the death of Tito. And what a success that turned out to be.)

The next six months should see an agreement on the 2007 – 2013 EU budget (during which period, incidentally, there will be national elections, European elections and a new Commission – none of that will have an effect on the budget, which, once agreed, rolls on).

Will it be agreed, though? And on what terms? As we know, the supposedly free-marketeer Commission President Barroso has called several times on the EU donor countries to raise their contribution to the EU budget, in order to enable the creation of new EU projects. Not one’s usual definition of a free-marketeer or liberal economic thinker, but let that pass.

Now we have M Juncker joining the chorus. As all incoming presidential leaders, he has made a statement about the next six months:

"If we don't arrive at an accord on the outlines by June 2005, it will be impossible to enact the programmes which should be available on January 1,2007."

That sounds a little alarmist, but he needs to be in order to whip the members into submission. The trouble is that it is not just an agreement he wants but an agreement on the terms he is outlining. These are not very popular with the biggest contributors, Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. They insist that their contribution should be 1 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI). The Commission and the incoming Presidency would like to raise the contribution to 1.14 per cent, in order, as AFP says:

“…to enact legislation for ambitious infrastructure projects and subsidies for the bloc's newest and relatively poorer members foreseen by the EU”.

The words cloth and coat and cutting come to mind. The eurozone countries are in economic trouble, with the two biggest, France and Germany, in greater trouble than the others. They need to concentrate on those long delayed and almost impossible reforms that will drag them out of the rut. Continuing economic weakness with an over-strong currency spells disaster.

While we are on the subject, whatever happened to the Lisbon process? It was meant to turn the European economy, whatever that might be, into the most efficient, knowledge-driven one by 2010. We are almost half-way there and nothing much has happened apart from an ever thicker mesh of regulations being spun by the giant spider in Brussels and, for entertainment, a large selection of scorecards that are meant to show entrepreneurial spirit.

In the circumstances, the idea of handing over more money to the EU for various projects, whose usefulness is doubtful and whose accountability is non-existent, tends to be greeted with scepticism by the donor countries.

M Juncker is not despondent. He has six months to find a compromise between the position of the donor countries (“Can’t pay, won’t pay”) and that of the Commission and Presidency (“The Don has a small proposition to make.”). Of course, if he does not succeed, he will be able to hand to mess on to his successor, Tony Blair. And just in case anyone thought his task was too simple, M Juncker has also announced that he intends to reform the Growth and Stability Pact. It is not stupid, he insists, non, non, non. But it could be made more intelligent.

We await the actual Luxembourg Presidency with some interest.

And the latest news inside the Great Glass Egg is that the Member Liaison Manager (a.k.a. Head of Secret Police) has returned from his bibulous lunch sans gossip, sans football, sans Christmas lights. No carols are being sung either. But yesterday there was a multicultural Nativity Play on the lowest level of the Egg, unnoticed by UKIP members as they were carousing upstairs.

Christmas truce in the trenches

2004-12-22T13:03:00.000Z

Some of our readers may recall a recent report about an unseemly war between the Conservative and the UKIP groups in the Great Glass Egg, separated as they are by a mere glass partition.

We are delighted to report that, in keeping with historic tradition, a Christmas truce has broken out in the trenches. The Conservative group took down their notice about leaving civilization and, in return, UKIP took down the two notices about entering a Brian Coleman-free zone and offering political asylum.

We think that this amazing display of good will is due entirely to the well-known diplomatic skills of the UKIP Member Liaison Manager (a.k.a. Head of Secret Police). As of now there has been no carol singing or coloured lights strung along the trenches but we await the outcome of what we suspect will be a fairly bibulous lunch attended by all the Member Liaison Managers (MLMs) and NCOs from the Secretariat.

There was a suggestion of a football game in no man’s land but nothing came of that, as the Conservatives demanded that, under the proportionality rules that they follow in discussion of the Assembly budget, they should have four and a half times as many players in their team.

Normal relations will, almost certainly, resume in the new year.

A troublesome bunch, these UKIP people

2004-12-21T17:19:00.000Z

Generally speaking they are known to be troublesome because of their awkward habit of telling the truth (mostly) and pointing out inconsistencies in other people’s stance. This tends to infuriate elected members of the Assembly, who are also rather anxious to show that they are incredibly important, even though it is hard to point to any specific achievement on their part.

The latest saga started a week or so ago when a round-robin e-mail was sent from the Assembly Secretariat, calling upon all members and staff of the Assembly to support the Chairman and Deputy Chairman in their commemoration of the Government ordained Holocaust Memorial Day.

At this stage, we shall let the London Evening Standard take up the story. The following piece appeared in Londoner’s Diary, in the earlier editions of the paper:

Stand off on ceremony

War has broken out in City Hall after plans were announced for a Holocaust Memorial ceremony in January. Members of the London Assembly, the 25-strong body charged with scrutinising the Mayor's policies, whipped themselves into a tizzy after UKIP researcher Dr Helen Szamuely dared to reply to the circular email.
"May I suggest that the Chair and Deputy Chair of the London Assembly also arrange for a public ceremony at some later date for a memorial to all the victims of
Communist systems?" she asked.
An extraordinarily vituperative exchange ensued with fellow Assembly Members. "I consider your reply totally inappropriate and I will raise the matter of your email with the chief executive," raged Brian Coleman, leader of the Assembly's Tories. Len Duvall, leader of the Labour members, accused Szamuely of being a holocaust denier. Bizarrely, it was left to UKIP Assembly leader Damian Hockney to provide a voice of reason. "If we cannot have a sensible debate can I suggest that we all stop now?"
At least we can rest assured they're justifying City Hall's £60 million annual running costs.

We shall pass over the suggestion that for the Dear Leader to provide a voice of reason is somehow bizarre.

It is interesting to speculate how the Evening Standard journalists first got hold of the story, which had unfolded in a series of internal e-mails. It had caused a great deal of agitations in the Great Glass Egg, but who passed it on to the outside world? Could it have been some politician, hoping to smear UKIP as holocaust deniers? Surely not. Would they do such a thing? Answers on the back of a postage stamp, please.

However, the journos on Londoner’s Diary sensed a good story and asked for the UKIP side of it. Having been sent the entire feverish exchange of memos, they decided that the story was, indeed, a good one, but not, perhaps, in the way their original informant had meant it.

Another challenge to the Conservative leader

2004-12-20T20:09:00.000Z

UKIP opposes identity cards (otherwise known as internal passports) as a matter of principle. They are not only useless and expensive but a serious and unwarranted breach of individual liberty; they change the relationship between the citizen and the state: instead of the state being at the disposal of its citizens, they become its servants.

At the London Assembly we have already made the point that our objections could be overcome if it were proved incontrovertibly that ID cards are essential, useful and indispensable in the fight against terror. However, we know that Britain has been fighting internal terrorists reasonably successfully for 30 years without the benefit or otherwise of internal passports.

As we have mentioned before, evidence given by a Metropolitan Police officer to the MPA stated clearly that ID cards were of no real use at all.

Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative Party, today published an article in which he explained why he was going to vote for ID cards, despite many misgivings and strongly expressed opposition in his own party. He mentioned airily that he had been told by police and security chiefs that these documents “can and will help” the fight against terrorism. In a press release this afternoon, UKIP at the London Assembly challenged Mr Howard to produce his evidence. As a lawyer, he ought to know that evidence is worthless, unless it is made clear.

Text of press release:

UKIP Challenges Howard on ID cards

The UK Independence Party at the London Assembly today challenged Michael Howard to produce the evidence from police and security chiefs who, he alleges, have told him that ID cards "can and will" help their efforts to protect people against
terrorist acts.

This contradicts the Metropolitan Police statement made to the London Assembly on 8th December. When asked by UKIP London Assembly Leader Damian Hockney: "Is there any evidence that compulsory identity cards would help protect London from a terrorist attack?" the Metropolitan Police representative produced no such evidence.

Damian Hockney said: "Extensive research by UKIP staff has not uncovered any data from anywhere in the world that supports Mr Howard's contention. If Mr Howard has any evidence from police and security chiefs, now must be the time to reveal it. Otherwise his assertion is worthless.

"UKIP is opposed to the introduction of compulsory ID cards as a matter of principle. If Mr Howard cannot produce his evidence he must retract and apologise for misleading the public."
-ends-

An interesting outside view of the European Constitution

2004-12-20T13:37:00.000Z

On the whole UKIP at the London Assembly is concerned, as our readers know, with events and developments in that august body. Occasionally, however, we put our noses outside the Great Glass Egg and look at what is going on in the world.

What, of course, is going on, apart from the gradual disappearance of human life in favour of Christmas preparations, is the European Constitution. With the probable general election in May of next year, Britain’s Presidency of the European Union from July 1 to December 31, 2005, the likely date, as we have already discussed it, for a referendum is March 2006.

The discussions are only just gearing up (or will be, as soon as the great Christmas Sleep is over) and it is interesting to see what is being said about that document in other parts of the world. Let us look at a recent American analysis.

The American commentator in this case is, in fact, a French citizen who has lived in the United States for thirty-three years. So, his views can be seen as well-meaning American. Jean-Loup Archawski is a retired businessman and a member of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s (FPRI) Study Group on America and the West.

He has produced an interesting though somewhat bemused analysis of the European Constitution, clearly attempting to explain the inexplicable. Mr Archawski can be described as both an insider – presumably his links with France are closer than the average American political analyst’s – and an outside commentator. After all, he does not live there. Also, he knows that his audience, that small part of the American public that is interested in European politics, is unlikely to find its way through the maze of it.

He makes the usual point that this is not a constitution as has been understood until now. A constitution ought to be a brief and precise definition of the various parts of the state, their relationship with each other and the relationship between the state and the individual. The European Constitution is not brief, seriously imprecise and goes far beyond the usual scope of such a document.

“The form of suggested governance is neither a confederation nor a federation. The document reads more like the by-laws of a very large corporation or a bureaucratic behemoth rather than like a constitution organizing the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.”

That is, in many ways, the point at issue. This is a behemoth, a leviathan; one that is not and cannot be, given its size and propensity to increase endlessly, a democratic, accountable, truly constitutional political system. Even in business terms this is out of date. Mergers do happen, of course, and the Commission is on the look-out for them, not wishing to see monopolies anywhere but at the heart of the project. But many seriously overgrown giant companies have found that they had to demerge to restore some kind of efficiency.

The paper comes to the conclusion that the Constitution is so convoluted and full of internal contradictions because of the nature of the negotiations that produced it. Mr Archawski echoes the “many people” (who are they, one wonders) who think that this Constitution has no chance at all of being ratified in the 25 states. Therefore, the most likely scenario, in his opinion, and the most attractive one is the reappearance of the document in a slimmed-down, clarified version. Something like the American Constitution, one assumes.

I think this is another one of those famous Tales of Porcine Aviation. It is extraordinary that, having grasped the basic problem about the EU, Mr Archawski can actually move on to that kind of an uninformed optimism.

The structure of the European Constitution, its size, detailed instructions and necessary vagueness about details is essential to the whole construct. Just as the EEC was never intended to be a free market and, thus, there is no point in suggesting we move back to it, so the European Union is not intended to be a carefully balanced federal structure with well defined government powers.

Its intention has always been to have as few definitions as possible – a very sensible course of action if you want to take over powers without anyone much noticing what you are doing. Its plan for expansion is ill-defined, partly because of an inability to put together a common foreign policy, there not being any common interests. Its structure is ill-defined, to allow more scope for future integration. And the last thing the authors of that wretched document wanted was an understanding either on the part of the member states or of individual citizens what their precise role and rights are.

If, for some reason, this Constitution is not adopted, the chances are there will be another committee that will tinker with a few details. The next document will not be any simpler or, if experience is anything to go by, shorter. Au contraire.

In the end, we have to come back to the most crucial question of all, one that Mr Achawski does not ask but UKIP at the London Assembly will most certainly do: what is the point of all this.

UKIP plays Marley to the Mayor's Scrooge

2004-12-17T16:43:00.000Z

We have already noted a certain lack of festivity around Oxford Street, which we put down entirely to Hizonner’s Olympic bid. Now one of our boys in the Assembly (one of the elected ones, who are superior to mere mortals) raised the subject of a similar Scrooge-like atmosphere around the Great Glass Egg. (Not that Hizonner would approve of Scrooge, who believed in private enterprise and as little redistribution of wealth as possible. Even in his reformed state he appeared to think that help should be given through private charity rather than municipal hand-outs.)

Nevertheless, Christmas cheer has arrived at the Great Glass Egg. There is a large Christmas tree in the lobby. There has been a call for presents to a children’s charity – almost like Scrooge in his reformed state, though he, I seem to remember took the turkey round himself, thus personalizing the gift.

I suppose Dickens might have approved the rather nannyish instruction of not sending any “violent toys” to the charities. Clearly, whoever came up with that knows very little about children. The little darlings do not need toys to have violent games. They can make a dolls’ tea party look like the Battle of Waterloo.

And as Tiny Tim said: “God bless us everyone!”

Swedes still oppose the euro (and are not too happy about the rest of it)

2004-12-15T18:01:00.000Z

Awkward customers the Swedes and have been so since the days of the great king Gustavus Adolphus. Having voted against the euro in a referendum in September 2003, they still maintain that they do not want to abandon the krone. And, indeed, why should they? After all, none of the terrible things that they have been threatened with, have materialized.

According to a survey conducted by Statistics Sweden, 49 per cent will vote no to the country joining the euro, were it conducted the day after the question was asked, 37 per cent would vote yes, and 14 per cent were undecided.

Euro-enthusiasts are trying to console themselves with the thought that the proportion of those saying no has gone down from the last survey, conducted in May. Then 51 per cent said no. On the other hand, the proportion of yes voters has gone down, as well, by one per cent. The undecided have gone up from 11 per cent. All of which reflects merely the fact that the Swedes know that there is no referendum coming on the euro and, therefore, they can afford the luxury of “not knowing” or not bothering to reply properly. (Even the civic-minded Scandinavians must get fed up with these endless polls and questionnaires.)

The Swedish government has decided not to have a referendum on the constitution. They know what they are doing. The same poll found that 43.5 percent had a positive view of the EU, compared to 33.6 percent who had a negative view and 22.8 percent who were undecided, before the details of the constitution were even known. A referendum after a dedicated campaign could turn out to be very unsatisfactory from the government’s point of view.

Tories grapple with the idea of principle

2004-12-14T17:15:00.000Z

The Conservative Party has come up with a wizard idea over internal passports, a.k.a. ID cards: they will support the idea in principle but pick holes in the legislation if they can. Principle? Principle? Wot dat as far as the Tories are concerned?

Do they believe in individual liberty or not? Answers on the back of postage stamps, please.

Of course, one can argue that in wartime or during any sort of a major emergency individual liberty has to be curtailed for the common good, if that common good can be discerned. As we have pointed out in a previous posting, the police have no particular notion of whether ID cards will be useful to prevent terrorist attacks or deal with the inevitably chaotic aftermath.

Last week Sir John Stevens announced that a Madrid-type attack on London had been stopped. Nobody pointed out the obvious: the potential attack was stopped as numerous IRA attacks had been stopped in the past, without ID cards. Spain, on the other hand, does have them. The Madrid attacks were not stopped and neither were the more recent ETA ones.

One must remember that it was the present leader of the Conservative Party, Michael Howard, who, in his days as Home Secretary, suggested that ID cards were necessary to prevent social security fraud. Now they appear to be necessary to deal with crime and terrorism. In fact, internal passports are the solution looking for a problem. So far there has not been a problem they could solve.

It seems that some members of the Shadow Cabinet have had “severe misgivings”, though, as ever, not severe enough to think of resignation, despite this being a very serious matter. Then again, am I being old-fashioned? Perhaps, matters of individual liberty no longer constitute serious political issues.

A spokesperson for Conservative Central Office said:

“During the course of the Bill, the Conservatives will continue to hold ministers to account over our five tests: the exact purpose of the scheme,whether it will meet those objectives, whether this Home Office is capable of delivering them, the cost-effectiveness of the scheme, and whether proper protection can be provided for privacy.”

Well yes, one could ask all of those questions and, even without asking them, most of us know the answers? Why, therefore, are the Tories not opposing this useless, expensive and authoritarian scheme? Errm, apparently, they are afraid of being seen as weak on law and order.

Well, we in UKIP at the London Assembly are not afraid of saying it: internal passports are a weapon of an authoritarian government against law-abiding citizens. They do not help in the fight against terrorism (have they helped in Russia?); they do not help in the fight against crime; they do not help in the fight against social security fraud. Why have them?

These people do not give up

2004-12-13T13:57:00.000Z

We have news of certain developments from Gerard Batten UKIP’s London MEP. Mr Batten sits on the Defence and Security Committee in the European Parliament. Although one would think this was an important topic, the committee sits once every two or three months. But then, presumably, there is not a great deal they can do apart from jaw-jaw. War-war, if it happens, will do so quite separately.

At the last meeting of the European Parliament Defence and Security Committee, the discussion was about an EU Defence White Paper, presented by an “independent task force”, that is the European Union Institute for Security Studies, based in Paris. So independent is this body that its existence was brought forth by a Council Joint Action and it “has the status of an autonomous agency that comes under the EU’s second ‘pillar’ – the Common Foreign and Security Policy”.

The Institute is very proud of the fact that it defends no particular national interest:

“Its aim is to help create a common European security culture, to enrich the strategic debate, and systematically to promote the interests of the Union.”

Those of us who would like to see a genuine debate on the future security of Europe and the West would say that this “independent” and “scholarly” institute starts with a certain view and looks for academic and political arguments to promote it, all using money from the European Commission.

The Committee that produced the White Paper comprised all sorts of experts on European security, none of which were in doubt on what the future should hold. But, just to prove its independence, the body was chaired by Nicole Gnesotto, Director of the European Union Institute for Security Studies (ISS-EU), who also presented the White Paper to the Committee. Further discussion was led by the Rapporteur, Jean-Yves Haine, who happens to be one of the Senior Research Fellows of the Institute.

According to Mr Batten, who sits on the Committee and, unlike many MEPs, seems to take his job seriously enough to listen to what is being said and to take notes, Mme Gnesotto announced that EU member states no longer had any political or ideological opposition to the ideas expressed in the White Paper (though she did not specify who had actually seen or discussed the document), only operational ones. These, she admitted were serious enough, to make putting the ideas in it into practice, rather difficult.

M Haine outlined five scenarios for possible EU military action, all of which seem to go beyond the old ill-defined Petersberg tasks:

1. Large scale peace support operations, the weakness here was the current inadequate troop levels in the EU.

2. High intensity crisis management, this requires rapid political decision making and a rapid deployment capability.

3. Traditional regional wars, e.g. the Gulf. The issues here were about armaments, deployment, locations of HQs and working with other, e.g. the USA.

4. Pre-emptive strikes, e.g. for countering Weapons of Mass Destruction. These operations require Special Forces and there was a problem with numbers.

5. Homeland defence (civil protection rather than military operations.

Interestingly enough, all five are the very actions and proposals that, when voiced by the United States, evoke shrieks of horror. Furthermore, none of them seem to have any direct relation to straightforward defence and security.

Even more interestingly, nothing has been said of this White Paper in the British media or in the British Parliament. Is there a reason for that? As the late lamented Bernard Levin used to say: I only ask because I want to know.

While the cat's away ...

2004-12-10T19:53:00.000Z

Dear Leader is visiting his family for the Christmas festivities, which, in his case start rather early. His people have decided to celebrate by opening a bottle of Kir and consuming various snacks.

It seems that there is some kind of psycho-hypnotic link between the UKIP office in the Glass Egg and the Dear Leader's other office. No sooner had the festivities begun but phone calls and e-mails poured in from the Dear Leader.

Two members of the team had to sit down and start putting together ideas for future policies. Luckily they had their glasses of bubbly to hand.

Referendum Bill may be postponed

2004-12-09T18:38:00.000Z

Business managers of both Houses of Parliament are worried that they will not have time to push through the EU Constitution Referendum Bill before the next election, still most likely to be in May.

They are anxious that the Conservatives (and, even more importantly, members of the House of Lords) will produce what they wryly call “a Maastricht scenario” that will drag out and take time away from other rather controversial measures such as the introduction of internal passports a.k.a. ID cards or the setting up of a Serious Organized Crime Police Force (dubbed the British FBI by those witty wags in the newspapers).

What the business managers or the usual channels, as they are sometimes described, do not mention is another fear, but one can almost hear it in their voices. The Maastricht debates in both Houses (and let us remember that with all his faults John Major did not guillotine what was indisputably a constitutional Bill) became a wasting disease. As the endless debates dragged on, the Conservative government bled slowly to death. This is not likely to happen to a government with a majority of the size this one has, but a wasting disease is not wanted just before a general election.

The likelihood is, therefore, that the Referendum Bill will be introduced immediately after the election, though it may well be published in January when we are also going to find out what the question will be and whether it will ask about the treaty or the constitution itself.

Lucy Powell of Britain in Europe is still insisting that there will be no messing about with the question. It will be simple and straightforward, just as the Prime Minister’s office is promising us.

“Opponents try and claim the public will be duped by the Government but by the time people go into the polling stations there will have been, hopefully, clear and well-run campaigns on the 'yes’ and ‘no’ sides. People will not make up their minds one way or another on the wording of the question.”

Those dastardly opponents.

The Vote – No campaign, capable of making a statement since this is really rather straightforward, is fussing over the difference between “a treaty to establish a European Constitution” or “European Constitution” tout court. Both would be technically correct.

It remains unclear when the actual Bill to amend the European Communities Act, that is to add the new treaty to British legislation (subject, for once, to a referendum vote) will be debated. Will that, too, be left till after the election? That could cause problems, as there will not be a great deal of time between that and the British Presidency of the EU. Surely, Tony Blair will not want a “Maastricht scenario” while he is wining and dining his colleagues from the other member states.

What is scrutiny about?

2004-12-08T19:08:00.000Z

The London Assembly exists to hold the Mayor of London to account and to scrutinize his doings. Well, so they say. It is, on the whole, rather difficult to scrutinize what Hizonner is up to as GLA has no mechanism whereby that can be done.

Once a month the Mayor comes to the Assembly, gives a report and answers a few questions. The time allocated to each group’s questions is strictly proportional and includes the replies. Should Hizonner wish to extend his reply to, say, question 1 by UKIP to the point where they have no time to ask question 2, well, he can do so.

Questions that are not asked because of lack of time get a written response, which is fine and dandy, except that you cannot put follow-up questions, particularly as the transcripts of the monthly MQT (Mayor’s Question Time) sessions are not written up for weeks afterwards, apparently, after a lot of toing and froing between the Assembly and the Mayor’s office. Parliament can produce Hansard transcripts of each day’s events, including that of committees, the following morning both for the website and as a hard copy. What is the problem with the London Assembly?

There are no other accepted mechanisms for questioning and finding out. UKIP at the London Assembly has been trying to find out details of the Mayor’s propaganda sheet The Londoner and have failed. Repeated requests for information about cost, distribution, expenses and so on, that ought to be in the public domain have been ignored. Nor have we been any luckier with the European Social Forum, an expensive and pointless extravaganza for various British and European NGOs and right-on political groupings that seems to have been paid for …. yes, you’ve guessed it, the long-suffering London taxpayer.

There are, of course, the committees. True to its stature as a virtual democratic body, rather like the European Parliament, the London Assembly transacts what business it does have in committees not in the chamber.

Ah yes, the committees. Well, there is the Budget Committee, which will meet on December 16 to have a preliminary discussion of a budget of almost £3 billion. This is not chicken feed and it is all the taxpayer’s money. Unfortunately, the long and complicated document that will be discussed does not get to the members till December 14, allowing 48 hours for the reading and inward digesting.

After the committee has had a preliminary discussion, it will go away, to have the various Christmas and New Year festivities and reassemble in January for another meeting on the budget, which will subsequently go to one of the monthly, two and a half hour long plenary sessions.

There is a snag in all this. (No, really?) The Assembly cannot, either at the committee stage or in the plenary, make any changes to the budget. The Budget Committee can cut back the money, if it thinks the whole shebang is becoming too expensive but cannot decide where the cuts should happen. Thus, UKIP can protest all it likes about the couple of million that goes into the financing of The Londoner or the £600,000 plus that goes to Hizonner’s outpost in Brussels, London House, but it cannot even put down a motion to reform these practices. It can suggest cut-backs of, let us say, £2 million in the budget but cannot go beyond that and specify where the cut-backs should happen. Neither can any of the other parties, or the Budget Committee or the London Assembly in plenary session.

That’s scrutiny for you.

It's official: the police do not know what ID cards are for

2004-12-08T17:13:00.000Z

During this morning’s Plenary Session of the London Assembly (attended by both our members – so no jibes please about people taking the money and not doing any work), the discussion was about plans for the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on London.

Since, apparently, none of the witnesses questioned will be in charge of any aspect of those plans, it seemed rather a waste of time but, one presumes that people who really are working on contingency plans are not going to be questioned about them half-way through their labours by not very knowledgeable politicos, eager to score points with the media.

Nevertheless, even though we say so ourselves, the most interesting question was asked by Damian Hockney, leader of the UKIP group in the Assembly. In fact, that was the one question the business managers for the plenary session were worried about as it might have political implications. Actually, they seem rather worried about Mr Hockney’s activities. UKIP is beginning to be known as the group that is likely to ask difficult to answer questions. Some might argue that this is precisely what members of an elected assembly are for, but it seems that the idea is rather novel and radical in the Glass Egg.

Mr Hockney asked Commander Mick Messinger of the Metropolitan Police (or MPS, as they like to be called in this age of cuddly abbreviations) whether, in his opinion, internal passports, a.k.a. ID cards were of any use in the prevention of terrorist attacks.

Commander Messinger did not seem to think that they would be of any real use, though he did think that there were certain benefits to these cards from the policing point of view. There were, also, certain disbenefits, he opined. He did not give any details of either.

It seems that these cards would be quite useful for identifying people (duh!), particularly those who had collapsed in the streets. As prior to a terrorist attack the number of people who collapse in the streets is not very large and are unlikely to be terrorists, this seems to be a very expensive way of dealing with a problem for which there are already ample provisions in the ambulance service.

One cannot help feeling that this is seriously unimaginative. After all, if we are talking about vulnerable people for whom ID cards (as our internal passports will be known) might be useful, what about those who had forgotten their keys? Can they use their cards to break into their homes? Not, presumably, if they have mortice or Banham locks. Could particularly absent-minded people use their ID cards to identify themselves to themselves? Will they remember to carry them? Perhaps, like evacuated children, they should have those cards tied to their coats.

Cars. Could they be used to open cars with keys locked inside? On present record the police would not notice anybody trying to break into a car using unauthorized tools, such as an ID card.

The one thing they cannot be used for is preventing any major or, even, minor terrorist attacks. Or so the police seems to think.

Picnic in the Chamber

2004-12-07T19:17:00.000Z

Not teddy bears exactly but the Dear Leader, as he still likes to be called, despite the disappearance of all of Kim-il Jong’s portraits in North Korea, and assorted British and German journalists.

It was St Nicholas’ Day and Miss Antoine, the group’s invaluable provender provider, has furnished mince pies and slices of stollen cake to keep everybody happy. Alas, the committee room the meeting was supposed to take place had not been cleaned or cleared after the previous meeting and the whole group had to move.

Where should they move to but the Assembly Chamber? Mindful of the regulations that say no eating or drinking on the seats, the group of journalists plus Dear Leader, decided to picnic at the centre.

As the discussion proceeded with the Dear Leader (Damian Hockney, since you ask) trying to persuade the German journalists that once Britain leaves the EU, Germany should follow and the old traditional alliance between those two countries should be revived (think Seven Years’ War and Napoleonic Wars), they realized that they were observed. The chamber is surrounded by glass and outside those walls a formal reception was going on.

Some criticism was expressed first by the security guards then by the head of catering at the London Assembly, who said that she had not had the heart to come and interfere with what looked like an extremely pleasant and comfortable picnic

Umbrella organization changes its name

2004-12-07T01:18:00.000Z

Ever since 1993 UKIP has belonged to an umbrella organization, the Anti-Maastricht Alliance, or AMA (which in turn is associated with various European umbrella organizations). The name is a tad out of date but it has been kept for fear of something worse coming our way.

I am glad to report that at a committee meeting yesterday the representatives of the various constituent organizations voted to change it to Alliance Against the European Constitution. It took us seven years to dither and twenty-five minutes to decide. I call that progress. Still, we can go forward into battle under a more or less recognizable banner.

Well, no, they still don't really know what they are talking about

2004-12-07T01:16:00.000Z

Occasionally UKIP at the London Assembly has to venture out into the big bad world and survey the many problems therein.

I have spent part of yesterday evening listening to Alex Hickman, Chief Executive of the Vote-No campaign (before he had to rush off in order to be present at the talk given by Marta Andreasen on how to reform the EU by making its accountancy system more transparent). Sadly, I have to report that neither he nor, apparently, the Vote-No campaign have a real understanding of the magnitude of the task or what the issues are.

Mr Hickman, who ran Business for Sterling while Gordon Brown was winning the fight for them, explained that the campaign has, in a way, gone back to its roots and is concentrating on business people and business organization. It is a little odd to think that business opinion will be of any value in the constitution referendum. We are not talking about the currency here or interest rates but about a whole raft of issues. As one of those will be the environment, having businesses line up on the no side might actually be quite useful for the yes camapaign.

It is the contention of the Vote-No campaign that it would be counterproductive to discuss the wider issues and all efforts should be concentrated on the constitution and on getting the no vote out. A perfectly reasonable argument, except for one thing – the constitution is about wider issues and these will come up in the discussion.

It seems that, although the famous or infamous “Europe Yes – Constitution No” cinema advert has gone out, no decision has been taken on what other slogans or messages might be put out. It will not be Europe Yes, he assured us, but EU reform yes. Not a catchy slogan and one that is calculated to introduce yet more confusion in the minds of the undecided at whom the entire campaign is aimed. After all the yes side will be saying that their shining new constitution is absolutely essential in order to reform the EU. Have we not already heard mutterings about people rejecting the reform constitution?

What worries the Vote – No campaign is that the government will use scare tactics. Actually, they are lining up positive arguments as well and the eurosceptic side ignores those at its peril. The government, said Mr Hickman, will tell people that voting no means being out of the EU. We must counteract that by never mentioning anything outside the constitution at all.

While some people may agree with that, many of us have seen the knots that the “I am for the EU/single market/previous treaties but against the euro/constitution” brigade ties itself into. Much easier to say well, yes, perhaps this will mean a completely different relationship with other countries in Europe and the world. Anything wrong with that? Like so many politicos, Mr Hickman and his colleagues underestimate people’s ability to understand straightforward ideas and see through humbug. For that is what they are producing: humbug.

Sadly, there is far too much emphasis on who will be taking part: businessmen, celebrities, politicians and far too little on what this is all about, that is Britain’s future. (Incidentally, I was rather surprised to hear that Mr Hickman considered Bob Geldorf’s involvement a huge success. Who on earth pays attention to that clapped out rock dancer and ridiculous aid groupie? Not the young, who think he is a wrinklie; not the middle aged, who think he is preposterous; not the old who have probably not heard of him.)

So what will be the Vote – No campaign talking about when it does go out beyond the London cinemas? Ahem, it seems that they have not decided yet. There will be focus groups and there will be opinion polls. They will talk about power going to Brussels and how much more the EU will cost after the constitution. What will they say when people talk of all the power that has already gone to Brussels and the cost without the constitution? Not disclosed. And, of course, they will talk about the EU taking over matters of criminal justice and asylum. Unfortunately, most of this is going through, constitution or no constitution with Tampere II being adopted.

Curiously enough, it has not occurred to those “bright” boys that virtually announcing yourself to be the No campaign does not make it so. They are merely doing their best to split the eurosceptic movement. They may not succeed.

Breakfast at BMAC - high jinks at City Hall

2004-12-04T01:23:00.000Z

Our Dear Leader was, as usual, rushing to get to one of his committees onTuesday, and PA Miss Antoine absolutely insisted he did not forgo his breakfast. So down trotted Damian to this televised committee, tray in hand with coffee percolator, croissants, assorted pastries, milk jug and sugar in spoon.

Gales of laughter as he staggered into Committee Room 1 under the load, and apologised saying plaintively: "I had to bring this, as Miss A insisted I must eat something".

Then he achieved the usual starting point for ten to any meeting by voting for something opposed by the Tories (these days a must). After that things went as normal: the ebullient and forthright Tory chair of the committee Brian Coleman shouted "Do you know what you're doing Damian?", provoking abarracking from all others.

Our Dear Leader smiled benevolently and munched away at his pain aubchocolat, thus proving that he does not oppose all things French. By the end of the meeting, fully stuffed with cakes and pastries and, therefore, in a friendly mood, he decided upon an alliance with the Tories for a final end flourish - a vote to ask the Mayor to cancel the Londoner propaganda sheet, thus annoying everyone else in the room!

Sounds like UKIP at the London Assembly is getting the balance right...

Could this happen in Britain?

2004-12-04T00:15:00.000Z

There have been many changes in President Bush’s cabinet, few particularly surprising. It will be the most diverse cabinet so far, with the first black female Secretary of State and at least two Hispanic members in high positions, one the son of Cuban refugees. The latest announcement is the appointment of former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik to head the U.S. homeland security department.

Could this happen here? Could a former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police be put in charge of homeland security? Well, there is the problem that we do not have true separation of powers and, thus, our ministers have to be members of Parliament, a system that has taken its toll on both the legislative and executive wing of government.

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Blair is given to making extra-curricular appointments of various “tsars” that have uniformly failed to deal with the problems they were assigned. Incidentally, why a “tsar”? Its autocratic connotations have never made the word popular in this country and, furthermore, a large number of them came to a no-good end. The last tsar was massacred with his entire family. All in all, not an auspicious title.

Still, there is no intrinsic reason why a former Commissioner should not become “security tsar”, perhaps to tell the sceptical populace that inernal passports, a.k.a. ID cards are terribly useful and not at all destructive of individual freedom.

There is, of course, another problem. New York’s finest are really rather popular with most people in that city, which has become safe and easy to live in. In London, on the other hand, we are moving in the other direction. The place is becoming ever less safe while the police is becoming ever less popular. Being seen as inefficient and too rough is a lethal combination. Then there is the undiscussed problem of Europol and its various rights, privileges and immunities. All in all, I don’t think any former Commissioner is going to rise as high as Bernard Kerik.

UKIP makes its presence felt again

2004-12-03T01:17:00.000Z

The Environment Committee of the London Assembly publishes its first report of the new session today. This deals with the disposal of hazardous waste and the difficulties of implementing the many rules, all of which emanate from the European Union.

Among the portentous comments on the need for transnational regulations to deal with hazardous waste and the terrible inability of the British government to implement the wonderfully wise directives produced by the EU, there are a few low-key but sane comments from UKIP.

In the first place, Peter Hulme-Cross, UKIP representative on the committee, has pointed out that far from solving the problem the EU has magnified it, by producing contradictory directives. On the one hand, the scope of what is hazardous waste has been widened, on the other hand, the number of landfills that can take hazardous waste has been drastically reduced. In a country that has traditionally relied on landfills, like the UK, the result has been total chaos and increased fly-tipping.

It is true that the government and the various agencies have been slow in implementing the directives, a course of action that is, let us remember, legal obligation, but the reason for this is not hard to find. In order to implement EU directives and regulations swiftly and relatively efficiently (not an easy task if they make little sense and create a confusing situation) the government would have to admit to two things: the fact that the flood of EU legislation has not abated but actually intensified and the other, even more difficult fact that no British government or British parliament can refuse to implement whatever comes out of Brussels.

Admitting these things hurts. It hurts very much. So they prefer not to do it and hope that those pesky directives and regulations will simply go away. Alas, they never do.

In an unusual development, an annex was added to the report, also on UKIP’s insistence. In this a clear account is given on how EU legislation is initiated, discussed and agreed on behind closed doors in Brussels. The role of the Commission and the Council of Ministers is examined briefly and the British Parliament’s lack of power over any legislation that is EU competence explained.

Information and clarification of these vital matters is of utmost importance. UKIP at the London Assembly has set that as one of its most important tasks.

Our boys never sleep (we think)

2004-12-01T15:06:00.000Z

Our readers will be glad to know that the UKIP London Assembly members are devoted enough to their duties to spend more than the accepted office hours on them. For instance, Peter Hulme-Cross will be spending his Saturday on a very important mission.

As member of the London Assembly committee on Safer London (and in case you are wondering it has nothing to do with the fact that people get knifed in their own homes by burglars), he will be attending an all-day conference on prostitution, called by the English Collective of Prostitutes. It is supported by various other Collectives of Prostitutes from other countries but, so far, as we can tell, not the Scottish, Welsh or Northern Ireland Collective. Why not, we ask. And should the Collective not be regionalized according to EU rules?

The European Parliament debates ....

2004-11-30T18:22:00.000Z

Well, after a fashion. The European Parliament’s work is done in committees behind closed doors and what comes to the plenary sessions is either the amendments already passed by those committees or entirely irrelevant matters that they can do nothing about.

The year’s penultimate plenary is coming up tomorrow and the day after. In it the MEPs, who cost us over £1 million a year, will debate the EU Budget that the Court of Auditors has refused to pass yet again. The Court has not passed a single one of the budgets since its existence, because of the proportion of the money that is unaccounted for.

The European Parliament, on the other hand, is not bothered by such minor matters. Well, they cannot account for their expenses – why should they care about anyone else's? Each of the unsatisfactory budgets has been passed.

Then there will be a debate on the safer use of the internet, a.k.a. attempted censorship. Luckily for those of us who believe in freedom and do not want to have our lives even more trammelled than they are already, the internet is almost impossible to control. You can demand that existing websites apply this rule, that rule, another rule, whatever you like, a new one will spring up immediately. As for the blogging movement, well, that has turned out to be the salvation of all those who are interested in politics but dissatisfied by the political establishment (and that includes the mainstream media).

Then there will be a debate on the situation in Ukraine about which the EU can do absolutely nothing. Even Solana’s attempt to negotiate a deal between the various parties, which he tried to do in defiance of a Ukrainian request, has failed. The Ukrainians are not listening to the soi-disant foreign minister of Europe. Why should they listen to the European Parliament that has now say in anything at all, and does not represent anyone to speak of?

Never mind. There is one subject that they will debate with great enthusiasm: football in the EU. Can’t wait for the transcript. Oh woops, they do not publish full transcripts. Well, can’t wait for some of the accounts of that momentous debate. Should the London Assembly have a debate on football? Or snowboarding? Just a thought.

Ah yes, the Greeks are in trouble again

2004-11-29T21:12:00.000Z

This Wednesday the EU Commission will begin former infringement proceedings against the Greek government. Well, to be quite precise, it will send a formal letter (delivered by the god Hermes, perchance?) to the Greek government, castigating it for presenting incorrect statistics in several annual budgets.

The Greek government will then have two months to reply but one can guess that part of the response will be: wasn’t us, guv, it was the other lot, the nasty socialist one. Which, of course, it was.

The previous Greek government, as we have mentioned before, had a curious way with the budget, forgetting to add certain items such as defence procurement. And, of course, there was that rather large item, the Olympic Games, that have now been billed as the most expensive ever. Not very helpful when you are told that you must keep within the designated deficit rule, 3 per cent of GDP.

At the moment the Greek government is promising to scrape back the deficit from the present 5.3 per cent to 2.8 per cent in the next year without, one assumes, any more EU hand-outs in the shape of various structural funds. And the porcine air force will take to the skies.

However, it does not matter what happens. Nobody has ever ended up in court because of breaking through the permitted deficit barrier or for lying about statistics in order to end up in the euro. As long as France and Germany roam free with ever higher deficits, it is unlikely that little Greece will be punished. Of course, we could give them the Olympic Games for ever and ever. That’ll learn ‘em.

Forty per cent Mr Brown?

2004-11-29T01:33:00.000Z

Gordon Brown has been giving his own version of what he thinks Britain should be like, to Newsweek. This is generally seen as another attempt on the Chancellor’s part to bid for the Labour Party’s leadership and, as it seems at the moment, the premiership. Why he should choose to do so in an American weekly, is a mystery. Perhaps, he did not think anyone will publish him here.

Well, it is a little difficult to take his comments seriously:

"It is by rediscovering our intrinsic strengths - our British values that include our belief in liberty, enterprise and civic duty," Brown said.

"And by celebrating them and by making investment in skills, science and enterprise our priority that the coming decade can be Britain's decade - making Britain one of the new global economy's greatest success stories."

This from a Chancellor, who is universally acknowledged as the man who has piled more taxes on British business than any other in recent history, makes rather queasy reading.

It gets worse:

"The long-term choice we must make is to learn from America, rigorously introduce the right incentives and rewards for risk, and make the changes in the school curriculum and in our colleges and universities necessary to create a revolution in attitudes toward enterprise and wealth creation," he added.

True enough but are we going to get to the interesting fact that most of the legislation that holds back British business is merely implemented by the British parliament, by the civil service and by those wretched agencies?

Ah yes, here it comes:

"And with 40 percent of new regulation coming from Europe, we will continue to resist inflexible barriers to job creation from whatever source they arise," Brown said.

Forty per cent Mr Brown? FORTY PER CENT? We always knew your maths was shaky but this is ridiculous. It is now acknowledged by all (except maybe governmental websites) that something like 70 to 80 per cent of all legislation and regulation comes from the EU and none of it can be rejected by any branch of the British government. One wonders why Mr Brown is so anxious to become Prime Minister.

Blame the Bid

2004-11-28T10:13:00.000Z

It is coming up to December and various London streets ought to be illuminated with bright, sparkly, often naff but sometimes tasteful lights. In the West End, Regent Street has all the Christmas glitz: blue and red with sparkling icicles, Santas, reindeer and the characters from The Incredibles.

Bond Street is its usual elegant, restrained, tasteful Christmas self. But whatever happened to Oxford Street?

Instead of gay and glitzy lights it is lined with extraordinarily ugly arches that look like the whole street is covered with building works and the sky above it is strafed with laser beams as if they were searching for enemy aircraft.

The beams vary in colour: white, red, green, silver, purple and occasionally go into techno mode. The one thing they are not is festive. The other thing they are not is attractive.

I blame the bid and not just because UKIP in the London Assembly seems to be obsessed with the subject.

This ghastly set-up appeared just before the final bid went in for the 2012 Olympic Games and was described as part of that highly expensive but so far not very accurately accounted for exercise. “Hisonner” the Mayor seems to have persuaded the Oxford Street traders’ organization to produce those arches and those beams, though, if truth be told, they will all suffer if London does get the Games, through higher taxes and lost revenue as people stay away in droves.

Of course, even Oxford Street cannot pay for two lots of lights in one year. At least, we assume they are paying for this monstosity. So, the Back the Bid lights have had to serve as Christmas decoration.

Not that anyone has noticed that this is Christmas. People are wondering around, scratching their heads, pointing to the beams, puzzled at the whole thing. At either end of Oxford Street there are notices welcoming visitors to the Oxford Street lights. As I recall, in past years one knew the lights were there without any notices.

Roll on the day we lose the bid to some other, better organized city, like Paris. We can go back to real life, the way it is lived by Londoners.

Dear Leader goes to pot?

2004-11-25T21:19:00.000Z

Well who'd have thought it? Our Dear Leader in the London Assembly, Damian Hockney, (as we like to call him, though with Kim Jong-Il’s portraits disappearing in North Korea, he is getting a little worried) actually got a round of applause at the Metropolitan Police Authority for his sensible intervention over the new cannabis rules. He called them “absurd”.

"The government puts out propaganda trying to be all things to all people and then gives young people the impression cannabis is legal…and is now claiming a great success because arrest and stop rates are 30 per cent up. All we've managed to do is alienate more young people and encourage them to think cannabis is legal."

Indeed so strong was the response (in almost North Korean style) that the Chair eventually called and halt and said he was throwing the report out…

What our Dear Leader said as well was that young people were becoming angry with the police who, they thought, were trying to confiscate their stash for some inexplicable reason:

"You can't have that, copper - it's legal now," appears to be the new cry of the 19-year-old.

As it happens, UKIP is not throwing itself straight in on the "legalise it now" route, but is almost alone in saying that the existing laws do not work and the supposed changes have merely muddied the waters. As a consequence we may have to start facing up to an option which many of us do not feel comfortable with.

Unfair, cries the Chairman of the Electoral Commission

2004-11-25T19:12:00.000Z

Sam Younger, Chairman of the Electoral Commission, who, let’s face it, made some very strange decisions during the campaign in the North-East, has come out and said it: the spending rules are unfair.

Speaking to an academic seminar yesterday, he gave his opinion that ministers should be banned from promoting the EU Constitution for at least 10 weeks before the actual vote, bearing in mind that they do so, using taxpayers’ money. Well, of course, everything ministers do uses taxpayers’ money, so, perhaps they ought to call an occasional 10 week moratorium on all their activity? Just joking.

The rules on spending in the last 10 weeks, as stated in the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act, are reasonably straightforward:

The main group (decided according to rules devised by the Electoral Commission and incomprehensible to everyone else, though that is not how the Act puts it) can spend up to a total of £5 million.

Other organizations that are registered as “permitted participants” can spend up to £500,000 each. Whether the European Commission comes under this or some other, unspecified, category is not clear.

However, the Government can spend an unlimited amount of the above mentioned taxpayers’ money on pro-constitution leaflets and advertising until the last 28 days of the campaign.

Mr Younger said that his Commission has already complained about this anomaly but nothing has been done so far.

A Bill to pave the way to a referendum on the EU Constitution is expected to be published in the next few weeks, though the referendum is likely to be next spring. The government’s timing is constrained by the fact that from July 1 to December 31 2005 the UK will have the rotating EU presidency. Therefore, those six months are out as far as the General Election or the Constitutional referendum are concerned. They have to come either side of what is likely to be a fraught presidency in any case.

Mr Blair has until June 2006 to call and election and until end of that year to call the referendum. If, as expected he will go to the country this spring, incidentally incinerating most of the proposed legislation, March 2006, ten weeks or so after the expiry of the presidency, is more or less the earliest time he can have the referendum

Useful historical quotes - 1

2004-11-25T13:30:00.000Z

As we face up to a raft of proposed legislation that intends to give more power to authoritarian politicians and officials, whether in Brussels and Whitehall, pleading internal and external security, the break-down of law and order (and who brought that about, one wonders), it may be worth recalling what William Pitt the Younger said on November 18, 1783, in his response to the East India Bill, put together by Edmund Buke and introduced by Charles James Fox on behalf of the Fox-North coalition:
“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves.”
Who says we have learnt nothing from history?

Concentrating on the real enemy

2004-11-24T15:30:00.000Z

An unseemly war has broken out between the UKIP and the Conservative groups in the London Assembly. The two leaders, our own Damian Hockney and the Conservatives’ Brian Coleman, who is also Chairman of the London Assembly and as such wears important insignia of rank and tries to control any attempt at a free discussion during plenary meetings and Mayor’s Question Time, do not see eye to eye.

As we know from previous postings, Mr Hockney does not stand up to that treatment well. He has insisted on raising awkward subjects like why does the Mayor’s office not answer perfectly reasonable requests. Mr Coleman has snarled imprecations.

What makes it worse that the two groups occupy adjoining segments of the glass egg that passes for the Greater London Authority building, situated, conveniently, across the river from the Tower of London.

A notice appeared on the Tory side of the glass partition between the two, which informed members and visitors to that group that on entering the UKIP section they “were leaving civilization”. A somewhat odd attitude for the Conservative Party to take but all is fair in love and war and, above all, local politics.

The UKIP wags reacted fast. Another notice went up, on the UKIP side but facing the Conservatives:

“And entering a Brian Coleman-free zone.”

A further notice was put up the following day, also on the UKIP side, also facing the Conservatives:

“Political asylum applicants welcome.”

Strangely, the Conservative leader, Brian Coleman, spent half an hour or so closeted with the UKIP leader this morning. Could he be applying for political asylum?

UKIP's own Ukraine

2004-11-24T13:16:00.000Z

Turmoil in Ukraine, turmoil in UKIP. So what else is new, you might ask. As the Ukrainian elections descend into chaos and worse with both candidates claiming the presidency; as Russia and the West line up snarling at each other across the struggling country; so UKIP once again becomes embroiled in a leadership tussle.

We have already had the questionable telephone poll, conducted by people close to the incumbent leader, Roger Knapman, which proved beyond any doubt that he was the most popular leader UKIP has at the moment. When challenged on methodology, those conducting the poll admitted that it did not live up to acceptable OSCE standards. (Then again, few things do and nothing very much gets done about that. So, what is the point of the OSCE? Well, that is another story.)

In one corner we have the incumbent leader, Roger Knapman and his trusty friend, lieutenant and possible successor, Nigel Farage. In the other corner there is the opposition leader, the man who wants to reform the party and to lead it into the mainstream of British politics: former Labour MP, TV personality Robert Kilroy-Silk, if not the most popular then certainly the best known member of the party.

There are dark mutterings of disloyal plots and rigged elections; demands for emergency meetings and assurances that more than 109 branch chairmen support the Kremlin … woops, sorry, the UKIP leadership.

Where does UKIP in the London Assembly stand on this engrossing subject? The leader of the group, Damian Hockney has spoken:

“I believe a leadership contest is now inevitable. I will work with anyone who is elected, but I will be voting for Mr Kilroy-Silk.”

Mr Yushchenko could not have put it better himself.

Factsheet #1 - EU legislation and how it affects us all

2004-11-23T14:46:00.000Z

Since the European Communities Act of 1972 the whole constitutional situation in the United Kingdom has changed, though there is a pretence among many of the subject’s students that this is not so. They continue discussing the British Constitution and the European Union (formerly known as European Community, before that the European Economic Community) separately. In the same way, the British media still insists on discussing the EU under the heading of foreign affairs.

According to the European Communities Act (and though the Act has been amended, this has always stayed in place) Article 2(2), European legislation is superior to British. Therefore, the British Parliament cannot reject or even amend the legislation as it comes. The only thing that can be done is to try to influence amendments at various earlier stages as the European legislation goes through the various procedures in Brussels (or Strasbourg).

According to legal opinion, implied repeal does not apply to any legislation that is brought in under the European Communities Act but its provisions exist by will of Parliament. At present, therefore, Parliament can repeal the superiority of EU legislation. That will change if the proposed EU Constitution is adopted.

EU legislation follows a different pattern from the British one. Instead of moving from the particular to the general, it moves from the general to the particular. Its starting point is the treaties signed at various times. It then moves through Framework Plans that, as one would expect, delineate the general framework of legislation that intends to achieve certain very general aims. One of those going through the works at the moment is the Financial Services Plan that has already produced a great deal of legislation that will affect the City (usually adversely) and will produce more.

The EU’s idea of governance is managerial rather than political. It lays down plans for legislation, for the amendment of legislation or, (a favourite one, this) consolidation of legislation for ten, fifteen, twenty years. In that period elections may or may not happen, governments may or may not change, the membership of the European Parliament may or may not alter. All that is irrelevant to the legislative plans, which grind on relentlessly.

A newly elected European Parliament proceeds to work on directives that have been in the pipeline for years. Who the new members are remains a secondary issue. Should the Parliament and the Council of Minister disagree in the co-decision process, it is the Commission that mediates and decides on the final version.

The other aspect of the managerial process of governance is the Annual Commission Work Plan. Its name says it all. The Commission outlines its intentions for the year and proceeds to follow it up. Anything left over, will be picked up in the following year’s plan.

Given those two frameworks, the actual members of the Commission and even the much more powerful Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) are irrelevant. The general rejoicing at the supposedly free-trade Barroso Commission that has finally been anointed by the European Parliament though not, of course, by the member states, was misguided.

Few British politicians understand the long-term legislative process. Nor, to be fair, could they do much about it, even if they did understand, as their own term is bound by those inconvenient things called elections. More seriously, they do not realize the importance of this as far as Britain is concerned. They assume that legislation begins at the point when a directive or a regulation is drafted or, even, in more extreme cases, when it is presented to the national parliaments. At that point they start consultations and generally raise the alarm but it is too late, as they had signed up, without realizing so, to the process that was to produce the legislation they dislike.

Forms of EU legislation

1. Directives – proposed by the Commission after a long process of discussion and consultation and passed by the Council of Ministers or, in the cases of co-decision by the Council and the European Parliament. In theory, these have to be passed by national legislatures. In fact, few of them require primary legislation and they are, therefore, put into law by Orders in Council (see above). However, as Parliament has no right to reject EU legislation (on pain of the country being taken to the ECJ and/or fined) the process means little in reality.

2. Regulations – by far the most favoured way of passing legislation, proposed by the Commission and passed by the Council of Ministers, by the Council and the European Parliament or by the Commission itself. These are directly applicable from the day they are signed or the day specified in the text. Details of implementation are left to member states but these documents are ever more detailed and there is little lee-way. In fact, what the British regulations do, whether put together by a Ministry or an Agency, such as the Food Standards Agency or the Environment Agency, is to bring previous British legislation in line with the EU one. Little else is left to do.

3. Decisions – in theory non-binding, except for the member states that they are directed at, in practice used as an additional form of EU regulation, with British ministries and agencies adjusting the existing regulatory structure to bring it into line with the new one.

No wonder our MPs have spent so much time on hunting with dogs. There are not many other subjects on which they can legislate without any interference from higher powers. As for interference by the people - well what a quaint, old-fashioned notion.

London isolated?

2004-11-23T01:03:00.000Z

Apologies to all our readers who were hoping for another corruscating piece or three. Our excuse is that we have been working on briefing papers and fact sheets, which, space permitting, we shall publish here. But, please do not worry: we shall also have entertaining stories about the goings on in the London Assembly.

The coming referendum

2004-11-21T18:22:00.000Z

This blog has already commented on the North-East referendum and, indeed, both the UKIP Members of the Assembly have managed to raise the subject on the floor of that august institution. The only addition we should like to make is to publicize, yet again, Neil Herron’s achievement in putting together and leading an immensely effective people’s movement against the North-East Assembly and in continuing with his work despite provocations from the johnny-come-lately, mostly ineffective NESNO, who is now trying to grab the credit and the glory.

That little outburst is, in fact, relevant to the rest of the posting. Though UKIP in the London Assembly is always happy to fight other groups and the Mayor over various issues, we do occasionally turn our attention to the greater struggle out there.

The next looming battle will be the referendum, probably in the spring of 2006. And, what do you know? A self-appointed Vote-No campaign has announced its existence and outlined its strategy, which is not dissimilar to that of NESNO. Just as the latter seemed to object to the North-East Assembly because it had no real power or lots of money, so Vote-No tells us that it is completely in favour of the EU, the single market, the whole shebang, but dislikes the constitution.

Its slogan is No to the Constitution – Yes to Europe. Well, well. I wonder which wizz-kid thought of that one. What it really means, as somebody commented, is No to the Constitution – No to Democracy. Oh no, no, no, say the great thinkers and teenage scribblers of Vote-No, we intend to win the referendum, change the government of this country (well, they think Blair might resign if there is a no vote but have not really worked out what might happen after that) and, together with other organizations in other countries, go to Brussels and demand reforms in the European Union to make “Europe”, as they so quaintly refer to the project, more democratic.

The strategy, as unrolled by their political wonks, is as follows: think of a divisive slogan and demand that everyone line up behind them; assume that the government will not win a referendum because it has lost the support of middle England because of Iraq (only people who spend their days and nights in political organizations can think Iraq is more important than taxation, education, law and order, you name it); ignore the core supporters in favour of the waverers whom they will entice with the confused message of vote no in order to stay in the EU and reform it; win the referendum. Then all our problems will roll up into a little ball and disappear.

I don’t exactly know what Wellington or Monty would have said but I assume they may have noted that this “strategy” underestimates the enemy, alienates soldiers and supporters and is rather confused in its aims. At least, there is no proposal to invade Russia.

It will never do to assume that because the Yes campaign is in disarray, it will remain so. This is not just a question of money. They will have a very determined battle plan, part of which will be to pick holes in the bizarrely named “strategy” of Vote-No. The assumption that this campaign will be just like the No to the Euro one is singularly obtuse. The aim of that was to prevent the holding of a referendum. As long as there was no referendum, we could not go into the euro. The threat of the referendum was by way of a nuclear deterrent – you have one in order not to have to use it. And, let’s face it, the man who won that battle was Gordon Brown.

With the Constitution we do not have the same luxury. The referendum will happen whether we want it or not and Gordy is not going to be on our side. This is a hot war and we need to plan for it accordingly.

That being so, it is suicidal to produce a slogan that ensures a split in the eurosceptic camp. How many of us, though fully intending to vote no, will go out to explain to voters that we are against the constitution but think the rest of the EU is absolutely wonderful; well not exactly wonderful but jolly nice really, if we can change a few things? Not many, I suspect.

In any case, how do you explain to wavering and, probably, not well informed voters the difference between vote no to stay in the EU and reform it and vote yes to reform the EU? That is what the Yes campaign will be saying: we need this Constitution to reform the EU and make it more democratic and accountable. The result will be a lot of undecided voters who will remain undecided and stay at home. Goody-goody. Just what the doctor ordered.

Incidentally, I question the logic of cinema adverts in this country and, even more, the logic of running them with Bridget Jones II. Who pays attention to cinema ads? One is much more likely to try and miss them, or be doling out the chocolates and the popcorn. And why BJII? Does the self-appointed Vote-No campaign think that women, likely to be the majority of that film’s audience, are particularly dim in their understanding of real political issues? I find that rather insulting and if any of the campaign’s wonks would like to debate the matter with me, I am ready to oblige.

Besides, the way the electorate is moving the message of No to the Constitution – Yes to Europe is becoming a tad unfashionable. The recent elections have seen a steady haemorrhage of votes to UKIP with neither the Conservative Party nor the self-appointed Vote-No campaign taking due note of it. People are voting UKIP because they like the party’s message on the EU, not for any other reason.

The aims are stunningly confused. EU reform? What’s that? When the self-appointed Vote-No campaign says it wants a more democratic EU, what does it mean? Union-wide parties? Directly elected Commission? Less money to the regions? And why bother? Surely, in the absence of a European demos the best way of strengthening democracy is to take back power, then look at what is wrong with our system and try to change it. Why insist on reforming something that is not susceptible to reform, as the shenanigans around the new Commission, the one that was going to change and reform the EU, have proved?

Then again: How are those negotiations going to be conducted? Which of the many EU institutions will be instrumental in bringing about the reform? The European Council, another IGC, the Council of Ministers, the Commission, the European Parliament, the ECJ? Does the self-appointed Vote-No campaign know about these institutions and the difference in them? Does it realize that they are all committed to further integration and all attempts at even the slightest reform have failed because there is no way to democracy in an inherently undemocratic, unaccountable organization, as it was always intended to be?

Well, yes, I hear our readers exclaim impatiently, but what are you suggesting? Simple really. We have to win the referendum. That is a given. If we lose it, we have lost the war and may as well start thinking about running up the South Carolina flag. But, if we win it, we shall have won a battle. Possibly, it will be our Tobruk, possibly, not even that. For the enemy will retrench and come back with another constitution or another treaty, having tinkered a little at the edges.

While campaigning for a no vote, we must make it clear that this is not the end, the beginning of the end and, probably, not even the end of the beginning. The end has to be an independent, newly re-democratized United Kingdom and, if possible, a newly refashioned European structure of free, democratic states, living and working together. We must explain over and over again that life outside the EU and, indeed, without such a thing as an EU is not at all frightening and quite manageable.

We must draw attention to the horrors in the Constitution but, wherever and whenever possible, show the links with the rest of the EU structure.

Fear is going to be the Yes campaign’s main weapon. We do not counter that fear by saying that voting no will not drive us out of the EU. Unless, by the time of the referendum, we have managed to convince a large proportion of this country’s population that being outside and even without the EU is not a frightening prospect, we shall have failed, even if the vote is no.

More on our new government

2004-11-20T21:43:00.000Z

Some of our readers may well have been trying to follow the intricate saga of the French Commissioner, also Vice-President of the Commission, also responsible for Transport, which carries possibly the largest budget, and his previous conviction for fraud and presidential pardon. The story is analyzed in detail on the EUReferendum blog and need not be repeated here.

The gist of it is that Jacques Barrot was arraigned in December 1999 together with three other politicians, two of them former ministers, for misappropriating various funds and donations. All were convicted in February 2000 and given various sentences, which, in French law automatically disqualifies people from voting for five years and from holding public office for ten years.

However, even before they were arraigned, much less found guilty, the newly elected President Jacques Chirac, himself not unacquainted with various accusations of money going AWOL, had issued a general pardon. So, as soon as the miscreants were sentenced, they were pardoned. As part of that convenient arrangement the French media was forbidden to write about the case, the trial or the sentence.

So it came to pass that nobody, least of all the new Commission President Barroso knew anything about this unfortunate fall from grace, except, presumably the odd French politician with a long enough memory. How the whole saga came to UKIP’s notice remains a mystery but not, one assumes, for very long. Nor is it entirely clear whether the French media can open its collective mouth on the subject now, with the rest of Europe sniggering at the story.

Then there is the slightly more convoluted story of the Estonian Commissioner Siim Kallas, also Vice-President of the Commission, in charge of anti-fraud. With him the story is a little more complicated and, again, it is EUReferendum that has unravelled it. We know for certain that he was a high-powered Communist apparatchik, as, indeed, many of the Commissioners and MEPs from the newly elected members are. (So much for new blood reforming the EU. As some of us have predicted, having survived 50 years of communism and even laughed, the East Europeans will play the euro-game with greater skill than some of their western colleagues.)

Commissioner Kallas was involved in two fraud cases, once as a witness and once as the accused. The latter, according to the UKIP source, related to a financial scandal in 1993 when, while Kallas was at its head, the Bank of Estonia secretly transferred US $10million to a Swiss account as part of a dubious contract in which the Bank was supposed to receive highly improbable dividends from the oil trade.

As the beneficiaries of the $10 million did not bear any liabilities, Estonia lost all the money. Details of this scandal only seeped out three years later, and it took a further four years to put Mr Kallas in the dock, by which time he had long since left the Bank to found his own political party and had now become Minister of Finance.

Kallas was acquitted on all counts except one, thanks, in no small degree, to the skill of his defence lawyer and nothing at all to do with the fact that the latter was the then Minister of Justice’s partner in a legal firm. But Kallas was found guilty on one count: giving false information to the court. Eventually, this, too, was quashed. The prosecutor wanted to appeal, being sure of his case but was ordered to desist by his chief.

So Mr Kallas is in the clear and can now turn his attention to tackling fraud in the European Union.

President Barroso’s problems do not end there. He still has not seen the end of the Neelie Kroes saga. Nickel Neelie the Boardroom Lady was supposedly brought into the Commission because of her business experience and the attacks on her by MEPs have been interpreted as the corporatist mentality attacking the business one. There is something in that, but one must also admit that the lady must have realized that taking on the position of Competition Commissioner (which does not argue much for her interest in the free market) would clash with her many positions on many corporation boards.

It ought to be said also, at least for the record, that real life experience tells one that the over-regulation that Ms Kroes was supposedly going to oppose, is often driven by the sort of corporations she was involved with. For those interested, the full list of her positions was listed on EUReferendum in September. She has now been forced to release her grasp on all these positions but there are dark mutterings by Paul van Buitenen that she lied to the Parliamentary committee and he has evidence of it.

Then there is the Danish Commissioner, Mariann Fischer Boel, in charge of agriculture and, therefore, the CAP. And who better, as her husband owns rather a large farm, thus being the beneficiary of CAP subsidies to the tune of around €60,000 (c£42,000) a year. This, she assured the European Parliament, would not cause any clash of interest. She has also been accused of using government lawyers and advisers when filling in various forms to do with the Commissioner’s job, her income and her taxes.

The original Latvian Commissioner-designate had to leave because she is still under investigation for fraud in her home country. (Presumably, if she had already been tried, sentenced and pardoned, she could have stayed.) As she had been a friend and political crony of the then Prime Minister, Indulis Emsis, who had to resign rather precipitately just before the signing of the Constitution, there was nobody to speak up for her.

Still, we do know what annoys the European Parliament most: certain well-known philosophers and theologians expressing unfashionable but widely held views on sin and moral behaviour. Up with this they will not put.

Interestingly, the European Union has always proclaimed itself to be the bearer of European cultural ideas. One of these is the distinction, not present in other moral structures, between private and public. A sin does not have to be a crime and vice versa. The distinction escapes our rulers and governors in Brussels. Consequently, they do find it difficult to grasp the concepts of public money not being private and the even more complicated one of a clash of interests.

UKIP at the London Assembly will be watching developments carefully and reporting on more revelations.

Going from strength to strength in ridiculousness

2004-11-19T20:06:00.000Z

Really, something needs to be done about Lord Coe. He goes from one ridiculous statement to another. Take his speech at the unveiling (unveiling?) of London’s bid for the 2012 Olympics. Paraphrasing President Kennedy’s very straightforward words of duty and patriotism in his inaugural speech, Lord Coe said:

“We shouldn't ask what these Olympic Games can do for us, we should ask what they can do for our children.”

Well, I’ll tell you what they will do for our children. Saddle them with huge debts, that’s what. There are people in Montreal, who were not born when the Olympic Games took place but are still paying high taxes because of the debts incurred at the time. The same thing will happen with generations of Greeks, particularly inhabitants of Athens, as the 2004 Games have been the most expensive ever. It seems a little unlikely that the 2012 Games will miraculously become cheaper.

A most extraordinary line-up of celebs and wannabe celebs are promoting London’s bid. There is Lord Coe, then there is Ken Livingstone, ex-Leader of GLC, failed MP, failed journalist, present Mayor of London, Mrs Blair, the human rights lawyer married to the Prime Minister, who has also joined the fray to announce that the 2012 Games will be the best ever, if they come to London. Not otherwise? Who knows.

A sprinkling of luvvies appeared together with the various medal-winning sports personalities, who explained rather haltingly that bringing the Olympics to London was vital to the growth of sport in the city and among its children. Most of us think that retrieving the sports fields and playing games as part of the curriculum and outside it would do more for the children of London.

The luvvies included Dame Helen Mirren (natch), Jeremy Irons, Sir Roger Moore and sundry others. (No, since you ask, none of them performed any sporting feats.) David Beckham has also appeared to head the bid. At a rough guess, he is the twelfth person described as heading the bid. That gives it more heads than the average hydra had.

Tessa Jowell, Minister of Sport, Culture and whatever else John Prescott was not really interested in, called upon the media not to publish anything critical of the bid, as that might have negative effects on the decision-makers. So much for Freedom of Information, which comes into effect next week. We shall see whether the journalists will live up to Humbert Wolfe’s disdainful little verse:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God!) the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to.

In the meantime, it is left to UKIP in the London Assembly to remain the one voice of sanity on the subject.

Bring on the dancing girls

2004-11-19T15:22:00.000Z

I switch on ITN news and catch the end of an interview given by our Dear Leader in the London Assembly Damian Hockney talking to a reporter. "…And all they need is a dozen high kicking dancing girls," are the first words I hear him say, so I stay tuned in fascination.

Half an hour later it is repeated, so I watch it all this time.

And jolly entertaining it was too. Damian was asked about the Olympic bid and made clear that no-one on the Assembly had been consulted about it - "we were only elected to scrutiny these things," he said witheringly, "so of course we are going to be the last to be given any details." He then suggested if the Assembly simply had to be cheerleaders for the bid without any knowledge of the facts, then all the Assembly needed to function was "a few pom-poms, some ra-ra skirts and a dozen high-kicking dancing girls and put the rest of us on the Assembly out of our misery". Damian also indicated that he would not be doing that himself for the scrutiny process.

In a long interview by news standards, he made a number of very important points, and re-iterated that extraordinary moment at the Montreal Olympics in 1976 when the Mayor of Montreal said that the Olympics could no more lose money than a man give birth to a baby…and the subsequent losses were so great that Montreal has just confirmed that the people of the city will not finishing paying them until the end of the next financial year (2005-2006).

"Anyway," the Dear Leader concluded, "Welcome to Jacques Chirac on his visit to Britain, and e'll be delighted to know we re-iterate here our support for the Paris Olympics bid until and unless we are given the full financial parameters and a vote for the people of London on whether to get involved."

Referring to the Mayor's claim that the cost of the event would be that of a walnut whip a week for each council tax payer, Damian replied that if the Scottish Parliament and Dome were anything to go by, Londoners would be forking out a box of chocolates a week…and that in any event

"most of us would prefer a lifetime's supply of walnut whips than a sporting event which could litter London with unusable sporting venues for decades to come".

Good splenetic stuff, no prisoners taken, loads of points made and fun to watch - and it might even help save council tax payers a few billion pounds. It pays to vote UKIP...

Ooops, I've upset someone again

2004-11-19T11:17:00.000Z

Damian Hockney does seem to have trouble with authority figures, despite being something of an authority figure himself, as leader of the UKIP group in the London Assembly.

His latest run-in came on Wednesday (17th Nov) with Brian Coleman, Tory Chairman of the London Assembly, at the monthly session of Mayor's Question Time (MQT). Brian has been getting stick from all the political groups at the Assembly (including his own) for his efforts to thwart Mayor Ken Livingstone's knack of capturing headlines. Brian's brainwave was to make MQT so boring that it would get no media coverage at all. The problem is, he has been so successful that the media now ignores the whole event, so none of the Assembly Members gets any coverage either.

Groups have to submit questions two weeks in advance, and Ken Livingstone's written report is also a week out of date by the time the Assembly meets, so MQT suffers from built-in obsolescence. The event used to be livened up by a verbal update from Ken, followed by cross-examination by Members, but Brian pulled the plug on this. In retaliation, there was a mini-rebellion yesterday when a Labour Member asked Ken such a vague question that Ken was able to launch into his usual self-promotional spiel in response. This provoked a lively reaction from Members, whereupon a disgruntled Brian tried to call a halt.

At this point Damian performed the Assembly's equivalent of "seizing the mace" by protesting loudly that Brian was preventing Members from performing their duty of scrutinising the Mayor's activities. Brian tried in vain to restore order, but was put in his place by Ken - never one to avoid a verbal punch-up - who backed Damian's bid to liven up MQT.

Even the usually somnolent Tories seemed inspired by this turn of events, and launched a counter-attack of their own, not on the Mayor, but on UKIP, whom they criticised for voting in July to increase the Assembly staff budget to fund properly the Green and UKIP groups. Ken pointed out that it isn't his job to defend UKIP, but in this case the Tories, who creamed off £120,000 of the budget increase for themselves, were hardly in a position to throw stones.

All in all, it was the liveliest MQT for some months. Long may it be so.

UKIP at London Assembly looks at the new government of this country

2004-11-19T01:29:00.000Z

Well, they have finally done it. 66 per cent of MEPs have approved Barroso’s somewhat renewed Commission during the plenary session in Strasbourg. Please pay attention as this will be the last time the European Parliament members will actually have the slightest idea of what they are voting about. Future votes will consist of hands raised (or occasionally cards raised for the roll-call vote) under instruction group leaders on several hundred amendments in the space of an hour or so, several days after what passes for a debate in that institution.

President Barroso, who is clearly as good at meaningless statements as his predecessor Prodi (we shall have to wiat to see whether he will also lose his temper from time to time) made a somewhat fatuous statement:

"We are able to say to the people of Europe that we have come out of this experience with strengthened institutions, in a better position to meet their expectations."

What very odd ideas he has of what the people of Europe expect or even care about. Does he really think anybody paid any attention to the tortuous negotiations on which particular failed politician or wannabe international personality should mouth the writings of which part of the bureaucracy? After all, the legislation of the European Union consists of unrolling multiannual programmes. Who the particular Commissioner is at any specific moment is of little relevance.

That said, it has to be admitted that there are some skeletons waiting to tumble out of cupboards. We have not heard the end of the story of Neelie the Board Lady, the supposed opponent of over-regulation, whose great achievements all seem to involve seats on numerous boards. She has been accused of lying to the Parliamentary committee and the accuser, Paul van Buitenen, whisltel blower turned MEP, is known for his persistence.

László Kovács, the Hungarian ex-communist apparatchik seems to have managed to mug up enough on the subject of taxes to pass his interrogation, but his known ignorance of the subject is bound to come out sooner rather than later. Incidentally, what of those whoops of joy at the thought of some East European taking on the tax portfolio? They have been muted somewhat.

The new Italian Commissioner has done well (he is going to be replaced by the flamboyant right wing Gianfranco Fini as Foreign Minister in Italy) but we seem to have a problem with the French member of the team.

There was an interesting kerfuffle during the so-called debate yesterday in Strasbourg. Nigel Farage UKIP MEP demanded to know whether his colleagues would buy a second-hand car from Jacques Barrot. Apparently he was not referring to his appearance but the fact that

“M. Barrot had been sentenced to an 8 month suspended sentence and was barred from elected office in France for 2 years, after being convicted in 2000 of embezzling FFR 25m (US$ 3.8m) from French government funds by diverting it into the coffers of his party.”

President Chirac had granted Barrot a presidential pardon, which made it illegal even to mention the conviction, so the French media obliged. Many of the French MEPs were unaware of the story.

Mr Farage was threatened with legal action by the European Parliament President, Josep Borrell, there by grace of a backroom agreement between the two main groups and censured by other MEPs. It is not done to reveal past secrets about present Commissioners. How different from the home life of the London Assembly.

So, it is business as normal in the European Union. And, just in case anyone is interested, here are the relevant salaries though not the expenses, which probably effectively double incomes:

Normal Commissioner: 217,280 euros (£152, 661 / $283,374)
Vice-President: 241,422 euros (£169,622 / $314,859)
President: 266,530 euros (£187,246 / $347,592)

Will President Chirac support UKIP in the London Assembly?

2004-11-18T15:02:00.000Z

President Chirac comes visiting and slags off his hosts even before getting here. What did his maman teach him? He has told the Guardian and the Times that he accepted Tony Blair’s views on Iraq (though not on agriculture) but clearly thought they consisted of nothing very much except sucking up to President Bush. And that, said Chirac, has got him nowhere. He came back from his Washington visit empty-handed.

This is a most extraordinary statement from a man who frequently pontificates on the high morality and sophistication of “European” (which he would like it to be interchangeable with French) foreign policy. Clearly, he does not think that there is any advantage in joining the fight against terrorism. Equally clearly, he does not realize that the reason Blair got nothing is that he took nothing. What did he want from Bush, apart from an acknowledgement of that fuzzy and impossible idea of Britain being a bridge between Europe and America and a pointless conference on the Middle East in London?

None of them are precisely radical or even coherent ideas but then have we seen any radical or coherent ideas from any politician from the three so-called main parties recently? Answers on the back of an envelope, please.

President Bush praised his friend Tony to the skies but refused to have that pointless conference. (Was it going to be a dress rehearsal for those infamous Olympic Games that Blair, Livingstone, Mrs Blair, Lord Coe and other members of the great and the good want, regardless of the price everyone else will have to pay?) When one considers the problems we already have with transport in London and the extraordinary amount of security around Westminster (though few other places), it seems to us in UKIP in the London Assembly, that a Middle East conference that is unlikely to have any results is not quite what this city needs.

President Chirac has also said that the world has been less safe since the deposition of Saddam Hussein. Far it be from us to cast aspersions on a great statesman but does he not mean France’s arms trade and certain slush funds from the food-for-oil scam that have been made unsafe? And if the world is really unsafe, would it not be a good idea for western countries to try to work together rather than have one or two European states undermine everyone’s efforts in an insane desire to integrate a chronically diverse continent?

We do think, however, that there is one issue on which President Chirac might support UKIP in the London Assembly and that is the best site for Olympics 2012. We think it should be Paris, he presumably thinks it should be Paris. The only people who might disagree are the people of Paris. Perhaps they and the people of London should have referendums on the subject. The alternative might be a more traditional Parisian way of coping with political problems.

Chinese news agency gets in on the Olympic row

2004-11-17T17:41:00.000Z

The Chinese news agency, Xinhuanet, decided that there was something to report from Athens: the fact that the 2004 Olympic Games were the most expensive in history.

The cost so far is said to be €9 billion ($11.6 billion, £6.31 billion) but, as Finance Minister Giorgos Alogoskoufis, this incredible sum does not include expenditure on infrastructure. Readers will, undoubtedly, recall that it is precisely the infrastructure that is supposed to be the reason for holding the Olympics in London in 2012 at an undoubtedly even higher cost.

Among the infrastructure are a new tram line, suburban rail network and the extension of the Athens metro system to the airport. The tram alone is supposed to have cost at least €267 million ($344 million, £187 million).

All previous estimates were considerably short of the figures so far and they are set to grow. The Finance Minister is insisting that the Games will not “place a serious burden” on the budget but the Greece’s deficit, which is supposed to stay at 3 per cent at GDP is likely to be double of that next year.

Another row in the London Assembly

2004-11-17T17:20:00.000Z

In today's Mayor's Question Time, Ken Livingstone agreed with UKIP that, in the light of the recent vote against a North East regional assembly, Londoners would probably not vote for the Assembly as currently constituted if a referendum were held today.

UKIP is calling for a fundamental review of the way in which London is governed, and has also criticised the limited remit of the Commission on London Governance. UKIP Leader in the London Assembly Damian Hockney, who sits on the Commission on London Governance, said:

“Since the No vote against the North East Assembly, the London Assembly has suffered a crisis of confidence. The whole structure of London government is unwieldy and undemocratic. We need to look at ways of devolving power and accountability down to the local level, not centralising more and more. The Commission on London Governance has been touted as the first major review of London government since the Marshall and Herbert Commissions, but it is danger of becoming simply a navel gazing exercise.”

In an ill-tempered session at today’s MQT, Assembly Chairman Brian Coleman came under attack from the Mayor and several Assembly Members over the conduct of Assembly meetings.
UK Independence Party group Leader, Damian Hockney, complained bitterly that MQT is being stifled by the Chairman and that the ability of the Assembly to hold Ken Livingstone to account is being restricted by his lack of flexibility. Surprisingly, the Mayor supported UKIP’s view.