The German communications agency Euro-Informationen has come up with a neat way of making the point that together European countries can form a bloc with enough clout on the world stage to rival the USA and China.

If the EU were a country, it would be well out in the lead in the table of gold medals at the Olympics: at the time of writing having 51 golds, compared to 35 for China in 2nd place and 19 for the USA in 3rd place.

Of course the EU isn’t a country and in many ways this is just a piece of fun.  

But their table makes very well the simple point of just influential a power bloc the EU can be on the world stage when it acts together rather than separately.

Most casual observers who are not particularly interested in the European Union and its development can surely be excused having really, by now, lost interest in this saga.

Born from the lengthy process of Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s Constitutional Convention (itself the most open and consultative process for reforming the EU ever undertaken) all the way back in 2003, then re-drafted by European Prime Ministers into a Constitution, which was then rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005, then re-drafted as the Lisbon Treaty, the ratification of which in this country it would be fair to say has caused its fair share of fuss, it has now been rejected by the people of Ireland.

The tempting conclusion is surely to say that really we must have had enough of this treaty by now: it’s time to accept that this project really isn’t going to happen, and to give up on it. Many will say that its rejection for the third time in a public referendum shows that it just doesn’t have the support of Europe’s publics, denying it popular legitimacy and that therefore the Lisbon Treaty should surely just follow the example of Captain Oates and wander off into the storm, muttering that it may well be some time coming back.

This reaction would be understandable – and of course, consistent for those who have opposed it throughout. But it would be quite wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

We frequently decry this government for making us perhaps the most spied-on nation on earth, ever. And having got hold of our extremely valuable information, they have then managed to use it to put us at risk - which as Nick said in his speech in Liverpool last Sunday, if it weren’t so serious would be laughable from a government that at the same time was advising us all to buy personal home shredders to protect our personal information.

But the ways in which they’ve put our information at risk are not only through their own actions - but also by allowing other people, who are even more cavalier with it than they are, to insist that we give it to them too.

I’ve highlighted before (George Bush knows your credit card number) the large amount of information which the American government insists on knowing about anyone before they can travel to the USA - as well as the fact that they have no real grasp of the concept of protecting that information once they’ve got it.

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Over the last few weeks there’s been a fair bit of heat generated by the suggestion that Tony Blair is interested in trying to become the first occupant of the post of President of the European Council, created by the Lisbon Treaty.

A lot of people seem very opposed to this - there appear to be no fewer than eight different Facebook groups of people opposing it (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), a website and a petition for you to sign.

Personally I can’t get too excited about fighting Blair on this. It may well be that, particularly following his actions on Iraq, he is not the person to take on such an important role on behalf of the EU’s 27 national governments - and that does seem to be the view of a good many of them at the moment. But I think there would also be some benefits (not only to Britain but to the EU as a whole) in having a Brit in that role - not least because it might help the British public to see the EU as a useful way of helping to achieve objectives that the British public (and those of other European countries) want to see achieved, rather than just of creating endless pointless interfering bureaucracies, which is what they largely seem to think it is there for at the moment.

I am more struck by some of the ironies of Blair going for this position.

Firstly, this is a post that will exist at all largely because Blair’s government argued for it, through the Convention. There is clearly some irony (which I have not seen picked up that widely recently) in the main proposer of this role becoming its first occupant - even if this seemed to some of us a distinct possibility at the time. Indeed I wrote here in March 2002 of this role when it was first proposed that its “working title [is] ‘the Tony Blair job’”.

A second irony is that Blair only wants this job if it can be made to be sufficiently important and powerful (and he is going round saying so, much as Paddy Ashdown did with his prospective Afghan job - in this case there may well be several prospective Karzais around the place willing to use their veto). This is consistent with his desire to create a powerful European Council President in the first place, and with his apparent view that government in general, and the EU in particular, needs someone who is in a genuinely powerful position to lead it if it is to achieve things.

But the man now arguing that there should be such a genuinely powerful President of the European Council is the very same person who, when Prime Minister of the UK, consistently fought against almost any extension of the ability of the EU to act effectively together - what he now wants this person to do.

If someone had demanded a few years ago the sort of powers that prospective President Blair is now insisting on for this role, then Prime Minister Blair would have had a fit.

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I was extremely pleased to see the fuss that Lib Dem MPs, led by Ed, deliberately made yesterday about their call for a referendum on Britain’s future membership of the EU. It was an excellent way of drawing attention to this Lib Dem call (which I have strongly supported here).

The Lisbon Treaty is obviously the particular document under discussion at the moment - but the referendum that people really want, is on the key question of whether Britain should remain part of the EU or not - not about details such as exactly how many Members of the European Parliament there should be, or the exact number of weeks that national Parliaments should have to object to any proposed European legislation, which is the kind of stuff the Lisbon Treaty is made up of.

When people express their concern about the EU they are not talking about this kind of detail but fundamentally whether we should part of it or not. (Indeed many normal voters I have spoken to over the years have expressed this as “I don’t think we should go into Europe” which says a lot about the false chimera of a “federal Europe” that people are scared of, rather than the reality of a pretty federal Europe that we already now live in - but that’s a topic for another post!).

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I’ve already written a fair bit about the Chatham House conference I attended recently, but I did just want to add something about the excellent points made at it by William Wallace about the UK’s position in relation to the EU and the US.

For he did a very good job of highlighting some of the choices faced by the UK.

We are in many ways prisoners of the way in which the British public and media like to see some of these issues, which does lead us into some quite odd positions. This view, which he says in a phrase he ascribed to Timothy Garton-Ash, sees everything that Britain has done since 1945 as ”˜footnotes to Churchill’, makes us very worried about any encroachment by ”˜Europe’, but almost totally unconcerned by any such thing by the USA.

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A few things have dropped into my inbox today which, as well as being interesting for other reasons, have been illuminating practical examples of how European Union can be an effective route for the 27 countries which comprise it, maximising their influence over important national interests, by working together through it.

The first is a report from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), which launches itself in Berlin tomorrow, about relations between the EU and Russia. The report, it seems (I’m afraid I’ve only read the summary) makes the case that the EU and some of its member states in particular, are much too afraid of the resurgent Putin’s Russia. I should think it’s possible to overstate this case, but certainly the energy issue in particular does seem to have got the EU worried, and Joschka Fischer (the former leader of the German Greens and Foreign Minister, whose memoirs I understand have been causing a stir in Berlin political circles this autumn) says that it is Russia which dictates the terms of EU-Russia dialogue at present.

The report highlights the fact that in recent years Russia has had 11 significant bilateral disputes with individual European countries, and says that if EU countries simply acted together rather than separately in their dealing with Moscow, they would carry a lot more weight.

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Liberty put on a one-night fundraising show tonight at the Hackney Empire (a grand old Victorian theatre now well restored) under the title ‘Bonfire of the Liberties’.

Performers included Rory Bremner and Marcus Brigstocke, and several other stand-up acts, introduced by Shami Chakrabarti, and we went along.

I was surprised not to see more Liberal Democrats I recognised there - there were a few but not many. But seeing several Labour people made me realise that there are many Labour members who still see civil liberties are a Labour issue - for much as we Liberal Democrats see the Government as limiting them and lazily think that so by extension presumably Labour members must also think the same, many longstanding Labour members see themselves as the internal opposition to their own Government on this issue (and indeed for many, other issues too).

In fact most of the performers didn’t really talk a lot about civil liberties - but it was nevertheless a very entertaining evening.

But the most striking satire of the evening for me wasn’t about civil liberties at all, but about Europe. Read the rest of this entry »