"Europe" writ large

The elephant continues to skulk, unseen, no more so than in the lead editorial in today's The Daily Telegraph, which complains that, "Business needs less, not more, red tape".

The proximate cause of its complaints is the government's new legislative programme which, it says, "will make life tougher for small firms on two fronts". One is the plan to extend the right to request flexible working hours to four-and-a-half-million parents of children aged up to 16, and the other is a plans to "give" new employment rights (not than many want them) to agency workers.

Nowhere, in the litany of grievances that follows, however, is there any hint of that elephant, the EU, yet both these measures have "EU" written all over them.

The paper, however, does have one small excuse in that neither of these issues is covered directly by existing EU directive. There is no obvious "smoking gun" to which we can point and say, unequivocally, this is an EU requirement, as such.

If there is an excuse, though, it is indeed a small one. What The Telegraph neglects – along with most of the population of the UK and almost all our provincial politicians – is the subtle but highly significant shift in the way that the EU is run.

The traditional paradigm is the legal route, whereby the commission proposes a new law, the Council of Ministers (and the EU parliament, where co-decision applies) approve it, and then member states implement it.

What is not happening though is that the EU is employing more of a political route in getting its measures introduced. The commission still makes the running, in tabling a series of proposals, but it does no go directly to the lawmaking stage. Instead, its ideas are presented first to the European Council, from which is obtained a political commitment to the ideas presented.

What happens then is that the member states start implementing the proposals, in anticipation of formal EU law, smoothing its path and, to an extent, neutralising objections when the law in finally introduced. This procedure also allows member state governments to foster the illusion that they are still in charge.

This mechanism was very much in evidence in the Spring European Council last year, when the member states apparently raised and then agreed the disastrous 20 percent quota on renewal fuels, and the ten percent biofuels quota.

In fact, what the members were actually doing was reacting to a formal commission proposal, namely COM(2006) 845 final, under the anodyne title of the "Biofuels Progress Report". And now the commission has its political "direction", the way is clear for it to move to the legislative state – in which it is currently engaged.

So it is with the so-called "flexi-working" and the "new employment rights for agency workers". The latter is already in the system as the "Temporary Workers Directive", progress on which is being help up pending the ratification of the constitutional Lisbon treaty. The government is simply paving the way for this directive.

As to "flexi-working", the agenda was agreed in principle at the 2002 Barcelona Council and the need for flexi-working was identified as an EU priority by the commission on 1 March 2006 in COM(2006) 0092 final, under the title, "A roadmap for equality between women and men 2006–2010". That was then approved by the European Council on 23–24 March 2006, when it which approved a "European Pact for gender equality" which encouraged "action at Member State and EU level".

From that point on, the UK was under a political rather than legal obligation to implement flex-working and, in its pre-legislative programme, it is simply "honouring" that commitment. In due course, EU legislation will follow, with the commission already having kicked off the process, on the back of yet a further report.

One of the reasons why the Telegraph is completely unaware of this dynamic – apart from the idleness of the hacks - is that, like all the of British MSM, it fails to understand the true role and significance of the European Council, still – like many – calling its meeting "summits".

Not only do we have an invisible elephant in the room, therefore, it has the ability to change shape so that, even if it appeared, its form has become unrecognisable.

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Yet again, we are superior

Britain and Europe, as we know, are superior to the United States. If we do not know it then many a deranged, furiously spitting commentator and letter writer both in the MSM and on the internet will tell us. At length.

One of the main reasons for that superiority is that a higher proportion of the American population is supposed to be in prison than that of any European country. Whether the figures are true is, for once, irrelevant. It is the attitude that matters. I thought of it as I read about the latest London stabbing, on Oxford Street this time, and about its victim.

The 22 year old man was out on bail and was coming up for two separate trials, one for a fight in a club that involved knives and one for a horrific rape of a sixteen-year old girl. Isn’t it wonderful, I thought, that this country is not like that ghastly oppressive one on the other side of the Pond and people of this kind are given bail because we have no more space in prisons.

The EU is, of course, never backward about coming forward on the subject of European superiority. On May 14 the Presidency issued a declaration "on behalf of the EU concerning the resumption of executions in the USA".

The statement, rather an impertinent one, is a response to the fact that the State of Georgia (for these matters are the states' competence) had ended the seven-month, voluntarily imposed moratorium on executions by carrying one out on William Lynd, who had been found guilty of murdering his girl-friend.

The moratorium, as this article in The Australian, which refers to executions, rather tendentiously, as "legal killings", was caused by several legal challenges to the notion of lethal injections. The Supreme Court has ruled 7 – 2 that the method did not constitute "cruel and unusual punishment". The latter is barred under the US Constitution, a document, as our readers know, we respect a good deal more than the Constitutional Reform Lisbon Treaty that is being imposed on the various peoples and states of the European Union.

Almost certainly, there will be other legal challenges and debates in the country and the various states will carry on. That is as it should be. Where does the European Union come into this picture?

As ever, it sets itself up as a kind of a moral arbiter of what is right and what is wrong with the world, though, given the numbers involved, it would be interesting to know whether there have been more protests and statements about executions in China than those in the United States and by what factor? If not, then why not?

The EU again reiterates its longstanding position against the death penalty in all circumstances and accordingly strives to achieve its universal abolition, seeking a global moratorium on the death penalty as the first step. We believe that the elimination of the death penalty is fundamental to the protection of human dignity, and to the progressive development of human rights.

The EU recalls that on 18 December 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on a Moratorium on the use of the death penalty, which explicitly calls upon all States that still maintain the death penalty to establish a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty.

This sort of waffle does not answer the question especially as we have seen no rush among members of the UN General Assembly to abolish the death penalty, often carried out in far more brutal conditions and after a considerably less free and fair a trial. Remember those teenagers hanged from a crane in Iran?

The first thing to be noted, as I am sure Americans will, is that the United States of America is an independent country and those states are no longer colonies of European countries.

The second point is the one mentioned above and that is the questionable moral standing in this, as in other matters, of the UN and its General Assembly.

The third point is a little more intriguing. Via Chicagoboyz we find an article in the New York Times (not the Grey Lady herself, the Bible of leftism and hatred of all obscurantism such as criminals must be punished?) that writes about a study on the subject.

The results of the study ought to be read by the Presidency of the European Union because they are rather shocking.

According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.

The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly.

The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates, conviction rates and other factors — and say that murder rates tend to fall as executions rise. One influential study looked at 3,054 counties over two decades.

At least one of the studies was carried out by an opponent of capital punishment but he found the figures hard to argue with. Naturally enough, the studies have evoked sharp responses, not least from lawyers, who argue that purely economic arguments do not apply to complicated matters such as capital punishment which is, in any case, a rare occurrence in the United States.

But if the figures about deterrence are close to accurate – and here we come to a difficult problem – then the "moral" argument against "legal killing" becomes hard to sustain. Is it really moral to oppose the taking of one life if that means supporting the taking of several other lives? What about the human rights and human dignity of the victims who might not be that if there were capital punishment? Could the EU Presidency answer, please?

Professor Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, a law professor at Harvard, wrote in their own Stanford Law Review article that "the recent evidence of a deterrent effect from capital punishment seems impressive, especially in light of its 'apparent power and unanimity,'" quoting a conclusion of a separate overview of the evidence in 2005 by Robert Weisberg, a law professor at Stanford, in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science.

"Capital punishment may well save lives," the two professors continued. "Those who object to capital punishment, and who do so in the name of protecting life, must come to terms with the possibility that the failure to inflict capital punishment will fail to protect life."

There is an additional problem for the anti-capital punishment or, at least, anti-American anti-capital punishment brigade. There is a common enough argument that the whole legal system in the United States is racist because proportionately more Afro-Americans are in prison than others and more are executed on the few occasions this happens.

The paper by Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule raises an issue that is closely related:

A study by Joanna Shepherd, based on data from all states from 1997 to 1999, finds that each death sentence deters 4.5 murders and that an execution deters 3 additional murders.

Her study also investigates the contested question whether executions deter crimes of passion and murders by intimates. Although intuition might suggest that such crimes cannot be deterred, her own finding is clear: all categories of murder are deterred by capital punishment.

The deterrent effect of the death penalty is also found to be a function of the length of waits on death row, with a murder deterred for every 2.75 years of reduction in the period before execution. Importantly, this study finds that the deterrent effect of capital punishment protects African-American victims even more than whites.

In other words, the study shows that capital punishment actually helps African-Americans though not the ones who decide to go down the route of murder.

The trouble is, as Shannon Love, of Chicagoboyz points out, that it is almost impossible to measure deterrence accurately.

I personally believe that the death penalty protects the innocent and punishes the guilty. However, I don't think we can accurately measure that effect directly. Instead, I think the death penalty merely serves as a marker to distinguish jurisdictions that have an effective anti-homicide political culture. The various studies, all using different standards and different assumptions, all converge on the same rough answers because many different ineptly-measured factors point in the same general direction. Metaphorically, I don’t think they can make an ordinance map of the landscape but they can determine which general direction is downhill.

At the very least, such studies and debates should be taken into consideration when the European Union, whose members' legal and punitive structures are variable, to say the least, makes another grand pronouncement of superiority to those dam' Yanks.

The sunset of environmentalism?

On the basis of a "new opinion tracker of 5,000 voters", Conservative Home is writing breathlessly that the economy has overtaken immigration as voters' top concern, tax has overtaken law and order and inflation has overtaken the environment.

Of course, the funders of the survey could have saved their money and simply read this blog. We wrote about this in Feburary and again in much more detail in late April, when we observed:

Whatever the political classes may now choose to prattle about, make no mistake, this is going to be the defining political issue for the elections on both sides of the pond. People are hurting, and they want answers from politicians, on how they are going to get to grips with the twin evils of declining incomes and rampant inflation.

In as much as what is happening over here is often seen first in the United States, the writing was very much on the wall with this poll.

However, since we are not a real political blog, our views can be safely discarded until the clever-dicks begin to notice. But the funny thing is, we are often able to detect changes long before they become apparent to the denizens of the Westminster bubble – where the politicians and their groupies are usually well behind the curve.

The Greenies need not worry though. While our politicians might be waking up to the unpopularity of "environmental" issues, their champions in our supreme government in Brussels will make sure that our provincial government is not able to respond to the popular will.

COMMENT THREAD

No newts is good newts …

… usually.

But, in this case, reported by The Daily Mail, Leicestershire Council is less than happy, having spent £1million on safeguarding a colony of great crested newts – which did not exist.

The story is also reported by The Daily Telegraph, and neither newspaper – for once – has any problem mentioning the elephant. The Mail refers to the amphibians being protected by EU law and the Wildlife and Countryside Act, making it illegal to capture or kill them or disturb their habitat, while the DT cites council leader David Parsons, saying: "It's completely unacceptable. I've written to the minister concerned, and all he can say to me is that it's because of European Union regulations."

Anyhow, this example of egregious waste occurred when Leicestershire County Council delayed a major road-building scheme for three months after evidence of great crested newts was found in ponds on the site. Yet, after the authority paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for special newt-fencing and traps, not one of the "rare" creatures was discovered.

The action had been taken on the strength of a report from "environmental experts", which found there could have been between one and 10 of the 6in amphibians on the site. What turned out to be the non-existent colony was thought to be located near the £15 million Earl Shilton bypass in Leicester so a 1,000-yard exclusion zone was erected around ponds. Further tests were carried out and hundreds of thousands of pounds was spent on newt-proof fences and traps to move the amphibians when hibernation ended in spring.

Yesterday, officials – who had already spent the money - admitted it was all "down the drain" after more tests showed there were no great crested newts at all.

However, huge though this sum might be, it is by no means the most expensive newt scam. As we reported n an earlier post, that record goes to Orton brick pits, near Peterborough in 1996. There, a new town of 5,200 homes required the relocation of 15,000 newts, at a cost of £3million – with none of the newts surviving the move.

Nevertheless, Leicestershire council now probably holds the record for spending the most money on no newts at all – small comfort when the farming and rural consultancy ADAS estimates that, if you take in species such as bats, lizards as well as the newts, dealing with EU-protected species costs UK developers is a staggering £15 million a year.

It really is outrageous that all this money is wasted on complying with EU law, when we could have given it to the MoD, which can waste it so much more efficiently.

(The pic shows a heron eating a great crested newt – is it breaking EU law?)

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The "underfunded" MoD strikes again

A £14 million fleet of 25 armoured "mine clearance vehicles" – desperately needed by British troops plagued by mines in Afghanistan – is being sold off, unused as "army surplus", at a knockdown price of less than £4.5 million – a loss to the taxpayer of nearly £10 million. The vehicles are Caterpillar DV104 ...

Posted on Defence of the Realm

Theatre and practice

No, not a misprint – we did not mean to write "theory and practice" only to have the automatic spell-checker substitute a different word, as it sometimes does, with unfortunate effect.

Watching the political scene from our lofty heights, we observe two different phenomena. One is the reality, the practice, of government – the nuts and bolts of the management of this country (insofar as it is managed at all) and the other is the theatre. The latter is the froth, the jousting over PMQs and the "scorecards" over who did better, or the performance of Brown on the Today programme; etc., etc., etc…

The great danger – if it is that – is that the political commentators (or theatre critics, as we prefer to call them) get so wrapped up in reporting their bits of the soap opera that, like some watchers of the TV genre, they begin to believe they are dealing with the real thing.

Hence, as do you get TV viewers writing quite genuine letters of condolence when one of their favourite characters "dies" on screen, so you get the theatre critics believing their own fantasies, projecting them into the media as if they had genuine substance.

Meanwhile, the business of government goes on, entirely unaffected and unobserved, the effect of which is of far more importance – and of greater lasting impact than the ephemera that dominates the headlines.

One of those bits of "business" that are going to have a profound effect is the ongoing exchange between the chancellor of our provincial government, Alistair Darling and the EU commission, over the immediate management of our food (aka agricultural) policy, and its shape in times to come.

As we left it, last Monday, Darling had written to his counterparts in the EU member states, pleading with them to support the continuation of the import tariff waivers on grains, and to re-think the biofuels policy. In the longer term, he also wanted an end to direct subsidy payments to farmers.

All this is in the context of spiralling food prices, which now have considerable political resonance, yet the move went almost entirely unremarked by the theatre critics in the MSM.

Nevertheless, as you might expect, Darling's action did not escape the attention of the farmers, with the result that the Farmers Guardian now reports: "Darling under fire for CAP attack in EU treasury letter".

Rarely do we ever find ourselves in agreement with the NFU (the initials of which we usually take to mean No F*****g Use), but it is hard to disagree with the words of NFU president Peter Kendall, who condemns Darling's letter as "badly timed and tactically inept". Although we might have different reasons for agreeing, we would also accept Kendall’s view that:

All the indications are that this letter will irritate others in Europe and be counter-productive to the Government's wish to see constructive progress on agriculture and trade.

NFU Scotland president, Jim McLaren, also pitches in. He adds:

I find it remarkable that as we're about to enter negotiations on reform of the CAP the UK Treasury would undermine the UK Government's credibility by making suggestions for reform which are so far out of touch with reality. Going into important negotiations, such statements make the UK look like a voice in the wilderness.

Again, he is right – and The Scotsman - which is still in touch with its agricultural roots – has more. Whatever one might think of the CAP, the fact is that what Darling is suggesting is totally at odds with the direction being taken by France and Germany that his pleas were almost guaranteed to fall on deaf ears.

The worst of it is that Darling does need to get some action. In EU agriculture commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel, we possibly have the worst agriculture minister (and yes, she is our agriculture minister) in living memory, a report in The Guardian confirming that she is living in the land of the fairies.

The paper is retailing a Reuters story which tells us that Boel is about to publish details of how she wants to build on the "radical 2003 reform of the CAP", with plans "change agricultural subsidies in a reform blueprint that would divert more cash from larger holdings into projects for enhancing the countryside."

This is a continuation of previous thinking, still predicated on controlling excess production, putting more money into environmental schemes, through a process known as " modulation". Yet this is at a time when pressure on farming has never been greater, with set-aside land released for food production to order to re-build depleted grain stocks.

Boel still has not come to terms with the idea that we are looking at structural changes in the global food supply, exacerbated by the rush to biofuels, and is still locked in the "over-production" paradigm that has driven the CAP ever since its inception.

Intriguingly, Reuters observes of this opening round in what are to be protracted negotiations: "So far most countries have played their cards closely." It adds: "However, the real debate is only just beginning and no deal is likely until at least November when France, by far the largest beneficiary of CAP spending, will be EU president."

And, as we observed at the end of last month, the debate goes on without us – unaffected by Darling's "tactically inept" intervention.

COMMENT THREAD

Update on Burma

There is very little good news from that country. Another cyclone is on its way and the Burmese government seems as determined as ever to reject help though it could be that they do not want NGOs in the country.

Gateway Pundit has an excellent round-up with many quotations about the uselessness of the UN (nothing new there). There are also pictures and videos taken at some risk to their lives by members of Burmese pro-democracy movements. They are, I must warn our readers, harrowing.

It seems that some American aid is reaching the country and, as ever, the much maligned United States of America, its navy and air force are standing by to send in whatever they can.

The elephant lives!

They are at it again … ignoring the elephant, even though it is alive and kicking – and dumping dirty great turds on the carpet.

Leading the fray in the eyes-wide-shut brigade is the BBC which retails the news that Postcomm's chairman Nigel Stapleton is calling for Royal Mail to be partly privatised "to safeguard the quality of the UK's mail delivery service".

He is warning that Royal Mail's financial difficulties would worsen unless bold action was taken and, without private sector involvement, the company "may require a government subsidy".

Apart from anything else, Stapleton's comment in the respect is, shall we say, as tad tendentious. He must know, better than most, that any idea of a subsidy is not on the cards – without the approval of the EU, which would be unlikely to give it. It would, in this context, be deemed illegal state aid.

But then Stapleton, according to The Daily Mail (which also does not mention the elephant) is comparing the Royal Mail's plight to "a person climbing up a very steep hill with a rucksack on his back filled with rocks", neglecting to say that the "rocks" are the postal services directives.

Is then a coincidence, one asks, that Stapelton should also happily chirp that, "Private sector partnerships had worked in other European countries," which is setting up precisely the agenda set up by the EU commission: first you break up the business; you allow it to be taken over by cross-border providers; then you move in to create a pan-European regulator on the grounds that the services can no longer be regulated nationally.

But it is the BBC that kindly reminds us that Royal Mail's troubles started with the ending of its 350-year monopoly at the start of 2006 – without mentioning why – telling us that other licensed operators were then given the right to collect and deliver mail, while the Royal Mail it is still obliged to deliver letters to and from anywhere in the UK at a uniform tariff. It is this which has given rise to a loss of £279m in the year to the end of March.

This gets agreement from Jeff Randall in the Daily Telegraph, who gets another comment piece on the issue. But, unlike his previous op-ed there is no mention of the elephant at all.

Instead, bizarrely, having referred to the problems of the universal service, and the possibility of reducing the burden, he notes that this is "enshrined in law". Amazingly though, he then goes on to say: "But laws can be changed."

That this man should make this comment is almost incredible. A man who told us that: "There exists no commercial, political or social problem that meddling by the European Union cannot make worse…", must know that the "law" to which he refers is EU law. As such, it cannot be changed - certainly not to suit Royal Mail.

Has Randall been got at, or have they applied a new coat of "stealth" paint to the elephant, so that it is invisible to him as well? I think we should be told.

COMMENT THREAD

"Next-War-itis"

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has given a massively important speech under the aegis of the Heritage Foundation – link here.

In his speech, he states that: "I have noticed too much of a tendency towards what might be called 'Next-War-itis' – the propensity of much of the defense establishment to be in favor of what might be needed in a future conflict…".

He then goes on to say:

But in a world of finite knowledge and limited resources, where we have to make choices and set priorities, it makes sense to lean toward the most likely and lethal scenarios for our military. And it is hard to conceive of any country confronting the United States directly in conventional terms – ship to ship, fighter to fighter, tank to tank – for some time to come. The record of the past quarter century is clear: the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Israelis in Lebanon, the United States in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Smaller, irregular forces – insurgents, guerrillas, terrorists – will find ways, as they always have, to frustrate and neutralize the advantages of larger, regular militaries. And even nation-states will try to exploit our perceived vulnerabilities in an asymmetric way, rather than play to our inherent strengths.

Then adding:

Overall, the kinds of capabilities we will most likely need in the years ahead will often resemble the kinds of capabilities we need today.

This is precisely the debate we have been pushing over on Defence of the Realm – the conflict between what we call the "future war" lobby and those who are more concerned with fighting and winning the current wars.

It is also a debate which also goes to the heart of our relations with the EU and it ambitions for increased military capabilities – yet the major players (France and Germany), not being engaged in any meaningful fashion in the current wars, are more interested in the "future war" scenarios. This is the driver behind the European Rapid Reaction Force, so that British future war advocates find in the EU their natural allies.

I have thus written an analysis of Gates's speech, which can be found on Defence of the Realm.

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Spending your money

You will be very pleased to learn that 14 films representing in total over €900,000 of co-funding from the European Union's MEDIA programme have been selected for screening at the 61st Cannes International Film Festival, opening today.

Chirps our supreme leader, José Manuel Barroso: "Europe can be proud of the cultural diversity and global attractiveness of its vibrant cinema … European productions such as La Môme, Das Leben der Anderen, Belle Toujours and Kontroll have been celebrated at international film festivals and watched by millions of people, projecting the message around the world that Europe is about 'Unity in Diversity'."

Amongst the other delights, we get Better Things directed by Duane Hopkins – A group of young people grow up together in a rural community in the Cotswolds, experiencing sexual awakening, boredom, and drug use. That cost us €90,500. Then we get Home directed by Ursula Meïer – The story of a handful of people gradually cut off and disconnected from the world, who end up shutting themselves in.

That latter film rather sounds like a description of the EU commission – no wonder they were so keen to fund it and, at a mere €50,000, it was a real bargain. For the rest of us, we really should be so pleased that our money is in such good hands.

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