Brian Barder's website and Ephems blog

I propose the following basic elements in a new constructive policy on Scotland for the Labour Party:

1. Scottish independence, just as much as devo max, will (or would) require the collaboration of the Westminster government, with whom its terms and practical application would have to be negotiated. It’s a myth that Scotland could simply take independence on its own terms without the government of the rest of the UK (“rUK”) having a major say in, for example, the division of assets and liabilities as between the two countries.

2. It is very much in the interests of all concerned, independentistas and unionists alike, that when the Scots come to vote in the autumn of 2014, they have a reasonably detailed knowledge of the implications of both independence and devo max.  Work should begin without delay on negotiations between Holyrood and Westminster, ideally on an all-party basis, to find as much common ground as possible about what either independence or devo max would entail. Any agreement on the implications of a vote for either would necessarily be provisional, with final decisions on all the issues deferred until the result of the referendum is known. If broad provisional agreement between all concerned could not be reached by the time of the referendum, both sides would need to publish an account of the negotiations, so that voters in the referendum would have a reasonably clear idea of the positions of the two governments and other parties, and the nature of the issues that would need to be resolved if the result turned out to be a majority for either independence or devo max.

3. The referendum is most unlikely to result in a majority vote for the status quo. As between independence and devo max, those who wish to avert the disintegration of the United Kingdom have a strong interest in encouraging a vote for devo max. The best hope of securing that result lies in a decision by the UK Labour Party, including the Scottish Labour Party, to give full support to devo max and to collaborate with the SNP and other Scottish supporters of devo max in working out which additional powers a Labour government at Westminster would agree to devolve to Scotland in the event of the referendum confirming majority support for devo max. If the Conservative and Lib Dem parties could also be persuaded to support devo max, so much the better. But at least Labour should do so, whatever the other parties decide. Labour, after all, is the father of devolution and should recognise its merits – or at worst accept that devo max would be the least damaging outcome of the referendum.

4. Both independence and devo max would have huge implications for rUK (the rest of the UK). The unionist parties should begin now to develop their policies for dealing with either a UK without Scotland, or a UK in which Scotland would be to all intents and purposes fully internally self-governing. In the latter case, full self-government for Scotland would inevitably prompt demands for the same status for England (which would require the creation of a separate parliament and government for England) and for Wales and Northern Ireland. This would take several years to achieve. The result would be the creation of a federation of the four UK nations, with all the institutional and legal safeguards required by a federal system. Such a radical change in the relationships between the four nations, and between the nations and the federal centre at Westminster, could well inaugurate a revival of the politics and constitution of Britain, to the benefit of everyone. Scottish independence, on the other hand, could well spell disaster for rUK. It is questionable whether the three remaining UK nations could form a viable federation, even if, as seems unlikely, the secession of Scotland were to prompt a desire for one.

5. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that devo max for Scotland would signal the beginning of the end for the UK. Scottish devo max would not be likely to turn out to be a stepping stone to full independence: quite the reverse. The full internal self-government enjoyed by, for example, California or New South Wales is not regarded in either state as a preliminary to independence from the rest of the United States or Australia. Indeed, the opposite is the case. The completion of the devolution project in Scotland could well pave the way to the completion of devolution in rUK and the establishment of a durable, democratic federal system, as suggested in (4) above.

6. Devo max for Scotland would not mean that Scotland’s MPs at Westminster would only be able to vote on foreign affairs issues. The Westminster parliament, already a quasi-federal organ, would have roughly the same powers in respect of Scotland as the federal government of the United States has in relation to California or Massachusetts. No one regards these powers and responsibilities as trivial.

[The writer and commentator Gerry Hassan has posted an interesting and thought-provoking article about the Scottish Question in the Open Democracy website forum, provocatively entitled 'Historic day for the UK:  Salmond consults Scotland but can't civilise Paxman'. This has prompted a number of equally interesting responses, some of which however reflect surprising misconceptions. This post first appeared, with some minor editorial changes, as my own comment on Mr Hassan's article and on some of the responses to it.]

In the last few days I have posted a couple of pieces about the Scottish Question (here and here), most recently quoting a prize example of sub-standard journalism in a Sunday Times article purporting to analyse the issues. I have now come across an equally striking example of excellent journalism from and about Scotland and its future, and  accordingly added this update to my last post:

Update, 17 January 2012:  For a stark contrast with the sloppy journalism quoted above, you should read an excellent article in today’s Scotsman by Professor Gavin McCrone, a distinguished Scottish former public servant, academic and economist (full disclosure: also one of my oldest friends). After describing some of the complex issues that will have to be negotiated either for Scotland to become independent or for it to achieve devo max, McCrone concludes that –

Sorting out all of these issues and ensuring that they are fully understood by those who will vote is going to take time, so that whatever Mr Cameron says, I do not expect the referendum to take place any earlier than October 2014, the date chosen by Alex Salmond. What worries me most is that as the debate continues, it could become not only increasingly intense but acrimonious. I give politicians the credit on both sides of not wanting that to happen, but they might find it difficult to control. There are plenty of people both in England and in Scotland who might make it so.

All those of us who comment on Scotland’s future, from north or south of the border, in the conventional media or in the blogosphere, have a duty to heed Professor McCrone’s warning. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game: if all concerned play fair, both Scotland and the rest of the UK can benefit equally from whatever constitutional changes emerge from the referendum process. Let’s all go easy on the acrimony, keep the temperature down, and treat each other like friends and neighbours, not as rivals or enemies.

Brian

Immediately after the nocturnal UK veto and decision on a new non-EU Eurozone agreement in the early hours of 9 December, it was difficult to assess what it all meant when we had so little hard information about it.  Nine days later, we know quite a lot more, with some new disclosures undermining earlier assumptions (probably including some of Mr Cameron’s at the time). But even now many puzzling questions remain unanswered. This is a rather lengthy post, even by my own regrettable standards, but I think the issues it explores and perhaps clarifies will be thought to justify it.  I have tried to expose some other fallacies in the received wisdom on all this in an earlier post, such as that whatever else he may have done on 9 December, Mr Cameron certainly didn’t veto an EU treaty, despite numerous assertions in the media that he did.  I hope I have not gone over the same ground again in this one.

New facts and insights are belatedly available from three especially valuable sources:

1.  A painstaking full-page reconstruction by the Financial Times of 17-18 December of the events of the night of 8-9 December and the fortnight leading up to them is essential reading, here (“Following numerous interviews with participants, the Financial Times has pieced together what happened in those two weeks“).    As well as shining a pitiless light on the performances of the protagonists, this includes some glorious nuggets:

Mr Sarkozy was characteristically blunt. “David [Cameron], we will not pay you to save the euro,” he said, according to one account. He went on to rebuke Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the freshly elected Danish prime minister, for the temerity to speak up for a deal at 27. “You’re an out, a small out, and you’re new. We don’t want to hear from you,” Mr Sarkozy said.  [The Danish prime minister is perhaps better known over here as Mrs Stephen Kinnock. -- BLB]

The FT account makes it clear, among many other striking things, that Mr Cameron had ample advance warning from, among others, Mrs Merkel, President Sarkozy, the British ambassador in Berlin, the British embassy in Paris, and even the prime minister’s own Chief of Staff, Ed Llewellyn, that his conditions for refraining from exercising his veto would not be acceptable to the key players at the summit meeting, although the FT notes, tellingly, that Cameron might not have been aware of “the warning lights flashing in Whitehall” (were both the FCO and No. 10 asleep?).  But he must have heard the warnings by Mrs Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, and presumably from his own Chief of Staff, from their own lips, even before his aircraft took off for Brussels.

This prompts the question: why did the prime minister lay down his demands at the summit when he knew they were bound to be rejected?

There are two possible answers to this.  One, the more respectable one, is that he was convinced that in the end the UK would not be able to sign to the proposed new EU treaty,  and he may have judged it better to make that position plain at the outset, before any treaty had even been drafted, rather than precipitating an even greater crisis in UK-EU relations by vetoing the treaty after it had been negotiated and approved by, probably, the whole of the rest of the EU, or by failing to secure parliamentary approval for it, or because a UK referendum that would probably be unavoidable if HMG and parliament had approved the treaty would almost certainly result in its rejection.  These would have been honourable reasons for putting the boot in before the game had even begun.  But their validity would have depended far too heavily on a host of extremely shaky assumptions about the future, some them already pretty well exploded.

The other possible explanation is much less defensible.  Since taking office, Mr Cameron and the eurosceptic William Hague, his foreign & commonwealth secretary, who accompanied Mr Cameron at all the key meetings on the eurozone crisis, had sought to appease the 80 or more eurosceptical and europhobic back-benchers of their own party by promising that if there should be another EU treaty proposed, the government would use it — by implication irrespective of its contents or merits — to force the EU to “return to Britain” some of the powers currently “surrendered” to the EU.  How to achieve this improbable turning back of the European clock? By threatening to veto the new treaty unless the rest of the EU acceded to the UK’s demands.  Perhaps Mr Cameron (and more probably Mr Hague) believed that this blackmail strategy would work, despite the several warnings that it would not.  More likely they both feared the wrath of their Europe-hating foot-soldiers on the back benches if they returned from Brussels having “agreed to a new treaty” but without having secured the repatriation of a collection of EU powers to Britain as a condition of that agreement.  By launching their demands and then, when the demands were rejected, carrying out the threat to ‘veto the treaty’, they were able to claim that they had honoured their promise; and that although they had not been able to repatriate any powers, at least they had stymied any new treaty (and thus by implication prevented Brussels from snatching yet more powers).  This line has been triumphantly successful, at any rate in the short term, with Cameron hailed by the europhobes as a conquering hero on his return from Brussels and his government propelled by general patriotic pride in his supposedly Churchillian stance to a position some way ahead of Labour in the opinion polls.  But this line of defence also depended on a series of extraordinary misunderstandings or misrepresentations, deliberate or otherwise, of what had actually happened.  Read on.

2.  The second new source of information to have come to light in recent days is the publication by the Daily Telegraph of somewhat indistinct photocopies, possibly pictures taken with a mobile phone, of a two-page ‘annex’ listing in detail the specific demands made by Cameron and circulated to his astonished EU partners at around 2am on that fateful Friday morning.  These can be both seen and, with some difficulty, read, here.  It’s surprising that this spectacular Daily Telegraph scoop has received, as far as I know, almost no attention.  It certainly seems to deserve the description of “exclusive” (“this is the UK’s protocol demand to the EU – obtained exclusively by The Telegraph’s Bruno Waterfield in Brussels“).  Well done, Bruno!  What a pity that we still don’t have the document to which these two pages were an Annex, unless that too is buried somewhere on the Web or in some published government paper; if it is, I have failed to find and exhume it.

The UK demands, essentially Britain’s conditions for not vetoing a proposed treaty that had not yet been drafted and whose likely contents were known only in vague outline on the morning of 9 December, mainly comprised moving a number of subjects from the category of decisions currently made by ‘qualified majority voting’ (qmv), and so not subject to any member state’s veto, to the category of decisions requiring unanimous agreement, and thus susceptible of being vetoed or otherwise rejected (eg by a national parliament or referendum) by any one or more EU governments.  As you can see from the Daily Telegraph’s photocopies of the two pages, the whole Annex is headed “Financial Services” and the entire list of items proposed to become subject to the veto concerns aspects of the regulation of financial services.  Some of these are so technical and detailed as to appear almost comically trivial:  the “Location of the European Supervisory Authorities“, for example, and the “requirement for executive powers of ESAs to be clearly set out and not replace the exercise of discretion by member states’ competent authorities.“  No doubt such matters are significant in the eyes of those affected by them, but the other EU heads of state and government receiving their blurry photocopies of demands like these for the first time at 2 o’clock in the morning could be forgiven for exhibiting a certain impatience, especially when they were supposed to be staying up late to devise a rescue plan for the Eurozone which had nothing whatever to do with the location of  the European Supervisory Authorities, or even with the regulation of financial services.

This remarkable document prompts another question:  did Mr Cameron (or Mr Hague, or the LibDem leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who had approved Cameron’s strategy in advance without apparently imagining that Cameron would go ahead and use his veto that very night if his demands were rejected) really believe that unless vetoed in advance, the proposed EU treaty would include provisions that would damage the interests of the City of London or indeed that would be binding on the British government and on the City? (If so, on what evidence, available on the morning of 9 December, did they base that belief?) Or was this just a case of using any proposed new treaty, whatever its subject and however innocuous in terms of British interests, in order to try to wrest back powers from Brussels to Westminster? In the latter case, they must surely have foreseen that trying to exploit an emergency euro rescue meeting at the EU’s highest level, in the middle of the night, to indulge the neuroses of a handful of cranks and obsessives in the British parliament, was more likely to cause massive exasperation than to win friends and influence people.

3.  We now also have a third source of illumination, almost as difficult to track down as the Daily Telegraph’s Annex scoop and, as far as I can see, equally little noticed by our media: namely, the text of the first draft of the proposed agreement of the 26 EU members (i.e. all except the UK), a draft agreement outside the formal framework of the existing EU treaties (because of Mr Cameron’s ‘veto’) designed to impose such fiscal discipline on the 17 members of the eurozone as to reassure the all-powerful markets and ratings agencies that past misbehaviour by the more fiscally challenged members would not be repeated, and that if it was, the miscreant would be promptly summoned to Mrs Merkel’s study for a dose of traditional punishment, pour encourager les autres.  The first draft of the proposed agreement is published in full here.  The Reuters news agency has published a useful summary of its main provisions (here).  A few especially interesting features are also worth noticing, subject to the important caveat that this is only a first draft, not yet even discussed by the member states, and certain to differ substantially from whatever text may eventually be agreed.  But it can be assumed to correspond pretty closely with drafting instructions received from Mrs Merkel, President Sarkozy and perhaps others.

The proposed agreement was drafted only after the EU summit at which Mr Cameron has been assumed to have ‘vetoed’ it.  Questions:  Since no draft treaty was on the table at the summit on 8-9 December, what exactly was the document or proposal that Mr Cameron ‘vetoed’? If his was a true veto, it must have been the kind of document or proposal that could be adopted only by unanimity:  would that really have applied to a mere proposal to commission a draft treaty for future consideration and negotiation with just a rough indication of the kind of provisions it should contain?  What would have been the problem with his eurosceptic followers if the prime minister had returned to Westminster with the news that he had agreed to the drafting of a new EU treaty which he would have no hesitation in vetoing, much later when negotiations on a draft began, if it proved to constitute a threat to UK or City interests or to entail a fresh surrender of powers to Brussels, or if it failed to take into account safeguards that Britain would insist on including in the text in the course of the negotiations? In other words, did Mr Cameron spectacularly jump the gun?

Another question: If all that Mr Cameron did on 9 December was to promise that he would veto at the appropriate stage any new EU treaty to establish a eurozone fiscal union, regardless of its contents or implications for UK interests, purely because his 2am demands on financial services regulation had been rejected, why didn’t the other 26 merely tut-tut, take note, and express the hope that when he saw the terms of the new treaty Mr Cameron would find all his concerns satisfactorily addressed, and then proceed to instruct the Commission to produce a draft EU treaty for consideration by all 27 EU members some time in January? Such an outcome would have been approved by 26 votes to 1 and no question of a veto should have arisen.  I know of no explanation for this.

Immediately after the 26 EU summiteers had agreed to go ahead with an inter-governmental agreement outside the EU treaties’ framework (Cameron having refused to agree to an EU treaty) to form a eurozone fiscal union and define its rules and sanctions, David Cameron insisted publicly that he would not agree to any of the EU’s institutions or facilities being used by the 26 for drafting, negotiating, finalising or enforcing their proposed non-EU agreement.  He seems to have believed that he could prevent the Commission from drafting the new agreement and participating in discussion of it, EU conference facilities being used for the negotiations and, most serious of all, the European Court of Justice from enforcing compliance with the new eurozone fiscal rules, on the grounds that these institutions and facilities “belonged” to all 27 EU member states and could not therefore be used by a group within the 27 except with the consent of all 27;  and he made it clear that such consent by the UK was not forthcoming.   Such deliberate sabotage not only smelled nasty, disruptive and vindictive, but also looked unlikely to be achievable. It was immediately challenged by the Commission’s lawyers, although Cameron’s initial assertion of a legally water-tight ban was allegedly based on advice from the head of the legal service of the Council of Ministers, the splendidly named Mr Hubert Legal, who, however, appears to have changed his mind later.  Whatever the legal situation might have proved to be, the really significant thing is that Mr Cameron quickly dropped his wrecking tactics and has now agreed to the full use of all EU institutions and facilities for the working out and enforcement of the agreement of the 26, as explicitly confirmed by Nick Clegg in his Guardian interview published on 18 December — and indeed by the text of the draft agreement of the 26, itself apparently produced by the EU Commission and replete with references to the close involvement of the EU and its institutions. Moreover the preamble to the draft agreement actually has its eventual signatories

BEARING IN MIND that the objective of the Heads of State or Government of the euro area Member States and of other Member States of the European Union remains to incorporate the provisions of this Agreement as soon as possible into the Treaties on which the European Union is founded

– which is about as clear a rebuke to the UK coalition government in a draft legal instrument as can be imagined.

Questions:  What was the purpose of the prime minister’s doomed attempt to complicate the preparation, operation and enforcement of the agreement of the 26 by denying them access to EU institutions and facilities?  What possible UK interest did he hope to promote by this apparently vindictive strategy?  And in particular, what were his reasons for abandoning it within days — pressure from his LibDem coalition partners, legal advice from the legal advisers of the Commission, the European Council or the British government, or belated remorse?

I think we should be told.

Publication of the first draft of the agreement of the 26 answers a number of questions raised by the events of 9 December, including some questions that have surprisingly rarely troubled the commentariat.  For example, –

Question:  Will the disciplinary rules of the new eurozone fiscal union established by the agreement of the 26 apply to all signatories of the agreement, including the nine EU members which are still not members of the eurozone, or only to the 17 eurozone members?
Answer:  It won’t apply to non-eurozone members at all, until and unless they join the euro — and indeed it won’t necessarily be binding on eurozone members either, unless and until they ratify the agreement.  The agreement will come into effect only on “the deposit of the ninth instrument of ratification by a Contracting Party whose currency is the euro” (Art. 14.2).  In other words, the agreement comes into effect even if only nine of the 17 eurozone members have ratified it, and even then it won’t be binding on the eight eurozone members who haven’t ratified it, until they do (if at all), and however many of the 26 may ratify it, it will only be binding on those who both use the euro and have ratified the agreement.  But the agreement allows non-eurozone members who sign and ratify it to opt to be bound by its provisions in advance of joining the euro, if they wish.

Question:  Will the agreement interfere in any way with the operation of the EU single market?
Answer:  No.  The draft includes provision that everything in the agreement must be compatible with the single market and other EU law, and in the event of conflict between the provisions of the agreement of the 26 and those establishing the single market, the latter will prevail.  (This appears to demolish one of the alleged excuses for Mr Cameron’s ‘veto’.)

Question:  Will the signatories to the agreement of the 26 form a legally established separate and distinct bloc within the EU?
Answer:  Yes.  The draft agreement provides for regular meetings of the heads of state and government of the signatories of the agreement of the 26 along with the Presidents of the EU Commission and the European Central Bank, under a separate President whom they will themselves elect.  This has potentially dire implications for the UK, which could well find itself the only EU government not eligible to attend these important meetings, where matters other than those directly affecting the eurozone will almost inevitably be discussed and agreed.  At regular meetings of the European Council, Britain may in consequence regularly find itself confronted with faits accomplis negotiated and agreed in advance in a “Euro Summit meeting” of the kind established in Art. 13.1 of the draft agreement.

Many other questions remain unanswered:

Question: Will Britain have any say in the negotiation of the agreement of the 26 and any opportunity to ensure that there is nothing in it that could damage UK interests, including those of the City of London?
We don’t know.  Mr Cameron has (surprisingly?) accepted a conciliatory invitation to the UK to be represented as an observer at the forthcoming talks on the text of the agreement of the 26, but it’s not clear whether this will entitle the UK observer to propose amendments or additions to the draft text or even to speak at those meetings.  Obviously the UK will have no vote at the meetings.  In the words of the Reuters commentary,

“In the coming weeks, representatives from the 26 countries expected to take part in the pact will meet to refine the details, with a final agreement expected in January. European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, who chairs EU summits and has overseen efforts to get countries to commit to the new pact, has called another summit of all EU heads of state for late January or early February, by which time officials hope the compact will have been ratified by a quorum of states.”

Question: What was the basis for Mr Cameron’s fears, confirmed by Mr Clegg in his Guardian interview, that if he had consented to the proposal at Brussels to have a new EU treaty without getting compensatory concessions over repatriation of powers to Westminster, he would not have been able to get that consent approved by the parliament at Westminster?
Mr Clegg claims to foresee a situation in which a combination of Labour opportunism and Tory europhobia might make it impossible to get any UK agreement to the preparation of a new Treaty approved by the house of commons. This is utterly mystifying.  There would have been no requirement for Parliament to approve a decision merely to allow a new EU treaty to be drafted and then negotiated by all EU members, with the possibility of a UK veto if the treaty’s terms proved unacceptable or if it had not proved possible to satisfy any demands made by the UK in the course of the negotiations.  Nor could the question of a referendum on such a decision have arisen, until (a) a treaty had been finalised, (b) the British government had signed it and proposed to ratify it, and (c) ratification had been approved by parliament.

Question: If the only proposal on the table at the summit on 8-9 December was whether to commission a draft EU treaty designed to form a eurozone fiscal union with tight fiscal disciplines binding only on eurozone members, why did Mr Cameron not go along with it, reserving his decision whether to veto it until he knew what would be in it, preserving Britain’s right to take a full part in its negotiations, and presenting his demands regarding EU powers on regulation of financial services, if relevant, to a later stage when the contents of the draft treaty were known?

Perhaps Mr Cameron will tell us the answer to that question one day.

Question:  Is an agreement of the 26 that requires, e.g., the approval of a majority of other eurozone governments for every eurozone country’s budget, if any single eurozone government (think Germany) challenges it, likely to be approved by the parliaments of a minimum of nine eurozone states, and even if it is, how likely is such a requirement likely to be approved in a referendum in any of those nine states?
In other words, is it all likely to happen anyway?

Question:  Even if the whole thing can be approved and brought into operation within the next three or four months (which seems unlikely), will it be enough to satisfy the markets and the ratings agencies that the eurozone is restored to health and triple-A ratings can safely be given back to Greece and the other eurozone countries currently under siege?  Will the promise of a future eurozone fiscal union with draconian rules and subject to ferocious sanctions be enough without international funding on a massive scale to avert sovereign defaults within the eurozone?
What do you think?

And, finally,

Question: For $64,000:  Will the medicine of cuts and austerity, deflation and deregulation, which the proposed agreement of the 26 is designed to institutionalise and set in legal concrete, be likelier to cure the patient, or to kill him?
One irony among many is that Mr Cameron and Mrs Merkel are both committed to the kind of pre-Keynesian, neo-liberal hair-shirt remedies for the debt crisis that are so far failing spectacularly in Britain — and which indeed are at this point making a bad situation measurably worse.  But Mr Cameron believes that ‘there is no alternative’ to them, and that they need to be applied throughout Europe, exactly as Mrs Merkel’s EU treaty, or failing that the agreement of the 26, is designed to do.  And who has made it impossible for this to be accomplished in a binding EU treaty and for Britain to play any part in bringing it about, being relegated to the sidelines as a mere observer in splendid isolation from the rest of the EU?

There would have been one excellent reason for refusing to go along with the kind of treaty now actively in preparation, in the form of the agreement of the 26:  a fundamental disagreement with the kind of economic remedies, as proposed in the agreement, that brought about the recessions and eventual slump of the 1930s, culminating in uncontrollable social unrest and eventually a world war. But even if Mr Cameron had embarked on his campaign of veto and obstruction for that extremely cogent reason — which of course he did not — the time for obstruction would have been much later in the process.  The verdict must be a simple one:  he did what could turn out to have been the right thing but for utterly wrong reasons: and even then, he acted so prematurely that Britain’s influence on these great events is now likely to be close to zero.

Footnote:  You may well know of other evidence now available that will answer some of these unanswered questions but which, through lack of diligence or research staff or both, I have failed to track down.  If so, it would be a great kindness if you will append it to this as a comment, with chapter and verse as necessary.  These are matters with great potential consequences for us all, and the more we know about them, the better.

Brian

The prime minister’s and his EU colleagues’ proclaimed purpose at the EU summit on Thursday was to save the euro and the eurozone.  There was already broad agreement on how to achieve this.  The plan was however torpedoed, for no discernible reason, by the UK’s veto. For this extraordinary blunder Britain will pay a high price.  By his recklessness, and his shameful failure to stand up to the swivel-eyed europhobes in his own party, Mr Cameron has destroyed Britain’s ability to influence developments in Europe that will profoundly affect every part of our economy; the best hope of recovery for the eurozone; our relations with our closest friends and potential allies in the EU; and any respect that Britain may have enjoyed in Washington and elsewhere in the world as an active and influential member of the European Union, the biggest player in world trade and a second-tier global superpower. Britain relegated to the sidelines of Europe is of precious little interest to anyone.  Our amateurish diplomacy has made us a laughing-stock to our critics and a source of bewilderment to our friends.

There’s no need to repeat here the most obvious paradoxes in these events. These have been extensively discussed in the media since the news of the disaster broke on Friday morning – how Cameron’s demands, crudely presented as his price for not vetoing what the rest of the EU wanted, were suddenly tabled in the early hours of the morning in Brussels on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, without the smallest attempt to forge alliances in advance to ensure that they would receive at least some support;  how our 26 EU partners were totally baffled by the apparent irrelevance and technical nature of our demands, for which they were completely unprepared – our diplomats were forbidden to distribute the texts in advance for fear of leaks;  how our veto achieves no possible purpose in promoting UK interests, since the remaining 26 EU members will go ahead anyway with an inter-governmental pact outside the Lisbon Treaty to forge a eurozone fiscal union, but the UK will now be excluded from the crucial meetings at which the terms of the pact will be hammered out; how LibDem ministers had succeeded in whittling down the UK demands to what they hoped were potentially negotiable, but were appalled to learn at 4am on Friday that because those demands had been virtually ignored, gaining support from not a single EU partner, the prime minister had actually carried out his self-harm threat to veto the eurozone rescue plan as an EU operation;  how the UK veto does precisely nothing to protect the interests of the City of London, but actually weakens the scope for protecting those interests in the coming months and perhaps years.

However, a few features of this sorry saga have not perhaps had the attention they deserve.  For example, –

• Most of the EU, including the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, wanted a new EU treaty amendment to the Lisbon Treaty to provide for a new régime for the eurozone, imposing fiscal discipline enforceable by the EU’s institutions, including the European Court.  A minority, including the French President Sarkozy, would have preferred an inter-governmental pact outside the Lisbon Treaty, to avoid conferring new powers over member states on the EU Commission and other EU organs; but in a series of informal meetings in the days preceding the summit – meetings from which Britain was excluded because Cameron had pulled the UK Conservative party out of the powerful centre-right European Peoples’ Party grouping in deference to the views of his party Europhobes —  Sarkozy had eventually yielded to Mrs Merkel’s pressures and had agreed to go along with a formal amendment to Lisbon.  Assuming that Cameron and his Conservative colleagues (but probably not the coalition LibDems) would also have preferred the new measures to be installed outside the Lisbon treaties and the EU’s institutions, there should have been scope for a French-British alliance to press for this procedure against the preference of the Germans.  But because of UK failure to participate in the preliminary conversations before the summit, the opportunity for this potential collaboration was passed up.  The UK veto enabled Sarkozy to get what he wanted while enabling him to blame Britain for wrecking the plan in the form preferred by Germany, to which Sarkozy had reluctantly agreed.
• Cameron didn’t veto a new EU treaty.  There was not at this stage any treaty to veto: it remained to be negotiated.  What Britain vetoed early on Friday was the proposal to set up the new eurozone fiscal union and embody its rules in a new EU treaty.  This forces the rest of the EU, all 26 members, to proceed instead by way of an intergovernmental pact outside the EU treaties.  Britain is threatening to prevent the use of EU resources – the participation of the Commission, the European Central Bank or the European Court of Justice, and their extensive facilities, for the negotiation and establishment of the new eurozone agreement.  If Britain succeeds in this, it will hugely complicate the task of setting up the new fiscal union and establishing its enforcement powers and procedures.  It also greatly reduces the international credibility of the plans for the new régime and market confidence in its chances of success in staving off the collapse of the single currency.  Is that really what Britain wants?  How does it advance UK interests to make the rescue of the eurozone more difficult?
• Cameron’s demands for ‘safeguards’ to protect the interests of the City, as the price of Britain refraining from vetoing the eurozone rescue plan in an EU treaty, had no direct bearing on that plan.  The main demand was for a UK veto over future EU decisions (‘directives’) affecting the regulation of national financial institutions, directives which under existing EU law are decided by qualified majority voting and thus not subject to a veto.  Cameron was demanding a change in existing EU law, not protection against some hypothetical new provision in the proposed eurozone rescue treaty.  The idea that the 26 other EU governments could be bounced into such a change in existing EU law, irrelevant to the eurozone rescue plan, without prior notice and at 2.30 in the morning, purely to avoid a UK veto of what everyone in the room, ostensibly including Cameron, was there to do, was frankly fatuous.  It was a bizarre attempt at blackmail, in which the blackmailer, failing to get what he wanted by threatening his 26 victims with a blunderbuss, demonstrated that he had not been bluffing by pulling the trigger – and shooting himself in the foot.
• It has been widely assumed that the protection of City interests demanded by Cameron was intended to prevent the EU from imposing stricter regulation of the UK’s financial institutions than that proposed by the British government.  In fact in several respects, including the relationship between banks’ capitalisation and their loan liabilities, the regulatory measures proposed for UK financial institutions by the British government are stricter and more onerous than anything proposed by the EU.
• The banking crisis, credit crunch, sovereign debt crisis and threat of euro collapse are all attributable in large part to failings in regulation of financial institutions throughout the western world up to 2008.  That failure is in turn mainly attributable to the impossibility of any one government imposing stricter regulation than others, because of the globalised character of international capital, which can easily move its resources to whichever country has the lightest regulation.  Thus effective regulation can only be exercised by international agreement.  Long before 2008 Gordon Brown had sought to interest the Americans and our EU partners in the possibility of tightening bank regulation on an international basis, but had failed to elicit any response.  Now everyone recognises the need for international collaboration to impose tighter regulation on an international basis if it is to be effective in averting future crises; hence the moves for EU-wide regulations currently in preparation.  Cameron’s demand that these should be made subject to the veto of any one EU government is thus calculated to undermine  the effectiveness of one of the most important weapons in the global armoury against future financial crises.  No wonder he found no takers in Brussels at 2.30am on Friday morning.
• Tory media and parliamentary spokespersons since Friday, seeking to represent the Cameron veto as a triumph of the British bulldog approach to international diplomacy, have sought to imply, whether in deliberate obfuscation or out of ignorance, that the veto was necessary to prevent the EU from imposing a financial transaction tax (aka Robin Hood or Tobin tax) which would disadvantage the City of London more expensively than any other EU country’s interests, because of the disproportionately large size of the UK’s financial sector.  In fact this is wholly irrelevant to the eurozone rescue plan and the proposed new euro fiscal union which were the subject of the summit.  Taxes may be imposed by the EU on member states only on the basis of unanimity:  so we already have a veto over any proposal to impose a financial transaction tax on us, or on anyone else.
• Defenders of the Cameron veto have also tried to imply that the strict and enforceable disciplines intended to be imposed on eurozone members would also be imposed on any EU countries outside the eurozone if they signed up in Brussels last week to the proposal for a eurozone fiscal union.  This is simply not true.  It is however true that new rules for fiscal discipline binding on 17 eurozone members of the EU and supported by at least six of the others (and possibly by all nine of the others, excluding Britain) will inevitably have a powerful indirect effect on all future EU policy and decisions.  When the 23, or probably 26, EU members participating in the negotiation of the new eurozone fiscal union and its rules have acquired the habit of consulting and collaborating with each other for that purpose, nothing will stop them agreeing together on other EU matters.  The exclusion of Britain, and only Britain, from this vitally important operation is bound to result in Britain increasingly being presented in future with faits accomplis, done deals already discussed and agreed in other forums from which Mr Cameron has recklessly excluded himself and his country.
• Apologists for that veto have argued variously that if Cameron had agreed to participate in drawing up a new treaty creating a eurozone fiscal union with enforceable rules, he would have been forced to approve the resulting treaty but unable to get it through the House of Commons.  Alternatively, it is asserted, even if he managed to get it approved by parliament, he would not be able to avoid a referendum on it in which it would almost certainly be rejected, given the generally eurosceptic mood of the country and the power of the populist tabloids.  In fact, however, neither proposition holds water.  Cameron would have no difficulty in securing parliamentary approval for an EU treaty that would be supported by virtually all Labour and LibDem MPs as well as a respectable number of Conservatives.  Having to rely on Labour and LibDem votes for a treaty to which he had signed up would be represented as a humiliation, but so what?  Was it really worth incurring the resentment of virtually the whole of Europe and the silencing of Britain’s voice in the EU for the indefinite future just to avoid a momentary embarrassment in the House of Commons?  As for a referendum, none would have been necessary, since the new treaty would not have entailed any transfer of powers from Westminster to Brussels, Britain not being a eurozone member.  The head-banging Europhobes would have screamed blue murder if deprived of a referendum, but they are already doing that anyway, egged on by the eurosceptic action of the the prime minister and scenting the seductive prospect of a referendum, not just on a new treaty, but on UK membership of the EU — which they might actually win.

Such is the price we are all having to pay for a prime minister who lacks the cojones to face down his europhobic followers in parliament and the press.  Indeed, whether they are truly his ‘followers’ is a moot point.  Which are the followers and which the leader — Bill Cash?  Those who meekly tiptoe behind the focus groups, the opinion polls and the prejudices of foreign newspaper proprietors, instead of either leading or ignoring them, are liable to end up in a quicksand.  The missing ingedient in our present discontents is clear, cogent and determined leadership.  The besetting sin of our present political ‘leaders’ is cowardice.  Ed Miliband, are you listening?

Brian

Financial Times, November 5, 2011:

Letters:  Salmond’s ‘devo max’ option is a camouflage device

From Sir Brian Barder.

Sir, You are surely unnecessarily alarmed by the Scottish first minister’s “shrewd” decision to include “devo max” (full fiscal autonomy within the UK) as an alternative to full independence for Scotland in the forthcoming referendum (“The ties that bind”, editorial October 29). Far from that being a trap, as you warn, it’s likelier to reflect Alex Salmond’s judgment that he’s unlikely to get a majority for independence in 2014 or 2015, with the devo max option a device to camouflage a humiliating defeat for independence.

“Full fiscal autonomy” for Scotland could describe a multitude of possible arrangements, none of which needs to frighten those of us who hate the idea of the amputation of Scotland and the disintegration of our country. Why should Scotland have any less internal self-government than, say, California or New South Wales? If the completion of the stalled devolution process for Scotland prompted demands for similar benefits for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, so much the better: the UK could then establish the safeguards and institutions of a full federation.

Brian Barder, London SW18, UK

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

Someone at the BBC seems to have it in for Ethiopia, for some reason.  Newsnight, the BBC’s most trusted and supposedly authoritative of current affairs programmes, this week (on 21 September 2011) thriftily recycled much of an aggressively critical film first broadcast on Newsnight last August, denouncing all UK development and humanitarian aid to Ethiopia because of the alleged defects of its government, whose shortcomings were luridly described on the basis of accusations made by Ethiopian opposition figures and exiles.  (The programme can be viewed here for another five days;  the Ethiopia segment starts at 23’50″.)   The glaring deficiencies in that film and the section of Newsnight in which it was broadcast were laid bare at the time in a blistering analysis by the respected journalist and Ethiopia expert Peter Gill in a blog post (here), and I posted some acid comments on it in a BBC blog (comment No. 48 here).  Newsnight ignored all such criticisms and blithely repeated all the crassness of the August film in last night’s programme.  You’d have thought that the BBC might have learned its lesson from the experience of the World Service radio programme back in March 2010 for which it was forced to issue a grovelling public apology to Bob Geldof and BandAid for much the same errors and defects as those of the two Newsnight programmes of last August and this month:  there are fuller accounts of that dismal episode here and here (and in many other places).

Last night’s Newsnight asked why “a single pound” of UK aid should go to an allegedly repressive Ethiopian régime which, it was claimed, manipulates our food aid for political advantage, won’t allow political opposition, crushes human rights, “hangs civilians”, commits “mass rapes”, and so forth.  The programme showed an interview recorded earlier in the day by Jeremy Paxman (for it was he) with the International Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, in New York, who very sensibly stressed the numbers of Ethiopian lives demonstrably saved by British aid and pointed out that none of our aid goes through the Ethiopian central government.  Mitchell said that the allegations of UK food aid being politically manipulated had been scrupulously investigated by British officials in Ethiopia but that they had found no evidence whatever of systemic food aid manipulation.  The effect of this was then ruined by Paxman’s gleeful announcement that after his interview with Mitchell, the Department for International Development (DfID, Mitchell’s own department) had issued “a clarification” to the effect that the British investigating officials had not gone out to visit the areas where the alleged manipulations were said to have taken place but had conducted their investigations from their desks in Addis Ababa.  Cue triumphant sneer on face of Paxman. [But now see update, dated 29 September, below.]

In both programmes Newsnight simply took it for granted that UK aid of any sort should be withheld from any country with an undemocratic government or a poor human rights record.  Perhaps regrettably, Mitchell didn’t challenge this disreputable implied proposition, repeatedly emphasising his insistence that all such serious allegations must be and were scrupulously investigated (thus implying acceptance of the feather-brained “no human rights, no aid” thesis), with the DfID ‘clarification’ used by Paxman to suggest that Mitchell’s officials’ ‘investigations’ were worthless.

Such unsubstantiated and misleading attacks on a major British country aid programme are bound to undermine public confidence in UK aid generally, as well as strengthening discontent about the ring-fencing of the aid programme from Coalition cuts. It would be nice to think that a suitably senior BBC executive could be challenged about this unbalanced, sub-standard, biliously anti-Ethiopian material, now broadcast on respected BBC channels on three separate occasions in just a few months, in which unsupported allegations are represented as ‘revelations’:  non-sequiturs are extrapolated from shaky or unsubstantiated evidence:  there is no discussion or even recognition of the potential consequences of the implied and profoundly mistaken doctrine that aid should be denied to countries with repressive or illiberal governments:  aggressive interrogation never allows the other side to have a fair chance to state its case:  and the implications for public support of overseas development aid are potentially so dire.  That such wretched stuff should go out with the cachet of the BBC’s reputation for fairness, balance and reliability is a mystery that surely calls for enquiry and explanation.

Post-script: the ‘Bureau of Investigative Journalism’ , which produced the film with and for Newsnight, has posted on its website a predictably tendentious account of its ‘investigation’ and of the Paxman interview with Andrew Mitchell.  This, unsurprisingly, is just as fundamentally flawed as the material broadcast in Newsnight, and in my view it’s open to the same criticisms.

Update (29 September 2011):  An important clarification and correction of the position of the Department for International Development (DfID) was broadcast by the BBC’s flagship Newsnight at the end of its programme on 23 September.  The DfID statement read:

The Department for International Development has confirmed that, as Secretary of State Andrew Mitchell made clear on Wednesday’s programme, DFID officials in Ethiopia did make regular field visits to look into the allegations of aid distortion.
“Those field visits — and dozens of similar visits by other donor agencies — made clear that there was no systemic distortion for political reasons in the distribution of aid.

It’s good to have this on the record.  The earlier DfID statement, read out with such relish by Jeremy Paxman at the end of the Newsnight programme two nights earlier, on 21 September, had left viewers with the unfortunate impression, not only that DfID aid and development staff based in Addis Ababa never ventured outside the walls of the safe and comfortable British Embassy compound there, but also that, in consequence, their ‘investigation’ of allegations of political distortion by the Ethiopian government of the distribution of UK food aid in remote areas of Ethiopia far from Addis Ababa can’t have been worth much.  It’s not clear, anyway to me, why DfID’s earlier statement gave such a damaging and inaccurate impression — unless Jeremy Paxman’s summary of it on 21 September was a distortion of what the full DfID text had said. If so, DfID has a strong case for complaint.

The sad truth is, however, that few Newsnight viewers hearing the subsequent DfID clarification (quoted above) will have remembered the Ethiopia segment in the programme of two nights earlier in enough detail to realise its significance.  The entirely false impression of DfID bureaucrats ‘investigating’ the misuse of UK aid out in the countryside from the comfort of their offices in Addis Ababa will inevitably, like the melody, linger on, as will all the other unsupported allegations against the Ethiopian government, cheerfully represented as established fact by Newsnight and the makers of its film.

Brian

As soon as the Libyan rebels appeared to have captured most of Tripoli, there was an outbreak of decidedly premature triumphalism by some, but not all, of the noisiest cheer-leaders for the NATO bombing campaign and Britain’s prominent role in it.  Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former Foreign Secretary who should know better, relieved himself of an article in the London Evening Standard which sneered at Tony Blair’s successful establishment of mutually beneficial trade and investment relations with Libya, and exulted that

It is a relief that the present Government has been far more robust in its approach to Libya. David Cameron, in particular, is entitled to credit for taking the lead in calling for international action and ensuring that the RAF has been one of the lead participants in the successful Nato action. Nato forces will be needed for a few more days but it is certain that they will be able to declare their mission accomplished in the near future.

Whichever sub-editor on the London Evening Standard wrote the heading of another article, by the American academic historian and diplomat Professor Philip Bobbitt, went one better, with the chilling words:

Libya shows the way the West can now intervene

– although Bobbitt’s enthusiasm for western intervention in the affairs of second and  third world states was somewhat more tempered than his sub-editor’s effort suggested:

Above all, will the publics of the Nato countries see events in Libya as validating preclusive interventions, when the experience in Iraq has convinced them that intervention is too costly, too bloody, and too lawless?

Still, Bobbitt’s article celebrated what he portrayed as an exciting new precedent for the UN Security Council to authorise western military action anywhere in the world where some disaster seemed likely to happen unless action was taken to stop it, a hair-raising doctrine that the professor christened ‘precursive intervention’ (a wonderful example of a scholarly high-falutin’ term designed to sterilise a brutal and bloody reality).

Dismayed by these arguments for repeating the Libyan adventure all over the place in the future, I wrote a dissenting letter to the Evening Standard, which duly published most of the first part of it on 24 August.  I had written:

Sir, In 2004 I was one of 52 former British ambassadors and high commissioners who signed a letter to the then prime minister strongly criticising many aspects of our government’s role in Iraq. The Iraq and Libyan situations are different in many ways but similar in others, such as the West’s reckless defiance, in both cases, of the UN Charter. The attack on Iraq was never authorised by the UN Security Council. Our initial military intervention in Libya was authorised by UN resolution 1973, but we ignored that resolution’s primary demand for an immediate cease-fire, and its requirement that outside military force should be used only to protect civilians.  After intervening to protect Benghazi, we brazenly supported the rebels militarily to bring about régime change, contrary to resolution 1973 and international law.

As in Iraq, by our intervention in Libya we have assumed a potentially expensive responsibility to help sort out the post-civil-war mess, probably including sending ground troops to maintain security.  Any Libyan government we help to create will risk being regarded throughout the middle east as a western puppet.  Even if western military intervention for a limited purpose was justified, Britain had no obligation to participate, given our disproportionate role in Afghanistan and our parlous budgetary situation.  We can’t afford our libraries but apparently we can afford to spend millions on bombing and rocketing a small country in the middle east which posed no threat to us.  A former Foreign Secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s, praise of David Cameron for rushing us into this costly and unnecessary adventure is incomprehensible.

Professor Bobbitt sees the NATO action as setting a useful precedent under a new doctrine of ‘preclusive intervention’, asserting that the Security Council broke new ground by authorising force when no other state was threatened by Libya: but that overlooks the Security Council’s formal finding that the Libyan situation constituted “a threat to international peace and security”, and the Charter recognises no such thing as a right of preclusive intervention.  Our involvement is by no means over and we shall come to regret ever taking on this open-ended commitment.

I wonder when our senior civil servants and diplomats, our air marshals and generals, will discover the intestinal fortitude to say to their naïve glory-seeking ministers:

“Sir, There are persuasive arguments for a western military operation to forestall the human catastrophe which you foresee, but there is nothing in the UN Charter (which constitutes international law on the use of force in international affairs and with which we are legally required to comply) that would permit the Security Council to authorise a military attack of the kind you envisage:  so anyone who launched such an attack in the circumstances and for the purposes that you describe would be committing the crime of aggression, and liable to prosecution in the International Criminal Court.

“Furthermore, even if the Security Council were to authorise such military action, there is no reason why Britain should take part in it, and many compelling reasons why we should not.  We have played a major role in Iraq and Afghanistan, second only to the Americans, and unmatched by any of our EU or other partners.  We are imposing on our own population unprecedented cuts in vital social services on which the poorest and most vulnerable in our society depend, in order to reduce a budget deficit for which ordinary British people are not responsible:  to embark now on a military adventure certain to cost many millions of pounds would be wildly irresponsible in present financial circumstances.

“It’s anyway far from certain that the political and social objectives for Tsetseland which you wish to achieve can be achieved by military force: and even if they were, our participation in the attack would impose on us an obligation to help financially and in other ways with a costly process of post-war reconstruction which could go on for decades, over which we would have no control and which we could not afford.

“Finally, you, the relevant government ministers, have very sensibly approved cuts in the UK defence budget which reflect a more realistic appreciation of Britain’s place in the world but which will make it impossible for us to arm and equip our soldiers, seamen and airmen adequately for an operation on the scale that would be required, to reinforce them if necessary, to rotate them to allow adequate rest and recovery, to take care of the wounded and of the families of those who may be killed, and at the same time to continue to fulfil our military commitments elsewhere in the world, including at home.  Against this background, we are bound to tell you that our armed forces are in no position to undertake the kind of military action which you envisage.  If you want a purely symbolic British contribution to this operation, and provided that it is properly and unambiguously authorised by the UN in accordance with our Charter obligations, we could probably find the money for a small team of communications experts and an ambulance unit.”

Brian

On 3 July New York Magazine (not  to be confused with the New York Times magazine) published an analysis of the challenges threatening President Obama’s re-election which has a huge resonance for us in the UK, as well as creating a stir in the US.  The wonderfully punchy article, by Frank Rich, the celebrated former NY Times commentator, is re-published in today’s UK Observer magazine, although with only a vertical and microscopic acknowledgement to New York Magazine and not reproduced on the Observer magazine website.  Fortunately however it can be read in full, across six web pages, on the NY Magazine’s website, here.  It should be compulsory reading for everyone interested in British and American politics at this time of economic and financial crisis and the threat to both our countries from the resurgent know-nothing right wing.

It’s worth noting that the original article in New York Magazine (of which Rich is now Editor-at-large) is headed “Obama’s Original Sin”, which seems a poor summary of the article’s thrust, while the Observer has seen fit to re-title it “Obama: the betrayal”, which in my view badly misrepresents it.  Rich’s concluding paragraphs give something of the flavour:

“A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” Obama declared at his inauguration. What he said on that bright January morning is no less true or stirring now. For all his failings since, he is the only one who can make this case. There’s nothing but his own passivity to stop him from doing so—and from shaking up the administration team that, well beyond the halfway-out-the-door Geithner and his Treasury Department, has showered too many favors on the prosperous. This will mean turning on his own cadre of the liberal elite. But it’s essential if he is to call the bluff of a fake man-of-the-people like Romney. To differentiate himself from the discredited Establishment, he will have to mount the fight he has ducked for the past three years.

The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation—so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope—would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there’s a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.

There are of course many significant differences between the problems facing the US and those facing the UK.  One is that the US administration is headed by a liberal Democrat who came to power on a tide of reformist enthusiasm but whose performance in office has disappointed many of the voters who helped to sweep him into the White House, whereas the British government is headed by a Conservative prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer whose positions towards the far right-hand end of the political spectrum are increasingly apparent.  Another major difference is that the President’s ability to carry out the policies he himself favours is gravely circumscribed by a majority in the lower House of the Congress largely composed of economically illiterate and politically irresponsible Republicans, whereas our prime minister’s power to impose whatever policies he likes is virtually unlimited (his junior coalition partner can block him only by committing political suicide, and he has almost total control of parliament).  As a result, potentially disastrous policies are being imposed on both countries by a right wing party in hock to big business and the bankers, fixated on deficit reduction at whatever cost, despite the appalling risk of a second and even deeper recession.  In both countries a desperately needed policy of renewed stimulus by central government to revive aggregate demand in the economy, to tackle unemployment and accelerate growth, is blocked in Washington by ideologically blinded Republicans and rejected in Britain by the governing party in its historic role as the political wing of the City, beholden to the bankers, the company directors and the retired army Majors, most of whom seem to think that Keynes was Milton’s surname and rhymes with beans.  Our situation in the UK is perhaps marginally even worse than that in the US:  until and unless Ed Miliband grows into the role that history demands of him, we don’t even have a Barack Obama, warts and all.

Brian