Eu

Friday

Matthew Lynn

The EU’s Brexit bill doesn’t add up

A dozen hospitals. A hundred million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, and a lot more of the Oxford one. Or even a few trips in one of Jeff Bezos’s new space rockets. Even with inflation, there is still plenty you can buy with an extra three to four billion pounds.  In recent days, it has emerged there is a big gulf between what the European Union insists we owe under the terms of our departure agreement, and what the UK believes is due.  In the EU’s accounts, it put the sum at £40.5 billion. The UK now says it will be £37.3 billion, or £3.2 billion less than the EU reckons.

Gabriel Gavin Gabriel Gavin

The EU’s growing migrant war with Belarus

The EU is building a wall — and they’re going to make Belarus pay for it. This week, the tiny Baltic nation of Lithuania began erecting a barbed-wire border fence on its frontier with its neighbour, Europe’s most notorious autocracy. Meanwhile, Brussels is ramping up economic sanctions against Belarus. Lithuania’s parliament has declared a state of emergency, citing a sharp rise in migrants attempting to illegally cross the border. More than 800 made the journey in the first week of July alone, coming from countries like Iraq, Iran, Syria and the Congo. In response, hundreds of troops have been deployed and construction of a 340-mile barrier is underway. The EU’s newly

Thursday

Steven Barrett

The rule of law is breaking down in the EU

There are 27 member states in the EU. Two have now declared they are not bound by EU law. Based on the law as set out in the treaty each member state signs when it joins the EU, that means both countries are in breach of international law. The first country in breach of international law was Germany. I wrote about this last year. The German court said it wasn’t bound by EU law because the EU had no power to act on the legality of the ECB’s bond-buying programme during the pandemic. The Germans said ‘you can’t answer this question, so we will’. Crucially, the EU disagreed and the

Dalibor Rohac

Why is the EU copying China’s Belt and Road initiative?

Much like Mark Twain’s apocryphal quote about arguing with idiots who ‘drag you down to their level and beat you with experience,’ Europeans should think twice about whether they want to try to compete with China when it comes to the use of economic power in pursuit of geopolitical ends. ‘It’s useless moaning about it,’ the German foreign minister Heiko Maas (correctly) told journalists last week, when discussing Chinese economic power at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels. The EU foreign ministers tasked the European Commission on Monday with preparing a European ‘strategic response’ to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Provisionally dubbed ‘A Globally Connected Europe’ –

Tuesday

Gerri Peev

Meet the punk comic taking on Bulgaria’s elite

Inconclusive election results following a snap election; a politician at the helm who made his name on satirical TV shows; a football fanbase condemned for its racism; and a population that has a polarised attitude to the EU. Bulgaria perhaps has more in common with England than would first appear.  Dissatisfaction spilled over onto ballot papers this weekend during the country’s snap general election. This has culminated in a celebrity-led, anti-elitist party winning the greatest share of the vote by a whisker: 24 per cent compared to the incumbent GERB party’s 23.5 per cent. Slavi Trifonov, who has dabbled in folk-rock, hip-hop and punk music, and starred in his own political sketch shows,

Monday

Ross Clark

A minimum corporation tax is nothing to celebrate

So is this what the new era of global co-operation looks like? The EU has agreed to delay the introduction of its proposed digital levy until the autumn to allow negotiations for a global minimum corporation tax. Biden had demanded that the digital tax be dropped, seeing it as a direct attack on US tech giants. In other words, the EU appears keen to compromise in the face of US pressure — something that it would have been less likely to do under Donald Trump. The move makes it more likely that a global minimum corporation tax of 15 per cent will now become reality. Is that a cause to

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

Why has the EU let German car manufacturers off the hook?

Two billion? Five billion? Perhaps ten billion to make it a nice round number? For colluding on diesel emissions you might think the European Union would hand out a pretty stiff fine to the big German auto-manufacturers. After all, it has hit American tech giants with huge penalties for far lesser transgressions.  Yet in the end, its response was predictable: the EU has largely let them off the hook. The reason? It turns out that protecting German auto manufacturers is what the Commission really cares about – and nothing else matters. According to Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s anti-trust chief, German manufacturers ‘possessed the technology to reduce harmful emissions beyond what was legally required under EU

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Lukashenko’s migrant warfare against the EU

When you have already forced a plane down with spurious claims of a bomb threat, just to arrest one dissident journalist, where do you go from there? For the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, a man looking to punish the European Union after it imposed sanctions on Belarus, it seems that exploiting would-be migrants and asylum seekers is the way forward. Last week, the dictator threatened to send masses of migrants to the EU, in retaliation for the bloc’s sanctions against Belarus. ‘We will not stop anyone’, Lukashenko said, saying migrants would be on their way to a ‘warm and comfortable Europe’ soon. His goal in particular appeared to be to

Andrew Tettenborn

Britain should resist copying the EU’s corporate responsibility law

Big corporations have a lot not to be proud of, and we certainly could do with laws to rein in some of their excesses. But that doesn’t mean that we should necessarily nod those laws through without a careful look.  A case in point is the demand made in recent days for the government to follow an EU initiative and introduce a ‘corporate responsibility’ law. This would require British companies to vet their entire supply chains for, among other things, human rights violations. The EU scheme in question, based on a European parliament vote in March, is what you have to look at to see just what is being asked for. Its demands

Tuesday

Susanne Mundschenk

Should flights be taxed more?

The European Commission is set to propose EU-wide minimum taxes on kerosene, the fuel for planes, as part of their EU energy taxation plans to meet the new eco 2030 targets. However, it remains to be seen if this tax will be agreed by all member states, as taxation issues require unanimity.  A leaked draft from the Commission proposes a minimum tax on flights inside the EU. Freight flights are to be exempted, so as not to give a competitive advantage to non-EU competitors, which could be seen as a muddled approach to satisfy too many objectives at once. And there are alternatives, such as including aviation companies in the

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The UK’s immigration figures are a fantasy

Journalists filing to deadline are apt to dig only so deep when googling for statistics, which in themselves are sometimes derided as worse than damned lies. Thus we’re often suckers for ‘known facts’. Besides, if the UK’s Office for National Statistics doesn’t produce reliable data, where’s a poor scribbler to turn? Nevertheless, the current uptake of Britain’s offer of settlement status to resident EU citizens exposes even this upright organisation’s immigration statistics as, well, worse than damned lies. Far more generous than the begrudging bureaucratic bramble of reciprocal packages on offer to Brits resident on the Continent post-Brexit, the UK’s settlement scheme for resident EU citizens had, by the end

Wolfgang Münchau Wolfgang Münchau

Angela’s ashes: Merkel is leaving the EU in chaos

Perhaps the most absurd thing ever said about Angela Merkel is that she was the de facto leader of the western world. She has certainly been one of Europe’s most successful politicians, if you define success as political survival. But as she comes to the end of her 16 years in office, her luck is deserting her and the mess she has created is becoming horribly apparent. She leaves behind a split EU that is not just unled but might now be unleadable. Humiliating reminders of Merkel’s imploded authority come regularly. Take her latest idea to keep British tourists out of the EU this summer. Germany is imposing a mandatory

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The sausage war ceasefire is a good sign for UK-EU relations

The sausage dispute between the UK and the EU may sound like something out of Yes Minister but it is the canary in the coal mine of UK-EU relations. In a sign of some progress, Maroš Šefčovič, the Commission vice-president, will announce this afternoon that the EU will agree to a UK request to extend the grace period for sausages and other chilled meats going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland for another three months. Both sides will offer their own unilateral declarations on what the extension means. RTE’s Tony Connelly provides a typically thorough run through of what we can expect. Two things are particularly worth noting. First, the

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

French democracy is in trouble – and the EU is to blame

France’s airwaves have been crackling with indignation this week, as politicians wring their hands at the record abstention in the first round of voting in the regional elections. Sixty six per cent of French voters found something else to do last Sunday other than vote, prompting Gabriel Attal, a government spokesman, to proclaim that the ‘abysmal’ turnout ‘imperilled democracy’. ‘French democracy is sick,’ said Emmanuel Rivière of polling institute Kantar Public. It was perhaps unfortunate timing for Monsieur Attal that his remarks were made on Wednesday June 23, five years to the day since the British people voted to leave the European Union. The milestone didn’t pass unnoticed in France, particularly among

Robert Jackman

The British shows beloved by Europeans

Forget the sausage war; could the real Brexit battle be over streaming services? After all, surely even hardened Remainers will have been appalled by the European Commission’s plan to make it more difficult to stream British shows on the continent. Will it happen? Only time will tell. But here are eight shows that are a hit on the continent and that European viewers will really miss: Chernobyl Sky Atlantic/Now TV Keenly watched pretty much everywhere, Sky’s superlative disaster drama is amongst the biggest British televisual exports to the EU (another accolade to add to its various Baftas, Emmys and Golden Globes). What’s more, Chernobyl is one drama that really went out of

Thursday

Peter Jones

What the EU could learn from the Athenian Empire

The EU has regularly been likened to the Roman Empire. But its current direction suggests that the Athenian Empire (478-404 bc) is a better parallel. The EU began as an attempt to unify countries economically after the second world war. By slow accretion of powers via the single market, Maastricht, the euro and finally Lisbon, the EU became, drip by drip, a full political union run by an unelected central authority, which now threatens to end vetoes and intervene domestically, suing member states with whose policies on immigration, civil rights, freedom of speech etc it disagrees. After the Persian wars, Athens in 478 bc assembled on Delos an alliance of

Wednesday

Jack Brown

The unfairness of London’s Remainer reputation

Today marks five years since the United Kingdom voted to Leave the European Union. London, as we all know by now, voted the opposite way to the rest of England — by a margin of 60 to 40 per cent. Ever since then, the capital has been portrayed as remote and out of touch, culturally disconnected from the rest of the nation. Brexit is often explained as the victory of the long-ignored Rest of England where the ‘real people’ live. In 2019, Dominic Cummings told reporters to ‘get out of London, go and talk to people who are not rich Remainers’. But is London really so different to the rest

Tuesday

Andrew Tettenborn

Prepare for the EU’s ‘Hamilton moment’

The EU may boast a common currency like any other state (even if nearly a third of its 27 members do not use it). It may also have, through its regulatory jurisdiction over banks and financial services, a vast say in the running of the financial system throughout the bloc: powers at least comparable to those of a federal government such as that in Canada or Australia. But there is one thing the EU has not yet managed to get: a unified tax system.  Any attempt seriously to impinge on national tax laws still requires unanimity among member states. This irks Euro-federalists.  One reason is that it draws the centre

Sunday

Pieter Cleppe

Boris shouldn’t write off fossil fuels just yet

At last week’s G7 summit, Boris Johnson pushed his fellow leaders to back his climate finance plan to support large-scale renewable energy projects across Africa and parts of Asia. The PM received a decidedly lukewarm response to his new Marshall plan, only netting pledges from Canada and Germany – and for good reason. As Rishi Sunak highlighted this week, when he declined to put a ‘specific figure’ on the cost of Net Zero in an interview on GB News, the cost of these climate plans are anything but clear. Fundamentally, Boris’s plan to boost renewables around the world misses the fact that renewables are actually struggling to catch up with

Thursday

Steven Barrett

Is the EU breaching its UK treaty by failing to protect LGBT rights?

Has the EU Commission lost any sense of moral value? This week, Hungary, an EU member state, voted to impose bigoted and oppressive laws on its LGBT citizens. This amounted to a clear breach of many of our domestic laws – and it is a breach of the shared Human Rights laws. Yet the EU’s response has been dismal. Is it time for Britain to show solidarity with LGBT Hungarians – and walk away from its treaty with the EU? The EU Commission said it is aware of what is unfolding in Hungary and that:  ‘When protecting children from harmful content it is important for member states to find the right balance