Eu

Monday

Matthew Lynn

The EU will regret suing AstraZeneca

Well, that will teach them to go around manufacturing a vaccine against a global virus at cost price, and at record speed. The European Union has today said it is planning to take legal action against the pharmaceuticals conglomerate AstraZeneca for failing to deliver enough doses of the Oxford shot on time.  No doubt European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and her team are planning to be exonerated. They will finally be able to demonstrate that the whole vaccine debacle, for which the Commission has taken so much flak, and which has already caused thousands of unnecessary deaths across continent, was all the fault of the Anglo-Swedish company. No doubt the untrustworthy

Thursday

Alex Massie

The nationalists’ vaccine fallacy

The trouble with nationalism of any and every sort is that, in the end, it eats your brain. As evidence of this we may simply note Nicola Sturgeon’s assertions this week that the success of Britain’s vaccination programme should in no way encourage the thought an independent Scotland might have struggled to match this happy development. According to Sturgeon, there is ‘absolutely no evidential basis to say Scotland would not have vaccinated as many people as we’ve vaccinated right now’ if it were an independent state. This is, to use the technical term, bollocks on a tartan pogo-stick. It would be vastly closer to the truth to argue the contrary,

Wednesday

Joanna Rossiter

Beijing is quietly challenging Brussels

The new agreement between China and the US on climate change, announced this week, contained the usual worthy overtures. Both nations reasserted their commitment to fighting the ‘climate crisis’ by ‘co-operating with each other and with other countries.’ But can the West really take the Chinese Communist party at its word? Judging by Beijing’s activity in the Western Balkans, the answer is a resounding no. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chinese state-owned energy companies have built four coal power plants since 2010, with a further four planned – made possible by the Chinese Development Bank. Europe’s political elites haven’t yet grasped how Beijing’s growing influence in the region is being used

Wolfgang Münchau Wolfgang Münchau

The Brexit bounce is underway

The collapse in UK-EU trade after 1 January was widely reported. What has not been reported nearly as much is that UK exports have made a near-complete recovery. They were up 46.6 per cent in February after falling by 42 per cent in January. Imports are not there yet. They were up 7.3 per cent in February after a fall of 29.7 per cent in January. The one prediction I am happy to make is that they will recover too.  What these and other numbers are telling us is that even this bit of the Brexit scare stories will not come true. If you look at the latest IMF data

Tuesday

Matthew Lynn

Juncker’s Brexit delusion

Regrets? It turns out he has a few. The former president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker does not seem too bothered by the EU’s miserable growth rate during his time in office, its geopolitical marginalisation, or indeed the growing power of corporate lobbyists in Brussels. But there is one thing that makes him at least a little sad. Not deploying the formidable force of his personality to swing the British referendum behind staying in the EU. Juncker now reckons the former PM’s judgement was a couple of bottles short of a full case In an interview this week, Juncker revealed that David Cameron told him to keep out of

Friday

Steven Barrett

The EU needs to stop playing politics with law

The Lugano convention – part of a tapestry of complicated international law agreements ensuring the courts of one country recognise the courts of another – has a dull name but it matters a great deal. Since the EU referendum, the convention has played a small role in the great internecine conflict between Britain and Brussels. Much energy has been wasted in this series of pointless bust-ups. And now, the EU is determined to use the Lugano convention – a playing field it claims to control – to ensure Britain pays a price for Brexit, by effectively blocking us from rejoining the convention. Why does this matter? Because without the convention,

Henry Hill

The Northern Ireland Protocol is untenable

The process that delivered us the Northern Ireland Protocol already seems to have been rewritten in official memory. It suits most parties involved to pretend the outcome was inevitable. For Brussels, it helps them defend an arrangement designed to ‘protect the peace’ which is instead corroding loyalist support for the Belfast Agreement. For those in London, it is infinitely preferable to pretend that they were honouring the UK’s ‘obligations under the Good Friday Agreement’ rather than own one of the most abject episodes of British diplomacy in recent memory. It also helps to shift the blame onto preferred targets. So Boris Johnson gets execrated for lying to unionists about his

Steerpike Steerpike

Von der Leyen’s latest diplomatic faux pas

Ursula von der Leyen isn’t particularly keen on diplomatic protocol. Earlier this year, in a bid to get EU hands on British bound vaccines, the Commission announced its intention to implement a hard Northern Irish border — without bothering to tell either Dublin or Belfast. (Naturally, that fit of international irreverence was blamed on a Brussels subordinate).  Then we had sofagate, which overshadowed what should have been a show of European strength in the face of Turkish President Erdogan. VdL instead decided to take the opportunity to make a fuss about a chair being offered to a man — despite Council President Charles Michel’s superiority to her in the EU’s order of precedence.  Now the haughty

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France’s growing German scepticism

Britain’s favourite Frenchman, Michel Barnier, is in the Calais region today where he will address a conference about his part in Brexit and perhaps give a further indication as to his presidential aspirations. The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator was described in yesterday’s Le Figaro as the man who can ‘unite the right’ and in doing so present a credible alternative to Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in 2022. Barnier presides over a political initiative called Patriotes et européens and he explained its concept to Le Figaro: ‘Patriot and European, this means that I believe in the force of the nations, the respect of national identities and France as a country of

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: There’s nothing libertarian about vaccine passports

Taking liberties Sir: I feel that Matthew Parris is absolutely wrong about liberty (‘The libertarian case for vaccine passports’, 10 April). True liberty is that each individual has the possibility to live their life how they desire (within the law), taking full responsibility for any and all the risks they incur. I am not responsible for anyone else’s health. To say that we have to stay indoors, wear masks, observe social distancing or have vaccinations because we would be killing others if we did not is blackmail. If you use the logic that the individual is responsible for the health of all other people then everyone who owns a car

Jeremy Clarke

Mon dieu! Our French residency permits have arrived

For EU nationals living in Britain and wanting to legally remain after Brexit, a letter or an email was enough to clinch it. It would have been churlish then for France not to reciprocate by relaxing its almost hallucinatory bureaucratic requirements for the British in France, allowing them to do the same. And to the astonishment of all, it did relax them. Catriona made an initial attempt to obtain a residency permit three years ago. She went for an exploratory interview at the nearest prefecture. A long wait in a squalid, packed waiting room, followed by the vituperative rudeness of the functionary traumatised her. Never again, she said. Sod that.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Britain is closing its trade gap with the EU

So it was just a blip after all. Remember those huge headlines last month revealing that exports to the EU had plunged by 41 per cent in January, leading frustrated remainers to bleat: we told you so? ‘Brexit – the unfolding disaster’ tweeted Lord Adonis for one, along with a graph showing the sharp fall in January. Now we have the figures for February, which has been reported rather less loudly, but which show just as strong a rebound. Exports in goods to the EU in February, records Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, were 56 per cent up on those in January. They are still down 11.6 per cent on February 2020, but

Monday

Jake Wallis Simons

The West’s shameful Iranian capitulation

On a sweltering day in July 2018, German police pulled over a scarlet Ford S-Max hire car that was travelling at speed towards Austria. The driver, Assadollah Assadi, the third secretary to the Iranian embassy in Vienna, was arrested at gunpoint and taken into custody. Although unusual, there was a good reason for detaining the diplomat: Assadi had used his immunity to smuggle a bomb on a commercial airliner from Tehran to Austria, intending to carry out what would have been one of Europe’s worst atrocities in recent years. Once in Vienna, he had handed the device — codenamed the ‘Playstation’ — to two married Belgian-Iranian agents, Amir Saadouni and

Sunday

Steerpike

EU commissioner says Britain’s vaccine success is down to Brussels

Europe’s vaccine rollout has been a chastening experience for many in Brussels with the World Health Organisation describing it last week as ‘unacceptably slow’. So Mr S was intrigued to read an interview in Der Spiegel today with Thierry Breton, the EU’s Commissioner for Internal Market, in which the top official appeared to take credit for Britain’s vaccination scheme. Both at home and overseas, the UK procurement and rollout of the vaccines been widely seen as a success, with credit mostly going to the taskforce led by Kate Bingham. Not so, according to a bullish Breton, who claimed credit for all the vaccines produced in factories which happened to be

Jim Lawley

Can Spain’s Europhilism last?

‘Suppose a man be carried, whilst fast asleep, into a room where there is a person he longs to see and speak with; and be there locked fast in … he awakes, and is glad to find himself in so desirable company, which he stays willingly in … I ask, is not this stay voluntary? I think nobody will doubt it: and yet, being locked fast in, it is evident … he has not freedom to be gone.’ Happy in a room he cannot leave, the man John Locke imagined during his musings on free will might almost be a metaphor for contemporary Spain in the European Union. Awakening from

Friday

Matthew Lynn

The economic cost of the EU’s vaccine catastrophe

It didn’t order enough vaccines, spent too little money, dithered over authorisation and then lashed out at the companies making them. Over the last few weeks, the catastrophe of the European Union’s vaccine roll-out has become painfully clear to everyone. We are already starting to see the toll it is taking on the continent’s health, with a brutal third wave sweeping across mainland Europe as new variants hit an unvaccinated population, and with fresh lockdowns, overflowing hospitals, and death tolls still climbing as they fall dramatically elsewhere. And yet there is also a second stage to that crisis – an economic catastrophe – that is just getting started. The EU

John Keiger John Keiger

What a Le Pen win would mean for Brussels

A Marine Le Pen victory in a year’s time can no longer be ruled out. Other than opinion polls regularly pointing to her place in the second round as a certainty, a few, such as Harris Interactive on 7 March, put her on the cusp of winning the second round with 47 per cent to Macron’s 53 per cent — a dramatic improvement on her 2017 score of 34 to Macron’s 66.  The traditional republican front against the radical right is crumbling and the stigma of voting Le Pen is diminishing. More of the electorate are coming round to the Rassemblement National’s views on national sovereignty, immigration, crime and security, and — with Brussels’s

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: The inconsistencies of Mormonism

A leap of faith Sir: I live not far from the ‘London Temple’ of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most summers, the local streets are trodden by American Mormon missionaries, polite teenagers who occasionally approach to ask if we know Jesus Christ. Some years ago, I read the book on which the new Netflix series Murder Among the Mormons (‘Latter-day sinners’, 3 April) appears to be based. So when I was accosted by a couple of missionaries, I was able to ask them why the practice of polygamy, so avidly promulgated by the founder of their church, Joseph Smith, had been abandoned. My interviewee explained that Smith

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

Salmond could spark a nationalist war over Europe

There was a Scooby Doo moment in Alex Salmond’s campaign launch on Tuesday. Something that made me think: ‘Ruh-roh’. The new leader of the Alba party was setting out his stall ahead of the 6 May Holyrood election and concentrating mostly on tactics. Voting for the SNP in the constituencies and Alba on the proportional list ballot, he contended, could elect a Scottish parliament with a ‘supermajority’ for independence. Thereafter — in fact, in week one of that new parliament — he would expect the Scottish government to open negotiations with Whitehall for the dismantling of the United Kingdom. He was not averse to another referendum like the one he

Monday

Benedict Spence

What should go in the Brexit museum?

Have you ever wondered what happened to Boris Johnson’s Brexit bus? One might think such a large, controversial item would be too conspicuous to vanish into the ether, but for the life of me, I have no idea where it is. Yes, I know, red buses aren’t exactly a novelty in the UK, being the favoured mode of transport of Liverpool footballers, the loud actor fellow who was in Lewis, and most of the city of London. Perhaps it’s decided to leave its infamy behind and hide in plain sight, and is currently ferrying people from Hammersmith to Chiswick. But that particular bus shouldn’t be left to a quiet, mundane