Eu

Monday

James Forsyth

Vince Cable accuses George Osborne of lying about tax rises

Vince Cable’s speech today was loyal and funny. Cable was, unlike in some previous years, very much on message. He lavished praise on Clegg for having turned the Liberal Democrats into a party of government. He ended his speech by telling the activists that ‘there is a lot to be proud of and we must be proud of it’ to the delight of Nick Clegg, who was rather distractingly wearing jeans in the conference hall. Cable also attacked both the Tories and Labour. He joked that the Tories were turning into Ukip without the beer and Labour into Hollande-style socialists but without the sex. The most aggressive part of his

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Why the real winner from George Osborne’s ‘Google tax’ could be Nigel Farage

George Osborne’s promise to crack down on multinational companies’ avoidance of UK taxes by the use of impenetrable devices such as the ‘Double Irish’ and the ‘Dutch Sandwich’ certainly has the support of this column. I have long argued that the ‘fiduciary duty’ (identified by Google chairman Eric Schmidt) to minimise tax bills within the law for the benefit of shareholders has to be balanced against a moral duty to pay at least a modicum of tax in every profitable territory. Google, Apple, Amazon and eBay, as well as Starbucks and big names of the pharmaceutical sector, are among those known to use smart schemes which variously involve sales bookings

Thursday

Matthew Elliott

The UK needs a referendum on the EU, or we won’t get a better deal

In this morning’s Independent, a collection of Establishment names have broken cover and lobbied David Cameron to abandon his pledge to hold an EU referendum by the end of 2017. In a letter, whose signatories include former Tory Ministers, the CBI and Peter Mandelson, they bizarrely claim that the lesson from the Scottish referendum is that people should not be given a vote on the EU, for fear of creating ‘uncertainty’. The motivation of many of the signatories’ opposition to a referendum should not come as a surprise. Many are either former employees of the European Union or have in the past urged the UK to join the Euro –

Neil Clark

Václav Klaus: The lies Europe tells about Russia

Václav Klaus has made a habit of saying things others shy away from saying, but it doesn’t seem to have done him much harm in the popularity stakes. Quite the opposite: the 73-year-old ardently Eurosceptic free-marketeer has legitimate claims to be regarded as the most successful ‘true blue’ conservative politician in Europe over the past 25 years. He was, after all, prime minister of the Czech Republic from 1992 to 1998 and then his country’s president for a further ten years, from 2003 to 2013. So when we meet after a typically hearty Serbian lunch — at the International Science and Public Conference in Belgrade — I am keen to

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: In defence of the EU, the Welsh and Mary Wakefield

Breaking the unions Sir: By the time this letter appears we shall know whether the land of my birth has separated from the land of my life. I hope not. But is there not an uncanny parallel between the rise of the Scottish desire to quit England and the English desire to quit Europe? The same arguments about control from a city outside the nation; about elites and technocrats dictating to and imposing upon a sturdy independent people; the belief that outside the union (with England, with European partners) a radiant future beckons; endless columns, pamphlets and books explaining why rule from London/Brussels must be overthrown; and a charismatic, one-liner

Thursday

Allie Renison

The genius of Jean-Claude Juncker

For all of the protestations about Jean Claude Juncker’s unsuitability for what is, ultimately, the EU’s top job (sorry, Angela Merkel), the unveiling of his new Commission yesterday has confirmed his reputation as a master of compromise and consensus. The City’s expectations that the UK would be given a standalone financial services brief were so low that it by and large opposed the job’s split from the Internal Market Portfolio. The shock in Brussels when it was announced that Lord Hill would be given this responsibility reverberated all the way to London. Dealing with financial services isn’t the total of Lord Hill’s duties, either. He will also have to deliver Juncker’s grand aim of creating a ‘Capital

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Britain gets better European Commissioner job than expected

Jean-Claude Juncker clearly appreciated that high-five David Cameron gave him in Brussels recently: he’s appointed Lord Hill to a sizeable economic portfolio as the UK’s European Commissioner. The full list of jobs, published here, is being billed as a ‘strong and experienced team standing for change’, and Hill, who Juncker reportedly had to google, takes the Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union portfolio. This means that has oversight of a key interest: regulations affecting the City. David Cameron is a little more worried about another Union today, but this appointment is a boost to his plans to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the European Union. It shows that he did

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Andrew Roberts on Cameron, and a defence of Kate Bush

Advice for Cameron Sir: David Cameron once saved my life from a school of Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish, so now’s the time for me to save his political life with this advice: to do nothing. The British people are a fair-minded lot; they will give him another term in office because he and George Osborne have delivered the best growth rates in Europe despite the monstrous overspending and boom-bust of the Blair-Brown years. Every newly incoming ministry since the war has been re-elected — except Ted Heath’s, which broke all the rules anyhow — and this one will be too. Douglas Carswell is an intelligent man who has made

Nicholas Farrell

Italy is killing refugees with kindness

The next time you eat a fish from the Mediterranean, just remember that it may well have eaten a corpse. As the Italian author Aldo Busi told the press just the other day: ‘I don’t buy fish from the Mediterranean any more for fear of eating Libyans, Somalis, Syrians and Iraqis. I’m not a cannibal and so now I stick with farmed fish, or else Atlantic cod.’ Personally, I prefer my fish natural, fattened on drowned human flesh, but there you go. I take the point. Foolishly, last October Italy’s left-wing government became the first European Union country to decriminalise illegal immigration and deploy its navy at huge expense to

Saturday

James Forsyth

Tusk as European Council President is a mixed blessing for Cameron

Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister, has been appointed the new European Council President. Tonight, Tusk has had warm words about how imperative it is that Britain’s concerns about the EU are addressed. As Open Europe reports, he called the possibility of an EU without Britain a “black scenario.”   Tusk’s appointment is a mixed blessing for David Cameron. On the one hand, Tusk comes from a non-Eurozone country meaning that he’ll be sympathetic to Britain’s desire for single market protections for the Eurozone outs. The Ukraine crisis has also reminded the Poles of how important Britain is in terms of stiffening the EU approach towards Russia; meaning that Tusk

Thursday

Taki

You can’t make friends with Uncle Sam and survive for long

Can somebody tell me when America last got it right? Uncle Sam’s track record in selecting leaders in faraway places reminds me very much of my own where libel is concerned: plaintiffs 5; Taki 0. Let’s see, the good Uncle overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran back in the early 1950s in order for the Shah to become his man in Persia. The Shah went gallivanting in St Moritz, threw very expensive parties in Persepolis and spent money like a Saudi camel driver-turned-prince on American weapons. But once the Shah became a pariah, the Home of the Brave chickened out. The Shah became Shah who? Only Henry Kissinger admitted knowing him

The Spectator

Podcast: Britain’s ambulance crisis, Cameron’s European way and the cultural generation gap

999, what’s your emergency? This time, it’s one right at the heart of the ambulance service, as Mary Wakefield reveals in this week’s Spectator. Paramedics are fleeing and needless calls are mounting. But why is the government refusing to take notice? And why are paramedics being denied the respect they deserve? Mary discusses her findings in this week’s podcast with Fraser Nelson and Julia Manning, chief executive of 2020Health. The Prime Minister heads off on Saturday to Brussels for one of his least favourite events: the European Union summit. In her column, Isabel Hardman suggests that EU summits haven’t been kind to Cameron, and that things aren’t about to change.

Michael Lind

The wars that really are about the oil

Is international conflict really just a fight over oil? It sometimes seems that way. In Syria and Iraq, the militants of the so-called ‘Islamic State’ sell captured oil while battling to establish a puritanical Sunni theo-cracy. From Central Asia to Ukraine, Russia is contesting attempts (backed by the US) to minimise Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and natural gas. Meanwhile, Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ allows the US to threaten the choke points through which most of China’s oil imports must pass. Conspiracy-mongering petrodeterminists who try to reduce world politics to nothing but a clash for oil are too crude (pun intended). No shadowy cabal of oil company executives pulls the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Europe’s leaders worship Mario Draghi. They should listen to him instead

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi secured a place in history by his demonstration, on 26 July 2012, of the power of words in a financial crisis. Not long in office, he had already shown willingness to act firmly, averting a liquidity crunch by providing three-year lending facilities for European banks. That day, he told a conference in London: ‘Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.’ While the rest of the speech was an opaque metaphor about the euro as a bumblebee — ‘a mystery of nature because it shouldn’t fly but instead it

Thursday

Radek Sikorski

Radek Sikorski’s diary: Show Putin what you think of him – eat a Polish apple

I made a welcome escape from sweltering Warsaw to the cloudy cool of Bodø, halfway up the coast of Norway, north of Iceland. Bodø’s harbour stays ice-free all year round only thanks to the Gulf Stream. The fjords bubble with whirlpools and offer some of the best cold-water scuba diving in the world. When the mist clears, the air in this visibly prosperous place has an Alpine, colour-enhancing quality. It’s my first time beyond the Arctic circle and the dusk through the night makes it hard to sleep. ‘Now imagine,’ says the wife over the phone from Washington, ‘what it was like to try to go to sleep in a

Taki

How dare they sell the beaches where I played as a child

 Porto Cheli Nothing is moving, not a twig nor a leaf, and I find myself missing the cows, the mountains and the bad weather. The sun has become the enemy, a merciless foe who can be tolerated only when swimming, something I do for close to an hour a day. Nothing very strenuous, mind you, except for an all-out 50-stroke crawl towards the end. For someone who has swum every year since 1940, I’m a lousy swimmer. Not as bad as Tim Hanbury, who swims vertically rather than flat on the water, and who resembles a periscope, but I’m no Johnny Weissmuller, the late great Tarzan of the Forties. From

Wednesday

Matthew Elliott

Boris Johnson lays down the gauntlet to David Cameron

Much has been made of the news that Boris Johnson intends to return to parliament at next year’s general election. The announcement, made in the Q&A session after his speech about London, Britain and the European Union, has got Westminster all hot and bothered. But another of Boris’s answers in that session also deserves to be highlighted. Gerard Lyons’s report for the mayor sets out 8 key points of European reform, ranging from changing the relationship between the Eurozone and non-eurozone countries, to the completion of the single market, to halting unnecessary regulations. But Boris went much further than this when responding to a question from Peter Wilding, director of

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The argument about Britain in Europe is just the same as the argument about Scotland in Britain

I know some readers have tired of Scotland’s independence debate. That is understandable, even forgivable. It has, after all, been rumbling along for 40 years. There may only be six weeks of campaigning left but these arguments won’t go away. You’ll be hearing them again and again for the next few years at least. This is true even if Scotland does vote Yes next month. Because the argument about Scotland’s place within the Union is really not very different from the argument about Britain’s place within the European Union. Of course the similarities are not absolute but they are significant enough to be striking. And just as Scottish nationalists have

Monday

Ed West

There are no lessons from the first world war

I’ve just been in France, where the shadow of the First World War always seems to be darker and longer than that cast over Britain; it is partly that, aesthetically, their war memorials are far more haunting than ours, but also that in sheer numbers our allies lost more men than we did, up to 1.4 million French soldiers died in the conflict. It still seems to haunt the country, and anyone travelling through empty countryside into a small town with its thick list of casualties engraved under the legend ‘mort pour la patrie’ can see why Frenchmen would ask ‘why die for Danzig?’ 20 years later; and can’t quite

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is David Cameron still afraid of Brexit?

Boris Johnson’s speech this week is one of the few domestic issues really animating Westminster. He will argue that the UK should not be ‘frightened’ of leaving the EU, supposedly in contrast to David Cameron, who has always made clear that he wants to remain in the bloc. But it’s worth remembering that Cameron himself has started to shift recently on how he’d vote in the 2017 referendum. When he returned to the Commons after losing his fight against Jean-Claude Juncker’s bid to become President of the European Commission, Cameron changed his language on that vote. Where previously he had argued that there was no doubt he’d be voting to