Eu

Friday

Charles Moore

The EU is eroding Swiss exceptionalism

Even in Switzerland, the elites are sold on the European Union, though it remains outside. It has a virtually irresistible draw in all European countries for the people that Mr Gladstone disparaged as ‘the Upper Ten Thousand’ (who today probably add up to the Upper One Million). As a result, Switzerland is gradually allowing its exceptionalism — in tax and banking, for example — to be eroded. On the other hand, the Swiss people are stoutly sceptical and have become more so. In February, they voted for a referendum limiting the free movement of EU citizens into their country, and so their EU relationship is now in flux. In this

Charlotte Henry

Clegg lost against Farage, but that’s not the point

Why did Nick Clegg bother debating Nigel Farage? The Ukip leader bagged two decisive victories in the battles. But that doesn’t mean the Lib Dem leader has failed to set out what he wanted to do. Clegg needed these debates to reach out to his base, to motivate them to go out campaigning and vote in May. He didn’t need to ‘win’ in order to do that: he just needed to put the case for EU membership loudly and proudly. He had to remind some of his party’s supporters why they joined the Liberal Democrats and he needs to motivate pro-Europeans from other parties to lend their vote to the

Thursday

Peter Jones

Is David Cameron trying to imitate the Delphic Oracle?

Nigel Farage rather missed a trick in his debate over the EU with Nick Clegg. The Prime Minister has promised us an ‘In/Out’ referendum on the EU in 2017, if the Tories are returned to power. But there is a condition: the referendum will be held (his words) ‘When we have negotiated a new settlement…’ (23 January 2013). The problem is that word ‘When’. Does he really mean ‘If’? As it stands, Cameron’s ‘promise’ has all the hallmarks of the Delphic Oracle. Take poor old Croesus, king of Lydia. The historian Herodotus tells us that he asked the oracle what would happen if he fought the Persian king Cyrus. ‘You will

Nigel Farage

Nigel Farage’s diary: Comfort for Cameron, and the wonders of German traffic

What a week! I was thrilled to have a chance to confront Nick Clegg but my excitement was tempered with disappointment that neither Cameron nor Miliband agreed to take part — although both were invited. I’d love to have challenged Miliband about the effects of uncontrolled immigration: wage compression, for instance, and the erosion of job opportunities within working-class communities. Why did he chicken out? My bet is he knows these facts are unanswerable. Cameron is, by all accounts, having kittens about Ukip but I think I can set his mind at rest. Our current wave of support seems to be thanks to working-class former Labour voters, which makes perfect sense.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The EU is worse than you thought

For me, by far the most surprising revelation in Martin Durkin’s documentary Nigel Farage: Who Are You? (Channel 4, Monday) was just how astonishingly vast, unwieldy, authoritarian, interfering, undemocratic, sclerotic, and sinister the European Union actually is. As a Eurosceptic, I suppose I ought to have known this already. But the secret of the European Union, as one of Durkin’s talking heads noted, is the way it uses boredom as a weapon. Even those of us predisposed towards thinking ill of the EU are unwilling to apprise ourselves of the full, tedious details because our brains would explode at the sheer, grinding dullness of it all. So it was a

Wednesday

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Clegg, Farage and the poverty of Britain’s EU debate

Two of the writers I most admire have fallen out over the Clegg vs Farage debate. James Kirkup calls it for the Lib Dem leader (his reasons here) and Peter Oborne for Farage – but I’m in the happy position of being able to disagree with both of them. I think they both lost, and I explain why in my Daily Telegraph column today. Clegg has decided to ride the Ukip wave, positioning himself as the patron saint of Europhiles who loathe the sight of Nigel Farage. He will be calculating that there are more of them than LibDem supporters. But I regarded their debate on Wednesday as rather sterile,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Cameron’s slow mission to convince sceptics at home and in Europe

Today’s joint FT article by George Osborne and Wolfgang Schäuble is yet another exhibit for David Cameron to wave at critics of his EU policy. While Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg fight over In or Out with no chance of leading the government that presents that choice to the British people (read Fraser’s Telegraph column on this), David Cameron can say that he is inching closer to winning debates, point by point, with European leaders. Today’s article contains the important acceptance that non-eurozone countries should be protected rather than disadvantaged by treaty change: ‘A stable euro is good for the global economy, and especially for Europe. The crisis has shown that

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

I’ll have to give up Waitrose. It’s too exciting for me now

Waitrose in Towcester has closed down for a week to make what it describes as ‘a final few touches’ to an ‘exciting’ refurbishment. We will see just how exciting this is when the store reopens this weekend with its ‘improved customer toilets’, ‘improved café’, and so on. But forgive me for being a little sceptical, for normally the main effect of a supermarket ‘refurbishment’ is to disorient shoppers. Managements wait until customers such as myself have finally mastered the layout of the store and know where to find everything they need (something that can take a long time to achieve) and then suddenly they move everything around again. It is

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes: If Putin can have a referendum, so can Boris

Everyone can see that the West has no idea what to do about Russian power in the Ukraine. Britain, in particular, is at the margins. It is time for the Mayor of London to fulfil his historic role of stealing a march on more conventional politicians. Boris should take a leaf out of President Putin’s book and call a referendum of Londoners. He should ask them whether they would like all Russian housing in London to be seized, and be inhabited, instead, by British families. I predict a Yes vote whose percentage would exceed even that of the recent Crimean plebiscite. Obviously the Mayor, unlike Putin, has no military forces

Sebastian Payne

Will Nick and Nigel be sidelined from the 2015 TV debates?

Has last night’s debate affected Nigel Farage’s chances of being involved in the general election TV debates? Although the broadcasters and political parties have yet to agree any dates or formats, the precedent has been set and the public will be expecting them. With weasel words from No.10 and a bullish attitude from some broadcasters, there’s a long way to go before an agreement is made. The public already have a clear idea of what they expect. According to the last YouGov polling on the subject, nearly half believe there should be a four-way debate between Cameron, Miliband, Clegg and Farage: [datawrapper chart=”http://charts.spectator.co.uk/chart/noqHV/”] It’ll be interesting to see whether the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Nick vs Nigel sketch: Farage edged ahead of a pompous Clegg – but there was no knock-out blow

Never mind the arguments, the body language said it all at the EU debate last night. Nigel Farage was relaxed, smiley and upbeat. Nick Clegg had a solemn and rather shifty air. He looked like a plain clothes undertaker handing out business cards in Casualty. Power has enclosed him in a layer of pomposity and self-righteousness (adding to a pretty thick undercoat, it has to be said), and he admitted no flicker of warmth or humour to his performance. Even his geniality was ice cold. When asked a question by the audience he memorised the questioner’s name and used it repeatedly during his answer. Where did he get that trick?

Owen Matthews

Let Putin have Crimea – and it will destroy him

David Cameron says that Russia’s annexation of Crimea ‘will not be recognised’. Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk promises that ‘we will take our territory back’. They are both misguided. Let Crimea go: it will be the making of Ukraine and the end of Vladimir Putin. Without Crimea, there will never again be a pro-Moscow government in Kiev. Ukraine will have a chance to become a governable country — a strongly pro-European one with a Russian minority of around 15 per cent. Putin will have gained Crimea but lost Ukraine for ever. And without Ukraine, as former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski famously said, ‘Russia can no longer be an

James Delingpole James Delingpole

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb

Just as every child now thinks he’s going to die of global warming, so those of us who grew up in the Seventies and Eighties all thought we were going to die of nuclear war. We knew this because trusted authorities told us so: not just the government and our teachers but even the author of Fungus the Bogeyman. When the Wind Blows (1982) was the downer of a graphic novel which Raymond Briggs wrote as our punishment for having enjoyed Fungus. It was about a nice, retired couple called Jim and Hilda Bloggs who somehow survive the first Soviet nuclear strike, unwittingly smell the burned corpses of their neighbours,

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Nick Clegg stands to beat Nigel Farage in tonight’s Europe debate. Here’s why.

Tonight is the first round of the Clegg/Farage debate on Britain’s EU membership. It is perfectly possible that both of the leaders could benefit from it. They could emerge as champions of their causes and gain plaudits for having the courage to debate the issue. But I suspect that this won’t happen. They both believe too passionately in their positions on Europe to play it safe, thought they might be cautious tonight knowing that there’s another debate coming in a week’s time. One other thing that has raised the stakes is the barrage against Farage. If Farage has a poor night tonight, there’ll be a lot of talk about how

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The west has a choice: abandon Ukraine or punish Russia? It should choose the latter.

An astonishing number of useless twits appear to think Russia’s annexation of the Crimea is somehow not Vladimir Putin’s fault. The poor Russia despot – no longer much too strong a term, by the way – is not responsible for his actions. He was provoked! Not simply by the Ukrainians, who should, it is implied, have known better, but by the west. It’s our fault and Putin is simply acting logically and rationally. He has every right to reassert Russia’s ancient prerogatives and if we hadn’t penned him into a corner he wouldn’t have needed to at all. Twaddle of course but the kind of stuff that’s not hard to

Sunday

Sebastian Payne

Nigel Farage and ‘new Ukip’ are running away from disaffected Tories. Why?

Who votes Ukip? It’s a question psephologists have been trying to answer for years but Nigel Farage had a clear response on the Sunday Politics today: not just disaffected Conservatives. Based on research by Lord Ashcroft, Farage boasted that ’new Ukip’ — a party which is ‘a lot of more professional, a lot more smiley, a lot less angry’ — now has such a great influence on the Labour party, they will be forced into changing their stance on an EU referendum following May’s Euro elections: ‘There’s a long way to go between now and the next election. As we’ve seen with Conservative policy, it chops and changes…I think what

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 March 2014

Home Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour party, promised that, if elected, his administration would hold a referendum on membership of the European Union only if there was a new transfer of power to Brussels, which he called ‘unlikely’. If Scotland votes for independence, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds might have to move their legal homes to London under European Union law, the BBC reported. BBC Three is to be closed as an on-air channel, to go online only. The future of BBC Four is also in question. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, told the Treasury Select Committee that interest rates could reach

David Blackburn

Ed Miliband’s non-policy EU policy

‘You only offer a referendum if you want to ratify your existing policy,’ a Tory veteran told me this morning while discussing Ed Miliband’s recent referendum announcement. The Tory illustrated his point with reference to the Major government’s row over a proposed referendum on the single currency. He said that the pro-European side of the argument ran from a referendum, fearing that the public would say ‘no’ to EMU. His logic was: there isn’t time to change minds during a referendum campaign, so the public backs the status quo. Leaving aside the matter of whether or not this old Tory’s interpretation of those historical events is correct, his logic suggests that Miliband

Allie Renison

Eurosceptics have lost a valuable general – Bob Crow

When Nigel Farage had the temerity to nod at Bob Crow’s euroscepticism while paying his respects to the late RMT leader, some were quick to accuse him of cheap political point-scoring. I suspect that many of them hardly knew Crow because he never missed an opportunity to slam the EU for being ‘a regional engine of corporate globalisation’. And eurosceptics of all political persuasions have reason to be disheartened by the loss of a voice like his to their cause. Bob Crow wasn’t a eurosceptic by convenience nor did he do it simply to pander to rising populist anti-EU sentiment. For years he regularly led union members in protests against