Europe

Debunking the myths about the ECHR

This year the European Convention on Human Rights and its Strasbourg court are 75 years old – the age at which British judges are obliged to retire. Is it time for Britain to retire from this ageing institution? Not according to the Attorney-General, Lord Hermer, a former human rights lawyer, who recently pledged that under Labour Britain would never leave. Apologists for the ECHR invariably turn to myths to make their case, foremost of which is the creation myth. The ECHR, they say, was a British invention. It was inspired by Winston Churchill and drafted by David Maxwell Fyfe. It codified historic British rights and the UK was the first

How long will Starmer’s ‘war bounce’ last?

11 min listen

Trump has been stealing the headlines when it comes to Ukraine this week, but Europe – and whether it can stay united in the face of the US pulling its support – remains an important subplot. At a summit yesterday, 27 countries backed the plan to increase spending on defence, but when will the cracks start to show? Thankfully, it seems that the Prime Minister is good in a crisis. Back at home, he has seen a modest bounce in popularity and he is making a good impression in Brussels, coming across as assured without grandstanding. He has also been leading on defence spending – could defence be the way

What Europe gets wrong about the far right

The head of America’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (Doge) has written to all federal workers in the US asking them to explain in a brief email what they did last week. The exercise is intended to take no more than five minutes but has already lead to howls from many employees. How could anyone expect them to perform such a task? How can one explain the intricacies of supporting transgender opera among the Inuit in such short order? Happily, the new editor is not putting those of us on The Spectator’s payroll through any similar exercise. Nevertheless, something in the global vibe-shift perhaps impels me to mention a little of

Can Starmer be the bridge between Europe and the US?

14 min listen

There is lots to make sense of today in a huge week for European and world politics, with the fallout of the Munich Conference and today’s emergency summit in Paris. European powers are trying to navigate peace in Ukraine in the face of a belligerently isolationist Trump administration. The UK is caught between preserving its privileged position with the US and the desire for a European reset, as well as the need for an end to the war in Ukraine without giving in to Russia. Can Starmer bridge the transatlantic chasm that has opened up? Do the Europeans want us, and do the Americans need us?  Events in Europe will

Gavin Mortimer

Europe should listen to America’s uncomfortable truths

The response in Europe to J.D Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last Friday was one of predictable outrage. Media outlets described it as a ‘rant’ or a ‘sermon’, and politicians and diplomats queued up to criticise the vice-president of America. Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, accused the Trump administration of ‘try[ing] to pick a fight with us, and we don’t want to a pick a fight with our friends’. Apparently, there were ‘dry laughs’ from some of the audience when Vance talked about ‘shared’ values. European diplomats have laughed at Trump before, notably in 2018 at the UN General Assembly, when

Is Europe really faring better than Britain?

Five years ago this week, Boris Johnson was celebrating the achievement of leaving the European Union and wondering how he might take advantage of Britain’s newfound freedoms. A virus had other ideas. Covid-19 didn’t just turn our lives upside down and cost many lives; it robbed the then government of the chance to seize the initiative and prove that Brexit was worth the pain and inevitable disruption. For frustrated anti-Brexit campaigners, the pandemic provided them with ammunition to claim that their worst predictions had been realised. Falling economic growth, rising inflation, empty supermarket shelves – all these came to be blamed on Brexit, ignoring the rather large spanner which had

Europe’s blind spot over anti-Semitism

You would think that we Europeans might have learned a thing or two about anti-Semitism over the past century or so – and perhaps come to understand pragmatically, if nothing else, that what begins with the vicious persecution of Jews usually moves on to murdering lots of other people, too. But no. Or if we did, then it has conveniently slipped our minds, as things tend to do in these complicated times. Or perhaps we think that the persecution of the Jews we are seeing right now in Europe is of a different marque to that which began in the early 1930s in Germany. Yes, it’s sort of anti-Semitism –

The slippery business of catching a snake

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna It is strange how events elide and create a pattern whose significance remains elusive. I had just returned from a raid under the cover of the night on a huge field near our house a mile from the sea. I had about 50kg of ripe tomatoes in plastic bags in the back of my battered old seven-seater Land Rover Defender and was wondering if, as an impoverished father of six, I could use the Thomist defence: ‘It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another’s property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes

Stalemate over Taiwan is the best we can hope for

The United States of China, anyone? The idea that a federal China might be able to accommodate within it a relatively autonomous Taiwan is one of the more radical solutions mooted to the thorny problem of Taiwan’s status. The difficulty, of course, is that neither the Chinese Communist party nor Taiwan’s leaders would find such an outcome remotely acceptable. The CCP will not countenance a loosening of its control over mainland China; the Taiwanese, for their part, see in Hong Kong’s recent sad trajectory a vision of their own future should their politicians ever accept an offer of special status within China.  At the other end of the spectrum lies

Albania has long lived in Italy’s shadow

Albanians are descended from the most ancient of European peoples, the Illyrians. The country came into existence only after 1912 with the demise of Ottoman power in Europe. Its first ruler, the glorified Muslim chieftain King Zog, was hounded out by Mussolini when fascist Italy invaded in 1939. (Zog was put up in London for a while at the Ritz.) Five years later the Nazi Germans were expelled by the Albanian resistance fighter Enver Hoxha. Outwardly a Stalinist, the artful Hoxha was a Muslim-born Ottoman dandy figure who terrorised his Balkan fiefdom through retaliatory murders, purges and the trap-door disappearance of class enemies. Albania has long lived in Italy’s shadow.

How the EU turned on Ireland’s low-tax project

First, the good news. The Irish government is about to receive a €13 billion windfall in the form of back taxes from tech giant Apple, after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled against the company. That should pay for a good few social homes in a country that has an even bigger housing crisis than Britain’s. It could even go some way to providing universal free public healthcare (at the moment most adults have to pay something, even at public hospitals). Why should countries which have been successful at managing their finances be forced to jack up tax rates? Now the bad news. Ireland doesn’t actually want to receive

My teenage Interrailing adventures

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna In my life I have nearly killed myself mainly with cigarettes and alcohol and dangerous journeys into the night. I have experienced what awaits you in those places but it is not the sort of thing you can easily talk about or even put into words. It is perhaps too secret. I am also usually skint, so all in all I do not exactly fit the bill as a solid and reliable father figure who commands respect. Yet I have six children, aged nine to 21, who live with me and their Italian mother, Carla, and I try to do my best. We have been talking about

What’s behind Starmer’s ‘reset’ with Europe?

16 min listen

Keir Starmer has been in Germany today visiting Chancellor Olaf Scholz, before heading to Paris to meet President Macron. This is part of his plan to ‘reset’ relations with Europe – but how close does he want to get to the EU? And, given Brexit wounds are still raw, what’s achievable?  James Heale is joined by Katy Balls and Sophia Gaston, head of the foreign policy unit at Policy Exchange to discuss. Produced by Megan McElroy and Patrick Gibbons. 

The danger of a Labour supermajority

We are witnessing what could well be the last few weeks of a constrained Labour party. Sir Keir Starmer is saying as little as possible about his agenda and is instead listing what he won’t do (raise income tax, etc). He is rightly fearful that the Conservatives may do better than the opinion polls suggest. That has happened in the past. There may be a ‘shy Tory’ effect in the polls as there was in 1992, 2015 and 2019. Who would admit to voting Conservative in the current climate? Regardless, power now looks certain to come Starmer’s way – perhaps with a majority bigger than that of any modern prime

The EU ‘elections’ vindicate Brexit

If Britain had not left the European Union, we would be going to the polls this week as well as on 4 July. The European parliament elections have come round again and it is likely that there will be a mass revolt against the direction of the EU project. Across the continent, voters disillusioned with the EU model of democracy are turning to the Eurosceptic right. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is on course to become the biggest single party in the European parliament. AfD is polling in second place in Germany. Geert Wilders’s Freedom party is comfortably ahead in the Netherlands. Chega, a new far-right party from Portugal, is

What Xi wants in Europe

On a quiet street in Belgrade, a bronze statue of Confucius stands in front of a perforated white block, the new Chinese Cultural Centre. This is on the former site of the Chinese embassy which in 1999 was bombed by US-led Nato forces during the Kosovo war. Three Chinese nationals were killed. The Americans said the bombing was an accident, but the deaths allowed China and Serbia to share a common anti-Nato grievance. This week, timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the bombing, Xi Jinping visited Belgrade and talked about the Sino-Serbian ‘bond forged with the blood of our compatriots’. He had been expected to visit the embassy

Europe has no answer to its immigration problem

Pulling off the rhetorical trick that Brexit would undermine the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement, Michel Barnier, the EU negotiator, said in 2018 that the agreement meant removing borders not only from maps, ‘but also in minds’. Even a single CCTV camera on the North-South roads was considered a threat to the peace process. Now it turns out, which is grimly amusing, that the Irish government has not banished the border from its mind. The Republic is upset that asylum seekers are crossing the border that it does not believe in, fleeing the threat of deportation to Rwanda from the United Kingdom. It talks of sending them back, ignoring a

In defence of the EU

Eastern Europe is the graveyard of empires. Rome failed on the Danube, Napoleon on the Dnieper. The epic struggle between the empires of Austria, Russia and Turkey in the first world war ended with the destruction of all three and the fragmentation of eastern Europe, giving rise to the word ‘Balkanisation’. Driving through the Balkans today, I am continually reminded that history has no full stops. Every empire leaves its ghosts to haunt its successors. Vienna, like London, is an imperial city without an empire. The ethnic antagonisms of the Balkans, which provoked the first world war, survived to divide Yugoslavia in the second and then destroy it in the

Judgment call: the case for leaving the ECHR

The debate about the European Convention on Human Rights is in danger of being diverted into irrelevant byways. Hostility to the convention has become a trademark of the right wing of the Conservative party, which invites unnecessary partisanship. This is unfortunate, because the United Kingdom’s adherence to the convention raises a major constitutional issue which ought to concern people all across the political spectrum. It is far more important than Suella Braverman’s battles with boat people and ‘lefty lawyers’. Yet so far, the debate has rarely risen above the level of empty slogans, meaningless mantras and misleading claims. The real purpose of the convention is to make us accept rights

You think British trains are bad? Try German ones

I found Jean-Pierre standing at a half-open window gulping down lungfuls of stale Dutch air as our night train chuntered, unseeing, through an expectoration of towns: Zutphen, Eefde, Gorssell. He was 79 years old, he told me, and returning to Berlin for the first time in 61 years for a meeting with an old friend. Our steward made it absolutely clear he couldn’t give a stuff that there was no buffet car Back in 1962, Jean-Pierre had been a very young Belgian Jesuit employed in smuggling hard currency from West to East Berlin, which he did by stuffing the notes inside a plaster cast which covered his right leg. There