Europe

After the horrific tragedy of MH17, Europe must wake up to the threat posed by Vladimir Putin

How many more civilian planes need to be shot down over European airspace before Europe’s leaders get serious about the threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia? As the smoke clears from Thursday’s horrific downing of a Malaysian Airlines jet traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, many will try to deflect blame from landing squarely where it should: on Russian President Vladimir Putin. ‘Airliner tragedy in Ukraine shows US & EU erred by not pushing to keep Ukr[aine] as neutral buffer state, not potential EU/NATO member,’ tweeted Stephen Walt, a prominent voice of the ‘realist’ school of foreign policy and a leading apologist for the Russian government. RT, Moscow’s 24-hour propaganda

Exclusive: Senior Tory backbenchers to push Cameron further on Europe

Key eurosceptic MPs are planning to push David Cameron further on his plans for European reform next week, Coffee House has learned. Leading members of a powerful group of right-wing Conservative MPs, who meet regularly to discuss strategy, will call on the Prime Minister to set out more detail on giving power back to Parliament and his plans for reform. ‘The ECHR isn’t enough,’ says one source. ‘We need to hear more detail from the Prime Minister and we will ask for that as soon as next week.’ The precise wording of the demand – and how it will be delivered – are still being discussed, but the rebels are

Britain’s immigration debate must address three key issues

Politicians tend to get all the blame for immigration policies not working. But politicians are often doomed to fail on migration questions because there are deep-rooted problems with the way we all debate immigration and with what we expect of immigration policy. Following UKIP’s success in the European elections, and given the likely failure of the government to meet its net migration target by 2015, immigration is guaranteed to be a key focal point of public debate in the run-up to the general election next year. There is widespread agreement that Britain needs a ‘better’ immigration debate – but how can that be achieved? Over the past year I have

Nigel Farage hints at how a Tory / Ukip electoral pact might work

Vote Farage, get Miliband might not have quite as much resonance with voters as the Tories would like. But it is certainly effective with donors. If Ukip is seen as Ed Miliband’s passport to Number 10, it will be far harder for it to raise the money it needs to fight a successful general election campaign. So when Nigel Farage spoke to the Midlands Industrial Council—a group of right-wing business people who have in the past donated substantial sums to the Tories—after the European Elections, most of the questions were about how to avoid a split on the right letting Labour back into government. As I report in the Mail

Jean-Claude Juncker’s biggest challenge: energy

‘Energy is the single biggest issue facing Jean-Claude Juncker,’ remarked a seasoned Eurocrat to me earlier this week. Europe’s energy infrastructure is decrepit and insular. Rates of cross-border interconnection, for example, remain very low – at just 8 per cent of their production capacity on average across the union according to the FT. The Commission’s 2030 energy package aims to raise the average rate of interconnection to 15 per cent — part of a string of targets designed to complete the single market in energy. Alas, it’s going to take more than a target or two. The level of investment required is enormous (more than 1 trillion euros by the Commission’s

Wave power is a really, really stupid idea. That’s why it’s getting so much taxpayer subsidy

The surface of the sea is a hostile and unforgiving place. Although it covers 71 per cent of the planet, nothing much bigger than a speck lives there. Obviously, lots of slimy and scaly things swim around beneath the surface — but on the very top, pretty much zilch. Mother Nature has found niches for life in the desert, the Arctic and deep underground but, after 4.5 billion years of trying, she is passing on the surface of the sea, thanks all the same. Now you would think that this very long experiment in trying to evolve life in a hostile environment would act as some kind of hint to

The nervous passenger who became one of our great travel writers

Sybille Bedford all her life was a keen and courageous traveller. Restless, curious, intellectually alert, she was always ready to explore new territories, her experiences recounted in a sophisticated style that Jan Morris in her introduction refers to as ‘a kind of apotheosised reportage’. Bedford’s first book, A Visit to Don Otavio, describing an expedition to Mexico, was to become a classic of travel literature, and the essays in Pleasures and Landscapes show many of the same exceptional qualities. Over three decades, from 1948 to 1978, Bedford journeyed through Italy, Switzerland, France, Denmark, Portugal and Yugoslavia. Vivid, acutely observed and intensely personal, her accounts of these voyages of discovery provide

What have we done for ISIS not to hate us?

After 9/11 the Western world’s response fell between two poles; on the one hand lots of people agreed with General Norman Schwarzkopf that it was not our job to forgive the terrorists, it was God’s job; ours was simply to arrange the meeting. On the other hand some on the American Left asked the question: why do they hate us so? Perhaps more worrying might be the question: why don’t they hate us? This week Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, head of the lovely Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—now just ‘Islamic State’—issued a statement to the worldwide faithful in his new role as self-proclaimed caliph. In a reasonably slick document

Ed West

Britain is part of a secret Anglo-Saxon world conspiracy. How can it also be part of Europe?

I’m not a great believer in the ‘special relationship’, a concept that exists almost entirely in the mind of British journalists, especially during those occasional moments when the English-speaking nations have to bomb some awful former colony. Americans and Brits have a generally positive view of each other—speaking the same language will do that—but American foreign policy does not have some special place for us, even during the rule of Anglophile presidents like Reagan; let alone that of ambivalent ones like Obama. America does have three special relationships: two emotional ones with Ireland and Israel, and a sado-masochistic political-financial one with Saudi Arabia. Still, there is one area where the

A lesser role in the EU for national parliaments is bad news for Cameron’s renegotiation

David Cameron may have got away with his failure to block Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Commission, but that doesn’t mean that his MPs aren’t agitated about the way things are going in Europe. One aspect of last week’s European Council meeting that most people missed was a document setting out what appears to be a significantly reduced role for national parliaments in the EU. The Strategic Agenda was published as an annex to the European Council conclusions last week. It says: ‘The credibility of the Union depends on its ability to ensure adequate follow-up on decisions and commitments. This requires strong and credible institutions, but will also

Confronting the Tories’ original sin: they are still seen as the party of the rich.

Dominic Cummings is at it again. Michael Gove’s former advisor has become a reliably entertaining guide to the Whitehall labyrinth. It is plain, too, that Cummings likes to think of himself as a Teller Of Hard Truths Many Of Which Our Masters Prefer Not To Contemplate Too Deeply If At All. This is fun. His latest post purports to be about swing voters, immigration and the EU but it is really about the biggest problem afflicting the Conservative party: who is it for? And who is it seen to be for? As Cummings puts it: The fundamental problem the Conservative Party has had since 1997 at least is that it

After being Junckered, the Cameron circle now fear for the renegotiation

Getting Junckered was not an enjoyable experience for Downing Street. Not only has David Cameron lost his battle to stop the former Luxembourg PM becoming Commission President he has also discovered that Angela Merkel’s assurances to him can be trumped by her domestic political concerns. Considering how Merkel is the hinge on which Cameron’s renegotiation strategy turns, this is worrying for him. As I report in the Mail on Sunday, members of Cameron’s circle are now contemplating that the renegotiation might not deliver enough substantive change for the UK to stay in. As one of those who knows Cameron best puts it, ‘They might plump the cushions for us but

Cameron defeated as Juncker nominated for European Commission President

The European Council has nominated Jean-Claude Juncker to be the next president of the European Commission despite David Cameron’s staunch opposition. In the vote that Cameron forced on the appointment, he was defeated 26-2 with only the Hungarians joining the British in opposing the former Luxembourg PM. Junkcer’s appointment casts fresh doubt on whether Cameron will be able to renegotiate a new EU deal for Britain and whether this country will stay in the EU. In the coming weeks, we will have to watch and see whether other EU leaders try and come up with some kind of compensation package for Britain. When Cameron first came out in opposition to

Fraser Nelson

David Cameron is acting in a principled way over Juncker – so let’s back him

It’s pretty rich hearing the Labour Party criticize Cameron for taking a principled stance on Europe. How vulgar, they say, how amateur. Doesn’t he know that the job is to (as Douglas Alexander put it yesterday) ‘balance’ domestic interests and European ambitions? When I thought that Cameron was following Labour’s ‘sophisticated’ approach – ie, being sellouts – I lambasted him. I had egg on my face pretty quickly: my Telegraph column was published on the day that he said ‘no’ to the Eurozone deal. In my defence, he had set out to sellout – he’d wanted to take a figleaf of protection from the French. Sarkozy denied him that, as

What Cameron and Labour want to get out of the Juncker row

Labour has supported David Cameron’s attempt to block Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Commission, but that hasn’t stopped it getting a little pre-emptive attack in today as the Prime Minister prepares for failure at the European Council. Douglas Alexander argued this morning that ‘there was an alliance that was to be built, but alas it appears that the Prime Minister so badly misjudged his tactics and his strategy that that’s not going to be the outcome in the next 24 hours’. At Business Statement in the Commons today, Angela Eagle joked: ‘Two weeks ago, the Prime Minister sent the England football team a recorded good luck message, and

Jeremy Hunt: Better to be isolated and right in Europe

Is it a good thing that David Cameron now appears isolated in Europe as he continues to dig a hole that Jean-Claude Juncker almost certainly won’t fall into? Jeremy Hunt tried to argue on the Today programme this morning that it was, saying that people would respect an isolated Prime Minister who was prepared to make the right argument. He said: ‘Sometimes leadership is lonely, but if it is the right thing to do for Britain, I’m glad that we have got a strong prime minister who’s prepared to take those steps, even if it means that he is isolated from time-to-time, I think people in Europe will respect the

Cameron: I speak for disillusioned European voters

David Cameron is today pleading with European leaders to drop their support for Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Commission. In an article published in a series of newspapers across Europe, the Prime Minister argues that the EU needs ‘bold leadership – people ready to heed voters’ concerns and to confront the challenges Europe faces’. While claiming that his critique of the way spitzenkandidaten are chosen is ‘not an attack on Mr Juncker, an experienced European politician’, his article is quite clear that Juncker does not meet the job description as Cameron sees it. Cameron wants to set himself up as one of the few European leaders who is

A Pole’s view of the Czechs. Who cares? You will

When this extraordinary book was about to come out in French four years ago its author was told by his editor that it was likely to fail miserably. As Mariusz Szczgieł explains, the doubts were reasonable. No one was sure if anybody in the west would be interested in what a Pole had to say about the Czechs: ‘A representative of one marginal nation writing about another marginal nation is unlikely to be a success.’ But in 2009 Gottland won the European Book Prize (a serious award; the late Tony Judt’s Postwar won it the previous year) and it has been well received throughout the continent. There must have been

David Cameron acknowledges that some Tory MPs want to leave the EU

David Cameron addressed the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers earlier this evening. The meeting was upbeat because of the introduction of the winner of Newark by-election Robert Jenrick and brief because Cameron had to go off and see the Queen. Cameron only took a handful of questions but all touched on Europe. Cameron defended opting back into the European Arrest Warrant, saying it was part of being touch on terrorism. He also said that he knew that there were those ‘in this room’ who wanted to leave the EU altogether but the only way you’ll get an In Out vote is with a Tory government. Unsurprisingly, Cameron aimed plenty of

Cameron’s EU threats must be plausible; nobody likes a Prime Minister who cries wolf

Angela Merkel is annoyed that David Cameron seems to be issuing threats to other European leaders in order to get what he wants. At a press conference concluding talks held by the centre-right EU leaders in Harpsund, the German Chancellor reiterated her support for Jean-Claude Juncker, and said: ‘I made myself clear by saying that I am for Jean-Claude Juncker. But when I made that statement in Germany I also made the point that we act in a European spirit. We always do that because otherwise you would never reach a compromise. ‘Thus we cannot just consign to the backburner the question of the European spirit. Threats are not part