Europe

One line jumped out at me in David Cameron’s Marr interview this morning. When Andrew Marr asked him if he thought we were halfway through the Euro crisis or nearing the end of it, Cameron replied: ‘I don’t think we’re anywhere near half way through it.’ Cameron clearly does not believe that any resolution to the crisis is in sight. Given that, as long as the Eurozone crisis rumbles on it is hard to see how the British economy returns to robust growth, this is immensely significant. It does, though, make me wonder if the government’s approach to the crisis should now change. If the Eurozone isn’t going to accept,

You don’t expect to find so much politics in a booze mag, but there’s an intriguing story in a recent edition of the Drinks Magazine. Relations between Britain and Argentina have been very fraught of late, so the good folk at Chapel Down, the internationally renowned vineyard in Kent, decided to promote peace and goodwill by importing Malbec grapes from Argentina to make a special English wine, called ‘An English Salute‘, to mark World Malbec Day, which took place on Tuesday. The vineyard planned to sell the wine in Gaucho, the chain of Argentine-themed steakhouses.  However, the European Commission blocked this neat marketing initiative on the grounds that grapes imported from outside the

In Westminster, the debate about the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights is all being seen through the prism of the Abu Qatada case. Undoubtedly, the whole debate over how many days had elapsed is something Theresa May and the Home Office would have liked to avoid. It has also come at a particularly unfortunate time for the government when people are prepared to believe it has been incompetent even when it hasn’t been. But what, I expect, is more significant in the long term than Abu Qatada is the fact that the Brighton conference on the ECHR is not going to deliver the

There’s barely disguised fury among Conservative ministers about Ed Davey’s claim that the coalition may well be more pro-European than the Labour government was. One complained to me earlier that it was typical Lib Dem mischief making and that ‘if they are not going to behave like normal ministers then we shouldn’t either’. Indeed, this minister went on to suggest that William Hague should publicly slap down Davey for his comments. I doubt this is going to happen. Davey is the leading Lib Dem on the Cabinet’s European Affairs Committee and I suspect there’s little appetite in the Foreign Office for a coalition row over Europe. But Davey’s comments do

News that Nick Clegg has brilliantly outmanoeuvred Cameron over the British Bill of Rights will come as no surprise to CoffeeHousers — we told you so last March. The panel was stuffed full of ECHR enthusiasts, balanced by Tories most of whose competence lay in other legal areas. Perhaps Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, the most clued-up of the Tory appointees, didn’t realise this when he joined the panel. He has twigged now, and has quit (or was eased out, depending on whose version of events you believe); observing that the ‘Lib Dem tail is wagging the Conservative dog’. As was evident from the start. Duschinsky made his j’accuse on BBC1’s Sunday Politics

Recent reports have suggested that David Cameron is interested in swapping Cathy Ashton’s job as the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy for another commission post. But sources close to Number 10 tell me this ain’t happening. Supposedly, Cameron was interested in swapping Ashton’s current role for the post of commissioner for the internal market, currently held by the Frenchman Michel Barnier. But, in reality, this was never on the cards for a whole host of reasons. Foremost of these was that Nicolas Sarkozy was never going to give up the French claim to this job just weeks away from a French presidential election. Secondly, because Ashton

David Cameron’s complaints at last night’s EU meeting about the lack of a growth agenda have, in part, been addressed by the new draft conclusions. Cameron — who was supported by the Dutch, Italians and Spanish — seems to have secured promises on the completion of the single market, deregulation and the services directive in the summit’s draft conclusions. This isn’t going to turn around the European economy. But it is a step in the right direction and a small, but possibly significant, victory for the PM.   I understand from sources in Brussels that there has been frustration with the extent to which the conclusions presented last night simply

When David Cameron headed to Brussels last December, it was far from certain that he would veto the proposed treaty. It was only when Nicolas Sarkozy proved totally uninterested in accommodating Britain’s demands that the Prime Minister decided that he could not sign up to it. In a way, Sarkozy did Cameron a favour. Imagine if Britain had got the safeguards the Prime Minister wanted and had signed up to the treaty. How would he then have reacted this week, when the Irish announced that they were going to hold a referendum on it? The pressure from the Tory benches to let the British people vote on it would have

Two items of news that may unsettle stomachs in Euroland today: i) that Ireland is planning to hold a referendum on the new European fiscal treaty, and ii) that the UK is pushing — as April’s European summit in Brighton approaches — for the European Convention on Human Rights to be rewritten so that national courts have greater discretion and power. The BBC’s James Landale has more details on the latter here, but the basic point is that the government has circulated a ‘position paper’ that proposes injecting a few principles and particulars into the ECHR. One of these is ‘subsidiarity’, the idea that decisions should be made at the