Euro elections

I’m so glad I can’t vote in America, I don’t want to be grateful that I can’t vote in Europe. But, unless the Vlaams Blok gets its way, next time around not only will I be able to vote, I’ll be required to by law. If they meant for us to vote, they’d have given us real candidates.

It’d be nice if the next EU parliament was coherent enough to get off its duff and pronounce itself the democratically elected representatives of the people of Europe, and then start kicking ass and taking names. I’m hoping that a bunch of starry-eyed eastern Europeans, full of ideas about how much more democratic our western governments are than their corrupt local regimes, will arrive in Brussels are start expecting to be taken seriously. But, I won’t bet on it. My only hope for the British contingent is that they be more entertaining than the last bunch.

Ah, the wonders of the Moonie Times! A more accurate article on the speech can be found at the EU Observer: http://www.euobserver.com/?sid=9&aid=16433

Bot also advocates an EU-wide public initiative procedure, the new EU constitution, and greater powers for the ECJ. However, Bot makes one very foolish argument about the funding of roads, and frankly, the EU has very few powers over health, culture or social policy, so I’m inclined to see the whole business as a matter of grandstanding.

“the EU has very few powers over health, culture or social policy”

May be not over health and culture for the present but that can hardly be claimed in respect of the Social Chapter which has been a huge generator of new employment regulations which could readily have been left for national governments to decide, each according to national priorities.

Well, I’m voting Lib Dem too – or rather voted, with postal balloting here in Manchester – and I suspect it would take a more general purge to get me back to voting Labour.

In regard to Bob’s point about the Dutch PM. Well, what’s new? The main problem as I see it with Europe is that it makes the governments of the member states more powerful, and more unaccountable, in relation to their own populations. Euro-policies are made through the council of ministers, comprised of the relevant ministers from the member states. But unpopular policies which they decide on are blamed on “Europe” as an autonomous entity. So every government goes into a Euro-election with a kind of faux-Eurosceptic agenda.

What we get out of this model of the EU as general blame dump is a marginally relevant Euro-parliament, and, at national level, bad jokes like UKIP.

The Lib Dem’s traditional advocacy of a stronger European Parliament within a genuinely federal system makes sense. At least, I’m ready to be persuaded of it. But now they’re trimming too.

After reading Ken Macleod’s essay, posted in a slightly revised version on his blog (june 6th), it’ll be a blank vote from me. Touch-screen voting also here in the NetherLands, so no smart remarks on the ballot from me either.

Don’t vote Labour, Chris. LD is the only way to go…

Sounds like you’ve got a pretty good plan to me, Chris. Putting the squeeze on Blair is a good thing.

Gordon Brown, according to the Gruaniad, is even more pro-American than Bliar. Brown met with Rupert Murdoch three weeks ago, apparently to test the water as to how News International’s various organs would respond to an elegant succession. With friends like these…
Sorry to sound harsh but anyone who has been awake and watching the news these last twelve months and who (like me) teaches elementary pol phil should be voting Respect tomorrow.

Re: hp’s comments…

That was rather amusing. Yes, having looked at the Europe issue from here in the U.S., I find the whole thing sort of funny. After all, y’all are having a lot of the same problems we were having in the 1780s (minus slavery, of course), and the solution we came up with seems to work just fine.

One thing that scares me a little about the European Constitution is how much policy is embedded in the document. One of the nice things about the U.S. Constitution is that it’s a very lightweight document, so it leaves a lot of flexibility to the States and to Congress to figure out whatever laws they need at the moment (rather than having to go through the process of amending the Constitution).

And… something I don’t understand at all is why, when you already have a deliberative body that’s one-state-one-vote (kind of like our Senate), you also give small countries increased representation in the Parliament. It seems like the medium-sized countries get screwed by that kind of thing. But maybe I don’t understand the difference between the two bodies – if the actual legislative branch of government is only going to consist of the Parliament, then I guess it’s a good compromise.

I lived in Britain in the middle 1980s, so much of this discussion has a strangely familiar wing. Labour’s left wing doing its grim and determined best to scupper Labour’s chances of winning the next General Election… hey, haven’t we been here before?

The idealization of Gordon Brown as the left’s Prince Across the Water is also pretty amusing. From here, it looks like three parts wishful thinking, one part “we’ve all repeated this so long to ourselves that now we have to believe it”.

Everyone remembers Tony Blair talking about what an “inspirational moment” it was when Kinnock finally turned on Militant. What they forget is that Brown shared fully in that inspiration. Brown loathed folks like Blair’s ex-roommate, Dave Nellist, just as much as Blair did. (Maybe more; Brown is built for long-term loathing in a way that Blair isn’t.)

The closest American equivalent might be the fondness of many American liberals for John McCain, which has given rise to the utterly daft idea that this lifelong Republican might agree to run for vice-president under Kerry. But that’s a madness of the moment. The British left has been making googly eyes at Gordon Brown for years now.

Ah well. Bring on the popcorn, say I.

Doug M.

I think it’s a mistake to be thinking about the Labour Party leadership when you’re voting in local and European elections. You’d be better off looking at the local situation and what the party is doing locally.

In my ward I had the choice of 3 Tories, 3 Liberal Democrats, 3 Labour candidates and one from the BNP. I voted on their local record.

The extent of Euroscepticism in Britain, as reflected in many polls, far exceeds the extent of any support for what is tagged as “right-wing Conservatism”.

In the regular, official Eurobarometer surveys, those polled in Britain almost invariably rank near or at the bottom in support for the EU, a belief in the integrity of its institutions or any conviction that participation in it is beneficial.

If Euroscepticism were congruent with right-wing Conservatism, we would not have Blairite, NuLab governments.

Instead of tagging Eurosceptics as just a bunch of nationalisitic and xenophobic, right-wing Conservatives, as Blairites are inclined to, it would likely prove more illuminating and generally instructive to unravel why the British are more Eurosceptical than most other Europeans. It seems highly unlikely that there is some simple explanation, very probably because there are several distinct, and quite possibly mutually inconsistent, threads within each of the bodies of Eurosceptical and Euro-federalist sentiment. There is absolutely no logically compelling reason why my Euroscepticism needs have the same rationale as that of UKIP supporters, to take an admittedly extreme example.

In all this, there are two inconvenient but well-documented factors, both of which are apt to get fudged out in ascendant political mythologies. The first is that the Conservatives in Britain were, in fact, mainly responsible for not only engaging Britain more closely in European affairs but also for promoting the Single Market concept. The second is that the self-styled “left” in Britain has, with a few exceptions belonging to the paleo-left, switched from being the main source of opposition to Britain’s participation in European affairs to becoming the most enthusiastic and vocal proponents of ever closer European integration.

As part of a timely exercise in illumination, it would be prudent to probe as to why this shift has occurred. I suspect at least part of it is that the “left” came to recognise that European integration has the most promising propect for achieving its ambitions for big, joined-up government, statism and market regulation, arguably the very reasons why the overall performance of the Eurozone economy is flagging.