There is an option; there is a choice; and the people know it.

A reader kindly draws our attention to a useful poll recently commissioned through YouGov.

The polling figures are large enough to have a narrow margin of error. The question is expressed clearly enough to be intelligible. Crucially, the wording is set out in a way not to deliberately encourage the individual to lean towards one particular response.

What is that question? In an abbreviated nutshell, which would be a better bet for the UK – membership of the EU, or membership of EFTA?

If anything, the costs ascribed to the EFTA option are too high, and the EU costs too low (even referencing just the direct costs). Yet that skews the answer towards the EU model.  Moreover, the question assumes that just one alternative model exists beyond the EU, and doesn’t explore the prospect of continuing trade with EU countries for an EU country that has sought a vastly looser arrangement – a rainbow of EFTA-style deals. So the drafter was quite generous with his wording.

But these simplicities are necessary for a quick question of binary choice, and draw us away from the remarkable findings.

Although only a third of respondents had heard of EFTA  (and therefore already had an understanding of other trade models in Europe), once the outline of the two organisations had been explained to them, more respondents preferred the EFTA approach  than the EU model, while a remarkable one in four were  ‘don’t knows’.

For an organisation like the EU that has been in the British public consciousness for the past 35 years, that’s quite a blow.

It also shows that there is more to the EU debate than simply being “against Brussels”, and that there are genuine options on offer with the prospect of popular backing.

The one statistic that those supporting the current type of EU linkage can point to is the very high number of supporters amongst those of student age (although as a subgroup, here the polling figures are liable to a much higher margin of error, and other polls with lower margins have seen the figures much closer). Then again, it is a specific target audience for the hundreds of millions of Euros of propaganda funds spent on winning over the Youth of Europe every year. No doubt the Commission would now see this as confirmation of PR money well spent.

You can find the original data here: http://www.yougov.co.uk/extranets/ygarchives/content/pdf/HugovanRandwyck(EFTA).pdf, courtesy of http://www.uk-efta.net/.   It’s a useful piece of commissioning and well worth a ponder.

In the light of the reported use of British passports by Mossad, the Prime Minister strikes a strident tone. "A British passport is an important part of being British," he declares.

Would this be the same passport that has been allowed since 1988 to shift into a communal trans-European burgundy red? The official document with the words "European Union" prominently heading up the front cover for over a decade now?

And would these be the same passports our friends in Brussels are still tinkering with in order to sell the benefits of EU membership to "European citizens" (see this story here, which we originally uncovered – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-565510/British-tourists-told-EU-stickers-passports.html, over which an embarrassed British government swiftly rowed back)?

Just wondering.

The wires have beaten me to it in any event, but readers will I hope allow the occasional migration from the EU into the global, particularly one with a relevance to the current crisis in Greece.

Last night, the think tank Politeia hosted economist and commentator Irwin Steltzer, on loan for the evening from Washington’s Hudson Institute (delayed somewhat by the wintry conditions in the capital of late: apparently the Mayor, when challenged what is plan of action was, indicated that he was waiting for Spring). His discursions on the state of Athens and of London were of interest, but as Business Week quite rightly flags up today, the real twist came in the questions session at the end.

Challenged what he would do in the place of an incoming Prime Minister after the elections, he jumped straight in: "Call in the IMF".

That organisation carries no domestic baggage, no sentimentalities, and no democratic responsibilities either.

It was a perceptive response, not because there is a lack of anyone capable of fixing the deficit and getting to grips with the banana republic levels of public spending and debt – the Canadian experience shows us that it can be done. But British politics has become so polluted with fear of cutting down on unaffordable levels of ‘bread and games’ that there is no will, barely enough even to debate the issue seriously in public. Whichever politician dares to tell the truth will be chastised as the hospital trolley candidate. In turn, there is little appetite for any future minister grabbing that ivory handled revolver.

Thanks to simplistic appeals and live wire allegations over many long years, politicians are afraid of massive public sector reform, even where failing to cut the addictions of the past will now clearly lead to utter ruin. Career trumps country, and pending disaster is barricaded away in a closet. The fate of Frank Field shows this all too painfully. As Seltzer also pointed out, the growth of the state over the past few decades has been so massive as to be approaching irredeemable, and the starting posts have shifted vastly.

In any case, an appeal to the IMF is a concept that is a stage too far, but it speaks to a basic truth. Are we come so far that the country needs a scapegoat to rescue itself?

Oh dear, oh dear! Self-interest strikes again.

A few months ago, we published research into the track records of British MEPs, and then ranked them. These things as we noted at the time are relative and to some extent subjective, but it proved a useful starting point for voters to challenge individuals up for re-election on the doorstep, and explore how they had voted on taxpayer-unfriendly roll call votes.

Judging from the latest reports emerging from Brussels, some of those rankings will have to be seriously revisited next time round.

MEPs have long been able to benefit from a ridiculous second pension scheme, allowing them matched funding to feather their retirement nest beyond their generous first pension. Today’s Telegraph reveals that at least 36 British MEPs are covered by the fund, plus a number of others who have since retired.

Just like ExpensesGate in the British Parliament, such grants are perfectly legal, but even a moment’s reflection would bring cause to reflect whether they were financially moral. The option to join the scheme is, after all, exactly that: an option. The scheme is voluntary. The incentive to join is driven only by self-interest, at public expense.

Four Conservative MEPs are reportedly involved in a legal challenge, demanding the scheme’s funding black hole be filled. Thanks to a failed attempt by some to maintain the anonymity of those involved in the case, the British MEPs have been named as Sir Robert Atkins, Giles Chichester, Roger Helmer, and Robert Sturdy.

Of course, while they are the active ones it may well be that a large number of more politically astute colleagues are quietly hoping that they will succeed, mutely willing reform to founder. Official party lines are that the taxpayer shouldn’t bail out the astonishing £106 million deficit. In this, they are correct. But it beggars belief that even after the shattering public outcry over expenses with MPs, some of our representatives still do not "get it", and fail to read the signs that the gravy train is about to hit the buffers.

Is Greece set to unravel the Euro? The dynamics of that undynamic public administration look set to have a crucial impact, but not necessarily in the way people are expecting.

Successful currency zones operate where safety valves operate to take the strain that a floating exchange rate would normally channel. Having the same currency as your export partners obviously does not allow for your national currency to depreciate under the market’s direction, allowing for exports to become more competitive on an exchange level. So a Eurozone country that is heavily reliant on inter-Eurozone trade cannot benefit from an export-led drive from recession in the way that Britain’s has. Heaven help us indeed if we had joined the Euro under Blair after all.

Instead, countries have to rely on social or financial shifts. Consider the case of, say, Merseyside (as a ‘Woollyback’ by origin I feel safe raising the analogy). Imagine – it’s not hard to do – there is a period of regional decline due to a shift in national and global trade patterns. Liverpool is in the same currency area as London, and so cannot offset a local recession through a depreciation of its currency compared with the London Pound. The cost of making a product in the Wirral does not become comparatively cheaper once it is sent down the M6, because the currency rate is fixed.

However, in compensation, since Liverpool and London are in the same country, and the national government recognises that there is an economic and social crisis, the state transfers money from the central budget into the area to support development, encourage shifts in employment, and bear the brunt of high unemployment. That is the price and the benefit of accepting currency union, based on the geographical redistribution of the take from a common tax system.

The other main alternative is for people to move away and look for work in areas lacking the necessary workforce. This of course is easier in countries where there is a common language and a common culture – the United States is a classic example, with an extraordinarily high ratio of movements of people both infra- and inter-state every year.

The problem with Greece and the EU, however, is that these principles do not apply to the same extent. The ‘federal’ EU budget is a tiny fraction of the federal budget of the United States. Meanwhile, despite a burst of considerable migration during the accession of several Eastern European states to the EU, there does not seem to be the same level of work fluidity in the Greek marketplace and certainly nothing approaching North American levels.

Where does this leave the Euro today? The Commission has apparently already suggested that Athens will come under ‘special measures’. Why anyone should express surprise or outrage within the Eurozone is a mystery; such a development was always inevitable, and pointed out by critics even at the time. At some point, with divergent economies cobbled together on the basis of political exigence and ideological aspiration, an economic crisis would hit one part of the currency union more than another. In the absence of all the customary safety valves, the call would come for Brussels to step in to do more.

It’s no coincidence after all that the Lisbon Treaty establishes on a legal footing, for the first time, another barely-known leadership post; the President of the Eurozone (see the Protocol on the Euro Group here: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2007:306:0153:0153:EN:PDF).

If you like, it’s the prototype for a Euro-Chancellor to go with the EU President and the EU Foreign Minister. Expect the importance of that post to grow swiftly.

We can also anticipate a growing backlash from trades unions and the Left against Brussels as emergency measures are touted; and also increased wariness amongst non-Euro countries to sign on the dotted line.

But above all, as the crisis deepens, the lesson from the past five years is that the planners and legislators in Brussels will call for more powers and more integration. Problems generate solutions made in Brussels and the European Central Bank’s home at Frankfurt. They will turn increasingly to the financial and fiscal models of other federal states across the world, to correct the imperfections of their federal currency. One might suggest cynically that this was the measure all along, with politicians refusing to admit to a greater project than their electorates at the time of Maastricht would have swallowed.

Perhaps this is the very moment that a two-tier European Union becomes set in concrete, with the ‘ins’ now consenting to the administrative forms needed to make their currency work in a crisis, and the ‘outs’ finding the step to currency union to have become too much of a bound.

The cost certainly will be heavy. For the British taxpayer, and regardless of the government in power in Westminster, the further we are out, the less burned we will be.

By a remarkable symmetry, two stories have today been breaking relating to opposite ends of the same piece of policy string.

The House of Bishops’ Europe Panel is the EU grouping of the Anglican Lords Spiritual. Today’s Telegraph carries a story highlighting an unusually critical report by the group. Well, these things are contextual. But what certainly leaps out is the following passage;

Such statements are far from unusual, other than the fact of it hailing from a normally more reserved source. They have long been made even within the Commission, not that you would know if from the end result of the Laeken Declaration, the failed referenda, and Margot Wallstrom’s ‘Plan B’ debacle.

But team this democratic issue with one of direct taxpayer concern. EUObserver.com today reveals the latest list of EU think tanks in line for Brussels funding (the article can be found here: http://euobserver.com/9/29368/?rk=1). It’s been said a hundred times before, but far too many of these organisations are institutions whose leaning is in favour of European integration. Of the top ten, readers will already likely be familiar with the work of the European Movement (the UK wing declares it no longer receives tax payer subventions, but its parent body does). Notre Europe meanwhile is the brainchild and retirement favourite of Jacques Delors no less. Many of the others also need not be dwelt on, as they feature in a hefty piece of research I did with the talented Lorraine Mullally (see http://www.openeurope.org.uk/research/hardsell.pdf) and also with Messrs Oulds and Ball some years before for the Bruges Group (see http://www.brugesgroup.com/mediacentre/index.live?article=79 – with a fairly clear cut title spelling out our conclusions!).

Whether these groups get money because they tend – with honourable exceptions – to be pro-EU integration, or find a slant developing naturally from a form of financial Stockholm Syndrome, is neither here nor there. The fact is that they have historically delivered reports to policy makers endorsing more Europe, which are then taken as justification by those who then draft the laws. This process generates an internal cyclical dynamic.

During the Convention on the Future of Europe, where for a full week many of these bodies were brought in for consultation, British delegate David Heathcoat-Amory coined a term for this mock accountability: "Brussels talking to Brussels." The funding issue then blew up and their partisan input was largely debunked in the media.

Unless we continue to shine the spotlight on these grants, millions of pounds’ worth year on year, taxpayers’ money will continue to be spent on what amounts to yea-saying consultants and Commission groupies.

Meanwhile, as the bishops quite rightly point out, democracy takes a backseat, because in the eyes of the Brussels lawmakers, European integration is too important to endanger by letting the people themselves decide.

Plato had a concept of perfection. His (platonic) ideal for each item was actually held to exist somewhere in the world in solid form.

By such philosophies do we learn about the morals of the time. Commission Decision 2009/894/EC tells us more about our own era.

The Commission’s form of ideological perfection here takes the form of an eco-label. To qualify, “an item of wooden furniture must fall within the product group ‘wooden furniture’ as defined in Article 1 of this Decision”. This is expounded as follows [sic];

The product group ‘wooden furniture’ shall comprise free-standing or built-in units, which are used for storing, hanging, lying, sitting, working and eating of domestic furniture, whether for indoor or outdoor use, or used indoors for business purposes. Business purposes shall include office and school furniture as well as furniture for restaurants and hotels.

The following conditions shall be fulfilled:

(a) The product shall be made of at least 90 % w/w solid wood or wood-based materials. Glass, if easily replaceable in case of damage or breakage, may be excluded from the weight calculation as may technical equipment and fittings.

(b) The weight of any individual material, other than solid wood and wood-based materials, shall not exceed 3 % of the total weight of the product. The total combined weight of such materials shall not exceed 10 % of the total weight of the product.

Of course the specifications do not end there, with nine further pages of zealously detailed instructions, including a number of banned substances such as these categories that shouldn’t be in the furniture just in case you had a peculiar idea what you should be doing with it;

R23 (toxic by inhalation)
R28 (very toxic if swallowed)
R39 (danger of very serious irreversible effects)
R52 (harmful to aquatic organisms)
R60 (may impair fertility)

A document and symbol of our times, indeed.

Istanbul’s accession to the club is one of the EU’s longstanding hot potatoes. As an applicant state and a neighbour, the country has, notwithstanding the political disputes, been the recipient of major grants.

The latest Special Report from the Court of Auditors (16/2009) produces few surprises for the weary Brussels watcher, highlighting once again a spending plan with no quantifiable objectives, indeed where there were specific objectives at all. 

Two thirds of short term priorities were not met in the stated timeframe, in part because of absurd targets such as aiming to end all fraud, drug trafficking and organised crime within two years. A food safety programme was delivered without checking the buildings and working practises were up to scratch, leading to training and new (but “inappropriate”) equipment but still no certification. Delays in customs scanner contracts led to two contracts being scrubbed as not coming up to scratch (in a country which is a major trafficker trans-route). The national Ministry of Justice had to step in to supply office equipment to the Probation Service due to contractual delays.

The Auditors observed, “Previous Court reports found similar problems in pre-accession assistance.” Lessons were not being learned, and taxpayer money not being used to best effect. Still it seems no heads have rolled.

For those who think state funding of culture should be limited to school Petri dishes, a set of lately-published European Council conclusions is likely to disappoint (2009C 301/08).

Culture takes up half of the title nomenclature – perhaps even half of the nomenklatura – of DG Education. As such, it already lends itself to interpretation as an area in which the EU should not be concerned; in terms of Subsidiarity, in the context of the role of the Council of Europe, in terms of the danger of propagandising European integration, and in terms of value for money.

The Council conclusions are intended to “promote a Creative Generation” through central funding. “Access and exposure to diverse cultural expressions, artistic practices and works of art from an early age,” the innovatively-named “Points Out” section of the Recitals observes, “is important for personal development, identity, self-esteem and an individual’s sense of belonging”. These are skills “important for social inclusion, active citizenship and future employability.”

By Brussels?

In real terms, the Commission should help “optimise the potential of the education sector to enhance the promotion of creativity through culture and cultural expression.” Explanations on a postcard, please.

As documents go, other than to demonstrate that ministers are actually ‘doing something’ at Council meetings, and to encourage the Commission to keep on spending hundreds of millions of Pounds more every year in a field of near-zero taxpayer merit, the declaration (just like the spending) is like the Empire State on a foggy day.

It’s hard to see the point.

International human rights law is already a minefield, especially for peacekeepers in conflict zones. Moves within the European Union now look set over time to make this worse.

The European Council has released a new set of EU Guidelines on promoting compliance with international humanitarian law, or IHL. This is also known as the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), and is a familiar requisite for all NATO soldiers when they deploy on operations, but also as part of their regular standard training.

States are already bound to comply under customary international law. What the Council is declaring is therefore a bolt on to a complex and shifting legal situation. Council working groups are to monitor situations where IHL may apply; regular reporting will occur from EU diplomats; a greater role is envisaged for the Council Working Group on International Law (COJUR).

This is well and noble, except for a few problems going beyond the monitoring of Third World gangsters. In the first place, the EU appears to be in the process of becoming a motor of an ethical foreign policy, and we have seen how that stated policy developed in the UK; secondly, the EU and not the UN is the centre of focus; thirdly, and of particular concern, is that the increased attention on IHL will inevitably spill over into interpretations of how forces from EU member states behave when they themselves are deployed.

The prospect of the European Court of Justice joining the European Court of Human Rights in interpreting actions taken by servicemen in a dust-hazed split second five thousand miles away is a real concern. From the taxpayers’ perspective, we can foresee increased legal ramifications, both in terms of lawyers' bills and court costs, and especially an increase in pernicious and vexatious law suits taken against deployed forces – a current and very real issue, not least thanks to certain UK law firms.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. In this instance, we are firmly on the tarmacked slip road.

Two weeks ago, we blogged about the EU’s developing powers as a "regional economic integration organisation". The trend, revolutionary in international diplomacy, is now confirmed.

That document was about drivers’ penalty points; now we see it in relation to railway points. Council Decision 2009/940/EC, agreed in December, relates to the European Community signing an international agreement on rolling stock in its own right and in identical terminology. Denmark, notably, once again decided to exercise its opt out. The decision applies to the United Kingdom, notwithstanding the very narrow gauge of its application.

Why are we concerned by this seemingly mundane matter? Item 7 of the annex notes;

In plain speak, since these transfers are one way only, this states that such acquis will grow, and suggests that contrary to certain reassurances, the passerelle clause is expected to be used sooner rather than later.

If we now we factor in a response from the Minister of Europe, we have a real issue of concern. On 25 June 2009 (Parliamentary Question 277085, column 1071), well in advance of the formal establishment of the European External Action Service, the minister was invited to list those international bodies in which the European Commission already enjoyed greater representational rights than his government. The reply was it would require an assessment of too many international agreements and would cost too much to work out.

He also by definition indicated that the Foreign Office simply did not know.

The ignorance of ministers on the destiny of their departments is blinding. The train is now leaving the station; will a driver please clamber aboard?

The scramble to digitalise might be costing us a fortune in dumped tv sets over these next few years, and leaving us with telly reception that wobbles during fog, but it also presents (or rather, presented) an opportunity.

The Commission has issued a text looking at the "digital dividend" (2009/848/EC) and wants the 790-862 MHz sub band set aside for roaming cells and for developing technology.

The Commission claims that the proposal could boost the EU economy by €20 to €50 billion. Outsiders point to, firstly, the lack of supporting evidence; secondly, the lack of an "EU economy"; and thirdly, to the lack of a seemingly realistic cost benefit given the range of the estimate. Already the service providers are claiming that over 100 million televisions, and millions of broadband internet users, would be hit by the proposal.

It’s only a ‘Recommendation’, which in legalese means that nobody has to pay any attention to it other than as a floating conversation starter. However, it’s certainly true that demand is outpacing supply.

The bandwidth aspect to the Commission’s broader policy fits into a context of broader international continental agreements. In June 2009, Baltic countries moved towards an agreement that included Russia. The Americas and Asia have both opted for 698-806 MHz. Some EU countries meanwhile will face difficulties in having neighbours who use the recommended range for their own governmental purposes.

As international agreements go, this has the feel of a missed boat, with too much of a fixation on the continental rather than the global. Sometimes the world is just bigger than the EU.