European Union

Voting patterns and polling data from the past year suggest the EU is moving towards a more ethnic, closed-minded and xenophobic understanding of “Europeanness” that could ultimately challenge the European project, according to a major report.

The report, by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and the European Cultural Foundation (ECF), identifies three key “blind spots” across the bloc and argues their intersection risks eroding or radically altering EU sentiment.

The report, shared exclusively with the Guardian, argues that the obvious “whiteness” of the EU’s politics, low engagement by young people and limited pro-Europeanism in central and eastern Europe could mould a European sentiment at odds with the bloc’s original core values.

The entire EU idea is based on the base contention that Europe’s different. There’s us in here and them out there. We should be protected from them. “White” isn’t wholly and exactly the same thing as that Europeanness but it’s damn close.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revived EU expansion as an imperative. For years, “enlargement” has been a low priority – Croatia was the last country to join the club, more than 10 years ago. But things have changed. Ursula von der Leyen told a forum in Bled, Slovenia I attended this month that Europe’s security depends on the 27-nation union expanding again. Thanks to Vladimir Putin, as the Albanian prime minister, Edi Rama, put it, enlargement is back on track.

The fact that expansion is a strategic priority makes it possible that new members will be admitted.

If European countries show that they can survuve – maybe even thrive – outside the EU then that calls into question the very justification of the EU. So, absorb them all before that is possible.

Note, that’s the less cynical description. The more cynicial is one ringpiece to rule them all.

Labour hopes to deepen economic ties with Europe outside EU’s structures

Cooperation with foreigners in foreign. Why not? It is, after all, the EU itself that is the enemy, not foreigners nor Europeans.

Microsoft has blamed EU rules for enabling a faulty security update to cause the world’s biggest IT outage.

The software giant said a 2009 agreement with the European Commission meant it was unable to make security changes that would have blocked the CrowdStrike update that triggered widespread travel and healthcare chaos on Friday.

CrowdStrike’s Falcon system, designed to prevent cyber attacks, has privileged access to a key part of a computer known as the kernel.

I think I’ve this right. M can’t ban access to the kernel – like Apple does – because of the agreement. Therefore folk have access to the kernel.

It’s thanks to EU……

The European Union will demand access to British fishing waters in return for a closer relationship with Britain, The Telegraph understands.

Sir Keir Starmer is pursuing a reset to European relations and last week hosted a summit for European Political Community (EPC) leaders at Blenheim Palace.

The Prime Minister hoped to use the summit as a springboard to forge closer trade, security and foreign policy ties with Brussels, as well as work on a migrant returns deal.

However, the EU is said to be preparing a list of “offensive interests” it will use in any future talks with the UK Government.

It’s not, in fact, “But they’ll take our fish” that is the problem. It’s that the entire idea of how fishing is controlled is wrong. Central bureaucracy handing out quotas on political grounds. It needs to be ownership, by individual fishermen, of the stocks. Unlerss and until the EU moves to ITQs – which will be never – we should not allow them anywhere near “our” fish stocks.

The first challenge they will bequeath to Labour, should it win, involves untying the tangled knot around imports and exports. The confused introduction of hyper-bureaucratic and horrendously expensive border checks is the result of hardcore Brexit ideology.

It’s the EU that demands the hyperbureaucracy.

We can do whatever we want – and we should. One useful idea is that if we were in the EU then we’d accept German, French, Italian, inspection as being valid. So, why not do so when we’re out of the EU?

But then of course we’ve got cretins like Jay Rayner.

But that would have stopped us doing terrible deals with other countries of the sort the EU would not allow. It’s why many UK products are now marked “Not for EU”. It isn’t that they don’t currently comply with EU standards; it’s that theoretically they may not. If an incoming Labour government negotiated alignment on food standards, huge costs and bureaucracy would be stripped out of food production. Imports could flow. With our self-sufficiency at just 60% and falling, that would be a very good thing. We need them.

Who so desperately confuse the EU’s rules on our exports with our rules on imports. They really, really, do not have to be the same.

The European election results both confirmed and invalidated a widely expected rightwing surge. But what does this mean for Europe’s place in the world at a time when Putin has the upper hand in Ukraine, war in the Middle East shows no sign of ending, Trump is a threat on the US electoral horizon and China is throwing its weight around?

Who gives a toss?

Green parties have shed seats in the European elections, provisional results suggest, raising fears that the continent may be on the verge of weakening its climate ambitions. Projections for the new European parliament showed the Green faction pushed from fourth into sixth place, with 53 seats, amid a broader shift to the right.

The way the system was supposed to work was simple enough: the EU would set an annual cap on its overall emissions, then issue various emitters a certain number of EU allowances (EUAs). Each EUA would entitle its holder to emit one tonne of carbon. If a company had extra EUAs at the end of the year, meaning that it hadn’t emitted all the carbon it was allowed, it could put them up for sale, and companies that had too few EUAs could buy them. Companies could also purchase carbon offsets, which basically meant investing in sustainability measures in other countries. The plan was for Europe to issue fewer EUAs year over year, so it would become progressively more expensive to emit carbon.

What made the market interesting to scammers was the potential for VAT fraud. To understand the scheme they cooked up, it’s important to know two things: because economic policies in Europe are aimed at facilitating trade across borders, VAT is waived on sales between EU member states. Also, since governments only want to tax the value added at each stage of the economic process, they credit or reimburse the buyers of certain products for the VAT paid to suppliers.

They lifted billions by running a VAT Carousel operation on carbon credits.

And yes, largely the people who had been doing mobile phones. Using much the same system. Well after everyone had grasped what was happening with hte phones too. Yet the EU still instituted the system that allowed – hell, a great gaping hole where it could be done – it to be cdone.

How’s that for people supposedly planning an entire continent to our benefit?

Cretins.

MEPs’ lack of racial diversity has caused EU identity crisis, campaigners say
Parliament’s failure to reflect the bloc’s diverse population could worsen with European elections

Apparently Europe being ruled by Europeans is a problem now.

But only on the left has there been clear reference to tackling systemic racism. What about also committing to making EU institutions more racially diverse and inclusive, and decolonising inward-looking and Eurocentric trade, aid and foreign policies? By ignoring such questions, many of these parliamentarians perpetuate the damaging disconnect between the predominantly white EU institutions and the reality of a vibrant, diverse and multicultural Europe.

The entire point of the European Union is to set up a system whereby Europe – or that vision of it – can be protected from the vibrancy of that outside world. They’re not going to try to stop Eruocentric trade, protecting expensive European businesses from more lively competition elsewhere is the entire point of the game.

As 400 million EU citizens prepare to cast their votes in June’s European elections, a new poll shows that it is Ursula von der Leyen who has caught voters’ attention like no EU chief before her.

Our survey suggests that a large majority of Europeans today are aware that she is the European Commission president, considered to be the most powerful political office in the EU. Previous EU chief executives have been largely unknown to the public. But almost 75% are able to correctly identify von der Leyen’s name and recognise her face. Five years ago, her predecessor, Jean-Claude Juncker, scored only 40% recognition.

Pressure for EU reform is becoming urgent. With war raging in Ukraine and Gaza, and the relationship between China and the US cooling, the EU needs deeper defence integration to meet the growing geopolitical challenges. Economic and monetary union might not be sustainable without closer fiscal integration and a stronger single market. New technologies need to be harnessed to generate prosperity for the next generation and the the 27-nation EU is committed to expanding to become a union of 30 or more member states.

That deeper integration, blah, blah, good job we’re out, eh?

The weirdness is that Europe hsa been asked three times now whether we’d like to be ruled by the German defence minister. Twice, in the face of vast armies trying to persuade us, we bloodily said no. Rather emphatically in fact. Third time around it’s the German defence minister who has four operational ‘planes and had the troops drilling with broomstocks. People are saying yes?

Weird.

Yes, yes, I know it will strike as trivial and all that. But it is at least possible now to have a rational fisheries policy:

The European Union has launched legal action against the UK over a ban on catching sand eels in British waters in a fresh post-Brexit fishing dispute.

In January, Britain announced a ban on catching sand eels on Dogger Bank in the North Sea to protect the area’s populations of puffins and kittiwakes, which eat the fish.

The reason, well, you’ve got to claim it’s for environmental reasons to be allowed to do it. But banning sand eel fishing is a good idea. Alloow them to flourish to as to provide the food chain for cod etc out there – rather than being ground up for pig feed in Denmark.

Or even, you don;t think it’s a good idea. OK. But it is, at least, a possible idea because Brexit. Staying within the Common Fisheries Policy would have meant the decision is impossible.

The UK has lost influence since Brexit to become just one of many “middle powers” in the world, former foreign secretary David Miliband has said.

Writing for the Observer, Miliband, now president and chief executive of the International Rescue Committee, said that in order to reverse the decline, the UK needed to enter new “structures and commitments” with the EU on foreign policy.

The 7th, 10th, whatever it is, largest economy, and one of what, 5 nuclear (admitted at least) powers, loses influence by being independent instead of 1/27th of a collective?

Oh, right.

The rule of law is declining across the EU

Everybody should leave the EU therefore.

Of course, the report is wildly different from that. It actually portrays the EU – snigger – as the protector of the rule of law.

And because a European Union project to manufacture a million shells for Ukraine was six months late for its 2023 deadline,

Last week the six biggest operators – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and ByteDance – were forced to toe the line on competition, advertising, interoperability and more. It was a gamechanger

Apparently passing a bit of regulation solves global problems.

The act imposes serious obligations: companies will have to allow third-party apps and app stores on their platforms; provide transparent advertising data; allow users to easily uninstall pre-installed software or apps; enable interoperability between different messaging services, social networks, and other services, allowing users to communicate seamlessly across platforms; and be more transparent about how their algorithms rank and recommend content, products and services.

It also prohibits certain practices by gatekeepers: favouring their own services over third-party ones, for example; engaging in self-preferential activities; and using private data from business users to compete against them. In other words, an end to tech business as usual.

The major effect so far – for me at least – is that Google Maps is no longer clickable from the Google search page. That’s improved my life no end.

Twattery.

Sachets of sauce and small bottles of shampoo will be banned from European restaurants and hotels after a deal was struck to ban single-use plastics in the EU.

Belgium, negotiating on behalf of EU member states, reached provisional agreement with the European Parliament on the law to cut packaging waste late on Monday.

Because I’m reasonably certain that they passed another law, a decade back, which insisted – on food safety grounds – that little refillable bottles of oil and so on were not to be allowed in restaurants and sachets had to be used.

I’d need to make sure that was true before making much of a fuss about it but that is the recollection….

Among the Brussels regulations was rule EN1176, which defines safety requirements for children’s playground equipment. It sets out how much space there has to be between swings and how high they have to be off the ground, and limits the number of swings per bay to two.

Local councillors mulling the park revamp realised that they would not have the space for both swings and the new pirate attraction if they wanted to abide by standards that could help protect them from injury claims.

Under the rules, introduced in 1999, any repair or refurbishment of the park would mean the swings would have to be demolished because there is not enough room.

Sure, don’t want the kiddies to be damaged by swings that are not far enough apart.

#But there’s a human type who thinks that such – the gap between the swings – is properly the business of the continental government of 500 million people. That life should be regulated in such detail that all such decisions should be subject to exactly such regulation – even law.

There are others who think that government is what is done to fill in the gaps. Only things that cannot rub along nicely without the tender ministrating, centralised, hand need government applied to them.

It’s not what the gap is between those swings which is the point here. It’s who, where, decides what it is? And upon all the other myriad such trivia in life?

The problem with the European Union is that those who think the centralised bureaucracy should write all these rules are in charge of it.

Entirely possible to have a different system. A general idea that those who own something are responsible for it. If an accident happens then have a little confab about whether it was idiot users or the design of the thing at fault. As those cases mount up over time we get a body of law on what’s a good design, what’s a bad one. Good spreads.

Roughly the difference between Roman and Common law.

The EU is run by those who think that Roman Law should determine all of life. That’s what’s wrong with the EU.

As both Germany and Poland have found out over the centuries:

As Putin and Trump threaten from east and west, Europe must stand up for itself
Timothy Garton Ash

If you’re threatened on both sides then you’ve got to be able to fight a two front war. Which nobody ever does actually manage. You’ve got to ally with one so as to be able to confront the other.

Knowing the EU they’d pick Russia of course. Can’t be having with those Americans, right?