How's our top EU negotiator doing?
One of the consistent themes of this blog is that Britain gets disastrous deals from Europe because of the Europhile dealmakers we have negotiating on our behalf.
Erudite and intelligent, Britain's top EU mandarins see their role as splitting the difference between what ministers want and what the Euro system will allow. And because they only answer to other Whitehall mandarins, they can ignore what the voters think.
With all that in mind, how has the decision to appoint Gordon Brown's top EU adviser, Jon Cunliffe, as the Coalition's top EU negotiator worked out?
Last year, as we all know, David Cameron vetoed the new Fiscal Union treaty. Three cheers! He made it clear if the rest of Euroland wanted a Fiscal Union, they should set up seperate arrangements outside the EU. Bravo!
But since then, the small print deal making was been left to Cunliffe and co. Oops.
Tomorrow, I gather, we will discover that the Fiscal Union rules must be incorporated into the EU rules by 2017. So not really a veto at all, then eh.
Sounds like Sir Humphrey intends to get his way. Or is it too late for Parliament to sack Sir Humphrey?
Posted on 28 January 2012 by Douglas Carswell
Continuity Brown must end before the economy can recover
Despite all the talk of change, when it comes to economic policy the current government has pretty much carried on where Gordon Brown left off.
As Fraser Nelson puts it in his brilliant article in today’s Telegraph “The list of undead Brownite policies lingering in the Treasury is long and ignominious.”
The Coalition – despite the spin – continues to borrow on a Gordonian scale. "A Government that is widely regarded as radical, and hawkish on the deficit, is making virtually no economic progress, while running up the debt like there’s no tomorrow”. Indeed. During this Parliament, we will borrow more than the last Chancellor managed over thirteen years.
Under this government, just like the last, the Bank of England has been encouraged to print money recklessly and conjure up candy floss credit. The sugar rush has yet to produce real growth.
The economy is flat lining as though Gordon Brown was in charge because the economic thinking from his era still pervades the Treasury.
“Where are the Conservative ideas?” asks Fraser.
Too often, ministers have simply looked to the Treasury mandarinate to provide them with the range of policy options from which they then make choices. Instead of bringing change, they have become spokesmen for failed Treasury thinking.
There are new ideas out there, but the Coalition provides a ready-made excuse to ignore any of the suggestions that we might do things differently.
So where is the supply-side boldness? Where is the growth strategy? Where is the strategic radicalism, rather than the tactical tinkering?
Instead of ministerial mangerialism, the Treasury needs to get much bolder. They won’t be until they start doing more than simply recycling failed Treasury thinking.
Posted on 27 January 2012 by Douglas Carswell
Sheriffs will have the power
In November, local people will have the chance to elect their own Police and Crime Commissioner, or Sheriff.
The Sheriff will have oversight over local policing, perhaps in time overseeing public prosecutions, too.
Despite the Sheriff having the power to fire the Chief Constable, critics of the new arrangements have claimed that the Sheriffs will have only a limited impact. The police will, they say, keep slavishly following Home Office directives. The new Sheriff will be little more than some sort of directly elected Police Authority.
Not if you read the small print, they won't.
Mark Reckless, the brilliant MP for Rochester, has ensured that the new Policing Protocol Order, which sets out the powers between Sheriffs and Chief Constable, allow the Sheriff to call the shots.
Since Lord Denning's 1968 ruling, operational independence has been interpreted widely. Mark Reckless' new Protocol Order ensures that the Chief Constable must answer to the Sheriff on all matters, except on "specific operational matters and decisions ... in arresting ... and pursuing investigations".
In other words, the single individual Sheriff you elect to hold the police to account in your county or city, really will be able to insist that the local constabulary's priorities are your priorities. Good news for the law abiding. Bad news for hoodlums.
Let's make sure we get lots of robustly independent-minded candidates come forward for the role.
Posted on 26 January 2012 by Douglas Carswell
Mervyn King should make us despair
"No reason to despair", says Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King. "All crises must come to an end".
Gulp. If this all-crises-must-come-to-an-end line is the best our top economic technocrat can come up with, it is hardly reassuring.
Economic crises do indeed come to an end - but usually because those in charge start to do the right thing. Mervyn King's Bank of England has been doing the wrong things. Unless he changes course, he will compound our current crisis, rather than resolve it.
Mr King was at the helm as the central bank kept interest rates recklessly low in the years before the credit crunch, stoking up a credit bubble and mistaking it for growth.
Once the credit bubble burst, it was Mervyn's Monetary Policy Committee that slashed rates further, hoping to cure the patient by giving it more of what made it ill.
At almost every stage he has talked of deflationary dangers as inflation has been taking hold. The MPC has consistently failed to meet its inflation target for years.
Rather than maintain sound money, Mr King's bank has engaged in a massive bout of monetary stimulus, attempting to engineer economic growth.
With almost every passing day it becomes clear that Mervyn's print-more-money / provide-cheap-credit approach has failed; debt remains larger than ever. The banks remain zombies. With every disincentive to save, there has been no significant build up of real credit in the system. And, to cap it all, we seem to be drifting back into recession.
This slo-mo crisis will indeed come to an end. But I doubt it will do so while Mervyn King and his debauched monetarism are still calling the shots.
Posted on 25 January 2012 by Douglas Carswell
No time for Adam Smith at the Treasury, I fear
Keen as ever to help the government, I recently tabled a question asking if the Chancellor or his team of ministers had read that Adam Smith fellow, author of The Wealth of Nations.
Smith's book is full of corking ideas if you're a little stumped for a growth strategy. Plus it has been around since 1776, so hopefully someone in the Treasury has had the time to pop out and get a copy.
I just got this reply from Mark Hoban MP;
“Treasury Ministers and officials consider a wide range of view from a variety of sources to provide the historical and international context to the UK’s economic policy”.
Perhaps you can now see where the growth strategy got to? Never let it be said that Sir Humphrey runs the Treasury.
Posted on 24 January 2012 by Douglas Carswell
Why we must quit the jurisdication of this foreign court
If you want to know why we must quit the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, read court president, Sir Nicolas Bratza trying to defend it.
Sir Nicolas writes as though it was this supranational quango from the 1950s that invented the notion of limited government.
British lawyers, Sir Nicolas seeks to assure us, played a very major role in the development of the court’s role. Perhaps. But what about the British people?
Mere "governments of the day" and "popular opinion", must not, Sir Nicolas seems to suggest, be allowed to stand in the way of the superior wisdom of these legal technocrats. I'm sure Abu Qatada would agree.
Sir Nicolas seems to have reverted to the pre-modern idea that an elite must govern wisely from on high, accountable not to the people, but to their own consciences to tell them what is right.
In defence of his court, Sir Nicolas cites several cases where the judges have clearly made rulings most reasonable folk would believe to be right. No one disputes this. Even a broken clock gets the time right twice a day.
The issue is not whether every ruling by the Human Rights Euro court is right. Rather it is whether this supranational quango has the right to be making these decisions in the first place.
If Sir Nicolas thinks the public policy priorities that the court imposes are so self-evidently good, he should run for election to Parliament the way I did.
The ECHR has expanded far beyond what was intended. Instead of safe guarding democratic values against tyranny, the court today facilitates a form of judicial activism that undermines democracy. The price we pay for judicial activism is public policy sclerosis as successive governments are unable to develop new approaches to dealing with terror suspects or the mass movement of people. We are left applying late twentieth century solutions to twenty first century problems.
The digital revolution means more and more decisions can be taken closer to citizens. Leaving it to remote grandees to decide things is becoming increasingly difficult to defend. As Sir Nicolas' article inadvertently shows.
Posted on 24 January 2012 by Douglas Carswell
Still sinking into debt ....
One of the best articles on the state of our finances is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's piece in today's Telegraph.
What I find so so remarkable is that for all the talk of austerity, the UK government continues to spend even more now than it did when Gordon Brown was in charge.
"Cutting government spending", say the experts in Whitehall, "is like trying to turn around a super tanker. Not even Thatcher managed it .... Must be done incrementally .... blah blah blah"
If government is so hopeless at reining in government, try giving the job to Parliament.
Posted on 23 January 2012 by Douglas Carswell
Why have we been drifting along with this Eurozone bailout disaster?
David Davis has an excellent article on Conservative Home this morning explaining the need for ministers to “stop pretending that preserving the Euro .... is in our national interest.”
Indeed. Bravo.
So how the heck did ministers manage to spend two years, and many billions of pounds, kidding themselves that it is in our interest to prop up the Euro?
Set aside the rights or wrongs of ministers committing large sums to sustaining a currency we chose not to join. Pushing more debt onto bankrupt nations will not reduce their debts. Every one of the Euro bailouts since 2010 has left the debtor nations with more debt. None of the Euro periphery nations will return to prosperity until they have escaped from Europe’s recessionary mechanism.
Yet instead of recognising any of this, UK ministers seem to have simply drifted along with established Treasury thinking, trotting out the same old clichés; dangers of instability, a zillion billion jobs at stake, blah blah blah.
Fourteen months ago, I met senior Treasury officials and discussed all this. They seemed certain that the Euro crisis would be resolved by now. They – and the minister in the room - scoffed at my suggestion that instead of bailout-and-borrow, we ought to encourage an orderly debt default and decoupling from the Euro.
Sooner or later, ministers will no doubt begin to let it be known, via pet pundits perhaps, that – nudge, nudge – they were never actually keen on all those efforts to bailout the Euro. Yet somehow they were never doubtful enough to refuse to keep putting more of our money on the table.
Ministers
only ever retreated from providing more support for more bailout-and-borrow under direct pressure from the Commons. Even then, they merrily went ahead and doubled our contribution to Euro bailouts via the IMF.
From policy on the Eurozone to our non-existent growth strategy, ministers seem content to merely drift along with established Treasury thinking. It is beginning to look as if too little Treasury thinking has changed since Gordon Brown was in charge ....
Posted on 22 January 2012 by Douglas Carswell
Power to the People. If not now, when?
I've back-to-back Advice Surgeries and meetings in the constituency today, so I'm going to lazily link to this article by Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail for my daily post.
It gives you an insight on the evidence Zac Goldsmith and I gave to a Commons committee yesterday about the government's promise to pass power directly to the people.
If the people control Parliament, Parliament might start to control the government. Then we might not perhaps have quite so many public policy disasters such as this and this and this .....
Posted on 20 January 2012 by Douglas Carswell
We need Real Recall - not this bogus Bill
Alongside Zac Goldsmith, I spent this morning in front of a Commons select committee explaining why we need a recall mechanism to allow local voters to sack lazy or wayward MPs.
The government has come forward with what it calls a recall proposal. Yet their proposal manages to get it 180 degrees the wrong way round.
Real recall ought to make MPs accountable to the people with two simple stages:
1. The Petition – Before anyone is recalled, 20 percent of local people would have to petition the local returning officer to conduct a recall ballot - AND, the majority of local voters would then have to vote to approve the MP's recall.
2. The Recall ballot - Only if over half of those whom an MP is supposed to serve voted "yes" to the question "Should your MP be recalled?", would there then be a by election (or perhaps one might call it the bye bye election?).
Real recall puts the trigger in the hands of the majority of constituents. Fearful of vexatious attempts to unseat MPs, the government's draft proposals puts the trigger mechanism in the hands of a huddle of SW1 insiders.
Under the government’s proposals, an MP could be turfed out of office by a committee of grandees in Westminster, with the approval of a mere one in ten constituents.
What makes anyone think that the Westminster insiders are incapable of being vexatious? Do you think George Galloway or Ken Livingstone would have always been given a fair hearing? What about John Wilkes?
Why not trust a panel of independent experts - known as the local electorate - instead, to decide by a majority verdict what is vexatious and what is legitimate concern?
Rather than making politicians outwardly accountable, the government’s proposals will hand the Westminster establishment the power to oust MPs that might well meet the approval of the voters – but fall foul of the SW1 club. Nor am I convinced that Westminster grandees would necessarily give an MP guilt of a minor infringement a fair hearing in the middle of a media fire storm.
Real recall would mean that the people would once again control Parliament. That would ensure that Parliament once again began to control the government.
And guess who doesn't want that to happen ....
Posted on 19 January 2012 by Douglas Carswell