European Union

Israel has accused Iran of lying when it signed the nuclear agreement and of secretly keeping research findings on building a nuclear bomb. Prime Minister Netanyahu has presented what he claims are secret service documents to this effect. Commentators are unconvinced and ask what the Israeli leader hopes to achieve with his revelations.

The Basque separatist organisation Eta has announced its full dissolution. During the almost 60 years of its struggle against the Spanish central government around 850 people were killed. In the view of commentators, however, the violent and ideological struggle continues.

On Tuesday 15 May, the European Commission and the European External Action Service will present their Action Plan on Military Mobility to the Subcommittee of Security and Defence. Facilitating the movement of troops across the continent is a vital for Europe's defence and Members will discuss the measures proposed such as the development of common military requirements and the infrastructure policies that will have to be implemented.
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Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

will take place on 15 May, 9:00-12:30 and 14:30-18:00 in Brussels.

Organisations or interest groups who wish to apply for access to the European Parliament will find the relevant information below.

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watch the meeting live
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Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

I’m being a bit of a dog with a bone on this one, mainly because no one else seems terribly interested in it.

As I’ve discussed before (here and here), the transition phase of withdrawal from the EU has been taken as a given. All parties were happy to sign up to the March text, it’s all highlighted in green, so job’s all done.

But as I discuss in the infographics below, there are lots of reasons why the transition period might not be long enough, plus various other reasons why extending it might not be an option.

In short, we might simply have replaced a cliff-edge in March 2019 with one at the end of December 2020.

So, some visuals for you, but not one on the consequences of falling off that new cliff-edge, because that’s essentially the same as all the stuff you’ve read about for ‘no-deal’ outcomes to Art.50 (like this).

Thanks to all my colleagues online who’ve helped shape these: any errors are mine.

 

The post Extending Transition appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

OTP Bank and OTP Faktoring
Environment and consumers
According to Advocate General Tanchev, a Member State legislative response to a ruling of the Court of Justice concerning the unfairness of contractual terms for lack of clarity is judicially reviewable

The Danish government published its long awaited energy plan for 2030 on 30th April. The plan reflects the government’s green realism (see previous blog post), where ‘more environment for less money’ translate into spending and tax cuts for the energy sector.

The plan aims to reduce energy taxes and charges, strengthen market regulations, support Danish energy technology export, and increase energy saving thereby achieve 50 per cent renewable energies in 2030 and a low carbon economy in 2050. There is no detailed strategy for how to achieve a low carbon economy and green transition in all areas of society, such as electrification of transport. The silo thinking is problematic from a climate perspective where everything is connected.

According to  the 2018 Energy Projection published by the Energy Agency in March 2018, Denmark will not achieve its 50 percent renewable energy target in 2030 instead it will only reach 39.8 per cent. Moreover, the report predicts an increase in energy consumption after 2020 due to new data centres, electrification of heating and transport, just as the energy companies’ energy efficiency scheme ends in 2021. According to the new energy plan, the government main energy investments is a new offshore Wind Park (2024-2027). Yet several green organisations (e.g. Ecological Council, Concito, Skovforeningen) argue this is not sufficient to ensure Denmark meet its long term climate and energy targets. It is, therefore, necessary with more and earlier investment in renewable energies, energy efficiency and emissions cuts for Denmark to achieve its climate goal in 2030.

Furthermore, the energy plan does not explain how the electrification of transport will influence the Danish energy system. The government’s transport policy favours private transport i.e. car ownership and investment in road infrastructure. Without any incentives, transport users are likely to continue to choose fossil fuel cars instead of public transport or electric/ hybrid cars. Indeed, the 2018 Energy projection states that fossil fuels in transport will fall from 95 per cent in 2017 to 93 per cent in 2030. Compared to other countries, such as Norway, the Danish government is not considering banning fossil fuel cars although transport is one of the main sources of pollution, especially air pollution in cities. Clearly, Denmark will not reach its 50 percent renewable energy or emissions reductions targets in 2030 without integrating transport into the energy plan.

One of the government’s central goals is to reduce taxes and charges for all areas of society. Indeed the energy plan wants to reduce energy taxes and charges for both private and corporate energy users, which is supported by several energy organisations (e.g.  Danish Energy, the Danish Chamber of Commerce and Danish Wind Industry Association), who want cheaper electricity. The energy plan wants to cut red tape to allow better use of surplus energy from especially smaller companies, this is clearly positive step towards better use of resources and the energy plan focuses on creating better business environments for business and industry. Moreover, the green think tank Concito acknowledges that reducing energy taxes can be positive, if these create a tipping point for renewable energies, nevertheless this is not the case in the energy plan. Instead, a general reduction in energy prices might lead to increased energy demand thereby jeopardising Denmark’s climate commitment vis-a-vis energy efficiency and reduction in emissions.

Overall, the energy plan is a clear example of green realism, which believes in bottom-up market driven innovation to energy transition. Crucially, the energy plan is likely to miss both the 2030 and 2050 climate targets. The energy measures are not ambitious enough for Denmark to achieve its climate goals, especially as the plan predominately focuses on renewable energies instead of incorporating energy efficiency targets and emission reduction targets for 2030 currently debated at EU level, where Denmark is not part of the climate coalition in the Council (Euractiv and Altinget). Significantly, the energy plan does not take into account all the different elements of green energy transition, e.g. transport decarbonisation. Indeed silo thinking does not lead to energy transition and a low carbon economy. Finally, the government plans to publish separate plans for transport and climate in the autumn, which begs the question of whether the government will coordinate the policy aims for these three policies to ensure Denmark will achieve its climate goals.

The post The Danish government’s new energy plan: green realism & silo thinking appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Today in Parliament, Prime Minister Theresa May said:

“We are committed to delivering on our commitment to having no hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, and that we have as frictionless trade as possible with the European Union.”

She added:

“There are a number of ways that can be delivered.”

The best way to deliver ‘as frictionless trade as possible’ and ‘no hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland’ is to have what we’ve already got: full membership of the EU

Nothing comes even close to being as good as that.

Ever since the EU referendum, Mrs May has been telling Parliament that she aims to get the benefits of EU membership without being a member. It’s nonsense of course.

For example, on 26 October 2016, Mrs May told Parliament she wanted “the best possible arrangement for trade” with the European Union.

Which is exactly what we have now.

Two months later, Brexit Secretary, David Davis, also told Parliament that he wants to get “the best possible access for goods and services to the European market.”

Which again, is exactly what we have now.

Last year Mr Davis also told Parliament that he had “come up with” the idea of a comprehensive trade and customs agreement with the EU “that will deliver the exact same benefits as we have.”

Of course, he has not found a way to achieve that. But this all begs the question: if EU benefits are so important to Britain (and they are) why on earth are we leaving?

In America they have a saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. So why does Mrs May want to fix something that isn’t broken?

She says it’s because that’s what the British people want. Well, that’s a moot point.

Yes, 17 million people voted for Britain to leave the EU – but that’s 17 million out of a UK population of 65 million.

And two of the four countries that comprise our Union of the United Kingdom – Scotland and Northern Ireland – don’t want Britain to leave the European Union at all.

What’s strange is that Mrs May also didn’t want Britain to leave the EU.

In a keynote speech during the Referendum campaign, she said:

“I believe it is clearly in our national interest to remain a member of the European Union.”

During a private and secretly recorded meeting with Goldman Sachs one month before the Referendum, Mrs May warned that companies would leave the UK if the country voted for Brexit.

What’s more strange is that, including herself, 70% of Mrs May’s current Cabinet voted to Remain in the EU. All of them said during the Referendum that leaving the EU would be bad for Britain.

So now they’re going to take Britain on a path that they all claimed would be against the interests of the country.

Mrs May now says we’re leaving so that Britain can trade with the rest of the world. But we already do that now. The EU doesn’t stop us.

On the contrary, Germany exports much more than Britain across the world, without any complaints that the EU is holding them back. Indeed, the EU was set up to facilitate better trade across the world.

Mrs May now says we have to leave the EU, its Single Market and Customs Union, so that Britain can be free to negotiate its own trade agreements with other countries.

Precisely for what advantage?

Currently the UK enjoys trade agreements with over 60 countries across the world, which we helped to negotiate as a leading member of the EU.

Since the EU is the world’s biggest free trade bloc, and the world’s biggest exporter, and biggest importer, of manufactured goods and services, it has the muscle and size to negotiate the best trade agreements with other countries.

By contrast, the UK, on its own and as a much smaller trader, is unlikely to get trade agreements anywhere near as good as the ones we have now, let alone any better.

On leaving the EU in March next year, the UK will have to tear up those 60+ EU trade agreements and negotiate them all over again from scratch. It will take years.

And for what?

Just so the name ‘UK’ is on the front of those trade agreements, instead of the name ‘EU’?

Big deal.

Does any of this make any sense?

No. It doesn’t. The EU is the world’s largest free trade area. As a member, we receive huge benefits worth enormously more than the net annual membership fee of £7.1 billion a year.

As a member, we enjoy free, frictionless trade with our biggest trading partner by far, right on our doorstep, where almost 50% of our exports go to and over 50% of our imports come from. Nowhere else in the world comes close to that.

The UK government is desperate to continue to enjoy similar membership benefits of frictionless trade with the EU after we have ended our membership, because they know that our economy’s survival depends on it.

But the UK government has said it wants to continue to enjoy membership benefits as an ex-member, without being part of the EU Single Market or customs union, without agreeing to the rules of the EU and its market, without being subject to the European Court of Justice to oversee those rules, and without paying anything to the EU for access.

It’s not going to happen. Mrs May knows this.

Before the referendum she said boldly and strongly, “It is not clear why other EU member states would give Britain a better deal than they themselves enjoy.”

Yet that’s exactly what Mrs May now wants. She says she aims to achieve a new trade agreement with the EU that’s unique to us, that no other country in the world has ever achieved.

Of course, it’s not going to happen.

What’s the point of a club if you are going to allow non-members to enjoy the same or better benefits as members? What club allows that?

So here’s the bottom line:

 Britain needs frictionless trade with the EU.

We need free movement of goods, services, capital and people for our country not just to survive, but to thrive.

For the sake of peace, we need an entirely open border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.

To achieve this, we need to continue with the status quo: the arrangement we have now.

Has this sunk in yet?

We’re leaving all the benefits of the EU, only to desperately try and get back as many of those benefits as we can after we’ve left.

This is complete and utter madness. It will be much better to just keep the current arrangement. It will be cheaper, and we will all be better off.

Sometimes the truth hurts, but it’s time we faced up to it before it’s too late.

Brexit makes no sense.

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At the European Parliament in Brussels I interviewed LibDem MEP, Catherine Bearder, who gave a positive message: We can stop Brexit.

“Absolutely it can be stopped,” she said, “and I think that’s the message that I would like to get out.”

The LibDem MEP added, “It has to be done democratically.”

Ms Bearder said that voters need to be told that, ‘This is not a done deal, this is your choice. Is this the deal you thought you were going to get? You can change your mind if you want to.’

“Lots of people do change their minds,” said Ms Bearder. “Even Mrs May has changed her mind.”

Ms Bearder, who has been an MEP for almost ten years, has promoted a hashtag, #GiveUsASayMrsMay.

Ms Bearder told me:

“My message is that Brexit is not inevitable.”

“We can stop this, but we need the voices to come from the streets. We need people to be saying: ‘This is not what we voted for.’”

Please share this 7-minute video. Polls show that most of the country now thinks that Brexit is a mistake, but that it’s too late to stop it.

But as Ms Bearder says, Brexit can be stopped. “We need to demand a vote on the final deal,” she said.

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'We can stop Brexit' – Catherine Bearder, MEP

→ Give us a say, Mrs May – Please shareVIDEO: ‘WE CAN STOP BREXIT’ – CATHERINE BEARDER, MEPAt the European Parliament this month, Reasons2Remain founder, Jon Danzig, interviewed Catherine Bearder MEP, who gave a positive message: We can stop Brexit.“Absolutely it can be stopped,” she said, “and I think that’s the message that I would like to get out.”The LibDem MEP added, “It has to be done democratically.”Ms Bearder said that voters need to be told that, ‘This is not a done deal, this is your choice. Is this the deal you thought you were going to get? You can change your mind if you want to.’“Lots of people do change their minds,” said Ms Bearder. “Even Mrs May has changed her mind.”Ms Bearder, who has been an MEP for almost ten years, has promoted a hashtag, #GiveUsASayMrsMay. “My message is that Brexit is not inevitable,” Ms Bearder told Jon Danzig. “We can stop this, but we need the voices to come from the streets. We need people to be saying: ‘This is not what we voted for.’”Please share this 7-minute video as widely as possible. Polls show that most of the country now thinks that Brexit is a mistake, but that it’s too late to stop it.But as Mrs Bearder says, Brexit can be stopped. “We need to demand a vote on the final deal,” she said.• This video is now on the Reasons2Remain YouTube channel. Please share widely: youtu.be/lfYrwxl86Vw• Please re-Tweet:twitter.com/Reasons2Remain/status/990923564948901888********************************************► Watch Jon Danzig's video on YouTube: 'Can Britain Stop Brexit?' Go to CanBritainStopBrexit.com********************************************• To follow and support Reasons2Remain just ‘like’ the page, and please invite all your friends to like the page. Instructions to ensure you get notifications of all our stories:1. Click on the ‘Following’ button under the Reasons2Remain banner2. Change the ‘Default’ setting by clicking ‘See first’.********************************************• Please rate Reasons2Remain out of 5 stars. Here's the link: facebook.com/Reasons2Remain/reviews/********************************************• Follow Reasons2Remain on Twitter: twitter.com/reasons2remain and Instagram: instagram.com/reasons2remain/********************************************• Explore our unique Reasons2Remain gallery of over 1,000 graphics and articles: reasons2remain.co.uk********************************************• Reasons2Remain is an entirely unfunded community campaign, unaffiliated with any other group or political party, and is run entirely by volunteers. If you'd like to help, please send us a private message.********************************************• © Reasons2Remain 2018. All our articles and graphics are the copyright of Reasons2Remain. We only allow sharing using the Facebook share button. Any other use requires our advance permission in writing.#STOPBREXIT #EXITBREXIT #PEOPLESVOTE

Posted by Reasons2Remain on Monday, 30 April 2018

The post ‘We can stop Brexit’ – Catherine Bearder, MEP appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

K.
Citizenship of the Union
The need for a restriction on the freedom of movement and residence of an EU citizen, or a family member of an EU citizen, suspected of having, in the past, participated in war crimes must be assessed on a case-by-case basis

  Last night Theresa May’s Tory (aka UKIP2) government suffered a major defeat in the House of Lords.

By a large majority, the Lords agreed to an amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill to give MPs the power to stop the UK from leaving without a deal, or to make Theresa May return to negotiations if the deal is considered not good enough.

Supporters of the amendment said that Parliament, and not ministers, must “determine the future of the country”.

Government ministers have expressed anger at the Lords amendment, calling it a betrayal of ‘the people’s will’. Mrs May is now trying to persuade MPs to strike out the change.

But wasn’t one of the main points of the Brexit campaign to give our Parliament in Westminster ‘more sovereignty’?

Isn’t it the job of our Parliament to consider, in great detail, all decisions affecting the future of our country, and to hold the executive to account?

When making a decision, our Parliament has many debates, and multiple votes, over a period of time, often many months, and our Parliamentarians can reconsider, amend or reverse the decision at any stage of the process.

But in the referendum us, ‘the people’, only had one vote, on one day, on a simplistic binary choice, without any chance to reconsider, amend or reverse our decision, even though voting took place almost two years ago.

What sort of democratic process is that?

Furthermore, the referendum was seriously flawed. Here’s why:

Many people directly affected by the outcome of the referendum were denied a vote.

The referendum was, by Act of Parliament, advisory only and not binding, but a minority was allowed to ‘win’. (Yes, a minority: 17 million people voting for Leave is not a majority in a country with 46.5 million registered voters).

The margin between Leave and Remain was wafer thin – less than 4%, so well within the margin of error.

Two of the four countries of our Union of the United Kingdom did not want Brexit, thus literally splitting the UK in half.

There was no manifesto, blueprint or plan presented for Brexit (and there still isn’t). So, the 17 million who voted for Brexit didn’t all vote for the same Brexit.

No one could have given ‘informed consent’ for Brexit, because none of us were fully informed about the meaning of Brexit.

Some Leave voters thought we’d be staying in the Single Market after Brexit. (Yes, that’s what some Leave campaigners told us).

Some thought we’d be staying in the EU Customs Union, or at least ‘a’ customs union after Brexit. (Yes, that’s what some Leave campaigners told us).

Many voted for Brexit because they believed the lies of the Leave campaign (more money for the NHS; getting our country back; more sovereignty; control of borders; the EU is undemocratic; Turkey is joining soon.. all misleading and false).

Some voted for Brexit because they never imagined ‘Remain’ would lose, and so used the ballot box as a protest vote against Cameron’s Tory government.

There were many reasons people voted for Leave, but no single reason, and certainly no defined agreement on what Brexit would mean or entail. (We still don’t know).

So, frankly, it’s disingenuous to claim that ‘Brexit is the will of the people’. By no stretch of the imagination can Brexit be described as ‘the people’s will.’

And in any event, even if Brexit was ‘the will of the people’ on one day in June 2016, that’s almost two years ago, and multiple polls have since shown that the will of the people is not now in favour of Brexit.

But this is the problem of referendums. They are not democratic, and they are a lousy way to make a decision.

So far, this has not been a problem in the few referendums we’ve had in the UK, because referendum results have not produced controversial results.

But, for the first time in a UK referendum, voters on 23 June 2016 rejected the status quo, the advice of the government, and the consensus of Parliament.

The Brexit vote pitched ‘direct democracy’ against ‘Parliamentary democracy’, with potentially disastrous consequences.

And therein lies the problem now facing and fissuring the United Kingdom.

Direct democracy (referendums) and representative Parliamentary democracy can be dangerously incompatible.

They cannot co-exist without the potential of one damaging or even destroying the other.

The few referendums that Britain has held in recent decades haven’t caused such major problems because, until now, referendums were generally relied upon to return a result in accordance with the status quo and/or the will of Parliament.

Put simply, voters tended to dislike change.

But that ‘rule of thumb’ was dramatically and perilously turned around when Leave won. For the first time, ‘the people’ voted against the overwhelming will of Parliament.

So which ‘will’ has superior sovereignty: Parliament, or ‘the people’? The conflict has the potential to destroy the very core of our democracy.

This is a problem that has never happened before in Britain, but it should have been anticipated. After all, referendums are a relatively new phenomenon in our country, and many sage British politicians were, for good reasons, completely against them.

Labour prime minister, Clement Atlee, categorically stated that referendums “are just not British.”

He said:

“I could not consent to the introduction into our national life of a device so alien to all our traditions as the referendum which has only too often been the instrument of Nazism and fascism.”

Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was also adamantly opposed to referendums. She said that they were the “device of dictators and demagogues”.

And it’s true: Hitler, Mussolini and Napoleon III all used referendums to legitimise decisions they had made. They could go to the populace and ask them any question, and then interpret the simplistic one-word answer almost any way they wanted.

(Which is pretty much what our Prime Minister, Theresa May, and her Brexit ministers, are attempting to do.)

Of course, former Prime Minster David Cameron knew the dangers of referendums all along. But he never anticipated losing.

After all, he felt confident after previously ‘winning’ two major referendums in a row: a referendum to change the voting system (2011; answer no) and a referendum giving independence to Scotland (2014, answer no).

Since Mr Cameron was so convinced that there was almost no chance of losing the EU referendum, a potential clash between the ‘will of the people’ and the ‘will of Parliament’ was not going to occur.

How wrong he was.

What’s worse is that there was no need for a referendum at all. Mr Cameron only decided to hold one to resolve an internal dispute in the Tory party, rather than for the national interest.

Euroscepticism, and the call for another EU referendum after the one in 1975, had always been on the minority fringes of the main political parties, especially as around two-thirds of both houses of our Parliament strongly supported EU membership.

Mr Cameron not only gambled with our country’s future by holding an unnecessary referendum, but he also put at grave risk the foundations and established mechanisms of our traditional method of democracy.

Following the referendum result, MPs and members of the House of Lords felt stymied. The vast majority of their heads and hearts told them that Britain’s best interests are served by remaining in the EU, and that Brexit is likely to cause the country severe economic hardship and isolation.

After all, that’s what the vast majority of them told us during the referendum campaign.

Instead of the referendum giving our Parliament more sovereignty – one of the many disingenuous promises of the Leave campaign – the referendum result severely weakened and demeaned Parliamentary sovereignty and the function of MPs.

Even though it was decided by Parliament that the referendum should be advisory only and not legally binding, politicians have felt agonisingly compelled to obey the Brexit result.

Were it not for the referendum, by a huge majority, Parliamentarians would have strongly and unequivocally voted against Britain leaving the EU.

Instead of empowering Parliamentarians, the referendum result has turned them into puppets of ‘the will of the people’.

Unlike decisions of Parliament, which can be fully considered, amended, changed and reversed, the simplistic one-word answer of the referendum now appears to be cast in stone.

This is all a hopeless mess. The so-called ‘will of the people’ has trumped and thwarted Parliament’s sovereignty, even though that ‘will’ was based on a minority of registered voters, who voted for something that was not clearly defined or understood.

(Indeed, the promises and claims made about Brexit were based on shocking lies).

The simple fact is that referenda are only benign when they agree with the will of Parliament. But when a referendum returns a result that’s entirely the opposite to the will of Parliament, our democracy, and our country, are in danger of tearing themselves apart.

Prime Minister Theresa May must have realised this. She considered it necessary to resolve the very narrow margin for Leave in the referendum by calling a snap general election last year, with the goal of winning a huge majority to give her an unquestionable mandate to go ahead with Brexit.

But instead, the country rejected her plans, leaving her with no majority at all.

That should be the cue for Parliament to regain its confidence and to take back sovereignty that it imagined, falsely, had been removed from it by the advisory referendum of 2016.

We now need a return to fully fledged, representative Parliamentary democracy, that has served this country well for hundreds of years.

We now need Parliament to act in the best interests of the entire United Kingdom; not just the 17 million who voted for Leave, but for all the people of our country: the 65 million who live here, and who our Parliamentarians are supposed to represent, and protect. • Photo of the Houses of Parliament by Diliff (Own work) [CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

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Speech by President Donald Tusk at ceremony of the award of the Polonicus 2018 prize in Aachen, Germany.

At the end of his tour in the Western Balkans region, President Tusk participated in the Brdo-Brijuni process Leaders' meeting held in Skopje.

Weekly schedule of President Donald Tusk 28 April-6 May 2018

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The Libya Quartet brings together the League of Arab States, the African Union, the United Nations and the European Union. The aim is to support UN mediation and regional efforts and to accompany the process of the political transition in Libya, in full respect of Libyan ownership.

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