European Union

Campaigners for a free Internet suffered a defeat in the US on Thursday. The country's top media regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, voted to dismantle the strict rules that ensure that all data is treated equally on the web. Commentators look at what the abolishment of net neutrality means.

With the votes of the Social Democratic and liberal ruling parties the Romanian House of Deputies has approved a controversial judicial reform. The EU has criticised the amendments for endangering the independence of the judges and giving corrupt parliamentarians immunity from prosecution. The vote in the Senate is scheduled for next week. Romania's media are already incensed.

The British parliament has secured the right to have a say on the Brexit deal. On Wednesday a majority of MPs voted in favour of an amendment to the EU withdrawal bill to this effect - against the government's will. Is this a bitter defeat for Prime Minister Theresa May, or is she secretly delighted?

The victory over the so-called Islamic State’s territorial rule presents a chance for the Government of Iraq to rebuild its state institutions and re-assert its authority. In this transition, will the Iraqi leadership move past cycles of failure and address the structural problems that perpetuate state weakness and facilitate the emergence of groups like ISIS? To answer this question, this paper analyses the challenges of short-term stabilisation programming with longer-term governance reform at the local and national levels. It argues that, without establishing representative and responsive state institutions, the processes of reconciliation and integration will be unsuccessful. To conclude, this paper offers policy recommendations on how the EU can support the upcoming state-rebuilding process.
Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

My editorial today for the Reasons2Remain campaign: The Daily Mail this morning reported:

“Eleven Conservative MPs last night voted to give the Commons a ‘meaningful’ vote over any Brexit agreement with the EU, despite government pleas to let ministers retain control.”

The Daily Mail accused those 11 Tory MPs of treachery.

We say they upheld and restored Parliamentary sovereignty at last. 

The Daily Mail called them “11 self-consumed malcontents.”

We say they are 11 brave democrats who did what all MPs should do: recognise that it’s Parliament, not the government, that should have the final say on what happens to Britain.

The Daily Mail says that those MPs who voted for Parliament to have a real say on the Brexit deal betrayed “17.4 million Brexit voters.”

We say Brexit was sold to those voters on the promise that Britain would have more Parliamentary sovereignty, not that it would be so weakened as to make the role of Westminster meaningless.

The 11 Tory MPs who voted against their government last night were Dominic Grieve, Anna Soubry, Ken Clarke, Nicky Morgan, Antoinette Sandbach, Stephen Hammond, Heidi Allen, Bob Neil, Sarah Wollaston, Jonathan Djanogly and Sir Oliver Heald.

They voted with Labour, the LibDems, SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party in favour of an amendment to ensure that Parliament takes back some control of Brexit.

The Daily Mail pictures them all on their front page today as if they are criminals and asks, ‘Proud of yourselves?’

We are proud of them, Mr Paul Dacre (editor of the Daily Mail).

But we don’t think you have anything to be proud about.

What kind of doublespeak is it on your front page today that attempts to conflate patriotism with dictatorship?

Since when was denying MPs a vote on something as seismic as Brexit anything to do with democracy or taking back control.

Dominic Grieve’s ‘Amendment 7’ was a perfectly rational Parliamentary proposal to ensure democratic checks and balances against an executive that looks increasingly dictatorial.

By just a majority of four votes, MPs last night backed Mr Grieve’s amendment to ensure that Parliament, and not government ministers, must approve the final Brexit deal before it can go ahead.

If the amendment was lost last night, our headline this morning would have been, ‘Death of Parliament’. We had planned to picture a hearse with the Houses of Parliament in the back.

Fortunately, 11 Tory MPs put their country before their party to prove that Parliamentary democracy is alive and kicking (just) and that it can, and must, assert its authority over the executive when it is in the best interests of us, the people.

Thank you.

Now you have found your voice again, Parliament, please use it more and more to protect the interests of the United Kingdom. 

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AFET hosted Albania's Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Ditmir Bushati to discuss the country's EU-related reforms. With the date of the future opening of the EU accession talks looming large, Members examined Albania’s efforts to overhaul judiciary, tackle corruption and drug trade, improve internal political dialogue and ensure good neighbourly relations.
Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

The next AFET meeting is scheduled to take place as follows:

Monday, 22 January 2018, 15:00-18:30, room JAN 2Q2
Tuesday, 23 January 2018, 09:00-12:30 and 14:30-18:30, room JAN 2Q2

Further information
Information for visitors
Draft agendas
Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Length of video : 47'
You may manually download this video in WMV (379Mb) format

Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

As we await the verdict of tomorrow’s European Council on the move to Phase 2, it’s perhaps useful to reflect on the decision-making style of Theresa May.

Last night provided a vivid illustration of this, with the amendment to the Withdrawal Bill, which provides Parliament with a vote on the final deal. We might discuss on another occasion how meaningful this is as a policy, given the likely political and time constraints, but its value for present purposes lies in the way it came about.

In essence, there are two ways you can make decisions: open or closed.

In an open model, you aim to build a consensus. That means reaching out to different voices and opinions, finding common ground. This makes it slower and more incremental, since you often have to work around specific concerns, but the pay-off is that you have a broader base for embedding the decision in the longer-term. As someone mentioned to me the other day, there’s a value in reaching across the aisle, if you know there’s a chance the other lot might be in power before too long.

The closed model is much more focused on power. You gather enough of it to overcome opposition at veto points (like votes) and you hoard it as much as possible. Because your supporting community is smaller, you can be more agile and are likely to make fewer compromises on the way, but without the inclusivity of the open method: it doesn’t matter if they don’t like, because they have to follow your decision, and they might come round in the end, in a realpolitik kind of way.

I’m putting May firmly in this latter camp, not just on Brexit, but throughout her political career. Perhaps it was a function of her long stint as Home Secretary – the Home Office has never been a place to promote inclusive policy-making – but it is clear that she does not care to share power any more than is necessary.

In the context of Brexit, we see this time and again. As Prime Minister, she has always kept the strategic planning to Number 10, gate-keeping through the (rare) speech and her slogans on the meaning of Brexit. The taking over of the final phases of Article 50 talks in recent weeks points to her desire not let Davis run loose. Her resistance to the High Court challenge from Miller and to Grieve’s amendment last night point to an unwillingness to open up domestic decision-making.

This is all quite understandable. The country faces a severe test of its abilities and intent, and May wants to have as much control as possible to pilot the very rough seas: her whole pitch to the party last summer was centred around her being the steady pair of hands, the calm leader in times of trouble. ‘Trust me’, she was saying, ‘but let me get on with it’.

But this all points to the fundamental weakness of the closed model: it’s brittle.

The point at which May lost control probably came with this year’s general election. It robbed her of her aura of determination and crystallised all those doubts that existed in the minds of others. The abruptness of that shift was all too visible, but it happens in almost every case of closed approaches: the signs are there around David Davis, especially after the fallout from Sunday’s interview with Andrew Marr (something that might still get much worse tomorrow).

Once broken, it’s very hard to repair the closed model, just as it’s hard to shift to an open model: May is temperamental not inclined to such a shift and others might mistrust her new-found openness.

Which leaves us with a question about what happens now.

For some, last night’s Parliamentary rebellion is the marker of a new, open model: Parliament will take the edges off the hardness and build on the latent consensus for a soft Brexit, maybe even ending up with full Single Market and Customs Union membership (rather than just ‘full alignment’). The absence of other credible leaders for the May-ist model might seem to point that way too.

But this risks over-determining last night. It remains far from clear that Labour is now solidly whipping for a particular outcome – as opposed to just making life uncomfortable for the Tories – or that Tory rebels have broad-enough common cause with the other parties.  Much feels as if it is still about opposing May, rather than a more positive project for Brexit.

Of course, negative projects can succeed – witness the EU referendum – but once beyond the thing you dislike, life becomes a lot more problematic – again, witness Brexit.

As long as the UK and British political debate remain stuck in debating why they don’t like things, they will find that – open or closed – they are much more likely to be the recipient than the instigator of meaningful political decisions.

The post On being open (or closed) appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Prime Minister, Theresa May, suffered a major defeat in the Commons tonight when MPs voted to curb government powers on Brexit – something she definitely didn’t want.

It’s the first time that government has been defeated on its main Brexit legislation.

MPs voted to back an amendment by the former attorney general, Tory MP backbencher, Dominic Grieve. His ‘Amendment 7’ won by by 309 votes to 305, a majority of just four.

The amendment means Parliament will have to approve the final Brexit deal before it can go ahead. However, the amendment does not give Parliament the power to stop Brexit.

The Independent reported this evening, ‘The setback is a major blow to Mrs May’s political authority, underlining how fragile her parliamentary majority is and also signalling that those who disagree with her Brexit plans are ready to cross a line in opposing their own leader.’

Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, called it a “humiliating” defeat for the Prime Minister. He said:

“This defeat is a humiliating loss of authority for the Government on the eve of the European Council meeting.

“Labour has made the case since the referendum for a meaningful vote in Parliament on the terms of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union.

“Theresa May has resisted democratic accountability. Her refusal to listen means she will now have to accept Parliament taking back control.”

Dominic Grieve said he was invoking the spirit of Winston Churchill to put “country before his party”.

Mr Grieve said he had grave concerns over the potential for Theresa May’s flagship Brexit legislation to become a “very worrying tool of executive power”.

His amendment required that any final Brexit deal has to be approved by a separate act of Parliament before it could be implemented.

Mr Grieve sought to change clause nine of the EU (Withdrawal) Bill, which provides the Government with the power to use secondary legislation to implement any Brexit deal.

That would require less scrutiny by MPs which clearly worried just enough Tory backbenchers to defeat their government.

Leave-supporting MPs including Dennis Skinner, Grahame Morris, Ronnie Campbell and John Mann all supported Mr Grieve’s amendment in order to inflict defeat on the government.

Writing for The Guardian, Jessica Elgot reported that one party whip described tonight’s loss for the government as ‘a game-changer for the hung parliament’.

The MP told her:

“It has broken the dam. It will be much, much easier to do it again. Rebelling once gives you a taste for it. The discipline has been broken and it shows actually that if you do risk it and rebel for something you believe in, you can make a difference.”

The Prime Minister is having to travel to Brussels tomorrow to meet her fellow EU leaders with her authority once again put into question.

Newspapers reported tonight that the government will now be under strong pressure to drop its goal to enshrine into law that the UK must leave the EU on 29 March 2019.

It is scheduled to be put to the vote next week, but after tonight’s defeat Theresa May could now conclude that it’s too much of a risk to lose that vote too.

Tonight, Parliament proved that it is alive and kicking – just.

We now need to see more evidence that Parliamentary representative democracy has more life in it, and is prepared to kick much more against the looming danger of the government imposing an undemocratic Brexit that the country never actually voted for.

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Petitions to Parliament calling for a second EU referendum have been rejected by both the Conservatives and Labour.

The biggest petition, which attracted 137,941 signatures, called for another referendum on the ‘final Brexit deal.’

The petition requested a new poll before March 2019 with three options on the ballot paper:

(1) To revoke Article 50, thereby keeping Britain in the EU
(2) To reject the UK-EU deal and leave the EU
(3) To accept the UK-EU deal and leave the EU

The petition was created by Londoner, Tom Holder, who stood for the Liberal Democrats in Castle Point, Essex, in this year’s general election.

He explained:

‘Regardless of whether individuals voted to remain or leave the EU in the June 2016 EU referendum, everyone should have a chance to decide their future based on the final agreement negotiated between the UK and EU.’

But the petitions were rejected. The government gave its standard response:

“On 23 June 2016 the British people voted to leave the European Union. The UK Government is clear that it is now its duty to implement the will of the people and so there will be no second referendum…

“There must be no attempts to remain inside the European Union, no attempts to rejoin it through the back door, and no second referendum. The country voted to leave the European Union, and it is the duty of the Government to make sure we do just that.”

The petitions calling for another referendum were debated in Westminster Hall on Monday.

Brexit minister Robin Walker said there would be no second referendum and Labour spokesman Paul Blomfield said he understood the “frustration” behind the petitions but ruled one out.

Lib Dem MPs, several Labour members and the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas supported another referendum on the final Brexit deal reached between the UK and the EU.

Said Labour’s Paul Flynn:

“Second thoughts are always superior to first thoughts.”

But this was rejected by Conservative MP, Martin Vickers, who said most people who signed the petitions wanted to change the result of the first referendum.

The SNP’s Peter Grant said he would not rule out another Brexit referendum at this stage but added that people had to “live by the results of their decisions”.

Of course, that’s how it works in our own lives, isn’t it?

If you take the wrong job, you can never resign. If you choose the wrong partner, you can never leave. If you go on the wrong journey, you can never turn back.

Yup. Parliament reflects exactly how things work in our own lives. Thank you.

But actually, no thanks.

Nobody gave an informed decision for the UK to leave the EU in last year’s referendum, because we were not adequately informed.

On the contrary, the country was misinformed, in a referendum that was profoundly flawed.

The Leave campaign had to rely entirely on lies, mistruths and false promises to win the referendum.

Furthermore, their win was only by the tiniest of margins.

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

And only a minority of registered voters voted for Leave – just 37% of the electorate.

That proportion would not even be sufficient to change the constitution of the Conservative Party, or UKIP.

It would not have been sufficient to allow Theresa May to hold a snap general on 8 June, because that required the permission of at least two-thirds of all MPs.

Nobody knew in last year’s referendum what Brexit meant, and we still don’t know.

But according to our political masters, you’re not allowed to change your minds. Oh no. You’re stuck with what you were told in last year’s referendum, even though what you were told was wrong.

Never mind that voters could not possibly have made the right decision based on the wrong information.

The electorate was wrongly told that £350m was sent every week to the EU and this could instead be used in the NHS; that Turkey was joining soon and we could do nothing about it; that the EU isn’t a democracy; that Britain has open borders and EU migrants could come here without any restrictions.

And there were many more lies besides.

Polticians say that the electorate has to live by the results of its decision because of course it’s the fault of voters that they believed the lies of politicians.

In other words, those politicians got away with it. They sold us a dud product. And now it’s too bad, you can’t question it or reject it or have any further thoughts about it.

Welcome to Britain’s brave new world, where politicians insist decisions can’t be undone.

Even though, it’s the primary function of democracy: to allow previous decisions to be undone, if that’s what voters want.

If Brexit is so good, politicians should not hesitate to give voters an opportunity to have another vote on the final Brexit deal, based this time on the facts that we didn’t have last year.

(Note: giving the electorate another referendum ‘based on the facts’, with an option to ‘exit from Brexit’, is the official policy of the Liberal Democrats).

• Related video: ‘Why the EU referendum was flawed’

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Is there a connection between the rise of right wing parties in Europe and America, and the devaluation of and the debasement of our languages?  Mike Ungersma thinks there may be a link

Words. They are stones shaped to the hand.
Fling them accurately. They are horses.
Bridle them; they’ll run away with you.

Caroline Fisher

“All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.  When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer”  It was April of 1946 and George Orwell was alarmed at the debasement of English.  “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,” he wrote in his still relevant essay, Politics and the English Language.  Three years later, in the futuristic novel 1984, he attempted to show how the very meanings of words can be turned upside down to support a maniacal and repressive police state.  In the essay he went on:

Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Later, in the same work, he adds: “I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.”

Is poetry possible after Auschwitz?

Orwell may have felt he lacked the expertise to link what he perceived to be a degrading of these three European languages to the rise of Nazism, Communism and Fascism, but scholars like the cultural historian George Steiner did not.  In a 1960 article for THE REPORTER, Steiner meticulously traces the connection between the rise of Hitler and the alarming and deliberate misuse of the German language:

Make of the words what Hitler and Goebbels and the hundred thousand Untersturmführer made: conveyors of terror and falsehood.  Something will happen to the words.  Something of the lies and sadism will settle in the marrow of the language . . . It will no longer perform quite as well as it used to, its two principal functions: the conveyance of humane order which we call law, and the communication of the quick of the human spirit which we call grace.

Are Orwell and Steiner – and many others – correct? Is there something special about ‘political speech’?  Do the words, the phrases, the repetition, even the rhythm of a politician addressing a crowd – or more likely today, the TV cameras – differ from the speech the rest of us use?  And why do we ridicule them for such speech?  Or accuse them of lying and avoiding the questions put to them?

At their recent joint news conference to announce a ‘breakthrough’ in their negotiations over ‘Brexit,’ the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, and the European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, employed the language we associate with virtually any modern politician.  Vague generalities, vague promises, few details, with much left unanswered and much more open to competing interpretations.

‘Bare ruin’d choirs’

Like a vicar in a Sunday sermon, May and Juncker were employing the vocabulary of aspiration: “We want the world to be different and better,” not what is, but what ought to be.  For them, politics is a process – a never-ending endeavour to create a better tomorrow.  Unlike the vicar who promises eternal life in exchange for an earthly commitment to sinless living, or damnation for ignoring God’s commandments, the politician can make no such bargain.  For him, there can be  no concrete goal, no identifiable end, no resolution beyond continuing and endless effort.  Like the vicar, the politician seeks to convince, not convert.

Religious homilies and political rhetoric have much in common, but the task of both – the vicar and the politician – has been made much more difficult, religion by the relentless march of science, and politics by the devaluation of language.  For religion, the issue seems decided – at least for Christianity.  Hundreds, thousands of churches today are bingo halls or deteriorating, empty shells, what Shakespeare may have had in mind in his sonnet that spoke of ‘bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.’ Church attendance has plummeted.  Those who identify with Christianity are a shrinking minority.  Sunday is just another day in the week, and even Christmas is robbed of its original meaning.

Just as the Renaissance and its successor, the Enlightenment, eroded the authority and foundation of Christianity, careless use of language may now be undermining politics and even democracy.

Walk into any British pub in the 50s, 60s or even as recently as the 1980s, and you found two permanent fixtures on the bar: a charity box for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and another apt to be labelled, ‘Fifty Pence for Each Swear Word.’  Keep up the flow of profanities, and the publican would admonish – “Gentlemen, there are ladies present.”

The RNLI box remains.  The ‘swear box’ and the landlord’s warning are long gone.

A volley of expletives

Nothing quite devalues a word more than its overuse.  The utter pervasiveness of profanity at every level of modern society has rendered words that were intended to shock useless.  What once was a scale of obscenities that could be employed with gradualness to reach a crescendo of emphasis is no longer available to any writer or speaker.  In every walk of life, profanity abounds – in film, music, theatre, social media, TV – and sadly – even in the school yard.

This one example of the debasement of language has yet to creep into political dialogue – but something else, far worse, has.  Restraint, logical argument, efforts to rationally persuade, all are increasingly replaced by rant, bombast and histrionics.  A new and frightening coarseness and total and intentional disregard for the truth has become the lingua franca of much political rhetoric.  When challenged, the politician responds with the charge of ‘fake news’.  The political right relishes the opportunity to use the tactics this trend offers, and it is having an appreciable effect.

Aided by an enabling technology, the internet and its social media, everyone wants to be heard and no one wants to listen.  Can’t be heard? Then just crank up the volume and shower the world with rage.  Will extreme language lead to extreme politics?  The evidence mounts in virtually every democratic country.

More worryingly, it might even lead to the perfected technique of Nazi Germany, where, as George Steiner notes:

Gradually, words lost their meaning and acquired nightmarish definitions.  Jude, Pole, Russe  came to mean two-legged lice, putrid vermin which good Aryans must squash, as a party manual said, “like roaches on a dirty wall.”  “Final solution,” endgültige Loüsng, came to signify the death of six million human beings in gas ovens.

Steiner concludes his article on post-war Germany, The Hollow Miracle, this way:

Everything forgets.  But not a language.  When it has been injected with falsehood, only the most drastic truth can cleanse it.

 

Mike Ungersma, Benicassim, Spain

December 2017

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