Hannan's calculated attack just an embarrassing stunt

There were controversial scenes in Parliament today as Conservative MEP, and Telegraph columnist, Dan Hannan stood up and compared his fellow EPP colleague, the Speaker of the Parliament, Hans Gert Pottering, to Hitler. Joseph Daul, the EPP leader, responded by telling the Parliament that he would propose to expel Hannan from the EPP.

This was a calculated attack by Hannan who will probably have already penned his Telegraph column which will accuse the Parliament of gagging him, and acting to ban any opposition to the EU.

Of course the reality is that anyone who stood up in any parliament would face opprobrium if they compared the Speaker to Hitler. Indeed, it was merely a petty stunt to support his claim that the European Parliament will not tolerate minority views.

This is simply not true. The European Parliament has a very wide range of political views and speaking time in debates is shared out proportionately among all the political groups - so all views are heard in the debates.

The incident which provoked his carefully choreographed outburst was a vote on an interpretation (by the relevant committee) of the rules of procedure of Parliament. The rules have not been changed, but it was confirmed that they already allow the President of Parliament to call an end to excessive use of points of order, procedural motions, etc where they are "manifestly intended to cause, and will result in, a prolonged and serious obstruction of the business of the House ."

This is a reserve power that has only once been used - by President Pat Cox some five years ago - but is there to protect Parliament, if necessary, from attempts to bring it to a complete halt. The President of the European Parliament anyway has far less drastic powers than the Speaker of the House of Commons

If Hannan and co are upset about that, it is probably because they are indeed intending to bring democratic debate to a halt, possibly next month when Parliament debates and votes on the Reform Treaty, which they oppose.

The interesting question now is whether Hannan will be disowned by his Tory colleagues in the EP (who, at committee stage, supported this interpretation of the Rule). It is certainly an embarrassment for the Conservative Party and it will be intriguing to see what David Cameron has to say about it. Probably nothing!

Better off out brigade are only lying to themselves

It was good to see the excellent points made in this week's Charlemagne column in this Economist refuting the arguments that Britain could enjoy the benefits of the EU without being a member of it.

Some Eurosceptics claim that the EU would continue to trade with us if we left it and re-joined the likes of Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein in the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). Indeed, they also spuriously claim that the EC was only ever supposed to be a free trade organisation, ignoring that Britain was in fact leaving a free trade agreement to join the EC which was always a political project as well as an economic one - a point which was spelt out in the White Paper by the Heath government which spoke of "an ever closer union among European peoples” not just of trade but "social progress".

Under its agreement with the EU, Norway, for example, has access to the internal market and most of the economic integration programmes. On a superficial level, this might to some to be an attractive prospect. But, as part of the terms of their agreement, each year, Norway transposes 400 EU internal market regulations into their national law, but have no say in shaping them. They have no Commissioners, no ministers in the Council to represent their national interests, no MEPs, no seat on the European Council and no civil servants in the EU institutions. They also have to make a hefty contribution to the EU budget, and receive no EU spending at all. Perhaps this is why Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg has publicly stated that he would like his country to become a member of the EU.

The members of the "better off out" brigade like to think of themselves as being true patriots, defending the British national interest. But the reality is that if Britain were to leave the EU, and re-negotiate access to the common market our position would be very weak. The remaining Member States would set stringent terms for access to the common market and a big contribution to the EU budget. The notion that they would offer a favourable deal to a country walking out and slamming the door behind them is pie in the sky. As The Economist rightly puts it: "anyone who dreams otherwise is lying not just to others, but also to themselves".

ECG programme on You and Yours

BBC Radio 4 finally got round to airing their piece on You and Yours about the European City Guide.

You can listen to it here for the next week.

Britain's not being "forced" into anything

We all know combatting climate change means switching to clean, renewable energy. We know that Britain doing this alone would be futile. Our country gets other EU countries to agree with us to work together to reduce C02 emissions by 20 per cent by the year 2020 - hailed at the time as a great example of British leadership in Europe.

How is this now rendered in ouur Eurosceptic media? Yesterday the Mail screamed that,"Brussels demands thousands more turbines across the UK", while the journalist, David Derbyshire, followed that article up with one today which stated, "Britain will be forced to generate 40 per cent of its electricity". Similarly the Telegraph went with "EU to set Britain 'ambitious' 40 per cent renewable energy target".

All of these imply that these targets are an unwelcome imposition by the EU instead of an agreed (and British-led) common endeavour.

Bonde embraces treaty

The leader of UKIP's political group in the European Parliament, Independence & Democracy, has moved an interesting amendment endorsing the Lisbon Treaty.

Jens-Peter Bonde, perhaps the most influential Eurosceptic in the Parliament, has tabled an amendment to my report on the Lisbon Treaty in the Constitutional Affairs Committee saying "endorses the Treaty and hopes that all Member States of the Union will be in a position to achieve its ratification by 1 January 2009, by involving their peoples, through referendums, in this fundamental stage in the European
intergration process."

Whether it's an amusing error or Bonde finally embracing the treaty, it is
one I doubt UKIP will be supporting!

The debate begins!

The first hurdle to the parliamentary ratification of the Lisbon Treaty was easily cleared in the House of Commons last night. Despite extravagant claims in some newspapers that up to 100 Labour MPs would defy the government by voting against the treaty, the bill's second reading was passed by 362 to 224, with 19 rebel Labour MPs, (a small group with a history of being Eurosceptic), voting with the Conservatives.

Let us be clear - leaving aside the hyperbole, the Lisbon Treaty amounts to a set of modest adjustments to the EU's institutional framework such as replacing the rotating six-month presidency with a full-time one on a 30 month term, reducing the number of Commissioners to 18, altering the voting system in the Council to be based on population and increasing the role of elected parliaments in EU law-making. But in terms of what the EU can and cannot do, it changes little. Unlike the Single European Act or Maastricht, there are no new subjects added to the EU's field of responsibility - put bluntly; the Lisbon Treaty is about reform, not new powers.

The Tories' opposition to this treaty is nakedly opportunistic and lacks credibility. As David Miliband put it: "Left of centre parties in all 27 European countries support the treaty; liberal parties in all 27 countries support the treaty; and Conservative parties in 26 countries support the treaty. Only in Britain do we have a major party opposed to the contents of the treaty."

Indeed, William Hague's speech for the Conservatives was long on jokes (no one can accuse Mr Hague of lacking a rhetorical flourish) but fell short on substance. At one point, he defended his party's opposition of the treaty on the grounds that it would "weaken democracy" by taking "more decision making away from democratic control". This argument simply does not stand up. In fact, the Lisbon Treaty, by making virtually all EU legislation subject to the prior scrutiny of national parliaments (with the power to object to a proposal) and to approval by both the Council of Ministers (representing national governments) and directly elected MEPs in the European Parliament. This would amount to a level of parliamentary scrutiny and democratic accountability that exists in no other international structure. To claim that this is a diminution of parliamentary democracy is no more than intellectual laziness.

My analogy that, just as the Lisbon Treaty is estimated to be 90% the same as the Constitutional Treaty, human beings and mice are 90% the same in terms of their DNA but the difference is pretty important, also made an appearance in Hansard, being quoted approvingly (and with acknowledgent) by the new Lib Dem Foreign Affairs spokesman Ed Davey, who also made a fine speech. It was also cheering to hear Nick Clegg's interview on Radio 4 this morning, during which he appeared to state that the Liberal Democrats would not support any Tory attempts to defeat the Government in demanding a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Although the Lib Dems have a reputation for saying different things to please different people, voting in favour of a treaty that they support rather than voting against it in a bid to embarrass and score points against the Government, would be an honourable approach.

Meetings in Malta

Am in Malta for a meeting of European Socialist parties. This month, Malta adopted the euro as its national currency, which most seem pleased about, apart from the currency exchange kiosks who will have far fewer opportunities to rip people off with extortionate exchange rates. (Good pub quiz quetion: which two Commonwealth countries joined the euro this year?)

Also interesting to see The Sunday Times of Malta, the entire front page of which is devoted to EU issues, not least the question of what action the EU might take to require Malta to cease the practice of indiscriminate and massive shooting of migrating birds as they fly over Malta from Europe to/from Africa. There is not much point in agreeing a Europe-wide system of protecting migratory birds (as we have in the EU birds directive) if one crucially-located member state does not respect it.

Also interesting was an article about Malta's MEPs being more well known and more popular than its MPs, and the European Parliament enjoying higher trust levels in opinion polls than the national parliament. I must remember to tell some of my Westminster colleagues!

Toynbee calls Cameron's bluff

Polly Toynbee's excellent analysis of the current state of play ahead of the Commons debate on the Lisbon Treaty is well worth a read here.

It makes various valid points not least about David Cameron's position, which, unsurprisingly, is more about striking a pose than actual intent.

Tories and UKIPs in cahoots once again

A month after bringing the tactics of football hooliganism to the European Parliament, four or five Tory Eurosceptics and UKIP have again worked in cahoots to undermine the work of the European Parliament.

They hit on two tactics. The first was to demand a full roll call votes (instead of a show of hands) on every paragraph and every amendment before the house. (Imagine that the House of Commons had a division on every paragraph of a bill). This slows down voting and costs £300 per vote (but they don't really care about taxpayers money).

The second was to use the procedure of "Explanation of Votes" which allows Members to speak after a vote, even if they have already spoken in the preceding debate, to explain why they voted in a particular way, for instance if they change their mind following the debate. Usually, only a few members avail themselves of this possibilty, and often do so in writing, which is also allowed. But yesterday, every UKIP member and several Tories asked to explain their vote verbally on every item on the agenda, whether or not they had already spoken in the debate. This would have held up the next scheduled debates for several hours, so the President proposed to take these explanations after those debates. This was agreed by the House, but UKIP and Dan Hannan protested that they were being "censored", that minority views were being crushed and that they had an absolute right to delay proceedings if they chose to do so.

Let one thing be clear, this is not about their freedom of expression. The European Parliament has a very wide range of poitical views and speaking time in debates is shared out proportionately among all the political groups - so all views will have been heard in the debates.

Most MEPs take their role as elected representatives seriously, working to deliver legislation and policy outcomes for their voters. In contrast, some Tories and UKIP are apparently only interested in disrupting the work of the elected Parliament either through behaving like football hooligans or procedural jiggery-pokery. The sheer contempt they show to democracy is breathtaking.

Brown highlights importance of Europe to business

A timely reminder from our Prime Minister at the Business for New Europeconference this morning about the importance of Europe to Britain:

"What is clear is that at this time of global economic uncertainty, we should not be throwing into question - as some would - the stability of our relationship with Europe and even our future membership of the European Union - risking trade, business and jobs. Indeed, I strongly believe that rather than retreating to the sidelines we must remain fully engaged in Europe so we can push forward the reforms that are essential for Europe’s, and Britain’s, economic future.

The EU is key to the success of business in the UK:

Europe accounts for nearly 60 per cent of our trade;

700,000 British companies have trading ties to Europe;

And 3.5 million British jobs depend upon Europe.

And even in the face of rapid globalisation, our trade with Europe continues to rise, meaning Europe is as important to the future of Britain than ever.

So European Union membership is good for Britain and British membership is good for Europe"

ECG programme postponed again!

A quick update on BBC Radio Four's You and Yours programme on the European City Guide and other directory scams.

The prorgamme has again be postponed and is now due to be aired, next Monday, January 21st, just after noon.

Rhubarb and chickens

After Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver’s investigations into chicken farming, there is much controversey about the goings on in some farm sheds but there has been no such concerns for the rhubarb growers in Yorkshire.

Grown in dark sheds, the first crop of Yorkshire forced rhubarb is currently being harvested and some of it will no doubt be in a crumble by this Sunday.

This time next year, Yorkshire rhubarb could well be afforded the same status as Parma ham and champagne if the European Commission decides to award it Protected Designation of Origin status.

As I have previously mentioned, Swaledale cheese currently has Yorkshire’s only PDO, something which will hopefully change during this year or the next, with Wensleydale cheese also seeking such status. In the meantime, best wishes to the farmers and hopefully this year’s rhubarb will be a better crop than last year’s, which suffered because of unusually warm temperatures.

Returning to the subject of chickens, the EU has now confirmed that it will be asking all member states to stick to their agreement to end the battery farming of chickens by 2012, despite calls from the industry for a delay.

The directive which will ban the use of caged chickens was formally adopted in 1999, giving the industry 12 years of preparation, so they cannot claim they have not been warned. As Channel Four’s series of programmes highlighted, for many people there are still serious ethical questions about the farming of some chickens but by 2012, the EU will have at least eradicated the very cruellest method, battery farming.

Mistaking your constituency for Alabama, USA

There has been much guffawing at the three West Midlands Tory MEPs, Philip Bradbourn, Philip Bushill-Matthews and Malcolm Harbour, after a blogger spotted that the picture on the front of their website, purporting to be of the largest city in their constituency, was actually of Birmingham Alabama, USA.

It was swiftly removed and replaced with a picture that anyone can find a few pictures down on a google image search, but you can see the original, and just how far it is from the UK's second city on Tom Watson's site.

Coincidentally there is a Leeds just a short drive from the Tory's newly expanded constituency and mistaking the two is easier than you might think. I'm sure the Tetley's Brewery is just round the corner from the station.

You and Yours programme postponed

The You and Yours programme which was due to go out just after noon today has been postponed while BBC Radio Four await a response from the European City Guide.

The rest of the programme will be recorded today but it will only go out after the European City Guide have been given a certain amount of time to respond.

I imagine it's unlikely the ECG will want to contribute but perhaps the fact it's Radio Four will make them think again. We shall see.

Radio Four to do show on ECG scam

The European City Guide and its family of deceptive mailing scams continues to produce a steady stream of correspondence from angry victims who are being pestered incessantly by the firms and their debt collection agencies.

Such is the omnipresence of the scam the media is starting to take real notice. At the end of last year I appeared on Radio York to talk about the scam and tomorrow I will be taking part in BBC Radio Four’s You and Yours programme which will lead on the scams.

It starts at 12.05 and if you miss it, it will be on the Listen Again facility for a week at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours/

Sun gives up on a referendum?

Another sign of the Eurosceptic anti-treaty campaign floundering: the Sun has apparently given up on its circulation-destroying obsession with a referendum on the EU.

Previously, its campaign for an EU referendum was flagged up throughout its website with the left-hand column of nearly every page linked to a dedicated site calling for a referendum. And while MRSA, Weird, Royals and even the US election primaries now enjoy the same treatment there is no sign of a link to their referendum page anywhere.

This of course follows the news that everytime the Sun led on its campaign for a referendum, droves of readers left the paper on the racks and relatively few people signed its petition.

Republican race sees new campaigning techniques

Novel campaigning techniques from America: ultra conservative presidential hopeful Huckerby urged supporters to prevent neighbours who intended backing anyone else from leaving home. "Shovel your snow into their driveway," the former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher suggested, "let the air out of their tyres, disconnect their battery cable". Not something that would cross the minds of British Conservatives. Surely?

Bill Cash is utterly deluded

On 12 December, I quoted Bill Cash's European Journal when it described how their anti-treaty campaign was running into the sands, failing either to persuade a majority of MPs or to ignite public opinion. The holiday break allowed me to read through a long diatribe by Bill Cash in the same issue.

Cash tries to rewrite European history and to place himself as the hero of some great struggle against the might of the European superstate. Initially, he and Enoch Powell stood alone in resisting this, were gradually joined by others, and now he stands on the verge of his views becoming Conservative party policy, resulting in an immediate swing of more than 8% to the Tories, which would lead to an election victory, a "fundamental renegotiation of the existing treaties" in an Intergovernmental Conference with "Britain in the lead… at which point many other Member States would back us" and which would "unravel the undemocratic European superstate". Wishful thinking is something we are all prone to, but this must surely take some beating!

Cash’s central theme is that the EU started as benevolent economic cooperation focusing on trade with no political implications and has somehow surreptitiously been hijacked by those intent on creating a political union leading to a superstate. He says that the original aim of the ECSC and the EEC "can be described in two words: FREE TRADE" (his capitals) - blissfully ignoring the fact that Britain actually left a free trade area (EFTA) to join the EEC, which has always been a political project, but has never aimed for the mythical "centralised superstate".

The Wilson government's application to join stated that "Europe is now faced with the opportunity of a great move forward in political unity and we can - and indeed we must - play our full part in it". Similarly, the Heath government White Paper on the British application stated that "if the political implications of joining the Europe are at present clearest in the economic field, it is because the Community is primarily concerned with economic policy. But it is inevitable that the scope of the Community's policies should broaden".

Cash is so obsessed with the EU that he must know that – but deliberately ignores it. Indeed, he claims that he was the one who "uncovered" that "significant political ambitions were afoot in the 1990s" when the drive for a single European market (which, he says, "came largely from the Thatcher government", which will be news to those who recall Thatcher trying to block the IGC which negotiated the single market timetable) was, according to his conspiracy theory, hijacked by the European Commission which "abused its powers, accorded under article 100a and similar provisions, and tried to interfere excessively". Never mind that the Commission could only propose and it was up to the elected governments in the Council to actually take the decisions.

He embellishes all this with ex cathedra comments to the effect that "it can never be right for a democratic country to abandon its own self-government", that the EU means we are ruled by people "we do not elect and cannot remove" (as if Ministers in the Council and MEPs were not elected and are non-removable!) and all, apparently, with the connivance with the Conservative party leadership for which "there can be no excuse for this failure of nerve, abandonment of principle and the gross incompetence which it reflected" (a comment apparently directed at successive Tory leaders right up to the present day).

Cash takes great pride in the backbench revolt that he organised in the 1990s, describing in detail how he tabled 240 amendments to the Maastricht Bill, set up the Great College Street group of Conservative rebels to organise their own whip and briefings against their own government, and how he attempted to repeat this again by tabling some 400 amendments to the second reading of the bill on the Constitutional Treaty (which, by the way, the Commons approved by a majority of 250). Given his history as a rebel, it is somewhat hypocritical to moan, as he does, about Ken Clarke, David Curry and Quentin Davies for supporting the Constitutional Treaty despite the Tory line on that treaty - a line that his the party leader, Michael Howard, did not even turn up to support.

But then, he is a bit full of himself, describing his defeated minority report of this year in the European Scrutiny committee as "totally undermining the government's arguments for the Reform Treaty". His own arguments are themselves undermined by his distortion of facts, such as when he rails against Britain's share of the votes falling from 11.5% to 8.4% without mentioning that this was the result of the enlargement of the EU to 27 members - and also without mentioning that the Reform Treaty would restore Britain's share of the votes to 12.2% by linking them to population size.

The article also reveals some of his other political positions: that the Human Rights Act should be repealed on the grounds that it is impossible to reconcile human rights with "policies to enforce public safety". He believes that the "vast quantities of British coal could continue to supply us with virtually limitless energy" making us completely free from imported energy (and, presumably, damn the ecological consequences). He worships Enoch Powell: "only much later did most people begin to see that Enoch Powell was right", he says - without, apparently, having as a result been censured by the Tory front bench in the way that the recently sacked Tory candidate Nigel Hastilow was. He even fondly recalls tabling an amendment with Enoch Powell at the time of the Single European Act back in 1986.

To sum up, this long and rambling article does much to reveal the state of mind of Mr Cash, his obsession with destroying the European Union by any means and his self-belief as the hero who will save Britain from having to cooperate with its neighbours.

Mail's dream 'manifesto' comes unstuck

After 25,000 people signed a Downing Street petition calling for Jeremy Clarkson to be made Prime Minister, the Daily Mail decided to draft a manifesto (or a list of all its hateful prejudices) on his behalf. No surprises then that this made the list (though only at number 17): "We fought the last war for our independence, and now we're under the heel of the unelected eurocrats of Brussels. Under my rule, Britain will withdraw from the EU, so we will no longer be governed by a bunch of sausage-eating Germans, French cheese-eating surrender monkeys and kebab-swallowing Greeks."

However the Mail must have missed Clarkson's article for the Sun last year, in which he outed himself as federalist when he wrote, "I also like the idea of a giant European state tempering American stupidity and Chinese economic might".

Hardly the talk of a rabid Eurosceptic!

Cameron still playing with fire over Europe

The new year has started but David Cameron is still equivocating over whether to pledge a post-ratification referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

This piece in the Daily Mail has been cleverly spun to make it seem as though a referendum will be promised – however, on closer inspection, Cameron parrots the same words as his Foreign Affairs spokesman William Hague did during a Commons debate a month ago, that an incoming Tory government "wouldn’t let matters rest there".

This ambiguous phrase is designed to appeal to the hardline Eurosceptics, whilst not quite committing the Tories to hold a retrospective referendum on a treaty already in force. As former Tory Chancellor Ken Clarke recently pointed out, the Tories had "always accepted treaty obligations accepted by previous governments" when they came to office. Former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind (by no means a Europhile) described demands for a post-ratification plebiscite as "silly and wrong".

By ratcheting up Eurosceptic fervour by implying that a post-ratification referendum would be held in the unlikely event of a Tory government being elected, Cameron is effectively digging a big hole and then throwing what remains of his credibility into it. A referendum on the Lisbon Treaty some years after its entry into force would, in effect, be a referendum on whether to renegotiate the terms of Britain's membership of the EU. The Tory hardliners are quite candid that they would view this as an opportunity to engineer British withdrawal. Cameron needs to stop playing with fire and state once and for all whether his Tory party would hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty even after it has been implemented.