Gerald Warner is on tip-top form this week.
From the comments section looks like the Tories did lose votes over Wee Willie Winkie on Newsnight after all.
Like on many issues it is more the politicians who fascinate me than the policies, and I am a Euro-agnostic after dabbling in federalism at university and going on a rather sickening goody-two-shoes Young European Federalists' junket to Vienna where in a role-playing game about the Council of Ministers, I was the only one playing the game as if I was a real Foreign Secretary - that is, dealing with what was best for my own country (I think I represented Timbuktoo) rather than what was best for the EU. Erm, isn't that what the Council of Ministers is supposed to do?! I got a (verbally) smacked botty as a result. Oh dear. I only went because the year before we had some rather off-the-cuff (and off-the-record) drinking games; and I still blame them for making me miss my connection to Dublin where my mother was living at the time on the way home for Christmas.
The only exam paper I got a First on at university however was a paper in which - for a "Democracy and Democratisation" module in my third year at the London School of Economics - I wrote that the EU does not represent pure democracy, but for trading and environmental policies, which cut across borders, it was often practically necessary to override pure democracy to enable agreement between nation states. This supra-national body meant that shibboleths of my lecturer/professor's course were dealt with (you couldn't do that course if you weren't prepared at some stage to stand up and denounce American politics as run by mere money - when it is hardly possible to run a nationwide campaign without sums that would put a British MP's claim to shame) but in a way which guaranteed that I had not only read the books on the course but had understood them properly as well.
I am voting Green for the European elections, perhaps as a result. Again I am agnostic to say the least on climate change. Fluctuations happen over such long periods that the average human lifespan will only register a gradual warming or gradual cooling, and although changes in the Earth's structure do affect human communities in large cataclysmic developments - just ask the Viking farmers of Greenland - in general terms the Earth was warmer at the time of Christ's birth than it is now, with thriving viticulture in the south of England under the Pax Romana. Green activists will always seize on natural modulation in the wind patterns to claim that this does not disprove climate change theories, it merely develops them. The winter this year, in Owlperson's opinion, was as normal British winters should be - cold, slightly snowy in rural areas, definable prolonged periods of near- or sub-zero temperatures. The twenty-year refrigerator effect brought deep snow to London and much of the south east (it was the week in which I was working at 7am on a number of days and walking through the snow as it was falling was just amazing), but then the environmentalists started to crow about - of course - more extreme weather, and that this just meant that somehow global warming was happening elsewhere. Of course. There has to be a reason to perpetuate the pseudo-science involved in a lot of climate change discussions. I do know someone for who environmental science is a hobby (she's only 16, I do hope she doesn't grow out of it). We need more people prepared to look at this rationally and take the debate forward, when gardeners in the Observer remarked at the beginning of the spring that plants had composted properly beneath the snow and ice this winter and the general outlook was similar to that of twenty to thirty years ago before we discovered global warming/climate change to frighten people with and had to make do with the Russians instead.
However I do want a party which has a commitment to using the EU for what it is there for - supranational decision-making. With Labour and the Tories damned by their pathetic responses to the expenses scandal, and the LibDems still partly complicit, the whole hog is necessary to be gone because of a need for a positive vote for positive reasons.
Europe enables these decisions to be taken at a level . I do believe any moves to solidify the presidential powers of the Commission and Parliament are doomed to failure because the treaties enabling this calcification have to be passed by so many countries it only takes one or two to hold the process up until . I predicted at the time of the greatest fuss over Lisbon that the treaty would end up as toilet roll in Sarkozy and Merkel's (communal?) bathroom. I would vote No to it, even if the only reason for doing so is seeing Tony Blair end up as President of Europe rather than consigned to the dustbin of the Faith Foundation history that he currently is. But we need to stay in it to win it, and the Conservatives' half-in, half-out stance just won't really do much for Britain in the long run except ensure that we remain subject to laws and their influences without really being able to have much of a role in drafting or formulating them.
Federalism won't work with 27 member states and the sclerosis will eventually collapse the EU back into a trading bloc and wealh redistribution network, as it really is in most respects now anyway. Michael Howard's "made to measure Europe" is the best hope while the Council of Ministers remains in control, purely because no Minister on that Council would sign away powers they would rather keep for themselves.
