MEPs and their non existent press attention

Today I went to the European parliament's office in London for a press briefing on needlestick injuries. The building is just off Queen Anne's gate, a very exclusive well, Queen Anne-architectured, part of town. The airport X-ray machine was set off the main entrance and rather pointlessly they gfed my bags through. (I could have concealed stuff in my coat, after al, wich they didn't check.) such small absurdities you become familiar with when dealing with the EP: just like all the unread reports in 20 languages that pile up in rows of pigeon holes outside the press centre. (How many footbal felds of paper do they use up?)
Once inside, the atmosphere was cosy if a bit seedy. An official told me that many MEPS avoided coming to London to give press briefings on their eurolegislation, because they were afraid no one would come. No one came to this press conference either, held by John Bowis MEP.

Hi Honey, I'm back

The main geopolitical event of the week is apparently the EU-Russian summit at Sochi. There have been talks on gas security, and also on easing visa restrictions.
Will travel to Russia be the same without it? Visits to that dank building in Kensington, occluded by its own private cloud, the bullet headed man who let the anticipatory queue in in groups of five, groups where camaraderie quickly grew after exchanges of nervous jokes?
No longer, apparently. So going into Russia will be easier. So will coming out of Russia.
The east Europeans must have mixed feelings about the latter. There are opportunities for greater trade, but as anyone who has spent time in the European parliament will tell you, it is clear that Russian imperalism remains a sore point.
At plenary speeches accompanying reports on human rights in Russia from the European parliament, the speeches there certainly thick with denunciation from MEPs, perhaps more than is politic. Polish MEPS spend their allowances engaging in vanity publishing projects - distributed free to parliamentarians and assistants - featuring their favoured historians to remind us of Stalin’s crimes, as if west Europeans didn’t know enough about this. (King of England in 1832, anyone?) Politicians like Toomas “My English is better than yours” Ilves, an Estonian socialist, have exhibitions on international women’s day that talk about the suffering of women under, you guessed it, Stalin.
The Balts in particular, with their large, 50 percent minorities of Russians, and which are being emptied of their professionals, their natives, going west to work, might be also ambivalent of the facilitation of family reunification that visa free travel offers. After all, if the UK cannot keep track of its illegals; why believe Estonia could be capable of doing so? And then there is Latvia, which already complains of being infiltrated by 1,000 KGB spies.

Could North Africa join the EU?

Preposterous, one might say, Morocco, Algeria and Egypt let alone Saudi Arabia are not geographically European, one of the essential criteria for joining the EU, one would have thought.
The joint national and European parliament meeting documents seems to think so .
"Any debate on further enlargement to the south appears moot: the countries of North Africa or the Middle East, while unarguably important neighbours, would have difficulties making a credible claim to European Union.*” (footnote follows, which I quote in full: because it is important; “*Morocco explored this territory with an application for membership of the EEC in 1987; it was rejected because of the Treaty provision limiting to community membership to ‘European states’. However Geography as such does not provide a sufficient basis for defining the ultimate shape of the EU either: on the one hand with Cyprus the EU includes a country that culturally clearly belongs to Europe. On the other hand Turkey (Ed’s note: a candidate) lies with the greater part of its territory outside 'geographical Europe.'"
The main text does go on to say that “ultimate limits of the EU boil down to” future membership of Ukraine, Belarus, and the Caucasus - Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan."
However the document also states that “EU enlargement could theoretically lead to expansion of greater than 35 member states”.
Now consider the next paragraph, speaking of the EU’s mediterranean neighbours: “The Euro-mediterranean partnership and Barcelona process aimed at increasing political dialogue, stepping up economic and trade relations (Creation of a Euro-Mediterranean free trade area by 2010). A document of March 2003 spoke of the EU’s neighbours as being a closer ring of friends with the prospect of economic integration with the EU, extending to the “four freedoms”, though subsequent action plans have toned down the “four freedoms”.
Finally, the document says “European neighbourhood policy” developed by the Commission in May 2004 in the EU offers its neighbours a privileged political and economic partnership, building upon a mutual commitment to common values.
So, sorted? Actually the Maghreb might be luckier than one thinks.
It is true that the document then says ultimate membership should be limited to the former Soviet republics; but the footnotes say that “geography” should not be the only definition. Indeed, if ‘mostly Asiatic’ Turkey - which would bring Europe to the borders of Iraq - or even more farflung Azerbaijan - a muslim state bordering Iran -- ever joins, then - the argument could surely be posed: why not a Europe, some may say, that ends in the Saharan desert.
The argument, when things get that far, might then be strengthened by membership, at that time, of the well established halfway house membership:
The document does not explicitly rule out offering North Africa the “four freedoms” - trade, services, movement of people - which is one of the most potent advantages of EU membership.
North Africa has friends who like all this.
The book Eurabia, by the academic Bat Ye’Or, alleges that there has been a long term conspiracy, going back decades, between elites and Arab establishments to bring about, ultimately, a single confederated entity - one powerful impetus being to shore up global French influence, whose elites have often treated Francophone North Africa as their baronial domain, with strong financial interests in the region, and for whom North Africa as part of Europe would revive Gallic dreams of a European-Mediterranean empire allowing France to play a more prominently leading role across Europe than presently. One of the aspects of the European-Arabic dialogue is the Euro-Med assembly,which meets regularly in Brussels, and whose activities might - if you are into conspiracy - be worth looking into.

No show from Falconer

What is the purpose of this?
The European parliament's briefling booklet on the constitution publishes letters to Michael Martin, the speaker of the house of commons, and to Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, inviting them to the joint parliamentary conference. Well, they didn't come.
At the risk of attracting ridicule, that they are not treated seriously by the mother of parliaments, are they trying to show up the arrogance of Britain's senior parliamentary figures?

Heathcote Amory's liquid lunch

It is May and Europe’s thoughts turn to the moribund constitution. Which is why the European parliament has been organising a get together between it - the allegedly most powerful legislature in Europe - and national parliaments.
With a maximum of 212 national parliamentarians attending, there were 70 MEPS. - including some usual British suspects as Richard Corbett, Andrew Duff and Charles Tannock - separating into four working groups: one to discuss the EU in the world and its external borders. Working group two discussing globalisation and the European economic and social model, group three discussing freedom, security and justice and group four devoted to the union’s future financial resources.
I went along to the building nicknamed caprice des dieux - after that cheese, and because of its similar ovoid shape - and sat in at the proceedings.
I was intrigued: almost everything in the new constitution would increase the areas of EU legislation subject to codecision - -ie European parliamentary, as opposed to intergovernmental, say. If every institution can be seen as organism whose sole raison d’etre is to fight for its own survival, then what interest do national parliaments have in coming to the table?
The difficulties are further compounded by the fact that the two bodies are of a different nature: one is a working legislature - ie, as alluded to an earlier entry, MEPS are having to compete with the technocrats in specialist knowledge to form judgments.
The others are material from which governments are formed, and so are expected to shut up for much of the time. As Arlene McCarthy MEP said: “If you want to do something come to the European parliament; if you want to be someone go to national legislatures.”
Given this mismatch, one can understand why senator Honorio Novo, a Portuguese leftist, and national deputy, took a truculent view of the idea of national and European parliaments being yoked together to drag the constitution back into life.
In his bluntness, he even resorted to the imagery of English humour: “This constitution is pining for the fjords.”
But he was in a minority. Several speakers noted that Finland has just become the 16th country to ratify the constitution, by parliamentary means. A majority of Europeans, headcount wise, were therefore for it - a stance known in Europe as the Juncker position, after the fanatically europhile Luxembourg prime minister who presumably has the least to lose from giving up his small nation’s national sovereignty. Here the view was forcefully argued by many deputies. “The constitution is alive and kicking,” said one Pole. “50 years after the Schuman declaration we have the same institutions for 25 nations as for six,” said Inigo Mendez de Vigo, a famous Spanish MEP. “A break in the journey is not the end.”
Moreover, a commission paper was about to be produced on the constitution and Chancellor Merkel was expected to make a statement on it.
So is the ball rolling or not? Politics is as much about creating reality as reflecting it, and both sides were trying their best.
On the anti-constutition side, David Heathcote Amory, who made a late intervention seemingly over refreshed after entering with his colleague Charles Tannock, doesn't seem to think so when he said:" No powers at all are being returned to the member states. We have to build a Europe from below up not top down." When I left, I was the only journalist in the press gallery. Only three had turned up at all.

The counterfeiters' most profitable product

Today I went to a conference on the dangers of counterfeit ink.
Printer firms are apparently reluctant to highlight the growing problem of counterfeited printer ink, which is cheap and profitable, for fear customers will use almost as expensive brand name alternative suppliers. As everyone knows, printer firms recoup the fact that they often sell the printer units at a loss by selling cartridges of ink expensively. Use has grown since the advent of digital cameras.
And therefore it is not perhaps surprising that counterfeiting too has grown fivefiold since 2001.
Perhaps 5% of ink is counterfeited, a figure that rises to half in Mexico. The advice is to avoid funny packaging, low prices, beware of ink that runs dry quickly - one way for the firms to make profits is not to fill up the cartridges to the top.
The consequences can be dire.
Here is an example. A firm called Multi Tech in the US sold cartridges at prices too good to be true via ebay in the US. Customers who initially thought they had a great deal, were soon in shock: there were illegible printouts, clogged inkjet printers that took hours to clean, or the printers just broke and had to be sold for scrap.
One person called Terry Schumacher from Mesa, Arizona, bought eight cartridges for his Stylus Epson 1280 for $150 but soon found it was a bad bargain: while packaging was a flawless copy, the ink started spitting everywherer when he tried to start making copies. Another person, a Gigi Diacomo from Minnesota, found that false ink ruined the printhead of her Epson 825 printer. They gave up after a few hours trying to repair the printer. And yet the deal had seemed so good: a third below normal price for a number of cartridges whioh were sealed and had holograms. So what to do?
Call the commission of course, which has promised to launch one of those white papers that may or may not end up as legislation.

The commission could watch you everywhere

Today I am off to the World Customs organisation, near the Gare du Nord. In the bowels of this big, grey type building there is to be a conference on the dangers of counterfeit ink.
Will it be as intriguing as the last visit?
Last time I came here was on a rainswept February morning for an East West security conference featuring a lot of high level Russians, Chinese, including Gao Jian (pictured) Director-General for Security, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Peoples Republic of China, Anatoly Safonov, Russia’s special terrorism representative - but also the US ambassador to the EU, Boyden Gray. Jose Manuel Barroso, head of the commission, was there too.
I spent the lunch hour interviewing the rep for firm called SAP firm which sponsored the event who demonstrated a computer program that could link cars to people to events (such as criminal incidents) and to CCTV camera sightings. For example: type in a registration number and you could find out it was last spotted at ta CCTV camera in London, or crossing the Luxembourg border and that it was bought in 1985 by this and this credit card. All this vast hive of interconnected information on Europe’s citizens and everything they do seemed to be the ultimate instance of big brother. The problem, as always, is the vast amount of information. But the program flag up odd events, such as a person paying for his ticket five minutes before departure on several successive occasions
I looked at him as he spoke. Who was it who said that liberty dies to the sound of thunderous applause? Not necessarily. Perhaps it comes in the monotone of a man selling a vacuum cleaner.

Launch credo: elitism is good

Spring weekend in London. Whenever you come back to the real world you always think about the huge EU publicity machine you have left behind, aware of its huge communications budget. You think of a particular debate, a debate carried out among journalists, and between officials: and that is, how can the EU communicate itself to the public? The European parliament has recently relaunched its website, in an attempt to become more user friendly. (And with the new dot eu suffix). Its slogan is: 457 million people at one address. (www.europarl.europa.eu). Some wags have said: and no readers. It is still to policy-oriented, too boring.
The thing is, the EU is not supposed to be democratic. It is the old argument of whether politics is an expertise or best exercised on the democratic principle. The Eurovision song contest model - where juries produce the Finnish winner, whereas the professional judges of yesteryear came up with Abba and the surprisingly good 1975 Dutch hit ding-ding a dong - is just another instance of how the masses, I am afraid, don't always know best.
The question is as old as Plato, but it is probably more true than ever before. The rewards of modern life are convenience; the price is complexity. So we have to leave modern politics to the experts.
You won't read the above in any of MEPs' increasingly numerous blogs, because they daren't tell their electorates - they themselves are becoming moree expert to keep with the ever rmore technocratic commission.

Norway, not another oil-rich Muslim state

What is happening in Norway? The country is completely
off the EU radar.
The country has now grown the western world’s largest
anti-immigration party when no one has been looking,
that is what.
Commentators insist though that Carl Hagen’s
Fremmskrittspartiet, or Progress Party, isn’t another
European far right party, a label it rejects. It calls
itself populist.
How has it managed to secure a 34 percent support in
the latest polls, in early April, making it the
largest party in the country - and three-and-a-half
times bigger than any other opposition party?

Fewer foreigners please

For a start it wants to cut taxes as well as boost
spending. Norway has a huge amount of money from its
oil income stashed away - 200bn euros, described as
the world’s largest pension fund. The leftwing
coalition government, led by Jens Stoltenberg, says it
cannot spend this money now, since it would send
inflation soaring. Anyway the cash is needed for
leaner times, when the oil runs out.
But Hagen wants to spend the money now, on schools,
hospitals and old people’s social services. A second
reason is that he wants to limit non-western
immigration to a thousand people a year - Britain
receives 1,500 people a day. Both these - possibly
unrealistic - policies appeal to an extraordinarily
loyal and often elderly cadre of voters and helped the
dapper 62-year-old into second place in the elections
last autumn. But now the Muslim cartoons crisis has
put further wind in the party’s sails.

Wrecked embassies, wrecked reputations

Because the country is next door to Denmark, and
because a Norwegian magazine was the first in the West
to republish all 12 cartoons, in January, its Damascus
embassy, along with Denmark’s, was torched in the
protest riots three months ago. Norwegian citizens
were evacuated from Syria.
As Scandinavian products were boycotted across the
Muslim world, an Anholt national brand survey, in
which panels from dozens of countries evaluate each
nation’s image, showed that Denmark fell from a
respectable position in Egypt to bottom of the table -
far below the US. Eighty percent of Egyptians did not
agree with the statement that Danes are honest.
Norway’s results were only a little better. In other
Muslim countries the results were similar. The report
noted: “This is quite significant. People’s views of
other countries are generally quite fixed and stable,
and it takes something very serious indeed to make
them revise their views. Above all, it takes something
personal.”

“The best person is he who repents”

Damage limitation was called for - or so thought the
government.
After the fires, it moved into conciliation mode.
Velbjørn Selbekk, the editor of the tiny Christian
periodical Magazinet, who had firmly resisted pressure
by Muslim extremists and the Norwegian establishment
to retract, was cajoled into a joint press conference
at a major government building by Norway’s minister of
employment. As Selbekk apologised, flanking him was
Mohammed Hamdan, head of the Islamic council of
Norway, who accepted his contrition on behalf of 46
Muslim organisations. Hamdan said:
“You are now under our protection. The prophet
Muhammed says everyone makes mistakes, but the best
person is he who repents.”
Then, the Norwegian government sponsored a team
comprising representatives for the Islamic council of
Norway and from the Lutheran church in Oslo to tour
the Gulf on a peacemaking mission. One of the people
they visited in Qatar was top Muslim leader Dr Yusuf
al-Qaradawi, who has reportedly supported suicide
bombings, and has publicly bragged about how “Islam
will conquer Europe”. The “moderate” al-Qaradawi was
apparently not entirely satisfied with Selbekk’s
apology and told his visitors that Norway ought to
introduce Islamic blasphemy laws. "Freedom of
expression is all about expressing an opinion. In the
cartoons case, there is no opinion or
counter-opinion," he told Islam Online.

“Freedom is Norway’s fundamental value”

Back in Oslo, mainstream media were careful to be
inclusive, but hyperactive blogs said Selbekk’s
humiliating apology to the Muslim leader in return for
pardon and protection was reminiscent of the state of
dhimmitude - the submission of non Muslims living in
Muslim societies to Sharia law. According to the
website Dhimmiwatch, Dhimmis, "protected people", are
free to practise their religion in a Sharia regime,
but are made subject to a number of humiliating
regulations designed to enforce the Qur'an's command
that they "feel themselves subdued".
While opposition politicians were cautious about
criticising all this, Hagen differed; he made a clear
demarcation in favour of the right to publish. Whether
it was accompanied by the dog whistle sounds of racism
- the country has a 6 percent immigrant population -
was for his listeners to decide. “Many Imans come from
countries where freedom of speech is not a
reality...They are trying it tear down our defences
that protect freedom of speech. When they have done
this, they will always be saying: ‘Now you must
respect this.’
“The Progress Party is going to stand up for freedom
of speech as a fundamental value. The government
should not be behaving as if its regrets the fact we
have freedom of speech in Norway,” he told
Aftenposten.
In polls, the party’s popularity rose by about eight
percentage points between January and April,
overtaking Labour, the largest party in the coalition.
It now has three supporters for every two it had at
the election.

“Dialogue is not appeasement”

So what next? Hagen has always wanted to be prime
minister, but in 27 years as party leader he has
always been locked out of the mainstream, like Vlaams
Blok. (Which he distances himself from).
For him it is too late, since he is stepping down
later this year in favour of the feisty Siv Jensen;
the next election is in 2009.
There are signs the country’s establishment are taking
the party more seriously, as it tries to sanitise
parts of its manifesto, and its best hope for the top
post - unless it grows further - is probably coalition
support from the now heavily depleted Conservatives -
the right’s traditional ruling party - who are
prepared to break the cordon sanitaire imposed by the
other parties.
Things would not be easy for this new alliance as the
party, which originally grew out of a protest movement
against Scandinavian high taxes and political
conformism would have to divest itself of the
indulgent habits of perpetual opposition: Nineteen out
of 20 economic experts recently said the party’s
economic policy didn’t add up. And its integration
policy? Aftenposten - the voice of liberal Norway -
has, despite not agreeing with everything about
government’s softsoaping of the Muslim community,
repeatedly warned against going down the hardline
Danish route on integration; Harvard Narum, a
political commentator, wrote: “The Progress Party has
clearly chosen to equate dialogue with appeasement.
This does not bode well for the important integration
and immigration debate in the time ahead.”
So Stoltenberg will be torn if he takes on the
Progress Party’s populist agenda. But there are
clearly votes to be won from the pressures many
Norwegians feel their small country is subjected to
from the Muslim community abroad and at home.