European Games

First off, a declaration. I am very much pro the EU, but not uncritically so. Even its most ardent supporters openly acknowledge that things are not perfect and a lot more needs to be done. For me, however, the EU is at its best when it protects EU citizens from their national governments. Without the EU, many bad laws would have been enacted by the British Government, particularly those that impacted on freedoms or our protections, particularly from large corporations. Examples such as the 90 days detention, the BT Phorm trials and the ongoing anti-competitive investigations by the EU into Microsoft, Apple, Intel and Google are prominent in my mind. So for all its faults, particularly in the way it operates and spends money, there are a lot of good things to say about what the EU does.

And so I now look at Cameron's speech on Europe which is still generating significant press coverage. My verdict is that there are some good principles in there. The Germans and the French do want the UK to get more involved, to push for beneficial change to the EU and to counter the perceived dominance of those two countries on most European issues. The UK is seen as a major player with a lot that it can bring to the table. However, I can only think that Cameron's strategy in pushing for this change is driven by political pressures, not by any realistic analysis of how best to go about bringing change and thus improving the EU. The European way of doing business is very much about obtaining consensus. Turning up from the beginning with a threat and a list of demands does not get things off to a good start!

My view is very much that Cameron (or any PM) should have simply signalled that the UK want to propose a number of changes which the UK feels is needed for itself, but would also benefit the EU as a whole. This could have been reinforced by a statement that the EU was becoming democratically tenuous in the UK (and other countries) and so it is critical that the UK government is able to demonstrate that the EU remains relevant and beneficial to the lives of UK voters. This is the sort of position that European leaders can understand and agree with. It is both a promise to be reasonable and a threat to challenge the democratic legitimacy of the EU if it cannot reform.

As for the issue of a referendum, Cameron is being as hypocritical as he accuses Alex Salmond and the SNP of being over the issue of Scottish independence. If you are going to have a seismic referendum, you should set the  date to be as short as decently possible only allowing enough time for a proper debate and not such a long period that it creates a whole load of planning and investment uncertainties. I am not saying that there should not be a referendum, but either it should be called quickly or Cameron should have left it as an unspoken threat for the EU to ponder over. That way, the UK has a strong hand in its negotiations, EU leaders can hardly be motivated to avoid the threat that a referendum brings if it is an inevitability. I fear, that the political pressure has over-ruled any common sense on this matter.

I know from my own work that being a leading member of  the EU brings significant benefits to the UK and I am going to share one example that illustrates this point. About five years ago I was dealing with a problem where working with the US was being problematic due to the way the Americans implemented their laws when co-operating with foreign governments. This issue was causing huge delays to work and creating a whole host of problems such as legal liabilities and delays to the UK. The UK had spent years trying to solve this problem, but to no avail as the Americans were not willing to change their position. My boss and I therefore approached our counterparts in the other five biggest countries within the EU to ask if they were having the same problems. Lo and behold they all replied that they were and so we set up several meetings to discuss it and to hammer out a strategy. We then invited the Americans to meet all six of us to discuss this problem which they willingly did. As a result, the Americans realised that they had a problem that needed fixing and so they went away and did so. For them, this was the ideal international co-operative scenario - the UK led the big European nations to clearly articulate the problem. Once the Americans proposed a solution, it could be agreed by the Europeans as a whole thus saving them from having to repeat the work for other countries and everyone went away happy.

Now of course, I can also give several examples of where working within the EU has not been so successful. But the example above illustrates why so many nations, both and and out of Europe want the UK to remain a leading member. It also shows how the UK is able to make itself more influential than if it tried to solve all these problems on its own. This is influence that political blustering and a UK only attitude cannot buy, it would be ludicrous to claim that giving it up would not have significant consequences. Is it worth what we pay the EU? That is a much harder question to answer, but what is clear is that the situation is far from black and white and the UK would be unlikely to be able to use the money saved to be able to protect its interests and influence world events as effectively as it does now.

How to make yourself very unpopular, written by the coalition!

Today's news is that the Home Office has decided to cut police pay, particularly for new recruits. Earlier this week, it was revealed that the police is suffering a huge decline in the young intake and thus the police forces are becoming older. In short, it looks like police recruitment is in for a rough time and there is no way that the current members of the police can see this scenario as anything other than they are getting screwed. A more Machiavellian outlook would be that this is a deliberate change that so happens to benefit companies such as G4s who just so happen to be significant contributors to the Conservative party coffers...

I will declare that I am not a police officer nor do I have any particular interests to defend on this issue, but I cannot help but imagine that the police feel pretty hard done by. Having covered for the Olympics thus not had much holiday, suffered pay freezes and pension cuts and worried about being on the front line at the next set of riots, I don't expect they feel particularly benevolent to the government right now. Traditionally, the Conservatives used to be able to count on a decent proportion of the police to vote for them. I doubt very much that is true any more.

In fact, I am pretty confident that the coalition has rather significantly lost of the vote of most of the civil service too. They feel pretty screwed over too. And with recent news that business leaders are worried about the anti-EU rhetoric, as is the US, and it looks like the coalition are fast running out of support from most quarters, including areas that would traditionally have been counted upon for some support. Like the Republican party in the US, they are in danger of running out of 'angry white men', or Euro-sceptics as they are otherwise known in the UK!

When they were in power Labour were terrible for making policies and promises specifically geared towards shoring up their political support rather than promoting good government. There are countless examples of this and the result were a lot of promises that were not funded. The coalition seems to have gone completely the other way and while this can be argued as possibly a good thing, if a bit politically suicidal, I would find it hard to argue that they are making good policies and winning support either. Without the support, they have almost no chance of implementing their policies, good or bad.

This behaviour from a politician is pretty hard to explain, after all, most shallow politicians are willing to sell their soul to win at politics right? Labour certainly did and it successfully kept them going for 13 years. So when one examines the behaviour of the coalition government and their apparent suicidal approach to gaining votes a rather disturbing pattern emerges. All those polices (cutting police pay, reforming the NHS, selling off national forests, privatising defence procurement, etc) all by amazing coincidence benefit significant contributors to the Conservative party. A coincidence? It is just too widespread to be written off as a conspiracy theory. If you take the view that privately the coalition knows it was left with an impossibly unpopular mess to fix, it can be easily imagined that those at the top have lost their motivation to win more votes. Thus we should ask what motivates them to shape government policy and endure the gruelling hours and criticism that results? A rather wealthy life after the general election in 2015 perhaps?

Before David Cameron became Prime Minister, he said that lobbying will be the next political scandal. That has yet to properly happen and so that particular cow will be milked for all it is worth before the game is up. Recent news coverage also states that MPs think they are not paid enough. I actually agree and I think these two issues are linked. Politicians should get a pretty generous pay from the state on the condition that they do not have second incomes or outside interests. If they are not prepared to accept this, then maybe they should accept, and the electorate should insist, that a career as an MP is not for them at that time. My sincere belief is that British politics would be in a better place when this happens. Sadly it cannot happen fast enough.