Best Of

‪@jorgeliboreiro.bsky.social‬

The European Union has triggered Article 122 to indefinitely immobilise the assets of the Russian Central Bank, worth a whopping €210 billion.

I explain what just happened and why this is such a big deal for Europeans.

https://bsky.app/profile/jorgeliboreiro.bsky.social/post/3m7q6klczks2w

No comments on this post? Don't know if confiscating Russian assets is a game changer, but it'll certainly make the Russians hopping mad. It's been a long time coming, and frankly I didn't think the EU would ever do it. I'm not normally a fan of the EU, but all credit to them if this is enacted.

Are there any alternatives to the EU as a bulwark for European interests that you are a fan of?

I posted on the old thread by a mistake that maybe Europe needs its own “UN” outwith the EU where it can listen to all European voices but not be a tool of the EU. Europe has huge social capital, soft power, vast financial power and can be a huge military (defensive preferably) power but it has to be outside of the EU.

This European UN can speak as a voice to China and the US, shorn of any concept of being a lapdog to the US so can perhaps be taken more at face value by Africa and Asia. We should be leveraging that if you want to deal with Europe (and that is the whole of Europe) you need to listen. But Europe needs to regain its self confidence, three countries effectively ruled most of the world, we aren’t weak, we aren’t stupid, we have power. But again, it can’t be an EU thing.

Why can't it be an EU thing? You have more or less described the purpose of the EU.

Brexit supporters keep reinventing the EU in the same way that tech bros keep reinventing public transport.

Remember when they used to call the EU the EUSSR?

Ah, nostalgia. The Rotterdam effect, "Love Europe hate the EU", commissars, diktats, bendy bananas/cucumbers, "we hold all the cards", "the German car manufacturers will come to our aid", "350million: let's give it to the EU", "Bollocks to Brexit - it's not a done deal" by the Pimlico Plumbers, jumpers for goalposts...

They need to do one of those Top 40 Brexit Moments nostalgia shows for the 10 year anniversary next summer.

With number one being Putin achieving his dream of Brexit.

I don’t think Putin cared either way. Why would he ?

The same reason that he wants Hungary, Austria, Italy and Poland to leave, as per the instructions he gave to Trump.

It weakens the EU and turns us on each other. That has been Putin's prime foreign objective since he took power.

It’s sweet, here we are again, at that stage of a Trump presidency in which we determine him a Russian spy, and that there’s a video about to be released. Any day now that shows him compromised.

I don't think he's a Russian "asset", but I'm wondering how would his behavior be any different if he was?

Putin would ask him to dial it down a notch.

Labour may yet demonstrate that Liz Truss is not the worst possible PM.

In all honesty, we are pretty much there already.

• Truss had a belief regarding what was wrong with the country and a plan to cure it. Her downfall was her inability to get anybody to agree to it enough to ride out the initial turbulence.
  
• Starmer has no beliefs regarding what was wrong with the country and no plan to cure it. He sees his job as carrying out the law regardless of whether it is right, wrong, or orthogonal to the problem. His downfall is his mental inability to realise this.
  

My understanding is that Truss's downfall was her inability to produce figures in support of the plan. This freaked out the City.

True dat. It was a leap of faith on her part that growth would appear. It may have. It may not have. But the fact that the City freaked out and killed her was an indication of who holds the power.

Whether it is Truss and the City, Starmer and the SC, or Burnham and the hedge funds, our politicians have become infantilised, lacking the power to change things or even to realise that things can be changed.

The latest example is Starmer's request that the EHRC be changed so that he can do things. Does he even realise he's Prime Minister? Or does he just sit upright fully dressed in the dark, waiting for somebody to switch him on so he can perform his daily tasks?

I agree that politicians have become infantilised, to the extent that they seem to have persuaded themselves that they are incapable of doing things. "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" seems to have been the motto for at least the last decade.

This is despite the fact that British cabinet ministers and prime ministers are among the least constrained executive officers in any democratic government (witness Starmer just appointing 25 new members to the upper house). A prime minister with a majority in the commons is an "elective dictator", to paraphrase Lord Hailsham: there is very little that he or she cannot legally do, especially (though not only) with a manifesto commitment to do it in place before election.

Ministers can arbitrarily reorganise, close down, or set up departments. Whole new ministries can be created, merged, or abolished at whim. For all of the claims of civil service obstructionism, this includes the very departments those civil servants work in, and the management and incentive structures that govern them.

My guess is that our government ministers have simply forgotten how to govern. You can get a sense of it from Michael Gove's complaints about "the blob". A competent administrator would be able to describe the system they're in charge of, its internal structure, long-term strategy and short-term goals, incentives, distribution of power and decision-making capacity, and so on. Such a description would be detailed and fine-grained. Instead, Gove (and others, I only single him out because he so readily admits this in public) have only a coarse-grained understanding of what's going on, hence the "blob", a thing that lacks any detail or distinction between its various parts. They can write essays and give speeches about the kind of world they'd like to live in, but have no real idea about how to organise a group of more than about 5 people to do anything about it. (Some of them can't even manage that).

The ECHR and international treaties is one area where I have a bit more sympathy, if only because there really are consequences to weigh up. If we think of Starmer as the CEO, he has complete power of hiring and firing over his employees, and the products his firm produces, but he might want to think carefully about breaking off contracts with suppliers and customers. That said, even there the doctrine of "efficient breach" says that if keeping to a deal costs you more than whatever you lose from withdrawing from it, you may be well advised to simply go ahead. The only tricky point here is that sometimes our estimates of the costs and benefits haven't been as accurate as we might like! If Starmer really can get an agreed change to how the ECHR is applied, then that seems like a strictly better outcome than unilaterally breaking the terms. (Time will tell if he can, of course).

Perhaps more that the politicians haven’t any experience in running large organisations. So they don’t know what to do apart from make a speech and bang on a desk.

I disagree.

Politicians are not Chief Executives - they are the Board of Directors. I spent a lot of my working life in local Government and one of the councils for whom I worked was a billion pound organisation which, unlike larger and more homogenous entities, covered a huge diversity of activities from social care to highway maintenance and from making dresses to running schools.

The change in governance to a Cabinet structure created a small tranche (cabal or clique also work) of Councillors who were basically full time and worked closely with the Chief Executive and Service Directors across the range of activities. The remaining backbench councillors were usually only interested in what was happening in their patch.

The lines between Cabinet members and senior officers weren't always clear and the personal relationships (or lack of them) played a big part in the effectiveness of the decision making process within the Council.

If a County Council or London Borough Council leader got into Parliament - one example being my local MP Sir Stephen Timms, they would have a much fuller knowledge of how local services work and what to do when they don't.

The problem with business people in politics is they are used to command and cajole - their word is law and the flunkies run round after them. In councils, command and cajole doesn't work - it's more argue and persuade primarily colleagues but also powerful local interest groups. It's my experience senior business people coming into local Government think they can get their way by shouting and screaming and when that fails they end up retreating into blustering.