Categories
IN (FEINT) PRAISE OF URSULA VON DER LEYEN – politicalbetting.com
IN (FEINT) PRAISE OF URSULA VON DER LEYEN – politicalbetting.com
Who would have guessed that a month and a half after Britain finally left the European Single Market and Customs Union that it would be the European Commission President who is under the most pressure with some calls for her to resign? Or that German press could be leading with headlines like “the best advert for Brexit”?
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Personally think EU should harness EUROVISION as a well-established, accessible vehicle for practical, popular, truly representative democracy.
She still has to get that Brexit deal she thrashed out with Boris through the EU Parliament. If you want a full-blown crisis in the EU on her watch, then seeing that blocked (perhaps as a way to express dismay at her vaccines policy) would be it.
Throw up a war in the Balkans or a global pandemic and everything that stinks about the EU rises to the surface and is smelled by all her citizens.
While there’s some understandable ructions within the Parliament about the UK vaccine rollout success so soon after Brexit, and no doubt some complaints from certain export sectors as there have been in the UK, actually voting down the trade deal would surely be close to a vote of no confidence in the Commission - to the point that such a formal vote would be close to inevitable?
One of those little EU quirks is that only the Commission as a whole can face a vote of confidence. Individual Commissioners, all appointed to their roles and not elected to any position, face no individual accountability whatsoever for their term of office.
It’s a fair question to ask why national governments, who are as you point out directly responsible to their electorates for healthcare, did not invoke the principle of subsidiarity. It doesn’t excuse the Commission’s failure, but if I were (for example) German or Dutch, I would be more angry with my own government over their derelictions.
And was it really a feint (and if so, to what end), or did you intend the more conventional faint praise ?
I don't think this crisis is the one causes that point to be passed.
If Marine le Pen wins next year, as I now think is a distinct possibility, that could be another decisive scene.
But given the circumstances of Brexit, it’s a little difficult to see how the EU might embrace and act on such a realisation.
As previously, the problem with the EU is that it's federalised as much as it could without incurring the wrath of the individual nation states, but not enough to be effective. They're stuck in no-mans land. The UK leaving offers them a chance to move decisively in the direction that we were pushing hardest against, which risks antagonising the anti-federalists, but at least means they might be better able to get things done.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/538928-perdue-files-paperwork-to-explore-2022-senate-run
Given the stakes, the midterms are likely to be a bigger betting event than usual. I wonder how soon markets might go up ?
The EU will become closer, not split apart. Member states and pro-EU politicians will have a natural psychological reaction to the UK leaving and cling together more tightly.
In the short term, at least.
Good article, Mr. Thompson.
The political capital invested is massive, and over decades, and it will take similar levels of political capital to undo everything. I think there will be ups and downs in the coming decades, rather than the relentless push for ever closer union we’ve seen over the past few.
The election of Le Pen in France, if it were to happen, might well be another key point in the story, but the message for now is that there’s possibly a little too much Europe - certainly over the vaccine project - and it needs to be dialled back a bit. How that’s compatible with a single currency, which by its very nature demands much more central financial control, is a great conundrum.
As of now, I’m not prepared to commit to a timeline
If a federation implies anything it's a single foreign and defence policy, masterminded by a federal government with its own directly elected leadership and tax base, as Philip correctly concludes. If and when France becomes a state in a full political union like this, it has no need for a president anymore...
I can imagine he’s not anxious to face Osoff again...
The alternative - letting things drift until there really is an implosion event and an uncontrolled breakup - is pretty well unthinkable. That would be a catastrophe for everyone.
But how, when and why it will happen are unknowable. My guess would be another financial crisis would do it - and there’s clearly one on the way - but I could easily be even wronger than Contrarian always is.
But in the context of the failure on healthcare, the case isn’t going to be easier to make, particularly in those countries which have the strongest national capabilities (and which also fund the EU).
Of course, referring back to Robert’s vaccine glut article, the failure might not look quite so dismal in a year’s time.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/15/bill-gates-climate-change-468928
The death knell for the EU has been rung. It's a question of when, not if.
How the Eurozone crisis has played out so far also demonstrates the amount of suffering at least some of the member states are ready to go to in an effort to keep the show on the road, and the capacity of the EU as a whole to make do and muddle through.
Some think that the next phase of the Eurozone crisis is just around the corner, because of the additional pressures arising out of the pandemic. Possibly, but given what the club has been through already it's hard to believe that this will be enough to tip it over the edge.
I suppose that the EU is a little bit like Austria-Hungary - a rickety construct full of tensions, an uneasy partnership between two central powers with a ring of largely disgruntled satellites orbiting them, yet which also somehow manages to do just enough to keep itself from flying apart. It took a catastrophic, four-year long war to finish it off; if that hadn't happened then who knows how much longer it might have limped on for?
Dear Javagal
We’ve never met, but I love you. You were one of Gloucestershire’s greatest overseas players, and no Shire fan will ever forget the 5-44 you took as you, Rob Cunliffe and Andrew Symonds tore those stuck up Lancastrians apart at Cheltenham.
So I beg you, please, keep the love.
Do not ban Virat Kohli. Yes, he’s broken the rules. Yes, he looks a pillock. Yes, he deserves a ban.
But if you ban him, Ajinkya Rahane, possibly the finest captain in the world right now, will take over India. And with Jadeja coming back, England will definitely lose the next two tests as well.
Please, don’t think of India. think of the contest. Give us just the faintest chance of a win.
And let Kohli play,
Yours, ever
On behalf of every England fan.
As for what would have happened to Russia itself, it’s anyone’s guess really. So many complicated changes were happening at once that predictions are impossible.
Things fall apart
The centre cannot hold
This is feint praise, followed by the sucker punch demonstrating she’s useless.
This is not von Leyen's fault, it is the system that she inherited and I consider her performance no worse than her predecessor (which is surely the ultimate feint praise). It is the fault of a system that aspires to be so much more without being willing to will the means.
Why does the Commission even exist any more? Why is it not a part of the Parliament, led by political groupings in the Parliament and up for election? The answer surely is that national leaders such as Macron and Merkel don't want to cede that kind of control, don't want to really build a democratic Europe that has real power over the economic policies of Germany or the underhand government funding of industry of France, let alone the power to control the undemocratic movements in Hungary and Poland.
It is worth reflecting that one of the biggest battles of recent years has been whether the budget could be increased from 1.2 to 1.4% of EU GDP. National leaders of the larger countries claim to aspire to the European ideal. They are liars.
Next Test, Crawley and Bairstow become available. Do Lawrence and Pope keep their places? What about Burns?
Similarly, do we recall Anderson in place of Broad? Or play Woakes instead of either?
Does Moeen get asked to stay for a bit longer? Or should Dom Bess be asked to return to the side having been told he’s not good enough?
Some difficult questions ahead of the next Test.
But let’s not forget, England did win the first Test. These are questions that can be answered.
https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/638613-russian-737-ils-263-knots-over-fence-2.html
Ah, my coat...
Now we’ve left the EU, can we finally get rid of that stupid rule that requires every website to give us cookie banners before accessing them? I believe it was an EU requirement?
That certainly would be a major benefit of Brexit for everyone, because they are incredibly annoying and completely pointless.
The member states say they ceded vacinne negotiation to the Commission out of European "solidarity" over the pandemic, but it's really because they thought they'd get better and quicker results for their citizens. Bigger orders and profiles for the vacinne producing states and quicker deliveries and rollouts for those who were not.
What the EU is afraid of is that they might, now, make a different calculation next time rather than always assuming More Europe delivers better outcomes.
https://order-order.com/2020/12/16/will-the-cookie-crumble-guidos-brexit-deal-test-on-regulatory-alignment/
Unfortunately we reached an agreement only yesterday that personal information could continue to be transmitted between the UK and the EU and our commitment to GDPR was a part of that. The agreement was important and an essential building block for any deal on financial services recognition and access this coming month but we are almost certainly stuck with the cookie banners.
Cookies should remain a part of the background that nobody cares much about besides geeks who know how to handle them, and then notification requests etc should be the exception that stand out like a sore thumb not be bundled in with cookie requests.
Alternatively, use private browsing windows which delete all cookies when you close them.
Apple are working on something similar for mobile apps, with explicit tracking permissions required. Facebook, among others, are absolutely furious about it!
Cognitive dissonance is a wonderful thing.
There are, as Philip's piece shows, a lot of democratic issues arising from this half way house. Governments no longer control monetary policy. Of course you could argue that this is no different from the "independent" BoE or the Fed but in my view the democratic levers are still there in the latter cases should the circumstance require it. With the Euro I am not sure what you do.
What is essential for proper economic policy is a coordination of fiscal and monetary policy, hence the demands to have domestic budgets scrutinised by the EU. But who is doing the scrutinising? Once again undemocratic bodies. It is a mess. At the moment any attempt to control budgets is going to go on the back burner for some time given the horrendous deficits created by the virus but this issue will come again.
"A society in which oppressive control of every detail of our lives is unthinkable except when it is thought to be a good idea, is not free. It is not free while the controls are in place. And it is not free after they are lifted, because the new attitude will allow the same thing to happen again whenever there is enough public support."
Liberal democracy will be the biggest casualty of this pandemic
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/15/liberal-democracy-will-biggest-casualty-pandemic/
Once the pandemic is over, we will as a society be more determined to use our freedoms, and much less tolerant of politicians who use flimsy excuses to take them away from us for ‘the greater good’, having seen what life is like when that actually happens.
I don't think the continent is going to see much less any time soon. So the answer is going to be more Europe. How they get there is another question.
The status quo is not a sustainable steady state, it is a step in the process of federalisation.
https://twitter.com/bestforbritain/status/1361582086914772992?s=21
Nevertheless there is a bigger picture, which is that the people of a fairly small continent, whose nation-states have fought some fairly savage wars over the past few hundred years are, by and large, making efforts to see what unites, rather than what divides them. In many cases those savage wars were the result of the personal ambition of 'leaders', who saw their own aggrandisement as more important that the welfare of the ordinary people.
That there will be problems along the way is inevitable; that any one of them should be considered a reason for tearing up the whole idea is ridiculous.
I sincerely hope that 'Europe' will use this episode as a basis for reform and progress.
Edit; predictive text strikes again!
I agree that we need to make sure deliberate go-slow tactics by the EU do not undermine the spirit of the Brexit agreement.
Say it isn't so.
They would have been better off had the EU had the authority and budget to have launched and managed the process from the outset.
(Am I the only person here who earns US Dollars and pays a mortgage in Sterling?)
Von der Leyen is a serial failure at big political jobs. With a special skill in screwing up procurement. And with a further skill in getting into legal fights with suppliers and losing.
When you look at her career to date, it would have been extraordinary if she had succeeded in vaccine procurement.
If Anderson plays, and Moeen (or less likely, a returning Bess) can find some consistent accuracy (both big ifs), then England have a real chance. In both India's and England's match winning innings, it was only two or three batsmen who made significant runs.
The key point however is that Germany proposed the EU-wide process as one of solidarity to resolve a dispute because they were already out in front in what looked like becoming a competition between individual countries. For the EU as a whole, it clearly makes sense to co-ordinate rollout to vulnerable people in parallel (rather than ending up, say, with the Netherlands mostly vaccinated and Belgium much less so). They lost out because the delay in re-starting allowed the UK to steal a march (when did we secure our outline deal with AZN?) and because trying to balance the interests of countries like Italy and France that were suffering badly wit those like Portugal and the Czech Republic, that escaped the worst of the first wave and imagined the virus might be gone, was always going to be cumbersome and difficult.
So the UK has had to eat price and liability, and the EU has had to eat speed and facilities.
A and B may be alternating but if I’m honest Broad didn’t look that dangerous. Archer and Stone have both offered more bite.
Your favoured outcome presupposes a genuine European government which doesn't currently exist (which is what Philip's article is about).
"What I also think, however and where I have sympathy for the @contrarians of this world is that the route out is far from clear. What's the difference between staying in lockdown because a new variant might emerge and staying in lockdown because a whole new disease might emerge? Finally, if Covid, what else? We have crossed the Rubicon of government administrative measures."
Don't agree with it all, obvs, but the EU severely disappointed wrt NI as far as I'm concerned.
As for the vaccines? Each Member State could have done their own thing so I'm less worried about that. The Member States delegated their vaccine effort to the EU because, as democratic nations, they decided to do so and will face their electorates next time having done so.
"Solidarity" is emotional hogwash. The EU works through pure power politics.
If the EU had the budget and authority to start with that doesn't mean it'd have made better decisions - in all likelihood it simply would have used its heft to protract negotiations over volume and price, rather than speed.
The great European myth that "solidarity" means bigger means better supply has been exposed as untrue. The idea being claimed was that working alone small countries wouldn't have been able to get vaccine supplies but that is categorically untrue - if you look at the list of countries that are doing better than the European Union is now then besides the US and the UK it is primarily a "who's who" of wealthy small countries. There was no reason that Belgium and other wealthy European small countries couldn't have initiated their own contracts on their own.
The issue with that would be the politics in those countries, who would legitimately see ‘their’ vaccines redistributed to other EU member states.
From the EU perspective, slower but in solidarity seemed the best way forward - until it became clear that the UK had stolen a march on them. If it weren’t for that, and only the USA and Israel were marching ahead, there wouldn't have been an issue.
Which is both unfortunate, given it will cost lives, and embarrassing, as the UK has done a lot better. So much better in fact that despite a constant battle against shortages, misinformation, and confusion, it has partially vaccinated almost one-third of its adult population in just two months.
But it’s worth remembering very few countries or organisations have done well on vaccinations. Canada is doing even worse. So is New Zealand.
So while this shows the EU’s weaknesses, and is a personal humiliation for von der Leyen, it’s unlikely to lead to significant reform.
The weakness of the Eurozone model is ultimately where the EU will be made or broken, although the delay in reopening the economy due to the vaccination issues will exacerbate its problems and may indeed be what leads to reform.
The alternative scenario, of continuing with each country securing its own deals, would surely have delivered a better result for Germany, Italy and France, and almost certainly a worse one for many of the other members.
Since the total amount of vaccine available right now would be the same, either of these alternatives may have put the UK supply back into the pack. Indeed the German consortium might have beaten us to the line with AZN.
Brexit having been done, in my naivety I had thought that discussion of the shortcomings of the EU would diminish. How wrong I was. Brexiteers in particular, having left the EU, have become even more obsessed with it, as evidenced by the sheer volume of commentary on the EU on this site this year.
Anybody who thought that leaving the EU would stop those opposed to it "banging on" about it was as naive as I was.
I hadn't realised Moeen was going home after a single game; that's utterly crazy. He was fairly hopeless in terms of accuracy in the first innings, when it mattered, and had just about found some form in the second, when it didn't. If he's not going to play in the next test, what was the point of picking him ?
You do realise Serbia is in a better position than every EU country in the International Vaccine Table.
Humbug.
What is amusing is seeing Brexiters trying to project their prior prejudices about the EU onto the story and re-writing the history to match
Brexiters: it is completely irrelevant that there is this huge landmass and trading bloc on our doorstep we should be looking to Tonga for the future.
Also Brexiters: Look at what the EU are doing now. Look at them handle this. I can't believe they did that.
FWIW I think the site is far calmer and more collegiate now than it has been in several years, notwithstanding that.
The issue was delays in signing the contracts led to delays in getting manufacturing up and running. Had the first consortium signed its deal months sooner then investment would have begun much sooner, manufacturing would have begun much sooner.
Other nations that had fallen asleep at the wheel could have woken up and signed their own deals in a similar timescale to what the EU did but critically there would have been more investment sooner, so more aggregate output sooner.
The total amount of vaccine available right now being the same is a complete and utter myth or fabrication - as confirmed by the CEO of Astrazeneca the only reason that the European Astrazeneca plant is not producing the expected amount of vaccine is they are three months behind on manufacturing. Had they begun three months sooner as they should have then there would be far, far more vaccine available right now.
PS the UK contract was signed before the European consortium was ready to sign, which was before the EU took it over. So the UK contract would never have been affected either way.
Of course, that may be a poisoned chalice.
That's not a Leave or Remain point.
Precisely the same reason we are attempting to keep progress of our own programme running broadly in parallel across the nations and regions of the UK, rather than allowing those that prove to be better managed and organised to run too far ahead.