Lavengro in Spain

High speed trains

The BBC celebrates fifteen years of Eurostar.

"It would be great to look up at the departure board at St Pancras International and also see cities like Amsterdam, Cologne and Frankfurt as direct destinations," said High Speed One director of communications Ben Ruse.

Well yes. And it would be great to look up at the departure boards at Amsterdam, Cologne and Frankfurt and also see cities like Liverpool, Cardiff and Edinburgh as direct destinations, wouldn’t it?

Why Blair?

It has been known for some time that Tony Blair will have to appear before the Chilcot enquiry, but yesterday's formal announcement to that effect has registered the fact in the EU corridors of power. There can be no possibility of the presidency going to a man who will have to appear, in his first few months in office, before an inquiry into a hugely controversial decision that he took as British PM.

This has set me thinking. It has been most curious, puzzling indeed, to see how the Labour Party’s top brass has closed ranks behind Blair, with Brown himself giving his former adversary a glowing endorsement for a post that he never had any realistic chance of obtaining. Is it possible that the party read this whole thing the wrong way round? Can it be that in their arrogance they assumed that if only they could get their man into a top international post, the Chilcot enquiry could safely be ignored?

BBC and terrorism

I have mentioned more than once (here for example) that the BBC is reluctant to call ETA killers terrorists, so it is with interest that I see this from the BBC. Perhaps it’s a mistake. After all, the headline calls him a separatist, the BBC’s usual term for ETA murderers, and this description is repeated later in the article (see screenshot).

'No threat' to Basque separatist

A convicted Basque terrorist is trying to "blackmail" a Belfast court by warning he faces near-certain death if returned to Spain, it has been claimed.

Curiously, De Juana Chaos is the man on whose behalf the BBC posted an ETA propaganda poster.

The Guardian and Spanish practices

Giles Tremlett reports in the Guardian on the education policy of the government of Extremadura:

The region's socialist government has launched a €14,000 (£12,600) campaign aimed at teaching young people how best to set about "sexual self-exploration and the discovery of self-pleasure" – or to put it less delicately: masturbation.

It’s a wonderful story – so who cares a jot that it’s untrue? 

Graeme of South of Watford has the full story.

Why the UK should run the EU – the Guardian

In an apparently irony-free article in today’s Guardian Simon Jenkins proposes Gordon Brown for President of the European Council. Brown, he says, has the necessary qualifications. He is not a fatuous foreigner:

He stands head and shoulders above the stage army of Belgians, Dutch, Latvians and others jostling in advance of next Thursday's EU summit.

and he could keep the Frogs and the Krauts in their place:

His presidency would counterbalance the emerging Franco-German axis.

Brown would introduce Europe to the best of British culture:

He would bellow and shriek, sucking health and safety from the padded corridors of power. There would be blood on the Aubusson. Fish and chips would drown the filet mignon and soccer songs the Odes to Joy. Translators would learn 27 words for shit.

Jenkins’s case is so sound that he is not afraid of a straw man argument:

If I were an integrationist, I would stop uttering flatulent vagaries about Europe "punching its weight in the world"

He knows that foreigners are so obviously untrustworthy that there is no need for him to to justify his comments:

… it was always inconceivable that France would conform to EU food laws, Spain to EU labour laws or Italy to EU transparency laws, it is inconceivable that Britain would accept a Brussels diktat on whether or not to go to war alongside America.

Err, can we have that last one again please?

it is inconceivable that Britain would accept a Brussels diktat on whether or not to go to war alongside America.

Apart from the fact that Brussels issues directives that are approved by the member states, with the innovation of input from national parliaments under Lisbon, the EU says nothing to prevent or require the sovereign deployment of national armed forces (this was one of the red herrings waved so effectively by the Irish anti-EU lobby). NATO’s clause V requires all member states to provide a common reaction against an attack on any one of them, but that is something completely different.

Following Henry Porter’s article in last week’s Observer in which he set forth his sound support for Silvio Berlusconi and the Catholic Church (never mind that his whole article was based on a howler of monumental proportions), I wonder just what is going on in the Guardian/Observer. Have the editors totally taken leave of their senses?

President of Europe

Silvio Berlusconi’s fan Henry Porter has written a particularly stupid article in today’s Observer (my comments on it). This article has attracted a number of online comments, some of which definitely appear to have been written by people with functioning brains. I particularly like the one about the job of so-called President of Europe, posted by lib410 on 8 November at 1.55 pm:

As for the so-called President of Europe, the actual title is President of the European Council.

Here's the job description as set out in the Treaty of Lisbon:

The President of the European Council:
(a) shall chair it and drive forward its work;
(b) shall ensure the preparation and continuity of the work of the European Council in cooperation with the President of the Commission, and on the basis of the work of the General Affairs Council;
(c) shall endeavour to facilitate cohesion and consensus within the European Council;
(d) shall present a report to the European Parliament after each of the meetings of the European Council.

The President of the European Council shall, at his level and in that capacity, ensure the external representation of the Union on issues concerning its common foreign and security policy, without prejudice to the powers of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

The President of the European Council shall not hold a national office.

Here's a list of things that the President of the European Council can't do (all of them are within the power of the US President):

Powers of the President of the European Council

Can sign or veto legislation? No
Commander-in-Chief of armed forces? No
Negotiates treaties with other states? No
Power to recognise governments and states? No
Can sign ?executive agreements? with other states? No
Head of the Executive Branch? No
Can appoint up to 8,000 employees? No
Appoints the EU Council? No
Appoints the EU Attorney General? NA ? no such position
Appoints Ambassadors? No
Nominates EU judges (including to the ECJ)? No
Executive privilege: can withhold information from the public on the grounds of ?national security?? No
Can grant pardons and reprieves to convicted criminals? No

Co-ordinates work of EU Council? Yes

Chairs Council meetings? Yes

Essentially the President of the European Council is a chairman who chairs meetings of the EU Prime Ministers.

That seems to dispose of that then!

Oh Mr Porter, what shall we do?

Columnist Henry Porter writes in today’s Observer (my emphasis):

When the European Court of Human Rights announces a ban on crucifixes in Italian schools, you can either celebrate the liberal march of secularism or deplore the illiberal attack on religious expression and national tradition.

Perhaps there is a third option which is to say that this has nothing to do with rights and everything to do with the EU's manic drive to standardise behaviour and attitudes, in the same way as it regulates the transportation of livestock and the safety specifications of new mowers.

The crucifix is none of the EU's business …

Dead right Mr Porter. It is none of the EU’s business and … err … that is why the EU has nothing to do with it. Now read very carefully, I shall type this only once. The European Court of Human Rights is run by the Council of Europe (an entirely different body from the European Union) and has nothing at all to do with the EU.

That is a fact that is known to anyone with the slightest knowledge of Europe. Such a basic blunder as yours is to be expected from ignorant British Eurosceptics in saloon bar discussions of the iniquities of those funny foreign ways that those funny foreign Europeans are allegedly forcing on them. To find it in your article in the Observer merely tells me that while you may think that you love Europe, as your headline says, you don’t understand the very first thing about it and that the rest of your article can safely be ignored.

You also totally fail to understand the nature of secularism as it has been practised in Europe for 220 years or the power and influence of the Catholic church in Italy (clue: I don’t think you’d like it).

 

Another cause for serious concern is that nobody at the Observer said, ‘But look Henry. We can’t possibly publish this. It's factually incorrect in the major point on which you base your argument.’

Remembrance day

‘All this remembrance day business gets on your nerves, don’t it? It’s my belief most of us would only be too pleased to chuck these community hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn't run it for all it’s worth. However, it don’t do to say so. They’d hoof me out of the Club if I raised my voice above a whisper.’

Major Lord Peter Wimsey, DSO and two years’ shell shock.

Dorothy L. Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 1928.

Portrait, Balliol College Oxford (168)

Cameron’s stance on Lisbon referendum

Air passenger duty

Every passenger departing from a British airport has to pay a tax called air passenger duty. It was introduced with the justification that air transport is bad for the environment and therefore (sic) had to be taxed. It has now gone up to £11 for a flight to Europe and will go up to £12 next year; premium tickets on long-haul flights will pay as much as £170. Despite this cosmetic attempt to make it progressive in terms of distance travelled, it is a very stupid tax.

Air transport is the preferred target of the Green Stalinists*, who like telling other people how to run their lives, and of the Green puritans**, who are appalled at the idea of people doing things that they enjoy. Needless to say, there are also Green Stalinist Puritans.

Darren Johnson, from the Green Party, said it was a good thing if people were discouraged from flying. "We need to be increasing the air passenger duty," he said. "Aviation is simply not paying its way in terms of the environmental damage it causes."

Cheap air travel has had a tremendously positive effect on mobility in Europe, enabling millions of people of all ages to travel to other countries for all sorts of reasons, not only the cliché of stag parties in Riga. Nor are these travellers the stinking rich businesspeople of popular Green mythology, jetting ceaselessly around to further their international conspiracy against the working class. They are mostly perfectly ordinary people travelling on holiday, or to meet friends or lovers, or for study, or yes indeed for professional or business purposes – and why not?

I do not deny that air transport produces greenhouse gases; it is an unarguable fact of basic chemistry that burning kerosene will do so. But the extent to which air transport is responsible for overall climate change, and the extent to which it should be taxed, is another matter. The airline industry, from plane-makers to airlines to airport management, is acutely aware of environmental matters. Modern planes, not to mention the ones that will be used in the future, are not only quieter than the older ones but they produce less greenhouse gas. As it happens, I live in a city, I work at home, I rarely travel outside the city, and when I do I use public transport as I do not own a car (or even a driving licence). When I am sternly lectured about how my occasional flights are damaging the planet, I find it rather irksome.

If air travel is to be taxed, and if everything else is there seems to be no reason to exempt it, please can we have a little common sense in the debate? The idea of taxing airline fuel is barmy and has rightly been resisted. There is one very basic fact about aeroplanes: they can move around very easily and very quickly. If the UK were to tax fuel, airlines would simply refuel their planes in airports in other countries. What should be done – and easyJet support this option – is that instead of crudely taxing passengers, the airlines should be taxed on each flight that they make, with variations in the tax for the age of the plane and the passenger load. With computer records that are kept nowadays it should be quite easy to say that a flight from Barcelona to Liverpool in a certain make of plane, of a certain age, with say a 93% passenger load, will use X tonnes of fuel. It might even be possible to include in the calculation the actual flight path distance (though a nominal one could easily be assigned for each route) or even the actual quantity of fuel used on each flight. This system would place the tax in the airline’s overall accounting system, thus getting away from the very obvious fact that the UK-origin leg of a return flight costs a lot more than the flight to the UK does (bad for the country’s image) and it would encourage airlines to be fuel efficient in their choice of aircraft and in their efforts to fill their planes. easyJet supports this because it uses new planes and manages to fill them almost to capacity on every flight. It is the less efficient airlines that oppose such a tax.

 

*It is not often realised that Stalinism is a Great British Invention, having been invented by one O. Cromwell in the mid-seventeenth century.

** “The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.” Thomas Macaulay