Europe

Ken Clarke is speaking at a Daily Telegraph fringe event and he was quick to play a few of his favourite European games in response to Theresa May’s assault on the Human Rights Act and the European Court of Human Rights. Nick Watt reports that Clarke claims May did not brief of her examples of the HRA being abused. And he cast doubt on their veracity: according to Lucy Manning, Clarke jovially challenged May to substantiate her claim that a criminal was not deported on human rights grounds because they happened to own a cat. This may seem like fun and games, but it reveals the tension over the HRA and the ECHR that exists

George Osborne told a Conservative Party increasingly wary of expensive climate policies that Britain needs to “cut [its] carbon emissions no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe. That’s what I’ve insisted on in the recent carbon budget.”  What he actually insisted on was what Chris Huhne described as “a review of progress in early 2014 to ensure our own carbon targets are in line with the EU’s”.  Even if that review is serious, and energy intensive industries have every reason to be sceptical, it is only going to hold our policy to the same standard as today.  The current targets require us to cut our

In a surprisingly testy interview on the Andrew Marr show, David Cameron defended the government’s approach to Europe, the economy and planning. But before the interview really got going, Cameron had to reiterate his Sunday Times’ apology (£) to women for the patronising comments he has made in the Commons chamber. This is hardly an ideal start to conference for a party leader who is struggling to maintain female support. On the Eurozone, Cameron was blunt that its problems were a threat to “the British economy and the world economy”. He also risked a clash with Nicolas Sarkozy by demanding that “action needs to be taken in the coming weeks to

As Peter Oborne observed on Newsnight recently, there is a tendency in the Eurozone to think its problems are political, rather than an economic crisis that cannot be wished away. For example, the Bundestag’s much vaunted approval of an expanded EFSF has done little to alleviate Europe’s weakness. Here’s why: 1) We all knew the vote would pass: the opposition support made sure of that. The key point was that Angela Merkel got an absolute majority. It was a close call, but it always seemed likely that she would gain enough support from the flailing junior coalition party, the FDP, which, given its collapsing poll results, was unlikely to threaten the stability of the coalition for

A showdown with the EU may come sooner than we expect. The European Commission has today threatened to sue David Cameron’s government unless it starts letting EU citizens come here to claim benefits. Until now, any EU citizen could live here, but if they couldn’t find work, they were not entitled to claim benefits. This was widely accepted. Today, the EU has issued a statement saying: ‘Under UK law, certain social security benefits – namely Child Benefit, Child Tax Credit, State Pension Credit, Income-based Allowance for Jobseekers, Income-based Employment and Support Allowance – are only granted to persons with a “right to reside” in the UK. Other EU nationals have to

James Forsyth has interviewed the foreign secretary, William Hague, in tomorrow’s issue of the Spectator. Here is an extended version of the piece that will appear in the magazine. Politicians normally have to wait for the history books for vindication. But for William Hague it has come early. All his warnings about the dangers of the euro, so glibly mocked at the time, have come to pass. But, as he makes clear when I meet him in his study in the Foreign Office days before the start of Tory conference, he is not enjoying this moment. Rather, he is absorbed with trying to sort out the mess that others have

Chris Patten has held almost every great and good job the great and the good can offer: Governor of Hong Kong, Companion of Honour, European Commissioner, Chancellor of the University of Oxford and Chairman of the BBC Trust. Only his parents’ decision to send him to a Catholic church will prevent him becoming Archbishop of Canterbury and winning the game of establishment bingo with a full house. Patten features in Peter Oborne and Frances Weaver’s strange polemic against British supporters of the Euro. (Strange because Gordon Brown and the Labour Party stopped Britain joining the Euro so the authors have no crime to accuse the “guilty men” of – other

Ed Balls’ choreographed apologies earlier today included the acknowledgment that “we should have adopted tougher controls on migration from Eastern Europe”. He first adopted this stance during last year’s leadership election, when he offered an undeliverable but popular objective to court the ‘Gillian Duffy tendency’, who had turned away from New Labour. What began as classic opposition politics is now the party line, with Ed Miliband telling delegates yesterday, “We got it wrong in a number of respects including understating the level of immigration from Poland, which had a big effect on people in Britain.” And there are stories in today’s Mail and the Express about the deleterious effects of

Most of today’s papers carry reports of a deal to relieve the European sovereign debt crisis. The details are varied, but it seems that 50 per cent of Greek debt will written off and the currency will be allowed to remain within the single currency. This means that banks that are exposed to Greek debt will incur potentially ruinous losses. The EFSF mechanism will probably be extended to cover those losses and guard against contagion. Estimates vary, but it seems the fund will have to increase to somewhere around 2 trillion euros if the mounting crises in Italy and Spain are to be contained. Britain’s exposure remains unclear at this