European union

President Emmanuel Macron was in an expansive mood this week as he presented his vision for France 2030 from the Elysée palace before an audience of business leaders and students. Macron is incapable of brevity. In a slick production that must have cost a fortune, presented to a fawning hand-picked audience, he spoke for two hours. His elocution was framed by a slick, Tik-Tokish video recalling the 30 glorious years of French economic growth and grand projects after the war. Macron is nothing if not busy. He’s just been on a series of pre-election grand tours, dispensing billions of euros in promises like confetti. That includes a proposed repair of

Much recent discussion has focussed on the collapse of Afghanistan and the decline of the West. The humiliating American-led Western retreat from Kabul is most poignant for the signal it sends to other ‘protected’ states, present-day and future. The Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece, Global Times, mockingly jibed in its editorial at the history of America abandoning its allies and warning how this might be an omen for Taiwan. But the Afghan smokescreen has obscured another aspect of Western decline: a European Court of Justice ruling of 15 July enforcing the same restrictions on ‘work time’ for member states’ military personnel as for any other worker, except on clearly specified military operations. If

Who is on top of the gold medal table at the Tokyo Olympics? China? The United States?  According to former European parliament Brexit chief Guy Verhofstadt, it is, in fact, the European Union that is triumphing at the games. While you have to go down to seventh place in the Olympics leader board to find an EU country (Germany), Verhofstadt appears to have his own scoreboard:  ‘Fun fact,’ he wrote on Twitter: ‘EU combined has more gold medals than US or China’. Verhofstadt went on to say that he would ‘love to see the EU flag next to the national on athletes’ clothes’.  Mr S wonders whether this is all just a ploy to ensure that Verhofstadt’s Belgium

In 1991, at the height of the first Gulf War, the EU demonstrated to the world its divisions and helplessness, as Belgium infamously blocked the export of munitions to the UK, then at war in the Gulf. They quickly came to regret it. The Belgian Foreign Minister subsequently remarked tellingly: ‘Europe is an economic giant, a political dwarf and a military worm’. It seems these days that little has changed, save that even the EU’s claim to be an ‘economic giant’ is eroding with the loss of the world’s fifth largest economy, a dwindling share of world trade and a catatonic growth rate, even before the pandemic. Worse still, much

What does 2021 hold for the European Union? At the end of 2020 Brussels has gone out of its way to engage in unity-signalling, announcing that all 27 members will begin vaccination on the same day and feigning a united front in the face of the UK’s new strain of coronavirus. But in truth its 27 member states are confronted by serious structural divisions in three fundamental areas: economics, culture, defence. Deep economic divisions surfaced in the EU after the 2008 financial crash along a north-south axis. The split between the richer ‘frugal’ northern economies and the ‘profligate’ southerners was starkest in 2012-13 over Brussels’ treatment of Greece. Papered over

To read this long-overdue and welcome biography of Peter Shore is to undergo a journey from Labour’s eurosceptic heights in the 1960s to its demise as a party of the nation state in the 1990s. Titled Labour’s Forgotten Patriot, patriotism is a theme which constantly recurs and, to a considerable extent, defined Shore’s political life. Peter Shore has been a rather neglected figure. This is odd since he had considerable influence over Labour politics for two decades and was probably the staunchest defender of Britain’s independence. A Cambridge Apostle, rising star in the Labour Research Department of the 1950s and part author of three consecutive Labour general election manifestos, Shore came

Sadiq Khan has ventured to Brussels today to meet with European Union negotiators. London’s mayor has a plan to convince EU officials to offer Brits ‘associate citizenship’ after the Brexit implementation period ends this year. The citizenship would grant Brits continued access to freedom of movement and residency within the EU, along with a possible host of other rights linked to healthcare, welfare and voting in European Parliamentary elections. The bid, Khan says, is for ‘heartbroken’ Londoners and others. Of course, Khan is extremely unlikely to be successful. Although London’s mayor wants associate citizenship to be high up on the negotiating agenda when it comes the ‘future relationship’, it’s probably