Fainting in Coyles An occasional letter from the
Heart of Euroville
Sunday, February 29, 2004
You dancin? No, I’m discussing the possibilities of a properly free-market economy in Europe, a Europe that stretches from the Urals to the Atlantic and beyond.
Or the CNE Capitalist Ball 2004
Well that was fun. A gathering of the great and the good of Euro-capitalist and free market thinkers in a suitable venue, with large quantities of booze and pretty decent music. Oh yes, and the blogosphere was there, represented by Mr Pollard, David Carr and Antoine Clarke of Samizdata fame.
Drinks before hand at Pollard’s place, well I didn’t make it, so I cannot report on that gathering. But back to the Ball.
After boneless quails (almost a tautology I would have thought, and an apt phrase to describe many of the attendees) and rosemary sorbet(?) we sat through the prize giving. I had been exiled to near Ghent for the dinner for historical reasons, thus the prize giving ceremony became a dim blur in the distance. However the table broke up into much shushed laughter when the prize for something-or-other was handed to some chap for a paper he had written. Hold your breath, and get downloading fast. You too can read “Parallel Trade in Pharmaceuticals” by Jacob Arfwedson by clicking the link. This was followed by a bow to the sponsor. Catherine Windels, of Pfizer who had paid for us all to get delightfully mashed.
The main speech came in a long paean of praise from Antonio Martino the Italian Defence Minister to Margaret Thatcher. Pretty good speech it was too, well the bits I could hear through the cackling at the table. Mainly based around the way in which La Thatch stood as a beacon of hope to continental thinkers and politicians during the dark ages of the social democratic statism of the 70’s and 80’s. Particularly he welcomed the way in which she supported the work of people like Arthur Seldon, the CPS and the IEA when prevailing fashion was merely for more state as the answer to the failure of the state.
Amongst other partaking in the fun were Julian Morris, of the International Policy Network, Ana Isabel Eiras of Heritage, Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and many more.
A good time had by all, topped of by the little giftys of half bottles of Cuvee du Capitalism champagne. Roll on next year.
Update
David Carr has posted up a piece on Samizdata, quite fun and with a prepoterous pic of your correspoindant and his wife. Oh the glamour...
Off to the CNE Capitalist Ball this evening, a night which last year, well according to the wife's quack, resulted in our daughter. No, the tests haven't been done, but taking one look at her ears and it is pretty obvious where she got them, poor thing.
Firstly ¡No Pasarán! partially because they have been kind enough to link to me. Hurrah, but more to the point because they seem to be concentrating on French foreign policy in an, errr... well shall we say less than sycophantic fashion.
Second is 'A Taste of Africa'. Though I do not always agree with the approach of the author, Yvette, I am a whole hearted supporter of the cause of Somaliland, and have been a semi regular reader of her blog for a long time. More power to her, and its elbow.
Not hard to work out. Just had a friend refering to Rifkind's success in Ken and Chelsea, sniffing about why it wasn't a woman or ethnic minority candidate.
Slight rant of a response
From your tone I take it that male highly experienced middle class gents are no longer to be selected by the Tory party. Fiddlesticks.
May I direct you to this page
Those who are going to win
Women 4
Non white 4
Men 24
Proportion in top two cases of over 10%
Now few in the Tory party have ever said that we would have quotas, nor should we, and it is a fact that there are no black candidates in a position to win (though this can no doubt be expleined by the fact that few black people vote tory - thus fewer join the party, fewer still are foolish enough to be activists and fewer still go for office - but we have a higher than population average ethnic minority score) Wimmin, not so sure but affected by similar concerns - ambition and the like have an affect - so does a conservative mindset anmongst the majority of women who are party members and activists).
I recall the day before the 92 election Nirj going off on one at the campaign team when it was pointed out by a supporter that he had walked 1 1/2 miles to the Tory offices and had counted 130 Labour posters 27 Lib Dem posters and only 12 Tory posters. I mentioned out a couple of points. Firstly nobody ever chucks bricks through Lib Dem and Labour windows and secondly and far more importanatly. Conservertaives are, ahem, in the main, conservative.
Update
Misunderstanding with chum cleared up. What they meant, and naturally misinterpreted by vexatious Coyle, was that the Tories had been trumpeting inclusivity and this had rather flown in the face of the rhetoric. True but I still think that that is not the point. Lordy lord, yesterday the Tories finally selected an out lesbian as a candidate.
That being said chum was highly complimentary about yours truly so why the hell am I carping?
The United States and the European Commission, joined by the European Union Member States, held a successful round of negotiations in Brussels on 24-25 February 2004. The delegations built upon progress made in The Hague and in Washington and were able to reach agreement on most of the overall principles of GPS/Galileo cooperation, including,
· Adoption of a common baseline signal structure for their respective open services
· Confirmation of a suitable baseline signal structure for the Galileo Public Regulated Service (PRS)
· A process allowing optimization, either jointly or individually, of the baseline signal structures in order to further improve performances
· Confirmation of interoperable time and geodesy standards to facilitate the joint use of GPS and Galileo
· Non-discrimination in trade in satellite navigation goods and services
· Commitment to preserve national security capabilities
· Agreement not to restrict use of or access to respective open services by end-users
· Agreement to jointly finalize associated documents after which the agreement will be presented for signature
The delegations will continue to work diligently to resolve the few remaining outstanding issues which concern primarily some legal and procedural aspects.
A technical briefing by Heinz Hilbrecht, Director in the European Commission, and Ralph Braibanti, Director in the Department Of State, will take place tomorrow, Thursday 26th February, in the European Commission press room (Breydel) at 11.15 am
I would like to bring your attention to a couple of choice aspects of this presser. The attempt by the Commission press flunkeys to add irony is a joy, thus - "were able to reach agreement" and even better "The delegations will continue to work diligently to resolve the few remaining outstanding issues which concern primarily some legal and procedural aspects" are my particular favourites.
However the issue of Galileo will not go away and I suspect that one of the oustanding aspects is the fact that Europe has been sucking up to the Chinese to such an extent that they have a major (30%0 if I am not mistaken in this piece of kit which has strong military applications.
Ho hum - methinks this story will run on
Update
Dr Richard North has commented on sme of these very points in a short piece for the Bruges Group
As he says "Enemies [of America] may still be able to rely on Galileo, which the EU may continue to keep operational if it sees advantages in so doing, irrespective of US interests".
Forgive me father, for I have stolen. Britain declared war on Japan soon after the US. The Royal Navy signalled all ship's and shore stations with the news. One group receiving the signal was a small group of escorts struggling to herd a convoy of reluctant merchantmen across the Atlantic. The Flotilla leader decoded the signal and relayed it to all the other escorts by lamp and flag hoist.
The signal read:
"Commence hostilities with Japan."
One of the escorts immediately flashed a reply:
"Request permission to finish breakfast first."
FT Headline - Friday 20th , what is the betting that they will be driving on the left? - No link
What is sad is that the Commissioner who is behind this is Frits Bolkestien, who we had all hoped would be a voice of reason in the college. No such luck, put a man amongst thieves and , he slowly learns their trade.
"The drive for European tax harmonisation received a boost on Friday when a senior European commissioner said an inner core of countries could soon be able to agree common rules to make their systems more transparent.The comments by Frits Bolkestein, commissioner for tax, are intended tocircumvent opposition by the UK and Ireland, which fear the creeping effect ofhis proposals on harmonising the corporate tax base."
I suppose that this could be seen as a good thing as it allows for seperate development in the EU (London as Sun City perhaps?)
Oh I can really see this being popular in the lower 5th.
There are a number of stupidities involved in this. In order to make the concept fair, the drugs tests are to be random. Now this is daft in itself. Surely if a school is any good at its pastoral care it would be able to tell those children who are having touble with drugs. Thus those who are not having trouble will be tested to make thse who are feel better. But surely the point is not to make children feel equal, but to concentrate the rescources on those who, might, need help. Those who are taking drugs without creating diminuation in their school work are obviously not targets, while those who are unable to keep up due to these troubles are the ones who need any help going.
In the meantime, it will be teachers who have to carry the can, the extra bureaocracy, deal with the added resentment from their charges and will have to spend even less time actually teaching.
Will these drug tests become compulsory? I don't know, but they say not. Are they an extension of state control over our childrens lives, most definately. Will private schools have to institute them, no idea.
Some private schools already have drug tests - but only of those who are seriously suspectd of drug-taking.
Alan in the computor room is normally exempt.
Today in the European parliament there was a meeting of the Budgetary Affairs Committee. They were there to question a chap by the name of Fabro Valles, who is the boss of the European Court of Auditors. I paraphrase a couple of his remarks. - You must remember he speaks in Portugese and I heard it through the Parliamentary interpreter.
"We must grub out anti-institutionalism and euro-scepticism"
and in answer to the question about the links between the Court of Auditors and OLAF, the internal fraud office,
"We are supposed to meet them twice a year, but I do not remember if I was present at the last meeting".
What the blazes are we paying this charleton for? Firstly,m it is not the business of an auditor to have political opinions when it comes to fraud, for one. And secondly, he cannot remember if he has spoken to the anti-fraud office in one of the two, check that, two meetings a year that the two organisations have. I am momentaraly speechless. One MEP I spoke to after the meeting was in a narcoleptic shell shock about the meeting.
Comedy - But with serious import Sean Gabb found himself cuit off by Radio 4 yesterday when he challenged Yasmin Alibi-Brown nO BE to state whether she thought that he wanted to kill her. The debate had ben high spirited to say the least.
"I do not necessarily object if people want to come to this country to look for a new life. I do object if they want this at my expense - at my expense as a tax payer, and at the expense of the constitutional rights which are my birthright."
"Every so often, someone stands up and tells us what benefits we have had from diversity. Such may be, but we must also consider that part of the price has been a police state. In this country, we have severe restrictions on freedom of speech, on freedom of association and on freedom of contract - all in the name of good race relations."
"The Libertarian Alliance believes in repealing all the race relations laws and in shutting down the Commission for Racial Equality."
When Yasmin Alibhai-Brown objected that this would remove all controls on racial attacks and on discrimination, Dr Gabb replied:
"Yasmin, are you saying that the white majority in this country is so seething with hatred and discontent that it is only restrained by law from rising up and tearing all the ethnic minorities to pieces?"
Her answer was yes, though she seemed to think better of this answer immediately after. But she did not take the invitation to deny that the white population was only kept in line by criminal laws to restrain them from attacking ethnic minorities. When Dr Gabb asked if she seriously believed he wanted to murder her, his microphone was turned off and he was "released" from his engagement with 20 minutes of discussion still to run.
Ok this from Dr Gabb's own press release about the incident, and I can see the legal bean-counters at the Beeb ggetting a touch antsy about the way the conversation was going, but didn't they prove his point there and then. How long before Trevor Philips and his cohorts at the CRE charge him with inciting racial hatred?
"Every Swedish citizen plus foreigners who have lived for a certain number of years in Sweden are allowed to vote. There's no disenfranchisement of groups because of criminal convictions or other reason and thus less risk for manipulation and arbitrariness. Unless you are judged to be out of your mind you can vote, and if you are, an administrator is appointed to vote in a way that is supposed to be in your interest. There's no registering to vote. As a citizen you are in the voting list and you are mailed all information from the various alternatives and a card proving your right to vote and in which election(s). (New immigrants are allowed to vote in local matters only.)"
Unless you are judged to be out of your mind you can vote, and if you are, an administrator is appointed to vote in a way that is supposed to be in your interest.
Ehh? In their best interest, and these trick cyclists decide upon what is good for you. Dammit why they don't just abolish the polls and farm them out to persons better qualified.
Quote of Yesterday "There is no European public opinion; no European national identity. In the
absence of a European demos, we are left with unadorned kratos: the power of
a system that commands respect through force of law, not public affection." Michael Howard - Konrad Adenauer Stiftung 12 Feb 2004
We are teams of American coalition troops writing from Baghdad Iraq! We are urgently seeking for your willingness to secure the below consignments as shown in the attached photos! The goods were captured here in Baghdad, abandoned in one of the Saddam Hussein's Treasure House. However, the contents of the box are Gold Bars, Gold coins and huge amount of fund in the sealed boxes! At moment, we are intending to ship these goods outside Iraq for safekeeping on our behalf but due to law and restriction order, we are unable to transport these goods. We hereby seek for your assistance to receive the box on our behalf. We are offering you 25% (25 per cent) of the entire goods either in cash or in value. Therefore, we will appreciate your effort to get back to us via my confidential Internet Fax number 1-309-216-1248, which is very confidential. All correspondence and reply to this mail should be by fax. Send us a fax with your NAME, TELEPHONE NUMBER, FAX NUMBER AND CONFIDENTIAL EMAIL confirming your interest to assist us receive the consignment. Then we will immediately get back to you and furnish you with further details. Please, note, this issue must be handled with utmost confidentiality as to avoid publicity! Yours truly. Capt. STELLA ANDERSON (Team Leader) N.B: If you show absolute willingness to work with us, we will keep you fully posted on any further dictators/bullion/gold coins unearthed in palaces or small holes in the ground, and any business opportunities, which may arise from such discoveries.
As some of you know, I co-edit a magazine called The Sprout. The nature of the magazine is acerbic and at times rude. However one of The Sprout’s perennial targets is a newspaper called the European Voice. This newspaper, which claims to be "An independant view of the EU" is owned by the Economist group and almost half of its sales figures come from dumping its copy, free to 8,000 EU officials. After 5 years in Brussels I have yet to meet anybody who buys it. Information in this town is free to the user. This deal that the Vice has with the Institutions acts as a form of subsidy. They can, accurately inform advertisers that there product is read by everybody who counts in the Commission, they know this because the Commission kindly distributes the paper into everybody’s pigeon holes for free. This of course allows the Vice to get better, and more expensive, advertising. The one page of the paper that is read is the gossip column on the back page called Entre Nous. And now we get to the point of my spleen and this little rant.
This weeks edition has a small piece about yours truly, fine no harm in that, if I dish it out it is only right and proper that I should also be able to take it. But the point is that they also included my wife and my three-month-old daughter in the joke. This is where I start to have a problem. From what I understand, the publisher of the Vice, a certain Denis Landsbert-Noon was so delighted with his piece of gossip that he wanted to have a picture of my wife pasted up. Not only that but it is the lead item on the website.
Now the story is admittedly quite funny, and I will not deny any of it – anybody could google and find the reference, and in the past quite a few have, but as a question of journalistic ethics from the Economist group is it right? And is it sensible practice for them to take the piss out a satirists wife and child? I only ask the question.
From The Sprout in February
European Politicians hauled over the coals in secret audit report - Presidents of political groups accused of double-invoicing expenses
All aspects of taxpayer funding to Euro parliamentarians have come under severe criticism in an internal report leaked to The Sprout. Recently, the European Court of Auditors produced a confidential memo which accuses political groups of drawing scores of millions of euros from the parliament’s central fund for their own purposes. - purposes that can’t be checked and are thought to have been paid for already from the MEPs separate allowances.
Not including their wages, the taxpayer funds MEPs activities to the tune of over 34 million euro in a single budget line defined as for “secretarial expenses, current administrative expenditure and expenditure relating to the political and information activities of the political groups”.
According to the report though much of this money is non-audited or audited in an opaque and fallible way. The report has discovered that the financial affairs of the Groups are riddled with opportunities for “double funding” where it finds the “risk particularly high in the context of general expenditure, travel, subsistence and secretarial allowances,”; or, in other words almost everything. The indictment will not be received well by the main three chairmen of the respective groups - Graham Watson (liberals), Hans-Gert Poettering (centre-right), and Baron Crespo (socialists) – whose personal expenditure comes under fire.
“All the reports we have seen from OLAF and the Court of Auditors confirms that we need clearer rules on the expenditure of the political groups”, said veteran budgetary hawk, the Danish Socialist MEP Freddy Blak, “it is about time we set the same standards for money spent in our own house as we do for money spent by the Commission or the Committee of the Regions”.
If an MEP spends their entire personal budget, the group can hand over unlimited cash and not account for it. The only requirement set by the Group is that the MEP “declare on their honour that they have used up their own” – a practice common for the group Presidents who usually have extra expenses, which go unchecked and bypass an audit.
The Court has turned its guns on the most senior members of Parliament, the Chairmen of the groups and their coteries known as ‘the Presidency’. The Groups pay their senior figures a monthly stipend but these payments are queried, “it is not clear why the membership of a political groups Presidency should cause costs that are not covered by the individual general and specific allowances available to every member of Parliament.”
The political system within the parliament is idiosyncratic. An individual MEP is a member of their own national political party, described in the parliament as a ‘national delegation’. The delegation is affiliated to a political Group and in some cases the group has a separate existence as a European Political Party. In a small minority of cases, members are not part of a Group and are described as ‘Non-éscrits’.
Individuals In the case of individual MEPs, there are two significant points made in the report, the way in which their secretarial allowance is handled and what can politely be called ‘discretional’ spending on, “Members’ social activities (e.g. meals, cocktails, etc.)”. Thus parliamentary piss ups can be “loosely justified as political or information activities”, but the efficacy of taxpayers money spent in this highly pleasurable way cannot be audited and is thus open to abuse. More serious is the way in which the secretarial allowance is allowed to be spent.
The Court is incensed by the way in which members are able to dodge normal employment procedures. It is impossible for the auditors to know how many staff are employed and how much they are paid. Back in 2000 the Parliament agreed to publish a list of “all assistants”, yet the publication on the web is an incomplete list that does not require those employed in the home country to appear. Worse, the report stresses that the MEP as an employer has no need to provide basic employment rights to their staff. Because every MEP sets his or her own contract conditions, the variety is massive. The member has to file a copy of the contract but it does not have to include “copies of payslips, proofs of membership of a social security scheme, proofs of payment of social security contributions…”. Furthermore, though the members have now started handing in the contracts – often merely a letter of a single paragraph - the Parliament’s secretariat, under Julian Priestly, has singularly failed to do its job. The CoA report pulls no punches on this and damns Priestly by writing that his department failed to “carry out any check and the forwarded documents were simply filed”.
National delegations
Within national delegations, whose expenses take up about half of the total of the 34m euro, the spending is not broken down in the accounts and is thus impossible to track. Invoices are missing, the auditors never left Brussels, therefore were unable to check office expenses which “can only be verified on the spot”, and again the Parliament’s own secretariat failed to cross-check contracts, the report reveals. In a hard-hitting comment it states, “the validity of certain practices seems doubtful with regard to national labour, tax and social security laws.”
Reading between the lines of the report, the multi-national groups themselves, such as the European Peoples Party or the Party of European Socialists (whose Chairmen take ultimate responsibility for all these funds), find themselves accused of creative accounting. The groups do not treat unspent monies rolled over from previous years (in 2001 20.5 million euro - 70% of the previous years appropriations) as assets, and do not even break down how they are used. Each different group has different accountants and different accounting methodologies, which results in a near impossible task for the Court of Auditors to treat like with like. In some cases the Groups mirror the disgraced American company Enron and employ the external accountants for other purposes “which have not been separately and properly reflected in terms of engagement and could have compromised their independence”.
Astonishingly, weaknesses in the accounts were also noted “in particular…the proof of the eligibility of certain activities…evidence of certain expenses, the avoidance of any conflict of interests…”.
The super soaraway, has picked up a stpry from my magazine, The Sprout in which we spotted on of those rather wonderful unitended consequences that are created by Brussels legislation. This time on the Waste Electrical Equipment Directive (WEEE). As mentioned below
