We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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“Gold Plating” is the practice of getting an order (a ‘directive’) from our masters in the European Union and adding lot of additional regulations to it. Sort of…
“If this arbitrary order has not destroyed your business we will add regulations to it, and we will keep doing so until you are destroyed”…
…”Why are we trying to destroy you?”…
…”Well what else do we have to do, it would be lazy and unethical to just sit in our offices and not do anything”.
The British Civil Service is supposed to love gold plating more than any other civil service in the EU. The British Civil Service having long prided itself on being more hardworking an ethical than Civil Servants in other nations (do not even think about bribing a British Civil Servant to save your business – he would rather starve than let you survive).
Examples are tossed about, supposedly a Directive on slaughter houses that started off as about 8 pages in Brussels (EU HQ) was turned in to about 7 pages in France – and about 97 pages in Britain.
No surprise that almost all of the little local slaughter houses closed down.
The BBC (and other such) still has the occasional item about how sad it is the all the local family owned places have gone, and how animals are now taken to great corporate factories (which actually have worse records for the quality and safety of meat). The little places may not have understood the paper work or been able to afford all the special people the regulations insisted they have (such vets – mostly from Spain) – but they did the job better. “Oh the wicked supermarkets” (they get the blame for destroying the “local food” from “local farmers” system that the media claim to love) “and now on to our next story about the need for more regulations concerning such and such”.
Well the British Conservative party has promised to end gold plating and if a business thinks that a EU directive has been interpreted more strictly in Britain than in other parts of the EU (or just used as an excuse for another regulation orgy) they will be able to take the matter to court.
Well this is good as far as it goes. The promise to end gold plating is nice to hear (although I doubt the Civil Service would take any notice) and taking things to court might work sometimes – although the British courts (like the courts of most nations) are a mess (and getting worse – as they slowly reject what is left of the old ‘out of date’ principles of law).
However, it is also a wonderful way for the British Conservative party to look as if they are “doing something” about regulations and “standing up for Britain”. After all by concentrating on ‘gold plating’ the Conservatives duck the issue of whether to defy ANY of the endless thousands of Directives that come out of the EU.
Too cynical? I hope so.
The Social Affairs Units has a great new digital publication called How to Maximise Your Expenses: Advice to new Members of the European Parliament.
Funny? For sure, but read it and weep.
The Royal Society has published its government sponsored report on nanotechnology. Professor Ann Dowling, the chair of the working group that wrote the report, produced a positive response in the press release:
The report does not find any justification for imposing a ban on the production of nanoparticles.
However, since these new technologies are uncertain and dangerous, the Royal Society called for the death of a thousand regulations. The Report concluded that all products including nanoparticles should be regulated by EU chemical regulation and the Health and Safety Executive:
Because of their novel chemical properties, the report recommends that nanoparticles and nanotubes should be treated as new chemicals under UK and European legislation, in order to trigger appropriate safety tests and clear labelling. Furthermore they should be approved – separately from chemicals in a larger form – by an independent scientific safety committee before they are permitted for use in consumer products such as cosmetics.
As the EU wishes to implement a new EU Directive (the Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals legislation – REACH) that introduces the precautionary principle to all chemicals produced within its borders, this sounds the death knell for nascent nanotechnology within Europe. The government has obtained the authority of the scientific profession (most of which works within the public sector) to justify conforming with EU regulation.
Will Europeans lynch their leaders when they realise they have been cheated out of an Age of Miracles?
One of the less trumpeted reforms of the European Union, brought about by the increase in the number of member states in May this year, is the reduction of British European Commissioners from two to one.
The news that arch-urophile Peter Mandelson is to replace both Neil Kinnock and Chris Patten gives me mixed feelings.
On the one hand there will be even less chance of dissent from the urophile orthodoxy. On the other hand one can hardly be too sad at the removal of Messrs Kinnock and Patten and their replacement by only one bureaucrat.
So what else is in the small print that somehow failed to get reported?
There is a stirring of campaign groups to oppose the EU constitution ratification in France. My latest posting on Combat links to the ‘acceptable’ opposition groups. To these we could add the far-right, who will no doubt be excluded from the ‘official No campaign’.
Our biggest problem at the moment is the total lack of a mainstream anti-EU press. This is not that different from the Maastricht campaign of 1992, and at least the Internet is reducing the organisational advantage to the political establishment. We may also have funding problems, though this is not the concern right now.
At the moment, the main job is trying to establish who can vote and where. The big questions concern foreigners. Can they vote? Can they donate funds to the campaigns? I shall keep posting.
The good news today is a rumour of dissent in the French Socialist Party. The leadership has committed the Party to voting ‘Yes’, wheras many members would have liked to wait until the text was actually available in September before deciding.
I swear I was not going to bash the Tories this week!
I was actually trawling the French news and looked forward to writing about some appalling corruption scandal. Well this [link in French] is close enough.
It seems that the European People’s Party (to which the British Conservatives belong) has done a deal with the European Socialist Party (to which the British Labour Party belongs) to ensure the election of a Socialist leader of the European Parliament: Josep Borrell Fontelles. In doing so they voted against the Polish former dissident Bronislav Geremek, who if this Communist denunciation is anything to go by, was obviously the right candidate to back.
So all the protestations that the Conservatives would defend British interests are a load of cobblers. These people are an insult to invertebrates.
It gets better, the French report says that the new President of the European Parliament (elected with the support of the European People’s Party) is a man who comes from the left-wing of the Spanish Socialist Party and who had to quit Spanish politics because of a series of unfortunate misunderstandings over large sums of stolen taxpayers’ money. I seem to recall that this was when the Governor of the Bank of Spain was filmed carrying suitcases of freshly printed bank notes to the Spanish Socialist Party Headquarters. The story was extensively covered at the time in El Mundo, the Spanish conservative daily newspaper. I forget if our new European Parliament President was personally involved (though the discreet shuffling of news reports suggests he may have been), but he certainly had to quit over that affair.
So the British Conservatives are fighting our corner within the European People’s Party? Nice one Michael Howard, I know exactly where we stand on the Conservative Party’s policy on Europe.
Support hard-core Socialists! Give fraudsters a second chance! Support even more European regulations and taxes! Vote Conservative!
Unless he was lying on national television again, or changes his mind like he did several times over the Maastricht Treaty, Saddam Hussein’s best chum has announced that the French (and colonies) will be given a chance to vote on the proposed European Union constitution.
Lucky, we know all the dirty tricks that can be used in such a referendum campaign, they were all used last time by the Florentine François Mitterand, to get the Maastricht Treaty through. So we shall be campaigning in Guadeloupe, and Martinique, and the Isle de la Réunion, and French Polynesia, St Pierre et Miquelon and New Caledonia, and Wallis et Futuna if necessary to avoid losing by 40,000 votes. Get the Atlas out!
I am starting a voter registration guide among the French refugees living in London. I am also checking whether foreign EU citizens living in France can vote and how to arrange this. My new blog Combat (named after the WWII Resistance magazine against the Nazi occupation) launched today will be tracking the campaign in French.
Instead of the national anthem’s “aux armes citoyens!”, let us “aux urnes citoyens!”
*”To the ballot boxes citizens!”
Lord Clarkeltine of EUphoromania, in a minor speech to Moonshine News 24 this afternoon, said that the case for the EEUUGGHH! needed to be made more vigorously, decisively, forcefully and adverbially.
People say that the EEUUGGH! is an undemocratic and bureaucratic monstrosity, said Lord Clarkeltine, which is robbing the people of Europe and enmeshing them in a web of regulatory guff, and threatening to drive them back to a new dark age of economic slump and third class status, just so that a corrupt elite of EEUUGGHH!rocrats can eat free lunches for ever and live in big houses in the countryside. They say that the EEUUGGHH! will end a thousand years of Britain’s history as a sovereign nation. They say that the EEUUGGHH! is a pathetic attempt to replace the USA as the top world power which threatens to bankrupt everybody. They say that the EEUUGGHH! should be learning from the recent free market inspired progress of India and China, but is instead making a new EUSSRGGHH! in the Heart of Europe.
I will answer these claims firmly and decisively, vigorously and forcefully answering myth with fact, fantasy with reality, vicious xenophobic mudslinging with cool, clean, clear Vichy Water. No it isn’t. No it won’t. No it shouldn’t. It’s jolly nice. And we must say this again and again, time after time, repeatedly and repeatedly. The case for the EEUUGGHH! needs to be made eloquently and forcefully, decisively and realistically, realistically and persuasively, persuasively, and forcefully, and thisly, thatly and theotherly.
Asked why nobody was explaining why the EEUUGGHH! is nice and not nasty, Lord Clarkeltine was adamantly adamant:
I blame the Prime Minister. He promised us that he would con everyone about the EEUUGGHH! but he hasn’t done it. Lying bastard. The Prime Minister can explain anything. Why hasn’t he explained that the EEUUGGHH! is good? Obviously I could, but I’m too grand. The Prime Minister is ordinary. He should do it.
But what about when the EEUUGGHH! does stupid things? → Continue reading: Clarkeltine calls on PM to make case for British involvement in EEUUGGHH!
It takes a lot to make me doubt the benefits of the free movement of people, money, ideas, goods and services. But a new report published by the Centre for the New Europe raises some questions about parallel trade in the European Union.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Stephen Pollard explains the harm that can be caused by the re-exporting of pharmaceuticals from a country such as Spain, where regulated prices are low, sometimes under different labels and with inaccurate expiry dates, to countries where prices are regulated higher, such as Germany and the UK.
Until now my own view has been so what?
If a company sells products in two countries at different prices then an entrepreneurial opportunity may exist for traders to exploit. Demand in the cheaper country goes up, pushing up prices there, and supply increases in the more expensive country, pushing prices down. We may not see equal prices everywhere because there may be other factors affecting costs: land prices, distance, demographic differences, even the cultural acceptability of using medication. But with price controls in the various countries, the market process is subverted: increased demand in Spain does not lead to higher prices and increased supply does not produce lower prices in Germany (except possibly in the ‘informal sector’).
The EU appears to be promoting the compulsion to sell the same product everywhere in the EU, which is a violation of a person’s right to choose to sell or not. So what I would at first glance dismiss as special pleading by a corporate lobby turns out to be an anomaly. The CNE estimates that more than 3 people could be dying every two hours as a result of these regulations.
If the EU really wants freer trade, it should start by challenging the price control systems of its own member states.
Imagine the European People’s Democratic Front.
Imagine their first press release…
We, the people of Europe, hold the following truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Unfortunately, we don’t consent to a junket-ocracy, which is what the proposed EU will be.
As such, we undertake to occupy and subvert any referendum in Luxembourg, a country with a conveniently tiny voting population of less than 350,000. One residential mailing address (with 50,000 registered residents) later, and the constitution will be consigned, where it belongs, to the dustbin of history.
Naw, it could never happen…
SlowJoe
Our Glorious Leader is seeking the Holy Grail of truth:
The political debate over the new EU constitution will be a “battle between reality and myth”, Tony Blair has said.
For sure, but from which side of the battlefield is Mr Blair going to lead his charge? The massed ranks of reality or the dark legions of myth? Successive British governments have spent the last four decades lying like tinkers over the European Union, so I think it rather optimistic to expect any defections to the forces of light at this late stage.
For genuine reality-seekers, there is the EU Referendum Blog:
Mr Blair would be very pleased to know that we started the battle between myth and reality some time ago. We have been collecting, analyzing and disproving EU Myths and we intend to go on with that task. As soon as there is a round dozen, we shall send Mr Blair a copy of the collection in either electronic of printed format. We think he might find it useful.
I think he may consign it to the shredder. However, I expect the stout yeomen at the EU Referendum Blog will make their findings available to the rest of us in early course.
I cannot recommend the EU Referendum Blog highly enough. They dissect and analyse the absurdities and the cant of the European Union in meticulous and compelling detail. Right now, it is the most important blog in Britain (after Samizdata, of course!).
David Smith, the economics editor for the Sunday Times, has a splendid article on his personal blog, Economics UK, about why the Eurosceptic approach is the economically rational one.
Britain’s unemployment rate, on a comparable basis, is 4.8%, against 9.4% in France and 9.8% in Germany. Unemployment stands at under half the EU average. Per capita gross domestic product in Britain, according to a new report from Capital Economics, is higher at $30,200 (£16,440), than Germany’s $29,200 or France’s $28,500.
The economic momentum is with us. Britain has been growing continuously for 12 years, during which time other EU countries have suffered at least one recession and in some cases two. The sick man of Europe has made a remarkable recovery.
Of course the economic argument for Britain being in the EU (as opposed to some EFTA-like agreement) was always tosh. Switzerland anyone? It is now highly visible tosh.
Here on Samizdata.net we may decry the regulatory idiocy of the Labour government but clearly things are even worse in Euroland, and at least if more sovereignty is maintained at the UK level, more of the damage can be undone at the UK level rather than locked in by remote stasis oriented Europe wide institutions. All the EU has to offer is corruption, stagnation and regulation. No thanks.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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