Tag Archives: constitution

They also serve… but don’t count?

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Ladies and gentlemen, today’s blog is dedicated to those who cannot make a difference to the general election today.

I’m not talking about people that did not register (their fault). 
Nor those who choose not to use the vote that others fought and died for them to have (and this debt is particularly great for women – yes, I would have been a suffragette). 
I’m not even talking about those in safe seats (after all, if enough votes are there percentage-wise nationally then it should be impossible to claim a mandate that ignores popular support for voting reform). 
And I’m not going to write more than this sentence about the scandal of our service personnel overseas who accidentally found themselves disenfranchised while on active service.

Today’s post does concern people who are effectively serving the interests of their country, but who are also exercising their rights as citizens of this country.  Today there are thousands of British people abroad, in other Member States of the European Union, who, because they have been abroad for more than 5 years have lost their right to vote in UK general elections.

The official explanation is that after 5 years – and it used to be 10 years – they are not sufficiently connected to the situation in this country.  And if they are so attached to living elsewhere, they can always apply to be citizens of the country where they are resident instead.

I can see that there might be something in this argument if you have, say, moved your entire family from Luton to a small village in Pakistan (although there are of course villages there where you can spend pounds). To move back to the EU for a moment, I can see that this might apply if you are living it up in the Costa del wossit, speaking English loudly at the locals and reading the Daily Mail.

But if you are a Brit directly employed by the EU institutions, the idea that you are that disconnected is… just weird.
Don’t get me wrong – on my return from Brussels I seriously considered (for about 5 minutes) a mini-memoir on recovering from expat life to be called “saying merci to London bus drivers”.
But living in Brussels, I was still intimately connected to the UK.  I not only travelled home for work, and for family, I watched the BBC (proper British BBC channels, not BBC World and BBC Prime), listened to Radio 4 in the mornings, shopped at H&M and Zara – and some people even had Sky (shh!)
Nothing about my life there made me particularly want to stop being British to become a Belgian national.
But that’s also a very odd suggestion for people who are actually engaged in one level of the UK’s governance (note that’s governance, not government, euroconspiracy theorists), just as if they were a public servant in local government or civil servant. 
The irony is that nationals from other EU countries can actually work in the UK civil service (except the Foreign Office, where they can only really be locally engaged at post).  For them, most of their governments allow them to vote – so they are not disenfranchised by living here.
But while we pride ourselves on being the cradle of democracy it actually seems that our starting point is not being expansive with access to the vote. 
Add to this the vagueries of a First Past the Post and the lack of a written constitution (where, watching Channel 4 news last night it looks as if either Cabinet Office guidance or the visceral right wing press will decide the way in which we get a new Prime Minister in the case of a hung parliament) and you begin to understand why no politician seems to care about those being left out while undertaking a role in public service at one of the UK’s constitutional political levels. 
So many of us don’t understand our political set-up and the potential wider implications of disenfranchising the Brits within it in the EU institutions, which help give it legitimacy (because there are Brits, who know and understand the UK in each of the institutions). 
Ignoring them gives succour to the europhobic idea that such people are somehow in it for themselves or traitors.  And that sort of rubbish denies us our right to see the EU as ours, just as much as it is French, Dutch, Portuguese or Estonian.   

But don’t hold your breath for this to be resolved.  No government can be expected to be motivated to change legislation for just a few thousand people, and the fact that they work in the EU institutions is hardly likely to motivate a great degree of sympathy.  Unless those that would benefit from the re-enfranchisement of the Costa Blanca expats might change it to get that extra support.

If you can vote, I hope you did.  On the Voltaire principle of course.

What’s the politics equivalent of CofE?

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When the census was published in 2001, the big story was the religion box and the internet rumours about how if enough people put Jedi as their religion it had to be “officially recognised”. Absolute rubbish of course, but nevertheless 390,000 people said that they were Jedi’s leading to this rather fab report title on the ONS website…
37.3 million of the 53 million respondents to the census gave their religion as “Christian”.  Individual denominations were not specified, nor was there any breakdown between practising and non-practising because the census records the label that people choose for themselves.

Just about anyone you ask will tell you that practically no one goes to church on a Sunday (actually it’s more people than go to football matches each week, but no one’s saying that football’s on it’s way out and the stadiums should be converted into bijou residences, are they?) 
And indeed speculation at the time was that many people that had said that had done so out of habit or tradition - that they were not really Christian other than for hatches, matches and dispatches, and that many people would’ve preferred to put ”C of E” rather than Christian in any case becuase it conveys a sort of equivocal, half-hearted, keeping the door ajar approach rather than a total immersion.

I suspect that actually there’s something very British about this sort of attitude.  Andrew Marr pointed out in his excellent series “The Making of Modern Britain” that what probably saved the UK from Oswald Mosely’s fascism was the British sense of humour, that we don’t commit too lightly or take things too seriously (look how long Jedward managed to stay in the X Factor if you need a more trivial example). 
CofE means: of all the faiths that I’m not currently practising, this is the one whose service I didn’t go to on Sunday… 
If that’s true, I guess they were the people that would’ve found my last three churches (TBT at Christchurch Mayfair, Holy Trinity Brussels and St Mark’s Battersea) a bit “too much”, not CofE in the sense they mean it. But I digress.

So I’ve just found this excellent post over at Sharpe’s Opinion, which sets out in a short, neat way something I’ve thought a bit about for some time. 

Political party membership is falling in the UK, and I think that part of the problem is that to join a political party, you need to feel that you subscribe to all of a diverse range of policies (and pay for the privelege of saying that you do so).
Actually I remember my politics teacher at school saying exactly that- that she had never signed up to a political party because she could not support the whole message of any of them. And she was one of the cleverest people I knew (Miss Pickles, you were a legend!  But as she was a sit-up-and-beg-bicycling, bun-wearing non-TV watcher I’m not honestly expecting to be able to find anything online from her to hyperlink to other than this link to the school…)

So you might be someone that thinks marriage is the best thing for encouraging families to stay together and that there should be tax breaks to encourage this, but pro-European. 
Or you might favour positive action in recruitment for women, disabled people and minority groups, but strongly in favour of grammar schools as the best way to help bright children from disadvantaged backgrounds be socially mobile. 
Or you might be in favour of local income tax but own a house worth over £2 million.
(Just to clarify this is not me we’re talking about in these examples - I don’t even own a house!). 
In each case, your two interests would conflict with two of the few clear policies espoused by a major political party.

So – assuming that there’s no one policy area on which you are intending to be a single issue activist – how would you be able to “commit” enough to actually “do” something in politics to make the world a better place?
  
It’s not that easy at the moment.
If – as it seems from my paddling in the UK and EU political blogospheres- one of the main ways of getting your voice hear is through the team/ brand loyalty of a political party.  This guarantees you a pool of potential readers who will click onto or link to your blog just because you’ve got a little bird or tree or rose emblem just like theirs (or indeed a different one to theirs).  There will be lists that you can get onto, bringing more readers to debate with in the comments section and share ideas and build your knowledge. 
But these of course are the hardcore supporters, and while bloggers like Iain Dale are clear that they are not official party mouthpieces, they do tend to take a my-party-right-or-no-actually-we’re-always-right type of attitude (unless on an issue where they’re personally affected in which case they try to justify both views).
And what happens if, like Charlotte Gore, you fall out of love with your party over bits of what they stand for? 
It’s a bit like a religion isn’t it?  But while exegesis or midrash are “allowed” in some religious circles, and small group discussion is thought to help you understand and deepen your faith, there will always be some people who are happy with the simple faith version, looking for an easy label and willing to say “C of E” and get back to mowing the lawn without trying to go into what it means and why.  And indeed there will always be some people within the faith that don’t want you to do more than parrot back received wisdom – could that be said to be the case for political parties too, as in “we have clever people to do the thinking and they’ve come up with this, take it or leave it?”

So can anything be done to make this better?
Not clear.  Experiments like Jury Team tried to overcome the political party system, but the polling at the 2009 European elections for their independent candidates was hardly spectacular. 
Esther Rantzen might be trying to use her celebrity in a Martin Bell-like manner to stand against a politician whose morals she disagrees with, but she’s not exactly standing on a platform of anything that people can sign up to positively, merely that she’s been known in the past as a consumer champion and is not the sitting candidate.
I suspect that actually a different electoral system allowing for coalition politics might be part of the solution. 
Then, I don’t know, pro-European Tories could be free to praise the benefits of the EU to the rooftops, Labour supporters that think that an insurance-based healthcare system might actually be better than the current NHS, and Lib Dems who think that students should pay tuition fees would all be free to say what they think without fear of losing the whip or never getting on in their party and therefore never making it to the front benches/ government. 
Maybe the way to avoid groupthink and to really stimulate new ideas is to have lots of different groups suggesting them.  And while I guess there’s a Pythonesque risk of ending up with the Judean People’s Front/ People’s Front of Judea, at least it would be debate out in the open rather than manifestos out the front but little black books and the like behind the scenes.

Of course which ever party forms a government via which ever political system, I’m sure they’ll do their best to be a good govenment.  But as the old saying goes, it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in. 
I guess there might be a lot of people out there wondering which is the “C of E” option on the ballot papers…

Enlightened Euroscepticism requires the enlightenment bit…

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eu with light

Henry Porter in the Observer yesterday talked about enlightened Euroscepticism.
His argument would be easier to accept if he hadn’t confused the European Court of Human Rights and its ruling on the display of crucifixes in Italian schools with the EU and standardisation.
He says “the crucifix is none of the EU’s business” and he is right.  It isn’t and wasn’t.
(Even if the EU is about the accede to ECHR).

He talks about the the appointment of a President of the Council in these terms: “the point is that the coronation will take place without the involvement of the people at the very moment when Europe marks the most significant and peaceful revolution in history”.  This makes me feel unspeakably angry for a number of reasons:
i) appointing a Council President is not a coronation – Henry Porter has either bought the lie or has not actually bothered to do more that read the UK press coverage of the role;
ii)  there’s a number of Presidents in the European context (Commission and European Parliament Presidents already exist).  Each heads an EU institution, each has a specific role in the overall EU institutional and decision-making process.  It seems unlikely that they would respond positively to a huge swing of power and influence towards the role of the Council (one of the EP’s favourite experssions is “inter-institutional balance”).  So I would expect that the postholders would go some way towards keeping a new “upstart” President in his or her place if they start seeing themselves in a more monarchistic light;
iii) Electing a President of the Council would be rather like directly electing a Nancy Pelosi type figure – charismatic, known internationally but more influential than powerful so how many people would bother to turn out.  As far as I can see, a directly elected by the EU populace President could not be simply a President of the Council.
iv) to invoke the anniversary of being 20 years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall to imbue the declaration that it is a coronation with added significance as if it is the installation of an absolutist monarchy over all EU Member States, with echoes of totalitarianism is insulting to the reader, to common sense and to the memory of that incredible event.  

Look – there was a chance, in the Constitutional Treaty and then in the Lisbon Treaty to have a directly-elected President of the EU.  But the Member State governments, who agree a text and then seek ratification in their own countries depending on the system that they use for this sort of process (parliamentary approval or public referendum), didn’t go for that.  They agreed to a lesser role, in one of the three main institutions rather than sitting above them all and hardly a symbol of superstatehood. 
The constant assertion that the role is the supreme leader role needs to be challenged whenever it is made – that is an argument that has already been overcome. 
Why can’t sceptics accept that what they’ve got is already a victory? Oh yes. Because we’ve forgotten what scepticism means!
As Julien Frisch said in his tongue-in-cheek guide to becoming a successful Euroblogger, it seems to be generally assumed that the world is divided into “Federalists” that are pro-European, and sceptics/ realists that are anti-EU. 
I would argue – as would Julien, Jon Worth, Nosemonkey and a host of other Eurobloggers that enlightened scepticism is actually the position that we all seem to hold: we support the concept of the EU but don’t believe it necessarily operates in the ideal way. 
We may not have a shared view over how and what it should do things differently, but the sooner we in the UK come to terms with the idea that being sceptical about something is not the same as being hostile to it, and that you can be broadly favouable towards something in cencept as well as sceptical about its execeution then the more measured, sensible and ulitimately effective and constructive a debate we can have.
So Henry Porter is right: “scepticism is not about being a little England Tory or any of the other nonsense spouted by French Euro-enthusiasts last week; it is sounding a note of caution, reserving judgement and not being in the interests of the common good”. 
The behaviours the French Europe Minister described would certainly not be “sceptical” behaviours if we are using the word properly.
I would add that a decent dash of scepticism is vital to get an approach to life verging on “everything in moderation”. 
Henry Porter is also right that people have to take responsibility and that the role of the people in a democracy is something that should not ignored.

But detail matters too.  And how can the people take informed decsions when they’re given distorted pictures on which to form their views?
So please – journalists, subs, editors, proprietors.  We understand that your first job is to write stories that sell papers or get ratings.  This is not always completely compatible with accuracy.  
And sometimes, as I would hope is the case with Henry Porter’s article, it may be uninformed error rather than deliberate innacuracy that leds to this sort of rant from bloggers.
But democracy itself is affected by what you say, what you publish (you’ve even boasted about this in the past e.g. “It was the Sun wot won it”).  You owe it to your readers to act responsibly. And the occasional full article correction, rather than burying corrections away near the letters page or just not bothering would really be a start.        

Update: excellent guide to the various Councils now available on Nosemonkey’s EUtopia blog. Fab stuff indeed.

A sense of sovereignty…

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Ok, so there’s not going to be a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in the UK.
The Czech President has signed, ratifying the Lisbon Treaty and bringing into force the treaty over which there have been so many statements, bits of information and misinformation and more proposterous headlines in our press than even I could have imagined.

I can’t parody them well enough after a long day at work, (but who needs parody when you’ve got “Signed. Sealed. Delivered. Up Yours” at the Sun and “Britain: the end” on the Express). You’ll just have to read Nosemonkey’s Tweets, now gathered together in one place to get a sense of what’s being said.
The Q&A on the Sun’s website informs readers that “the aim of the Treaty is to build a federal united states of Europe” – must be a different Treaty from the one I read then.  The Daily Telegraph talks about more British powers being “surrendered to Brussels” but doesn’t directly cite any and instead offers this:

Daniel Hannan, a Tory MEP and leading Euro-sceptic said the signing was a step towards a European super-state. “The boot continues to stamp on the human face,” he said.

The Daily Telegraph also says that “one of the most visible changes the treaty makes is the creation of a new permanent president for the EU, who will chair European summits and set the union’s agenda”. 
Again with the President of the EU thing! 
The EU is awash with Presidents: President of the European Commission (Jose Manuel Barroso), President of the European Parliament (Jerzy Buzek) and this role, President of the Council.  This is not a Napoleonic high ruler of all Europe role but, as the Telegraph itself sets out, a role for chairing summits and setting the agenda (i.e. the work programme).  It’s likely also to have some overlap with the “Foreign Minister” (actually the High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy) and therefore have a “world stage” role.  But we’re not about to be ruled from Brussels with the President’s face on our Euro banknotes…

Oh what’s the use?  When that’s the quality of the information being given out, how are we ever supposed to have an informed debate in the UK?

I used to teach constitutional politics to people who really ought to understand it, but often really didn’t. 
I found the most effective way to bring the key points home was to run a constitutional quiz, with an element of competition between “teams” within the group, and a ridiculous prize (a handful of boiled sweets or losing team to buy winning teams in the bar that night).  I’m particularly missing the chance to teach the big constitutional change that’s been promised today.

Not completion of reform of the House of Lords – it seems that, with talk of Kirsty Allsop and others becoming new peers if the Conservatives win the next election, the chance of signing up sympathetic names with a recognised expertise is too attractive to an incoming government for any swift promise of reform. 
Actually, the idea of short-term peers appointed for one parliamentary term for a specific task rather than for life, while a big change constitutionally, is potentially quite attractive as a way of getting some real expertise into parliament without requiring them to be elected to a constituency (a system by which if we get expertise its incidental to being a consituency representative rather than by design).

No, David Cameron’s speech on Europe today was actually very radical.
Not the defensiveness on dropping the pledge on a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty – it’s been obvious for a while that that was going to come because, as he said, holding a referendum on a(n amending) treaty that has already passed into European law is a pointless exercise and most governments don’t want to use up all of their international negotiating capital on a big dramatic but ultimately futile gesture. 
The interpretations of the UK constitutional settlement are new, and definitely interesting. 

There are indeed some changes coming in the Lisbon Treaty – Ralf Grahn’s Grahnlaw blog sets these out comprehensively  and Euractiv does the same for the layperson- but its the changes proposed in today’s speech that I want to look at from the constitutional side.
Cameron proposes three UK constitutional changes:
1) a referendum lock, to require referenda on any future Treaties, which all parties would pledge never to overturn;
2) a sovereignty Bill, on which more below; and
3) a block on the use of “ratchet clauses” (known as “passerelle” clauses elsewhere in Europe) that would allow extension of QMV to areas on which there are currently national vetoes, without the backing of a vote in the UK parliament. 

David Cameron says

“if we win the next election, we will amend the European Communities Act 1972 to prohibit, by law, the transfer of power to the EU without a referendum.  And that will cover not just any future treaties like Lisbon, but any future attempt to take Britain into the euro.  We will give the British people a referendum lock to which only they should hold the key – a commitment very similar to that in Ireland”.  
“It is not politicians’ power to give away – it belongs to the people.  So at the General Election, we will challenge the other political parties to accept the referendum lock and pledge never to reverse it”. 

Three ideas to think through here:
I’m dubious about the idea of a “pledge never to reverse it”.  I guess such a pledge could have no weight in law, because in the UK we have a principle that no parliament can bind another – this a key point of our parliamentary democracy.  In that case, the only weight of such a pledge would be in the infamous court of public opinion.
Secondly, up until now, we’ve also had another point of parliamentary democracy that we are a representative democracy – we elect representatives to take decisions on our behalf and hold them to account through elections.
And thirdly, a quick aside if I can: I’m not a constitutional lawyer, but I’d be interested in a view on this one… the thing about the European Communities Act is that it is effectively a piece of the UK’s constitution.  I mentioned that we have a tradition in UK politics that no parliament can bind any future parliament.  Just like any other piece of UK legislation, the ECA could be repealed at any time.  Until now, you can speculate that would’ve taken the UK out of the EU (although of course there would’ve been a whole load of further work) if a future government have , but now there’s a clear procedure for so doing, an “exit clause”.   Actually, I’ve just heard Chris Bryant, the Europe Minister, say that. So it must be right.
Ooh – one more, having just heard William Hague on BBC Newsnight – why wouldn’t a referendum lock be triggered by accession of a new Member State?  This was explicitly excluded in the interview just now, but given that accession of, say, a big new Member State like Turkey would change the relative power of the UK in the EU – so why would that not be automatically subject to the referendum trigger?

The idea of a Sovreignty Bill immediately gave me a sinking feeling when I heard the term – was this yet again a “EU law must not be superior to UK law” argument of the sort that the tabloid press raised when the Lisbon Treaty was drafted to put into the text of the Treaty something that’s been case law since before the UK joined the EEC (the German courts tried to argue that their Constitution came above everything else, but actually tried to use this principle to block the single market – ironically one of the elements of the EU that is most acceptable to the UK eurosceptics)?

Actually, what is described makes some sense:

Take the sovereignty of our laws.  Because we have no written constitution, unlike many other EU countries, we have no explicit legal guarantee that the last word on our laws stays in Britain.  There is therefore a danger that, over time, our courts might come to regard ultimate authority as resting with the EU.  So as well as making sure that further power cannot be handed to the EU without a referendum, we will also introduce a new law, in the form of a United Kingdom Sovereignty Bill, to make it clear that ultimate authority stays in this country, in our Parliament.  This is not about Westminster striking down individual items of EU legislation.  It is about an assurance that the final word on our laws is here in Britain.  It would simply put Britain on a par with Germany, where the German Constitutional Court has consistently upheld – including most recently on the Lisbon treaty – that ultimate authority lies with the bodies established by the German Constitution.

Of course, what with this, the incomplete Lords reform and the idea of a British Bill of Rights, it might be clearer and more effective to establish a written constitution for the UK.  This would of course be likely to require a higher threshold for change – and that would protect citizen’s rights (and stop Councils (ab)using counter terrorism legislation to justify putting spy cameras in people’s bins).
But it seems no politician is willing to spend the political capital that could be spent pushing forward their policy agenda on a full-on tidy up of the UK’s consititutional settlement.

What about the rachet clauses?  Are they really so scary?

Furthermore, we would change the law so that any use of a ratchet clause by a future government would require full approval by Parliament.

According to the easy guide to the Lisbon Treaty (ok, Wikipedia) the treaty also allows for the changing of voting procedures without amending the EU treaties. Under this clause the European Council can, after receiving the consent of the European Parliament, vote unanimously to:

  • allow the Council of Ministers to act on the basis of qualified majority in areas where they previously had to act on the basis of unanimity. (This is not available for decisions with defence or military implications.)
  • allow for legislation to be adopted on the basis of the ordinary legislative procedure where it previously was to be adopted on the basis of a special legislative procedure.
  • A decision of the European Council to use either of these provisions can only come into effect if, six months after all national parliaments had been given notice of the decision, none object to it.

So essentially promising a full vote of parliament on the rachet clause is effectively required by the Treaty of Lisbon itself!  So that’s not actually that radical then…

If you look at the development of the EU to date, you’ll notice that there’s been a speeding up in recent years.  There was no new Treaty between 1956 and 1987 although the original 6 member states were joined by 6 new countries in that time. 
The Single European Act, in 1987, is still the most radical change to the powers of the EEC/EC/ EU that has taken place – and Thatcher thought majority voting was a price worth paying for a completed single market. 
We’ve had a huge number of new Member States (6 to 9, to 10, to 12, to 15, to 25 and now 27) and there’s always been a sense that enlarging the EU in terms of the number of Member States should be accompanied by a “deepening” of the sort of decisions taken collectively.  But I don’t think that we’re there any more.  When Lisbon was being negotiated, if you read the press reports afterwards, there seemed to be a bit of a sense that the Treaty better be as good as it could because there’d probably never be a chance to develop another one. 
So I’m not clear how much use any of this is likely to be anyway?

Finally, there are also three policy areas named from which a future UK Conservative government would seek to extricate the UK:
1) social and employment policy;
2) the charter of fundamental rights, and
3) criminal justice.
I have to admit that at the moment I can’t really understand why these are so totemic.
For example, a range of questions inspired by the social and employment policy field:  I’m not clear what the damage that eminates from Europe as opposed to poor implementation and goldplating? The example cited is the NHS and the Working time Directive, but don’t tired doctors make mistakes? Why can’t the BMA find an alternative approach to training that doesn’t require such long hours that e.g. parents of small children would never be able to train? And would the extrication go wider than just the NHS or public sector?
And presumably the price for extricating the UK might take into account the fact that UK-based companies would then be able to compete against those based in other European Member States by requiring their workers to work long hours? 
Happy to try to understand more on this one if someone can explain this to me, please. 

On the Charter of Fundamental rights – forgive me, but don’t we already have most of these rights via the Human Rights Act? 
Or indeed a British Bill of Rights, were such a thing to be introduced and the HRA repealed?  
I’m not going to deconstruct the argument that appears to have been revived today on e.g. the imposition of collective argaining or the right to strike, but would suggest instead that you read this excellent summary and take into account the “national rules apply” sections of the Charter’s text.

I’m going to stop now – after all I no longer teach constitutional politics.
But, it looks like there are going to be interesting negotiations if and when there’s a change of government in the UK, especially if the story the Guardian is running right now gives a taste of the likely tone…