Tag Archives: EU

anything and everything connected to EU politics, particualrly with a UK slant

Burka bans, Brussels and bended knees

Posted on by
5


…the niqab is a feminist dilemma… and a European one…

Eurogoblin today reported that the three Presidents of the EU – Council President Van Rompuy, Commission President Barroso and Parliament President Buzek met with religious leaders from across Europe to discuss poverty and social inclusion.


Image of leaders family photo from Flickr under Creative Commons licence

What’s faith got to do with poverty and social exclusion?
While it is possible to argue that it should be the duty of all to mitigate against poverty and social exclusion, we have a choice.
Either, we say that the state should provide and by means of “fairer” or “progressive” taxation that can be spent for the good of all.
Or we say that the Big Society will provide, because as responsible citizens we should rail against and commit ourselves to the fight against poverty and social exclusion.
In most Member States the reality is somewhere between the two – the state takes some tax from us in the name of that purpose, but as it is not hypothecated we’ve no idea what percentage actually goes on these projects locally, regionally, nationally.  All we do know is that a huge number of people are homeless or do not feel themselves to be part of the wider community.
And the reality is that it is often faith groups that step into the breech.

Let me give you a small and very parochial example.
I’ve spent today at the Rare Breeds Centre – a kind of farm zoo and current home of the Tamworth Two.
This was the Ashford Baptist Church toddler group outing.  Some anonymous donations via the church and lift-sharing arranged by the ladies from the church who run the toddler group made it possible for a big group of us to go out for the day, with our packed lunches and have fun playing at the farm without having to pay for anything.
Now this may not sound like much, but the majority of people there don’t have holidays, don’t go for days out because incomes are low and costs when several children are involved just aren’t compatible.

In fact, most of the toddler groups in Ashford town centre are run by faith groups – not religious, in that we don’t require membership of a church to attend and we don’t “spout religion” at people who come.
But we do use the church hall, the organisers tend to be from one church or another and the children’s holiday club which is based around bible stories is advertised.  There’s no obligation to attend that either.  I don’t actually attend the church that runs this toddler group but I do approve of its open, inclusive approach and that it genuinely welcomes everyone, of all faiths and none.
There is a non-religious Sure Start centre, and a toddler group was started that declared that it was “an alternative to all the church-based play groups” but I can no longer find any details about it online.  The situation is a little different for play schools for pre-schoolers, not least because 12-15 hours worth of state funding is available.

That’s not to mention the soup kitchens, the event organisation, the small but helpful charitable efforts  that almost go unnoticed generally but help to keep heads above water.
So in these ways, we try to help with the physical needs of those around us.  Jesus commands us to this  - give him that asks of us our coats our shirts also.  There’s no sin in being poor – although the comments about workhouses etc. on the government’s spending cuts website suggests that some people today feel there should be.
Jesus also spends a lot of the sermon on the mount talking about the poor being blessed, the meek inheriting the Earth, everybody selling their possessions, and rich men having less than a camel-through-a-needle’s chance of entering Heaven…  Oh and for more on “the poor will always be with you”, see this link.

But surely it’s not just Christians that do this?
Of course not.  It is just noticably Christian-dominated around here – one of the things we noticed on moving here was the huge number of churches.  I’m sure in other areas of the country there are thriving synagogue toddler groups, muslim women’s get-togethers and more.

I know that charitable works are a requirement of some faiths, and that performing them is not only good for the individual but also good for the community.

But please don’t think that Christians do these things in some kind of effort to earn their place in heaven.  If you read the Bible, we don’t have seven things we have to do to (nor do we have to follow the rules of the old covenant in Leviticus), that just not the Christian position.
While some parts of the church have attempted to create structures and rules to make it easier to understand actually reading the New Testament shows how hard Jesus and the early Christians worked to say – no, that’s not ever going to be enough, God forgives you, accept it and that’s it.
And so when it comes to charity, we do these things because God himself has paid the price for the sins we have commited and we want to praise him and make his world a bit better.  going to church reminds us of this, because just like everyone else we find it hard to find time and hard to feel motivated all the time.

But you don’t have to be a person of faith to do this?
Of course not.  Humanism is after all placing the human at the centre where others place God.  But it is humankind and not the self that needs to be the centre.
And if it is hard to feel motivated without external help as a person of faith, imagine the sheer bloody self-motivation required to do it without and keep it on track and not self-serving.  It would take a stronger person than me to do that.

Is there a place for faith in the EU?
But I digress.
Does religion have a place in the EU?  Indubitably.

Look at the fuss about the Constitutional Treaty and whether there should be a reference to religion within it.

One religion?  It is indisputable that the present Europe was shaped by the Christian faith, Catholic and Protestant, and also by the enlightenment and the freedom to question (itself part of the true nature of protestantism) from which modern atheism takes its roots.

But even as a practicing Christian I’m still not sure that the Constitutional Treaty should have had a reference to this (and at the end, the Lisbon Treaty doesn’t).

I don’t think that we can always claim that all decisions taken in a state can truly reflect the ethos on which the state evolved.  To claim that we do everything in the EU on the basis of our faith/ faiths is to deny the nature of compromise by which decision-making to cover many conflicting and competing interests take place.  While it’d be great to think that all the politicians and policymakers were doing as Mark Greene suggests and remembering in their work that they are a “might policymaker for God”, I’m pretty clear that the UK expenses scandal shows that it is all too easy to forget how to do the right thing.

But the future of Europe looks multifaith rather than secular.
For all that we might try to draft rules of public engagement that exclude religion, that we might ban people in public office from actually mentioning the thing that shapes, inspires and drives them, most people across the EU have some sort of belief.
This may be in something ranging from “spirituality” and the supernatural, through humanism to the deification of science or money, to agnosticism, deism, right through to following an established faith.
Human beings bend at the knee.  This is not a design flaw.
How on earth can we expect decent policymaking if asking people to deny their fundamental belief systems?

And that brings me to the burka question…

Should women in the EU wear the niqab or the burka?
This is a European question in the sense that it is currently being asked all over Europe.

As Eurogoblin pointed out, the recent burqa ban overwhelmingly passed by the French parliament last week (335 votes to 1).
The Belgian lower house voted on a ban in April 2010 (note the handy BBC guide to different veils.
The Dutch were debating this as far back as 2006.
The Spanish parliament is also likely to start debating their own burqa ban this week.

And the UK? Immigration Minister Damian Green has said that any ban on religious clothing would be awfully “un-British”.  And he’s right.
Freedom of the individual is a very British concept and the idea that a woman might be fined as in the Netherlands for wearing something expressing their religion is distasteful.
I’m not sure I’d want to live in a UK that imposed on me whether or not I could wear a sign of my faith outwardly, and if this is a move away from the mealy mouthed illiberalism that clamped down on it through uniform policy, sudden changes to health and safety policy and statements from the NSS.
Besides, have you been to the West End in London?  This particular Nation of Shopkeepers could find itself hit in the profits if rich middle eatern visitors could not dress as the wish to shop.

So there’s no common approach.

Is the burka ban a European issue?  It seems Vivianne Reding thinks not – I hear that when asked about it, she said that this was an issue for national governments and not something that she would touch with a bargepole.

But as the Commissioner for women and equality (and fundamental rights, and justice), Commissioner Reding also needs to think about the burka as a feminist issue.
And that’s a dilemma.
On the one hand, equal rights means the right not to be subjected to men’s control, nor objectified.  Women should be able to work – or not to work – as much as they like, and so should men.  They should be able to dress as they want to dress…
Ah.
Because what if a woman want to celebrate her faith and her devotion to her God by wearing a headscarf, a veil, a chador, burka, hijab, niqab etc. ?
What if she’s not being oppressed into it by bullying male members of her family or her husband but has chosen freely and in full knowledge of the implications of what she is doing both religious and worldly to separate herself from the world?
Surely fighting for a woman’s right to self-determinism extends to her right to cover up if she wishes too?

So these are hugely tricky issues.  But we don’t live in the lyrics of “Imagine”, we live in the real world in all its messy, diverse glory.
God inspired, uplifts and makes us more than we can be by ourselves.  Europe needs that to flourish, no matter what flavour that inspiration is.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Doing the job: debating the top euroblogs?

Posted on by
5


Well, if the Waagener Edstrom list of the most influential euroblogs was designed to provoke debate, it certainly has done amongst the eurobloggers.

Jon Worth, the fifth most influential according to the list, had to invite himself to the study’s launch.
Nosemonkey, whose authoritative, informative blog is regularly nominated for best blog awards finished outside the top 10.

Eurogoblin, Mathew’s Tagsmanian Devil(top 20!) and EURoman (a site I’ll admit I’d never heard of before today have all critiqued in a lot of detail.

For me, a few thoughts:
1)  the USA is being held up as the model against which to judge how influential the EU blogosphere is – but is that a realistic comparison?
Is it actually what people writing euroblogs are aspiring to?

Importing a methodology used in the US and the comparisons with the US blogging scene as if this something that the Euroblogosphere should be aspired to become like may also have added to the distortionary effect.

The EU is not the USA, and I don’t think it’s right to say one if  ahead of or more advance than the other.  The US doesn’t have the multicultural, multilingual diversity of the EU at its federal level, so while an English-language blog in the US might have a widespread influence, one in Brussels might have a lesser impact, similarly one in French, German etc. as the potential audience reading in that language for interest and pleasure is smaller.
Plus with Jon Worth announcing he’s moving to London, Nosemonkey in London, ghost blogger Julien Frisch until recently in Germany, Joe Litobarski in Italy, is labelling it  the “Brussels Blog” survey really getting the full EU blogging picture?  I agree with EURoman Christian, local interpretation of EU stories is definitely an important factor.

I’m also not convinced that there has to be “a purpose”- the best euroblogs from my reading perspective are those where the author’s found something of interest and run with it because they are interested, not because they are paid to do so, or are single purpose.

Eurobloggers that are most interesting to me tend to be amateur rather than professional journalists – that’s why the alternative views can prevail.

While the excellent bloggingportal team tries to galvinise us into something more coherent, the actual effect has been a bit like trying to herd cats.

2)  What are Eurobloggers writing about?
While in the US the Washington world is probably exciting enough to fully occupy bloggers, most EU blogs I read seem to also have interest in other things – whether that’s Jon Worth’s sportsblog or Joe Litobarski’s musings from Ethiopia.

I’m an occasional euroblogger, who, through a combination of not-covering-some-things-because-I-value-my-job and blogging on things other than the EU (primarily parenting, feminism, local issues and faith), is never going to make it high up the Euroblog rankings.

That’s fine by me – I was flattered to even be listed in Fleishman-Hillard’s citizen blogs list for just that reason-

4) Where did the blogs under consideration come from?
While I understand that my own blog’s too random to fit the primarily EU-focussed criteria, I’m a bit surprised that none of the blogs of the EU girl geeks appear even to have been in consideration: where was Europasionaria? Euonym? Lino the Rhino?
Or did I just miss the longlist of blogs that were considered?

3) Twitter is where it’s at…
While eurobloggers do try to take time to comment on each other’s blogs, as Eurogoblin points out, it’s Twitter where we really talk to each other, share information, views, debate and discuss.  And all in 140 characters.
The last great Euroblogger meet-up online was hosted on Skype in the end, with Twitter and Googlewave elements.
So we have to ask – to shape debate in social media- whether our individual blogs are the place where that’s done most effectively is a debate for another day…

The Brussels Lost Generation

Posted on by
2

There’s something striking about the British Foreign Secretary’s speech today.  While the idea that this is one of a series of “repositioning” speeches is interesting, and the wider world politics are interesting, for EU geeks (and there’s a lot of us), here’s the interesting section…

we are determined as a Government to give due weight to Britain’s membership of the EU and other multilateral institutions.
It is mystifying to us that the previous Government failed to give due weight to the development of British influence in the EU. They neglected to ensure that sufficient numbers of bright British officials entered EU institutions, and so we are now facing a generation gap developing in the British presence in parts of the EU where early decisions and early drafting take place.
Since 2007, the number of British officials at Director level in the European Commission has fallen by a third and we have 205 fewer British officials in the Commission overall.
The UK represents 12% of the EU population. Despite that, at entry-level policy grades in the European Commission, the UK represents 1.8% of the staff, well under the level of other major EU member states.
So the idea that the last government was serious about advancing Britain’s influence in Europe turns out to be an unsustainable fiction. Consoling themselves with the illusion that agreeing to institutional changes desired by others gave an appearance of British centrality in the EU, they neglected to launch any new initiative to work with smaller nations and presided over a decline in the holding of key European positions by British personnel. As a new Government we are determined to put this right.

Now, it’s great news that the lack of Brits in Brussels is being acknowledged.  It is after all one reason why the European Fast Stream (EFS) has been reconstituted.
Graduates of the UK with French or German A-level (grades A-C), I’d urge you to try for this.  The EFS as an interesting way of getting EU policymaking experience in an environment where what you do actually counts.

But if there’s a gap at Director level (and there will be as the 1973 intake of Brits retire), and a shortfall of Brits overall, bringing in more Brits at ground level will mean it takes time to get them to filter through to senior roles.  And if issues like adding a language to gain a promotion are still prevalent in the coming years, then only the few will actually make those dizzy heights in any case.

It is in the spirit of genuine interest from the outside that I float a few radical suggestions I’ve come across today:
i) lobby for the UK staff already in the Commission to get key roles- other Member States are not shy about doing this, so there’s no need for the UK to be shy either.  At the moment, other than at Cabinet time, Commission contacts indicate the UK is less prominent in doing this (or just subtle?);

ii) really think about what key positions are: for example, France seems to put a lot of effort into securing Head of Legal Service jobs across the Institutions- why?  Because interpreting EU competence is a key role…

iii) think about pursuing parachutage, for example using temporary agent contracts to address the deficit in the short term.  There are quite a few UK experts with wider ranging EU experience (from UKRep to SNEs, to the UK’s last Presidency of the EU) that understand the EU’s inner workings, and, combined with their knowledge and experience of policy development and delivery at the national level too, could provide a valuable service to the EU overall until that next generation filters through.

I’ve written before about why I’m not going for the next concours.
But the problem goes much wider than just me and the husband/ mortgage/ children/ part-time issues I faced in taking that decision.

There is a lost generation of Brits – there was nearly a decade without a generalist, English language concours, and an awful lot of bright, capable and (by now) experienced Brits who missed out as the accession of ten new Member States lead to the necessary prioritisation of fonctionnaires from those countries.
Even those that passed recent concours haven’t necessarily actually found jobs at the end of it.

Surely seeking to put some of them in as temporary Heads of Unit would help sort out the problems identified in this very interesting speech?

The new Margaret Thatcher?

Posted on by
Reply

Watching the news tonight, this occurred…
One EU leader was nakedly pursuing their national interest at the press conference today.  And that leader is increasingly reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher demanding her money back.

But that leader is not David Cameron.

Cameron’s speech, however unpalatable to his host, was actually very pragmatic and sensible.
Consider an analogy put to me today. 
Say I have some friends who like skydiving.  They invite me to join in, but I decline.   And then one of them breaks her leg having jumped out that aeroplane.  Should I then have to pick up her healthcare bills, and agree to change the terms of everyone’s holiday insurance policies to do so?
 
In any case, Treaty amendment can surely not be the most popular proposal that could be made just at the moment. 
The Lisbon Treaty may not have been perfect.  Like all Treaties, now it has been ratified it needs a bit of bedding down, a bit of implementing to see how that carefully compromised document actually works in practice.
After the Convention on the Future of Europe was first convened in February 2002, it took 7 long painful years to finally get a Treaty that could be ratified by all. 
Surely the last thing anyone is likely to want is to have to reopen that process so soon? 
And you don’t have to be that interested in politics to realise that the leader of a new type of British government, a coalition only weeks in place, with an overall Eurosceptic party behind him is highly unlikely to want to risk the whole thing falling apart over Europe. 
Talking about a veto plays to Cameron’s domestic audience, true, but what he said in essence may well turn out to be what others are thinking too if they’ve been through the Treaty-making process.

As for Merckel taking a role like Thatcher, well, she does seem to be asserting an increasingly nationalistic agenda, acting unilaterally on issues that have repercussions for not just the Eurozone but the whole EU – for example the banning of shortselling yesterday.
(And the consquences of that announcement impacted more widely than that, hitting the US stock markets). 
In times past, to make a big statement like “to save the Euro we need Treaty change”, you used to get the French and German leaders together, speaking as if they were truly the heart of the EU – the Franco-German motor powering the project. 
Not this time.
Merckel was speaking as Germany, as the piggybank of Europe. 
And going it alone is very Thatcher indeed.

Is there any likelihood that Germany might actually get that chance for Treaty change?
Well according to the press, there’s already a miniature IGC planned for June (without a Convention) to sort out the European Parliament which has a bit of a mess over voting. 
If a Treaty amendment were to be opened for ”economic government” arrangements, that would presumably be the window? 
But it’s not that simple.  Change like that would mean prices would be extracted, whether CAP reform, power repatriation, a single seat for the European Parliament at Brussels… and that’s several years of negotiation, let alone vetoes and referendums.   

It may of course be the case that enough can be done without Treaty change. 
But proposals for “economic government” are likely to be contentious even if Treaty change was not a factor.  Even the spring European Council steered clear of that language, instead using “economic governance” to bee clear this is not supranational government that is under discussion. 

PS kudos to Christine LaGuarde for co-opting the phrase “we’re all in this together” in making her point to the BBC this evening.  After the seemingly far more cordiale visit to Paris yesterday, she’s talking to the British government in its own language.  Very neat.

10 random things about #myEurope

Posted on by
9

9 May is Europe Day.  No one in the UK is really likely to know or care, so (as part of the bloggingportal #myeurope blogging carnival) I want to take a few short minutes to celebrate some of the things that I love in and around Europe…

1) Europe is my continent, the place where no matter what the language spoken in the place I visit, however different it is from home in terms of weather and building style, there a sense of familiarity (working out which bit of Bratislava I’d want to live in, where I’d set up my B&B in France, whether I could take that job in Brussels etc. etc.) and a sense of interconnectedness between my history and those of the people living in the other countries near mine.  And yes I am aware that the common history is largely that of fighting each other in different combinations… so my Europe is partly about preventing future conflicts.

2) Oh wow, European food.  Yummy things.  Including but not exclusively sachertorte, Belgian chocolates, pastichio, bacon, queso de membrillo, French cheese (all of it), feta, beer, goulash, Parma ham, battered courgette flowers, crayfish, clafoutis/financier, asparagus, curries, British Beef with yorkshire pudding… I defy anyone to live in Belgium for 3 years without gaining what British diplomats call “the Brussels stone”.

3)  There’s something beautiful about countries choosing to work together for a common future, not something being imposed by an outside force.  Forgiving what has happened in the past, but not forgetting, and trying not to allow the memories that need to respected become a quest for future vengence. 
For example, Riga has an amazing museum of occupation, heartbreaking when you see the things that you have read about a thousand times that happened all across Europe and witness by those not even two generations before my own.   

4)  My B&B?  It’s a little near-retirement dream.  But I love that if I want to set up business anywhere I want to, I can.

5)  Such amazing diversity.   Not just of peoples, languages, cultural traits, but look at the geography!  From tundra and mountains to reclaimed land, lush green fields and pastures, to biblical dusty paths and scratchy bushes, coastlines, rivers and marshes, annual snow and wrong-sort-of-snow…  Flora, fauna…


 

6)  I gain a whole extra level of identity.  I feel like a kid writing my address on an envelope my house, my road, my town, my county, my country, my continent, my world, my solar system, my universe…  Being European doesn’t detract from me being British, or Kentish, or Ashfordian, it adds to it.  I’m one of nearly half a billion.  And that matters.  In a world where climate change deals are struck by the USA, India, China, South Africa and Brazil, being at the table counts, and you don’t get to be there if you’re not big. 

7)  I hardly dare mention it, but I’m going to.  If I want to buy strawberry jam in the shop down the road that was made in Spain, I know that the contents will be as safe for my child as strawberry jam that was made in East Sussex and will be lovely and fruity rather than filled with sawdust or plums-with-strawberry-flavouring.  It has to be, or they’re not allowed to sell it here.

8)  I love that it’s so easy to travel around Europe, crossing borders without tedious queuing and visas, fulfilling the quote attributed to Ernest Bevin “my policy is to be able to take a ticket at Victoria station and go anywhere I damn well please!”

9)  Despite living on an island, I grew up living closer to Calais than to London, and could see France from the beach nearest to my house… and had a friend who lived on the other coast who could see that beach from hers!

 

10)  I have posted 10 random things in a random order, some triggered by the one in front, others completely disjointed.  If I was writing this list in French in the 1960s, this would be known as a stream of consciousness list!  How fantastic would that be? Tres Marguerite Duras. And that itself brings back the memory of reading L’Amant for A-level French. Not my finest hour!


P.S. Write on My Europe Week, or link a post on your own blog, in the language of your choice. Twitter away under #MyEurope and #EuropeDay. Share your Europe.

They also serve… but don’t count?

Posted on by
1

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.

Having our say in Europe – but will we get anywhere?

Posted on by
8

You may not have caught it on the main news bulletins today (though kudos to Radio 4′s World at One for covering it) but today saw the launch of the European Citizens’ Initiative. 
Despite the name, which has slight Orwellian overtones in English, the policy which was introduced under the newly in force Lisbon Treaty is actually designed to increase the direct access that citizens have to the EU level.

So what do you have to do to get your idea considered by the EU?  Well, the Treaty says you need:
- one million citizens;
- a third of EU countries represented amongst the million (so nine at the moment)..

But it’s not as simple as that.  Today’s announcement was related to the clarification of the rules that the European Commission has just launched following several months of public consultation. 
Presumably in order to stop the accusations of token representation of some countries by having one or two signed up (see the formation of the ECR Group in the European Parliament for the type of debate I’m talking about), the Commission proposes that the number of signatures from each country must be proportional to its size – “4500 for the four smallest countries up to 72,000 for the largest, Germany”.  So if I’ve got, say, 60,000 Germans in amongst my million, that may be an awful lot of individualsbut not enough to count as having representation from Germany and being able to tick off Germany as a Member State where interest has been expressed?
I guess what’s trying to be overcome is the idea of having 995,000 French farmers, or British hunt supporters or Greek public servants or Danish students or whatever on board with the remaining 5000 made up from a ragbag of other people who think the idea is interesting.
But is there anything so wrong with that?
Inside a country, if one part of that country felt so strongly about a specific issue, would it really escape discussion at the national level…?  Or are other Member States with more federal structures (that’s federal as it’s really meant, with decision-making at clearly defined and subsidiarity-applied levels, rather than the perjorative sense in which UK Eurosceptics tend to use it) immune to discussion issues at the wrong level of decision-making?  
And in the internet age, it might actually be quite straight forward to get 4500 Cypriots interested in something (via Twitter, Facebook etc.) whereas 72,000 is a big ask for anyone – this seems a small country bias? 

The Commission is proposing quite a sensible mid-way stage – “once at least 300 000 signatures from citizens in a minimum of three countries have been collected, the petition will be registered with the Commission and a decision made on whether the initiative falls within the scope of its powers. From that point, the organisers would have one year to provide the outstanding signatures”.
As Michael Mann pointed out on the radio earlier “if a million people called for Mickey Mouse to be President, we couldn’t do that as it is not within the Commission’s powers“. Quite.

The antifraud measures are likely to be the ones that cause sensitivity to this idea in the UK.  We’re used to having to provide our names and addresses for petitions but without a compulsory identity card we are unlikely to have passports on us and as for handing over our National insurance number for a petition… I feel slightly incredulous!  Expect to see headlines about the huge potential for identify fraud with this proposal, ironically just what the Commission are striving to avoid.  If anyone publishes anything on this at all in the UK, of course.

The “who’s the money?” point is a good one though.  It would not be good if this worthy intitiative became an exercise in big companies buying influence.

Finally, once all of the signatures are in place and the request meets the criteria (another is apparently being in the spirit of the EU so I guess that stops one million “federalists” fed up with UK recalcitrants getting together a proposal to kick us out? :) ), then the European Commission has four months “to investigate and decide to pursue legislation, launch a study or forgo further action. It will need to explain its decision publicly“. 
At this point there’s a new feature of decision-making.  Although the Commission is the only Institution with the right of intiative, the idea is that the “proposed rules must be approved by parliament and council”.  This is not the case if, for example, the Commission has some ideas in a White Paper – those might be presented at a Council but they don’t have to be endorsed (I’m happy to be corrected on this!)

I really want to believe that the Commission are going to get some initiatives under this scheme “potentially as early as 2011″.  After all the requirements are setting the bar quite high.
And I hope that there will be a technological level of support for this initiative – will there be a section of the Europa set up to enable this?
My starting point for this is the “petitions” section of the Number Ten website, the UK Prime Minister’s website named after the official residence.  While most petitions tend to get an answer along the lines of “yes the government recognises that this is an important issue and is doing x about it/  which is related to it/ which is nothing really to do with it but the civil servants really hope you won’t notice”, it is important that each petition is on there from a starting point of no one except the originator being signed up to it, and can grow virally (through promotion on subject related internet forums or social media campaigns, mentions in the press, friends telling each other, bake sales etc. etc.) and that the gvernment is seen to be facilitating this.

So that’s the challenge for the Commission now – it needs to be facilitating this process and making it as easy as possible for citizens to meet the criteria, and to be seen to be doing so.  If it succeeds, then it can genuinely say that it is bringing Europe closer to the people.  If not, then the EU remains that thing over there that imposes things on us in the popular perception.  That’s not a challenge I’d want to see end in failure.

Brussels mon amour

Posted on by
1

 photo from fab site http://bars.blogueur.info

Have just had a day working in Brussels for the first time since February 2007. 

The sun was shining, it was warm, I even managed to squeeze in a swift coffee in a street cafe (cheers Jon!) before dashing to the Eurostar that takes me practically door to door and just about got me back in time not to be fined by the nursery.

There are many things that annoyed me about Brussels when I lived there – from the randomness of the cobblestones which procluded heels on all but the most important occasions, to not being able to buy stamps anywhere but the post office which was never open when I was free to go, to the need to return to the UK to go “proper clothes shopping”,  the water supply being so cleaned with chlorine to meet water quality standards that it upset my skin (and my husband’s), to the weeks of delay to get cable TV fitted…

But I loved the restaurants, the people I met including some of my truest and best friends, the real sense of community in being an expat, the sort of apartments available on a reasonable budget when compared to London, the way that TVBrussel kind of made sense after midnight even though it broadcasts in a language I don’t speak, the sort of jobs I did when I lived there – which I’d find nigh on impossible to do these days when I work part-time.

Oh Brussels I’ve missed you. 
Even though your metro system got so messed up earlier that I almost missed my train.

I really enjoyed the meeting I was at too – a combination of Brussels residents and interlopers like me, but conducted in a proper Brussels Eurocrat manner, recognition of each other’s expertise, positivity, genuine seeking of a conciliation and compromise helping each as much as possible to get what they were looking for. 
It can be hard to explain sometimes why that is a good thing when to many people here in the UK compromise is a dirty word, and the word Brussels is itself anathema.

Life in the UK is good, familiar, I know (roughly) how to handle local bureaucracy (probles here tend to be less with public authorities, more with the private companies that – oh, I’ll post about Northern Rock another day…). 
But life in Brussels was fun, oddly exotic and dipping my toes in the EU politics pool again today just reminded me why I enjoyed it so much before.  Perhaps more so now, having had a break from it all.

A recurring theme of my personal reflection blog posts is that I have a life with a husband and a son and a house and a job and that these things are good and I would not have it otherwise.  Life in Brussels now would not be the same as it was for us before as we’re parents and the hard bits of life (which to be honest are mainly logistical!) would still be with us. 
And -as the second earner- the idea of upping sticks to Brussels because I might want to is just not realistic.

But today, just for a minute, I felt properly like EU me again. And I liked it.

I wonder whether our toddler would be good at Flemish?        

PS apologies for the stream of consciousness style, but the title should’ve been a warning :)

What the EU has done for women…

Posted on by
2

                                           

Have you ever tried to find a list of what the EU has done for women?
It’s International Women’s Day today… while Sarah Brown (in this odd unelected First Lady-type position that appears to have been evolving for Prime Ministers’ wives which rankles a little when celebrating issues of women’s equality) is leading the UK events for IWD, CSW (the UN Commission on the Status of Women) is meeting in New York, and the EU is… well, let’s see.

Did you know that the European Commission had launched a Women’s Charter on Friday, in advance of IWD?  Here it is.
The Charter was accompanied by a Eurobarometer survey on gender equality. Interesting for me was that, while the UK participants surveyed shared a common set of priorities with the other EU Member States for addressing gender equality, when asked which sort of organisation (NGO, EU institution, national government, or others) had done most for gender equality, only about 10% of Brits cited the EU institutions.
Not really surprising I suppose, given the UK ambivalence towards the EU and tendancy to simply bank any good thing that the EU does…
So I decided to try and help out and post a link to the Commission’s list of what the EU has done for women. I Googled the phrase (amazing how quickly that has become the first port of call for all information searches these days) but nothing came up from the Commission’s own website.

Actually, the best source of information has turned out to be the website of Arlene McCarthy MEP – from four years ago. So with apologies to Arlene (much of this is hers, but I’ve removed the party political commentary), here’s a quick list of what the EU has done for women:

1) Moving towards Equal Pay

  • Equal pay for women workers: this was included in the original Treaty of Rome, the first EU Treaty in 1957
    (NB this was 13 years before the UK legislation on equal pay. Given that the UK was looking at EEC membership at that point could it have been the prospect of joining the EEC that prompted the UK to adopt its legislation?)
  • Equal pay for work of equal value: despite the equal pay legislation, many companies classified jobs done by men and women differently, paying higher wages to men for doing jobs that actually required similar levels of skills. Many women since have won equal pay claims, some backdated years including school dinner ladies, hospital and factory workers.
    (Some people still seem to think that heavy lifting and digging is “worth more” than hanging out in a warm classroom with a bunch of snotty 5 year olds… despite the fact that the latter is sometimes like an exercise in germ warfare)
  • Equal rights for part-time workers, better rights for agency workers: nearly half of British women workers work part-time, four in five of the part-time workforce, and about 5 million women. In the past, many women lost out but since July 2000 part-time workers have had equal rights to pro-rata paid leave, pensions, maternity rights, access to training and other company perks and benefits.
    (Jolly good thing too. Ridiculous to assume that people are less capable and less clever if they have other responsibilities outside the workplace – unless the hidden job criteria is soul-selling and working all the hours God sends to the glory of the company?)
    And via the Agency Workers legislation, temporary workers have more clearly defined rights too (UK rules set out here).
  • Minimum wage: love it or hate it, there’s no denying that when the UK opted into the European Social Chapter the biggest winners were those on the lowest pay, for whom the basic rights it guaranteed brought about the minimum wage. This is particularly important for women – 70% of low paid British workers are women (including a disproportionate number working part-time hours) and over a million British women have since benefited.
  • Equal rights to a pension: Pensioner poverty is a real problem for women, many of whom were excluded from company pension schemes because they worked part-time or had career breaks to have children. EU laws prevent pension discrimination and guarantee equal rights for all to social security benefits.

2) Better rights for women as parents

  • Maternity rights: About 70,000 women have babies in Britain each year, and that number is growing. The EU sets a baseline of a year working for an employer in order to get maternity rights (but UK law is actually better and the directgov website has a fantastic calculator setting out the minimum requirements in the UK).
  • Parental leave: Since 2002, a new EU law means that any parent with children under 5 has the right to a minimum of 13 weeks parental leave to be taken whenever they choose over the 5 year period. That extends to 18 weeks for any parent of a disabled child under 18.
    (This is ideal if you have an ill child – though I wonder what would happen if just before a child hits 5 all parents who have not used the 13 weeks unpaid leave actually took the time to go once-in-a-lifetime travelling or similar? Seems a great opportunity, but is it even possible?)
  • Right to return to work: I take this so much for granted that the idea that this is a new element of maternity rights law is shocking. Discrimination against pregnant women is outlawed (doesn’t mean it is not still happening though) and, importantly now, particularly in the recession, a woman’s job (but not her specific post) must be held open so she can return to a post without loss of pay or status. Many older women will remember the days when getting pregnant meant losing your job (heck, there are people that remember when as a woman you had to leave the Foreign Office when you got married! And if you read any of the Jilly Cooper short stories from the 1970s you’ll see that it was a cultural expectation among the middle classes even if it wasn’t a requirement). EU laws have put paid to that.
  • Paid holidays and a shorter working week: Since 2000, workers have been given the automatic right to 4 weeks paid annual holiday, and a guaranteed at least one day off per week (which was not a given for part-time workers in sectors such as cleaning, who often only got one day off every fortnight). (How on earth do people function on less than 4 weeks holiday a year? I know it’s only 2 weeks in the USA, but when do working parents get to see their kids? And who looks after the children in the school holidays?)
    And under the Working Time Directive, employees can no longer be obliged to work more than 48 hours per week, are guaranteed breaks and night shifts are restricted to 8 hours. Despite the right to work shorter British workers work the longest hours in Europe. One in eight mothers work more than 40 hours a week, 30% of fathers more than 48 hours, taking its toll on family life.

3) Protecting women

  • Protection: the EU is working on legislation against Female Genital Mutilation, and Gender Based Violence as well as combating human trafficking (which is the fastest-growing criminal activity in comparison to other forms of organised crime).
  • International protection: by working together on relations with third countries, in EU foreign policy and within international organisations, the EU Member States can help women in developing countries too.

4) Combating the Gender Pay Gap

If you are a fan of bus campaigns, then you might have noticed the Gender Pay Gap campaign on the buses in capital cities across the EU. But what’s it all about?
One measurement of whether equality has been achieved is the gender pay gap, that is the difference between the average pay of women and the average pay of men.
The gender pay gap can be contentious when discussed with some businesses, so it needs to be remembered that it is a crude tool and the contributing factors are (in the words of the Women and Work Commission in the UK) “complex and multi-faceted”.
But if anyone tries to tell you it only exists because women take time out of the labour market to have children or to work part-time (and that part-time jobs “ought” to be lower paid as part of a lifestyle choice being made), then its worth noting that the National Equality Panel report out this year said that new graduates in the same subject from the same university experience a statistically significant gender pay gap within three years of graduation.
So the EU has also launched a gender pay gap calculator so you can measure the inequality where you work (the UK Government Equality Office has had a methodology on their website for a year).
The new Women’s Charter promises a number of measures, legislative and non-legislative, to tackle the gender pay gap – no idea what these will actually be (but it’s worth keeping an eye on this to ensure that the measures are about valuing women and men equally, because if the drive to get the headline figure down starts to become the end in itself then we could end up with daft ideas like restricting access to part-time work which would be to the detriment of women who would lose the ability to organise their family life as they would wish…)

So the EU has actually done quite a lot to the benefit of women.
And, as the Women’s Charter indicates, there’s still more that can be done.
I come from a Member State that is at the forefront of women’s equality, even if we’re a bit embarrassed to talk about it in those terms. And even here, women are still not able to live the fulfilled lives that they should be able to if we were truly free to balance our working lives and families lives as we wished without constraints forced on us by others (e.g. availability of childcare).

So a very happy International Women’s Day to you.
And, as it is a women’s day and we’re free to do things our way, an air kiss on both cheeks and a gentle hug to each and every one of you.

Open letter to Ashford Future from some new residents

Posted on by
1


Fantastic image of Ashford from North Street, copyright Iain Crump but licensed for further reuse, available at http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1142576

Dear Ashford Future

We really appreciate the role that you are playing in developing our new home town to accommodate 29,000 new households in the next 20 years.  This is a massive undertaking and we’ve now seen the overview plans that you have put forward to develop the town.  It’s good to know that there is an overall vision as so any towns see not to have one. 

We’ve not yet had a chance to read in detail the town centre plans that have apparently just been approved, but suspect that they are linked closely to the overall plan we’ve seen and on which these comments were drafted.
We don’t know whether you intend to keep consulting on individual aspects of those plans or whether you intend to give residents a chance to comment on the overall shape of the plans. 
Either way, as recently arrived resident who intend Ashford to be our home for the foreseeable future, we’d like a chance to share our views with you on some of the key elements.

Transport Links
Highspeed train – this is a fundamental in us being able to live here – commuting for even longer every day would make it almost impossible for both of us to work in London and also handle the childcare arrangements. 
Please do keep on at southeastern trains about train timings – every half hour is pretty good (a six coacher every 15 mins would be even better!), but the preview services were standing room only at some times of day and with new arrivals like us using the service daily, and at over £5000 a year, that’s a lot of money to stand at 140 mph…  Timing of the trains getting back in the evenings is frustrating too – there’s just not quite enough time to get to the nursery without being at risk of a fine. Is there any consultation or consideration of these things when timing the trains? 

We’ve read your car parking strategy.  Yep, sometimes even the X Factor or Dancing on Ice doesn’t give a thrilling enough Saturday night.  We noted that you pretty much intend to phase out town centre carparking and have Park and Rides.  Having lived in towns like that before, we’ve bought a house within walking distance to the station. Just one light against you, or traffic jam, and you’ve lost the time advantage you might’ve hoped to gain.
We noted too the comment that the station car parking needs consideration.  We’ve considered it – and again that’s why we’re moving to the town centre and not the prettier villages – the chances of parking near the station in 5 years time are looking remote.  Commuters are likely to want to live not just at Cheeseman’s Green and the like but in existing villages too – so what do you have planned for them?

We’re in favour of SmartLink.  Shiny blue buses do not of themselves a mass transit system make - and the website publicity focuses on the wrong things: the ability to buy tickets from a machine before boarding and nicely landscaped routes are not really the point when assessing whether the scheme is fit for purpose. 
As far as I can see the main questions are actually whether the tickets will be affordable (no more than a pound anywhere and with timed tickets rather than just single or return journeys), available as a season pass, on a smartcard which should be interoperable with Oyster and the rail system, the frequency, how and where exactly the dedicated bus lanes will be established, plus why, if you are intending to phase out the town centre carparks, you’ve not considered a Kennington route for SmartLink.  On this last point,  when I asked I was told that was because there was high car ownership in Kennington but as SmartLink is designed as a mass transit system and as part of the greening of Ashford, that’s a bit illogical.   

The new plans for M20 Junction 10A seem pretty good (do we really think though that it’ll allieviate traffic at Junction 10 by convincing traffic from Park Farm to join the motorway one junction further from their intended direction of travel? That’s not in line with human nature…). But the proposed lorry park, to be sited between Evegate and the substation at Sellindge really concerns us. 
Which road are you intending they use to get there?  The A20 between proposed juntion 10A and Evegate cannot cope with a lot of extra lorry traffic without disturbing the main route out of the surrounding villages, negating any time benefit that they might derive from the building of 10A. Plus the projected traffic flows for the area suggest that space for 3000 lorries would not actually allieviate Operation Stack in any case!   
And why build it there at all?  Surely the solution is to increase the size of the existing lorry parks at Ashford and at Folkestone which are surrounded by wasteland.  And if it’s cost as well as lack of space that’s the reason so many lorries end up parked around the market at Ashford, then lower the cost of using the lorry park and clamp down on the illegals – I think I recall that fines can be pursued cross-border these days?
 
New Housing
If you are going to build 29,000 new homes, there’s a serious case for making these eco-friendly.  Park Farm may be built to high eco standards and as we’ve a new build ourselves we know that the insultation etc. needs to be second to none.  We were pleased too to hear about high quality builds in Victoria Way. 

But what an opportunity this town expansion presents! 
We feel you should only be granting builders permission to build these new homes if they are truly sustainable – are you going to be requiring greywater or rainwater harvesting systems for saving water (this must surely be a priority in this drought-prone area of the world)?  What about solar panels on the houses, or possibly wind turbines? 
If you’re concerned that this would be difficult to achieve for lots of new homes individually, what about a communal requirement for each new estate or block of flats? 
Unless these things are required, we risk saddling ourselves with a huge housing stock requiring individuals to invest in a way that is difficult in a recession, but is much easier if the cost has been absorbed into the price that you can get a mortgage on.
We’re also a bit concerned at what seems to be a focus on building flats.  Who is it that Ashford is intending to attract?  What’s the future profile that is in mind here?  If we’re looking at young people that work locally, then my own family provides a good example.  My cousin and her boyfriend were school leavers with jobs locally – but they were not after a flat in the town centre when for only a little bit more they could get a house on one of the new estates, with a garden. 
Ashford has not to date been the sort of place you aspire to live in the centre of.  What is intended to attract people to live in town centre flats?  There’s precious little outdoor space, nor nice places to go out to in terms of chic little restaurants and wine bars to support this city centre approach to living. And are the flats to have parking?  If not, then there’s even or reason to require things to do in the town centre.

Update: my husband reminded me that I also meant to make a point about the need for commuter-friendly housing near the station.  If Ashford is looking to attract incomers from London, again they are unlikely to be looking for 2-bed flats. 

Charter House
Charter House is frankly an eyesore.  We’ve seen that the plans are to fill it with a mixture of residential and retail and offices.  The point is that Charter House looms in central Ashford and we’re not clear what could be done to make it look better.  Tall buildings are not a problem per se, but Charter House is surely beyond redemption.  Why not find someone to flatten it and build something inspiring, glass and steel?

Green Spaces
The thing is, we’ve lived in flats.  It’s normal in towns in the rest of Europe and it’s normal in London.  Our last flat had a roof terrace, and quite a big one, not just a balcony.  And it isn’t enough – you still feel boxed in and end up hanging your socks on a rack over the bath to dry.
The thing that flat builders elsewhere in Europe get right is the common green spaces.  If you’re building flats, you need to give people a decent amount of common outdoor space nearby.  There’s a human need to get your shoes off and feel the grass under your feet, to sunbathe, to picnic, to have a kickaround with your toddler or go for a bike ride. 
Funnily enough, that’s something that the Victorians in London actually got right – the parks and commons really are the lungs of the city.  At the moment, other than the tiny memorial garden or Victoria Park which really isn’t up to much, Ashford does not have much in the way of common land in the town centre area.  At the moment, it’s easy to say that the countryside is not far off and it’s easy to reach green spaces.  But, if you are expanding the town, that green space gets further away.  And sympathetic landscaping is just not the same thing as a bit of wild yet safe land.
Surely either Dover Place or Vicarage Lane car parks could – instead of both being handed over for retail – be given over to a beautiful green space?
And don’t get me started on the river.  The nice leaflet identifying a kind of chain-like link of grassy areas along the river doesn’t really hold up in reality (I guess that’s the proposed Stour nature park?). 
But where are the riverside restaurants around the Stour?  There’s a stonking great Hitachi rail depot on one side, and the Stour Centre carpark on the other… come on. Natural assets like a river frontage should be positively exploited rather than act as if we have our backs to a rather damp inconvenience.

Retail, Food and Drink
Practically every new development says that there will be retail, offices and housing.  That’s great.
But you’ll have all these new houses, and all these park and ride schemes and very little for these new people to be doing in Ashford.
The designer centre is a great place to start, but there’s a few stores that would really be welcome there which you can find at other outlet centres: Monsoon, Banana Republic (in Gap) and Charles Tyrwhitt.  But now that Waitrosehas arrived (albeit in the wrong place if that survey in town the other day is anytihng to go by), and Debenhams has made such a difference to the town centre, can a John Lewis be that far behind, especially with plans for County Square expansion? And what’s going to be done to attract something other than poundshops to Park Mall?    

Ashford’s food and drink is somewhat underwhelming.  I know we’re starting from having come from the gastronome’s delight of Northcote Road but a choice of four MacDonalds is not my idea of diversity.
So please, in the new places being built at the station let’s have a Pain Quotidien, or a Paul (it is Ashford International, after all).  And an M&S food – they seem to be compulsory at London stations these days, and putting one in at Ashford International would really help commuters who’ve dashed past all the fabulous shops at St Pancras or Stratford to bag one of the few empty seats on the high speed train home and forgotten the milk they promised to pick up.  
What about a Giraffe child-friendly but nice cafe in the town centre?  We’d love that – or Carluccio’s?  How about a Jamie’s Italian? What about Strada? Or a Nando’s? I’m not asking for Michelin three stars, but I can’t help thinking that it’s all very well these companies eyeing up the likes of Canterbury, but it’s Ashford that’s got the population to support them. I know a lot of the decent shops and restaurants have gone to slightly-posher looking Tenterden, but that’s o reason for Ashford town centre to miss out. 

Schools and childcare - what are the plans for new primary schools and secondary schools?  With so many new households, the schools are going to come under serious pressure.  It’s already hard to find the right sort of childcare to handle the commuting lifestyle. 
That said, resist the pressures and keep the grammar schools.  They’re a  major selling point for us people moving into Ashford from elsewhere (because of course we all believe our child will pass the 11-plus with flying colours) but they’re also good for social mobility and they give a chance to people who might not have had one otherwise in a segregated-by-address schooling system.

Europe’s best placed?
We are also particularly interested in what plans you have for the European side of Ashford – attracting business to the town from Paris, Lille and Brussels, and beyond.  We’ve already seen one attempt at sidelining Ashford for that build-it-and-they-will-come upstart Ebbsfleet (surely only there for the convenience of Bluewater?) by Eurostar, so how are you going to attract visitors and investment?  The town and wider region would suffer greatly fro loss of that link, so creative ideas (like the Calais metro train proposed for 2012) need to be brainstormed as well as the more serious planning. 

I’m not going to go on about recycling here, as you can read it in a separate post on this blog,  but surfice to say this really needs sorting if Ashford is to be carbon neutral and all the other things we can surely aspire to if we have a regeneration/ development agency with the word “Future” in the title…  

As you can tell, we’re genuinely interested in the future of our new hometown, and would love to work with you on making it happen.  Do get in touch and let us know what you’ve got planned next…