Feeling a bit bleak about the whole EU shambles at the moment? Think we’re headed for the exit? Well, if you want some good old fashioned common sense, listen to Charles Kennedy, here on yesterday’s Sunday Politics. Sadly, you have to listen to arch Eurosceptic Tory Daniel Hannan again, but it’s still worth it.
The most interesting thing is that Charles calls on those who see the value in the EU not just to leave it to the Liberal Democrats to make the case for staying in. They need to put their heads above the parapet, too.
There’s also a discussion on what federalism actually means. The Daily Fail and the Tory right think it’s all about creating a big European superstate. No, actually, it’s about making decisions at the lowest practical level. It’s about that most liberal of ideas, decentralisation. Watch and enjoy.
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18 Comments
Charles Kennedy made a great point in today’s House of Commons debate about Cameron’s problems over Juncker stemming from his refusal to join the EPP Group in the European parliament. The PM’s objection to the appointment would have carried more weight if he had allied himself with the more mainstream centre right party, said Kennedy.
Nick Clegg didn’t comment as he wasn’t there.
Charlie Kennedy is still a class act and a true lib dem why didn’t we keep him as leader – everyone gets problems in their life and people are better for them. I wish he could lead us to a better place.
Daniel Hannan is about the only politician to tell the truth about the EU in many decades.
Why do LibDems think that the UK is better served by being ruled by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels?
Charles Kennedy is absolutely right to call for a common vocabulary re ‘federalism’ – a point I’ve made a number of times in comments here on LDV. Charles is also right to say that in both mainland Europe and North America it means devolving powers where possible – a meaning that’s shared by most Lib Dems. The trouble is that it’s not the usage in the UK where it’s generally understood to mean almost the exact opposite – i.e. a highly centralised super-state. If you doubt this try asking any reasonably informed Tory what they think about moves towards a federal EU – but stand well clear to avoid the inevitable explosion.
A further complication is that although the powers that be in Brussels may claim they aspire to a devolved system they are, ahem, telling porkies. Like any power structure have sticky fingers and tend to accrete power unless they experience strong and focussed push-back – which they are NOT getting from Lib Dems.
So, when Lib Dems say ‘federal’ and mean ‘more devolved’ UK voters hear ‘more centralised’, an interpretation that is supported by developments including the serial ignoring of popular sentiment when it goes against the EU establishment’s ambitions. Brilliant! Is it any wonder our narrative has never got off the ground? There is no chance of retrieving the proper usage of ‘federal’ given how massively Lib Dems are outweighed by both Tories and the MSM which are unlikely to lend a helping hand. The only solution at this point is to invent a new word. We should start arguing for a more ‘DEVOLVED’ Europe but of course we would at the same time have to explain what that might look like as people don’t have much idea and the devil is, as ever, in the detail and we would also have to make it very clear that it does NOT include ‘ever-greater union’.
I agree about putting heads above parapets and at least Charles Kennedy was present and speaking at the important report back by and questioning of the Prime Minister today. Where were most of our other MPs? Given our claim to be leading on Europe it was downright embarrassing to see the the sparsely populated Lib Dem front bench and the totally empty bench immediately behind it. Indeed it was pointed out by a Tory MP that no Lib Dem minister was present in the house. I don’t know if that applied throughout the debate but I didn’t see any. Why?
‘federalism’ – a point I’ve made a number of times in comments here on LDV. Charles is also right to say that in both mainland Europe and North America it means devolving powers where possible – a meaning that’s shared by most Lib Dems
But this makes no sense.
Before a nation joins the EU, all its powers are exercised at the national level — ie, are devolved.
When a nation joins the EU, some of its powers are taken away from it by Brussels; others remain with the nation ; still others are taken by Brussels but then given back on sufferance (this being what ;devolved’ means: the lower authority is allowed to exercise a power by the higher authority, but the higher authority can take the power back at any time. That’s how devolved powers work in the nations, after all: an Act of the Westminster Parliament could at any time suspend the devolved powers and bring them back under direct rule, as happens from time to time in Northern Ireland).
So how can ‘federalism’ mean ‘devolving powers to the lowest level’? By definition, the move towards a federal state means giving up powers which previously belonged to the nation.
Those powers may then be ‘devolved’ back, indeed, but (a) devolved powers can be taken back at any time and (b) more importantly, if a power should be exercised at the national level, it seems a very roundabout way to go about it to cede it to a foreign government and then have it devolved back.
If a power should be exercised at a national level, why not simply retain it at the national level, rather than taking it to the federal level and devolving it back?
An the point about North America also belies this. In North America, which presumably means the US, then ‘federalism’ means that the federal government and courts become the highest authority: individual states are only allowed such autonomy as they are granted by the federal government, and the federal supreme court can overrule any state court. So it’s a lie to say that ‘federalism’ in North America’ means that powers are devolved: in reality it means that ultimate power is taken away from the individual states and given to the federal body.
Which is fine when you have a single federal country where the population feels a common kinship, but not so fine when you have an association of states with no unified population trying to act as if it were a single country.
“There’s also a discussion on what federalism actually means. The Daily Fail and the Tory right think it’s all about creating a big European superstate. No, actually, it’s about making decisions at the lowest practical level.”
Hmmm, would this be like submitting budgets to Brussels before our own parliament, or harmonisation of taxation and spending plans…?
@ Sean – “Charles Kennedy made a great point in today’s House of Commons debate about Cameron’s problems over Juncker stemming from his refusal to join the EPP Group in the European parliament. The PM’s objection to the appointment would have carried more weight if he had allied himself with the more mainstream centre right party”
Always and forever an utterly daft accusation as the EPP remains an avowedly federal group where the tories are explicitly the opposite.
Jonathan Pile
“everyone gets problems in their life and people are better for them”
Yes but it is also sometimes better for those people to have a break away from the highest pressure while they recover. It is unfair to ask someone facing a problem to stay on while they deal with the problem. Give them a break and let them come back if they want to later.
Yes, amazing how the right wing press has been able to hi-jack the meaning of the word ‘federal’ and (as usual) wield it as a ready reference hate word to sum up everything ‘true Brits’ should loathe and detest (unlike, say, the total freedom of multinational corporations to save millions in taxation by swapping particular aspects of their operations between various countries as their accountants advise). Considering the Tories total and utter to the United States of America, the role the UK played in the late-1940s in putting together the Federal Republic of Germany and the scale devolution has now reached in the UK, it is amazing how, as the article points out, more leading UK politicians have not taken Kennedy’s stance before now. A key problem with the EU is that the concept of subsidiarity has been allowed to lapse far too much since Maastricht and one of Clegg’s failings in the debates was to present a vision of how the EU should be reformed to bring it back to this concept, i.e. affording powers to the best possible level of competence. Anyone who believes that the EU has no role to play in terms of environmental considerations, cross-border criminality, energy policy (not least with Putin’s Eurasian Trade Association being set up) and preserving and enhancing the world’s largest single trade area is living in a world of delusion based on nostalgia and wishful thinking (which is basically the mainstay of the concluding sections of Roger Bootle’s new book; ‘Let’s leave the EU and hope for the best!”)
Unfortunately there is a problem here. What is the position of the Liberal Democrat party? Above a knee jerk UKIPer type comment comes out with the cliché of “unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats”, yet when there is an attempt to make a process accountable and electable it is rubbished and denounced by the same voices. Debates between Juncker, Schultz, Verhofstadt etc. were widely covered and discussed around the EU, but ignored in the UK.
Lib Dems appeared to endorse the process until Olli Rehn stepped aside in favour of Guy Verhofstadt. Was it at that moment that the Lead Candidate (Spitzenkandidaten) system was rejected? Rejected by whom? – Nick Clegg? The Parliamentary Party? The national Party? MEPs (I think not)? What has happened appears to lack principle as it seems that the Party or important elements in the Party would have clearly endorsed Olli Rehn.
If the Lead Candidate system is wrong, why is it wrong? What was so wrong with endorsing Guy Verhofstadt (I though I had voted for him indirectly)?
Can we accept a situation in which those who least want democracy complain most loudly of a lack of democracy? The name of the party is Liberal Democrat, although many of us put more emphasis on the ‘Liberal’ the ‘Democrat’ is an important component of Liberalism, yet on the EU we have no vision for developing democracy in the EU.
Personally, I am unsure that the President of the Commission should be chosen this way as this post is part of the executive. However, I do not see a way of avoiding politicisation of the appointment and the new system does seem a bit better than the old procedure where the UK, driven by its media, ritually denounce whichever candidates emerge first before agreeing on A.N.Other.
It is nonetheless clear to me that the President of the Council (part of the legislature) should be appointed in a way that is clearly supported by elected representatives. The Lead Candidate system would be one way of achieving this. However more radical solutions are possible.
On Federalism, yes I have noted that those who proclaim that they are anti-federalist, do want to accumulate and centralise power in Westminster. However we are Liberal Democrats and we are against that sort of thing!
@ Martin – “Above a knee jerk UKIPer type comment comes out with the cliché of “unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats”, yet when there is an attempt to make a process accountable and electable it is rubbished and denounced by the same voices.”
I don’t know if this is intended to for me, but I at least have always been extremely clear in my objection to ever-closer-union:
‘They’ are not ‘my’ people. They have their own aims and expectations arising from their own social and cultural norms that have formed from their own shared history. Therefore, I do [not] consent to common governance from among all the people[s] of europe, and thus I do not assent that such governance may act in my name and consider myself bound by the result.
It is not just that I think I will get better governance, being deemed legitimate through being [both] representative of, [and] accountable to, my needs. No, they too will receive better governance, for it will better reflect the social and cultural norms that have formed from their own shared history.
@ Martin – “On Federalism, yes I have noted that those who proclaim that they are anti-federalist, do want to accumulate and centralise power in Westminster. However we are Liberal Democrats and we are against that sort of thing!”
I’m sure this one cannot be addressed to me for I have made it crystal clear on a number of occasions that there is no internal contradiction between my content at a future federal governance of the UK and rejection of a future federal governance from Brussels. As above; Are these ‘my’ people or not, the very same question the scots are being asked to answer…
People are far too focused on the second of the two words in “representative democracy”, when really it is the first that matters and the latter no more than a mechanism to achieve this representation. I say this specifically to highlight the fact the getting all moist over the EP and the concept of spitzenkanidats is besides the point, it is lipstick on a pig, if they do not represent [my] will then I will deem them illegitimate.
Jedi – sorry, it was not particularly addressed to you at all (unless you are coming out as a UKIPer). However, that said, I do regard myself as European, I do identify with European culture and regard the European wars of the last century to be in many respects civil wars, but ones that because of the empires involved had a world wide dimension.
I understand that the EU has evolved from a premiss, articulated most clearly by Schuman and Monet, that such conflicts should be made inconceivable.
It’s a real pity that the post of DPM doesn’t seem to have any actual responsibilities. NC would surely have been an excellent choice to negotiate with the other EU nations and the EU itself about the next EC president. He is much more European – speaking several languages and experienced with the bureaucracy, and might well have achieved a different candidate – or indeed a more cooperative environment for the future. It must be very frustrating to see DC make a complete mess of it.
@ Dav – It makes perfect sense if you start from the position of how things are now although I must admit that kind of glosses over a world of important detail about how we got there that you explore in your comment.
I take it as axiomatic that all powers belong to the nation state but that it usually chooses to devolve some to lower tiers – e.g. local government or Northern Ireland. It can also pool selected powers (using ‘pool’ as an opposite of devolve) where there is an advantage to so doing. This stands in sharp distinction to powers being “taken away” by the higher tier as you suggest. The question then is, does pooling operate as a ratchet (i.e. going only one way) or is the decision to pool specific powers reversible if it’s later seen to be a mistake or perhaps no longer appropriate in the face of changed circumstances?
In practice, it’s pretty clear that the Brussels establishment takes the ‘ratchet’ view summed up in the ever-greater union slogan (see my earlier comment about sticky fingers). This is surely wrong; it should be possible to reclaim specific powers when the situation warrants and to withdraw them from the pool. That’s subtly but crucially different from the “devolved back” you discuss. For what it’s worth, I think we should expect to move powers backwards and forwards from time to time – that’s no more than practical politics and responding flexibly to experience about what works best or to shifts in sentiment.
In North America Canada is also a federal system. As for the US you are wrong to think that, “… individual states are only allowed such autonomy as they are granted by the federal government …” The US started as a confederation of formerly independent states that had previously all owed allegiance to the Crown and which all valued their independence but recognised the value of pooling certain functions. This is reflected in the US Constitution that explicitly makes the individual states’ the locus of formal authority. In the words of the 10th Amendment, ” The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”. In other words, unless the individual states have agreed explicitly to pool a specific power that power remains with the states. That remains the principle even though some recent Presidents have driven a coach and horses through the Constitution and there seems to be remarkably little will to defend it so practice now departs considerably from theory.
I’m just trying something here … F-word!
F-ing F-word
jedibeeftrix
‘They’ are not ‘my’ people. They have their own aims and expectations arising from their own social and cultural norms that have formed from their own shared history. Therefore, I do [not] consent to common governance from among all the people[s] of europe, and thus I do not assent that such governance may act in my name and consider myself bound by the result.
I find that people in the rest of Europe tend to be liberal-minded, tend not to be influenced by dogmatic religious beliefs, tend to take a pragmatic position on the balance between state and private enterprise, tend to have some feeling for the need to protect the environment, tend to dislike militaristic solutions to problems, and so on with many other things that fit my way of thinking. I find this is much more so than people in most other parts of the world, including the USA. Although the USA uses (almost) the same language as us, its culture is very much influenced by its background of being a vast and almost empty country colonised in the last few centuries – this leads to quite different attitudes than we get in Europe.
So actually, yes, I do see the people of the rest of Europe as “my people”, and I do see there is a need for these people with their smallish countries to co-operate in a way that preserves their values against the various pressures from the rest of the world.