Oh, so Citzalia is all my fault

Aahmed ElAmin, one of the developers of Citzalia (whose words were followed hook, line and sinker by The Guardian) has penned his own side of the story at a website entitled The Royal Gazette. Odd location, and his approach to the whole thing is even odder. You can read the whole piece here, and as parts of it specifically attack me, I’ll deal with those one by one.

First, a widely-read blogger, Jon Worth, blogged about the site, speculating that Parliament was spending about four million euros on the site.

No Aahmed. I made it very clear from the outset that I did not know the precise source of the money. I found two budget lines, each allocating 4 million Euro to ESN, the web agency behind Citzalia, and linked to those. I made it clear that I did not know whether this was the case. Plus no information about funding was made available on the Citzalia website when I wrote the first piece. If you assumed you could just avoid any critique of your project then you are naive and stupid, and if you knew you were going to be criticised and did not think to explain how the project is funded then you’re just stupid.

He then went on to use Citzalia as an example, rather bizarrely, of the Parliament’s supposedly collective aim to squish a measure that allows EU citizens to bring forth legislative issues by referendum.

The words I used were “All of this seems especially poignant just now as the European Parliament seems to be doing its best to kill off the European Citizens’ Initiative” – which Aahmed then twists into Citzalia squashing the citizens’ initiative. No… What I am saying is that the European Parliament cannot get its initiatives for regular democracy right, and until it does that, why is it creating models for virtual democracy?

Since then, the four-million-euro figure has been carried by other blogs, despite our post correcting the original spark.

Yes – all those blogs had posted the 4 million figure long before there was any formal response from ESN. I even posted comments on many blogs correcting the figure before ESN did. The official reaction was just too slow.

The original blogger himself amended the article to use the correct figures but also responded that we should have contacted him as soon as he blogged his speculation. Huh?

Yeah, huh. You informed me about this project, direct to me via Twitter, a super-fast medium. I post a reply direct to you, to the Citzalia account, stating I don’t agree, with a link to the blog entry. Everyone blogs and speculates for half a day, with no reply whatsoever from the Citzalia team, who then freak out. Come on folks! I might have a widely read blog, but I am a one person operation, and blogging is a hobby. You have 20+ staff, a €275k budget, Google alerts, RSS feeds and hell I even informed you I had written the blog entry! If you were not ready to monitor the reactions to your project you should have not released information about it in the first place.

Your problem Aahmed, and indeed ESN overall, is you were actually made to look rather silly by a bunch of amateurs on this issue. Use of social media is not just nice and smily and chirpy and new and funky – it’s a hard world too. Maybe after this episode you could have learnt that a little, but judging from your piece you seem to think I’m responsible for the whole episode, so it looks like there has been scant little learning going on.

August 11, 2010 | Posted in EU Politics, Euroblog, Technology | Tagged , , , , | 14 Responses

Why EU taxation is actually a good idea

Janusz Lewandowski - CC / Flickr

Janusz Lewandowski - CC / Flickr

Budget Commissioner, Janusz Lewandowski, has said he will present some options next month for how direct EU taxes could work. The story is covered by the BBC. Cue a load of instant complains, howls of derision etc., particularly from Brits.

Wait a moment.

Think of what the EU does and how it is paid for. Roughly 40% of the EU budget is spent on agriculture, and the same amount on funding for the EU’s poorer regions (structural funds). The game played each year by the Commission and Parliament is to demand more money from the Member States, who then fend off the requests to bring the budget back down the roughly the same percentage of GNI as the previous year.

In short the way the EU budget works builds statsis into the system, and pits the EU institutions against the Member States. This is no good for anyone, least of all Europe’s tax payers as a load of cash is still wasted on CAP.

The issue to make EU taxation would be to ensure that taxation and representation run together – i.e. parties can put forward different taxation plans before European Parliament elections, and then have the power to put those into practice if they can command a majority in the European Parliament. This should be coupled with a constitutionally set maximum percentage of GNI allocated to the European level – perhaps the 1.24% of GNI currently in place. So, in short, you couple taxation with representation, and you bind the EU institutions to not spend excessively.

In addition there are some things that would have to be taxed supra nationally were they to work – taxation on aeroplane fuel (kerosene) for example. It’s unjust that petrol and diesel for road transport is taxed, yet kerosene is not. But if one EU state were to levy a kerosene tax then you make the environmental problem of air travel worse, as planes would refuel where it was cheapest (wherever practical) and fly heavier.

Now I have no idea what the Commission is going to come up with, and I would be astounded if it came close to meeting the principles I have outlined here. But – under the right circumstances – EU taxation is actually a good idea.

August 9, 2010 | Posted in EU Politics, Euroblog | Tagged , , | 16 Responses

Campaigning for a PES primary

What should the Party of European Socialists do in 2014 to avoid a repeat of 2009′s disastrous European Parliament election results, and the mess over the dithering prior to 2009 that resulted in the PES not selecting a candidate to be Commission President?

While Martin Schulz and the Socialist Group in the EP have not been asking himself this sort of question, it has not stopped some enterprising PES activists, led by Desmond O’Toole in Dublin, from raising the issue of a PES Primary. You can also join the Facebook Group here.

So what’s the basic idea?

Essentially the PES should select a candidate for President of the European Commission, and the members of the PES parties – in a one member, one vote postal ballot – would get to decide who that person should be. If the PES parties then were the largest group in the European Parliament after the 2014 elections that individual would be nominate to be Commission President. Simple, straightforward, accountable… and if the PES did it then other parties would surely follow? Also within the PES it would eliminate the dithering and horse trading we’ve seen in the past when it comes to whether to nominate a candidate for Commission President or not.

The chances the member parties of the PES are going to back this are slim to none, and the costs of the ballot would surely be considerable, but it’s vital that this issue is debated and discussed and – with luck – eventually it will happen.

August 9, 2010 | Posted in EU Politics, Euroblog | Tagged , , | 10 Responses

Handling a comms mess – Citzalia

My previous post about Citzalia has been creating waves in the small pond of EU debate throughout the day. The blog entry was first linked from Tim Worstall, then appeared in the Open Europe press review, and has then subsequently been linked by England Expects, Politics.ie, The Endless Track and Bill Cash.

My original blog entry was posted at 0935 this morning, after I was first made aware of the project from this tweet at about 1800 yesterday. It then took until 1539 today until Paolo, one of the project officers at ESN, posted this comment in reply to my piece, setting things straight about the budget.

I absolutely stand by everything written in the original blog entry – I made it clear that I was not certain about the budgets for this, and as a result I have posted comments on all the blogs that have mentioned the story, pointing out the new information supplied by ESN. I’m posting those comments as I’m conscious of my reputation as a blogger – surely ESN ought to be doing this too, and quickly?

Beyond that questions have to be asked about the broader communications here. It’s not as if I’m kind and mild on this blog, and while I want the EU to exist, want the UK to be in the EU, and indeed want a federal Europe, I also – very strongly – want the European Union to be efficient, democratic and avoid waste. Anyone who has ever read a few of my blog entries over the months and years can surely see this – I’m not just ‘pro-European‘.

Surely today’s case shows, once again, that EU bloggers now matter in the Brussels bubble, and they have the power to inflict some damage.

August 6, 2010 | Posted in EU Politics, Euroblog, Technology | Tagged , , , | 9 Responses

Citzalia – the virtual ghost European Parliament (really, why spend money on this?)

Yesterday – thanks to this tweet – I had the dubious honour to be one of the first people to have a look at a draft website for Citzalia, a project that promises some sort of virtual European Parliament role playing game. The official blurb is as follows:

Citzalia is democracy in action. It is role playing game and social networking forum wrapped in a virtual 3D world that captures the essence of the European Parliament. You may even recognise parts of the building [...] Current Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and European officials will be on hand to guide you through the procedures and provide background information.

I don’t really know quite where to start to critique this, so perhaps I’ll start with the positive – the graphic design for the site, even the draft so far, has been meticulously delivered by ESN – it all looks smart and crisp. So I can’t fault the agency.

The question I simply cannot answer is why is the European Parliament spending money on this?

Thanks to the research of some fellow EU bloggers we reckon this is financed from €4 million allocated to ESN in a 2008 budget line from the EP – see page 21 of this PDF. In the same period ESN has done this project for the EP, presumably under the same funding line? The only other similar line is this from the Commission, but Citzalia looks like an explicitly EP project. If someone knows the precise answer to these funding questions please do leave a comment. [UPDATE - 6.8.2010, 15:45] See the comment below from ESN – funding totals €275k, from a different funding line than the one I had suggested.

All of this seems especially poignant just now as the European Parliament seems to be doing its best to kill off the European Citizens’ Initiative – a way for citizens to have a direct (rather than a virtual) impact on EU decision making. How about using some EP money to deliver a simple to use, online petition platform for the ECI? Surely simpler to program than a virtual European Parliament!

Education about the European Parliament is important, sure, but the problem for the EP is however much people learn it’s not likely to make them more favourable towards it, for the EP has a structural problem – individual MEPs matter to individual pieces of legislation, but the overall direction of European integration and even the composition of the European Commission are too little influenced by whether the EP is controlled by the left or the right. So inform people, sure, but the incentive for Members of the European Parliament to really effectively communicate themselves is still lacking. No amount of slick websites can possibly address that.

All of this rather reminds me of the MyParl.eu story from 2008 – a social networking system for MEPs which was then ditched. I wrote then that it’s simpler for MEPs to approve a few million Euro for a website than it is to actually get them communicating effectively themselves, and that seems to hold true for Citzalia as well. I really fear this is going to become a virtual ghost European Parliament with high costs and very few users.

[UPDATE - 6.8.2010, 10:45]
Please note: I am not saying this site cost €4 million – I don’t know the precise sum. I am saying that as far as I am aware the funding came from within €4 million of funds allocated to ESN. Those are rather different things.

August 6, 2010 | Posted in EU Politics, Euroblog, Technology | Tagged , , , , | 27 Responses

What’s the value of an e-mail (or a thousand) in a political lobbying campaign?

If you’re an elected representative, what does an e-mail mean? If it’s from a constituent, individually written, it’s clear enough. But what about if it’s part of a campaign? In the clip above Clay Shirky argues that the predictive value of an e-mail for a member of Congress is zero, and with e-mail campaigns its impossible to rescue the signal from noise. Have we put the barrier to political engagement so low that it can cease to be meaningful? I can’t claim to have the answers, but watch the clip and have a bit of a think. The clip starts at the best bit of the presentation, but the rest is worth watching too.

August 4, 2010 | Posted in EU Politics, Euroblog, Technology, UK Politics | Tagged , , | 3 Responses

Europa ist führungslos cries Helmut Schmidt. He’s right. But why?

Kohl and Mitterrand at Verdun

Kohl and Mitterrand at Verdun

It seems it’s the season for high level German politicians of yesteryear to have a go at the EU. Former Bundeskanzler Schmidt is quoted by Euractiv.de (Google translation here) as saying:

Es ist im Augenblick keine Führungsperson da. Das ist eine schlimmere Situation, als wir sie jemals in 60 Jahren der europäischen Integration erlebt haben.

The gist is that at the moment there is no leading person there (in the EU), and that it’s a worse situation that we have seen in 60 years of European integration. Schmidt also goes on to have a rant at the whole enlargement of the EU.

Continue reading “Europa ist führungslos cries Helmut Schmidt. He’s right. But why?”

August 3, 2010 | Posted in EU Politics, Euroblog | Tagged , , , | 3 Responses

Gender and Labour’s MEPs

EP Elections - CC / Flickr

EP Elections - CC / Flickr

I’m in Sweden at the moment, one of the most gender-conscious countries in the world, and motivated by this I’ve been thinking about the impact of election systems on gender representation, inspired in part by this from Talking about the EU. The general rule is that list-based election systems tend to do better when it comes to representation of women as parties either use a man-woman or woman-man arrangement on lists, or even if they do not do that it looks out of place to select a team of 10 men, while selecting 10 men in 10 separate first-past-the-post constituencies, each with decision resting with a separate local party is far more likely.

So then, I wondered, what about Labour’s representation in the European Parliament?

Continue reading “Gender and Labour’s MEPs”

August 2, 2010 | Posted in EU Politics, Euroblog, UK Politics | 1 Response

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Jon Worth. European, social democrat, federalist, feminist, atheist, anti-monarchist, ENTJ. Inline skater. Blogger, website designer, avid Mac user, trainer.

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