How much does a Presidency cost?

The only point of genuine contention in the first session of the Danish Presidency press trip with Europe Minister Nicolai Wammen was a debate about the cost of running a Presidency. What – a Polish journalist asked – is the Danish Presidency not doing, when it costs €35 million while the Polish Presidency cost €115 million?

Wammen’s answer was interesting, but missed the point. We won’t have, he said, as much merchandise as previous presidencies (and – apart from ties for participants – he seems true to his word), and bottled water will not be available in meetings. The latter drew laughter as there was water in bottles on all delegates’ tables. The last time, one hopes. There is also a commitment, he said, to making sure public transport is used wherever possible and to make this Presidency the greenest ever.

However none of that comes close to accounting for €80 million. The reason – as far as I can tell – is that all the wider PR work of a Presidency – the signs at airports, the educational activities in schools, the effort to show the population the value of a Presidency has been cut this time. I’m torn as to whether this is a good thing. Denmark suffers the same problems of lack of knowledge and engagement in EU matters as other countries, and a Presidency is an opportunity once every twelve and a half years to do something about it. Conversely some of the cash used is often crass and useless expense, so perhaps the cuts are important.

Anyway, I am glad we opened up with a discussion of whether the Danish Presidency is worthy of its Brussels nickname: the Discount Presidency of the EU.

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So who attends a Presidency press trip?

One of my questions before arriving in Copenhagen was: who are the others who are attending the Danish Presidency press trip? Now I have the answer – albeit only on paper. This is a picture of the pages from the programme (click to enlarge)

I’m glad to see Bruno Waterfield (@brunobrussels) and Peter Spiegel (@spiegelpeter) among the names, and also that EUObserver is represented. But what about European Voice (covered by The Economist?) and Quatremer / Libération?

UPDATE: I’m informed that Simon Taylor is from EV. Typo in the list above!

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Why there’s no LabourList column from me today

It seemed like an excellent opportunity – to write a weekly column for LabourList, one of the biggest left-leaning blogs in the UK. Take EU matters to a new, wider audience. So I thought. In the second half of 2011 I churned out more than 20 columns, and a variety of other pieces.

But things have not turned out as I had expected and – at my own choice – I am weighing up whether the columns should continue. Things are on hold for now.

Above all, the joy of blogging (here on this blog in any case) is that hitting Publish is only the start. I learn from the comments, the comments are largely civil, and themes grow over time. Importantly I get an e-mail notification every time a new comment is posted to allow me to follow discussions. On LabourList I can’t get this, meaning that by the time I go back to the website I’m treated either to a stream of critique, or comments that have departed at a tangent. There I don’t have the tools to engage with the audience properly. Secondly, there is no RSS feed of just my posts, meaning no way to auto-import into Facebook or auto-tweet my posts, two important ways I generate useful discussion around what I write here. I’ve even volunteered my technical assistance – for free – to solve these issues, to no avail.

More widely, writing to a weekly schedule is rather tiresome, as I am used to the immediacy of blogging, while writing columns on a Sunday morning is probably the last time I would choose to do it. Plus – apart from an interesting spat with Emma Reynolds over my critique of Douglas Alexander – what I’ve written has generated very little substantive follow up. I also have no meaningful feedback on whether what I write – either in terms of style or substance – is what the readers of LabourList want.

Thoughts and comments from LabourList readers and others would be most welcome in light of this blog post…

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Danish Presidency Press Trip

Sometimes unexpected doors open thanks to blogging, and next week is one of those circumstances. I am spending four days (Monday-Thursday) in Copenhagen on the Danish Presidency Press Trip.

Did you even know Presidencies organise press trips? I didn’t before getting the invite to this.

Anyway, what am I going to try to do? I have the advantage – unlike the rest of the regular journalists on the trip – that I do not have pieces to file to newspapers or radio. I can choose my take, write as little or as much as I like. I’m going to try to give an impression of how a Presidency works, my impressions of the ministers and their level of knowledge of their briefs, and try to determine some of the prospects for Denmark’s stint as Presidency for the next 6 months. The trip features – among other things – briefings with Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Foreign Minister Villy Søvndal, Radikale leader Margrethe Vestager, Minister of Finance Bjarne Corydon and Europe Minister Nicolai Wammen. As well as blogging I’ll be tweeting on the hashtag #eu2012dk.

For the sake of openness: my accommodation in Copenhagen is being paid for by the Danish Presidency (and I imagine that is the case for the other journalists attending). I am covering the costs of my own travel. I am not paid to blog or report on this. I am invited to attend thanks to contacts I’ve made in the past with communications people in the Danish Presidency, both in Copenhagen and Brussels.

Comments and questions you would like me to pose are most welcome!

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Even if the EU became a functioning representative democracy tomorrow it’s not going to solve its ills

What do you do when one of the fundamental things you’ve believed in for years, have spent ages working towards, is actually not anywhere near as desirable as you previously thought?

That’s basically the predicament I find myself in these days, and it’s not a very pleasant place to be.

The old federalist argument, repeated ad infinitum at Ventotene, drawing on Spinelli’s manifesto, is that the nation state is broken and only supranational democratic structures in Europe (a European federation) can fix it.

That’s all very well if your systems of representative democracy work OK, but what if they don’t? What if political parties are tired and hollowed out, and beholden to narrow interests and are in awe of the power of the markets? With election turnouts decreasing? With messy multi-party compromises, and leaders ready to ditch the few principles they once had? Why should we expect leadership to be any more enlightened at EU level than is the case nationally just now?

Make the EU a representative democracy in the classical sense (government contingent on a majority in parliament, executive proposes legislation that the legislature approves and amends, parties run in elections etc.) tomorrow, and we’re just going to replicate all the disfunction on a continent wide scale.

But – conversely – the alternatives are worse. We cannot rely on the illegitimate technocracy of the past that has lacked citizen involvement and democratic control. Equally direct democracy is not the answer, as I am yet to see a fair and partial referendum campaign. And – with the world faced with an economic crisis and the impending damage of runaway climate change – it’s not as if we don’t need political solutions to our many problems, and with so many of these being cross-border in nature, it’s not as if we can do away with the supranational institutions we have.

Where, please, out of any of this, is there any small sliver of optimism?

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Thoroughly non-plussed by politics

Today has been a normal sort of day for me online, in that I’ve stumbled across a couple of really fascinating things, stuff that’s brilliant. Today it was the Lytro camera, and an examination of the design work of Dieter Rams. Earlier this week it has been Solar-Powered 3D Printer that Prints Glass from Sand and the joys of the Kew Gardens iPhone app. Pick any day and there will be some new nugget of information fixed in my mind somewhere.

Only the problem is that so damned few of these things relate to politics. How many things that really make you sit up and think, inspire you, have there been in politics recently? The only things that have come close for me in the short term have been Radek Sikorski’s Berlin speech, and Jack Layton’s Letter to Canadians. Stoltenberg’s Til Deg made me smile with its neat combination of tech and politics. But beyond that I am absolutely non-plussed. At least I’m not alone in this.

Today in the UK we have a case in point. Purported to be one of the thinkers of the Labour Party, Gregg McClymont has written a pamphlet (with Ben Jackson) summarised on Comment is Free with the piece entitled “How Labour can avoid the Tory trap“. I don’t actually disagree with the tactical substance of what they write, but the style and approach is so narrow, so insider orientated, so lacking in optimism in its articulation. “A patriotic appeal for national growth could highlight the divisiveness and inefficiency of Conservative political economy” they argue. Really? Can we not do any better than that? The same tired appeals to worn out nationalist rhetoric? As innovation and thinking proceed apace across the rest of our society, it seems our politics has failed to move on. Perhaps it was always thus. But where is my role within this morass?

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A generalised explanation of the decline of political leadership

Political leaders in the EU are incapable of leading us out of the current multiple crises we face. I think that’s generally understood. But what we’ve been incapable of explaining is why is leadership in such a bad way? Where is our Adenauer, Kohl or Delors when we need them?

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Cameron, Vickers, the EU and the recapitalisation of banks

It sounded a bit far-fetched – that the UK wants to set higher standards for its banks than the EU would allow. But these are Cameron’s words in his statement on Monday [from Hansard here]:

To those who say that we were trying to go soft on the banks, nothing could be further from the truth. We have said that we are going to respond positively to the tough measures set out in the Vickers report. There are issues about whether this can be done under current European regulations, so one of the things we wanted was to make sure we could go further than European rules on regulating the banks.

First of all this relates to regular EU law (Directives rather that Regulations actually, but definitely not in the Treaty). So whatever Cameron had or had not negotiated last week will not have impacted this.

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