I suppose if you run Liberal Conspiracy you’re grateful for pieces from MPs and have to accept them. Today – via this tweet from Sunny Hundal – I read “We need to re-assess our approach to Europe” by Helen Goodman MP. This follows on from Douglas Alexander’s effort to re-assess Labour’s EU policy that didn’t impress me. Goodman’s effort is probably even worse.
“It’s in Britain’s national interest to be in the EU” – it pains me how often we hear that phrase (or words that that effect) in speeches made by UK politicians about the EU. Yet we very seldom question its use.
The need to start to question it, for me at least, has been given new urgency by Douglas Alexander’s EU speech earlier this week (full text here) that mentions ‘national’ 9 times, and ‘democratic’ only once*. Alexander uses phrases like “those of us who see Britain’s national interest as best served within the European Union”.
But what does that actually mean? What is the national interest?
Something has been nagging at me since the True Finns’ election success on Sunday. I think it’s because I am struggling to answer this question: why must True Finns be brought into a governing coalition?
This question was brought into focus in a Twitter discussion with Mia Välimäki:
The essential gist is: True Finns ‘won’, the others (particularly the Centre Party) ‘lost’, and because Finland has a tradition of broad based coalitions the True Finns should of course be brought into the government. I’ll call this the winners criterion.
This is not too dissimilar to the debate last year in the UK – Labour ‘lost’, the Tories had ‘won’, and a Lab-Lib coalition would look like a government of losers, hence it was perceived to be a non-starter.
I saw this tweet earlier from Brian Duggan who works for EPLP in their London office:
I followed the link to the letters page of The Guardian, and this is what I get:
Your report on the conviction of John Sweeney should be essential reading for some of my colleagues in the European parliament who have consistently argued against the very programme that brought this murderer to justice (Report, 4 April). Last year the Guardian reported that the UK requested Eurojust’s help in more cases than any other EU country. Yet time and again, the Conservatives and Ukip in Brussels have refused to support the organisation, a body set up to help the police work more effectively with their colleagues in other EU countries. Perhaps they don’t see the link between abstract agreements in Brussels and the reality of fighting crime.
Claude Moraes MEP
Labour’s European spokesperson on justice and home affairs
The link on the Guardian site leads here, not exactly informative about the processes behind the case. So how about Moraes’s website? That has just a copy-paste of the letter. His briefings page contains no information about Eurojust or this issue more widely. The link to his Twitter account from his website is broken.
So what do I learn from all of this? Well it shows my MEP is at least active – he’s writing to the newspapers. But I don’t actually learn anything. How are the Tories and UKIP blocking Eurojust? Does Labour, the EPLP, PES or S&D group have a proper policy? How should Europe-wide judicial cooperation work? Not a clue.
Now I can understand why a letter to a newspaper has to be short, but surely the website or Twitter account of a politician should be just the place to add that extra context?
David Miliband set out his concerns about the predicament of the European left in a speech at LSE this evening. The full text of his speech is available at Labourlist here, and Next Left has a little post from earlier here.
As you would expect from the elder Miliband, the speech is full of references to thinkers in Labour’s past and a compassionate understanding of some of Europe’s main centre left parties. The headline fact is that at no time since World War I has the left not been in power in the UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Italy and Sweden, and Miliband sums up the predicament this way:
Left parties are losing elections more comprehensively than ever before. They are losing from government and from opposition; they are losing in majoritarian systems and PR systems; just for good measure they are losing whatever position the party had on the Iraq war; and they are fragmenting at just the time the right is uniting.
It’s from this point on that it’s possible to examine Miliband’s words, and also try to propose some first hints of ways forward.
In Brussels it’s reasonably easy. There I was (and indeed still am) the EU politics blogger nerd. So if there are events and conferences to attend I go to ones about EU politics on the web first and foremost. Then I will go to ones about institutional reform or centre left politics. It’s all quite simple.
But not so in London. What is my role in this city? It’s a bit hard to define, and the events here demonstrate that.
I attended and ran a session at Netroots UK, but the session was on fundraising and not about blogging or networking or party politics. I couldn’t attend the Fabians’ New Year conference but suppose I would have pottered along and have been generally underwhelmed. The RSA today ran an event with Evgeny Morozov about Wikileaks and I hadn’t even realised it was happening…
This weekend is ukgovcamp but I am not public sector enough for that, so will not be there, even though I know most of the organisers. Policy Network are running an event entitled “What future for Europe?” – worth going to that as it’s one of the few big EU events in London? But I wouldn’t have gone to something like that when I lived in Brussels, it’s too general. The Fabians have something similar a week later. I’m a leftish blogger and Fabian member, but their event doesn’t even have a programme yet… I will for sure be at eCampaigning Forum in Oxford in March, primarily an event for NGO campaign folks, even though I have done rather little work in that sector since the Atheist Buses. Further into the future I’ll probably be at PdF in NYC in June and the World Humanist Congress in Oslo in August.
What a mess!
More worryingly all of this sums up my general confusion being in London. What am I here? Am I a web nerd? A web comms trainer? An EU training person? How much am I about intellectual stuff, how much about practical training? Am I better off working with the public sector, with political parties, with non-partisan campaigns, or with NGOs? How much EU stuff should I do? How much UK stuff? How much blogging? How much party politics, either offline or online? At the moment I’m trying to do all of that, working silly hours, and have a rubbish bank balance. Something isn’t right.
Ideas how to fix it?
