Don't bet on Klaus caving in

The consensus out there (FT Blog, Daily Telegraph, the very interesting Seifert/Litobarski podcast, Centre for European Reform) seems to be that Czech president Václav Klaus will cave in to pressure from all quarters and complete his country's ratification of the Lisbon Treaty ahead of a general election in the UK. The election is likely to put a Conservative government into office that is deeply hostile to the treaty and has promised to hold a referendum in the UK if it has not been fully ratified.

Klaus is the last hope of the anti-Lisbon community, now that the Irish have voted Yes. But all over Europe, people are interpreting his latest pronouncement on the subject as doom for the No camp. Here it is:

"I am afraid that the British people should have been doing something really much earlier. There will never be another referendum in Europe"

Now in my book, that is pretty Delphic at best. He pointedly did NOT say that he was going to sign off on the treaty. He made a tangental allusion to a possible referendum "in Europe". Quite apart from the fact that many Brits don't consider themselves to be in "Europe" at all, this is not a clear or robust statement by any means. And don't forget that there is a court case ongoing in his country that could potentially put paid to the whole thing without his intervention. My own reading of this oracle is that he'd love to kill the treaty off himself before the UK election, so that there would be no need for a referendum.

I am no great Klaus expert, but everything I have read points to him being both a consummate maverick and a "troublemaker", always keen to be controversial. He loves the limelight.

Take my advice. Don't go out to the betting shop and put any money on Klaus signing before the Conservatives win the UK election next year. At the very least, he'll want to keep us on tenterhooks.

Open Europe is failing

I for one joyfully welcomed the creation of Open Europe, a eurosceptic think tank funded by leading UK business people. "At last", I thought, "a serious think tank, funded by serious people, taking an objective but critical approach to the EU, and challenging the more traditional Brussels think tanks like the European Policy Centre, the Centre for European Policy Studies, and others. Take a look at the vision statement. While I would criticise it in some minor respects on the substance and style, it optimistically (and I mean that positively) describes a realistic and not unattractive version of the Europe of the future.

But I have been very disappointed by Open Europe's anti-Lisbon Treaty campaign. Whereas the bulk of the organisation's research throws some light, albeit with a strong eurosceptic bent, on real issues and proposes real solutions, the pieces on the Lisbon Treaty, as well as the blog, seem to have been written by a political party and not a serious think tank. The most recent piece of research focuses on the amendments that the Irish government sought, but failed, to get included in the Lisbon Treaty. On the surface, it is detailed, well-researched, and powerfully argued. But anyone with the slightest interest in objectivity would immediately ask whether the Irish experience of treaty negotiation was so different from that of other Member States. Open Europe is a British outfit, so you would have thought that at least some UK material wouldn't be too hard to find and use. But this question does not appear anywhere in the paper. It's clearly meant more as a direct appeal to Irish voters in the context of the second Irish referendum than as a piece of research on how (un)satisfactory the process of treaty negotiation was for various countries. In fact, I can't find a single mention of any other Member State in the whole paper. In other words, this paper boldly takes the Irish experience of the negotiations out of all context, with a transparently tactical objective: getting the Irish to vote No. If Open Europe had been true to its ostensible mission, it would have provided such research for more Member States. OK, so you could argue that it was only worth investing the necessary resources in a paper on the Irish case because only Ireland was voting. But then they should at the very least have included some comparisons with other countries' positions.

In the months leading to the second Irish Lisbon referendum, the blog has plumbed the tabloid depths. Apparently the end (getting an Irish No vote) justified the means. Because I don't know how a serious think tank can take an honest look at its blog and not cringe with shame. Take a look at this piece on a Labour candidate's criticism of the UK government for failing to hold a referendum on the lisbon Treaty. It's fairly factual, but it does stray from a discussion on the merits of the Treaty into politics.

Then there's this post on the organisations that campaigned for a Yes vote in Ireland, seeking to discredit them by pointing out that they get funding from the Commission. When I questioned in a comment why funding from a body that has a treaty mandate to promote European integration should be considered improper, the Open Europe blog team was silent. Only an anonymous commenter accused me of being an "apologist". He/she obviously hasn't read this blog or my comments elsewhere.

This piece came back to the theme of the alleged "issues" with the Commission "paying organisations to come up with policy ideas to feed back into the Commission". Hang on a minute. So are they saying they would like the Commission to receive feedback only from business or from privately-funded think tanks like them? And why do they assume that the feedback the Commission is going to get is going to be "pro-EU", as if the pro- or anti-EU debate was really what people in Brussels spent their time worrying about every day? Why ignore the fact that a lot of the Commission's funding goes, for example, to environmental NGOs? The Commission does indeed get policy ideas from such organisations, and they have indeed been used in Commission policy-making. But these NGOs overwhelmingly provide input on policy, and not on an obsessive questioning of the EU's structural problems.

Here, Open Europe accused Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary of double standards for changing his mind on the Lisbon Treaty, conveniently ignoring the fact that its own white knight, Declan Ganley, had sworn he would retire from politics if snubbed at the European elections (which he was), only to return to the fray despite himself. A pretty obvious case of double standards in my book.

A really appalling example of tabloid journalism was the repetition of the claim made by the Irish Times that Commissioner Wallstrom had told Irish voters that the Lisbon Treaty was going to improve childcare. When Wallstrom's spokesman pointed out that the irish Times had got it wrong and that she had been talking about the Lisbon Agenda and not the Lisbon Treaty, did we get a retraction or an apology from Open Europe for the precipitous overreaction? Not a bit of it. We simply got more aggressive questions implying that the Commissioner deliberately sought to confuse Irish voters by making statements about the Lisbon Agenda in Ireland during run-up to a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Don't expect people to treat you as a serious partner for discussions if you question their good faith.

There are plenty of good reasons to reject the Lisbon Treaty. In my opinion, the worst thing about it is that it is so unreadable. The significance of the changes it makes are lost in a morass of legalistic text that no voter could ever understand. It also marks a failure by the Member States to grasp the nettle of reform as tightly as they should have. Some of the positive aspects, such as the simplification of the legislative process or greater involvement by national parliaments, seem like cosmetic changes when set in the context of grandiose new positions and the extension of QMV.

But sadly, here, Open Europe cast aside all pretence that it actually believed that the Irish should be persuaded to vote against Lisbon because it is a bad treaty. Instead, it expressed the hope that posters urging the Irish to vote No in protest against the government would be successful. Is this the message of a serious think tank taking a fresh, oprtimistic look at how the EU can be reformed? No. It's the voice of the worst sort of political cynicism. Shame on them.

“It’s anybody’s right and privilege to change their mind”

So does the No camp in the Irish Lisbon referendum debate really believe that No means No? Just weeks after promising the Irish that he'd leave them alone if they didn't support his Libertas party in the European elections, Declan Ganley is singing a different tune. He says that he simply cannot stand the lies being told by the Yes camp. But weren't they largely the same things the Yes camp were saying last time around?

What I'm most curious to see is if he returns to his own old arguments about abortion, neutrality, and tax, or if he changes his tactics.

For the record, I am no great lover of the Lisbon Treaty. I'd just rather the debate be held on the basis of facts (on both sides). And in all objectivity, Ganley's first referendum campaign was the most striking example of a concerted effort at deception of the electorate.

Polish Plumbers Apply Here!

The Polish plumber was the bogeyman of European politics for the two years that the Services Directive was going through co-decision in the EU institutions, coinciding with the accession of Poland and seven other former Communist Bloc countries - perhaps not quite a hate figure, but certainly feared as the symbol of Eastern European workers coming to Western Europe to "take our jobs", working for East European wages. The Polish tourist board outflanked French trade unionists by using humour and publishing the now-famous poster of a hunky, wrench-toting, pipe-wielding Polish plumber addressing French lady tourists saying, "Je reste en Pologne. Venez nombreux!"

At the time, the argument went something like this: Polish plumbers will come in large numbers to "old" EU countries like France and Germany, will price local competitors out of the market, and will not contribute a penny to local taxes. This has all been proved to be nonsense by the UK and Ireland, which have no successfully hosted several hundred thousand Polish workers (not just plumbers), of whom the overwhelming majority pay taxes and fill labour shortages. Most EU Member States took advantage of a "phase-in period" for the freedom of movement for workers from the new Member States, and have seen very limited immigration. Germany and Austria retain these controls. What immigration there has been there seems to be part of the grey economy, with the workers legally present in the countries, but working illegally.

And now we have the German government acknowledging a skills shortage in Germany, and calling for immigration from the East to be made easier. Great! Let's all gloat at the Germans and say how pleased we all are that they were wrong. And wrong they undoubtedly were. But is it really that simple?

Now, I'm not an economist, but I know for a fact that Poland is facing severe shortages of skilled construction workers, and yes, plumbers! Word is, you can't get hold of a decent plumber anymore, because all the best, most enterprising ones, have moved West. Can it really be that good for Poland to lose large numbers of its best and brightest? Sure, it makes the government's drive to cut unemployment much easier - the stats are good even taking into account the fact that many who are working abroad are claiming unemployment benefits at home.

There seems to be a consensus that most of the emigration is temporary, that workers are sending money home and will return when the Polish economy begins to catch up. That may be the case, but in the meantime, Poland and some of the other new Member States are making do with shortages of their own.

Shouldn't this really be about addressing the need for better education and training in all EU countries, rather than moving skilled workers from low-wage countries to high-wage countries? Isn't the issue here that all EU countries need these workers, and aren't we making a mistake if we seek to solve the problem only through labour mobility?

Don't get me wrong - I am not in favour of closing the borders. But I don't see governments addressing this in a way that is sustainable for Europe - the German government has little interest in what's happening in Poland; it wants to find the easiest way to fix the skills shortage. Shouldn't policy be more consistently directed at addressing the underlying structural problem?

I don't know. Maybe national governments are taking this seriously and are doing lots to increase the skills of the local labour force, and the media aren't reporting on it. But I have my doubts.

I have a confession to make: I have used a Polish plumber, a Polish handyman, and a Polish-owned Belgian construction company here in Brussels. They are competitive on price, especially for the small jobs, and they do good work. By contrast, my experiences with Belgian plumbers have invariably been negative: rude, incompetent, late, untidy, and expensive. The Poles are "incontournable" in Brussels, but I expect the locals still rule the roost outside the big city.