Tell It Like It Is, Dave: Cameron Calls Out the EU on Bureaucracy

For most of 2013, David Cameron seemingly couldn't please anyone. The "we want out of Europe" wing of the Conservative Party didn't think he'd done enough, even with the 2017 In/Out referendum pledge, to further their cause. The British economy sputtered like an old engine on a frigid morning. And the Tories slipped up in by-elections that many political commentators viewed as an indictment of Cameron's leadership.

Barely a month into 2014, and Cameron must feel like the storm clouds have finally cleared. Unemployment dropped to 7.1 percent and the number of people out of work fell by 167,000 since November - signs that the UK economy is creating jobs and at last pulling out of its recent slump. Such figures undermine Ed Miliband's vague, unsubstantiated claim that "life's getting harder" for the average Briton.

Certainly, last week's news that the House of Lords has sent the EU Referendum Bill back to the Commons for re-wording is less than ideal. But Cameron has proved his commitment to getting Britain a "better deal" in Europe by pushing the matter and, in practical terms, can do little more to satisfy Euroskeptics at this point.

Well, except maybe continuing to deliver speeches like last week's salvo at the World Economic Forum in Davos. There, Cameron offered re-assurance to his Get-Us-Out supporters that the "fight is not yet won." He then took the EU to task for it's cloying, go-slow bureaucracy, claiming that if Brussels workers aren't producing regulations for regulations' sake they feel like "they're not doing their job."

After revealing his hopes that fracking would lower energy bills and encourage employers to move jobs back to the UK ("reshoring") to take advantage of cheap energy, the Prime Minister then shared his fear that such potential benefits would be strangled by "burdensome, unjustified and premature regulatory burdens" from Brussels. Such over-regulation permeates every edict the EU issues, Cameron stated, as what Daniel Hannan has called "euro-apparatchiks" view any attempt to simplify policy as "an act of self-harm."

Regardless of what people think of fracking, it's hard to argue against the key premise of Dave's diatribe: that the EU is a bloated entity that exists merely to further its own over-reaching power. 

Click here to finish reading this blog entry via The Huffington Post

The Winston Churchill Fiver, David Downing and the Berlin Blockade

I was delighted to read last week's news that from 2016, Winston Churchill will be the new face of the fiver (five pound note, about $7.50, if you're reading this in the US).

Now, my reaction isn't surprising, given that I wrote a book about Sir Winston. But it goes far beyond my appreciation for the man who led Britain through her darkest hour and into her finest.

The pound is a reminder to Brussels that Britain is still, in the best ways, the same country that Churchill gave his all to preserve. While the Tory Europhiles (step forward, Mr. Heseltine and co.) wanted to let the Euro technocrats consign our currency to the history books in favor of the gold-starred monstrosity of the Euro and Tony Blair would surely have done the same, several things stood in their way.

Chief among these was arguably Gordon Brown's finest political act: his Five Tests. These were conditions that the British economy had to meet before the then Chancellor of the Exchequer would permit Britain to join (see: capitulate to) the single currency. I'd like to believe that, despite his failings as Prime Brown is a man who understood the economic catastrophe that would be unleashed if he let Blair do away with the pound.

Because it's not just about getting to choose pictures to put on your country's notes and coins - though I believe that both American and Brits agree this is important, given the historical giants whose images these countries put on their currency (as did Jesus, and, ahem, John Maynard Keynes per this Daniel Hannan video).

In fact, the ability to make such decisions, to name your coins, to set their value, etc. is a key marker of how much influence a government and the people who elected them have over their country.

Certainly British author David Downing is aware of how important currency is not just in domestic affairs, but also on the world stage. In the wonderful conclusion to the John Russell series,Masaryk Station, Downing's protagonist ruminates on the currency reform that America, Britain and France initiate in their occupation zones within postwar Germany in 1948. Echoing Keynes, Russell tells one of his CIA handlers, "Whoever controls the currency runs the economy, and whoever controls the economy runs the country. If Washington leaves Berlin out, then they're handing it to the Russians."

And how did the Soviets respond to the currency reform? In the same manner any authoritarian regime reacts to a threat to its power and legitimacy - by attempting to reassert control in the most dramatic fashion possible. In the case of 1948, this took the shape of the Berlin Blockade, whereby Russia locked down all road, rail and water travel between its zone in the East and the British, French and American zones in the West. The goal was twofold: force the Western allies to abandon the currency change or quit Berlin. Thanks to the imagination and resolve of General Lucius Clay, George Marshall, Harry Truman, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin, they failed on both counts.

Click here to finish reading this article via The Huffington Post. 

Echoes of Churchill

With the Eurozone in crisis over the Greek tragedy, Ireland’s financial tumble, and the economies of Portugal and Italy teetering on the brink, a core group of EU leaders came together on December 8 and 9 to draw up a new EU treaty. Led by the indomitable, if misguided, Angela Merkel of Germany and with Nicolas Sarkozy of France in tow, the Europhiles seek tighter integration, centralized control over financial markets, and, ultimately, even more national power from EU member states divested to Brussels – whether or not the people agree. Indeed, Mrs. Merkel recently called for a “Fiskalunion” at all costs, insisting recently that she would “give up a piece of German sovereignty” in order to make it happen.

And what of Cameron? Recently, he angered Tory backbencher Euroskeptics, whose motion in the Commons demanding a referendum on Britain’s role in the EU was beaten into submission by party whips. Many conservative columnists predicted his capitulation to Germany, accusing him of, at best, weakness, and, at worst, treason. Some, more outrageously, even compared him to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who infamously signed over the Czech Sudetenland in a vain attempt to appease Hitler, before pompously declaring , “peace for our time.” 

Indeed, had Merkel, Sarkozy et al read the British broadsheets, they would have reasonably assumed that, when faced with even the slightest opposition, Cameron would roll over. Even smaller nations turned up the heat on the embattled Prime Minister, with Luxembourg’s prime minister and chief of the ‘Eurogroup’ warning, "I don't want the United Kingdom setting aside entire pages to say the United Kingdom will not do what all the others have to do. I will not accept that."

In the end, however, Mr. Cameron invoked not Chamberlain but his more prescient and formidable successor, Winston Churchill. First, Cameron demanded protection for the City of London, which, to the chagrin of European technocrats, remains the financial hub of the continent. This prompted a blazing row with Sarkozy, who wouldn’t hear of such a thing – dissention in this “new Europe,” not being tolerated. Undeterred and finally channeling Churchill’s mythic “bulldog spirit” that has been absent for much of his term, Cameron refused to back down, and eventually wielded Britain’s veto.

This bold stroke has endeared him to the same Euroskeptics who, just hours before, were filleting him on Fleet Street, while also sending a direct signal to the power base of the EU that Britain will be pushed around no longer. Boldly defiant, Cameron’s stance reveals a hearteningly Churchillian willingness to become a pariah.

During the mid to late 1930s, Churchill issued a wakeup call over Hitler’s ambitions and military buildup, vocally criticizing the leadership of his own party and ensuring that he would never hold a Cabinet post under Baldwin or Chamberlain. He endured his outsider status, and was proved right in the end, when he was called on to lead Britain against the Nazi Germany. Then, in March 1946, once again finding himself out of office, Churchill took the podium at tiny Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri to issue a stern warning about the ills of Communism, the division of Europe by an “iron curtain,” and the need for a “special relationship” between Britain and America.  It was a time when many still considered “Uncle” Joe Stalin a staunch ally, wrongly assessing Communism as merely an alternative system of government, thus reverting to the isolationism of the interwar years. Churchill’s words of warning set off a firestorm of hostile criticism from politicians on both sides of the aisle, the ridicule of most magazine columnists, and a stinging rebuke from Moscow itself. Yet, when asked a few days later if he regretted his sentiments, the supposed ‘warmonger’ roared, “I do not wish to withdraw or modify a single word!”

Now it seems it is Cameron’s turn to be unpopular. Worldwide financial markets have plunged, the Europhiles are in a white-hot rage, and Douglas Alexander, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, recently blustered, “Britain this morning is more isolated than at any point in the 35 years of British membership of Europe.” Cameron’s coalition partner, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, he of the strong pro-Brussels views, was so miffed that he stayed away from the first Commons session after Cameron’s controversial decision and has subsequently decried the Conservative’s veto. The Prime Minister has even risked straining the Anglo-American “special relationship,” with Barack Obama cozying up instead to the EU’s integrationist leaders. 

Like Churchill in 1946, Cameron must screw his courage to the sticking place, and reaffirm in 2012 that Britain is, and will ever remain, a sovereign nation. He should also, as Iain Murray and James C. Bennett suggested in the Wall Street Journal and the prescient English Member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan has advocated for years, look to the rich trade possibilities of the Anglosphere instead of to the crumbling Continent and what Hannan has correctly called (in homage to C.S. Lewis) its “hideous strength.”