JUNE 2007

EUROPEAN NEWS
updated:

This WEEK in the European Union

17.06.2007 - 20:49 CET | By Andrew Rettman
EUOBSERVER / WEEKLY AGENDA (18-23 June) - At the end of what is set to be a roller coaster week for the European Union, 27 presidents and prime ministers will on Thursday (21 June), Friday and probably the small hours of Saturday morning slug it out over the shape of a new European treaty.

VIPs will arrive at the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels' EU quarter at 16:45 Thursday local time, culminating six months of intense diplomacy by the German EU presidency and two years of introspection since the draft EU constitution was rejected by referendums in France and the Netherlands.

Berlin's summit agenda wants to focus on: the status of EU symbols such as the flag and hymn; primacy of EU law over national law; the force of the charter of fundamental rights; the role of national parliaments; the future of EU foreign policy; new enlargement criteria; energy and climate goals.

On one hand, Germany is trying to diffuse tension and avoid future referendums by aiming for a modest "Reform Treaty" instead of a bombastic "constitution." On the other, it is creating drama by suggesting that if this week fails to see agreement, it "would jeopardise the union's ability to deliver."

Poland has emerged as Berlin's biggest headache so far - German chancellor Merkel in Berlin on Saturday could not persuade Polish president Kaczynski to drop plans to renegotiate EU voting rights. Warsaw is threatening to veto a post-summit "intergovernmental conference" on the new treaty if it does not get its way.

But the UK and the Netherlands could also cause pain. London wants permanent opt-outs from future EU home affairs legislation and to avoid giving the rights charter legal force. The Hague is shooting for national parliament vetoes on all future EU laws and criteria for future EU expansion to be enshrined at treaty level.

In terms of personalities, the summit will be the first major test of new French president Nicolas Sarkozy. It will also be the EU swan song of British prime minister Tony Blair, a veteran of some 40 such events. The fact he will be replaced as PM on 27 June by Gordon Brown adds to the uncertainty of the summit's ultimate outcome.

Middle East strife
EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg Sunday night will at dinner hold the first formal talks on Berlin's EU treaty proposals. On Monday and Tuesday, they will discuss the unfolding civil war in Palestine; Iran's nuclear ambitions; genocide in Sudan, Bulgarian nurses in Libya, Cuba sanctions and Kosovo.

A UN peacekeeping force for Gaza is on the table after hardliners Hamas last week seized control and declared a new Islamist "era." Russia's blockade of a UN mandate on Kosovo independence is hampering plans for an EU police mission next year. And ministers have pre-agreed not to fully lift sanctions on Cuba.

Meanwhile, president Yushchenko of Ukraine and president Voronin of Moldova will drop into Luxembourg and Brussels on Sunday and Monday. Ukraine is in a tense calm after political infighting almost spilled onto the streets of Kiev last month. Chisinau is in the midst of delicate conflict resolution talks with Russian-backed rebels.

Business as usual for MEPs
The European Commission and the European Parliament will take a back seat this week. But MEPs at their plenary session in Strasbourg plan to vote on early stages of new legislation on the labelling of alcoholic drinks (Tuesday) and the portability of pensions rights in the EU (Wednesday).

Strasbourg will also see debates on Tuesday on whether the UK should compensate victims of the Equitable Life pensions scandal and if the EU should ban trade in cat and dog fur. The transport committee on Monday will vote on pushing back deadlines for liberalising postal services from 2008 to 2010.

Barroso warns UK on EU treaty

By George Parker and John Thornhill in Brussels

Published: May 31 2007 17:41 Financial Times, (excerpt)

Tony Blair will represent Britain at a European summit on June 21-22 in virtually his last act as prime minister, and will be asked to agree the outline of a slimmed-down treaty to replace the constitution.

Mr Brown is insisting that Mr Blair avoid any overt transfer of British sovereignty – such as the removal of national vetoes over justice matters and giving the EU a “legal personality” – that would put him under pressure to hold a referendum.

With Mr Brown waiting in the wings, Angela Merkel, German chancellor, hopes to nail down the outline of the new treaty with the help of Mr Blair, minimising the risk the new prime minister might try to unpick the agreement later.

Mr Barroso said he expected the June EU summit to produce a “precise and clear mandate” for the new treaty, strictly limiting the scope of an inter-governmental conference which would finalise the text. He said detailed work could start in July and end by December.

The European Commission president has warned Mr Brown privately that if he fights a rearguard action against the new treaty this autumn it would seriously harm his relations with Ms Merkel and other European leaders.

Mr Brown’s aides are studying the details of the proposed new treaty carefully, but Mr Blair’s team believe it could suit the chancellor of the exchequer for the dirty work to be done by the outgoing premier.

Mr Barroso said President Nicolas Sarkozy of France had given “momentum” to the drive for a speedy agreement on a new institutional treaty, replacing the grandiose constitution that was rejected by referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005.

The new text would update the EU’s institutions, creating a full-time president and foreign minister. It would also create a simplified voting system in the Council of Ministers, giving more votes to the biggest member states, particularly Germany.

Poland is opposed to the new voting system, but Mr Barroso said Poland should remember that the EU – including the German presidency – was standing behind it in a row with Moscow over meat exports.

“I hope Poland’s leaders understand that solidarity is a two-way street,” he said.

ENGLAND:The entire Labour party shares blame for Iraq's horrors
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2089505,00.html
The Guardian ~~ London ~ Monday May 28

The members may want to pin responsibility on just one man, but they have a moral duty to question their own role
Haifa Zangana

Iraqis often debate whether it is the Labour party as an institution or Tony Blair as an individual that is the real British culprit in their tragedy. This issue needs to be addressed, not least for the future of relations between Iraq and Britain; but the debate echoes the deeply felt anger among Arabs and Muslims worldwide.

Blair's callousness about Iraqi lives and the country's ongoing destruction should now be notorious. In December 2004, the BBC's Andrew Marr asked Blair during a visit to Baghdad's Green Zone: "Many thousands of people have died for this moment, including scores of British people: are you sure that this prize was worth that price?" Blair's answers ranged from, "I know that we are doing the right thing" to, "Yes, I believe we did the right thing" and, finally, "I've got no doubt at all that that is the right thing for us to do".

But all that was in the second year of the occupation, and some Iraqis naively thought that the Labour party would deal with an individual who discredited its ethical foreign policy. It proved a delusion. Blair was re-elected as prime minister.

"Why?" we asked, while witnessing the descent of Iraq into hell. Has Blair apologised for the death of 650,000 Iraqis? Of course not. His emotional resignation speech to members of his party two weeks ago displayed the same rhetoric: "I did what I thought was right for our country."

This is not unusual. History, the gatekeeper of collective memory, teaches us that dictators and tyrants never admit to committing crimes, but adamantly justify them by saying that they acted in the national interest. Parties and ideologies often act in the same way. Parties rise to power on the strength of declared commitments, and they must be judged on whether they fulfil them.

It was the late foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who launched the Labour government's ethical foreign policy in April 1998, following Labour's manifesto of 1997 which pledged: "We will make the protection and promotion of human rights a central part of our foreign policy." I was one of many who believed that. Since then the Labour government has been engaged in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, based on a lie, and a hypocritical policy on Palestine involving doing nothing about Israel's aggression against Lebanon. Neither policy can be described as ethical.

Robin Cook kept a measure of sincerity in his resignation speech in the House of Commons on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, by pointing out the hypocrisy regarding Iraq and Palestine. But the Labour party continued its march under Blair, guided by a shared sense of mission and vision with President Bush in his war on terror, laced with rhetoric about "legal and moral obligations towards Iraqi people". How to dispose now of this legal and moral responsibility? In the fifth year of occupation, Iraq is a country of horrors, invoking comparison in the mind of Iraqis with the barbarity of the Mongols in 1258. An academic, who fears for his life, told me last week that every aspect of human rights has been violated.

This April Iraq lost between 3,000 and 10,000 of its citizens, depending on who estimates the figures, since no one officially counts. British forces lost 12 soldiers, the largest monthly total in the 50 months of occupation. The United States lost 104 soldiers, with 634 injured. No one has yet declared the number of dead and injured foreign mercenaries, euphemistically labelled "contractors", whose numbers in Iraq are widely believed to equal the official occupation troops.

The latest military operations and the much-publicised "surge" have displaced a further 27,000 Iraqis in three months. The pretext of fighting the militias and murder squads was shown to be phoney by the continuing daily spectacle of handcuffed, tortured and brutally murdered men found after night curfew; by gruesome executions in public places by thugs wearing police uniforms; by the sectarian walls built around many districts in Baghdad and other cities; and by the corruption and oil-smuggling, which is breeding new militias for the political parties in government. The United Nations last month confirmed a massacre on January 28 in the village of al-Zarka, in the province of Najaf, in which more than 260 people were killed by the police and by aerial bombardment from multinational forces.

The Labour party should not be relieved of its responsibility just because Blair is leaving. It is the moral responsibility of its members to question the party's role in the destruction of Iraq, and whether its new leader will listen to them and to the people of Iraq.

The overwhelming majority of Iraqis want the occupation forces out now, and they believe that the enemy is the occupation itself and not "al-Qaida and Iranian-backed elements", as Blair tells the world. In order to put an end to the daily bloodshed and to build a lasting peace, the Labour party and its new leader must accept that this will only be possible when they acknowledge that there are different voices that represent the Iraqi people. These include the widely popular resistance, whose different strands include both political and armed movements. And the British government must agree to initiate a compensation programme for the destruction it has helped to cause.

Haifa Zangana is author of Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London
haifa_zangana@yahoo.co.uk [GSN] UK The entire Labour party shares blame for Iraq's horrors

*************************

'Blare'
- by Ian Reed -
(on Tony Blair's remarks in a lecture given in Cardiff)


He calls it "lurching into total frankness"
decrying the "young black kids" going outside
"the proper lines of respect and good conduct,"
The guns and knives begetting Britain's tide

Of violent crime. How long ago he crossed
the line of international law himself,
he mentioned not, nor, worse than guns, the bombs
he ordered plundering Iraq's oil wealth.

What pious bleating from 10 Downing Street,
as if our pilots, safe in cockpit seats
or armchair monsters in executive suites
were better than thugs in our city streets.

This state of lawlessness starts at the top,
The prime minister's precedent shows how,
So, filled with fury, knowing his time is short,[1]
Blair's lurching into total madness now.

Apr. 11, 2007

'Polemics,' a collection of political verse dating from 2000, is at:
http://www.reedandwrite.com/Political_Poems_date.shtml 'Blare' - by Ian Reed

The retreat of Nordic social democracy

By Quentin Peel , Financial Times
The retreat of Nordic social democracy

Published: March 20 2007 21:06 | Last updated: March 20 2007 21:06

To the outside world, Finland’s general election result may not look that dramatic. In Helsinki, however, political commentators see the loss of eight seats in parliament by the once-dominant Social Democratic party as little less than a landslide.

For the first time since 1962, the centre-left party that was considered the natural party of power has been reduced to third place in parliament. Left-leaning parties that would normally expect to have at least half the 200 seats have been reduced to just 62. The result is not just a setback for the Social Democrats: it is also a considerable success for the conservative National Coalition, whose 35-year-old leader Jyrki Katainen has brought his party within one seat of being the largest in the country, just behind the liberal Centre party.

Opinion polls did not predict the result, but what has happened in Finland seems to mirror a process across the Nordic region: social democracy is in retreat. If Finland sees a conservative-liberal coalition emerge from the weekend election – the most likely outcome, but still subject to negotiation – non-socialist alliances will be ruling in four of the five Nordic countries. Only in Norway are social democrats surviving in coalition with a centre party.

The remarkable thing about the Finnish result is that it saw the ruling parties punished in the polls at a time when the economy was doing very well. They say in Scandinavia: “The time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining.” Finland’s gross domestic product grew by 5.5 per cent in 2006, the fastest in the eurozone, although the Finnish central bank is now forecasting a slowdown to 3 per cent this year.


04/30/07 "BBC" -- -- The United States and the European Union have signed up to a new transatlantic economic partnership at a summit in Washington. The pact is designed to boost trade and investment by harmonising regulatory standards, laying the basis for a US-EU single market.
The two sides also signed an Open Skies deal, designed to reduce fares and boost traffic on transatlantic flights. But little of substance was agreed on climate change. However, EU leaders were pleased that the US acknowledged human activity was a major cause.

Economics rather than the environment or politics was the focus of the summit, says the BBC's Europe correspondent, Jonny Dymond, from Washington. The two sides agreed to set up an "economic council" to push ahead with regulatory convergence in nearly 40 areas, including intellectual property, financial services, business takeovers and the motor industry.The aim is to increase trade and lower costs. Some reports suggest that incompatible regulations in the world's two richest regions add 10% to the cost of developing and producing new cars.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency, said last month that if the US and EU could set business norms today, they would "secure the markets of tomorrow". Since she came to office 18 months ago, she has made repairing damaged relations with the US a top priority.The Open Skies agreement will take effect on 30 March 2008 and will allow EU carriers to fly to anywhere in the US and vice versa. The deal promises to lower airfares and widen choice for passengers on both sides of the Atlantic. The EU hopes to go further and create an "Open Aviation Area" between the two sides "in which investment can flow freely and in which European and US airlines can provide air services without any restriction," said a EU statement. The EU is also hoping that the US will agree to withdraw its visa requirement for travellers from a number of EU states.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/6607757.stm

THE PRIVATIZATION OF WATER GOING ON A PACE IN ENGLAND

Water merger leads to regulatory clash

By Michael Harrison, Business Editor

Published: 02 May 2007

The Competition Commission approved the merger of Mid Kent Water and South East Water yesterday, provoking a regulatory clash with the industry's watchdog, Ofwat. The two companies will be required to make a one-off price reduction to customers totalling £4m as the price for allowing Mid Kent, which is owned by the Australian fund Hastings, to buy South East Water from fellow Australian bank Macquarie.But Ofwat said it remained concerned that the merger would reduce its ability to make comparisons between the performance of individual companies. It pointed out that this could result in higher bills for households overall, whereas the one-off price reduction ordered by the Competition Commission was worth less than £5 to customers in the Mid Kent and South East Water regions.

The commission acknowledged that Ofwat's ability to make comparisons would be prejudiced, but it argued that the extent of this would be limited.It also said that the merger would generate customer benefits in the shape of cost savings and would enable the two water companies, which are adjacent to one another, to share water in what is one of the driest parts of the country.

Ofwat responded that making comparisons between individual companies was "a vital part of its work in determining the size of customer bills".It added that the commission itself had said that, as a result of the merger, Ofwat may be expected to set less challenging targets for water companies across England and Wales, which was subsequently likely to lead to higher prices.