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To understand the often down and dirty world of EU policy-making, look no further than last week’s battle to get a revised deal over rules on working hours.
The EU’s "working time" directive states that employees cannot put in more than 48 hours a week, even if they want to.
The law has become a symbol of the divide between "liberal" and "social" Europe - but has left both sides stretching their principles.
The idea that Brussels caps working hours, (its reasonings are health and safety) on health and safety grounds) is incomprehensible to some.
This includes "liberal" Britain, which "opts out" of the rules.

Continue reading "Wheeling and dealing"

The Finns love open, transparent government. But even they admit privately that it is not particularly helpful to have cameras filming EU ministers as they try to hammer out a compromise on the vexed question of European working hours.
Spanish, French and Italian employment ministers are widely expected to use the televised session to denounce Britain over its use of the "opt out" from the EU’s maximum 48-hour working week legislation.
"We expect a lot of playing to the trade union gallery," said one EU diplomat.
It is only over lunch at Tuesday’s meeting that ministers will have their real negotiation on whether a compromise settlement can be reached under which the UK could keep its opt out, with some strings attached.
"The cameras won’t be allowed into the lunch, so you can expect it to be quite a long one," said the EU diplomat.

Continue reading "Playing to the gallery"

Poor Romania. After decades of communist dictatorship and a bloody, violent revolution the country finally managed the transition to democracy. It endured years of economic and political upheaval, rising crime and the exodus of young and talented workers to the rich countries of western Europe.
Month by month, the government inched its way towards membership of the European Union. It enacted all 85,000 pages of EU law. It rolled out the red carpet every time a lowly bureaucrat from Brussels came to visit. It sat through long nights of negotiations to sort out the country’s farm budget and clean up the state aid regime.
At last, Romanians thought they had made it. The country is now only two months away from becoming a fully paid-up member of the Union, with its own seat at the table and its very own commissioner in Brussels.

Continue reading "Romania’s less than glittering prize"

This week’s paper on how Europe can reduce the harm caused by binge drinking was one of the most fiercely resisted of the year in Brussels.
Drinks companies lobbied furiously after research commissioned by the European Commission proposed measures such as a ban on advertising and tobacco-style warning labels. They muttered that a Swede was drafting the paper looking to push his own country’s restrictive approach to alcohol sales. No such proposals appeared. So is the glass half full or half empty for drinks’ companies?

Continue reading "A glass half full or half empty?"

Andrew Duff, the British MEP and thinker on the future direction of the European Union, is known by some in Brussels as one of the "astronauts". How come? "He’s on another planet," says one ally of Jos Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president.
Although Mr Duff’s enthusiasm for further European integration is not shared - to put it mildly - by large sections of public opinion, one has to give him credit for thinking out loud about what the EU should do next with its comatose constitution.
The constitutional debate is not over, in spite of the obituaries written for the treaty when it was rejected by French and Dutch voters in the spring of last year. It is true the original text is dead as a doornail, but a rebranded and slimmed-down version will come back on to the political agenda next year.
German diplomats believe that by January - when Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, takes over the EU presidency - 18 out of the 25 current member states will have ratified the original treaty, placing a strong moral and political obligation on the others to agree to many of the proposals in the original text.

Continue reading "Reviving the comatose constitution"

Everybody knows that one of the EU’s idiocies is the requirement that the European parliament has homes in Brussels and Strasbourg and is required by treaty law to commute between the two.
Less known is the bizarre requirement that in three months of the year - April, June and October -  all EU ministerial meetings have to take place in Luxembourg.
Thus with a heavy heart, the diplomatic and media circus descended on a corrugated iron shed on a Luxembourg industrial estate for the monthly Ecofin council of finance ministers, braving irregular air connections or the permanent roadworks on the motorway from Brussels.
But this time several things brightened the day. The first - the mist rising like gossamer off the green Ardennes valleys - need not detain readers long, especially if they are hoping for some serious economic analysis.
The second was the magnificent understatement of Hungarian finance minister Janos Veres, who told colleagues that the state of his country’s dire public finances had been "a matter of considerable public debate" in recent days.

Continue reading "On the road again"

The British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen (aka Ali G) has caused a diplomatic storm with his latest film lampooning the central Asian state of Kazakhstan. His creation Borat, a fake TV reporter, was denounced by Nursultan Nazarbayev’s man in London, Erlan Idrissov  on Wednesday.
He attacks Borat for saying that in his country women are kept in cages, and that wives can be bought from their fathers for 15 gallons of insecticide.

Continue reading "Bulgaria gets its own Borat"

A politician keen to maintain popular support and enjoy a quiet life is not generally advised to pick a fight with postmen.
For a start, there are quite a lot of them - about 5m people are employed by postal groups in the European Union. They are also highly organised, with the French postal workers� union boasting particularly strong political influence.
Postmen are also popular, in an old-fashioned, gentle kind of way. Everyone, after all, loves to get a letter, and some of that feeling surely rubs off on the long-suffering men and women who cycle around town in the early-morning drizzle to deliver you a precious piece of mail.
Yet Charlie McCreevy is undaunted. Later this month, the EU internal market commissioner is expected to table a proposal that will introduce full and unlimited competition into the Union’s market for postal services. As the FT reported last week, the proposal will dismantle the last "reserved area" in which the big national postal groups retain a monopoly - the market for delivering mail weighing less than 50 grammes.

Continue reading "McCreevy to sound last post"

Europe could soon have weaker pollution controls than the US. I’ll say that again. Europe could soon have weaker pollution controls than the US. In a surprising about turn, the European parliament voted this week to relax air quality controls.
The European Commission, the bureaucracy that comes up with the targets, was shocked. It has asked member states, who must ultimately agree them, to sharpen them again. If they refuse, the Commission could scrap its proposal altogether.

Continue reading "Europe votes to relax pollution controls"

Diana Wallis, a British MEP, had it right when she denounced the entirely unacceptable way in which the EU handled membership negotiations with Bulgaria and Romania.
She said the EU was simply "going through the motions" in negotiating with the two countries, since both already had firm guarantees they could join the club in 2007 or 2008 at the latest.
"EU membership is an attractive proposition and a sought after goal," she said. "It should not be some sort of freebie to be handed out with cornflake packets."
Bulgaria and Romania will join the EU on January 1 and we should rejoice at the fact: both countries suffered grievously under communism and their accession to the club will be of benefit both to them and to the Union as a whole.
But the conduct of the membership process has done nobody any favours.

Continue reading "EU enlargement: forcing the issue"