The March economic summit is upon us, and as every year my in-tray is being flooded with reports examining the EU’s progress towards meeting the dreaded Lisbon Agenda targets.

The Lisbon Agenda - for those who believe that life is too short - was an ambitious package of reforms and targets agreed by EU leaders in the Portuguese capital seven years ago. In what was perhaps the most strikingly overblown claim in recent EU history, the heads of government said at the time that the Agenda would transform the Union into the "most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010".

Well, it clearly is not going to do that - and the European Commission acknowledged as much when it quietly dropped the target date a couple of years ago.

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Politicians all over Europe are once again turning their attention to the menacing world of high-end financial investment - and they don’t like what they are seeing one bit.

Franz Muentefering, the German vice-chancellor, last week repeated his notorious comparison between hedge fund investors and "locusts". Across the border in France, Nicholas Sarkozy launched another attack on hedge funds, urging a new European tax on "speculative" money flows. Add to that the growing chorus of critics within national parliaments, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that hedge funds and other active investors are facing a head-on assault.

Few people feel much much sympathy for the managers of hedge funds and private equity groups. They are spectacularly well-rewarded for their labours, and - compared to politicians or managers of listed companies - they face little public scrutiny or the risk of humiliation in the mass media.

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There was a time when the spring European Council was dedicated to questions of economic reform - the annual paying of homage to the Lisbon agenda, and its vainglorious targets for making the EU the top performing economic bloc in the world.

Not any more. This year’s summit on March 8-9 will see Europe’s leaders focussing instead on energy policy and - most important of all - climate change. I doubt if their discussions on the Lisbon agenda will last more than ten minutes, if that.

I just wonder whether we are in a classic "top of the cycle" moment, when Europe lulls itself into the dangerous view that the reforms are paying off because the economy is working well.

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Woe betide Europeans whose lot it is to be young, foreign or female. So says Anthony Giddens - Baron Giddens of Southgate, to the likes of you and I - who has spent the week in Brussels delivering his findings after a year probing the European social model.
The big problem for the European Union, says Giddens, who made his name as the architect of the Third Way theory that shaped the political vision of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, is its "radically divided labour markets". These are most gratuitously in evidence in Italy, Germany, France and Poland, where the jobs of an inner core of workers are treated as sacred.

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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.

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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.

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