European Union

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Disclaimer : The interpretation of debates serves to facilitate communication and does not constitute an authentic record of proceedings. Only the original speech or the revised written translation is authentic.
Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

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EU Ministers of Finance meet in Brussels on 13 November 2015 to prepare the negotiations with the European Parliament on the 2016 EU budget.

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Apple's Tim Cook, left, chats with CBS's Les Moonves at Sun Valley, Idaho in July

With Margrethe Vestager handing down her decision last month that Starbucks and Fiat received unfair tax benefits from the Netherlands and Luxembourg, most believe it is just a matter of time before the EU competition chief does the same with the biggest of the tax cases she is examining: Apple’s comfortable arrangement with Ireland.

But in case anyone in Brussels expected Ireland to distance itself from the California-based tech giant ahead of the Vestager decision, the FT’s man in Dublin, Vincent Boland, has sent Brussels Blog a note on just how close the relationship remains – as evidenced by the reception chief executive Tim Cook received on a rare visit to the Irish capital:

Cook was on his way to Cork, where he announced that Apple’s operations in the south coast city would expand to create up to 1,000 new jobs by the middle of 2017. That will take the total workforce there to 6,000 – which he said would represent a quarter of the company’s workforce in Europe.

It is the sort of announcement the Irish government loves. Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach (prime minister) tweeted a photograph of himself and a smiling Apple boss: “Great to chat with Tim Cook on the day apple announce 1000 new jobs in Cork.”

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For most people observing – including myself - the existence of two major groupings on the Leave side of the referendum wasn’t really an issue. Arron Banks’ Leave.EU hasn’t looked nearly as serious a proposition as Vote Leave, either in terms of ideological breadth or of general respectability (however you’d like to define that). Vote Leave has been sober, serious and generally had the feel of an official campaigning group. A bit dull, but worthy of communicating that side of the discussion.

Obviously, someone’s had a meeting at some point in recent weeks and decided that being a bit dull wasn’t the right play.

Hence, Students for Britain’s heckling at David Cameron’s CBI speech earlier this week. The stunt got some coverage, but was actually more noteworthy for Vote Leave’s support in the organising it: as Robert Oxley, Vote Leave’s media head, said:

“We will be working together closely during the campaign to do more of these protests – particularly at the AGMs of big companies who try to scare the British people into voting to remain”

This is not unreasonable as a strategy, and certainly the CBI looks rather less able to push a strong pro-EU line after this week’s events, so the logic is not that tenuous.

However, it has had the unexpected side-effect of moving Eric Pickles to complain to the Electoral Commission that Vote Leave’s stated intention to campaign ‘nasty’ should disbar them from becoming the official group. Pickles is broadly sympathetic to Cameron’s approach, enough that Vote Leave chose to portray the complaint as a sign that Cameron’s team was rattled and trying to deflect attention from the general indifference to his letter to Donald Tusk, which spelled out the broad areas for negotiation.

Obviously, in all of this, there’s a lot of spinning going on, but a number of things look pretty clear.

The first is that Vote Leave are very confident about becoming the official grouping. In practice, the CBI heckle wasn’t the most intrusive of actions and one that can’t easily be replicated at AGMs, so the intention to ‘do more of these’ remains just that, an intention. Students for Britain might find that until the Electoral Commission makes its decision, there will be more planning than action.

The second is that Leave.EU continues to suffer from a comparative lack of media  and popular interest. Recall that bad publicity is better than no publicity at all (VW might disagree on this one), especially if it allows Vote Leave to communicate the impression that Cameron is actually concerned enough to try using a third party to halt them.

The third is that the Leave side will always enjoy benefits from its position as the change option. As much as the status quo carries great weight, being the challenger allows for such opportunistic approaches that speak to images of pluck and verve. The Remain campaign will never have a similar opportunity to the CBI heckling, precisely because none of the major meetings of economic or social actors have taken a sceptical stance to EU membership.However, ‘meeting agrees something’ isn’t nearly as good a headline as ‘hecklers disrupt meeting’.

All of this comes with a warning, however. While it is good to mix things up, Vote Leave will have to balance that with the risk that others paint them as being less than serious. The heckling might has raised the profile of those involved and the issues around the CBI’s stance, but that’s still a considerable distance from changing peoples’ minds about how to vote. And neither side have cracked that one yet.

The post The curious path of Vote Leave appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

HSH Investment Holdings Coinvest-C and HSH Investment Holdings FSO v Commission
State aid
The General Court dismisses the action brought by two minority shareholders of HSH Nordbank and therefore upholds the Commission decision of 2011 authorising, under certain conditions, rescue measures in respect of that bank

Plenary sessions : Parliament urged member states to fulfil their pledges and pay for the EU migration actions that have been agreed by EU leaders. In Wednesday's debate, MEPs proposed to use an unexpected windfall of €2.3 billion from EU fines and customs duties to finance some of the measures. The Commission earlier said the new trust funds set up for Syria and Africa were short of €2.22 billion in national contributions.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

Plenary sessions : Parliament urged member states to fulfil their pledges and pay for the EU migration actions that have been agreed by EU leaders. In Wednesday's debate, MEPs proposed to use an unexpected windfall of €2.3 billion from EU fines and customs duties to finance some of the measures. The Commission earlier said the new trust funds set up for Syria and Africa were short of €2.22 billion in national contributions.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

The EU principle is quite clear. EU citizens are entitled to work in any other EU country and enjoy the same working rights as the nationals of that country. Those rights will vary EU country to country. But that isn’t the point.

The point is that if I go and work in France, as an EU citizen I can expect the same rights as French workers there. If I go and work in Germany, I can expect the same working rights as Germans. If I live in Spain, I’ll have the same rights as Spanish workers. That’s the EU principle, and I believe it’s a good one.

And this affects many Britons; more than two million have moved to live in the rest of the EU. Not all of them for work, of course; but most of them.

The concept of ‘free movement of people’ would fall down if workers moving from one EU country to another were discriminated against and didn’t have equal working rights with the workers of the host country.

I don’t think it’s a difficult concept to grasp. But it seems to me that the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, simply didn’t understand this principle, until now.

One of the key reforms that Mr Cameron hoped to win from the European Union was to allow workers moving to the UK from the rest of the EU to have less rights than British workers.

If this was to be permitted, it would in my view undo the entire raison d’être of free movement of people. The domino effect of such a policy could mean the end of EU workers willingly and easily moving from one EU country to another.

If Britain could discriminate against Germans working in Britain, then of course it could mean British workers in Germany having less rights than German workers; and British workers in France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Belgium and so on being similarly discriminated against.

And what would be the point? I can’t find any.

Mr Cameron’s great reform idea was to discriminate against workers from the rest of EU by barring them from claiming any benefits for the first four years of their residency in the UK. That would be inequitable because British workers don’t have the same restrictions on claiming benefits.

Is there a real problem of EU workers claiming benefits? Not according to economist Jonathan Portes in his excellent blog yesterday for the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

As Mr Portes points out, EU migrants come to Britain primarily to work, and their employment rates are considerably higher than that of the native population or non-EU migrants.

Only 2.2% of welfare claimants in Britain are EU migrants – just 114,000 out of a total of just over 5 million benefit claimants.

The situation is somewhat different regarding tax credits – or ‘in work’ benefits for migrants, that Mr Cameron has described as the main problem. EU migrants make up around 7% of those claiming tax credits, so about proportionate to the numbers of EU migrants working here.

But is this actually a problem? Not really, states Mr Portes.

“People who are in work, even in low-paid jobs, are after all contributing to the economy in a variety of ways; most analysis suggests that EU migrants, overall, improve the fiscal position, both in the short and (more importantly) in the long run.”

Mr Cameron often argues that it’s unfair for EU migrants to arrive in the UK, start a job, and immediately begin to receive public funds in the form of tax credits, having made absolutely no prior contributions. But the situation is exactly the same for British citizens, who can start a job for the first time and immediately claim in-work benefits. .

It’s the same for all insurance-based systems. You could insure your home today, paying just the first month’s premium, and if your home burnt down tomorrow, you’d still get a pay-out, even though you hardly made any contributions.

Child benefit is also often cited by Mr Cameron as a problem because EU migrants here can claim benefits for children not even living in the UK. That, of course, was never the intention of the child benefit system.

However, as Mr Portes points out, “the parent(s) are working and paying tax here (by no means true of all UK parents) and the children are certainly overall less of a cost to UK taxpayers than if they were actually living here!”

Mr Cameron has stated that he wants to reduce EU migrants coming to Britain (I can’t imagine why, since most of them are in gainful employment and making a significant net contribution to the Treasury and Britain’s wealth).

But is our benefits system really a ‘pull factor’ for EU migrants coming to Britain in the first place? The evidence is that welfare systems don’t generally drive immigration, according to Mr Portes. Nobody from Eastern or Central Europe comes to Britain to claim benefits; they come here for employment.

When the European Commission asked the British government for evidence of so-called ‘benefit tourism’, three times the government failed to provide any.

According to Mr Cameron, however, “40% of all recent European Economic Area migrants are supported by the UK benefits system.” But the data to back up the Prime Minister’s claim has never been published; almost certainly a violation of the Code of Practice on official government statistics.

The fact checking organisation, FullFact, has already submitted a formal complaint to the UK Statistics Authority.

The government’s numbers “look very odd” according to Mr Portes. According to published research, only a very small number of EU migrants would be affected by Mr Cameron’s 4-year-ban-on-benefits, because most EU migrants claiming the benefit have already lived in the UK for more than four years.

The four-year-ban, since it would affect such a small number of EU migrants, would be unlikely to make any difference to the numbers of migrants coming here.

So why did Mr Cameron want to risk Britain leaving the EU for a problem that doesn’t exist, and a solution that would make no difference?

Yesterday’s front page of the Evening Standard stated, “Cameron ‘retreat’ over EU migrant benefits”. It appears that the Prime Minister has now acknowledged that he cannot, after all, secure a four-year ban on welfare benefits to EU citizens exercising their right to work in Britain.”

Mr Cameron was quoted as saying, “Now I understand how difficult some of these welfare issues are for other member states.”

Isn’t it a bit late for Mr Cameron to “understand”? Shouldn’t he “understand” the issues first, and how important or otherwise they are, before risking the country’s future membership of the EU on demands that he should have known are incompatible with the principles and function of the European Union?

I am not confident that our Prime Minister knows what he is doing. It could be his, and the country’s, undoing. 

*Join the discussion about this article on Facebook.

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Related stories by Jon Danzig:

• Why is Britain so against migration?
• Fiddling whilst the rest of the world burns?
• The end of free movement to and from Europe?

To receive regular updates on this and other ongoing stories, please click the ‘Like’ button on my new Facebook page: Jon Danzig Writes

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Does @David_Cameron know what he’s doing on #EU reforms? Read and share my latest blog: https://t.co/YXdOONYd7C pic.twitter.com/qtzDT6WTvd

— Jon Danzig (@Jon_Danzig) November 11, 2015

The post Does the Prime Minister know what he’s doing? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Plenary sessions : European elections should be fought with formally endorsed, EU-wide lead candidates (“Spitzenkandidaten”) for the Commission presidency, Parliament said on Wednesday in a formal proposal for a change to EU electoral law. It says these candidates should stand for election to the EP themselves, and be formally nominated at least 12 weeks before the elections.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

Plenary sessions : European elections should be fought with formally endorsed, EU-wide lead candidates (“Spitzenkandidaten”) for the Commission presidency, Parliament said on Wednesday in a formal proposal for a change to EU electoral law. It says these candidates should stand for election to the EP themselves, and be formally nominated at least 12 weeks before the elections.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

Plenary sessions : To boost the EU's air transport economy, the EU needs to ensure a level playing field, while upholding high safety and social standards, says Parliament in a resolution passed on Wednesday and intended to feed into the Commission’s forthcoming aviation package.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

Plenary sessions : To boost the EU's air transport economy, the EU needs to ensure a level playing field, while upholding high safety and social standards, says Parliament in a resolution passed on Wednesday and intended to feed into the Commission’s forthcoming aviation package.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

I am happy to see so many of us here in Valletta today to discuss migration between our continents.

I would like to thank Prime Minister Muscat once again for kindly hosting us here in Valletta. I would also like to thank our senior officials for their hard work (until the early hours of this morning) in the preparation of a successful Summit.

As you know this meeting was suggested after the tragedy on 19 April, when hundreds of people lost their lives in the Mediterranean sea. This called on us to increase our efforts to try to stop such things from happening. The European Union took on the heavy responsibility of trying to save as many lives as possible. But this is dealing only with the symptoms. 

The only way we can manage migration is  by working together. Our purpose today is to agree a joint approach and concrete steps so that migration becomes fruitful exchange between our peoples, and not a tragic loss to all. We have a joint responsibility, and we must deliver on it in partnership and solidarity. That is why we are here.

Migration creates both challenges and opportunities and it affects us all - countries of origin, transit and destination. The number of people on the move globally has never been so big. Both Africa and Europe are put under heavy pressure trying to manage the scale and its effects on local communities.

Firstly, one of our biggest responsibilities is to address the root causes of the movements we are seeing. It is our job, as leaders, to ensure that people do not feel the need to risk their lives to achieve their aspirations. Security and opportunity are things that Europe and Africa already work on together. And we will continue to do so.

This means making our extensive development assistance more efficient, more targeted; creating more opportunities for young people to work. It also means stepping up our efforts to prevent and stop conflicts, and to help countries build systems of government that are accountable and open, that reinforce the rule of law, that respect human rights.

Secondly, people's aspirations and needs have to be met first and foremost at home. Legal migration can offer opportunities for some, but not for all. Routes for legal migration to Europe should remain open; mobility between our continents is a driver for growth on both sides.

Thirdly, and this is a crucial area for urgent action, we must do more to prevent the trafficking of human beings and the illegal smuggling of migrants by criminal gangs whose only motive is their own profit.

Fourthly, the EU and African countries have a history of protecting those entitled to international protection. We are ready to step up our support to you to help you deal with the displaced persons within Africa. At the same time, we will continue to offer international protection to those entitled to it.

Last, but definitely not least, proper return and readmission of those not entitled to international protection is essential. This is an international norm, and a responsibility of states to citizens. To keep the doors open for refugees and legal migrants, irregular migrants should be returned effectively and quickly. Voluntary return is always preferable. But when it is not possible, non-voluntary return is a pre-requisite for a well-managed migration policy. And once returned, we must all work together to reintegrate these people and provide them with the means to meet their aspirations.

Europe is taking its responsibility - saving lives, welcoming refugees and those entitled to international protection, offering more organised routes for legal migration, and dismantling criminal organisations.

We need our African partners to help us better address our common challenges. We have no choice but to be partners in this.

One of the strengths of our partnership is that we can have open and honest conversations about even difficult subjects.  We have these within the EU all the time.  Migration is a sensitive political topic within and amongst the EU Member States, as I am sure it is among African states too.  But we have to discuss it to find the right way forward for all of us. 

I look forward to our open and honest discussions. And more than that, I hope we will take the necessary action to forge our future cooperation. We have to turn our principles into action. Thank you.