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The need for a restriction on the freedom of movement and residence of an EU citizen, or a family member of an EU citizen, suspected of having, in the past, participated in war crimes must be assessed on a case-by-case basis

  Last night Theresa May’s Tory (aka UKIP2) government suffered a major defeat in the House of Lords.

By a large majority, the Lords agreed to an amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill to give MPs the power to stop the UK from leaving without a deal, or to make Theresa May return to negotiations if the deal is considered not good enough.

Supporters of the amendment said that Parliament, and not ministers, must “determine the future of the country”.

Government ministers have expressed anger at the Lords amendment, calling it a betrayal of ‘the people’s will’. Mrs May is now trying to persuade MPs to strike out the change.

But wasn’t one of the main points of the Brexit campaign to give our Parliament in Westminster ‘more sovereignty’?

Isn’t it the job of our Parliament to consider, in great detail, all decisions affecting the future of our country, and to hold the executive to account?

When making a decision, our Parliament has many debates, and multiple votes, over a period of time, often many months, and our Parliamentarians can reconsider, amend or reverse the decision at any stage of the process.

But in the referendum us, ‘the people’, only had one vote, on one day, on a simplistic binary choice, without any chance to reconsider, amend or reverse our decision, even though voting took place almost two years ago.

What sort of democratic process is that?

Furthermore, the referendum was seriously flawed. Here’s why:

Many people directly affected by the outcome of the referendum were denied a vote.

The referendum was, by Act of Parliament, advisory only and not binding, but a minority was allowed to ‘win’. (Yes, a minority: 17 million people voting for Leave is not a majority in a country with 46.5 million registered voters).

The margin between Leave and Remain was wafer thin – less than 4%, so well within the margin of error.

Two of the four countries of our Union of the United Kingdom did not want Brexit, thus literally splitting the UK in half.

There was no manifesto, blueprint or plan presented for Brexit (and there still isn’t). So, the 17 million who voted for Brexit didn’t all vote for the same Brexit.

No one could have given ‘informed consent’ for Brexit, because none of us were fully informed about the meaning of Brexit.

Some Leave voters thought we’d be staying in the Single Market after Brexit. (Yes, that’s what some Leave campaigners told us).

Some thought we’d be staying in the EU Customs Union, or at least ‘a’ customs union after Brexit. (Yes, that’s what some Leave campaigners told us).

Many voted for Brexit because they believed the lies of the Leave campaign (more money for the NHS; getting our country back; more sovereignty; control of borders; the EU is undemocratic; Turkey is joining soon.. all misleading and false).

Some voted for Brexit because they never imagined ‘Remain’ would lose, and so used the ballot box as a protest vote against Cameron’s Tory government.

There were many reasons people voted for Leave, but no single reason, and certainly no defined agreement on what Brexit would mean or entail. (We still don’t know).

So, frankly, it’s disingenuous to claim that ‘Brexit is the will of the people’. By no stretch of the imagination can Brexit be described as ‘the people’s will.’

And in any event, even if Brexit was ‘the will of the people’ on one day in June 2016, that’s almost two years ago, and multiple polls have since shown that the will of the people is not now in favour of Brexit.

But this is the problem of referendums. They are not democratic, and they are a lousy way to make a decision.

So far, this has not been a problem in the few referendums we’ve had in the UK, because referendum results have not produced controversial results.

But, for the first time in a UK referendum, voters on 23 June 2016 rejected the status quo, the advice of the government, and the consensus of Parliament.

The Brexit vote pitched ‘direct democracy’ against ‘Parliamentary democracy’, with potentially disastrous consequences.

And therein lies the problem now facing and fissuring the United Kingdom.

Direct democracy (referendums) and representative Parliamentary democracy can be dangerously incompatible.

They cannot co-exist without the potential of one damaging or even destroying the other.

The few referendums that Britain has held in recent decades haven’t caused such major problems because, until now, referendums were generally relied upon to return a result in accordance with the status quo and/or the will of Parliament.

Put simply, voters tended to dislike change.

But that ‘rule of thumb’ was dramatically and perilously turned around when Leave won. For the first time, ‘the people’ voted against the overwhelming will of Parliament.

So which ‘will’ has superior sovereignty: Parliament, or ‘the people’? The conflict has the potential to destroy the very core of our democracy.

This is a problem that has never happened before in Britain, but it should have been anticipated. After all, referendums are a relatively new phenomenon in our country, and many sage British politicians were, for good reasons, completely against them.

Labour prime minister, Clement Atlee, categorically stated that referendums “are just not British.”

He said:

“I could not consent to the introduction into our national life of a device so alien to all our traditions as the referendum which has only too often been the instrument of Nazism and fascism.”

Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was also adamantly opposed to referendums. She said that they were the “device of dictators and demagogues”.

And it’s true: Hitler, Mussolini and Napoleon III all used referendums to legitimise decisions they had made. They could go to the populace and ask them any question, and then interpret the simplistic one-word answer almost any way they wanted.

(Which is pretty much what our Prime Minister, Theresa May, and her Brexit ministers, are attempting to do.)

Of course, former Prime Minster David Cameron knew the dangers of referendums all along. But he never anticipated losing.

After all, he felt confident after previously ‘winning’ two major referendums in a row: a referendum to change the voting system (2011; answer no) and a referendum giving independence to Scotland (2014, answer no).

Since Mr Cameron was so convinced that there was almost no chance of losing the EU referendum, a potential clash between the ‘will of the people’ and the ‘will of Parliament’ was not going to occur.

How wrong he was.

What’s worse is that there was no need for a referendum at all. Mr Cameron only decided to hold one to resolve an internal dispute in the Tory party, rather than for the national interest.

Euroscepticism, and the call for another EU referendum after the one in 1975, had always been on the minority fringes of the main political parties, especially as around two-thirds of both houses of our Parliament strongly supported EU membership.

Mr Cameron not only gambled with our country’s future by holding an unnecessary referendum, but he also put at grave risk the foundations and established mechanisms of our traditional method of democracy.

Following the referendum result, MPs and members of the House of Lords felt stymied. The vast majority of their heads and hearts told them that Britain’s best interests are served by remaining in the EU, and that Brexit is likely to cause the country severe economic hardship and isolation.

After all, that’s what the vast majority of them told us during the referendum campaign.

Instead of the referendum giving our Parliament more sovereignty – one of the many disingenuous promises of the Leave campaign – the referendum result severely weakened and demeaned Parliamentary sovereignty and the function of MPs.

Even though it was decided by Parliament that the referendum should be advisory only and not legally binding, politicians have felt agonisingly compelled to obey the Brexit result.

Were it not for the referendum, by a huge majority, Parliamentarians would have strongly and unequivocally voted against Britain leaving the EU.

Instead of empowering Parliamentarians, the referendum result has turned them into puppets of ‘the will of the people’.

Unlike decisions of Parliament, which can be fully considered, amended, changed and reversed, the simplistic one-word answer of the referendum now appears to be cast in stone.

This is all a hopeless mess. The so-called ‘will of the people’ has trumped and thwarted Parliament’s sovereignty, even though that ‘will’ was based on a minority of registered voters, who voted for something that was not clearly defined or understood.

(Indeed, the promises and claims made about Brexit were based on shocking lies).

The simple fact is that referenda are only benign when they agree with the will of Parliament. But when a referendum returns a result that’s entirely the opposite to the will of Parliament, our democracy, and our country, are in danger of tearing themselves apart.

Prime Minister Theresa May must have realised this. She considered it necessary to resolve the very narrow margin for Leave in the referendum by calling a snap general election last year, with the goal of winning a huge majority to give her an unquestionable mandate to go ahead with Brexit.

But instead, the country rejected her plans, leaving her with no majority at all.

That should be the cue for Parliament to regain its confidence and to take back sovereignty that it imagined, falsely, had been removed from it by the advisory referendum of 2016.

We now need a return to fully fledged, representative Parliamentary democracy, that has served this country well for hundreds of years.

We now need Parliament to act in the best interests of the entire United Kingdom; not just the 17 million who voted for Leave, but for all the people of our country: the 65 million who live here, and who our Parliamentarians are supposed to represent, and protect. • Photo of the Houses of Parliament by Diliff (Own work) [CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

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The post Why referendums and Parliament are incompatible appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Speech by President Donald Tusk at ceremony of the award of the Polonicus 2018 prize in Aachen, Germany.

At the end of his tour in the Western Balkans region, President Tusk participated in the Brdo-Brijuni process Leaders' meeting held in Skopje.

Weekly schedule of President Donald Tusk 28 April-6 May 2018

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The Libya Quartet brings together the League of Arab States, the African Union, the United Nations and the European Union. The aim is to support UN mediation and regional efforts and to accompany the process of the political transition in Libya, in full respect of Libyan ownership.

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The EU’s cohesion policy is 30 years old and now accounts for around a third of the EU’s budget. To celebrate, the European Commission has published a new dataset. This details annual payments to the EU’s regions since 1989.

The dataset covers most funds under the European Structural and Investment Funds umbrella. For the UK this covers the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the European Social Fund (ESF) and the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD). This means some big areas of EU spending (such as payments made via the Common Agricultural Policy) aren’t included. The dataset also doesn’t include the territorial co-operation element of ERDF, such as Interreg.

This aside, it provides some interesting insights into how the EU has invested in the UK since 1989.

Between 1989 and 2016 the UK received a total of €37.4 billion from the three funds. There’s sometimes a popular assumption that the lion share of EU regional spending has been focused on central and eastern Europe, but over the long term the UK has done relatively well. The amount spent in the UK since 1989 is well above the EU-28 average of €28 billion.

This partly reflects that the UK has been a member state for a long time and so has been able to benefit from EU funds over a longer period. But it’s also important to remember that the UK pushed hard for EU regional policy to be adopted in the first place, mainly because many of its deindustrialising regions would be key beneficiaries.

The UK benefited most from the 2000-2007 programming period, which saw €16 billion worth of investment. Spending reached a peak in 2005. It then fell from the 2007-2013 programming period as funding shifted its focus to central and eastern Europe.

In terms of where EU money has been spent in the UK, West Wales and the Valleys have benefited the most. Merseyside, Northern Ireland, South West Scotland, South Yorkshire and the West Midlands have also seen high levels of investment. But something worth noting is that every area in the UK has benefited to some extent – EU investment has not just been the preserve of areas in industrial decline.

In the context of Brexit all of this leads to an obvious question: what will happen to this investment after the UK leaves the EU? The amounts spent are not insignificant. As austerity bites, localities have also become increasingly reliant on EU funding schemes to deliver projects.

During the 2017 general election the Conservative Party manifesto committed to establishing a “Shared Prosperity Fund” which would replace EU regional investment after Brexit. But there’s been little progress and clarity on this since the election. While the EU is preparing its proposals for the next cohesion policy programme from 2021, the UK has only got as far as guaranteeing to underwrite EU projects up to the end of 2020. For this reason, UK local authorities – the primary beneficiaries of EU regional funding – are starting to worry.

There are plenty of debates about how effective EU regional spending has been. But overall UK regions have seen sizeable investment from the EU, which the LGA says has been used to “create jobs, support small and medium enterprises, deliver skills training, invest in critical transport and digital infrastructure and boost inclusive growth”. The extent to which this support will continue after Brexit remains uncertain.

The post Exploring EU regional investment in the UK since 1989 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

Recommendation to the Council, the Commission, and the EEAS on Libya
Recommendation to the Council, Commission and the Vice-President of the Commission / High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy on the negotiations on the modernisation of the EU-Chile Association Agreement
Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

The next AFET meetings are scheduled to take place on:

Wednesday, 16 May 2018, 09:00-12:30 and 14:30-18:30, room JAN 2Q2
Thursday, 17 May 2018, 09:00-12:30, room JAN 2Q2

Further information
Information for visitors
Draft agendas
Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

will take place on 15 May, 9:00-12:30 and 14:30-18:30 in Brussels.

Organisations or interest groups who wish to apply for access to the European Parliament will find the relevant information below.

Further information
watch the meeting live
Access rights for interest group representatives
Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

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President Donald Tusk receives the Polonicus Award on 28 April 2018 in Aachen.

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The informal meeting of EU ministers of finance and economy to be held on 27 and 28 April at the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, Bulgaria. Ministers of finance and economy and the central bankers of the EU discuss the convergence policy inside and outside the Euro area, as well as the further reduction of fragmentation within the Capital Markets Union. The second day of the meeting is devoted to improving revenue collection and fighting tax fraud in the single market, as well as to corporate taxation and the taxation of the digital economy.

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AMENDMENTS 1 - 138 - Draft report Partnership and Cooperation Agreement between the EU and Iraq
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

Remarks by M. Centeno following the Eurogroup meeting of 27 April 2018 on Greece, banking union and wage dynamics.

During his last stop of his Western Balkan's tour, President Donald Tusk met Prime Minister of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia Zoran Zaev. The main topic of the discussions was the preparation of the upcoming Sofia summit.

The Council adopted revised rules on the funding of European political parties and foundations.

In Sarajevo, President Tusk met Bakir Izetbegović, Mladen Ivanić and Dragan Čović, members of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and discussed the state of play of preparation of the EU-Western Balkans summit in Sofia.

As part of his tour of the Western Balkans, President Tusk visited Pristina and met President Thaçi to prepare the summit in Sofia.

The Council extends and strengthens arms embargo, and adopts a framework for restrictive measures against officials responsible for human rights violations in Myanmar / Burma.