European Union

In defiance of a new law that obliges 27 of the country's 73 Supreme Court judges to retire, the latter turned up for work as usual on Wednesday morning. The EU has accused Poland of seeking to "systematically weaken the rule of law". The dismantling of democracy could harm Poland for years to come and be copied in other countries, journalists fear.

Europe's politicians and civil society are caught up in a row over how to deal with refugees. Commentators sketch out the changes needed for the EU to overcome the crisis sparked by migration.

Committee meetings, Brussels

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Joint AFET/SEDE Public Hearing on Nuclear deterrence
11 July 2018
10.30 - 12.30
Room: Paul-Henri Spaak (4B001)
Further information
Draft Programme
Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

First published by UK in a Changing Europe, 27 June 2018

Downing Street, Westminster, London

In the classic American musical, Guys and Dolls, the cast sang the praises of Nathan Detroit, the man who ran The Oldest Established Floating Crap Game in the City of New York. The game produced winners and losers with one exception: Nathan Detroit was always a winner. As long as, that is, he could keep the crap game going.

Faced with a choice between splitting her Cabinet into winners and losers, Theresa May has sought to keep the Brexit crap game going. She does this by avoiding betting on either a hard or soft Brexit.

The cost of doing so has been a steady reduction in her political capital, which has been spent in buying off her divided Cabinet ministers. This has involved issuing ambiguous statements that each side can then interpret as giving them what they want.

The Prime Minister’s strategy can work if both sides are willing to keep playing the Westminster game, in the hopes that in the end they can walk away with a lion’s share of the Brexit stakes. If she took the dice away now, the stakes would change. With Number 10 at stake, knives would come out for a street fight. Back-stabbing would end and she would face a full-frontal challenge of a confidence vote by Tory MPs.

The Prime Minister cannot emulate Nathan Detroit by keeping her Brexit game going by floating from one side to the other. Nathan Detroit could do so because of the readiness of New York City police to take his weekly pay-off in return for letting him break anti-gambling laws.

Michel Barnier is the opposite of a New York City street-corner cop. His job is to enforce EU laws that put a strict time limit on the current Westminster crap game. Article 50 stipulates that two years after a national government notifies its intention to withdraw, it will cease to be a member-state.

When Theresa May triggered Article 50, March 29 became the date at which the UK ceases to be a member of the European Union. Doing so mollified pro-Brexit Tory MPs distrustful of her position because she had bet her Cabinet post under David Cameron by voting to remain in the EU.

In the months ahead Theresa May will have to wager her political future, not to mention the future of the United Kingdom, by playing by the EU’s rules in the Brexit negotiations. These offer a very limited choice of alternatives. The soft Brexit option, chosen by Norway and Switzerland, would give the UK customs and single-market benefits. However, it would require the UK to make financial contributions to the EU budget and accept EU rules regulating markets and enforced by the European Court of Justice without a voice and vote in deciding what these rules are.

This is consistent with the EU’s political decision that a state that withdraws must suffer a net loss in benefits. Rather than, in Boris Johnson’s word, having its cake and eating it too.
Hard Brexiters denounce EU terms on offer as vassalage. Theresa May has been keeping her Westminster crap game going by proposing measures that the EU has rejected as violating its red-line conditions for relations with non-member states. If no agreement can be reached on post-Brexit relations, the alternative is no deal.

This is acceptable to the EU and to the hardest of hardline Tory Brexiters but no deal is feared by enough Tory MPs to threaten defeat in the House of Commons.
At the beginning of October the EU will play the role of a tough cop. It will blow a whistle warning that the current Westminster crap game will have to end in less than six months time.

At this point, Theresa May will have to stake her political future by betting on one form of Brexit. A soft Brexit choice would keep some of the economic benefits that member states enjoy in exchange for political conditions that the EU will accept. This is sure to start a bloody knife fight with hard Brexiters and only gain parliamentary endorsement if enough MPs think that the conditions are a lesser evil. .

The alternative is no deal. This will scatter MPs, businesses, and foreign residents to look after themselves. The crap game that Theresa May has been playing will be replaced by a kind of Alice in Wonderland Caucus race. But instead of everyone who plays having prizes, everyone involved would have losses, and the finger of blame will point straight at the Prime Minister.

By Professor Richard Rose FBA, Professor of politics at University of Strathclyde.

The post Can Theresa May keep her Brexit crap game going indefinitely? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

maybe ‘train driver’ instead?

Perhaps the most infuriating questions to ask a young child is “what you do what to be, when you grow up?” Well, I found it infuriating, at least.

The question supposed that you knew what the options might – did I even know that ‘social media pundit’* was a thing back then? – and that you cared in any case: why do I need to set a goal now, when I’d rather be getting back to Top of the Pops (more innocent times, certainly)?

This might explain why my kids are currently offering ‘shark investigator’ and ‘ummm’ as their responses, when asked by others.

To generalise massively from this, forward planning is one of those things we know is probably important, but also a drag. That’s as true for politicians as it is for children (insert punchline here).

It’s even more true for organisations, because not only do you have to be bothered, but you also have to organise others to be bothered and then to do something about it. The burden-sharing that organisation brings is partly offset by the motivational aspect, especially when it’s something quite nebulous.

And Brexit is nothing if not nebulous. It requires not only an idea of what you want from a Withdrawal Agreement, but also what you want from a future relationship with the EU, and also what you want the UK to look like as a society and as a member of the international community.

‘Shark investigator’ is sounding a bit more appealing now, right?

None of this is to excuse the chronic inability of the Conservative party to settle on a course of action for Brexit, but rather to provide some context: any governing party would have faced the same difficulties and hard choices.

But as the Cabinet packs their bags for a weekend at Chequers, it’s helpful to consider how Theresa May has decided to tackle this challenge, both generally and specifically.

The first key point is that May’s general mode of making decisions is to keep things tight. As those of you who’ve read Tim Shipman’s excellent volumes All Out War and Fall Out will know, both in the Home Office and Number 10, May has tended to discuss matters with a few key advisors and then tell everyone else what’s happening. The merits and demerits are neither here nor there, but her success in her former role has evidently made it harder to adapt it to her current one.

In particular, May’s relative weight in decision-making is less now than it was pre-Premiership, especially since the 2017 General Election: the weight of the Cabinet sits relatively distinctively away from her own tendencies.

And those tendencies have been a mix of a more instinctive soft Brexit with a pragmatic desire to hold the party together, which points in a harder direction. Given where we are on policy, this suggests that party unity is the priority issue, even if opportunities to soften are pursued regularly. That the EU is also a source of softening provides a degree of cover on this.

Ultimately, that has tended to make May conflict-averse to a degree. Whereas her more general model has been to decide-and-stick, on Brexit issues she has hedged her language from her first days in office, to avoid having to collapse ambiguities and compromises that have enabled the party to stick with the programme.

All of which suggests that Chequers will not be a big break-through moment for the process.

It’s important to note here that one key strategy that May has employed in her management has been to avoid some issues (typically the more pressing ones), and focused on others. The customs arrangements is a case in point: it can only ever be a small part of a future deal, but it has occupied minds in London for many months, apparently much more than the question of the Irish dimension.

As I’ve discussed before, this is partly because customs has become a proxy for other battles about hard-/softness, but also it’s because by resolving a position on customs (which is less ‘high politics’ than borders) it is then possible to work backwards to a position on, well, borders. The fundamental interlinkage between domains in Brexit means that decisions in any one part can and will shape decisions elsewhere: that’s one reason why progress has been so hard, as those linkages become clearer and doubts are sown.

However, even if Chequers can produce a consensus around a model for customs, that will not immediately resolve the Irish dimension, which is now the very large elephant in the room: unless and until that can be addressed, there will be no customs arrangements of any kind, because there won’t be a Withdrawal Agreement or a political declaration on the future relationship.

That everyone knows this suggests one of two things.

Either London thinks that Brussels (and Dublin) is biddable on the Irish dimension, despite absolutely no objective evidence to support this: it is a hill the Commission and European Council appear fully prepared to die on.

The alternative is that there is a move to reframe the issue, in part by using the customs debate.

A recurring theme that is emerging from the debate within the Tories is that none of the exciting options can be ready for the end of 2020. That means there’s a gap between then and the implementation of whatever model it is, and no one is making a very hard bid on what that gap should look like.

Put differently, Tories seem to be arguing about the long future rather than the near one: they’ll accept some form of high alignment in return for political commitment to future jam. Given the generally low levels of trust in the political class, and the rifeness of backstabbing, this seems rather optimistic to me, but then I’m just the dad of someone who wants to be a ‘shark investigator’.

This might work, but as so often with the British debate, it’s an idea that’s driven much more by a concern about domestic politics than by an understanding of how the EU works.

If Chequers is to be a credible step forward, then it has to work not only for Tory ministers, but also the country as a whole and for the EU. Manage that and maybe we’ll all have grown up a bit.

 

*For any senior management reading this, this is internet slang for “high impact academic with world-leading research”. Trust me.

The post The Conservative mode of making Brexit decisions appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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The Austrian EU Presidency takes over on 1 July 2018, until the end of 2018.

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Generalstaatsanwaltschaft (Conditions de détention en Hongrie)
DFON
Advocate General Campos Sánchez-Bordona proposes that the Court should rule that the existence, in the State issuing a European arrest warrant, of judicial remedies against possible inhuman or degrading treatment is a relevant factor allowing such a risk to be discounted and that, consequently, there are, in principle, no exceptional circumstances capable of justifying the non-execution of that arrest warrant

Kuhn
Area of Freedom, Security and Justice
Advocate General Bot proposes that the Court of Justice rule that the ‘Brussels Ia’ Regulation is not applicable in determining which Member State’s courts have jurisdiction to rule on claims brought against the Greek State by an individual holding Greek sovereign bonds following their forced exchange in exceptional circumstances and under exceptional conditions

Wirth and Others
Transport
In the case of long delay of a flight, the air company which must pay the compensation owed to passengers is not the air company which leased the aircraft and its crew, but the air company which decided to perform the flight

Planta Tabak
Freedom of establishment
Advocate General Saugmandsgaard Øe proposes that the Court rule that the broad prohibition on the sale of tobacco products with characterising flavours complies with the principle of equal treatment

Commission v Slovakia
Law governing the institutions
For having delayed in implementing EU law on the landfill of waste, Slovakia is fined a lump sum of €1 000 000 and a penalty payment of €5 000 per day of delay