I suppose it was inevitable:

MP demands Eurovision vote change

The Eurovision Song Contest voting system needs to be changed because it is “harmful to the relationship between the peoples of Europe”, an MP has said.

Countries voted for their neighbours rather than the best songs, Liberal Democrat MP Richard Younger-Ross said.

And the BBC should insist on voting changes or withdraw from the contest all together, he added.

PR for Eurovision?

Of course, a far simpler solution might be to borrow Lemsip’s girlfriend and her sister - the distinctly Romanian Cheeky Girls - for next year’s contest and bank on hoovering up the Eastern European block vote ourselves.

Personally, I’m still of the opinion that we forget winning the fucking thing and go all out to take the piss as much as possible.

Let’s cut a deal with the Irish for next year - we’ll send the Happy Mondays if they’ll ship over the Pogues and let’s just fuck with everyone’s heads.

Moan as much as you like about the nakedly political voting, it still doesn’t detract from the fact that left to its own devices and a BBC phone poll, the British viewing public will still decide to enter the biggest bag of shite on offer to them anyway.

Bollocks to trying to win the damn thing, let’s just kick back next year and see what the Serbs make of Shaun Ryder, Bez and Shane McGowan.

From the Beeb:

The European Commission is to propose more majority voting on police and justice matters.

The proposals, to be presented on Wednesday, would shift the legal basis for decisions in areas including terrorism and organised crime.

Up to now decisions in these areas have been made by unanimous agreement among the 25 member states.

That’s not the good bit, however - this is:

The President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, said that a large number of the decisions in the fields of justice, freedom and security could be "dealt with more effectively at European level than at national level".

"Security is increasingly becoming a concern of people in Europe. But it is a concern that is accompanied by a feeling of certainty that has been clearly expressed during the debates over the last year: the most effective response in the field of security is the European response," he said in a speech in Portugal.

"People are asking for ‘more Europe’ in order to combat terrorism and organised crime. It is our duty to respond to this appeal, with or without a constitution."

And which people are these, because I haven’t met any of them lately.

WTF is going here - has Tony loaned him Alistair Campbell for a while?

I Don’t often post much on the subject of Europe but thought I would repost here my comments from a debate at Samizdata on Blair’s offer of concessions on the UK’s rebate.

The basic hypothesis here is that there may be more to Blair’s offer of concessions than first meets the eye.

…

Right now, Blair is in a major bind.

The UK presidency has achieved nothing, less than nothing in fact as we’re further away from any agreement on the budget now than we were when he took over the role.

He was also completely outmanouvered by Chirac and Schroeder on the budget when they succeeding in shifting attention on to the rebate and away from reforming CAP and liberalising the internal service sector market which is what Blair seems to want.

The way in which the rebate is calculated and paid means that, on paper at least, the accession countries of Eastern Europe, will join the rest of EU in paying into the pot that funds the rebate which, naturally, is pissing them off a fair bit as they’re piss poor broke and desperately in need of structural funds to investing in business, etc.

What Blair appears to be doing in offering to waive that portion of the rebate which would come from the accession states in return for a cut in their expected structural funds - which is meaningless as only Portugal has ever come close to spending their full allocation and then only for one year - typically there’s a routine 15-20% underspend on structural funs due to the way they are paid as national governments have to provide 50% match funding to release them.

In return what Blair hopes to get, I think, is the full support of the accession countries for his other reforms on CAP and market deregulation. From what I understand, only Poland, which has a large agricultural sector, may be difficult as they stand to gain heavily from CAP. Other states which are focussed more on industrial and service sector development should fall in behind Blair quite readily as they see market liberalisation as the key to inflating their economies on the back rapid economic growth.

So - Blair offers a concession on the rebate, but if he’s smart it’ll be a ringfenced deal from which only the accession countries will benefit - existing member states will stil make their usual contributions.

Next he ups the ante on reform of CAP and market deregulation, knowing he has the backing of the accession states and throws the ball back into Chirac’s court.

Chirac now faces two choices - either he makes the deal and gets a hammering at home or he sticks to his guns on CAP, etc. and it all falls through.

If Chirac capitulates, Blair takes a modest hit from the Mail/Express - which would happen if he gave the EU a fiver back let alone £1 billion.

As for Murdoch and the Sun, who knows where they’ll go? Murdoch is a eurosceptic, true, but then think?

Won’t deregulation of service sector markets also work in his favour by creating conditions which allow him to expand the News International empire into the new markets in Eastern Europe?

Check the press today - the Express are leading on the rebate, the Sun have one column on an inside page and the Times are talking up the importance of keeping ‘New Europe’ onside as being more important than the rebate.

Blair may get a bit of a kicking on the rebate but not as big as some clearly think and not from where, in the media, he’ll see it as mattering most - and any, it’s not like he’ll have to worry about going to the country again for a mandate.

Sudden a lose-lose scenario becomes a win-win.

Chirac folds and Blair gets the reforms he’s after and the gratitude of the accession countries who stand to gain most from inward investment arising from deregulation and he gets to see Chirac take a beating from his own press.

Chirac sticks to his guns and Blair can claim that he tries to be reasonable and make concessions only for the Frence to screw over the deal out of naked self-interest, which means he gets to turn the tables on Chirac and make him the villain, keep the backing of the accession states and keep the rebate.

Meanwhile, the Mail, Express and Sun can get back to their favourite pastime of blaming the French for everything and Blair’s off the hook.

First it was Non. Then it was Nee. And now it seems it could be ‘We want our currency back’ as at least one Minister in Berlusconi’s Italian government has started making noises about a referendum to bring back the Lire - also in the Times.

Is this a another serious threat to the European Project or just a bit of popularist opportunism? Only time will tell, I suppose.

But what it does show is an important knock-on effect of this week’s referenda - by saying ‘no’ the French and Dutch peoples have implicitly given other nations ‘permission’ to say no themselves, not just to the EU Constitition but on other matters where the drive to deeper integration turns out not to have quite the benefits that people expected or hoped for.

What happens next is going to be an interesting test of the ability and astuteness of Europe’s politicians.

The old post-war rationale for the EU, the one which said that European co-operation from the top down would serve to prevent further wars between what we once the ‘Great Powers’ is no longer relevant to a generation for whom the Second World War is an ever more remote piece of history and about as relevant to modern political culture as, say, the Battle of Agincourt. You should never say never, of course, but the idea that idea that Western Europe, at least, could again go to war over matters of territory and resources is no so remote as to be negligible.

The challenge now seems to be how to rebuild and re-orientate the European project from the bottom up, to found the next stage in Europe’s development on the wishes of its people and not simple that of a small political and bureaucratic elite. It sounds obvious - in fact it should be obvious - but I think Europe has reached the very limits of what can be achieved without fully engaging its people, without having a proper democratic foundation for its role and activities.

Federalism is a dirty word to the Eurosceptic right. Federalism in the enemy. Federalism means the loss of national sovereignty.

No it doesn’t. European federalism does not have to mean that more and more power is turned over to Brussels and to a Parliament which, for all that its elected by the [some of] the people still seems wholly remote from people’s day to day concerns. Not if you have a federal constitution which clearly defines and delimits the boundaries between the authority of the federal core and that of its component nation states, one which says that federal influence extends so far and no further.

That seems, to me, to be message of the week for Europe’s politicians - good fences make for good neighbours.

That’s what the eurosceptics need to understand about the idea of a European Constitition, that a properly written consititution, one which clears defines its purpose, which says, in effect, that ‘Europe ends here’ is ultimately their best possible defence against the kind of ‘feature creep by treaty’ which allows their jealously guarded sovereignty to ebb away, in a piecemeal fashion, to Brussels.