EU Referendum

Showing posts with label think-tanks. Show all posts

Bloomberg has an article about a meeting at our own Institute of Economic Affairs that discussed the possible, nay probable, effects of more EU regulation of the financial markets. It was off the record but a few participants agreed to be quoted. What use an off the record meeting about financial regulations might be to anybody is not clear but the IEA loves to seem important.

Things are not going well. The financial regulations may affect the City adversely. Or so opines Ruth Lea, director at Arbuthnot Banking Group Plc and, as our readers may recall, director of the now moribund but formally still living Global Vision.

We have written about this group before (here and here for example) and we did not think highly of it. There seemed to be a great deal of retreading of old ground (people will listen if we tell them about the economics, yaddda-yadda) and their proposed aim seemed completely irrational.

Global Vision's view was that Britain should renegotiate a different relationship with the EU and its member states. I shall not weary our readers with a rehash of all the arguments why that can be described in technical terms as utter tosh. They are there in the postings I have linked to.

It would appear that Ruth Lea has inched away from that position.

"I am extremely worried about the City of London," said Ruth Lea, a director at Arbuthnot Banking Group Plc, who agreed after the Sept. 24 meeting at the Institute of Economic Affairs for her comments to be published. "Britain may be able to influence EU regulation, but we won't be calling the shots. Britain should consider the nuclear option of leaving the EU."

Mind you, this is something she said to the journalist. Did she say it in so many words at the meeting? This is not clear.

Other contributors made it clear either with approval or disapproval that what is at issue is not economic development or fear of financial crises; it is the "Anglo-Saxon" way of doing things that the EU is out to destroy.

Let us not at this stage go into what "Anglo-Saxon" might mean or whether it is really in evidence in Britain. What the financial regulations intend to do, according to all those quoted in the article is to undermine or destroy the City of London, the only really big international financial centre in the EU. The fact that these regulations will not help anyone else particularly seems to be irrelevant.

Read the whole piece on Bloomberg. But before you do, let me note one more interesting comment:

"It's good to avoid mentioning London in every single sentence and start looking at this from a European point of view," said Mats Persson, research director at Open Europe, a London lobby group that's critical of EU integration. Persson also spoke at the IEA. "I am Swedish, and I have sympathy for this kind of thinking."

What kind of thinking? More European control of the financial markets because the City is dispensable? Is this quite what we want to hear from our premier glasnost think-tank?

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TPA[i-TPA]No, not the war in Afghanistan. I refer to the eurosceptic fight. We have won, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. How do I know this? Well, I have been given a copy of The Taxpayers' Alliance's 08/09 Review and it is quite clear to me that they have achieved all that the rest of us have been working for all these years.

What's that? You are asking what it is they have achieved? Really, how can you be so cynical? They have had campaigns against the EU Rip-Off, produced a possible ad that tells everyone who is not completely asleep that the EU costs us a lot of money and have worn t-shirts against the Common Fisheries Policy. As readers may recall, I mentioned the demonstration at the time.

Anyway, the Review is very glossy with lots of pictures and two pages devoted to the European Union, which comes in the section Policy Influence. This must mean that somehow, somewhere they have influenced somebodies policy on the EU. So there you are, I told you we have won.

What do you mean, there have been no changes in anybody's policy with regards to the EU? I fail to see what that has to do with anything. After all, they quote Tim Montgomerie, who, apparently said, possibly after a very good dinner, that

The Taxpayers' Alliance is more likely to deliver Eurosceptic change than UKIP.

It is, perhaps, as well that Mr Montgomerie, who is, himself a member of Better Off Out, did not specify what those eurosceptic changes might be. For the TPA tends to finish all its reports, which are always the first ever on the subject, with suggestions of what the EU should do to reform itself. No suggestions on formation of Porcine Air Force but, I am sure, that is only a matter of time.

Anyhow, the section concludes with the following encouraging paragraph:

The EU campaign continues apace. We are already rallying support in the City against the EU's proposed financial directives, which seriously endanger the hedge fund industry. Later in the year we will publish an exciting short book, exploring the opportunities for Britain in a new relationship with our fellow European countries.

Let us not worry about the curious grammatical and syntactic structure. Let us look at content only.

Of course, the problem of the financial directives (part of a ten-year programme for the consolidation of the finance industry within the EU) has never been raised by anybody, not on this blog, not in the House of Lords, not at Bruges Group meetings, not in the City itself. How thankful we are that the TPA has come along and started campaigning.

Above all, we are looking forward to their ideas of how those "opportunities in a new relationship with our fellow European countries" are to be achieved. Exactly what methods of change will the boys and girls at the TPA be proposing. Can't wait for the exciting short book to be published later in the year.

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BNE+001[i-BNE+001]Readers of this blog who have long memories will recall the excitement caused among Western politicians, journalists, academics and other analysts Mikhail Gorbachev's concept of "perestroika", otherwise known as reconstruction. It was a wonderful get-out clause for those who fought hard against all evidence about the Soviet system. Here was a leader who believed in that system but wanted to reform it.

Some of us maintained that it could not be done and we turned out to be right. In case anybody is wondering, there was no mass resignation of all those experts who turned out to be wrong.

It is, however, a very useful expression and there are many "perestroika" organizations, both europhiliac and eurosceptic. We used to refer in those terms to the Centre for European Reform, but that has changed in the last two or three years and become europhiliac without much attention being paid to any possible reconstruction though they do, from time to time, call for reform of something or other in the European Union.

Its long-standing director, Charles Grant, Jacques Delors' biographer, has now turned up in another "perestroika" organization, Business for New Europe. Actually, it has existed since 2006 but has now turned up on my horizon or, to be quite precise, in my e-mail inbox as part of the regular information I get from the Stockholm Network, a pan-European network of market-oriented organizations.

So what is Business for New Europe and what does it hope to achieve? It "is an independent coalition of business leaders articulating a positive case for reform in Europe" and its aim is "to support the UK's active engagement in Europe, and a reformed, enlarged and free-market EU". This is rather a muddled set of aims as there seems to be no difference in the minds of those who wrote them between Europe and the European Union. Furthermore, the "reformed, enlarged and free-market EU" is nothing much more than a pipe-dream even if BNE and its talented staff could define what they meant.

Going past all the various refugees from the short-lived "Business for Europe", ex-FCO people, including Sir Stephen Wall, and Charles Grant we come to those who, presumably, actually run the place. Well, decide on the policy, at least, as it is run undoubtedly by badly paid assistants and unpaid interns.

Zaki Cooper has been Director of Business for New Europe SINCE February 2006. Prior to that, he worked as the Head of External Relations for the Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks and in public affairs for One to One/T-Mobile between 2000 and 2003. He has also worked for a British MP and a U.S. Congressman. He has a BA in Politics and Parliamentary Studies from Leeds University and an MPhil from Cambridge University in Social and Political Sciences. As well as his role at BNE, Zaki is also an inter-faith consultant and commentator.

Vrey nice, too. All the right qualifications: degrees from good universities but dubious subjects; jobs in public relations and work for various politicians; inter-faith consultant (wot dat?) . I see no particular reason to suppose he knows anything about the EU but I may well be wrong. Certainly this letter to the Wall Street Journal, published on July 1, does not exactly fill one with any kind of faith (if I may use that word) in Mr Cooper's knowledge and understanding:

Wall Street Journal, 1 July 2009

EU Membership Is a Boon For Britain

It is ironic that there is still so much ambivalence and hostility toward the European Union at a time when the direction of travel has been toward Britain ("The Dis-Uniting Kingdom," State of the Union, June 30). Since 2004, the EU has expanded to 27 member states and has made progress on strengthening the single market, such as the services directive which liberalized services, accounting for 70 percent of the European economy.

Developments in the area of financial services illustrate that the debate has moved in a Britain-friendly direction. Britain's financial industry is an important component of the European economy and London has established itself as the leading financial market in the EU. The single market and in particular the free movement of capital has been integral to that process. The corollary of the single market is regulation, and again many of the efforts to coordinate the regulatory structure have helped the development of financial services. Obviously the financial crisis has necessitated some new thinking and changes to the regulatory system. But rather than a federalized single regulator, many of the ideas being considered aim to increase coordination as well as strengthen warning systems. Such measures could make the British financial services industry even more robust to withstand economic turbulence. While there are specific regulatory threats such as the directive on Alternative Investment Fund Managers, the EU can manage overall to help rather than hinder Britain's financial services dynamism.

Zaki CooperDirector, Business for New Europe

They do also have a Public Affairs Executive:

Arif Shah joined Business for New Europe in September 2008. Prior to this,he worked at Westminster for a Member of Parliament and a member of the House of Lords. Arif has been closely involved with various non-governmental organisations including Human Rights Watch, Médecins Sans Frontières and WarChild Canada. He has a MA in International Studies from Durham University and BA in Political Science from Dalhousie University (Canada).

A true denizen of the tranzi-world.

The Advisory Council gives us a list of all the usual suspects from the business world but it hardly matters. No think-tank ever asks for advice from its Council. They would be mad to do so.

What worries me more than anything is that I can easily imagine that the Conservative government, should we have one after May next year, will turn to organizations like Business for New Europe for advice because they are so on-message.

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