Do you know of any others that you trust?
Colin sends Booker's latest -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/9813101/Norways-fax-democracy-is-nothing-for-Britain-to-fear.html
Norway's 'fax democracy' is nothing for Britain to fear
Britain might exercise more influence over the European single market outside the EU than in it
7:00PM GMT 19 Jan 2013
118 CommentsIt is possibly just as well that David Cameron had to postpone that most-trailed speech in history, on Britain’s place in “Europe”, because it may have given him time to get rather better briefed on what he proposes to say than the advance leaks of his speech have suggested. We gather that he proposed to say that the wish of the eurozone countries to drive on to much closer political union will push the British people “nearer to the exit” unless the EU is radically reformed.
Since Britain leaving the EU is the last thing Mr Cameron himself wants to see, he hopes to negotiate a new relationship with the EU, centred on our having continued free access to its single market: this is what he hopes to be able to put to the British people in a referendum, when such negotiations are completed in several years’ time (very possibly after he is no longer in office). I have pointed out before that this shows so little understanding of the rules of the EU that it is no more than multiple wishful thinking.
Under the EU’s treaty rules, there is no way powers, once handed over by a country, can be given back. Such negotiations as Mr Cameron has in mind would require a new treaty, a convention and an intergovernmental conference, which his EU colleagues would never allow. The only way he could compel them to negotiate would be by invoking Article 50 of the treaty, which can only be triggered by a country announcing that it wishes to leave. So the only way Mr Cameron could get agreement to the negotiations he wants would be by doing something he insists that he doesn’t want to do.
But another very important point he keeps on getting wrong is his insistence that he wouldn’t want the kind of relationship with the EU enjoyed by the Norwegians, because although they have full access to the single market, as members of the European Free Trade Association (Efta), they only do so at the price of having to obey rules they have no part in shaping: what is dismissively described as “fax democracy”. Mr Cameron clearly has not been properly briefed: the Norwegians in fact have more influence on shaping the rules of the single market than Britain does.
Like many other people, he hasn’t grasped that the vast majority of the single market’s rules are decided by a whole range of international and global bodies even higher than the EU – from the International Labour Organisation, which decides working-time rules, to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, which agrees worldwide standards on food safety and plant and animal health. On these bodies, Norway is represented in its own right, as an independent country, while Britain is only represented as one of the 28 members of the EU.
A recent Efta report shows that more than 90 per cent of the laws of the single market in fact originate from UN or other global bodies. Norway has more influence in drafting these than Britain, which simply has to accept the “common position” agreed within the EU. My colleague Richard North has lately been describing on his EU Referendum blog numerous examples of such international “quasi-legislation”, where Norway has more than once played a leading role in shaping rules which the EU members then have to obey. The EU countries are in fact more subject to “fax democracy” than Norway is. There have even been occasions when Norway has refused to obey rules that touch on its national interest, but which the British have to obey even though they are significantly damaging to us.
Next week, I will go into all this in greater detail, because the extent to which the EU must act in subordination to these higher bodies is one of the least-understood aspects of the way it works. This is not to say that Britain should necessarily seek the same relationship with the EU as Norway, as a member of Efta. But what it does demonstrate is that if Mr Cameron continues to talk scornfully of Norway being subject to “fax democracy”, he and his advisers simply haven’t taken on board one of the most important ways in which our globalised world is increasingly being run. If he persists in talking like this when he finally makes that long-awaited speech, it will be one of the main reasons why, as I wrote two weeks ago, he will fall flat on his face.
Baby escapes, entire family arrested
There has been a disturbing twist to the story I reported here last year of a couple who fled to France to prevent their expected child being seized at birth by social workers. This was threatened because the mother had already had her five older children taken into care after her ex-husband, now out of her life, had been imprisoned for abusing one of them. Although one judge authorised the social workers to travel to France to bring the new baby back to England, another judge in the High Court made legal history by ruling that this had been illegal and that the social workers must return the child to its overjoyed parents in France.
This was quite a reverse for the social workers, but for the family all seemed well until, at five o’clock one morning last week, the children’s semi-invalid maternal grandmother was woken by a loud banging at her door. She was arrested, held in a police cell for nine hours, then questioned for two more on what she regarded as bizarre allegations that she had sexually abused her five older grandchildren – even though they have been in foster care for three years.
She was not charged, but told that she could go home on police bail once several other people had also been questioned. Later, she found that those who had faced similar allegations included her husband (from whom she is separated); their other daughter and her husband – in a state of shock after seeing their two children taken into care that morning; and a friend of the daughter who lives in France, whose six children had also been taken.
When the grandmother, who has been a qualified Victim Support worker, returned home she found that her house had been raided by the police, who had removed 39 items, including her laptop and books on social care. The others’ homes had been similarly searched, with scores of items taken, including mobiles and computers.
Before any of those arrested can be charged and brought to court, the Crown Prosecution Service will have to be satisfied that the social workers have enough evidence to support their very serious allegations. The evidence will be tested under the strict rules of a criminal court, very different from the kind of thing that social workers are used to in the family courts.
A 'thing of the past’ comes back - again
As I looked out of the window on Friday morning to see that 6in of global warming had turned my Somerset garden into a winter wonderland, just as the Met Office had forecast, my first thought was to express smiling surprise that, for once, that much-maligned institution had got it right. But I was also not alone in recalling a famous headline from The Independent in March 2000, “Snowfall now just a thing of the past”, over a quotation from David Viner, of East Anglia’s celebrated Climatic Research Unit, predicting that falls of snow would, within a few years, become “a very rare and exciting event”.
Having read, in recent years, scores of books, hundreds of scientific papers and thousands of blog posts on every side of the great global-warming debate, I have concluded that there are only two things that can be said with certainty about our changing climate. The first is that no one in the world actually knows what global temperatures will be even next month, let alone in 100 years’ time. The other is that every one of the vaunted computer-model predictions on which, in the past 25 years, the warming scare has rested has been proved wrong.
All we are left with are the astronomic bills we will all continue paying into the indefinite future. These were foisted on us by politicians, scarcely any of whom have done their homework, simply accepting what they were told by seemingly plausible scaremongers who, as has become increasingly apparent, didn’t have a clue about what really drives our climate.
