The Edge of England's Sword

The Ex-President from Balliol Speaks

Like them or loathe his politics, Christopher Hitchens, ex-President of the Oxford Union, is fast reclaiming his student reputation as one of the most brilliant advocates of his position currently operating. Here he lays the smack down on Michael Moore's fed-by-candy ass so sublimely that I can but quote the conclusion and urge you to read the entire article:

At no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer. He pitilessly focuses his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. (But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia.) Such courage.

Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …

And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.

If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.

Oh, to see an OUS debate between Hitchens and Moore. Collapse of stout party, indeed...

Conspiracy

Greenpeace idiots!

I haven't bought Exxon gas since the Valdez incident and these guys are claiming Iain is part of a vast oil conspiracy?!?

If that's true then why don't I have jewelry? Or All-Clad cookware, a mandoline, and a chinois? And why haven't we had a proper hotel-based vacation ever?

If Exxon coughs up some money so that I can finally have a honeymoon after seven years of marriage, then I'll gladly be part of Greenpeace's conspiracy theory. Until then, Greenpeace are big dinguses in my book.

Kris Murray
Iain's Wife

Army for Environmentalism

My minions at TCS have just published my take on the 'political Europe' document unearthed by Richard North. As you might guess, I'm not impressed.

Rumbled

You will see from this map, kindly provided by Greenpeace, that I am in fact at the head, nay apex, of an International Capitalist Conspiracy, funded by ExxonMobil. I number Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Condi Rice and many others amongst my minions.

For proof, see here.

Bwah-ha-ha-ha!!!

(Rubs hands together in delight and EVIL)

Putin and Kyoto

I have an article in the Portsmouth Herald, summing up where I feel Putin is going with his Kyoto policy. He's positively Clintonian.

Blogroll update

You'll see I've updated the Blogroll at long, long last. So say welcome to a lot of deserving newcomers, some returns that had inexplicably dropped off and farewell to a dew old favorites.

Now I'm using Blogrolling, by the way, it should be much easier to keep this up to date.

Crushing of dissent?

A colleague wanted to email a letter to the New York Times, but couldn't find the letters email address that used to be fairly prominent in the Editorials & Opinion section. We searched around a little but were unable to locate it anywhere.

They must have removed it because of spambots, I thought, so we decided to take the old-fashioned step of looking in the actual paper. Nope. No email address printed there either.

How odd...

McCain Again

I have a new article up on TCS. Here We Go Again explains how the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act, which just won't go away, is more costly than two Iraq wars.

Steyn on form

It's a pretty good column from Mark Steyn in the Telegraph today, but this paragraph may be the funniest thing he's ever written:

In France in 2002, the presidential election was supposed to be between Jacques Chirac, the Left of Right of Left of centre candidate, and Lionel Jospin, the Right of Left of Right of Left of centre candidate. Chospin and Jirac ran on identical platforms, both fully committed to high taxes, high unemployment and high crime. Faced with a choice between Eurodee and Eurodum, the French electorate decided they fancied a real choice and stuck Jean-Marie Le Pen in there. Same in Holland until Pim Fortuyn got gunned down by a crazed vegetarian, the first fruitarian to kill a fruit Aryan.

Politically correct? Hardly. But funny.

RIP Sir Stuart Hampshire

I learn from Prof. Geras that Warden Hampshire has died. Sir Stuart Hampshire was the last of the great mid-century generation of Oxford philosophers and was Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1970-1984, just before I went up there.

He was very warmly regarded by Wadham staff, academic and domestic, and was truly a great figure in college history. His Telegraph obituary contains some fascinating details about his career in military intelligence, about which I knew nothing, but it is his philosophy for which he shall be remembered:

Hampshire had a horror of the moral certainties of Left and Right from his time in British intelligence during the Second World War. He valued freedom over equality and rejected the classical philosophical tradition that set up reason as an absolute arbiter of disputes. Nor did he believe that liberal or socialist values had any special moral or historical significance, regarding all claims to moral universality as bogus.

His distrust of those who believe that they alone have a monopoly on truth led him to examine, in his later years, how justice could be done and seen to be done in a pluralist society. In Justice is Conflict (1999), Hampshire acknowledged that it is inevitable that people should hold irreconcilable views - on, say, the morality of warfare or abortion or even whether a motorway should be built through a beautiful valley. The popular idea that politicians should aim to find consensus on such issues, he suggested, was not only misguided but wrong. Conflict presumes the right to question authority and is a fundamental safeguard against tyranny.

Instead of consensus, Hampshire argued, a free society should aim to perfect the intermediate institutions that arbitrate between contending parties so that all sides feel, whatever the eventual outcome, that they have been given a fair hearing.

Sounds pretty sensible to me. Amazingly, I have never read any of his work, although I've heard him discussed many times. I must rectify that deficit soon.

So what do EU think?

All in all, the Euro elections proved very interesting as UKIP came from nowhere to be the undoubted winner on the night, depsite only polling 16% of the vote in total. Let's look at each party's performance overall, in reverse order:

Scottish Socialist Party: Barely registered. Gorgeous George is the current voice of the extreme Left.

Nationalists: Devolution continues to hit them badly. The SNP's share of the vote slumped badly, while Plaid Cymru fared even worse. I suspect these parties are on their way out as serious forces, and a curious result of devolution will be the reintegration of Scottish and Welsh politics into the mainstream. Funny, that.

RESPECT: Well, Gorgeous George did much less well in the Euro elections than in the locals, which may be the result of extreme left Euroskeptics voting UKIP. The extreme left can't get a foothold in UK politics as independents, so it looks like a return to entryism for them.

BNP: The big surprise of the night for me, as they got 5% of the vote, depsite the presence of UKIP, but I suspect that there might be a degree of confusion inherent here, with some voters ticking their box thinking they were UKIP. On the other hand, they mobilized strongly in an ultimately futile effort to get Nick Griffin elected.

Greens: Vote and representation unchanged. They did this partly, I think, by campaigning for the most part on a Euroskeptic ticket, essentially ignoring the much-vaunted unified campaign with the other European Green parties. You know, I can see a successful future for the Greens as a reactionary, leave us alone, conservationist party, anti-wind power, anti-development, anti-, well, progress. The Greens as Hobbits? Possibly.

Lib Dems: The early reports were painting them as big winners. Wrong, and the reports changed their tune. Despite being the most Europhile party by some distance, despite the supposed boost from the Iraq war backlash, despite their existence as the only credible left-wing alternative to Labour, their vote only increased 2.3%. I predicted they'd get 14 seats and they didn't even manage that. While they probably did win quite a few Labour votes, they probably also lost a lot of Eurosceptic votes in areas like the South West. The combination of this and the Local elections shows that the Lib Dems are no longer a real threat to the Tories, which means that many of their MPs will be in real trouble at the next election. They have to concentrate on winning seats from Labour. This is, believe it or not, what I predicted as their only real course of action almost exactly three years ago in my second-ever blog post. Things are not looking good for the third force...

UKIP: Spectacular success earned despite, rather than because of their leadership. They gained votes from all parties, I suspect, rather than just abstracting Tory support (although the vast majority of the Tory slump can be ascribed to them, I suspect). Hopefully Robert Kilroy-Silk can use his new position to voice the strong Eurosceptic position without appearing like the popular caricature of the swivel-eyed loon banging on about the Magna Carta that has hurt the strong Eurosceptic position so badly for so long. If this has broken the taboo on honest debate over withdrawal as a viable political option, then this is a good result for British politics.

Labour: Didn't do as badly as I thought they would, but still recorded their worst result since before WWI. I thought they'd lose more votes to the Lib Dems as well as some to UKIP, but losing almost a quarter of their vote is bad enough. It's a clear indication that Labour's European stance, with all its talk on redlines and so on, has little credibility with the British people. The best Labour can hope for is to use this result to immerse the IGC Constitution negotiations in nitpicking and hope that the Europe-wide victories of skeptical parties will do the difficult jobs for them.

Conservatives: The loss of massive numbers of votes to UKIP was predictable as soon as Howard allowed the perception of being soft on Europe, and a major part of that was his decision to align with the EPP, which annoyed activists and those who actually care about the Europe issue up and down the country. I have a feeling that Howard's Europe policies are viewed as being more Majorite than Thatcherite (although they're actually better than Maggie's as enacted, but not as good as Maggie's now), and all the talk of not making the same mistakes as Hague will have contributed to that. Yet the Tories can gain heart from their local performance, from which they can extrapolate that very many of the UKIP votes will go to them in a general election. A tougher public line on Europe, as Howard tried to put out after the strength of UKIP support became apparent, will help there. Labour's talk of the Tories performing 'disastrously' will, I think, be dismissed by an electorate that will regard UKIP as Tories by another name. I look forward to the next voting intentions opinion poll (and it seems that YouGov are again vindicated. Perhaps they're not shysters after all...).

For a slightly different take on the parties' performances, check out Anthony Wells.

AAAARRRGGGGHHHH!!!!

We had it won and then Heskey barges into someone when Hargreaves had it covered...

Can someone pease tell me why Heskey is ever on the pitch for England? Comments open...

First of Three for England?

England have won the third test against New Zealand after what was by all accounts a spirited run-chase.

Now all we have to do is beat France and see the Euroskeptic parties give the Europhiles a jolly good thrashing for it to be a splendid day for England, what?

Sympathy for the devil

So Michael Moore is going to make a film about Tony Blair, eh? There's lots of rumored material for him to work on - check out here, for example, for one man's views.

Of course, if he follows those lines he'll be throwing in his lot with the extreme right. If it'll make him a buck or two, I wonder if he'd see anything wrong with that? From what I've read of him, I doubt it.

The Anglosphere Remembers Ronnie

Lady Thatcher's moving and heartfelt tribute to President Reagan is here. I was also impressed by Brian Mulroney's well-delivered eulogy (here) and have no idea why Andrew Sullivan found it boring. We often forget that today's Anglospheric Three Musketeers had their forerunners in Reagan-Thatcher-Mulroney. I find myself much more in agreement with John Derbyshire's take than Andrew's, although I'm glad someone else noticed Bubba with his eyes closed. Kris suggested he might be praying. Let's be charitable and accept that.

There were a couple of moments that touched me surrounding the service. First was Mikhael Gorbachev, sat next to Mrs T, pointing something out to her in the programme. I wonder what? Second was Laura Bush's pat on Tony Blair's shoulder as she came into the Cathedral, perhaps an indication that the strength of the Bush-Blair friendship is as strong as the Reagan-Thatcher one. I did notice Tony had his head bowed a lot. I wonder if he was praying for his party, or simply watching the results come in on his Blackberry?

For the record, I cried three times watching the ceremonies today.

By the way, does anyone know what words the choir was singing to 'Jerusalem'?

Other views

Best analyses of the results so far (aside from Political Betting, referred to below). Mr Spin is gritting his teeth and conceding that the Lib Dems did very well in Newcastle. The ever-reliable Anthony Wells has lots of interesting commentary, of course. EU Referendum has some interesting early snippets on the Euro elections.

Maybe it's because they're Londoners...

Well, Red/Cuddly/Loonybins Ken won more handsomely than many predicted, a result that Political Betting explains by reference to Livingstone's personal vote, with 1 in 6 Tories and 1 in 4 Lib Dems voting for the man. Amazing.

The Assembly, however, now sees the Tories as largest party and there essentially being 3 power blocks: the Tory/UKIP block (11 seats), the Lib Dem/Green block [there's so little difference these days] (7 seats), and Labour (7 seats). I imagine a great deal of horsetrading is going to go on, but Ken should be able to get most of his legislation through with just a few environmental concessions, I'd imagine. He declared London a nuclear-free zone, so I can see him declaring it a carbon-free zone soon.

But the real story in London as far as I can see it is the rise of the minor parties. Over a quarter of Londoners voted for someone other than the big three parties. UKIP on the right and the Greens on the left got 8% each, and the extreme parties, the BNP and RESPECT, got about 5% each. That's a major change in British politics, especially if reflected in general elections (I haven't seen the overall figures for the minors in the locals broken down by percentage yet). It would not surprise me if this led to more calls from the minors (UKIP probably excepted) for PR (proportional representation). It would also not surprise me if the two majors strengthened their stance against it, avowedly to keep the extremists out of government. The more intelligent Lib Dems might also realize that they stand to gain much less from PR than they would have a decade ago if the following of the other minor parties continues to rise.

We also see that even the PR system used in London isn't true PR. Parties oted for by 1 in 10 Londoners gained no seats, while the Lib Dems gained 5 seats as opposed to the UKIP and Greens gaining 4 between them, despite more Londoners voting for those two parties combined than for the Lib Dems. Something must be done about the electoral system so blatantly favoring the Lib Dems...

See Labour lose in 3D

Looks like a pretty good night for the Conservatives in the local elections, winning seats from both Labour and the Lib Dims (who have lost more councils than they're gained so far), and a bad one for Tony Blair. Most of these councils are urban, and therefore more naturally Labour in the post-Thatcher political world, yet they're still losing. They lost Newcastle, for goodness' sake (and I wonder how Mr Spin will react to that).

Anyway, you can watch the gains and losses via a dead cool graphic on the BBC site.

Instant analysis? Prescott and Blunkett are putting it down to Iraq, but if that's the case, why didn't all the votes go to the Lib Dems? The only possible construction I can see is that it was down to a combination of Iraq and honor. The Tories were for Iraq, but aren't perceived as lieing about it to the people. That's the only way I can see it. More likely, however, the voters are just generally dissatisfied with a government that appears to have run out of steam. We've been there before, not too long ago...

Er-hang on a minute

There's an article on NRO about oil that's a tad confused. First of all, can we please settle once and for all this myth that the settled origin of oil is from 'dead dinosaurs' which is one of those eternal urban legends that just won't go away. Oil does not originate from dead dinosaurs, the accepted theory is that oil originates from organic rich sediment exposed to great pressures and temperatures at some point after burial. The origin of the organic matter in the shales is not dinosaurs but tiny planktonic organisms known as Dinoflagellates, which are among other things responsible for the phenommenon of 'Crimson Tides'.

The origin of this 'abiotic' theory is cited as being some Russian scientists in the 1950s. That is all well and good but since the 1950s the geological sciences have undergone a wholesale revolution with the introduction of the theory of Plate Tectonics, which has touched every other part of the discipline in some way or another (for instance in this context providing mechanisms which might explain why oil was to be found in places that were unexpected in the 1950s). Soviet science was one of the lasting holdouts against the theory and only really got on board in the 1970s and 1980s. It should also not be forgotten that the Soviets funded some pretty weird stuff (but thinking about it their 'odd' research was sort of like us throwing money at the BSE brigade and the Global Warming lobby).

I can't comment at this stage on the detail of the theory or suggestions about western interest in the 'abiotic' theory itself as I've not had the chance to look at the links provided, but I will endeavor to have a go at that and report back later. What is absolutely clear cut is that we are not running out of oil - a fact which is clear whatever the origins of black gold - and never have been. Current known oil reserves provide for at least two centuries of affordable oil, and with improvements in exploration and extraction technology there is no doubt that the known reserves are a fraction of the total. And that is before we even approach the technology needed for investigating oil and gas deposits at the margins of deep ocean basins...

Oh good grief

Michael Ancram has a plan to win the Wars Against Terror - with chit chat. How very nuanced and continental.

Michael Ancram has called for renewed co-operation and dialogue between mainstream Islamic countries and the West - in a move to outflank the international terrorist organisation al Qaeda.

The Deputy Conservative Leader has written to Tony Blair highlighting his paper "From Clash to Dialogue: An Answer to al Qaeda", in which he proposes a "big initiative" based around a new Grand Congress of Reconciliation.

I think the Tory webmasters feel the same way about this as I do - I detect a little dose of sarcasm in the fact that the title of this page is "Michael Ancram's answer to al Qaeda."

Swivel-eyed and proud

"I agree with the Tories on Europe, but Labour on everything else." said the girl on the bus.

That was nearly five years ago, yet it remains clear as if it were today. After all its not everyday that one hears ordinary people discussing politics in public. That summer the Conservative Party, had stunned the media-political classes by winning the European Elections by a landslide (and had the old FPTP system been used, rather than the vile undemocratic PR system now in place their victory would have been more comprehensive). The overheard comment confirmed what I had suspected about the elections - that contrary to the spin being put about (Labour voters staying home, only Tories voting) the voters had deliberately chosen to vote for the Eurosceptic option - because they were fed up with what was being done to their country without their consent.

Sadly, William Hague and his advisers also drew the wrong conclusion. They decided that Europe would win them the next election, and concentrated on it to the exclusion of all else, resulting in the debacle of 2001.

Well, as Iain has commented below, it rather looks like the successes of 1999 are not going to be repeated for the Conservatives this Thursday - though people looking for results should remember that the votes won't actually be counted in the Euro elections until Sunday night lest their being counted on Thursday influence the continentals who vote on Sundays.

This year, the Eurosceptic vote is not going to the Tories in the wake of their pathetic campaign (once Blair promised a referendum on the Euro-constitution the entire Tory manifesto was rendered obsolete), but looks like it will transfer to the UK Independence Party. All I can say is good. Michael Howard will get a kicking for his incompetence and spinelessness and then, he needs to find a way to reconnect with those voters he's lost. And calling us 'extremists' won't cut it.

Yes, us. Until now I have voted Conservative in every public election I've been able to, and I've been leafletting for the local party candidate in my ward the past few weeks. The local party kept my vote, but in the Euro elections I went for UKIP for a variety of reasons.

My vote was initially shaken from the Tory tree by Michael Howard's opportunistic attacks on the occupation of Iraq and President Bush. Oh, I know Howard is playing what he thinks is a clever game - winking at the anti-war brigade while telling those of us who support the war that we needn't worry about a future Conservative Government's ability to back the USA. I'm unconvinced. What with the Tories proposing Defence cuts in wartime and the entire editorial staff of the Spectator sticking their heads into the sand in the hope that the jihadis will look elsewhere, I rather doubt that even if he wanted to, PM Howard could muster the courage to, say, bomb Syria. The point about that is that when people tell me, as the Spectator did last week, that a vote for UKIP is a vote for Blair, my only response is 'good - I can help him, without actually having to vote Labour'.

But beyond that (and what probably motivates most UKIP voters) there is the complete failure of the Conservative Party's Europe policy to make any sense. In Britain they claim to be Eurosceptic and they call for pulling out of the Common Fisheries Policy (which everyone knows none of our judicial overseers will permit) but in Brussels they sit with the Federasts. Either they are naive or Michael Howard has no control over his own MEPs or they are pulling a Daschle. None of those options makes me want to vote for them.

Iain's friend claims that Kilroy-Silk has had a huge effect on things. Sorry, colour me un-spun. I've seen very little talk about Kilroy, apart from among the pundit class complaining about UKIP being populated by freaks and loons. Guess what? Message: we don't care. We're not selecting a government, we're selecting a delegation to a parliament whose sovereignty many of us don't recognise in the first place. The fact of their election is as important as what they'll actually do once there because this appears to be the only way we'll get a message to our political class that as Melanie Phillips puts it, we want our country back.

Now, we're pragmatic enough to appreciate that right now the Tories are not going to promise outright withdrawal. All that we are looking for is some evidence, that a future Tory government, on hearing that "our European friends" have said no to their precious renegotiation, will do something other than say "OK" and knuckle under. In other words reassurance that Michael Howard won't do exactly what John Major did every time he lost a fight in Europe. Because without that he's no better than Blair.

And of course the Tories would get killed if they brought up straight withdrawal now, but that should not stop the idea from being brought into the mainstream by being floated as the alternative option should renegotiation fail. (Why, incidentally, is it extreme to support [as 40% of the country does] withdrawal from the EU, but moderate to support [as barely 10% do] signing our freedom away into a Euro Empire?)

If the Tories don't recognise this message. If they persist in smearing people who voted for UKIP. If they continue (as Iain's friend does) to talk down to the 'punters' about this (when the 'punters' are more clued up than most MPs), Michael Howard's honeymoon will be more than over. He will wind up having done what John Major, William Hague and IDS all failed to do: drive the core of the Party's voters away.

Stupid, stupid, stupid?

A friend of mine still involved in Tory politics in the UK writes:

So are you right in thinking the Tory Europe policy is 'stupid, stupid, stupid'? I think that's much too harsh. As another of my friends has written (my highlighting in red):

"the apparent success of UKIP has taken me by surprise and strikes me as highly ironical. When Hague sought to play the EU card, he was widely condemned. IDS ignored the subject. Howard has placed the issue back on the Agenda and has said some eminently sensible things (and I think struck the right balance - because to argue for outright withdrawal would destroy his credibility as an alternative PM). We know where he comes from. And his reward is to be abandoned atthe moment when he needs a psychological boost. And yet plenty of my friends are, I know, planning to vote UKIP."

We're playing for the general election. The party was foolish in building up expectations ahead of the European elections as we polled extremely well last time round and the number of seats up for grabs is being reduced. However all the polls show that the UKIP supporters recognise that this is a European election and not a general election. If the Tory strategy has gone awry it's in not having been more appreciative of this fact for fear of annoying Tories who choose to vote UKIP.

I personally believe that the only time the Conservatives could credibly argue for withdrawal is in Government after showing that we have fought several times for reforms and been blocked by Brussels on each occasion. Then we'd call a poll on membership at the same time as a snap election (if we're still allowed to do this following the creation of the Electoral Commission which is meant to govern how referenda are fought). The press would slay the Party if we campaigned on the same manifesto as UKIP (and you cannot possibly understand from the US how much the announcement of Robert Kilroy-Silk as a candidate has boosted their cause - without him there is no way they would be polling as well and they wouldn't have had half the press attention).

Blair's announcement of a referendum on the Constitution was vitally important too. The whole Conservative message was based around such a referendum. That wasn't stupid, but it's made it terribly hard to point to the benefits of voting Conservative without this string in the bow. Look at it the other way: what are the consequences of someone voting UKIP rather than Conservative?

Answer: there aren't many, but there are a few. Now let's try explaining these to the average punter. Power in the European Parliament is chiefly exercised by the two big blocs of the PES and the EPP (which I'll come on to shortly). These blocs tend to be dominated by the countries supplying the biggest wedges of MPs. Hence the UK, Germany and Spain have traditionally had the biggest say, and so have gained a bigger share of committee chairmanships and the like than they might have done had we previously voted for more 'fringe' parties. By contrast, the French vote all over the place at the European elections and have little influence in the European Parliament. For British business and I'm sure the population at large, this matters.

Unfortunately, this can now matter as the European Parliament has co-decision on an ever-wider amount of legislation, and the Social Affairs Directorate of the European Commission often works in tandom with Socialist MEPs to overturn an agreed common position among the member states by pushing for European Parliament.

Whilst I have no doubt UKIP MEPs will also work to prevent additional legislation coming our way, they won't carry as much clout as power goes with the larger groups in the European Parliament. (Remember that there isn't a similar surge in Euroscepticism in other member states - a neo-fascist surge, perhaps, but that helps no-one and UKIP won't get into bed with them as they're not neo-fascist.)

The power of the blocs explains why Howard decided to throw in his lot with the EPP. I'm not happy about this, but I cannot possibly believe that this decision is actually costing us votes up and down the country. Also, arguably, it would be better to wait until all the new member state centre-right MEPs had joined the EPP before fomenting a revolt from within. Whatever, I'm confident that a sounder right-of-centre grouping can emerge in time.

Finally, Roger Helmer won't lose his seat as he's number one on his region's list, as per most of the other sceptics and Thursday night will be fine - that's just the locals. Friday will be the Mayor of London and the GLA (if we pick up one more seat I believe we can block the mayor's budget even if Livingstone wins, so that would be a huge success and I'm reasonably confident of that). The European results won't be out till Sunday.

I saw your seats predication on Anthony Wells' site. I hope you're right. My guess is that we'll do better in London than the rest of the UK for the Europeans, gaining a seat more than Labour here, as UKIP doesn't have the same resonance in the city (the parties will need roughly 9% in London for every MEP elected I reckon, as opposed to 5% for a GLA member). While canvassing, it's impossible to tell which way people will vote. We ask 'will you vote Conservative' and they say 'yes' but don't tell us for which election. There certainly aren't the huge numbers of UKIP posters that are apparently seen elsewhere in the country. I find it difficult to believe that the Tories and Labour together won't poll more than 50% of the vote, but we'll see.

A useful perspective, but I still find the strategy unconvincing. As I replied to my friend, I still think the massive vote haemorrhage to UKIP will be used time and time again to Labour's advantage and that the EPP point is actually very important to a lot of those who are voting UKIP (join a few of the Euroskeptic mailing lists and you'll see exactly how clued in they all are to the minutiae of Europe). I'm also sure, because European politics is all about compromise, that we could have come to some sort of arrangement that would have got us the same weight as a large group outside EPP as a now much smaller group within EPP. Oddly, I think that our reduced circumstances probably make us better off within EPP, but that's a pretty small consolation.

I'm also pretty sure that withdrawal has reached or is close to a tipping point. It certainly shouldn't be taboo any more. A Tory policy of "We will propose certain necessary reforms. If they are not accepted, we shall have to consider withdrawal" would have the same effect as the strategy you propose, but would play better with the UKIP voters. The Ken Clarkes could be asked what they object to about the reform agenda and made to put up or shut up.

I continue to think that soft-balling Europe was a huge error of judgment and that Howard will be hurt badly by it. I hope I'm wrong (which will have the side-benefit of exposing YouGov as a bunch of lucky shysters, which methodologically they have always seemed to me to be), but I don't think so.

And, seriously, Kilroy-Silk a huge factor? If so, then Britain is completely in hock to the cult of personality and I'll be applying for American citizenship. I really don't think a C-list celeb could have that much influence.

Over at the Commons

I have a few recent posts over at The Commons, on some tendentious claims following The Day After Tomorrow (my review to follow, by the way) and the French decision to constitutionalize the Precautionary Principle. Zut alors!

"A Truly Great American Hero"

I thought I'd leave the tribute to Ronald Reagan to the Briton who knew him best, Margaret Thatcher:

President Reagan was one of my closest political and dearest personal friends. He will be missed not only by those who knew him and not only by the nation that he served so proudly and loved so deeply, but also by millions of men and women who live in freedom today because of the policies he pursued

Ronald Reagan had a higher claim than any other leader to have won the Cold War for liberty and he did it without a shot being fired.

To have achieved so much against so many odds and with such humour and humanity made Ronald Reagan a truly great American hero.

I await the eulogy she has taped for him with nervous pride.

Staying on matters European

I've been meaning to mention the excellent EU Referendum blog maintained by heavyweights Richard North and Helen Szamuely for a while now, but a couple of recent posts are well worth attending to. The one linked here is an excellent analysis of why the Greens are tanking in the Euro polls at the moment. This is a particularly important observation:

Interestingly, in Eurostat opinion polls of approval ratings on EU policies, "environment" shows up consistently as the most popular. The demise of the Greens, therefore, may in part reflect the increasing disillusionment with the EU, which relies on its "successes" in pursuing environmental legislation as justifying, in part, its existence - relying on the tedious mantra "pollution knows no frontiers".

It is perfectly true that environmentalism is one of the leading raisons d'etre of the EU at the moment. This is acknowledged explicitly in the horrifying document mentioned here and elsewhere on the site. I'll have more to say myself on this terrible, terrible document (which I realize is not official EC policy, but which does represent the thinking of the technocratic elite of the European project), but for the moment consider the suggestion that the EU must have significant military strength to impose its model of the world by force, and that the model consciously rejects liberalism...

Better off out?

I haven't commented on British politics for what seems like an age, but today's opinion poll in the Telegraph which gives UKIP 21% of the likely Euro-vote on Thursday is remarkable. Anthony Wells has had some cautionary things to say on these polls, but given that YouGov's burgeoning reputation rests heavily upon them (bottom line: if they're wrong, YouGov will go bust), I'm inclined to give them some weight.

What it shows is that Michael Howard made a massive mistake by taking a Euro-friendly line, refusing to pull out of the EPP and so on. He did this to stop a few fat old Tory wets like Ken Clarke criticizing him and to prevent what? about 5 percent? of the Tory vote from going to the Lib Dems. Instead, he's handed the twenty percent of the likely electorate who feels strongly about Europe to UKIP on a platter.

Let's not underestimate the importance of this. Howard had the opportunity to get the moral triumph of almost getting almost double Labour's vote in these elections. He could have spoken with the clear mandate of reflecting the will of the British people on Europe. He could have used it as the bedrock of an election campaign - the British people support the Tories on foreign policy, and they distrust Labour on domestic policy etc. He could have commanded TV air time. He could have done lots of things.

Instead, the news on Thursday night will be - make no mistake - Labour and the Tories humilated. Howard will look weak and Tony Blair will be able to say the British people have rejected the Tories again. And there's a good chance that some of the excellent Tory MEPs we have, like Roger Helmer, will lose their seats to, erm, swivel-eyed loons.

And there was so little need for it. As a new study from Civitas on the EU's Costs and Benefits makes clear, Britain will be billions of pounds better off out of the EU, and the likelihood of any jobs being lost (as the EU alarmists always maintain) is tiny.

[By the way, if anything the figures Civitas uses are massive underestimates. Compared with the annual per capita cost of new Federal regulation in the US, as admitted by the OMB, the costs used by Civitas are tiny. Unless the EU is really a much less heavily regulated place than the US, which I very much doubt, these figures should be increased massively, which would therefore massively increase the benefit to the UK from withdrawal.]

So I think I'm justified in summing up the current Tory European policy in three words: stupid, stupid, stupid.