Hola. Do
you have a battery for this Samsung phone?
An
internal one?
Yes.
No,
we don't
OK. Can
you tell me where I could get one.
No.
If you
check on Moovup here, you'll see they sell all sorts of accessories for mobile phones. Except batteries, it seems. On the latter, I went
to the non-Apple IT shop yesterday morning to pick up the battery
they'd said on Monday would be in by then. But it wasn't. So I will try again this morning.
A couple of readers have suggested that Europe's youth are, indeed, patriotic towards the EU. I rather think there's a big difference between valuing something - in your own, understandable, self-interest - and in feeling patriotic towards it. Would young Brits really favour the EU in the - admittedly unlikely event - of a war between 'Europe' and the UK? Would even the young Spaniards or young Poles who have benefitted so much from it? If faced with a hard choice between nation and the EU supra-nation, would any of these rank the EU first? Madrid has enough problems getting Spaniards to prioritise the nation above their region or even their patria chica. Which rather points up the essence of this issue - to be patriotic, you need a patria. Does anyone really see the EU in this light? As opposed to a convenient benefactor chucking other peoples' money around.
Talking of Madrid's problems with local troublemaking nationalists . . . Here's The Local on the latest stage of the Catalan saga. They're to get more of their own cash back, it seems. In an attempt to buy off those planning an ('illegal') independence referendum. Can't see it working, myself.
The Spanish Language Corner: Here's someone's - pretty accurate - view of the bear-traps that lie in wait for Anglo students of Castellano. Then there's the very high percentage of common verbs that are irregular. And the bloody subjunctive mood. And the 10 versions of the positive/negative imperatives. Still, it's easier than French. They say.
So, B-Day has finally arrived. And I've had to switch off the UK News channels, as they're talking of nothing else. One can take either a short-term, micro view of this development - Shit, my pension as been hit and I might have to return to the UK - or you can take a longer-term, macro view - The EU is a failure and it's best for the UK to be out of it PDQ. At the end of this post is an article from the estimable Ambrose Evan Pritchard, who takes the latter stance. If I have any readers left who are Remainers, I urge them to read it. All that said, I still take the view that absolutely no ono knows what lies down the road and that it's even possible a Brexit won't take place. And I accept that the British government's management of the process has been woeful so far and that there are very major problems ahead. You can't read Richard North regularly without sharing these views with him. So . . . Vamos a ver. I still tend to the view it will be alright on the night. Though I grant this an optimistic view. The night might be quite delayed.
Richard North, as some readers will know, has no time for the idiocies of the UK media in respect of Brexit. This morning he casts this gem in the direction of The Daily Telegraph: There are many tales emanating from the Telegraph about the downsizing of the editorial workforce. What we didn't bank on was a downsizing of the collective IQs as well. If they got much lower, we would be watering their journalists, not reading them. To which I would add that this once-great paper has not only farmed out what passes for it editing to teenagers in New Zealand but then permits them to use an American spell-check. So, this morning, we get signaling, instead of signalling. Sic transit . . .
I realised yesterday that blusterer was probably an adjective not yet listed in those that pertain to Donald Trump, as well as huckster. But it is now.
Today's cartoon:-
Inspired by watching a PBS documentary on Stonehenge last night . . .
THAT EU ARTICLE
Britain is
the least
of Europe’s problems: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The European Union is
encircled on the outside, split three ways on the inside, and is
saddled with a corrosive currency union that is still not established
on workable foundations and is likely to lurch from crisis to crisis
until patience is exhausted.
Europe’s economic
“Lost Decade”, and the strategic consequences that stem partly
from this failure, have emboldened enemies and turned the Continent
into a dangerous neighbourhood. The EU now badly needs a friend on
its Atlantic flank.
While it would be
undignified for any British government to exploit these circumstances
(and Theresa May is certainly not doing so) this is the diplomatic
and military reality as Britain triggers Article 50.
Along an expanding arc
across the East, the EU faces a pact of autocrats. Russia and Turkey
are moving closer to an outright alliance - an ideological hybrid
like Molotov-Ribbentrop - that cuts at the heart of Nato. Both are
openly at war with the post-Second World War liberal order.
The Kremlin is
meddling in the Baltics, the Balkans, and the EU’s internal
democracies. Vladimir Putin acquired a military edge during the
energy boom - when the EU was disarming to meet austerity targets -
and now enjoys a window of opportunity to extract maximum advantage.
In the West, the EU
faces Donald Trump. This is a US president who refused to shake the
hand of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. For the first time since the
launch of the European project in the 1950s, the US no longer sees
the EU as an asset in the diplomatic equation. Many in the White
House would happily see it broken up.
This means that
Washington will no longer allow the eurozone to use, or misuse, the
International Monetary Fund for its own internal purposes. The
implications are already apparent in talks over Greece, but they do
not stop there.
It would be lamentable
statecraft for EU leaders to pick a fight with Britain in these
circumstances. For all the noise over Brexit, the UK is really the
least of their problems. A clash would be worse than futile, as
Italian premier Paulo Gentiloni said in London. Key figures in
Germany, Poland, and Spain have repeatedly made the same point.
As the initial
bitterness over Brexit fades, EU leaders are pleasantly surprised to
learn that they, like many, misunderstood the referendum. Britain is
not resiling in any way from Western liberal principles. It upholds
all its strategic commitments to Europe through Nato, and is stepping
up its defence EU’s eastern border with infantry and aircraft; it
remains a champion of global free trade (more so than the EU
itself); it has stuck by its climate pledges.
The country does not
have a populist government. The Prime Minister could hardly be more
cautious and proper, a child of the vicarage. She has defended the
European cause in US Republican circles, almost as if she were its
ambassador. Her cordial overtures have for the most part been
received well in EU capitals and the upper echelons of the
Commission.
The constitutional
caveat, of course, is that Britain will act an independent nation. It
cannot accept the permanent jurisdiction of the European Court over
almost all areas of UK law and policy, the baneful and masked
consequence of the Lisbon Treaty.
It was always on the
cards that the UK would have to extract itself from a venture that
spends most of its energy trying to hold the euro together. Monetary
union must evolve into a full-fledged federal state, with a single
EMU treasury, fiscal system, and government, if it is to survive.
Britain obviously cannot be part of such a structure. Trying to
obfuscate this constitutional fact helps nobody.
In short, nine months
after the referendum, Europe’s leaders are reconciled to the
necessity of separation. The debate has moved beyond the false
dichotomy of soft and hard Brexits. Most welcome the clarity of
British withdrawal from the single market, recognising that it may be
healthier for both sides than a messy fudge based on the hybrid
Norwegian model. Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon is barking up the wrong
tree if she really thinks that the EU is pushing hard for Brexit
Britain to stay in the single market.
There are, of course,
discordant notes, especially in France, where much of the political
elite is stuck in a time-warp. Emmanuel Macron, the electoral
boy-wonder, offers little beyond ideological pedantry and the old EU
Catechism when it comes to Brexit.
He is apt to dictate
absolutist terms with an imperial tone. No such terms are imposed on
Canada in its trade pact with the EU, and for obvious reasons: Canada
is an independent state.
I doubt he will succeed
in trying to chastise Britain since he also wants an
unbreakable “Franco-German position” on Article 50
talks, and Germany has different interests. The old Rhineland axis
was in any case rendered obsolete by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Any
attempt to reconstitute it will merely underscore France’s
painfully subordinate role in what has become (to the dismay of the
German people) a German Europe. Better for France to hang on to the
tight Franco-British defence and security pact for a little strategic
ballast.
With or without Brexit,
the EU has to keep living with the error of monetary union, so
destructive that one leading voice of the French establishment has
written a book, La Fin du Rêve Européen, calling for the euro to be
broken up in order to save what remains of the European project.
The eurozone is
horribly split into the creditor and debtors blocs, each with
clashing macro-economic interests, and each clinging to their own
narrative of what happened in the debt crisis. Quantitative
easing by the European Central Bank and a cyclical economic
upturn have masked the tension over the past two years, but the
underlying North-South rift is still there.
The ECB will have to
taper and ultimately end its bond purchases as global reflation
builds. The markets know that once Frankfurt rolls back emergency
stimulus, as it must do to avert a political storm in Germany over
rising prices, Italy, Portugal, and Spain will lose a
buyer-of-last-resort for their debt.
The core problem
remains: the conflicting needs of Germany and the South cannot be
reconciled within EMU. The gap in competitiveness and debt burdens is
too great. They should not be sharing a currency union at all.
As matters now stand,
Italy’s anti-EU Five Star movement leads the polls by a six-point
margin with 32pc of the vote. The four anti-euro parties are likely
to win over 50pc of the seats between them in the Italian parliament
in the elections early next year.
Whether it is this
cycle or the next cycle, voters will ultimately elect a rebel
government in a eurozone state that is too big to be crushed into
submission “a la grecque”.
An equally poisonous
split over the rule of law, immigration, and Kulturpolitik divides
the EU between East and West. It has reached the point of open
defiance in Warsaw. “We must drastically lower our level of trust
toward the EU,” says the Polish foreign minister.
The East Europeans
suspect that plans for an “advance guard” of core states in a
multi-speed Europe, without dissenters being able to stop them, is
really an attempt to separate the EU into rich and poor blocs. “It
is seen as a new kind of iron curtain between the east and west. That
is not the intention,” said commission chief Jean-Claude
Juncker.
Yet Mr Juncker has no
plausible solution for how to revive the EU after Brexit. One of the
five options in his “White Paper” proposes retreat to a
minimalist single market, but it is a pro-forma suggestion. This is
obviously impossible as long as the euro exists.
His clear preference is
what he calls “Doing Much More Together”, even though Pew surveys
consistently show that most EU citizens want to see power repatriated
to the states. It is the perennial EU reflex: pushing further
integration without positive consent, the Monnet method of creating
facts on the ground that then have a logic of their own.
What is certain is that
the EU’s interminable crisis will go on, but without the British to
blame any longer. For decades the political game in Brussels has been
to hide behind the UK, letting British ministers and diplomats fend
off integrationist excesses or fight their corner for them. Those
such as the Scandinavians, Dutch, and Baltic states that rely on
Britain to defend the free market and to balance ideological power
will lose a key ally within the EU machinery. Votes will go against
them more often.
At the end of the day,
Europe faces more intractable problems than Brexit. None of these
will be improved by making life harder for Britain in negotiations,
and the EU’s predicament would undoubtedly be worse if any attempt
to asphyxiate the City led to a eurozone credit crunch.
A punitive approach
would needlessly create another crisis by putting Ireland in an
impossible position, and it would create further lines of cleavage by
hitting some EU states harder than others.
Those who argue in the
UK’s internal debate that Europe will have to be excruciatingly
tough over Brexit in order to hold the project together have the
matter backwards. To act on a such a primitive impulse would be
calamitous for the EU itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment