Very silly (but fun) interactive game...

...from the Guardian. Contains the breath-taking revelation that if the Dutch vote no, the constitution's really f*cked.

Euro myths and the French "non"

Lenin, Apostate Windbag, and Meaders - amongst others - have posted their responses to the French verdict on the European constitution. In as far as the "non" verdict was the French recoiling from "Anglo-Saxon" neo-liberalism, they are correct in seeing this as a victory for the left.

However, I'm not sure if it is accurate to see the constitution as somehow introducing the principle of neo-liberal competition.

Rather, what the constitution did was to codify those elements which were drawn from the previous treaties and there are a couple of reasons why people tend not to notice how market-based the European Union always was. One is the CAP, the biggest exception to free-trade in the EU and, probably more importantly, the most noticed.

The other is the behaviour of member states towards EU competition rules. It is, as lenin says, "remarkable that the market and competition should be raised to the status of constitutional precepts" - but going by the previous form of member states, it didn't seem likely that these rules would have been given the status of constitutional precepts in practice.

For instance, one of the neo-liberal EU rules drawn from a previous treaty (Maastricht) was the so-called "stability pact" which decreed that member states that are members of the European Monetary Union should not be able to run budget deficits beyond 5 percent of GDP (or thereabouts; can't remember). The Germans (I think) insisted this rather silly rule was included in the constitution while they were - along with the French (and us, although the stability pact doesn't apply to Britain) - busy breaking it.

What was new in the constitution was not the rules as such but their likely impact in the wake of enlargement - with the French understandably apprehensive about competing with countries with much lower labour costs and a much lower take in corporation tax.

Having said that, I'm still broadly in favour of the EU for a couple of reasons. Lenin correctly points to the woeful lack of democratic principles which one would normally hope to find in any constitution worth the name but it is a paradox of the undemocratic EU that it is, to some extent, a force for democracy in the world, simply because aspiring members have to be democratic to join (witness Turkish reforms, motivated by the prospect of accession). And although its role has been overstated in this, the EU acts as a check on inward-looking, flag-waving nationalism.

I won't even attempt to speculate where the EU goes from here, but in the time-being I hope we'll hear a little less of a few Guardian-liberal myths and misconceptions about it:

• The ludicrous Polly Toynbee liberal self-loathing take on the EU where anyone who suggests it might not be in our interests to join the Euro or whatever is dismissed as a xenophobic little-Englander. As if you have to advocate the surrender of monetary and fiscal policy to Brussels to prove you're cosmopolitan, or something. Drives me mad that one; I trust we're done with that now?

• In the same vein, can we dispense with the equally silly idea that it's only the British who pursue their self-interest in the EU? (To read the Guardian sometimes, you'd be forgiven for thinking that all the other member-states do everything out of the goodness of their hearts).

• The idea that only right-wing loons are opposed to the EU.

• That the single currency was a good idea. Surely it now has to be accepted that at best it was premature; at worst a fiscal and monetary straight-jacket entirely inappropriate for such a diverse range of economic situations?

The key problem with the EU is that it has been a project driven by elites who haven't really bothered to explain what it is for. That'll have to stop now, surely? I would also hope that one of my own big problems with the EU will now be addressed, which is that we are never given any idea when the project can be considered to have been accomplished. Without that, it's obviously not just me that is very suspicious of the idea of perpetual integration as an end in itself. A United States of Europe is neither feasible or desirable and given this fact, Europe's leaders have to be much clearer about the limits of its competence.

Gulag-lite

So sad - day off and I can't get away from this damn blog. SIAW has a post about Amnesty's Report 2005, which states, "The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times".

I do share the criticism of the American policy vis-a-vis detainees at Guantanamo - as well as those being held in Iraq and Afghanistan and I absolutely refuse to rationalise any acts of torture: they are - if you believe in human rights - always and everywhere unjustified and my own view is that Guantanamo should be closed as a matter of urgency.

However, SIAW is surely right to describe the comparison as completely lacking any sense of proportion - and Amnesty's use of it is part of a wider trend of trivialising historical horrors by applying them to contemporary cases that simply don't match the original events either quantitatively or qualitatively.

Practically any case in the world that involves widespread killing is today described by someone as "genocide", or a "holocaust"; any infraction of civil liberty, regardless of how trivial, is taken as proof of a "police state"; and everyone knows about the long and ignoble history on the left of using "fascist" or "Nazi" as epithets to discredit ideological opponents.

In the case of this use of gulag, quantitatively it is, of course, a wild exaggeration: the Gulags were set up in 1919 as a system of forced labour camps. By around 1934, these Gulags had several million members. The regime was brutal in the extreme with death from disease and exhaustion commonplace. There is no doubt in my mind that the inmates of Guantanamo Bay have had their human rights violated, which is disgraceful - but it is not a forced labour camp and there are around 500 inmates.

I'm aware of how tempting it is to use historical comparisons to win arguments; I confess - and this as someone who really should know better - that I've done it before and I think I may even have used this one before - but I'm going to make a special effort not to because it represents a very serious degradation of the historical language. This must be resisted because apart from anything else, it allows states to deflect perfectly valid criticisms of their conduct as wild and irrational.

'Moff

for the long weekend. Bloody teachers and their holidays, eh? Back on Tuesday after we've found out if the French electorate are the people who like to say "non".

Bank fears tax on sperm

From the Metro:

"THE WORLD'S BIGGEST sperm bank may soon run dry if a tax on donors becomes law.

Men visiting the Danish Croyos International Sperm Bank may soon have to pay tax on the £46.21 they receive for a donation.

The bank wrote to the government saying, 'It is a special kind of work and therefore the fee cannot be compared to normal working income.'

It added it risked losing donors, most of whom are students."

I'll resist the obviously cheap joke about the favourite pastimes of students...