theinspectorst

It’s not Orban’s party but that doesn’t excuse him. He’s been in office for the last 14 years and deliberately cultivated a political climate of aggressive nationalist conservatism fuelled by propaganda about historical greatness and foreign betrayal. He’s the one who has moved Hungary’s Overton window so far to the far right that politicians such as these can get elected.

I mean, it’s worth being clear: these are EU citizens who did break the rules, in terms of not registering their (supposedly ULEZ-compliant) cars before driving into the ULEZ zone in London as they are required to. For UK-registered cars, TFL can determine ULEZ compliance directly from the domestic car registry database, which they can’t for foreign cars.

The complaint against TFL is much narrower: the company they used to chase down these rule breakers then itself seems to have broken data protection rules, since ULEZ breaches are civil not criminal matters and so the relevant EU rules didn’t allow for their information to be shared.

But at its core - if these people had just registered their cars as required before they drove into London, none of this would be an issue. It’s not about UK authorities unfairly targeting EU citizens (not least as it’s London we’re talking about - Remainer central!)

Someone should explain to her that all those roubles that appear in her bank account when she says these things aren’t actually worth very much.

He’d like it to be an empire again…

Victor Orban is a fascist and he’s spent the last 13 years seeking to turn Hungary into a fascist state. He controls the judiciary. He controls the media. He scapegoats Jews, Muslims and refugees for the country’s problems. He aligns himself with Putin.

Fascists inherently don’t like cross-border cooperation and supranational governance - it runs against all their beliefs about their nation’s superiority. So he doesn’t like the EU either and blames it for things to his domestic audiences. There is no press freedom in Hungary and so Hungarian voters get bombarded with this nonsense.

The EU needs to recognise that an enemy of European civilisation has been given the keys to the castle. That is a dangerous situation. It is time to invoke Article 7 to recognise that Hungary is acting against the EU’s founding values, and remove Hungary’s veto.

Forcing clearing houses to relocate from London to Paris is part of French industrial policy and it has been going on (unsuccessfully) for half a century.

It’s got nothing to do with Brexit - they were trying this long before that happened (and the Single Market be damned - at one point the UK had to take the ECB to court for breaking the Maastricht Treaty over this). And it’s got nothing to do with the EU’s regulatory reach - market infrastructures in London and Paris are regulated along the same lines under the globally-agreed Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures, and the UK clearing houses already opt-in to direct EU regulation as third-country CCPs post-Brexit anyway.

This is purely about the French state again trying to use the EU as a mechanism to deliver their industrial policy. For French politicians this just has a weird totemic significance.

It’s worth saying that both major parties are way out of line with the electorate on this - polling of whom shows:

• there were consistent majorities for Remain from about mid-2017 until Brexit happened; and

• there has been a consistent polling plurality for Rejoin pretty much since that point onwards (and sometimes outright polling majorities for Rejoin).

So neither of those parties are currently speaking for a large (and possibly majority) share of the electorate on this issue. When such situations arise, it’s rare for the electorate to be the ones who have to change their mind and accord with what the politicians think…

What I expect will happen in the coming years (particularly after Labour go into government next year) is that the Lib Dems will get increasingly bolshy on this issue and probably build towards announcing a Rejoin manifesto in the run up to the 2028/9 general election, and Labour will start bleeding votes to them. That will force Labour to shift its position (in the same way they shifted their position on a People’s Vote after the Lib Dems trounced them in Labour strongholds at the 2019 EU elections).

By the end of this decade, Rejoin will be a very mainstream position among British politicians in the way it already is with British voters.

Agree that’s a stupid system, but 60 out of 100 senators can still vote to override it, right?

In the EU, on votes that aren’t subject to QMV, 26 out of 27 member states can fervently agree with something but still do nothing about a veto by the 27th state, whose veto can often have nothing to do with the question at hand and be more about domestic political posturing or some other such nonsense.

The veto existed from a time when the EU was much smaller (in both scope and scale). Having a member state veto today is approaching being as ludicrous as if each US state had a veto on national legislation - it allows small countries with extremist governments (of which there is always likely to be one in office somewhere) to clog up the gears of the entire union.

The European Council’s well-established alternative to member state vetoes also still does plenty to respect member state interests - qualified majority voting. QMV means big changes aren’t getting passed on a 51%-49% knife edge. QMV puts a two-step lock in place, requiring a) at least 55% of member states that also b) account for at least 65% of the EU’s population, to vote in favour.

But this is all moot. Abolishing the member state veto will itself almost certainly be subject to multiple member state vetoes at the Council so this is going nowhere.

Young people will fix shit. Western European societies have significantly ageing populations. That means they need to choose between three options to maintain their pension systems:

1. Cut benefits for pensioners and/or increase the retirement age.

2. Increase taxes for the young to pay for pensions for the old.

3. Keep tax and benefit levels the same, but allow foreigners to move to Western Europe where they can work and pay taxes.

1 and 2 both have huge intergenerational consequences - and bluntly, having seen how the baby boom generation have pulled the ladder up behind them, I have no great urge to pay taxes through the teeth for the rest of my working life to fund their cushy retirements. 3 hurts nobody and benefits everybody - it’s a no-brainer.