Though Cowards Flinch

Matthew Barrett has an interesting piece up at Conservative Home introducing the work of Fresh Start, the initiative of three Eurosceptic Tory MPs, including one Chris Heaton-Harris:

The Fresh Start Project is in the process of comprehensively researching the different options for renegotiating and reforming – ie taking back – the areas of competency Britain currently cedes to the EU.

So far, so normal. Studying how best the UK can freeload on Europe as-it-is-now, rather than contribute to ‘research’ into how European institutions might be reformed/renegotiated so it benefits the whole of Europe, is a traditional Tory stance.

But then we get this :

The wider campaign for a new relationship with the EU takes the form of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for European Reform, which is open to all MPs, and which was set up in order to ensure that pro-reform voices from across the parties could be heard…… The pro-reform European think tank Open Europe acts as the APPG’s secretariat (my emphasis).

Regular TCF readers will remember Open Europe, and its relationship to Chris Heaton-Harris:

He [Chris H-H] doesn’t like regulation.  Especially EU regulation.  Especially things to do with workers’ rights.  His main source of evidence is the not-entirely-unbiased Open Europe:

“Based on over 2,300 of the government’s own impact assessments, an Open Europe study (2010) found that regulation has cost the UK economy £176 billion since 1998, a sum roughly equivalent to the UK’s entire budget deficit.”

It looks like Chris H-H may have got as far as the press release on this report. Otherwise he might have seen that this is a study of benefits/costs, not just costs:

“We estimate the benefit/cost ratio of the regulations we studied at 1.58. In other words, for every £1 of cost introduced by a regulation since 1998, it has delivered £1.58 of benefits” (p. 1).

Put simply, Open Europe is a rightwing attack job, happy to send out misleading press releases on the basis of twisted reports.   Just look at the website.

Why, then, would a solid leftwing MP like Kelvin Hopkins agree not just to sit on this All Parliamentary Working Group (alongside the odious Frank Field, naturally), but also accede to Open Europe as its ‘secretariat’;  surely Labour MPs sitting on this group simply legitimises Open Europe’s pernicious policy influence within Westminster.

There is a whole leftwing rationale out there for the reform of the European Union: rebalancing power between the Council of Ministers and Parliament, challenging neoliberal assumptions built in the EU treaties, ensuring that free trade development takes human rights into account, and so on.  In advance of any EU Referendum, it is vital that the left rises to this challenge.  

Unless I’m missing something, allowing Open Europe free reign in parliament is the opposite of seeking to achieve this.

Today the Scottish government is passing legislation leading to a 50p minimum price per unit of alcohol.  The legal provisions have the support of all parties.  The UK government is set to follow suit, though at the moment 45p per unit is the figure being bandied around.

All this would be, except that the research on which the legislation is singularly dependent doesn’t say what the legislators in England and Scotland say it does.  I do wonder if any of the legislators have actually bothered to read the research. If they had, and if they’d appraised it honestly, the legislation would not have been passed in Scotland, and would not be in hand in England.

The research both governments depend on is from the University of Sheffield Alchohol Research Group.  The Scottish Government commissioned research and “modelling” from the Group, with its most recent report delivered in January 2012, and research for England in 2009.  The England report contains a more detailed methodology, but both studies are similar in design and the data used.

Here the crucial bit of the England report:

The elasticity matrices [the method used in the research] on their own are not sufficient to reveal the likely behaviour of the population to price changes, since these also depend on the preferences for beverage, drinking location and price point that the different sub-groups exhibit. However they do form a useful starting point for analysis, and can be compared with existing results from the literature. (p. 50)

My rough (and I admit slightly mean-spirited) translation:

The researchers don’t know whether the results the legislators want will be achieved or not through a minimum unit price, but they’ve gone out of their way to provide some mathematical modelling which suggests it might because, after all, that’s what the legislators want and they paid for the research.

The research depends for its findings on a complex set of mathematical modelling, with log-log analysis of the relationship between price and consumption, changing over time, at the heart of this.  The data comes from five years of the annual Expenditure and Food Survey and, in the case of the more recent Scotland report, the Scottish Health Survey.  This is sample data based on respondent completing diaries of what they purchase and consume over a two week period.

The principal outcome of the modelling is a set of  ”elasticity matrices” in which the relationship between increase in minimum unit price and change in consumption is modelled for various population types, including moderate and heavy drinkers.  The model suggests that a 50p minimum unit might decrease overall consumption by 5.7% (Scotland research, Jan 2012).

It’s an impressive piece of work in its own terms, but it simply doesn’t find what those desperate to find a ‘solution’ to people drinking too much say it does.  Indeed, there is a strong indication that the real rationale for the mathematical modelling is to provide a fit with other research into the relationship between alcohol price/tax and consumption (not, note, minimum unit pricing):

Recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses by Gallet (2007) and Wagenaar et al (2008) found, respectively, a median elasticity for alcohol of -0.535 and a mean elasticity for alcohol of -0.51. By comparison, our elasticity matrix for all of England shows broadly similar results, with own-price elasticities ranging from a least elastic estimate of -0.2350 for on-trade higher-priced spirits to a most elastic estimate of -2.9386 for on-trade low-priced spirits.

The problem is that these meta-analyses don’t really show what the researchers and legislators want them to show either, even though they are meta-analyses of the general relationship between price and consumption (where you might well expect an inverse relationship)

 Take the Wagenaar et al. study:

Price/tax also affects heavy drinking significantly (mean reported elasticity = -0.28, individual-level r = -0.01, P < 0.01), but the magnitude of effect is smaller than effects on overall drinking.

This is the opposite of what the legislation is aimed at: heavy drinking leads to anti-social behaviour and increased health problems.

The Wagenaar report also recgonises that not all may be as it seems from the 112 studies it analyses:

[P]ublication bias(or, more generally, small-study bias) is always a threat to the validity of a meta-analysis. Statistically significant findings are more likely to be published than those that are not significant with one estimate suggesting that the odds of publication are 2–4 times greater when results are statistically significant. Thus, it is possible that a substantial number of studies with non-significant effects remain unpublished.

So what’s going on?  Why are the English and Scottish governments apparently so keen to push through legislation which is wholly based on wholly spurious evidence?

Why, on the other hand, is the Scottish government apparently so keen to overlook the research ‘findings’ that a 70p per unit price would lead (p.5 of report) to a 16.9% reduction in consumption, while the 50p price actually adopted will read to a 5.7% one? Does it not have the courage of its public health convictions? Or is is, perchance,  that a 70p unit price would put the price of ‘decent’ wine up, while the 50p one only affects the really cheap alcohol that the poor people drink?

The answer to these rhetorical questions is simple enough. 

There is a problem-drinking problem – that can’t and shouldn’t be denied.   The respective governments are desperate to be seen to be doing something. 

Doing something genuinely effective about it is beyond them, because that would mean putting in place policies (and government spending) which lead to people having realstic choices other than blotting out – at least for the night – what they have to live with.  That’s not a new, or British cultural problem – re-read the Paris bit of George Orwell’s Down and in London and Paris to remind yourself of that.

So the easy option is to put in place legislation aimed (almost certainly ineffectively) at a certain type of person most in the public eye.  Owen Jones calls them ‘chavs’. They’re probably called something else in Scotland.

And when the minimum price measure fails – and it will fail - at least the problem-drinking problem will be set out clearly in terms of the ‘target population’ (those chavs who got round the law by spending more on booze/buying it illegally), and the need to control it more effectively.  That’s even written into the ‘sunset clause’ provisions of the new Scottish Act.

The Scottish and UK governments perverting the role of science for short-term political ends at the expense of  social cohesion. Who’d have thought it?

The top five news stories on the FCO website are all to do with Syria, and what the UK government is doing to get rid of the Assad regime. 

 Meanwhile in Africa, a nascent democracy has fallen, a large part of the country is in the hands of a different number of armed grops with differing levels of affiliation to Al Qaeida, trouble is spilling over into neighbouring countries and refugees are on the move.  All this is happening as a direct result of the UK’s last major military intervention.

I speak, of course, of Mali, and the vast desert area referred to as Azawad by those Tourags who seek its independence.  Over the weekend the major town Timbuktu and Gao have fallen to Touareg rebels, taking strategic advantage of the recent coup d’etat.  This coup d’etat was itself undertaken by a section of the army supposedly as a reaction to the civilian government’s inability to deal with armed rebellion in the North, and that armed rebellion was fuelled by the massive overspill of weaponry from Libya via Niger into the desert regions of Mali. 

In the mix are various groups, with confused and confusing allegiance, and including the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), the (Islamist) Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJWA) , the (Islamist) Ansar al-Din and of course Al Qaeida Middle East (AQIM), present in one form or another (from bases in Southern Algeria).  

More details are here, courtesy of the very excellent Kal at The Moor Next Door. There’s a handy map here.  I don’t pretend to out-analyse Kal on the specifics of what are and what will be in the region, but simply ask the questions:

Do Cameron and Hague now accept that what seemed like a nice Boys’ Own Adventure is turning out to have very nasty consequences not just for the millions now directly affected (Mali’s population is 16 million to Libya’s 6 million) but potentially for the much of the Sahel and into the West African states?

Hague has made no comment on Mali, as far as I can see.  Perhaps he’s not even noticed. 

As and when he does, I’d recommend this book as a primer, and especially the chapter by Robert Keohane on the distinction between act- and end-utilitarianism (aka thinking things through).

Francis Maude is being pilloried for a) not knowing the law about fuel at home; b) kicking off the panic-buying (with Cameron then joining in).  Fair enough.  He is a bit of a knob.

But it seems to me that the left is missing a trick here. 

The primary cause of the panic-buying is not Maude’s stupidity, but the draconian anti-union legislation introduced the last time the Tories were in power.

The Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 (and the consequent BIS Code of Practice) requires that:

If the union decides to authorise or endorse industrial action following a ballot, it must take such steps as are reasonably necessary to ensure that any employer who it is reasonable for the union to believe employs workers who will be, or have been, called upon to take part in the action receives no less than seven days before the day specified in the notice as the date on which workers are intended to begin to take part……and so (para 50)

It is this enforced delay which means that the government has been able to get itself into such a tizzie, not least because it knows the current legislation backs the union into a corner: strike soon or lose the right to do so.

Pre-legislation, UNITE and management would have battered it out to the end, possibly via ACAS.  Had a strike then have been in the offing, the union would have had the flexibility to go back to members and postpone the action at the last minute/shortly after it started, pending further negotations.

Now, if they UNITE does this, they’ll have to go through the whole costly balloting process again, in the knowledge that use of the courts to stop action on the grounds of procedural technicalities is positively encouraged by the government.

Back in November, Francis Maude himself recognised this, though his response is – bizarrely – to reduce union flexibility even further:

At present, once a union has voted to strike, a walkout must be held within 28 days or a new ballot must be held. But if a strike is held, the union then has a legal “mandate” for more strikes or other action until the dispute ends.

Mr Maude says the rule gives unions a “perverse incentive” to strike and should be changed.

The Coalition will consider a new legal time limit on the mandate that a union has for industrial action after a vote. The limit could be as low as three months.

The government, it seems, is being hoist by its own anti-union petard. Now, tactically, it will be hoping that the strike does go ahead, and may well be privately urging employers not to negotiate, because that is the only way it can now justify its actions this week. 

Effectively, the government has to hope for the worst, because that’s its best way out of this mess.

The privatisation of our roads is a little way off, and it’s still not clear what Cameron’s initial announcement actually means.

The two key questions are whether any new programme will be for a large part of the existing network (rather than new roads and “pinch points” and whether the longer term plan is to do with tolling/roadpricing, or just another expression of what Chris calls ”irrational debt phobia”, whereby what could be achieved by borrowing through the gilt market is instead put out to much more expensive PFI so as to keep it off the balance sheet.

We’re unlikely to know much more on this until the Autumn when the Treasury and the Department for Transport report back with their feasibility study.  Nevertheless, on the pretty reasonable assumption that what is announced later may be just as bad as we think it might, it’s wise to start thinking about how any privatisation might be resisted. 

The most obvious spanner for the works, it seems to me, is the “community right to bid” provisions set out in the Localism Act, which came into force in late 2011.  I’ve covered the basics of what those provision are (and aren’t) here.

Under these provisions, local community groups and parish councils etc. have the right to request that any “assets of community value” be placed on a register of same by their local authority.  If the local authority agrees to place these assets on the register, they then become subject to the “community right to bid” process. 

This means that when any owner wishes to dispose of any such asset, s/he must first observe a moratorium period during which community groups get the chance to express an interest in their purchase, and if they do express an interest a further time period must be given to allow for a business plan to be developed and bid submitted.

Now clearly, it can be argued that a road is an “asset of community value”.  Without access to it, people within that community can’t get from A to B.

If, therefore, lots of local authorities start putting their entire road network on the Register of Assets of Community Value – a register they are required by law to draw up  – their sale becomes an interesting question. 

With a typical trunk road passing through, let’s say, 10 local authority areas, of which five non-Tory ones choose to put their bit of road on the Register, the government would be legally obliged to go through five different moratorium/business plan processes, during which time community activists could come together with local authorities to develop a “buy back” offer, whereby central government has to pay them for maintenance rather than a private contractor (though as now maintenance would be done by contractors anyway). 

Even the thought of having to compete for stretches of road, and the fear that a 10 mile stretch out of a 100 mile highway might end up in the “wrong hands” might well be enough to put sovereign wealth funds off the whole idea in the first place.

Worth thinking through, anyway…..

In the meantime, it’ll be worth seeing the extent to which the DfT’s feasibility study takes into account another new piece of legislation: the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012, which became law on 8th March 2012. 

Under this Act, if a “relevant authority proposes to procure or make arrangements for procuring the provision of services, or the provision of services together with the purchase or hire of goods or the carrying out of works”, then that authority must consider:

(a) how what is proposed to be procured might improve the economic, social and environmental well-being of the relevant area, and

(b) how, in conducting the process of procurement, it might act with a view to securing that improvement.

The selling off of our roads would, to say the least, be an interesting test of the application of this Act.  Failure to apply it before flogging off the highways would surely lead to Judicial Review action against the government by one or more of the larger campaign groups, perhaps in conjunction with some of the more pro-active local authorities.

Roger Helmer has quit the Tories for UKIP.  This is no surprise.  He wanted to hand over his seat to a Tory someone even more politically incompetent than him, and Tory HQ’s refusal to allow has left him with this as the only alternative.  This is nothing to do with Helmer’s politics.

However, it does highlight the distinction between the Tories and UKIP in Europe.

Official Tory policy is one of support for the existence of the EU, and Britain’s membership of it.  UKIP’s position is rather more contested.

On the one hand, Farage and his cohort take up their entitlement to speak in the Strasbourg parliament, and their website contains articles on how they have successfully influenced EU policy on Britain’s behalf.

On the other hand, I recently received this unambiguous view of UKIP’s stance on the EU from North West MEP Paul Nuttall, when I wrote to him  asking him his views on a specfic area of policy:

UKIP does not recognise the EU’s legitimacy to make legislation or policy on behalf of the citizens of our country. In view of this, Paul Nuttall and his UKIP colleagues will take no part in the process of the EU-India Free Trade Agreement.

This reply suggests that UKIP’s stance on the EU is similar to that of Sinn Fein’s stance on Britain – that taking up seats in the parliament does not imply recognition of authority, past, present or future, and that this is reflected in total non-attendance and non-engagement.

This is an important distinction.  It is a valid enough position to say that the EU is bad for Britain and that Britain should withdraw; it is quite different to say that Britain’s entry into the EU was not legitimate, since such an assertion opens up the question of how exactly the 1973 entry into the EEC, the 67% “yes” vote in the 1975 referendum and the subsequent signing of the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties were all unconstitutional.

I would like, then, to think that Roger Helmer will be questioned closely in coming weeks on what version of UKIP he thinks he has joined. 

Has he joined the one that engages with the EU for Britain, or has he joined the Sinn Fein-style non-job version as political statement? 

Or has he joined UKIP because they are as self-serving and hypocritical as he is – ready to engage with the EU when it suits, but equally ready to say the EU has no authority when they can’t be arsed to do any work for their constituents.

In a 2008 essay, I set out in some detail the policy implementation theory and empirical research to show that the then emerging Workfare programme would end up being entirely counterproductive:

[W]ith the ‘welfare reforms’ now proposed there’s a real risk that, given the additional bureaucracies inevitably involved, mechanisms will evolve that produce less flexibility, more ‘processing’ (i.e.  dehumanising) of clients. In the US at least front-line staff’s starting culture was one geared to just processing benefit claims with no great expectation of what might happen next; in the UK, the invasive New Public Management techniques of the last 25 years mean that front line staff in Job Centre Plus already start from a more a negative standpoint, just as inclined to ‘process’ but to do so with more of a mind to benefit withdrawal.

[T]here is a huge risk that the whole plus side of the reform – and at policy-making level increased personalized support is seen as a plus – will be ignored in favour of the downside; this will be about pushing people into (for them) counterproductive ‘work related activity’ in order to meet the newly introduced range of targets…..

At the time, the essay received some praise from the left, while on the Labour right it was largely dismissed it as pseudo-academic esoterics irrelevant to the main debate about how we needed to deal with the “welfare problem”.  Those same commentators now apparently have little to say about the abuses being heaped on the unemployed, the disabled the sick.

The Conservative regime has picked up from New Labour’s intellectual incoherence with glee, and my predictions about dehumanisation of welfare recipients have been fully borne out.  Under a Labour government, the consequences of advisor “flexbility” might have been seen as unfortunate and unintended, and in time processes might have been adapted to make them more humane.  Under the Conservative regime, there will be no such change of course. 

The current adverse public reaction to the regime’s “slave labour” excesses is to be welcomed, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that it’s anything other than a temporary setback for the government.  Indeed, the signs are that the Coalition’s “job snob” narrative, while not currently effective, might well end up turning the current backlash to longer term advantage (this will be the subject of another blogpost). Once the backlash has faded from the headlines, the sanction rules will remain in place, as will the perverse-incentive contracts with A4E, Serco and the rest. 

The key problem is that we are focusing our resistance at the wrong point.

At the moment, the focus of attention is on those parts of the Workfare system which are wholly under the control of the private providers.  The private providers are an easy target it in the short term, but this ignores the fact that clients only arrive for abuse at their hands via Job Centre Plus advisers, who form part of a still largely unionised workforce.

This raises difficult questions for the unions, and in particular for PCS, the main union operating in this sector.

Why, we should be asking, are these unionised advisers apparently not telling young people that they don’t have to stick with work experience placements that they are not finding valuable?  Why are unionised advisers using their discretion to impose “Mandatory Work Activity” on a much larger group of people than was originally set out in the government’s own plans.  Why are unionised advisers not telling JSA claimaints that I have a right to refuse disclosure of their details to thirs parties, thus preventing their entry in the Work Programme, at which point unpaid work becomes mandatory.

Why, moreover is the only recent PCS press release concerned with Workfare, focused solely on the activities of A4E, rather than on the dehumanising tasks that his own members are being encouraged to carry out?

I am not seeking to blame individuals here. As I set out in my 2008 essay, the way in which job centre staff are now treating claimants is simply a reflection of the way in which they have been ground down by the forces of New Public Management, to the point that they see clamaints as part of their target, not as people.  The New Labour ideal that they might, in the culture and with the resources they are now expected to work, offer a MORE personalised service than before, is more ridiculous now than it was in 2008.

This is how I concluded my 2008 essay:

So how should the Left react to the ‘reforms’? I’ve already indicated some ways in which we might seek to ameliorate the situation, given that the bill WILL go through and the ’reforms’ will be implemented, however badly. In general, I think alongside the protest marches and the opposition in totality, we need to be thinking about the best way to deal with what is coming. To a large extent, I think the responsibility has to lies with the unions, especially the PCS, not just to protest, but to get their members thinking at an early stage where their priorities lie.

In practical terms this means looking at the ‘detailed guidance’ that comes out in due course, arguing long and hard over the drafts to make them fairer, working to ensure that the performance targets imposed reflect real people, not numbers on a claimant count, and working with their staff and all their unions supporters to enable them to stand up to managers driving their ‘performance, by empowering those staff to say ‘No, these people have a right to personalized and appropriate support – it says so in the guidance. It also of course means arguing and if need be striking hard for extra resources – staff, time, office space – to do the job properly.

This will not be easy, and it will take a huge effort not just from the PCS but the whole union movement and its support to make, what for some branches at least will be a step change from arguing the vital but narrow case for member conditions, to a scenario where members realize that their conditions and fairness to clients are inextricably intertwined, and that some form of ‘strategic alliance’ is needed to combat what is bad in the ‘reforms’ and to bring out what might be good if it’s given a proper chance.

Time has moved on, and the details of what can be done are clearer.  Yet I stand by the view that the only effective resistance to the demolition of this large part of the welfare state is through organised labour, in conjunction with the broader protest movement, in which union members come together, with the support of their leaders, to establish institutional legitimacy for their way of doing things – including respect for the people they are there to serve.  In time, this institutional legitimacy must compete openly for primacy with the rules imposed from without (and a signficant aspect of this later stage will be unionising the private provider workforces so that the “sites of resistance” can grow)

2012 is a lot worse than 2008, but the same basic rules apply: organisation, organisation, organisation.  I just hope Mark Serwotka and his PCS comrades takes note that public sector unions have two interrelated duties: to defend the interests of members, but also to defend public service.

It is amusing to note Tory loon Priti Patel MP making a formal protest to the BBC about its supposed leftwing bias in its coverage of people forced to into unpaid “work experience”.

It is amusing because a month ago the BBC apologised formally to me for its poor news coverage of a government announcement on that very matter.  

That announcement deliberately sought to obscure the detail  the very unpaid Work Experience programme that is now at the centre of the furore.  The BBC fully accepts that it gave a false representation of the facts, suggesting that £1bn was being spent on subsidies to employers, whereas in fact £406m of that £1bn is earmarked for contracts with the like the notorious A4E, allowing them to push people into unpaid work experience.

So will Patel now apologise for not having noticed the BBC’s earlier apology, and accept that the BBC has been caught red-handed showing rightwing rather than leftwing bias. 

I suspect not.

Sunny Hundal is half right:

incompetence in dealing with the NHS and incompetence in growing the economy & reducing unemployment is how Labour need to define this government. Not ‘out of touch’ but just ‘incompetent’.

Labour’s first line of attack does indeed need to be on the government’s incompetence, but it needs to stress that the government as a whole is incompetent precisely BECAUSE Cameron and his inner circle (Osborne, Letwin and a couple of others) are ‘out of touch’.

The image that springs to mind is a public school.  For convenience, let’s call it Eton.

Cameron is the head boy, sitting in his warm study by the fire with his chums, toasting muffins and talking high political principle.  Meanwhile, outside in the courtyard the megalomaniac prefects, of a lower social class than Cameron and chums – selected for their mix of brutality to those over whom they wield power and obsequiousness to their superiors - wreak havoc on the lower fourth, picking particularly on the weedy vulnerable ones.  Cameron is oblivious to all this. He would probably, you feel, disapprove slightly, but the study is warm, and Oliver’s brought sherry……

Within four months of the Tories coming to power. I set out this public school-like operational code of the government: a high politics/low politics divide, in which a lot of domestic policy is regarded by the inner circle as simply beneath them, and has been delegated in full to rabid freemarketeers like Gove, Lansley and Pickles.   This has been reflected not just in the NHS debacle, but also in Gove’s repeated blunders and Pickles’ obvious lies.  It is also reflected in Cameron now frequent lies at PMQs, and his developing ‘Flashman’ image.

To date, Labour has been too focused on identifying Cameron as heir to Thatcher to notice that the style of government is quite different.  Now, at last, it does look like they are adopting accurate line of attack, though probably still more by accident than by design. 

When Cameron vetoed the ‘Merkozy treaty’ in early December, it meant that the deal could not be signed off as a variation to the Lisbon Treaty, and that any deal would need to be an intergovernmental treaty of the 26 participating countries.  As such, any deal is separate from the workings of the European Union.

This threw into doubt whether the 26 countries signing up to the Merkozy “non-EU” treaty could legitimately use the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) to police the deal and punish states which failed to abide by the proposed fiscal rules.  At the time, Cameron threatened legal action to stop the other 26 governments trying to use the ECJ in this way.

Unsurprisingly, now that he’s gained cheap political brownie points from using the veto, Cameron’s not bothered about pursuing this threat.  Diplomats are calling it a “heat of the moment” thing, and it’s being dropped as quietly as possible. 

This does, however, raise an intriguing possibility.

If the 26 member states now do go ahead uninterrupted and sign offtheir economically absurd pact, and include within it provision for ECJ ruling authority, it sets an important precedent for any set of European countries to come together, bash out a deal, and then call on the ECJ to do its thing.

Logically and legally, what could stop Francois Hollande, coming together with other like-minded European countries to sign a pact running entirely counter to the Merkozy pact, and asking the ECJ to be the binding arbiter on that too? 

After all, Hollande has already set out a clear manifesto promise around the need for a new ‘pact’.

Je proposerai à nos partenaires un pacte de responsabilité,de gouvernance et de croissance [growth] pour sortir de la crise et de la spirale d’austérité qui l’aggrave. Je renégocierai le traité européen issu de l’accord du 9 décembre 2011 en privilégiant la croissance et l’emploi, et en réorientant le rôle de la Banque centrale européenne dans cette direction. Je proposerai de créer des euro-obligations [Euro-bonds]. Je défendrai une association pleine et entière des parlements nationaux et européen à ces décisions. Cinquante ans après le traité de l’Élysée, je proposerai à notre partenaire l’élaboration d’ un nouveau traité franco-allemand.

Why would this new pact have any less legal weight than the one now being rushed through before Sarkozy is sent packing?

The  like-minded countries Hollande needs for such a scheme might include Spain, whose (rightwing) government is now calling for a ‘new realism’ about how to manage the economic crisis in light of its descent into economic chaos, and Greece,  fuming at Germany’s proposal to make its government subservient to an EU budget commissioner. 

It might, in 2015, also include Britain (or England/Wales/NI & Scotland) if Labour were minded to push for an entirely new approach to the European economy, something Ed Miliband at least hinted at in Davos this week (though clearly ideas on what to do are not yet formed).  If Labour has its wits about it, it should see jumping on the Hollande bandwagon, in a common drive to reorientate the EU towards the welfare of its people, as a very attractive proposition.

The alternative ‘Holliband’ pact might include shared commitments to investment in jobs, with targets for the reduction in unemployment levels, as a mirror to the stupid fiscal targets advocated by Merkozy, and call on the sanction of the ECJ for countries that failed to meet the employment and other needs of its citizens.

Clearly, two diametrically opposed  intergovernmental pacts, formed outside the EU but calling on the same EU institution for their operative legitimacy, would create a legal and institutional crisis at the heart of the EU that Cameron could never possibly have dreamed of when he stook his foot in his mouth in December, but that might well be better than simply allowing the current rightwingers in France and Germany to carry through their plans for the outlawing of  socialist econmics in Europe.

And what better payback for Cameron’s arrogant but wholly ignorant politicking with the EU than for him, in time, to see it used as the opening for a few Left front for a new Left ascent in Europe.