Obama's Lessons for Europe

Alphen, Netherlands. 7 November.  James Freeman Clarke once said, “A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman of the next generation”.  President Obama has just been re-elected by the next generation.  Now is his chance to be the statesman he needs to become.  If 2008 was an economic-storm election to lose 2012 could be (could be) the election to win with a US economy predicted to grow at 3% next year with three million jobs being created over the next four years.  What is truly remarkable is that the president held together a coalition of young white suburbanites, women and urban minorities to get re-elected in what is still an instinctively centre-right country.  Certainly, this US election has profound lessons not just for Republicans and conservatives but also for Europeans. 

 

The first lesson for Europeans concerns the growing political gap in western societies between old and young, men and women, whites and minorities.  Women, who make up 54% of the US electorate, voted 55% for Obama.  Albeit a chronic generalisation the message from American women seems to be that at a time of economic crisis they want more government not less.  They also reject the machismo pain is gain logic of fiscal discipline and austerity which may make financial and economic sense over the longer-term, but causes suffering in the short-term.  Those preaching fiscal common sense clearly failed to resonate with many in an America facing a fifteen trillion dollar deficit and soon to peer over the edge of a fiscal cliff which come 1 January, 2013 could cut 4.7 percentage points off the US economy, and see taxes soar and public services savagely cut. 

The second lesson concerns the impact of changing demographics on the vote in all western societies.  In the US the white vote is now down to 72%.  In most European countries it is between 80-85% but given immigration it is heading in a similar direction.  For conservatives it means they can no longer hold onto their 1950s view of society and for all the frictions and failings of fifty years of the liberal experiment it has created a society that whilst fairer is grossly uncompetitive.  As globalisation bites that decadent reality will become ever more apparent.  For progressives immigration might work in the short-term because it shifts the ‘class’ vote in their favour but at the cost of social cohesion that is now a distant memory.  It also reinforces a culture of dependency on government which is economically unsustainable. 

 

There is another third and potentially more dangerous lesson. If (as now seems possible at midnight Washington time) Obama wins the presidency but Romney wins the popular vote what legitimacy the president?  At electoral day’s end the candidate who wins the most votes should be the one who is elected.  There are several countries on both sides of the Atlantic where too often a leader is elected on a minority vote, not least my own country Britain.  Semantic and sophisticated arguments can be made to justify this but over time all that happens is the growing alienation of a large minority who believe the systems works against them.  Alienation is a real threat to European democracy already under threat from centralising EU technocrats and Euro-federalists. 

There are also aspects of this vote that are peculiarly American.  No US president has ever been elected with unemployment over 7% as it is today.  Obama won as much on charisma as policy, which was very hard to discern on either side.  His charisma and celebrity made contact with the lives of millions of ordinary Americans in a way that a billionaire white, wooden opponent too close to irresponsible, greed-stricken extremist capitalism simply did and could not.  Democrats should and will rejoice but they should also remember that Obama is a one-off political phenomenon.  Four years hence it will be back to Washington business as normal…almost.  

Sadly, it is the precisely the mix of extreme capitalism and the politics of entitlement implicit in this election that has led Europe to the edge of the abyss.  America (like Europe) is today a society unable to face the hyper-competitive facts of globalised economic life and one in which capitalism red in tooth and claw is championed.  How and if that contradiction is resolved will define Americans (and Europeans) in the coming age.  There can and must be no return to some form of sweat shop economy but nor can Americans or Europeans defy economic gravity.  Rather, the political class left and right must seek a new balance between competitiveness and compassion, between government and civil society, between liberty, responsibility and entitlement to sustainably pay for the values that Americans and Europeans share and which not only define who we are but what we stand for together in the world.

Julian Lindley-French

Angela and David: Time for an Amicable Divorce

Alphen, Netherlands. 5 November.  Tonight is Guy Fawkes or bonfire night when the good people of England commemorate the burning at the stake of the leader of a 1605 Catholic plot to burn down Parliament, which to many Britons seems merely an idea that was ahead of its time.  This week Chancellor Angela Merkel is due to visit London as part of a German charm offensive to persuade PR-Meister Cameron to support an increase in the EU budget - if there are three things that have brought the EU low it is British ‘vision’, French ‘pragmatism’and German ‘charm’.  What Cameron should be telling Merkel is that Britain will leave the EU unless Germany ends its drive towards further political union.

   

Cameron of course will not do that.  Rather, surrounded by his group-think, europhile officials (one must be europhile to get promoted in London) he will meekly apologise to Merkel for last week’s outbreak of parliamentary democracy and MP’s demand for a real cut in the EU budget. He will instead agree with the German Chancellor to delay any decision on the budget so long as he can keep the deal from the British people...and hope. 

That will be difficult because Britain’s departure from the EU is now nigh on inevitable, not least because the EU seems determined to accelerate Britain’s departure.  Last night it became clear that the EU’s European Investment Bank has loaned the Ford Motor Company some €100bn (some of it British money) to establish a factory in Turkey, a non-EU member, so that Ford can close a factory in Britain, an EU member.  Ford clearly sees no real problem with basing production outside the EU to sell into it.  Indeed, any attempt to impose trade sanctions on a departing Britain would be illegal under World Trade Organisation rules, which is precisely why Ford can use British money via the European Investment Bank to shift production from Southamption to Turkey. 

Germany is the prime architect of Britain’s pending departure from the EU because Berlin is intent on changing the rules of the EU game in its favour.  It is a crisis-driven power game the full extent of which will only become apparent after the September 2013 German federal elections when a newly re-elected Merkel will then and only then the German people the enormous political and financial cost of the Eurozone crisis. 

At that point today’s phoney war will end and Europe will come to dominate British politics in the run-up to the 2015 British general election.  Indeed, battle-lines are already being drawn with Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and his “Little Britain” followers (which by the way includes much of the Labour Party and some in the Conservative Party) who believe one of the world’s leading economic and military powers could not survive outside the EU and the massive bulk of the British people who now believe Britain can and should go.

The facts speak for themselves.  Today the Centre for Economic and Business Reform said Britain will enjoy the strongest growth of any major European economy over the next two years.  The percentage of British trade going to the EU is dropping fast from near fifty percent to around forty percent with the rest of the EU selling some €55bn more of goods and services to Britain than Britain sells to the EU, which suggests the EU needs Britain far more than Britain needs the EU.  Indeed, the huge transfers of British taxpayers’ money the EU demands is little more than a tax on the British people for no demonstrable benefit and even less influence because the link between such transfers and boosting the single market has now been broken.  Instead the cost of regulation that Brussels imposes on Britain has become one of the main breaks on economic recovery.

The irony is that tensions between a globalising Britain and the Eurosphere would have been rising even in the absence of the crisis.  Britain's future will depend far more on growing world economies than a doomed-to-be sclerotic Eurozone. British trade with the emerging markets is growing year-on-year in double-digit figures. It is perhaps no coincidence that Cameron is today visiting the booming Gulf States which suggests the PR-Meister may have an alternative strategy up his sleeve (do not hold your breath).  There are some surprising boom areas in the British economy such as the establishment of English law as the legal framework for global contract law. 

Therefore, if Cameron has any political sense he will politely tell Chancellor Merkel the truth at this week’s meeting; there is no place for Britain in her vision for Europe and no amount of ‘charm’ can change that.  She is a sensible woman and will of course understand the implications and she will also see benefits from an amicable divorce that would separate Britain’s political destiny from resolution of the Eurozone crisis.  If not David Cameron might soon find that he too joins Guy Fawkes atop a political bonfire of his own making.

Julian Lindley-French

Cloud Cleggo Land

London, England. 2 November. As I write this I am sitting in the Senate Chamber of Church House at the Chief of the Royal Air Force’s air power conference organised by the Royal United Services Institute.  Church House is the Supreme Spiritual Headquarters of the Church of England and there can be no better place to discuss the future of the Royal Air Force than the seat of the Lord High Air Power Almighty in London.  The good news is that British Defence Minister Philip Hammond has just given the strongest hint yet at this conference that HMS Prince of Wales, one of two super aircraft-carriers the British are building will be commissioned into the Royal Navy towards the end of the decade.  Rule Britannia!

 

And then there is Europe.  The latest foment over the road in the House of Commons has been triggered by the ‘we don’t do political principle’ Labour opposition who joined with Tory rebels Wednesday to inflict a humiliating defeat on PR-Meister Cameron as he prepares to head off to not-negotiate the European Omission’s five year Multi-Annual Financial Framework or EU budget.  The sceptics want the PR-Meister to negotiate a real-time reduction in the Omission’s budget.  Fat chance!

Last night at Chatham House Lib-Dem leader and David Cameron’s Coalition partner-in-crime Nick Clegg said that there was not the slightest hope in hell (or is that Brussels) of Britain securing an aforesaid reduction not least because a strong majority of EU member-states now have access to British money with Labour having in effect negotiated away any say over the matter.   Rather Nick wants Britain to confront changes in the EU “head on”, which in Nick-speak means join the Euro. He is after all the Omission’s point-man in London.

 

Now, I like Nick Clegg.  He is a fellow Sheffielder and given that we are an endangered species we really should stick together.  And, technically he is right but that is not the point.  What Nick fails to point out is that the changes taking place in the EU will inevitably lead to the runtification of the European nation-state and thus represent a clear and present danger to the British state.  Do you really think Scotland would be considering independence if not for the political backdrop of the EU?

Rather, Nick’s false ‘reality check’ reflects the lack of any sensible debate in this town about what next in Europe.  The choice Nick offers is either complete political immersion in Project Europe or a form of political Dunkirk, a false choice wrapped in a European flag.  In fact what is needed is a sensible chat about Britain and a very changed Europe.  There are huge questions of political philosophy implicit in the changes taking place in the EU, particularly as it affects the relationship between the state and the individual.  It may well be that in time the UK leaves the EU, although we are not there yet.  Therefore, London desperately needs grown-up people to talk in a grown-up way about one of the most important choices Britain will soon have to make.

 

This RUSI conference could point the way forward.  What has struck me about the British defence leadership is that they are slowly muddling towards something like a real defence strategy, although given the lack money and personnel committed it still too often smacks of hollow strategy. That said the emphasis on strategic partnerships with allies and partners both within institutions such as the EU and NATO and beyond is to be welcomed.  Britain foresees a series of powerful partnerships with emerging states and traditional allies befitting the world’s 5^th or 6^th real economy and 3^rd or 4^th defence actor. 

Whatever happens to Britain’s EU membership it is vital that the strategic state-to-state relationship with France is preserved and new relationships built with Germany and Italy.  However, that will require Europe’s power states to look at their respective relationships with London in a new light.  Equally, Britain must be freed to exploit deeper its strategic relationship with the United States and others, just like Germany is doing with China in pursuit of the German interest.  These relationships will be built on traditional forms of statecraft for which and to which Britain’s powerful defence strategic brand will be critical.

 

This will be the decade of choices for Britain and Nick’s implicit status quo at any cost is not an option.  It is not those who question Britain’s continued EU membership who are in cloud cuckoo land, even if sometimes they sound like a stuck record.  

Rather it is you Nick who is stuck in cloud Cleggo land with your misplaced “resistance is futile” nonsense.  At the very least give the rest of us a vision of how Britain could in future stay in the EU and outside the Euro.  We have yet to hear it.

 

Julian Lindley-French

2014: NATO Year Zero

Bologna, Italy. 29 October.  I love Italy.  As I write this I am gazing down from on high over-looking the Po Valley that separates Bologna from Milan re-thinking NATO.  That in any case was the title of the conference I have just attended (high level of course); Dynamic Change: Re-thinking NATO.  Still, as I wrapped up the conference in my now accustomed role as a strategic hooligan it struck me that if NATO’s members could just summon up even a modicum of strategic honesty NATO has an opportunity to remodel itself that it has never had before nor will likely ever have again.  Indeed, 2014 when NATO leaves Afghanistan (and it will), will be as close to a defence planning Year Zero as it is possible to get.  

The problem is that NATO members today range from the “I’m small get me out of here” type of country through the “I used to be important and I ought to be listened to” country up to (of course) the one “my way or the highway” country.  Apart from the latter they all suffer from a crippling disease called strategic pretence with “national strategies” for NOT doing things, also called “dynamic” and which talk about “change” a lot.  The result is NATO’s Defence Planning Process by which NATO’s Europeans – the pygmy powers - pretend to the “my way or the highway” country that they are fully committed to what the latter calls “transformation” and the "my way or the highway" country pretends to believe them.   

Naturally, the “my way or the highway” country has a 'plan' (they have a lot of those).  In the plan the pygmy powers and their bonzai militaries will join together to render unto someonw they call Uncle Same a NATO Europe cast in his image, albeit a midget version.  This may or may not include the Canadians as no-one can decipher anything Ottawa ever says these days as it is so politically-correct.  Does anyone speak Canadian around here?  Now, another reason the “my way or the highway” country pretends to believe the pygmies is because their defence-industrial “champions”, otherwise known as gangsters, have erected a big neon sign over Europe that flashes “suckers”.  

Today NATO Defence Planning is one of the greatest works of European fiction since Dante’s Inferno: the Four Choices before the Apocalypse.  Indeed, if the European Onion can be awarded the Nobel Prize for Not Yet Being in Pieces then surely NATO Defence Planning should be up for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

To finesse this lack of mutual comprehension away NATO talks a lot about “language”.  Indeed, anyone who has worked for NATO knows the importance of “language” which in human-speak means the use of long words in by and large indecipherable documents to present full-scale and rapid decline as efficiency and effectiveness.

The thing is that the pygmies, even the smaller pygmies, are slowly waking up to life beyond December 2014.  It is going to be a big, bad and for the first time in four hundred years not waking up every morning being impressed by Europeans world (I exaggerate that bit for effect).  In such a world defence transformation will really matter and in defence planning terms 2014 is yesterday.  Unfortunately, the gap between what Europeans need to do to defend their vital interests and what they can do is now so wide that only a true work of grand fiction can mask it.  Most small bands of bedraggled European brothers (and sisters) that these days pass for armies could now fit inside an old London double decker bus, if we could afford it that is. Strategic logic would suggest much deeper military synergy for some even defence integration.  The problem is the lack of trust after eleven years of Afghanistan.

 

For those reasons all the future planning I have seen is old wine in new bottles.  It is of course sprinkled with the current buzzwords of military-speak and much emphasis is now being placed on two blokes in the Special Forces who apparently in future will be able to achieve the same as an entire army today.  In the real world Europe’s pygmy governments are broke, want to cut armed forces further and have no intention of doing very much for their defence.  Their respective navies, air forces and armies are also far more interested in fighting each other than defending me, which in military-speak is called – jointness.

My own “I used to be important but ought to be listened to” country is a case in point.  Soon to become two “I’m small get me out of here” countries, and having spent the last eleven years fighting wars with “please after you” allies, it too has decided to become a “please, after you” ally as it seems a lot more effective to get others to fight your wars for you than do it yourself.  It is a sad delusion not least because the “my way or the highway” country will soon conclude NATO no way. 

Carpe diem as they say in these here parts (or at least used to).  NATO is not a Terry Pratchett novel and we Europeans do not live in a Disc-World atop a giant turtle - it just seems like that.

2014: NATO Year Zero

Julian Lindley-French

Merkel's Great Euro Deception

Bologna, Italy. 26 October.  “Oh what webs we weave when at first we seek to deceive”.  In the run-up to D-Day in 1944 the British ran a superb deception campaign called Operation Fortitude to fool the Germans as to the real location of the invasion.  It worked spectacularly.  Today, the Germans are being fooled again, this time by their own government.  The report by the so-called EU-European Central Bank-IMF Troika on Greek efforts to reduce €13.5bn of their budget deficit in return for more of my money and a two-year extension is pure theatre.  Berlin took the decision a long-time ago to give Greece the extra time and money.  Chancellor Merkel’s pretence to be awaiting the Troika report before making a decision was revealed by Athens this week to be what it is; political sleight of hand.  The reason is simple; Chancellor Merkel wants to mask the truth about the real cost of saving the euro until after the September 2013 German federal elections. 

It was Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker who famously remarked, “We know how to solve the crisis.  We just do not know how to get re-elected afterwards”.  It was a point this week reinforced by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble who contradicted French President Hollande’s outbreak of insane optimism by saying that Europe is only “in the eye of the storm”.  

The figures are simply staggering and Schauble is of course correct. Hence the need to hide the hard truth from the German, Dutch (i.e. me) and other northern, western European taxpayers who are going to have to foot the bill with broken hopes, dreams and bank balances.  Even the most optimistic assessments suggest a Grexit (a Greek exit from the euro) would cost at least €320bn.  And that does not take into account the secret EU (my) money being poured into banks across the Balkans which to all intents and purposes are insolvent.  If the euro then began to progressively fail German banks alone would need at least €500bn to remain solvent or 20% of Germany’s gross domestic product.  Even modest move towards a banking union and limited debt mutualisation would cost between €300bn and €400bn of which the German taxpayer would be liable for at least 30%. Moreover, mutualising debt would increase German interest costs by at least €15bn per year whilst cash transfers to poorer EU economies to bring their deficit-busting revenues up to that of mid-ranking EU member-states would cost the German taxpayer at least €250bn per year.

The consequences of Chancellor Merkel’s perennial kicking of the now famous can down the seemingly interminable road are dangerous in the extreme.  At some point I will run out of money and the ECB’s printing presses will run out of ink and then the markets will take savage revenge.  Moreover, Chancellor Merkel may no longer be able to control this farce.  At the next EU summit Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden will veto the European Commission’s future budget.  This will mean that much of the regional aid and many of the infrastructure projects undertaken in recent years in central, eastern and southern Europe with the promise that my money will be used to pay for them will effectively default.

Such a default will plunge Europe into another political crisis and bring into sharp relief the sheer incompetence of EU leaders in failing to deal with a crisis that they themselves have turned into a pending disaster.  Chancellor Merkel has much of the responsibility for this dereliction of duty to the European citizen for whilst she has talked Europe, she has meant Germany and only short-term Germany.  As a consequence of this prevarication the fundamental issue; growth-killing structural deficits that plague most EU member-states has not even begun to be addressed.  Indeed, her entire strategy of hoping sufficient growth will turn up to make the problem go away is doomed by her very inaction which increases the cost to her own taxpayer with each passing day.

Furthermore, whilst no-one can doubt her commitment to this most political of projects (and therein lies the problem) her prevarication and short-termism now makes it ever more likely the real crisis when it comes will either destroy the euro or force a democracy-busting, Franco-German axis crippling British-exiting leap to some form of weak political union wanted only by the self-interested Euro-fanatics in Brussels DC.  That crisis will now come in the first quarter of 2014 and it will hit hardest in places like Italy from where I write you this missive.

To paraphrase Geoffrey Chaucer the truth will out – eventually.  As President Hollande said last week Chancellor Merkel has her own deadline.  Let us all hope it is not so late that the can has grown so big that not only can she no longer kick it – but it kicks back with a vengeance.  Chancellor Merkel must come clean with the German people now.

Julian Lindley-French

El Alamein: The End of the Beginning

Tartu, Estonia. Baltic Defence College, 23 October.  Seventy years ago today the British Eighth Army, comprising British, Australian, Indian, New Zealand and South African forces, launched the Second Battle of El Alamein.  It was a battle that with Stalingrad would prove to be one of the most important of World War Two in the war against the Axis Powers.  Taken together the two battles sounded the first toll of the death knell for Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich.

 

In what in many ways was a classical set-piece World War One assault a heavy British artillery barrage supported by air power hammered the one hundred thousand strong German Afrika Korps and their Italian allies before one thousand tanks and two hundred thousand men assaulted the Axis lines.  Over the next eleven days General Bernard Law Montgomery, whose name became synonymous with this battle struggled to break through.  Montgomery pulled his severely over-stretched enemy, at the very end of his lines of supply, north and south across the Egyptian desert to the west of Alexandria and Cairo.  Finally, on 4 November no longer able to parry Montgomery’s thrusts the German commanders, absent their sick leader Rommel, broke.  By the end of the battle the Afrika Korps had been reduced to less than thirty tanks.  

Losses were steep on both sides but nothing like those suffered at the parallel Battle of Stalingrad (2 August 1942 to 2 February 1943) which eventually saw the Red Army defeat Von Paulus’s German Sixth Army.  Within days of the victory at El Alamein Anglo-American forces landed in Morocco and rolled up the Afrika Korps which surrendered to the British in May 1943.

For the British the victory was particularly timely.  Whilst the Royal Navy had by then effectively defeated the Kreigsmarine’s surface fleet, German submarines continued to threaten the British people with starvation.  And, although the retaliatory strategic bombing campaign of the Royal Air Force was beginning to wreak havoc in Germany it was at an immense cost.  On land the British had won no significant battle since the 1939 outbreak of the war.  With the Americans rapidly taking over the strategic direction of the Western war from the British and with Stalin increasingly dismissive of British efforts Churchill desperately needed a major victory against the Wehrmacht to preserve at least a modicum of influence with Roosevelt and Stalin.  El Alamein provided Churchill with just such a victory even though by late 1942 it was plain to see that Britain’s power was waning fast and that it would be the Americans and Soviets who would henceforth call most of the strategic shots.

 

In the wake of El Alamein the Western Allies began the long slog first through Sicily, then onto the Italian mainland as they laid the groundwork at Salerno and Anzio for the critical D-Day amphibious assault on 6 June, 1044.  In the wake of El Alamein Nazi Germany became increasingly trapped in a three-dimensional vice between the Anglo-Americans, the Red Army and Western air power. 

It is fair to say that the May 1945 defeat of Nazi Germany really began in the wastes of Stalingrad and the dust and sand of the Egyptian desert because taken together the two victories broke the myth of invincibility that the Wehrmacht had acquired.  Having already defeated the Italians at sea critically El Alamein gave the Western Allies undisputed control of the Mediterranean.

 

There are also lessons from El Alamein for the defence and military strategy of today.  Defence strategy that is not properly grounded in national grand strategy i.e. the organisation of large means in pursuit of large ends, is but a meaningless waste of taxpayer’s money.  El Alamein served a very clear strategic end.  Military strategy that is not embedded in and conscious of a workable political strategy and its context is merely a waste of lives and materiel.  El Alamein was essential to the ultimate success of the Western political strategy.  Above all, El Alamein was the proof of that old military adage; do what the enemy least desires, where and when he least wants it.

But El Alamein is testament to another military truism.  Decisive advantage comes only when the critical weight of mass, manoeuvre and mobility has been established.  Military innovation is important but cannot act as a short-cut to such advantage.  Today, innovation is driven too much by the triumph of hope over experience.  For example, a platoon will never do the job of a brigade, let alone a division.

 

Winston Churchill said of El Alamein, “This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”. 

Lest we forget.

Julian Lindley-French

 

The EU Muppet Show!

Alphen, Netherlands.  18 October.  It’s the EU Muppet Show tonight…and its official!  Der Spiegel, a German political magazine reputedly close to Chancellor Merkel, suggested that Angela has likened PR-Meister David Cameron and the British to the Muppet Show's Statler and Waldorf.  These are the two old blokes who heckle the Muppets from a theatre box who think the show is rubbish and are forever complaining about Fonzo the bad comedian.  

Angela’s alleged irritable dig at the British got me thinking.  If Cameron is Waldorf or Statler (it is not clear) who are the other Muppets?  Kermit the Frog is easy.  That has to be France’s President Hollande, the insanely optimistic kind little frog who yesterday said that this would be the last EU summit with an agenda dominated by the Eurozone crisis, before going on to accuse Angela of being too parochially German because she does not want Germany to pay off everybody else’s debts, particularly French debts.  

Fonzo, the bad comedian unsure himself whether anything he ever says is even vaguely funny can only be Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission and one of the EU’s leading federalist Muppets.  Fonzo is a close friend on Brussels’ Sesame Street with EU ‘President’ Hermann ‘The Beat’ van Rompuy who is perfectly cast as Animal, the fanatical drummer who is forever making a lot of noise but little music.  Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker is Dr Teeth and together they formed Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, an anarchic federalist Muppet band that plays crazy music that no-one ever wants to listen to other than themselves.

Carl Bildt is of course the Swedish Chef because he speaks a language no-one can understand and is always trying to cook something up from an alternative recipe that no-one can swallow.  Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank must be Beaker the mad scientist who is forever undertaking mad experiments in his mad laboratory none of which ever work, but which cost an awful lot of money.  Gonzo the Great must be Muppet stuntman and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy because he is always performing insane political and economic stunts and will soon be, well, gonzo.  If there was a Dutch prime minister he would be Zoot, the fifty-something burnt out musician in Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem who never speaks, occasionally makes a sound, probably smokes something dodgy, gets stoned and then is never heard from again.  

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti must be Sam the Eagle the tall, erect, Euro-patriotic self-appointed and utterly unelected leader of the EU Muppets.  Sam gives unwanted self-important lectures on the need to better integrate the Muppets and regards the whole show as beneath him, forever trying to impart some dignity and gravitas and forever failing.   

The rest?  They are the Frackles, a race of little monsters that come in many different colours, shapes and sizes that make tweeting noises from the margins and which Angela is forever trying to herd in her direction.  It is like herding cats.  New on the scene and keen soon to become a Frackle is Alec Salmond, or the Scottish Argyle Gargoyle as he is known in the EU Muppet Show.  Argyle can gargle Gershwin perfectly but otherwise no-one understands a word he says.  And then there is Foo-Foo, Miss Piggy’s dog, which probably barks Belgian. 

Today, the same cast of characters gather in Brussels for yet another EU Muppet Show.  This is the twenty-second time the EU Muppets have met NOT to manage the Eurozone crisis since it broke in 2010. Expect the French and others to push for a full banking union in an attempt to drive down the borrowing costs of the Italian and Spanish Muppets (and their own of course) and the German Muppets to offer only a Kommissar Muppet to ‘oversee’ the whole fiasco. The Berlin Muppets are ever fearful of losing control of their regional banks which provide cheap loans to their municipalities in the landes (German states).  The British Muppet will grumble impotently from the margins and then return home to tell the Muppets in London that he successfully defended the British interest and all that he now has to do is decide just what that interest is.  

And, of course, tonight another fantasy Muppet breakthrough will of course be heralded in the fantasy land that is the EU Muppet Show.  Let’s see if this one lasts longer than a Brussels Cappuccino.  Yawn!

In the words of the Muppet Show song, “Why do we always come here; I guess we'll never know; It's like a kind of torture; to have to watch the show.”

And finally, there is one character missing.  She is large, domineering and always gets her way.  Who could that be?  I will leave that to your imagination.  One thing though Angela.  In the Muppet Show it is always Statler and Waldorf who have the last word!

Watch the EU Muppet Show tonight folks!

Julian Lindley-French