What a very long time it has been since I last wrote anything here on the Thursday Briefing. My failure to post has been caused by the need to devote all my time to writing a thesis and attempting to plan and execute an international move in just a fortnight (not a wholly successful endeavour). Thankfully now though, the thesis is done and graded, and as of tomorrow the stressful nightmare that is moving house will be completed, leaving me free to pursue my attempts to become a Eurocrat here in Brussels. I have a feeling that living in Brussels and working in, and around, EU politics will be nothing but good for this blog, especially as I will have enough free time to actually write stuff.

Anyway, with perhaps a little stutter, while I attempt to get everything settled (dealing with Belgian bureaucrats is not fun), the Thursday Briefing is back. I did have a chance to think about the content of the site though, and I plan to change the focus. This started out as an attempt at a hybrid Scottish-European-Green politics blog, but since I haven’t lived in Scotland for more than a year, I think it is time to change the focus to being a much more of a EU/Green blog. Not that I won’t ever write about Scotland or Scottish politics, but it only makes sense to focus on what I know, and that is the EU.

So, what started as a little experiment in CSS3 has now entered its second year of existence. Lets hope it can last to its third birthday.

It might not be the best thing to start a post with, but I’ve come to a conclusion: the citizens’ initiative, currently being fleshed out by various civil servants and politicians in Brussels, is not really all that much about citizens. My conclusion has been prompted by the changes that the Council of Ministers has proposed to the draft regulation that will set out how the whole thing will work.

“… and enhances further the democratic functioning of the Union by providing inter alia that every citizen shall have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union and that not less than one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of Member States may take the initiative of inviting the European Commission, within the framework of its powers, to submit any appropriate proposal on matters where citizens consider that a legal act of the Union is required for the purpose of implementing the Treaties.”

Extract from the proposal for a Regulation on the citizens’ initiative.

A bit of background first: the Lisbon Treaty included a provision for a citizens initiative, essentially being a petition by individual citizens to get whatever the issue at stake might be, considered by the Commission. Lisbon however, left most of the detail for later. Now is later, and the details are here.

With the current Council proposals, a minimum number of citizens (in proportion to the number of MEPs from a state), in at least one third of member states, will need to sign the initiative for it to be accepted. I don’t know about you, but I certainly would struggle as an ordinary European Citizen to pull off something like that. Even with a movement of some form behind the issue being dealt with, it’d take a lot of international coordination (I’d say more than Twitter could achieve) to get the initiative off the ground, let alone successfully submit it to the Commission. There’s also a slightly sinister provision that, “the Commission should reject the registration of proposals which would be manifestly against the values of the Union.” From a legal perspective, that’s not too controversial a statement. It means that initiatives which contradict the positive and sunny opening articles of the treaties—where all the good things the EU wants to do and thinks are important are laid down—would be dismissed without the Commission having to publish the initiative on its website, or give it any serious thought at all. From a non legalese point of view though, the language is unfortunate. Politically, it could be thrown back at the EU, for it reserving the right to dismiss things based on values that it, not the people, decides. And to citizens thinking of organising an initiative, it is as clear as mud in its meaning.

The citizens initiative, as it is being proposed now, needs someone with a fairly well developed knowledge of how the EU works. Most people don’t have that sort of knowledge about their own political systems, but they aren’t barred at the door for that ignorance. In Scotland, ordinary people (am I using that term too much now?) can start or participate in a petitions system which triggers discussion on the topics in a committee of the Scottish Parliament. Knowledge of the intricacies of this system, and a reading of the Scotland Act to determine the details of reserved and devolved powers. or the ‘values’ of Scotland, isn’t needed. An interest in a political issue (and isn’t everything political?) and an understanding of how to get people to sign a petition means that any person in Scotland can “participate in the democratic life of the” country, to borrow a few words from the Council’s suggestions.

The Citizens’ Initiative will be pretty good for some though. Lobbying groups, NGOs, and campaigning networks will love this. It offers a way to get the EU to, at the very least, think about something. This is good to some extent, but it means that it is wrong to go about thinking that having this wonderful Citizens’ Initiative helps to lessen the democratic deficit of the EU. I still support the idea of the initiative, but it is not something that many ordinary citizens will ever have a chance of using to further a cause dear to their hearts.

I love the way that the Belgians have their crises. They set a date, have a panic, and talk of the end of Belgium. Then they seem to adjourn the crisis until a future date. I don’t profess to be an expert on Belgian politics (though I doubt many could), but if the problem is centered around the bilingual constituency of Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde, would it not make sense to simply redraw the boundaries and split it into one Flemish, and one French constituency? My other suggestion for fixing Belgium is the Bosnian model and forced Esperanto, though I doubt that’d go down well.

It was quite amusing to read that some think tank or other has spent the last six months putting together a report that concludes that expats in Brussels don’t integrate. I once spent an evening in the company of a Flemish anti-capitalist who had the idea of giving the EU to another city. I think the words he used to describe the expats advances toward his neighborhood were, “crawling up the hill from Schuman”.

Seriously though, if you move somewhere because of a desire to live in that particular place, then it’s likely that you’ll try to integrate a bit, but moving somewhere because it is the place you have to be to do what you do, especially when what you do is international politics, is never going to encourage you to integrate. Brussels just happens to be where the EU is.

As an aside, this post may, or may not be the first in a series of ‘useless X of the week’ posts. It depends how much I can be bothered.

My last post was resolutely negative, but I said I was doing two posts, so here is the second, and it’s thankfully a lot more positive. In the UK, we held our two seats: there are still two loud Green voices from the UK in the EP. True, we didn’t manage to increase our seats as we had expected to do, but we held our base firmly, and the UK-wide increase in the Green vote was 50%. In other words, the electoral system is just a tad crap for us, but we did pretty well. Now we need to build on that and make sure that we get those extra seats next time. One of my favourite set of numbers for the night was Brighton & Hove, where we took the most votes, beating all other parties. Lets hope we can have a repeat performance when it comes to the general election.

Looking elsewhere in Europe, the state of the greens is rather good. In France, we saw a gain of 8 seats, taking us to a total of 14. In Belgium, Groen! (Dutch-speaking greens) suffered at the hands of Vlaams Belang (far-right), but Ecolo (French-speaking greens) won two seats in the EP (up one from last time), and are also the third largest party in the Brussels Capital Region Parliament. Not all results are in, but by my estimates, we’ve gained 13 seats across Europe, making the European Greens a stronger force in EU politics. I’ll try and keep that pan-European thought in mind, rather than the UK results.

I’ve never witnessed a European election count before, so my idea of live-blogging it may be a bit presumptuous, but I’ll give it a go anyway. Proper live-blogging should start from about 21h30 CET. The spreadsheet below is my attempt to gather together the green results from the European Parliament; Belgian and Luxembourgish legislative; and Irish, English, and Maltese local elections. Tweet in my direction (@tredford01) if I’ve missed anything out. Results in italics are provisional, and all information is as correct as I can make it, but there may be errors.

02h46 CEST: Well, that’s all I can manage for now. It seems that the European Greens have so far gained 12 seats against the 2004 session numbers. With the fresh light of day, I’ll hopefully be able to complete my results spreadsheet and put together some coherent comment on things, but just now I have mixed feelings. I’m happy for the overall gain, but the far-right’s gains in the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands, our losses in Austria and Italy, and our failure to increase our number of seats in the UK is very disappointing. Goodnight.

02h27 CEST: So in the last two results from UK South East and UK South West, Greens have beaten the Labour Party. Shame we aren’t managing to increase our seats.

02h25 CEST: UK South East results: 4 Conservative, 2 UKIP, 1 Green, 1 Labour, 2 Liberal Democrat. Greens on 12%, 4% ahead of Labour.

02h21 CEST: UK South West results: 3 Conservative, 2 UKIP, 1 Liberal Democrat. Greens on 9%, 1% ahead of Labour.

02h01 CEST: Apparently there is a recount going on in Manchester. That explains the delay in results.

01h53 CEST: East Midlands results: 2 Conservative, 1 Labour, 1 UKIP, 1 Liberal Democrat. Greens on 7% with no seats.

01h41 CEST: London results: 3 Conservative, 2 Labour, 1 Liberal Democrat, 1 Green , 1 UKIP. Our first Green to be re-elected this time round.

01h32 CEST: BBC are now predicting that the BNP will win 2 seats, and Greens will also win 2 nationally. So UK North West could easily go to the evil nazis, while we just manage to hold our two existing seats.

01h25 CEST: Re-Tweeting @AdamRamsay “Report from NW count: Greens 5,000 behind in final tally ”

01h22 CEST: And there is a computer failure in the count for UK South East. Wonderful: more delays.

01h20 CEST: BBC are predicting that we will take a 9% share of the vote UK wide.

01h03 CEST: Italian result seems to have sneaked past the BBC. According to the European Greens, we’ve lost our MEPs from Italy. Federazione dei Verdi down to 3% of the vote.

01h01 CEST: Irish results forthcoming. No seats for the Greens.

00h54 CEST: So to tot up UK results so far, we have 7 Conservative, 4 Labour, 3 Liberal Democrat, 4 UKIP, 1 Plaid Cymru, and 1 evil fascist BNP nazi.

00h47 CEST: Greens on 6% with no seats in UK Wales, and Plaid Cymru will join the Greens/EFA group in Brussels.

00h46 CEST: UK Wales results: 1 Conservative, 1 Labour, 1 Plaid Cymru, 1 UKIP.

00h41 CEST: Welsh results should be through shortly.

00h32 CEST: Greens on 9% in UK Yorkshire & Humber.

00h29 CEST: Fascist BNP have their first seat in UK Yorkshire & Humber. Horrible

00h28 CEST: UK Yorkshire & Humber: 2 Conservative, 1 Labour, 1 UKIP, 1 Liberal Democrat, 1 BNP.

00h22 CEST: UK Yorkshire & Humber result should be through shortly.

00h10 CEST: Greens on 9%, no MEP from us for East of England.

00h09 CEST: 3 Conservative, 2 UKIP, 1 Liberal Democrat, 1 Labour from UK East of England.

00h05 CEST: UK East of England result just coming through.

23h58 CEST: Apparently the Italian result is about to be announced. Also, there is a potential for BNP seat in UK Yorkshire & Humber.

23h36 CEST: Worrying news from the count in the UK North West, BNP may be 2,000 votes ahead of the Greens with 14 out of 39 areas in the region announced.

23h04 CEST: Argh, maddening religious population of Western Isles in Scotland refuses to count votes on a Sunday. Northern Ireland also waiting until Monday.

22h58 CEST: Tweets are suggesting the BNP are going to do badly in the UK North West. Still could be very tight, and still big chance Greens might not get a seat there.

22h45 CEST: 1 Labour, 1 Conservative, 1 Liberal Democrat in the UK North East region. Greens were up 1% to 5.8%.

22h43 CEST: First results coming in from the UK North East. Will post results very soon.

22h32 CEST: Discrepancies between the BBC’s reporting of results, and what I’m getting through SMS, Twitter and European Greens. We may have 1 or 2 MEPs from Spain.

22h15 CEST: RT @patrickharvie Rumours of 18% Green vote in Glasgow.

22h09 CEST: Finally getting some proper results in. Great results from France, and Germany.

21h08 CEST: Will be taking a short break in live-blogging to cycle to an election party now. Back online in half an hour or so.

20h56 CEST: Lebanon has apparently also voted in national elections today, so I’ll try to slot those results in as a little bonus when they come through. I’m not sure how strong the green party is over there.

20h53 CEST: Apparently low turn-out in France (surprise, surprise!), but Europe Ecologie (Les Verts and Regions et Peuples Solidaires) seems to be on 14.8%.

20h39 CEST: Closer to home, I’m also hearing good things about the Scottish Greens in Edinburgh. Let’s hope it’s enough to get Elaine to Brussels!

20h36 CEST: I’m hearing word that we may have our first MEP from Οικολόγων Πράσινων (Eco-Greens) in Greece. Looking for more information just now.

19h45 CEST: Getting mixed information from Belgium. Ecolo (French-speaking greens) seem to be doing quite well with 16 seats in the regional parliament for Brussels. Groen! (Dutch-speaking green), on the other hand, appear to be suffering, with few gains, and lots of far-right gains for Vlaams Belang. Very worrying, and I hope not an omen for our performance in the North-West region of the UK.