EU Fishing Fleet Rules 'Disastrous'

The rules governing the fishing fleet are an "unmitigated disaster", Scotland's Rural Affairs Secretary Richard Lochhead has claimed.











The SNP minister said the European Union's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) has failed to do what it was designed to achieve. Most of the stock is over-fished, valuable species are caught but thrown back into the sea dead and fishing communities are being damaged, he told MSPs.

Mr Lochhead, leading a debate at the Scottish Parliament, said: "I expect and hope that we can all agree that the CFP has been an unmitigated disaster. It has been a horror story since the day it was written. Fish stocks have been slashed, vital jobs have vanished and communities have been cut up.

"The very people who have to cope with its consequences are disenfranchised from the decision-making process. Our fishermen who struggle day in, day out, with the Byzantine regulations will certainly agree with that.

"I and the 27 other ministers - who have to sit in Brussels into the early hours in December attempting to decide the mesh sizes for individual fisheries from the Baltic to the Bay of Biscay - also agree."

The Scottish Government wants a guaranteed seat at the table in European negotiations, instead of representation by UK ministers, but Labour MSP Elaine Murray defended the role of Westminster.

She agreed that the CFP does not work, but added: "If an independent Scotland joined the EU, it would have to adhere to the Common Fisheries Policy. It could of course negotiate for itself as one of a large number of nations - there would be at least 36 by the time an independent Scotland joined."

She said the number of MEPs in Scotland would remain at about six from a pool of more than 700.

"Quite frankly, I and my colleagues on this side of the House fail to understand how this would better protect the interests of the Scottish fleet," she added.

"Surely the best way to protect the Scottish industry is to work to persuade our UK colleagues that the Scottish interest is also the UK interest?"

Cameron Rules Out Europe Referendum

David Cameron has insisted Britain must make Europe "work for us" as he again ruled out holding an "in out" referendum.








During Prime Minister's questions he was urged to listen to the calls of Conservative eurosceptics who want a swift vote on the UK's relationship with the EU.

However Mr Cameron, who is meeting president of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy on Wednesday, insisted there is "no case" for a vote.

Mr Cameron said: "I want us to be influential in Europe about the things that matter to our national interest - promoting the single market, pushing forward for growth, making sure we get lower energy prices.

"Those are things we will be fighting for but I don't see the case for an in out referendum on Europe. We are in Europe, we have got to make it work for us."

It comes as a group made up from around 80 new intake Conservative MPs plans to press the Government for significant changes in Britain's role in Europe.

Tory MP George Eustice, one of the group's conveners, insisted the initial aim was for reforms rather than a referendum. He said: "The aim of this new group is to promote debate about creating a new relationship with the EU and reversing the process of EU integration."

The group will work closely with think-tank Open Europe and could eventually expand to take in Labour eurosceptics and possibly some Liberal Democrats.

UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage said: "The Prime Minster has said today that he didn't see the case for an in/out referendum on Europe. 'We are in Europe', he told us and 'we have got to make it work for us'.

"Well it is obvious that the EU is not working for us, and hasn't worked for us. So then what does Mr Cameron propose? By ruling out a referendum he leaves himself naked in the negotiations. Our EU colleagues must be laughing at his naivety."

Darling: EU Must Get A Grip On Greece

The European Union must "get a grip" of Greece's economic woes before the contagion spreads, ex-chancellor Alistair Darling has said.

In a gloomy assessment of Europe's economic prospects, Mr Darling told Sky News the EU had to find a solution to the problems in Greece.

He warned a failure to tackle the problem would have a "damaging impact" on European banks and governments.

"That's why the EU has got to be realistic and at long last do something that actually fixes the problem and not this series of short-term fixes that keep failing, that keep coming back," he told Jeff Randall Live.

"This is what they've been doing now for the last 18 months and it doesn't work."

Mr Darling offered the pessimistic analysis of EU economies in an interview also critical of former prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.











Economic troubles provoked clashes on the streets of Greece.

He was speaking in advance of the publication of Back From The Brink, a memoir of his time as chancellor during the financial crisis.

The former chancellor said he had to elaborate on his fraught relationships within the government in order to tell the story of the turmoil that engulfed the markets in 2008.

He said Mr Blair and Mr Brown had been allowed to assume too much control.

"In the 1990s, we were happy in some ways to let Tony and Gordon run the show - it wasn't quite a dictatorship - they made the changes Labour was desperately needing to make but hadn't done so.

"The problem was the decision-making became increasingly centralised," he said, adding policies on tuition fees and the economy would have benefited from wider debate.

"Collective discussion, the benefit of getting a combined wisdom, is I think something we didn't pay enough attention to," he added.











The ex-chancellor explained his criticism of Gordon Brown.

Asked if Ed Balls was among those who unleashed the "forces of hell" in negative briefings about him during the financial crisis, Mr Darling refused to attack his Labour colleague.

He said he backed the whole Labour front-bench, including the shadow chancellor.

Mr Darling said he acknowledged Labour did not always get it right in government and expressed regret more had not been done to fully implement welfare reform.

He cited the minimum wage as one of his party's greatest achievements.

An MP since 1987, Mr Darling was chancellor between 2007-2010 and also served as secretary of state for work and pensions, transport and trade and industry.

His outspoken remarks since leaving office are considered to be a contrast to the more low-key style he adopted in government.

Cameron Still Lacks A Foreign Policy Vision

What kind of a power do we want to be? How do we achieve that ambition? Cameron is unsure.












David Cameron greets troops after making a speech to British and American troops at Camp Leatherneck military base on July 4, 2011 in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

Nato's mission in Libya looks like a foreign policy success for David Cameron, but that is not the same thing as having a successful foreign policy.

First, the obvious caveats: it is early days; the battle is not over, let alone the war. There are easily enough military and diplomatic traps ahead for the Libyan intervention to become a failure. The prime minister, the deputy prime minister, the foreign secretary and the defence secretary have all said as much. But for now, the politics of the situation are favouring Cameron. He took a big decision under considerable pressure and, after some nerve-wracking months, it appears to have paid off. "He definitely leapt before he looked," was how one senior Ministry of Defence official put it too me early on in the campaign. (The same source also said of the anti-Gaddafi rebels "the only good fighters among them are the al-Qaeda ones", a slightly wild allegation which should nonetheless be reason enough to put blind optimism for the future on hold.)

Libyans will decide whether they are better off in the long run for the UK's military partisanship in their insurrection-cum-civil war. The point is that, in the eyes of the British public, Cameron has effectively led a short war. There are usually political dividends to be drawn from that position.

But I suspect they will be limited in this case because, as with so much of Cameron's leadership, the good news story doesn't slot into a wider strategic narrative. It is worth remembering that the Conservatives came into power signalling reluctance to reshape the world - a la Blair - by military excursion. The new doctrine, as spelled out by William Hague in a series of speeches in July 2010, was a kind of bilateral mercantilism. The UK would continue to promote freedom and democracy around the globe, the foreign secretary said, but the main tool would be aggressive pursuit of trade interests. Overseas embassies would be reconfigured as pushy chambers of commerce.

Barely weeks before taking action in Libya, Cameron declared: "I am not a naive neocon who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000ft." The fact that Cameron then decided to use British military assets against Gaddafi doesn't signal some visionary conversion to fanatical interventionism. Libya might be a one-off; Gaddafi might just have been low-hanging despotic fruit.

To get the maximum political advantage from the intervention, Cameron has to frame the episode in terms of his vision of Britain's role in the world - and it isn't clear that he has one. The project of expanding our national influence by trade is looking trickier as the global economy falters. As an ambition it is of a pair with George Osborne's hope of rebalancing the economy and driving growth through exports - which relies on a level of overseas demand for UK goods that has not yet materialised.

A big gap in Cameron's world view (at least the publicly known portion of it) is his sense of how Britain's position in the European Union will evolve as the single currency lurches ever onward in financial and institutional crisis. As I mentioned in my column this week, this omission is stirring dissent in the party. A lot of Tories see the eurozone crisis as an opportunity to start a wholesale renegotiation of Britain's EU deal, but there isn't much appetite for that at the top of the party. (This is partly because the leadership's view of all matters EU is coloured by their "modernising" crusade in opposition, so there is an association between public expressions of fierce euroscepticism and unelectability. Then, of course, there is the problem of the stubbornly Europhile Lib Dems.)

The Arab Spring; global economic turbulence; structural crisis at the heart of the European Union - three giant themes that raise profound questions about Britain's position in the world. What kind of a power do we want to be? How do we achieve that ambition? I don't get the impression that Cameron is any closer to having persuasive answers to those questions than he was when he moved into Downing Street last year.

Migration Into UK Rises 21% As Fewer Leave

Net migration into the UK rose by 21 per cent last year to 239,000 on the back of a significant fall in people leaving the country and a net increase in migrants from eastern Europe, according to the Office for National Statistics.















Uncontrolled immigration: Asylum seekers in Calais, hoping to settle in the UK instead of the continent.

The ONS estimates released on Thursday show that while long-term immigration to the UK was 575,000 in the year to December 2010 – only up slightly from 567,000 the year before – emigration was at a six-year low of 336,000 in the 12 months to December last year.

The figures will make grim reading for Theresa May, home secretary, who is working to fulfil the coalition’s manifesto pledge of reducing net migration to the tens of thousands by the end of this parliament. Ms May has repeatedly confirmed that she will meet this target, although annual net migration levels were around 150,000 when the Conservative party first made its promise.

One of the biggest hurdles for the Home Office is that net migration figures can be inflated by several factors beyond the government’s control, such as the recent decrease in emigration or an influx of migrants from within the European Union. The ONS statistics show that net migration from A8 countries – including Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia – increased nearly eightfold to 39,000 in the year to December 2010, from 5,000 the year before.

Responding to the latest data, immigration minister Damian Green pointed out that from the quarterly perspective, net migration had in fact stabilised given that the current 239,000 figure for the fourth quarter of 2010 is a minor shift down from 242,000 the previous quarter.

“After almost two years of increasing net migration the figures stabilised in the last quarter,” Mr Green said. He added that the statistics cover a period before the government’s “radical changes” to the immigration system, which started in April this year, had kicked in.

The changes include a cap on the number of migrants entering the UK to work from outside the EU and a crackdown on bogus educational institutions in an attempt to reduce the number of foreign students coming into the country.

Matt Cavanagh, associate director at the Institute for Public Policy Research, a think-tank, expressed doubts that the fledgling policies were working. The latest quarterly figures to June 2011 show a slight fall in entry for work, which is down 2.7 per cent, although this is offset by a rise in entry for study, which is up by 3.5 per cent.

“Politicians shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver, particularly on immigration,” Mr Cavanagh said. “Before the election, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats said immigration was out of control; afterwards, they said they would cut it dramatically. Neither was true.”

But Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the campaign group Migration Watch UK, said the figures laid bare the “legacy” of the Labour government – although he added that the coalition would have to “face down some vested interests” in the business and education sectors if they were to reach the tens of thousands target.

The shadow Home Office minister, Shabana Mahmood, said the figures revealed the “gulf” between the government’s rhetoric on immigration and the reality in the official figures.

“The prime minister said ‘no ifs, no buts’ on immigration, but on the contrary, ‘ifs and buts’ sum up the government’s policies,” she said. “Cuts to the UK Border Agency forcing the loss of over 5,000 staff is making it harder not easier to enforce the rules we have.”

UK Elderly Fourth Poorest In EU As Third Of British Over-65s Live In Poverty

Campaigners have called for urgent action to stamp out pensioner poverty after a report found nearly a third of British over-65s are living on below average incomes.

The European Commission statistics, published by Eurostat, place the UK's elderly among the worst in Europe, with 30 per cent living on incomes far below the national average.

This was the fourth highest level in Europe, better than only Cyprus, Latvia and Estonia, the figures showed.













European Commission figures revealed 30 per cent of Britain over-65s are living in poverty, with UK elderly the fourth poorest in the EU.

Age Concern and Help the Aged called for ministers to act through measures such as reforming the benefits and pension system.

The figures come ahead of the Work and Pension Committee's review of government efforts to tackle pensioner poverty, which is published on Thursday.

The EU research, which compared relative poverty in the 27 member states, showed nearly one in three UK over-65s were at risk of poverty in 2007, the same proportion as in Lithuania (30 per cent).

It revealed that in most leading European economies, pensioner poverty levels were either below or slightly above the EU average of 19 per cent.

British pensioners were worse off than Romania, where 19 per cent fell below the poverty threshold, Poland (8 per cent) and France (13 per cent).

Pensioners in the Czech Republic were least likely to be living in poverty, with 5 per cent below the threshold of an income of 60 per cent of the national median, according to the figures.

Michelle Mitchell, charity director for Age Concern and Help the Aged, said: 'What this report clearly shows is that, even before the recession sets in, many older people weren't keeping up with the pace at which the general wealth of the nation has increased over the past years.

'This means they risk being increasingly excluded from community life.

'In a country where the richest have incomes five times higher than the poorest, older people are disproportionately bearing the burden of this inequality.

'To lift millions of pensioners out of poverty and prevent this situation from getting worse in the future, this government and the next must find a more effective system to ensure benefits reach those who need them and mee the existing commitment to reform the pension system by 2012.'

Recent research by the charity showed one in five people aged 60 and over are skipping meals to save money on food, while two-fifths are struggling to afford essential items.