Latest from New European
New European
4 days ago
- General
- New European
Meltdown
Hello. It looks like you're using an ad blocker that may prevent our website from working properly. To receive the best experience possible, please make sure any ad blockers are switched off, or add to your trusted sites, and refresh the page. If you have any questions or need help you can email us.
New European
04-06-2025
- Business
- New European
The chancellor has the worst job in government
Rachel Reeves is undoubtedly doing the job at a difficult time. Fourteen years of Conservative government left both the public finances and public services in a parlous state. Fixing the former requires a tight grip of the purse strings, while fixing the latter necessarily means loosening them. To make things worse, the disastrously brief reign of Liz Truss showed the perils of testing whether markets would tolerate a chancellor taking a chance with the public finances – and the markets resoundingly said 'no'. It is a wonder that anyone wants to be chancellor – and have no doubt, hundreds of MPs would chop off several fingers, perhaps even their own, for a chance at the job – because it is surely the worst job in government. You are near the apex of political power in the UK, and your job is to say 'no' to all of your colleagues and then explain to the public why they can't have nice things. That leaves the chancellor walking a dangerously narrow path, trying to find enough money to deliver the improvements her government has promised the public, without allowing the public finances to tip into a fresh crisis. Thanks to changing the fiscal rules, next week she will announce some £100bn in new investment over the next five years – new roads, rail, infrastructure of all sorts, as well as new defence spending. But this is likely to be overshadowed by reports of fresh rounds of austerity in key spending departments in their day-to-day finances. Labour is fighting mightily to make sure no-one uses the 'austerity' word, but this will surely be in vain. Spending cuts by any other name land just as uneasily with Labour MPs who feel this was the opposite of what they came into politics to do. No-one should suggest Rachel Reeves has an easy job, nor that she's been doing nothing – but a week out from revealing her spending plans, she has certainly made it easier for those who can't see any sense in what she is doing. Speaking on Wednesday, Reeves recommitted herself to her fiscal rules, to not raising VAT, income tax or national insurance, and to promising that the major tax hikes of her first budget are a 'one off' – and by implication, she committed herself to budget cuts across the next few years, too. This is certain to cause despair in policymaking circles, as well as on her own benches. Reeves's plans barely meet her rules, to the point that even just six months after her first budget she had to scrabble to find billions more in cuts or extra spending to meet the updated forecasts. Even in normal times, Reeves could expect to have to do the same twice a year for the rest of parliament, but these are not normal times. For one, the US president attempts to upend the rules of world trade several times a month. Despite all this abnormality, Reeves is trying to govern like a peacetime chancellor during a period of steady growth. More than that, if politics is the art of the possible, Reeves seems determined to ensure the range of what is 'possible' is narrow: in the first year of a government with a landslide majority, she has ruled out any kind of major tax reforms. Council tax doesn't work, isn't fair, and hasn't been reassessed since 1991, but Labour won't touch it. National insurance is unfair and benefits rich pensioners at the expense of poor working age adults, but it won't be touched. The interaction of the income tax and benefit systems is a complicated mess, and again will be left unreformed. Social care has been punted until the next parliament. Labour will never have an opportunity like this to fix some of the big challenges facing the British state, and Reeves and Starmer are making a deliberate decision to duck every hard decision. That leaves them tinkering around the margins, trying to make the sums add up, without changing anything fundamental. That is a choice they are free to make, of course, but it is the exact same choice as was made by their predecessors in government, and is likely to turn out just as badly. There is a truism in Westminster that Labour has no shortage of policies, but no overarching vision. With her approach to the Treasury, Reeves is ensuring that no vision can emerge, either – ministers will have to dream small, and hope they can do better than the last government with good intentions, and a little more capital spending. If there is such a thing as Reevesism, it is putting your head down, trying to make no mistakes, and hoping something comes along to make things better. There are surely worse philosophies, but it is not the stuff of which history is made. Unless Reeves is very lucky, it will not be enough to keep her in the Treasury for five years, either.
New European
04-06-2025
- Business
- New European
Geert Wilders: the fall of an extremist
Wilders has long been at odds with the government that he helped form, after his party, the PVV, won elections in 2023. On several occasions he clashed publicly and spectacularly with Dick Schoof, the non-party-aligned prime minister. And last week he presented the cabinet with a list of demands on asylum that even anti-immigration media outlets thought were unrealistic. The bizarre, 11-month-long sock puppet show that called itself the government of the Netherlands has come to an end, thanks to the puppet master himself. Geert Wilders, the 62-year-old, far-right anti-Islam Dutch leader, has pulled his party out of the ruling coalition, saying he now wants to be prime minister himself. But with elections scheduled for the autumn, he could end up frozen out of power. Schoof, now caretaker prime minister, labelled Wilders's withdrawal from the coalition 'unnecessary and irresponsible' during a debate in parliament on Wednesday. While the outgoing prime minister is unlikely to play a role in the upcoming campaign, his remarks signal a line of attack on Wilders that the other parties have already taken up. This is now the second time that Wilders has brought down a government dominated by the right, the type of government he has always said he wanted for the Netherlands. Former prime minister Mark Rutte called Wilders a 'quitter politician' in 2012, after the far-right frontman withdrew support for the minority government he was leading at the time. In the subsequent elections, the PVV paid a heavy price, and the party was left out in the cold for over a decade. The other parties are bound to highlight Wilders's apparent unreliability to end his dream of leading the country – for good this time. The fractious coalition between the PVV and three more centrist right-wing parties managed to last for almost a year, but the end was never far away. Three of the four parties, the PVV, the farmers' party BBB, and a largely Christian Democrat offshoot, NSC, had no previous government experience, and neither did Schoof. From the start, negotiators were hit by ethics scandals, as were ministerial candidates. Trust and approval ratings among the electorate were low almost from the start. In contrast to some other right-wing European leaders, such as Giorgia Meloni in Italy and lately Bart de Wever in Belgium, the PVV-led coalition was never able to project competence, or stability. Rumours abounded in The Hague about the inefficient and unprofessional ways in which ministers ran their departments. Suggested Reading The right spells trouble for von der Leyen Ferry Biedermann Beside inexperience, the root cause of public disenchantment, and falling PVV polling numbers, might well have been the string of unrealistic promises the party made. In quitting the coalition, Wilders made much of the government's inability to fulfil his election promise of an 'emergency law' to limit asylum seekers. Instead, the government worked on a 'fast-track' law that complied with Dutch and EU rules. On other key issues, such as easing the increasingly onerous nitrogen requirements for Dutch farmers, the coalition saw its approach blocked by the courts that forced it to stick to European targets. On broadly supported socio-economic initiatives, such as free childcare, the coalition ran into logistical and budgetary constraints. In the end, Wilders was unable to make the transition from firebrand opposition leader to responsible statesman. He did, as demanded by his coalition partners, damp down his anti-Islam rhetoric while the PVV was in power. Wilders has been living under police protection and in safe houses since 2004, after receiving death threats following some of his remarks on Islam. Asked during the parliamentary debate on the fall of the coalition whether he would now resume his diatribes against Islam, he said it had not been foremost on his mind. The question is whether Wilders will continue in his more moderate guise, in order to maintain his viability as a future coalition partner. But this seems unlikely and unnecessary. His current coalition partners had no issue doing business with him after the previous campaign, in which he was clear about wanting 'less Islam' in the Netherlands. And voters rewarded him by making the PVV the largest party. Despite the decline in the polls, there is no reason why he shouldn't be able to repeat that feat in the upcoming elections. While many might blame him for bringing down the most right-wing government since the end of the Second World War, his base might applaud him for putting a clearly outmatched team out of its misery. Still, other movements in the polls, particularly the revival of the Christian Democrats, could mean he'll be left without coalition partners. While Wilders could triumph once again, his path to power might well be blocked.
New European
04-06-2025
- General
- New European
Has Reform's newest MP already gone off message?
Pochin, elected as MP for Runcorn and Helsby in May's by-election caused by the nocturnal activities of Mike Amesbury, asked her first question of Keir Starmer today – and it took a turn which few, least of all her leader, seemed to anticipate. Has Sarah Pochin, Reform's newest MP, gone off-piste already? It certainly seemed so from a first-ever appearance at Prime Minister's Questions which was unlikely to have been signed off by Nigel Farage's office. 'Given the prime minister's desire to strengthen strategic alignment with our European neighbours, will he, in the interests of public safety, follow the lead of France, Denmark, Belgium and others and ban the burqa?'. Farage's face, which was staring towards the chamber's ornate ceiling, was not caught by cameras. For, for all his many, many faults, overt Islamophobia is one rabbit hole he has studiously avoided getting sucked down – less, perhaps, for ideological reasons than for seeing how an obsession with it once he stepped down as UKIP leader damaged that party's standing (when, in 2017, the party's general election manifesto included a ban on face coverings, leader Paul Nuttall endured the best part of week fielding questions as to whether it would apply to beekeepers' outfits). Pochin already looked a slightly troublesome choice, being a former councillor with the dubious distinction of having been kicked out of both the Conservative and independent groupings on Cheshire East council since being first elected in 2015. Keir Starmer, for his part, had some fun with Parliament's newest MP, asking whether she would tell her new leader that 'his latest plan to bet £80 billion of unfunded tax cuts with no idea of how he is going to pay for it is Liz Truss all over again – although considering I think she was a Conservative member when Liz Truss was leader, she probably won't'. But might Pochin be a bet Farage is already having gambler's remorse about?
New European
04-06-2025
- General
- New European
Matt Goodwin's curious definition of ‘white British people'
Goodwin's report claims that 'an analysis of migration, birth and death rates up to the end of the 21st century' predicts that 'white British people' will decline from their current position of 73 per cent of the population to 57 per cent by 2050 before becoming a minority by 2063. Matt Goodwin – the academic turned hard right rabble-rouser – is out stirring things up again, this time with an article in the (inevitably) Daily Telegraph claiming that 'white British people will be a minority in 40 years'. For the purposes of the report, Goodwin defines 'white British people' as 'people who do not have an immigrant parent' – a definition which not only has nobody actually ever used before, but is so broad as to include Winston Churchill, Nigel Farage's children (two born to his Irish first wife, two to his German second), England football captain Harry Kane, England cricket captain Ben Stokes, former ERG chairman Mark Francois, right-wing 'comedian' Jim Davidson, Sunday Telegraph editor Allister Heath and the actual King. Suggested Reading Matthew Goodwin finally sees the light Rats in a Sack Illustrating his findings with a back-of–a-fag-packet graph of when we will all be subsumed by alien races – the sort popular with 'great replacement' conspiracy types, and which does not add up to 100%, because he's strangely not included non-British white people – Goodwin dons his Morris dancer's uniform to bemoan 'the symbols, traditions, culture and ways of life of the traditional majority group'. 'By the year 2100, and again unless things change, our immediate descendants will be living in a country in which the white British will only comprise one third of the population,' writes Goodwin, fretting about the country he will live in when just 119 years old. Goodwin's Law of the 'white British people' is obviously complete racist nonsense, although its broad sweep has just single-handedly upped the diversity of a Last Night at the Proms audience. And if it allows us to deport Prince Andrew…
