Repealing the Human Rights Act: pulling on a thread of the constitution

Britain’s new Conservative government has launched its term by aiming to repeal the Human Rights Act, which was brought in by Labour in 1998 to bring the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic UK law. The Act has largely been a success, enabling the courts to take more account of Convention rights in the cases before them and reducing the number of cases being taken to the Strasbourg court. However, controversial decisions such as Strasbourg’s judgment in support of prisoners’ voting rights and the long-standing line in the right-wing press that the Act is a “criminals’ charter” has made the ECHR, once backed by Churchill and imprinted with British influence, something of a bête noire of the Tories.

So the Tory attack on the HRA isn’t a surprise – it was in their manifesto for this election, and it has long been a proclaimed goal of the party. In its place is supposed to be a “British Bill of Rights”, but it’s not clear what the difference will be. Already under the HRA, judges can only interpret laws so that they are in line with human rights, but they cannot overturn laws passed by the UK Parliament. If Parliament passes a law that breaches human rights, then all the courts can do is issue a declaration of incompatibility, referring the issue back to Parliament. This might seem odd to those from countries with constitutions that restrain the legislature from breaching people’s rights – and indeed, the devolved administrations in Scotland and Northern Ireland are prohibited from doing so and can have their Acts struck down by the courts – but the HRA is designed to preserve Parliamentary sovereignty. In addition, the UK courts only have to “take account” of the jurisprudence of the Strasbourg court, so making the European Court’s decisions less binding is not really the issue that some of the Act’s opponents make it out to be. And in the end, of course, the Strasbourg court is the court of final appeal on human rights matters in Europe. That’s simply a function of being a member of a court – that’s what it’s for – so fiddling with domestic law isn’t going to change that.

However, former judge Lord Bingham’s question of what rights people want to remove is just one of the challenges the Tory plan faces. It turns out that the Human Rights Act is linked at a fundamental level to the devolved institutions. It’s built into the local constitutions of Scotland and Northern Ireland and there is no desire for repeal there. Scotland’s representation in Westminster is now dominated by the fiercely anti-Tory Scottish Nationalist Party, which opposes repeal, and the Human Rights Act is intimately bound up in the Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement is not just the basis of Northern Ireland's peace process government, but a treaty between the UK and Ireland that has been deposited with the UN. Now the Irish government is finding that not only does it have to worry about a potential Brexit, but also the potential unravelling of peace in Northern Ireland.

A possible solution to this, repealing the HRA for England but leaving it in place in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, but that immediately makes the exercise ridiculous. How can you have two sets of fundamental human rights across the same state? Are people deserving of more or fewer rights depending on what side of the border they’re on?

It’s hard to imagine anything more fundamental than the rights of people, and you would think that any changes would be a matter that should be made with cross-party consensus and put to the people in a referendum. But here it looks like a party political wheeze aimed at throwing red meat to the Conservative’s Euroskpetic backbenchers. Ironically, here too the government could run into difficulties as some Tory backbenchers may rebel over the plan to repeal. Normally it’s the Euroskeptics who rebel frequently and drag their party further to the right, but with a majority of just 12, it wouldn’t take many MPs to blow the government off course, and MPs like David Davis (who resigned and stood again in his constituency to highlight his opposition to the then Labour government’s terrorism legislation) could be a real headache for Cameron. The opposition is likely to almost completely united against repeal, so every Conservative vote counts.

Euroskeptic Conservatives may imagine that repealing the Human Rights Act is a great act of freeing the UK from European courts, but it will soon become apparent that repeal threatens to tear at the UK’s constitutional fabric.

Interesting Times in Britain

Thursday’s election in the UK returned, against all expectation, a majority Conservative government.  In the months in the lead up to the vote the polls had shown the Tories and Labour in a tight neck-and-neck race to become the biggest party in the Parliament, with UKIP, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens also fighting for seats. The Scottish National Party was on course to overturn the Labour majority in Scotland, and all the talk was of a hung parliament with Ed Miliband’s Labour party in a better position to form a coalition or minority government.

In the end Labour was heavily defeated in Scotland and England. The defeat in Scotland was so devastating that the SNP now hold all but 3 of the Scottish seats, with their candidates unseating Labour heavy-weights (Labour’s foreign affairs spokesman was unseated by a 20-year old politics student, who will presumably be automatically granted her degree by the university). The Conservatives managed to take some seats from Labour (the net exchange was slightly in Labour’s favour, but they didn’t make up nearly enough ground to offset their Scottish losses), and the Lib Dem seats were divided by the Conservatives and Labour, leaving them with a mere 8 seats.

A majority Conservative government and a strong SNP presence in the Parliament heralds some interesting times for Britain. Cameron has had trouble with the rebellious right-wing of the party in the past, which has driven him into ever more Euroskeptic positions. The slim majority his government will have means that these rebels could have a big impact on the government, ensuring that it is steered further to the right.  Meanwhile, the SNP were elected on a platform of being anti-Conservative and anti-austerity, as well as seeking to maximise Scottish autonomy within the UK after the failed independence referendum. Together with the two big issues of this parliament – how to deal with devolution in Scotland (and its effects on England) and how to define the relationship with the EU – it looks like the next 5 years will be politically turbulent. Already this weekend Cameron appointed Michael Gove as Justice Secretary with the job of repealing the Human Rights Act that transposes the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law.

Since Cameron announced the referendum on EU membership in 2013, he has failed to properly articulate what he wants to change. The last government laboured over a report on the UK-EU relationship, which was meant to be a comprehensive inquiry into the balance of competences. It got a lot of PR at the time, but ever since the report concluded that the balance of competences are pretty much right, the report has sunk into political obscurity. The referendum, whether in 2016 or 2017, will now have to be held, but the shape of a “reformed EU” that would be acceptable to anyone has yet to be defined.

It’s going to be a rocky few years in the UK…

Security without Liberty – the UK joins the Schengen Information System

A Fistful of Euros has discovered that the UK will join the new Schengen Information System II, which is designed to allow border control, customs and police authorities to share information. Under SIS II, information on suspects, potential illegal immigrants, missing persons and stolen property can be shared. Biometric data, such as fingerprints and photographs, and European Arrest Warrants can also be shared.

The fact that the UK is joining in on this aspect of European integration is not going to be trumpeted from the rooftops of Westminster in the current Europe-bashing climate. It does point to the fact that cross-border co-operation on crime and law enforcement is necessary in a globalised world – and in a common space like the EU in particular. However, UK citizens aren’t exactly getting the full benefits of the Schengen system. Passport controls are still an issue, and Britain loses out on potential tourism from countries such as Japan and China because they are not part of the common visa.

All the extra security and co-operation that the Schengen zone entails is meant not only to create better security for the sake of more security – rather, it is to help create more liberties and freedoms for citizens. Not for the first time, it seems that security is preferred over liberty in the UK, at least when it comes to “Europe”.

Federalism in the UK?: the Flexible Constitution warped

The referendum in Scotland was a great example of democracy, with high levels of engagement over a fundamental issue dealt with peacefully (though I suspect that if the result had been a Yes for independence, the negotiations for separation would have been less civil). The morning after the result, UK Prime Minister David Cameron said that Scotland would get the extra powers the pro-Union parties promised, but that devolutionary measures for England would have to be brought in in tandem. Linking the two means that great constitutional change has to be brought about in the UK before the next election, which is a mind-boggling task.

Given the short time frame, the Conservatives were quick to promote their idea of "English votes for English laws". Since the Scottish Parliament will have wide powers on most domestic matters, such as health and education, the argument is that Scottish MPs in the UK Parliament should not be allowed to vote on draft laws that only affect England. It's a neat idea as, the Tories argue, it can be brought in quickly and without the need for more politicians, as the English members of the current UK Parliament can simply sit as the English Parliament for a day or two each week. However, the Labour Party, traditionally strong in Scotland, is suspicious that this is simply a plan to rob the Labour Party of a workable majority after the next general election if it wins by essentially disqualifying their Scottish MPs (the Conservatives are a very minor party in Scotland).

It's not just the worrying party-political nature of the proposal that's concerning, but there are other problems that carving a part-time English Parliament out of the UK Parliament would have.

First of all, it causes a problem with how the government is to be formed, since ministers are generally drawn from MPs (some ministers are brought into Parliament by being made Life Peers who sit in the unelected House of Lords). If the ministers of Education and Health work on an England-only basis, then there will be pressure for those ministers to only be drawn from English MPs. And these ministers would be accountable to the English Parliament within the UK Parliament, while other ministers would be responsible to the UK Parliament as a whole. There would need to be a "double majority" of English and UK-wide MPs to form a stable government. It seems odd that a Tory party that largely opposed the Alternative Vote on the grounds that First Past the Post produces (generally) stable governments, now want to introduce a divided government with loyalties to a divided Parliament.

It's not just that it would complicate the government, but that no real thought has gone into the powers and policies that need to be looked at from a UK-wide and a national or regional level. The NHS - the National Health Service - is supposed to be a UK-wide institution, and as England makes up the vast majority of the population and spending power within this, English decisions would have a bigger impact on the other parts of the UK without the Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish having much of a say. If certain policy decisions on health were located at national and UK level this would be less of a problem, but it's a tougher question for taxation and spending if there isn't a divide between different pots of money (UK and English), which would cause plenty of government divides and tensions in itself. (Just as people have drawn parallels between the unionist case for Scotland staying in the UK and the UK's in-or-out debate on the EU, maybe we'll see some more being drawn if and when it's argued that the Eurzone MEPs should be the only ones permitted to vote on Eurozone matters).

Ironically for a proposal supposedly designed to strengthen the union by giving the English more powers, having a UK Parliament where large parts of the UK government are English-only would be a great symbol of English dominance within the union that won't help its image in the Celtic nations. Surely for devolution - or a federal arrangement - to work and really mean something, there should be a Union Parliament and government at one level, and state governments below it, with a thought-out division of responsibilities and powers?

Sadly in comparison to the Scottish referendum, little debate engaging civil society is taking place as Westminster MPs try to rush this to their Scottish timetable (to get Scottish devolution measures passed before the general election in May). Would the simple division of MPs into English MPs and the rest actually mean much more democracy for England? Hardly. There is no opportunity to explore the idea of English regions as states, empowering, say Yorkshire (which is about the same population size as Scotland), to make its owns decisions and rebalancing England as a whole away from the over-dominant South East and London. Regional parliaments may not be a hot topic in England at the moment, but the fact that there is no debate or discussion over it at all when English devolution is supposedly the topic is damning in itself.

The British constitution's strength is said to be its flexibility. Unfortunately this is a clear example of how such flexibility works in practice: (part of) the Westminster elite spots a potential constitutional issue, tries to quickly turn it to its advantage and shape reform according to its own interests, while closing out proper public debate. It's hard to see how this can result in good decision-making, never mind good constitutional reform, for either England or the whole UK - and harder to imagine that these decisions are really being taken in the best interests of the citizens in whose name they are being made.

Detoxification was so last decade; say hello to UKIP-lite

David Cameron once told the Conservative Party to "stop banging on about Europe". Now, having let it be known that he could support a Brexit if there isn't sufficient repatriation of powers, it's hard to see how he's going to be able to stop banging on about Europe himself, never mind the Conservatives. It's yet another step the right wing of the party have forced Cameron to take: first he brought the Conservatives out of the European People's Party, then he tried to veto the Fiscal Stability Pact, then he held his big speech on Europe and promised a renegotiation and referendum by 2017. Far from bringing the right-wing of the party onside, the Tories are in a state of near civil war.

The Conservatives themselves have been hit by 2 defections by sitting MPs to UKIP: Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless.  Both of them have resigned their seats to contest by-elections, which appears to be a strategy to keep the political pressure and momentum running in UKIP's favour: with staggered out by-elections in the lead up to the general election, UKIP could have the Tories constantly looking over their shoulders for UKIP.

But if the decision to stay or leave the European Union is a pragmatic decision for Cameron (if, I suspect, one where the security of his premiership weighs quite heavily as a factor), it's a reckoning for others. John Redwood, a former Conservative cabinet minister, has warned businesses not to speak out in favour of remaining within the EU:

"If they don't understand that now they will find those of us organising the 'get out' campaign will then make life difficult for them by making sure that their customers, their employees and their shareholders who disagree with them - and there will be a lot who disagree with them - will be expressing their views very forcefully and will be destabilising their corporate governance."

It's not often you hear a Tory talk about destablising corporate governance! (I can't wait to see Redwood camped outside the Confederation of British Industry telling worker of the world to unite). For me this sums up how much leaving the EU has become an article of faith for much of the Conservative party. Leaving the EU itself seems to be a symbol for being able to push ahead with other right-wing policies: cutting red tape, getting even tougher on immigration, cutting taxes... When Cameron was first elected leader of the Conservative party, he wanted to detoxify the Nasty Party, but now much of the party is set on turning to "true conservativism" in the belief that this is the only way for the party to win (or be worthy of winning) elections. And increasingly the Conservatives are equating true conservatism with UKIP.

Attacks on "Welfare Tourism" are really political grandstanding

Worries over the free movement of people have grown into a huge political issue in the EU, with the idea that EU citizens are using their free movement rights to sponge off the welfare states of other Member States becoming more widespread. The panic is particularly pronounced in the UK, where David Cameron has announced changes that will "put the Britain first" by reducing the time EU citizens can claim benefits in the UK without realistic job prospects from six to three months. (So this will put the UK first on benefit claims for those without realistic job prospects?).

The rhetoric over the UK's supposed "magnetic pull" is now deeply ingrained, and hasn't exactly been informed by sober comparisons of the relative generosity of the British welfare system versus other Member States (there's no league table of European magnetism). Strangely, there was an article in the right-leaning Telegraph about how thousands of Britons were claiming unemployment benefits in Germany. And when we look at what the change in the law will mean for benefit claims, the BBC reckons that the change will only affect roughly 10,000 people.

This is a small number - which amounts to around 1% of all jobseekers benefit claimants - but apparently a big enough policy for the Prime Minister to announce it. Indeed, the numbers of EU citizens claiming benefits while not working are tiny across the EU. But the pressure to be seen to be tough on immigration and on the free movement of people is building in many countries, leading to many of the centre-right (and centre-left) parties to adopt tough language on immigration and welfare to win back support from voters who have voted for populist parties. The danger is that this political grandstanding legitimises the politics of populist parties while not winning back support as the measures introduced by the mainstream parties have no obvious effect. The small numbers affected by welfare changes will be read in this political climate as showing the weakness of the mainstream parties, rather than demonstrating that, in reality, the numbers that move just to benefit from the welfare system (rather than actually looking for work), are just that small.

Clearly it's easier to bang the welfare tourism drum and toughen welfare laws than to stand up for the free movement of people - ministers prefer to be able to say "ah, but we have been tackling the problem" rather than be called out of touch for standing up for the free movement of people or arguing for policies to actually improve public services. But it feeds the anti-immigration climate and paints mainstream parties into a corner. When people discover (or "feel") that the policies aren't having any effect, they will lose faith in the ability of the mainstream parties and shift their support to the populists.

Focusing on creating jobs and making the economy work for all is a much harder task but it should be the business of the mainstream parties. It's when they give in to the allure of easy political grandstanding that they fritter away their credibility on a game with the populists that they cannot win.

Independence or Devolution?

Last week saw the first TV debate between Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling the leader of the pro-Union "Better Together" campaign in the run up to the referendum on Scottish independence. Salmond is known across the UK for being a shrewd politician and a great debater, whereas Darling, a former Chancellor, is seen as competent and dependable, but dull. So much was made of Darling's victory in the debate (according to the snap polls immediately afterwards), particularly with the Yes (pro-independence) side behind in the polls.

Darling won the debate largely because the independence campaign has stuck to a highly optimistic view of the transition to independence, so in a debate it comes across as if the Yes side aren't taking the concerns of the No side seriously (hardly a way to woo swing voters with similar concerns). And there are issues with the transition to independence: EU membership won't be automatic (though it hardly be a complicated process for a country that already complies with EU law), and creating a suitable currency union between Scotland and the rest of the UK will doubtless be a complicated task.

But the real question is whether Scotland is not only different to the rest of the UK (read: England), but different enough that full independence is necessary to properly express that difference. From education to healthcare, there's no denying that Scotland is more social democratic than the rest of the UK (though it may just be more in line with the rest of Europe than England), and the political gulf between Edinburgh and London can be seen in the lack of Tories North of the border. But does devolution (with more powers to be shifted from London to Edinburgh in the event of a No vote) not enable Scotland to give voice to those politics while also retaining the benefits of union? The fact that the independence plan would keep so much of the union, from the monarch to the currency, suggests that the "best of both worlds" argument might have some attraction yet.

Looking at how the debate has played in Westminster and how the main UK parties have dealt with it, I can see it only being a matter of time before Scotland leaves. More devolution to Scotland is great, but the asymmetric nature of the union is a big problem for its future survival. Without any debate about what the union should be about and how it should work together apart from occasional devolution to the constituent nations, the union ends up on the wrong side of history. The momentum will stay with Scotland's drift towards independence, and the central institutions of the UK will not be reformed to reflect how the UK is developing. The UK needs to stop acting like a unitary state - really, the UK should take a federal approach to empower English regions as well as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, re-balancing the UK away from London and the South-East and making devolution and union part of the same political narrative.

That's not going to happen. England famously doesn't like to debate constitutional reform, trusting in a flexible, "unwritten" constitution (which underestimates the danger of bumbling through decisions and undervalues the virtue of democratically facing up to such decisions rather than leaving them to a cosy elite to sort out amongst themselves). A political atmosphere where the union is increasingly an English space that the Celtic fringe gets exemptions from is not a union of equals and this leaves very little in the way of common institutions or political narrative to justify sticking together.

Scotland's social democratic vision is a very attractive one - it's one that it can achieve as an independent country, and probably also as part of the UK. Independence will give Scotland something more indefinable than what Salmond promises: the freedom to reflect on, debate and shape itself. The real weakness of the UK may not be that it isn't giving Scotland the tools that it needs to forge its own path while staying inside the union, it's that it struggles to be about more than the London-centric Westminster bubble.

The Great British Cabinet Reshuffle

David Cameron has reshuffled his government for the last year of the parliamentary term, giving us the ministerial faces that will fight the next election. Reshuffles in themselves are generally not a major event for the European political sphere - Ireland had a government reshuffle last week, which might be of more interest to those still pondering Juncker's question of how to get elected after running an austerity government - but the UK government reshuffle has attracted some comment over the perceived Euroskeptic shift.

The last of the old Tory Europhiles, Ken Clarke, and some of the more pragmatic ministers such as Dominic Grieve and even William Hague (he of the 10 Day to Save the Pound fame) are gone. In their place is the new class of 2010, who are generally younger and more ideological. Richard Hammond, the Euroskeptic Defence Minister who publicly indicated that he would vote Out in an EU referendum unless there is enough to the reform package, is now the Foreign Secretary. The reshuffle has sparked fear in some quarters that it marks a turn for the worst that could signal the start of moves to take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights.

But we shouldn't get over-excited. The main focus of the reshuffle is domestic, like all other reshuffles. Promoting the younger generation of Tories is more about making the ministerial benches more diverse and slightly more gender-balanced while harnessing their zeal for the campaign. In Michael Gove's case (the highly divisive Education Minister), there has been a surprising demotion to Chief Whip (to reports of teachers celebrating in classrooms). The new cabinet is more Euroskeptic, but the focus is on the next election rather than on a big bust-up with Europe.

The next Tory manifesto will be the real test for how far the Conservatives will go. If a pledge to withdraw from the ECHR makes it into it, then we can be sure that Cameron has thrown in the towel on pretending to have a moderate European course. Membership of the ECHR is fundamental to membership of the Council of Europe and the EU, and a pledge to withdraw would indicate that Cameron himself could campaign for an Out vote. Nominating Lord Hill to be the next UK Commissioner may be a pragmatic sign (he's reported to be relatively pro-EU), but the Liberal Democrats would have had a say in moderating the government choice, so it's not exactly a clear signal. Hill is also an unknown figure with little obvious connection to a Commission portfolio, making it harder for the UK to get a good post (or harder for Juncker to reconcile with Cameron!), which could add to the narrative of Britain being sidelined in the EU.

In any case, the big fights will come after the next election, when a new cabinet would have to be formed. This reshuffle may be a Euroskeptic turn for the Conservatives, but it really doesn't tell us much new. Cameron's policy of appeasing the Euroskeptics has been heading this way for some time, and domestic political calculations are the biggest consideration here (Cameron is hardly famed for his long-termist thinking on Europe). It will be the next election manifesto that will be the true benchmark for how far Cameron is willing to go.

A very Cameronian blunder

Since the election the backing for Juncker as the European Commission President has stiffened, from Angela Merkel to even European Left candidate Tsipras saying that Juncker deserves to get the job if he can get a parliamentary backing, because that's the democratic, parliamentary process. Set against this, Cameron's campaign against a Juncker presidency looks more and more misguided by the day. While the Netherlands, Sweden and Hungary are against Juncker, by leading such a prominent campaign against him, Cameron has probably made it more likely that Juncker will get the presidency.

Cameron tends to have a very short-term, tactical approach to politics, particularly when it comes to the EU. The big speech that was supposed to outflank UKIP clearly didn't - in fact, the more the Conservative party echoes UKIP, the better UKIP seems to do. Promising a renegotiation and an in/out referendum on the basis of the result hasn't done much to quiet his party on the matter either (with people now wondering if the referendum date of 2017 will be brought forward to 2016). When wielding the veto in December 2011, Cameron was able to strike the pose of a decisive leader with good Euroskeptic credentials, but the ability of the other countries to go on without the UK ended up showing how devalued a veto can be. (If the UK had taken part in the negotiations while holding on to the veto, it would have been able to shape the agreement and it's potential veto would have carried more weight towards the end of the process). This short-termist thinking is often traced back to Cameron promising to take the Conservatives out of the EPP as part of his platform for the party leadership.

Opposing Juncker's candidacy was always going to be risky. While the campaign might not have been as high profile as some would have wanted, it's difficult to name alternatives from outside the Europarty candidates - Lagarde has ruled herself out, and many of the others are serving Prime Ministers and Presidents. Pascal Lamy, director-general of WTO and formerly the chef de cabinet of Jacques Delors, is hardly a fresher name than Juncker when it comes to EU politics. More importantly, the European Parliament is set on getting one of its candidates in the job, and they can veto any nomination by the European Council. It's difficult to see any of these speculative alternatives giving up their jobs (or present themselves as willing to give up their premierships/presidencies to their national electorates), to place themselves in the middle of a power struggle between the Parliament and the Council.

And while the UK has some allies on its side, it's going to be very difficult to form a blocking minority in the European Council. Cameron's view on EU politics seems strikingly simplistic - focused on winning over Merkel and co-opting Germany's political weight in Europe. It's hardly a secret that Merkel is lukewarm on a Juncker presidency, but the German media rallied behind Juncker when it was suggested that the UK may be threatening leaving the EU. That the CDU's coalition partners in Berlin, the Social Democrats, were so closely wedded to the presidential campaign meant that the pressure on Merkel to publicly back Juncker was strong within the government too. Rather than working to quietly sideline Juncker behind the scenes, Cameron has made it much harder to get rid of him by forcing public declarations of support or opposition.

All this raises the question: if it's this difficult to block Juncker, how much influence would the UK have in shaping the alternative? A nomination still requires a majority. Even if Italy joins the UK in blocking Juncker (a big if, in my opinion, as Italy will soon have the presidency of the Council for the second half of 2014 and will probably want good relations with the Parliament if it wants to push legislation through), will the blocking minority form a coherent enough bloc vote to be able to shift the rest of the Member States (and for the UK to have a decisive role in that)?

Cameron would probably have done better by quickly getting the European Council to adopt priorities that are closer to his position using the election results as political support. The European Council still sets the overall policy direction of the Union (and Merkel has tried to steer the debate in this direction as a way of finding consensus). But now a Juncker presidency will have been badly burned by the right-wing, British-led, opposition to him, and he will be aware that his political base in the Parliament rests on a coalition with left-wing parties who were needed in order to overcome ECR opposition and any EPP rebellions. The institutional balance and Juncker's own affinity for fellow national leaders will mean that his presidency will focus more on consensus rather than confrontation, but it will be far from a natural ally of the current UK government.

European Elections 2014: UK and The Netherlands

It's the first day of the polls for the European elections, and the first countries to start voting are the UK and the Netherlands.


United Kingdom:

The election debate in the UK hasn't had much cross-over with the debates in other countries. The debate been the Europarty candidates for Commission President were shown, but only on the BBC Parliament channel so they didn't get wide coverage. The tone of the election is very much a pro- or anti-UKIP one. UKIP has been rising in popularity despite candidates and even the leader, Nigel Farage, getting themselves into hot water and despite the constant attacks of the other parties.

The Liberal Democrats are expected to lose a lot of support as they are now a party of government (they are the junior party in the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition) and are no longer very attractive for the protect vote. Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, has set the party up as the "Party of In", and has taken on Nigel Farage in two debates (which Farage is widely considered to have won). The Conservatives are expecting a hit as the senior government party (they were in opposition during the last election) that's pursuing austerity in power, as well as losing Euroskeptic votes on the right to UKIP.

Labour is expected to win seats as an opposition party, but expectations are muted due to the UKIP surge. The European elections are being portrayed as a protest vote against the established parties before the run up to the 2015 general election, so poorer than expected showings for the main parties probably won't be as damaging as they might have been in past elections. The Greens are confident that they will improve their polling performance this year, but since the polling data tends to lump them in with others, I don't know what the generally predicted numbers are. The far-right British National Party will probably lose the two seats that it controversially won last time around.

Current polls: Sun/YouGov poll [BBC group of polls]:

Conservatives: 23% [31-33%]
Labour: 27% [35-38%]
Liberal Democrats: 10% [8-13%]
UKIP: 27%[13-15%]
Greens: 8% [?]
Other: [7-9%]


The Netherlands:

The Netherlands last had a general election in 2012 when a VVD-PvdA (Liberals [economically right-wing] and the Labour party] grand coalition government was elected. That election had been caused by Geert Wilders' populist PVV withdrawing its support for the government (they supported the minority government in parliament but weren't part of it). In the general election the PVV lost support due to this, but now that they're not connected to the government their support has risen again.

The PVV have made common cause with the Front National in France, forming an anti-EU alliance against the "monster in Brussels".

The Prime Minister, VVD's Mark Rutte, came out just yesterday with the statement that the EU should stick to 5 key areas: the internal market, free trade, cutting red tape, combating labour market abuse and making a single energy market. The move might be intended to win back support from right-wing voters, but announcing it the day before the election is an odd decision and it may not have much of an impact.

The PvdA is in a tough position. It ran against the VVD in the last election and has made compromises as part of the government. In the general election it faced tough competition from the Socialist Party, which was very popular early on in the campaign. Now the Socialist Party is doing well in the polls and looks like it's on course to beat the PvdA.

D66, a left-liberal party is performing strongly in the polls at the moment. D66 has one of the most well-known MEPs, Sophie In't Veld, who has a strong position on privacy issues. In some polls D66 is leading.

The Dutch political party landscape is varied and it made up of a lot of small parties who will be in the running for some seats. It is unlikely that even the party with the biggest percentage of the vote will get more than 6 seats.

Currently the polls stand at (could have changed if there are more recent polls I haven't seen):

VVD (right-wing liberals): 12-16%
PvdA: 9-10%
PVV: 12-18%
D66: 15-19%
SP (Socialist Party): 10-12%
CDA (Christian Democrats - the big winners at the last elections): around 11%
CU-SGP (Christian Union-Reformed Political Party): 8-9.5%
GL (Groen-Links/Green-Left): 5-6%
PvdD (Party for the Animals [animals' rights party]: 1-2%
50PLUS: 3-4%
Others: 2-2.5%