Quotulatiousness

December 9, 2012

Nigel Farage profiled in the New York Times

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:10

After all this time, Farage is starting to get serious media attention:

But for Mr. Farage, who has waged a 20-year campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union, Strasbourg has become the perfect stage to disseminate his anti-European Union message by highlighting the bloc’s bureaucratic absurdities and spendthrift tendencies as well as by mocking with glee the most prominent proponents of a European superstate: the head of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, and the European Council president, Herman Van Rompuy. “I said you’d be the quiet assassin of nation-state democracy,” Mr. Farage has declared, as his target, Mr. Van Rompuy, squirmed in his seat just opposite, “and sure enough, in your dull and technocratic way, you’ve gone about your course.”

His speeches mix the pitch-perfect timing of a stand-up comedian — he once told Mr. Van Rompuy that he had the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a bank clerk — with a populist passion that critics say approaches demagogy, and they have become wildly popular on YouTube.

[. . .]

“All of us are selling a product,” said Mr. Farage, who before turning to politics worked as a commodities trader. He swallowed from his glass of Rioja, on his way to putting a sizable dent in the bottle, during a lunchtime interview this fall in the parliamentary dining room here. “But neither of these guys ever worked in the commercial sector where they had to sell something,” he continued. “They are ghastly people, and neither pass the Farage test: Would I employ them or would I want to go have a drink with them?”

The very thought of raising a pint with either Mr. Barroso or Mr. Van Rompuy elicits a cigarette-scarred chortle from Mr. Farage. With his dapper suits, cuff links and love of a wine-soaked lunch, Mr. Farage can come across as a caricature of a past-his-prime City of London financier — a loudish type that one frequently encounters in pubs in the wealthy suburbs, sounding off on cricket and the latest bureaucratic atrocity in Brussels.

December 2, 2012

Is UKIP about to become a mainstream British party?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:53

After the strong showing in the Rotherham by-election, the UK Independence Party is on the verge of becoming mainstream:

The steady rise of the party originally known as the United Kingdom Independence Party has spanned a decade, taking in a second place at the 2009 European Parliament elections and extending into its remarkable performances in three parliamentary by-elections on Thursday. Ukip is now widely predicted to win the next European elections in 2014.

“Our previous best-ever by-election result, a fortnight ago, was 14.3 per cent and this one is comfortably over 20 per cent,” Ukip’s oddly charismatic leader Nigel Farage declared on Friday. “The political establishment is just going to have to wake up to the fact that Ukip is here and here to stay as a significant and rising mainstream part of British politics.”

Ukip is still far from winning a parliamentary seat, but its most recent achievements are acknowledged with some concern by the three main parties. Mr Farage’s claim that he is now leading the “third force in British politics” might be a little overexcited, but after Thursday, the Liberal Democrats have been put on notice that they are in mortal danger, as their traditional ability to vacuum up protest votes is challenged. Senior Conservatives are openly debating an electoral pact with a party David Cameron once dismissed as a bunch of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”, in an effort to neutralise the electoral damage Ukip could wreak on the Tory Eurosceptic vote. Mr Farage is demanding a place on the podium at the leaders’ debates during the next general election.

It is a far cry from the early days, when Ukip — founded from the Anti-Federalist League by the academic Alan Sked to campaign for the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union and dominated by middle-class males of a certain age — struggled to cast off its oddball reputation. In its first venture into parliamentary campaigning, at four by-elections in June 1994, its candidates — including Mr Farage — won a total of 2,324 votes. Mr Sked claimed they would win “six or seven” seats at the 1997 general election, but their 193 candidates garnered only 0.3 per cent of the national vote between them.

November 18, 2012

UK voters turning against EU in latest polling

Filed under: Britain, Europe — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

In the Guardian, Daniel Boffey and Toby Helm report on the rising tide of anti-EU sentiment among British voters:

Well over half of British voters now want to leave the European Union, according to an opinion poll that shows anti-EU sentiment is sweeping through all three main political parties.

The Opinium/Observer survey finds that 56% of people would probably or definitely vote for the UK to go it alone if they were offered the choice in a referendum. About 68% of Conservative voters want to leave the EU, against 24% who want to remain; 44% of Labour voters would probably choose to get out, against 39% who would back staying in, while some 39% of Liberal Democrats would probably or definitely vote to get out, compared with 47% who would prefer to remain in the EU.

The findings will make sobering reading for all three major parties, which are at risk of losing support to the buoyant anti-EU party Ukip — now two points ahead of the Lib Dems on 10%.

Overall just 28% of likely voters think the EU is a “good thing” while 45% think it is a “bad thing”. The 18-34 age group is the only one in which there is a clear majority backing the EU, with 44% saying membership is good, against 25%.

November 13, 2012

Denmark discovers that “price elasticity” is a real phenomenon

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Food, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:24

Denmark is getting rid of its “fat tax” imposed last year, as it has failed to solve the problem it was intended to address:

Gone, by popular demand: Denmark’s fat tax. ‘The fat tax is one of the most maligned we [have] had in a long time’, said Mette Gjerskov, the Danish food and agriculture minister, in a press conference on Saturday announcing the decision to ditch the policy. ‘Now we have to try improving the public health by other means.’

[. . .]

It turns out, unsurprisingly, that slapping taxes on things doesn’t necessarily persuade people to consume less of them. So Danes either went downmarket in their buying habits by buying cheaper products, or popped across the border to Sweden or Germany to buy their fatty foods there instead. The only real effect was to hit the profits of Danish companies. Chastened by the experience, the Danish government has also scrapped plans for a sugar tax, too.

As the OECD notes: ‘The impact of imposing taxes on the consumption of certain foods is determined by the responsiveness of consumers to price changes, ie, price elasticity. However, it is difficult to predict how consumers will react to price changes caused by taxation. Some may respond by reducing their consumption of healthy goods in order to pay for the more expensive unhealthy goods, thus defeating the purpose of the tax. Others may seek substitutes for the taxed products, which might be as unhealthy as those originally consumed. Depending on the elasticity of the demand for the taxed products, consumers will either end up bearing an extra financial burden, or changing the mix of products they consume in ways that can be difficult to identify.’

So, simply from a practical point of view, food taxes — indeed, any sin tax, including extra duty on tobacco or minimum prices for alcohol — can have some unwanted negative consequences while largely failing to achieve their intended aim.

October 15, 2012

“[T]he Nobel Peace Prize Committee [wouldn’t] recognize absurdity if it slapped them in the face and did a Macarena”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, History, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

Marian L. Tupy writes about the absurdity of awarding this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union at the Cato@Liberty blog:

The esteemed members of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee have awarded the 2012 prize to the European Union. So, if you thought that awarding it to President Barack Obama for the sole reason of not being George W. Bush was strange and unusual, think again. (By the way, I have nothing against our president. I am sure he was just as embarrassed as everyone else.)

[. . .]

As for democracy, the Peace Prize award to the EU drips with irony. The EU is not only un-democratic, in the sense that it is run by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, it is positively anti-democratic, in the sense that the democratically expressed wishes of the European peoples are either ignored or treated with contempt. When the Danes voted against the Maastricht Treaty, they were forced to vote again. When the Irish sunk the Lisbon treaty, they too had to repeat the vote. And when the Dutch and the French said no to the EU Constitution, they were simply ignored.

Here is how the president of the eurozone, Jean-Claude Juncker, sums up the decision-making process in the great bastion of democracy that is today’s EU: “We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”

I could write about the overgrown and arrogant bureaucracy in Brussels; about the monstrously high and recession-proof salaries of European decision makers; about widespread and widely tolerated corruption; about the prosecution and silencing of whistleblowers, and about many other ways in which the EU does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Suffice it to say that those have been widely documented and are available to anyone interested.

October 13, 2012

Sometimes there’s a logical reason to discriminate in pricing

Filed under: Business, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

Tim Harford on the recent EU ruling that insurers will no longer be allowed to consider gender in setting insurance rates:

He: And not before time. It’s outrageous that I have to pay more for my car insurance than you do. I’m a perfectly safe driver.
She: Of course you are, dear. But you also drive a lot more than I do, which is not unusual for men. Since you drive more miles you are exposing yourself to the risk of more accidents.
He: Am I? Oh.
She: This is one of the reasons that men have more accidents than women. Another, of course, is that some young men are aggressive, overconfident idiots. But in any case you should probably put the money you save into your pension pot because you’re going to need it when you get stuck with the low annuity rates we women have had to put up with.
He: But my life expectancy is shorter. I deserve much higher annuity rates. That’s outrageous.
She: So you’re outraged that discrimination against you hasn’t ended earlier, and equally outraged that discrimination in your favour isn’t going to continue for ever?

[. . .]

She: We might not get too comfortable. Insurers will start looking at other correlates of risk. The obvious one is how far people drive: men tend to drive more than women. Then there are issues such as the choice of a sports car rather than a people carrier. Such distinctions may carry more weight in determining your premium than they do now. As for annuities, if they can’t pay any attention to your sex they might start paying more attention to your cholesterol.
He: I can see that this might get very intrusive.
She: It might. Or it might get very clumsy. Mortgage lenders used to be accused of using geography as a way of discriminating against minorities in the US, since ethnicity and postcode can be closely correlated. There are modern analogies: since women are on average smaller than men, perhaps in the future premiums will be proportionate to height. Stranger things have happened.

October 12, 2012

McParland: How about Nobels for Canada, Switzerland, and Costa Rica!

Filed under: Americas, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

The latest Nobel Peace Prize winner follows a pattern that Kelly McParland thinks he’s identified:

I’m pretty sure the Nobel peace prize committee just bought itself a regular spot on Saturday Night Live. How could it award a peace prize to Europe – yes, all of Europe — based on the fact that it’s not at war with itself, and not become a target of satire?

[. . .]

Today, the notion of Italy invading Spain, or the Dutch royal family seizing the British throne, is unimaginable. Austria, once one of the world’s great powers, is now a small Alpine nation that’s a threat to nobody. Obviously this is a good thing; being friends is better than being enemies. But is that reason to give it a peace prize? Canada has never started a war with anyone, anywhere, so where’s our prize? Switzerland washed its hands of war a century ago and remained neutral through both world wars. Costa Rica doesn’t even have an army. How about a peace prize for that?

This whole peace prize thing is getting weirder by the year anyway. In 2009 it went to Barack Obama, for reasons even Obama couldn’t explain. Since then his administration has been picking off terrorists with drones with gay abandon. In 2007 it went to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore, because why? Because alternative energy is peaceful? Because you can’t stoke a nuclear weapon with solar power? Beats me. You get the feeling the committee finds itself facing a deadline, can’t make a decision, and someone says, “The hell with it, let’s just pick a name out of the hat.” This year some scamp had scribbled “European Union” on a piece of paper and slipped it in with the others, and that’s the slip they drew.

Maybe it’s more complicated than that. But you wouldn’t know it from this year’s winner.

October 7, 2012

Recycle, re-use, re- … oops.

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Food, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:48

The EU is being its traditional bureaucratic self again, this time in the home-made jams and jellies department:

It’s a fairly usual part of modern government to try to increase the rate at which people recycle used items. Sometimes it’s a very sensible practice indeed (we’ve been recycling gold for millennia precisely because it is so valuable) and sometimes it’s really rather silly (no trees are saved by paper recycling as we make paper from trees that we grow specifically to make paper). But more recycling is generally seen as a good thing. Which is what makes this latest piece of tomfoolery from the European Union so strange:

    But the thousands who regularly sell their home-made jam, marmalade or chutney in re-used jars may have to abandon their traditions after a warning that they are breaching European health and safety regulations.

    Legal advisers to Britain’s Churches have sent out a circular saying that while people can use jars for jam at home or to give to family and friends, they cannot sell them or even give them away as raffle prizes at a public event.

No, it’s not a spoof. It really is true that those tasked with running an entire continent, the bureaucrats in Brussels, think that putting home made jam (jelly to you perhaps) in used jam jars should be and is a crime. With serious penalties too:

    The agency said it was up to local authority environmental health officers to enforce the regulations, and penalties can reach a maximum of a £5,000 fine, six months’ imprisonment, or both.

October 5, 2012

sp!ked shorts on the Eurocrisis

Filed under: Economics, Europe — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:12

September 28, 2012

Defending the welfare state … badly

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:27

At sp!ked, David Clements reviews a new book by Asbjorn Wahl which inadvertently exposes some of the very real problems of the modern welfare state in the process of praising and defending it:

Asbjorn Wahl is a trade unionist, director of the Campaign for the Welfare State and Norwegian. While you shouldn’t judge a book by the biog of its author, far less his nationality, it is fair to say that when I opened his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Welfare State, I wasn’t expecting much.

He begins, as all defenders of the welfare state must, with a bleak account of the public; that is, of the welfare state’s helpless, vulnerable clients and potential clients. There is a ‘feeling of powerlessness and apathy among people’, says Wahl, a feeling of ‘tragic stories’ too numerous to mention. As well as discovering an ‘unexpectedly large number… of victims of workfare’, he finds other people suffering ‘bad health and ever-more demanding work’. He tells us ‘stories of people who struggle with their health, then their self-confidence and their self-image’. As I heard a man on a picket line tell a Sky News reporter recently, everyone is ‘sick and tired of being sick and tired’.

[. . .]

Wahl is critical of both the anti-democratic tendencies of the European Union and the imposition of the ‘economic straitjacket’ resulting from the attack on living standards in the Eurozone periphery countries. But his call for the ‘stimulation of the economy, investment in infrastructure and in productive activities’ can hardly be taken seriously given his doubts about the benefits of economic growth. While attempts by Europe’s governments to counter the financial crisis, and in so doing to create public debt crises, have, as Wahl says, been ‘exploited as an excuse to make massive, intensified attacks on the welfare state’, this does not in itself invalidate the attack. His view that capitalist excess is responsible for all of Europe’s ills is also his blind spot when it comes to seeing the damage done by an increasingly therapeutic welfarism. In truth, the welfare problem is not something dreamt up by neoliberals (whoever they are). Rather, it is symptomatic of a political culture that robs people of their agency, something that you might expect somebody like Wahl to be opposed to. Far from it. ‘Good social security’, he says, ‘gives people that much-needed self-confidence boost that enables them to become active players in society’.

As this back-to-front and patronising rationale makes clear, today’s welfare state infantilises people. It tells them that they are too damaged to function without its official hand-holding and belittling interventions. Any ‘progressive’ movement would surely endorse the contrary view that people should be treated as morally independent beings, responsible for their own actions? But to say as much is to invite the charge that you are horribly right wing and endorse ‘welfare-to-work’ policies (which, incidentally, sound rather more like the unforgiving and austere welfare state envisioned by its founders than that proposed by its supposed critics).

September 9, 2012

You know who are really sick of the Euro crisis? Press photographers

Filed under: Europe, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:43

The unsung heroes who provide you with those ?memorable? images of Euro coins being eaten by toy sharks to illustrate stories about the Euro crisis:

Stratenschulte is a photographer with the German news agency DPA. He has been photographing euro coins from various angles for the past three years. He tries to convey the complex crisis in images. The problem is that the crisis won’t end, which means Stratenschulte has to keep coming up with fresh ideas.

His colleagues have resorted to using children’s toys, arranging a plastic shark to look like it’s eating a Lego man holding a Greek flag. They have photographed coins in a free fall. Rumor has it that one photographer poured gasoline on coins to try to make them glow with heat.

Photographers call such images illustrations, they use them to help visualize abstract events. Most crises don’t hold the public’s attention for more than a few weeks or months, but it has been different with the ongoing euro-zone debt debacle. Stratenschulte has had enough of it.

“It is difficult to keep finding a new approach,” he says. “I’m glad the euro coins have different designs in each country. That makes it possible to vary things at least a bit.”

H/T to Tim Harford for the link:

https://twitter.com/TimHarford/statuses/244699544028315648

September 8, 2012

QotD: The European Project

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

Like all people with bad habits, politicians and bureaucrats are infinitely inventive when it comes to rationalizing the European Project, though they’re inventive in nothing else. Without the Union, they say, there would be no peace; when it’s pointed out that the Union is the consequence of peace, not its cause, they say that no small country can survive on its own. When it is pointed out that Singapore, Switzerland, and Norway seem to have no difficulties in that regard, they say that pan-European regulations create economies of scale that promote productive efficiency. When it is pointed out that European productivity lags behind the rest of the world’s, they say that European social protections are more generous than anywhere else. If it is then noted that long-term unemployment rates in Europe are higher than elsewhere, another apology follows. The fact is that for European politicians and bureaucrats, the European Project is like God — good by definition, which means that they have subsequently to work out a theodicy to explain, or explain away, its manifest and manifold deficiencies.

[. . .]

The personal interests of European politicians and bureaucrats, with their grossly inflated, tax-free salaries, are perfectly obvious. For politicians who have fallen out of favor at home, or grown bored with the political process, Brussels acts as a vast and luxurious retirement home, with the additional gratification of the retention of power. The name of a man such as European Council president Herman Van Rompuy, whose charisma makes Hillary Clinton look like Mata Hari, would, without the existence of the European Union, have reached most of the continent’s newspapers only if he had paid for a classified advertisement in them. Instead of which, he bestrides the European stage if not like a colossus exactly, at least like the spread of fungus on a damp wall.

Corporate interests, ever anxious to suppress competition, approve of European Union regulations because they render next to impossible the entry of competitors into any market in which they already enjoy a dominant position, while also allowing them to extend their domination into new markets. That is why the CAC40 of today (the index of the largest 40 companies on the French stock exchange) will have more or less the same names 100 years hence.

More interestingly, perhaps, Hannan explains the European Union’s corruption of so-called civil society. Suppose you have an association for the protection of hedgehogs because you love hedgehogs. The European Union then offers your association money to expand its activities, which of course it accepts. The Union then proposes a measure allegedly for the protection of hedgehogs, but actually intended to promote a large agrarian or industrial interest over a small one, first asking the association’s opinion about the proposed measure. Naturally, your association supports the Union because it has become dependent on the Union’s subsidy. The Union then claims that it enjoys the support of those who want to protect hedgehogs. The best description of this process is fascist corporatism, which so far (and it is of course a crucial difference) lacks the paramilitary and repressive paraphernalia of real fascism.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Rejecting the European Project”, City Journal, 2012-09-07

August 24, 2012

The diminishing importance of borders in a supranational world

Filed under: Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

At sp!ked, Angus Kennedy reviews The Significance of Borders, a new book by Thierry Baudet:

A controversial Dutch columnist for NRC Handelsblad, a lawyer and historian at the University of Leiden, Baudet argues that representative government and the rule of law is impossible without the nation state. But today, he argues, the nation is under attack from two directions.

First it is under attack from supranationalism, that is, from institutions like the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Security Council, and, most dramatically, the European Union. So while nations retain sovereignty at a formal level, increasing degrees of ‘material sovereignty’ have been acquired by supranational organisations. Baudet argues, for instance, that the official aim of the EU ‘is the negation of the concept of statehood’, because the nation state is held responsible, most notably by German theorists, for war. The EU’s immanent federalist logic leads to the necessary extension of its bureaucratic power (taking more and more countries into its orbit). Or — as an illustration of the attack on the democratic basis of national sovereignty — take the contempt in which the ECHR holds Britain for denying convicted prisoners the right to vote: this despite the fact that parliament voted 234 votes to 22 against the proposal. It seems the ECHR is happy to demand Britain change laws upheld by its own democracy.

Second, self-government is also under attack from below. Firstly, in the form of multiculturalism and its official support, legal pluralism (where the law is applied with cultural ‘sensitivity’ rather than justly). Secondly, from cultural diversity, which rejects the idea of a British or a Dutch identity in favour of overlapping multiple, provisional and lightly held, identities. Baudet gives the example of the Dutch crown princess, Máxima, who declared in 2007 that ‘the Dutch identity does not exist’, that the world has ‘open borders’ and that ‘it is not either-or. But and-and.’ When royalty — once the very symbol of national sovereignty — refuses to discriminate between citizens and outsiders, then even the most ardent internationalist might begin to smell a rat.

As Baudet argues, without a community of interest, a ‘we’, there is nothing. He notes that the ECHR outlaws ‘discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status’. Everyone must be treated equally. Baudet is correct to point out that such a widely drawn attack on discrimination ‘must necessarily implicate the citizens’ indifference towards those criteria’. Any form of particularity, of which nationality is one, is denied in the name of a totalising universality. The effect is not the widening of ‘minds and sympathies’ but rather their ‘Balkanisation’. In the process, the law becomes ‘no longer “ours” or “from within”, but from “out there”’. Our responsibility is eroded and our capacity to decide for ourselves (however we constitute that ‘we’) is further diminished, both at the level of the nation state, historically the basis for constituting a self-governing ‘we’, and at the level of the individual citizen.

July 31, 2012

Milton Friedman on the Euro in November, 2000

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Europe — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:49

In the National Post, Michael Walker has an article on the great economist, Milton Friedman and his influence on Canada. He also includes this interesting comment on the Euro from a Bank of Canada conference in 2000:

When, at that same Bank of Canada Conference in 2000, Milton Friedman was asked about the future of the Euro, he said:

“I think the Euro is in its honeymoon phase. I hope it succeeds, but I have very low expectations for it. I think that differences are going to accumulate among the various countries and that non-synchronous shocks are going to affect them. Right now, Ireland is a very different state; it needs a very different monetary policy from that of Spain or Italy… On purely theoretical grounds, it’s hard to believe that it’s going to be a stable system for a long time… “You know, the various countries in the Euro are not a natural currency trading group. They are not a currency area. There is very little mobility of people among the countries. They have extensive controls and regulations and rules, and so they need some kind of an adjustment mechanism to adjust to asynchronous shocks — and the floating exchange rate gave them one. They have no mechanism now.

“If we look back at recent history, they’ve tried in the past to have rigid exchange rates, and each time it has broken down. Nineteen ninety-two, 1993, you had the crises. Before that, Europe had the snake [the first attempt at European monetary cooperation in the 1970s], and then it broke down into something else. So the verdict isn’t in on the Euro. It’s only a year old. Give it time to develop its troubles.”

It is highly unfortunate for the European countries that they did not pay more attention to these piercing insights — and that Milton Friedman is no longer here to hold them to account.

Update: Reason.tv did a tribute to Friedman last year:

July 4, 2012

ACTA rejected decisively by European Parliament

Filed under: Europe, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

Apparently even the insulated, protected European Parliament can be moved if enough people are actively against something — in this case it was the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Michael Geist explains:

When ACTA was formally signed by most participants in October 2011 in Tokyo, few would have anticipated that less than a year later, the treaty would face massive public protests and abandonment by leading countries. But with tens of thousands taking to the streets in Europe earlier this year, ACTA became the poster child for secretive, one-sided IP agreements that do not reflect the views and hopes of the broader public. This morning, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly against the agreement, effectively killing ACTA within the EU. The vote was 478 against, 39 in favour, with 165 abstentions. This is a remarkable development that was virtually unthinkable even a year ago. Much credit goes to the thousands of Europeans who spoke out against ACTA and to the Members of the European Parliament who withstood enormous political pressure to vote against the deal.

The European developments have had a ripple effect, with the recent Australian parliamentary committee recommendation to delay ACTA ratification and the mounting opposition around the world. ACTA is not yet dead — it may still eke out the necessary six ratifications in a year or two for it to take effect — but it is badly damaged and will seemingly never achieve the goals of its supporters as a model for other countries to adopt and to emerge as a new global standard for IP enforcement. That said, ACTA supporters will not take today’s decision as the final verdict. In the coming weeks and months, we can expect new efforts to revive the agreement within Europe and to find alternative means to implement its provisions. That suggests the fight will continue, but for today, it is worth celebrating how the seemingly impossible — stopping a one-sided, secretly negotiated global IP agreement — became possible.

This has been referred to as the biggest parliamentary defeat ever for a European Commission initiative. In theory, the ACTA treaty cannot be enacted into EU law without being approved by the European Parliament (although, as we’ve seen before, the EU is adept at getting around minor inconveniences like referenda and recalcitrant national governments).

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