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In The Big Brother House
Identity cards will be compulsory for new British passport holders from 2010.
Chirac Prepares To Jump
French president Jacques Chirac has announced that he will shortly address the nation, as the crisis surrounding the CPE employment contract worsens.
UPDATE: The top French constitutional body has just ruled the CPE is legal. This means Chirac will have to sign it - or force his PM Dominique de Villepin to enter intro further negotiations.
Villepin's Bad Hair Day
Did France's unelected prime minister Dominique de Villepin foresee the trouble ahead when he pushed the First Employment Contract (CPE) through parliament? The PM chose not to negotiate with union leaders - the first port of call for any leader attempting to introduce labour law reform - and passed the new law under emergency rules brought in during last autumn's riots.
History Revision
Caspar Weinberger died yesterday. Britain's newspapers are getting their version of history in fast. Here's the Guardian's World News intro:
"Caspar Weinberger, a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, dies at the age of 88."
Comment Is Free...
Eagle-eyed readers will note that we have finally added comments to EURSOC. About time too, some of our correspondents will say.
Glossing Over The Facts
Embattled Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has sent eleven million copies of a glossy magazine to households throughout Italy in an attempt to influence the general election on 9-10 April.
The Incredible Sulk
Incroyable! Chirac storms out of summit
French President Jacques Chirac interrupted the annual spring summit of the European Union when his fellow citizen Baron Ernest-Antoine Seilliere - head of the European employers' group, Unice - addressed the gathering in English.
The Sarkozy No-Show
Where's Sarko? France is gripped by another outbreak of rioting. This time ageing hard-left fantasists are stirring up trouble as students protest against a new employment contract, but new reports suggest that thugs from the banlieu - who caused so much trouble last year - are already infiltrating the marches.
The A-Word
Extraordinary article on French anti-semitism in the Guardian earlier this week. The correspondent talks to Jewish victims of anti-Semitic attacks in the tough Paris suburb of Sarcelles, reports on rumours of Jews leaving France for safer lives in Canada, the USA and Israel, describes the mounting sensation of oppression that even middle-class Jews are experiencing in the country after the torture and murder of Ilan Halimi... but nowhere does the journalist mention who is actually carrying out these attacks.
Youth Runs Wild
Anger against a new youth labour law has culminated in a riot on the streets of the Left Bank of Paris.
Jostling For Position
It's probably inadvisable to judge someone's political career from the number of searches carried out for their name on a website like EURSOC, but we like to think it provides a valuable little cross-section of what interests the public at any given time.
So it's interesting to note that for the first time in our history, French socialist candidate Ségolène Royal has overtaken Nicolas Sarkozy in EURSOC's search rankings. Sarko has been in our top three search strings for years - now he's down to sixth, behind Iran and, er, "Eurosoc." Mme Royal leaps in with a bullet to number three.
Opinion polls show that the two are neck-and-neck for the presidency of France, up for grabs in 2007. Our insider's view suggests that Ségolène Royal might be worth a flutter.
The good news for both candidates is that the incumbent, Jacques Chirac, registers a poor 42nd in the search strings. The bad news? Both Royal and Sarko are beaten by our number two search query, "Banana Republique."
Crooks Corner
After a month reporting on threats to western freedoms from religious nutters, the media's fawning indulgence of terrorists and Iran's drive for nuclear armageddon, it seems almost a relief to get back to a report on European Parliament MPs with their snouts in the trough once more.
Taliban-tastic
Imagine if a group of disgruntled fundamentalist Christians seized power of a US state by force. Those who resisted the takeover were rounded up and slaughtered. Teaching of any subject other than their warped version of Christianity was banned. Women were prevented from attending schools, forced to wear extremely modest clothes and threatened with execution if they contemplated adultery. Homosexuals were executed. Television was banned as "The Devil's Jukebox", as its messages from the outside world risked corrupting young minds. Dancing was forbidden. Don't even think about the Internet.
Going Backwards Fast
European governments have recently built a score of barriers to so-called foreign hostile takeovers of their country's companies.
Last Legs?
"There is no European public opinion, rather national public opinions," said Poland's president Lech Kaczynski at a conference in Germany this week.
Cameron Vows To Stay In EU
Conservative Party leader David Cameron has declared that should he come to power, he will not attempt to extract Britain from the European Union.
Sky High Snobbery
Anatole Kaletsky launches an attack on the "left-wing radicals" who want to see air travel restricted with punitive taxes.
Up In Smoke
By the summer of 2007, smoking will be banned in "enclosed public spaces" including all pubs, clubs and restaurants in the UK.
It Lives! ...Errr, Again!
EURSOC is quickly running out of Frankenstein-Zombie headlines with which to refer to attempts by Eurocrats to revive the rejected EU Constitution. This time, reports suggest that France's Jacques Chirac and Germany's Angela Merkel are working on a means of stitching together various parts of the treaty and resubmitting a revised document to voters.
Voters would be asked to approve the EU's competences and the charter of fundamental rights. The third part of the treaty - those parts that lay out EU policies - would simply be approved by parliaments.
Do they really think voters are so stupid?
We The People
Former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Moazzam Begg is guest of honour on the BBC's World Service today. Begg, who confesses to having attended two terrorist training camps, has had an easy ride from the British media. Commentators have spluttered with indignation at every mention of the US prison camp, but have failed to call the released prisoners up on what they were up to in Afghanistan - and what they would have done in the west, had they not been captured by the Americans.
The BBC offered its online viewers the opportunity to put some questions to Begg. Unfortunately for terror supporters, the comments posted suggest that sympathy for Guantanamo detainees is in short supply among members of the public, compared to their counterparts in the media and theatre professions. Even allowing for the fact that the survey is moderated, and the editors are certainly trimming the number of attacks on Begg in the interests of "balance", at last count the score was 5 percent messages of support, 95 percent tough criticism.
Iran To EU: Fooled Ya!
The Americans have quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) believed that the EU Three were being taken for a ride by Iran's nuclear negotiators. Now, Iran's former lead negotiator has revealed that Tehran used the talks to play for time and dupe Paris, London and Berlin - buying enough time to make its nuclear program unstoppable.
Tatlerite Tories
David Cameron’s ‘Tatler’ Tories are doomed to failure.
They have no idea how ridiculous they look in their open-neck shirts and baggy jeans: somehow it just doesn’t work. Old Etonians trying to look cool by dressing up as plebeians is so transparent. Up north (where Cameron needs to win votes) they are sniggering over their Newcastle Brown’ at these Notting Hill ‘trustafarians’.
Quote Of The Day
"..in our increasingly mixed-up, multicultural world, there are so many groups that care so strongly about so many different things, from fruitarians to anti-abortionists and from Jehovah's Witnesses to Kurdish nationalists. Aggregate all their taboos and you have a vast herd of sacred cows. Let the frightened nanny state enshrine all those taboos in new laws or bureaucratic prohibitions, and you have a drastic loss of freedom. That, I think, is what is happening to us, issue by issue. These days, you can't even read a list of the British war dead in Iraq outside the gates of No 10 Downing Street without getting a criminal record. Inch by inch, paragraph by paragraph, we are becoming less free."
- Timothy Garton Ash, "We must stand up to the creeping tyranny of the group veto."
And before anyone writes to remind EURSOC that we've just published a series of attacks on Ken Livingstone, we know, and we agree with Garton Ash's remark that Ken should be " let off with a rap over the knuckles" (though a good hard kick up the backside would be better). Livingstone and his supporters need to be reminded why and how his remarks are anti-semitic. However, the rest of us need to be aware that shutting down freedom of speech, rather than forcing fools to have their theories held up for scrutiny and derision, leads us down a dangerously illiberal path.
Ken Keeps Digging
When you find yourself in a hole, it's a good idea to stop digging. Unfortunately, London's Mayor Ken Livingstone is not renowned for listening to sensible counsel, so he'll probably ignore Melanie Philip's warning that he's still digging.
Ken's At It Again
Just days after being suspended for calling a Jewish reporter a concentration camp guard, London's mayor Ken Livingstone has accused the leaders of Britain's Jewish community of McCarthyist tactics.
