Book review: Adults in the Room, Yanis Varoufakis, 2017

Adults in the Room, economist-turned-politician Yanis Varoufakis's account of his attempts while Greek finance minister to get the country's creditors to agree to write off some of its debts in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, opens like a thriller. Although it then goes on to become a slightly overlong blow-by-blow account, it always maintains its grip on your interests, even though you know how things turned out. 

You can understand why Varoufakis would have wanted to set the record straight with a microscopic account of the events given how he was maltreated by the media through the machinations of his political opponents, but the middle part of the book does drag slightly with the succession of meetings and papers.

On the other hand, how often do you get the chance to take a ringside seat at the eurogroup? Not very.

Among the major players, only Varoufakis and Emmanuel Macron emerge from the book with their reputations essentially intact. The Eurogroup itself, most of its member ministers, the media, the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, Sigmar Gabriel, Wolfgang Schauble and even Angela Merkel all display varying degrees of incompetence, ineffectiveness, illogicality, callousness and foolishness, even allowing for some bias on the part of the author. 

This is a sometimes-thrilling, ultimately depressing account of how governments and institutions can allow themselves to become trapped by circumstances, group-think, myopia and stubbornness. There are glimmers of hope for a better future, not least in Macron, but will those glimmers coalesce into a guiding light?

Ask me, ask me, ask me

The prospect of a second referendum on the UK's membership of the EU, or on the nature of its future relationship with the EU, has been on many a lip and TV show since Nigel Farage suggested he might be open to the idea in order to kill off the question for a generation.

One pretty common reaction is demonstrated by the guy 40 seconds into the above video - asking how many referendums there might be, or whether there should be a "best of five", etc.

For many people, the idea is a bit like this scene in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, where our heroes are aggrieved to have to play the Grim Reaper over and over again having already beaten him at Battleships:

But the EU referendum differs from this in crucial ways, as Farage has recognised. Firstly, the result was ridiculously close. Farage even said before the referendum that if the outcome was split 52%-48% (he was assuming that would be in favour of Remain), there ought to be a second ref.

Requiring a straightforward majority is standard in referendums internationally. However, "supermajority" requirements of say 60% and double majority requirements (meaning both an overall majority and a majority backing of, say, in the UK's case, all four of its component nations), are far from unknown (PDF and article).

Furthermore, in this instance, almost every promise made by the winning Leave campaign has now been reneged upon. There will be no £350m per week for the NHS, economic growth will be lower outside the EU, migration will need to remain high, sovereignty will be relinquished to the US, China and India rather than to an entity over which the British people have a substantial degree of control, etc etc.

All of which favours a second referendum. Ideally one in which the options are clear and the campaigners are held to account for what they say.

Personally, I'd be in favour of taking no drastic action - neither leaving the EU nor lending British backing to further EU integration - unless there is at least a 55% majority, and ideally a 60% majority, one way or the other.

One objection that is often raised is that the British people will feel like they've been betrayed if there's a second ref. This tends to go hand-in-hand with the suggestion that the referendum will be repeated until the "elites" - whoever they are, given that the Leave campaign included the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg - "get the result they want".

This is ridiculous. People don't collapse when they're asked the same question more than once. Remember Ed Miliband?

Nor are people like fruit machines that spit out different answers at random. If people feel strongly one way or another, they'll turn out again and vote in accordance with their feelings. If they don't they'll stay home, and will have no right to complain.

And if the answer isn't clear cut, the political outcome should be one of compromise that pays heed to the closeness of the result.

Winner takes all, but victory is Pyrrhic

Theresa May's Brexit plan, which entails leaving the EU's Single Market (which the UK itself essentially created) and not being part of a customs union with the EU, is the most extreme form of Brexit shy of a "no deal" situation (which would be utterly disastrous).

In pursuing this hard Brexit, May is ignoring the views of the 48 per cent of referendum voters who backed Remain. She's also ignoring the narrowness of the result, the vagueness of the referendum question, the many lies told by the Leave campaign, the likely preferences of EU citizens resident in the UK, the Remain majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland, the preferences of most businesses and, last but not least, the fact that young people, who will have to live with the effects of Brexit the longest, overwhelmingly favoured Remain.

Why is May doing this? She was herself a remainer, after all, albeit not a very effective one.

In large part, she's probably doing it because she's wanted to be prime minister all her life, and she knows that she would face a leadership challenge from hard-core eurosceptic Tories if she pursued a softer Brexit. She's putting her career ahead of the country.

But it seems to me she's also probably been enabled and emboldened by the standard model of British politics, which is the first-past-the-post electoral system.

Under FPTP, the party that wins an outright majority can implement its manifesto in full - or in practice can do whatever the hell it likes - with no regard to the extent to which any given policy was emphasised in the election, the level of support for it among its own voters, the divergence on that issue in the opposing parties' manifestos, or the level of support for those policies among the opposing parties' voters.

The public mostly puts up with this, in part probably because people hope that their party will win next time, and in part probably because people are now so weary of politics in general that they can't be bothered to kick up a fuss.

But Brexit is different, or ought to be. First, the closeness of the result and the preference for Remain among young people make it very likely that there will be an outright majority in favour of Remain in the near future. That's assuming that there isn't already such a majority, which there might well be given the number and importance of the Leave lies that have now been exposed. Is it really wise to go through the horrendously costly and time-consuming process of leaving, only to then attempt to reverse that process in a few years' time?

Second, while we can probably assume that most Remain voters would favour staying in the Single Market and joining a customs union, while most Leave voters wouldn't, we don't really know. Certainly there are some Leave voters who favour those softer Brexit options.

So the fairest, least divisive, least disruptive options would be to recognise the closeness of the result and pursue a compromise remain or compromise soft Brexit, or hold a second referendum on the nature of the Brexit.

Unfortunately, the Labour opposition leader is an undercover leaver, and has done little if anything to oppose May's damaging actions, just as he did so little during the referendum campaign.

Hence it's fallen to rebels in both parties, like Anna Soubry and Chuka Umunna, to provide the checks and balances that have been so sadly lacking.

Charles Tannock was one of three rebel Tory MEPs among 20 who signed a letter last week calling on May to remain in the Single Market and join a customs union with the EU.

As the Guardian reported, he "described the 52% victory for leave in the EU referendum as a margin “not convincing for Brexit, let alone the hardest of Brexits” given the scale of constitutional change".

Or as Andrew Adonis put it in his letter resigning his position on May's cross-party infrastructure commission:

“If Brexit happens, taking us back into Europe will become the mission of our children's generation, who will marvel at your acts of destruction.”

Book review: On Europe, Margaret Thatcher, 2017 (2002)

This extract, published this year, from a book Thatcher wrote in 2002 is interesting to read today for several reasons, foremost among which is the extent to which the arguments she advanced for reforming or terminating the UK's membership of the EU, and for the likely success of that endeavour, were adopted by the Leave campaigners in the UK's 2016 EU referendum, warts and all - and warts there are in plenty.

Take for example "The rest of the EU needs us more than we need them" and "EU workers are going to bring pressure on them [EU politicians] to keep our markets open". Both of these were uncritically parroted by the Leave campaign, and both are utter nonsense.

In support of the former assertion, Thatcher cites the fact that the UK is a "substantial net importer from the rest of the EU". Well, as well as this ignoring that British consumers want to purchase these EU goods, and would be unhappy at not being able to do so, it also ignores that the proportion of UK exports to the EU is much higher than the proportion of EU exports to the UK. Meaning the EU has the UK by the short and curlies. The latter assertion has now been disproved by history, as Germany's car manufacturers have lined up to emphasise the importance of the integrity of the EU's Single Market.

Indeed, On Europe is full of the kind of subjectivity, hypocrisy, wishful thinking, woolly logic, appeals to authority, and outright falsehoods that characterised the Leave campaign. For example, Thatcher complains that when she became PM, the UK was "on the verge of becoming the EEC's largest net contributor, even though we were then only the seventh richest nation per head". This of course is comparing apples with oranges: the net contribution of the UK, which is a total for the country as a whole, and therefore dependent on population size, and the UK's wealth per head, which is an average. To give just one more of the many examples of unsound argument, Thatcher compares unemployment in the UK, USA, Germany, France and Japan in order to attack Europe's stronger social protections, which she says hinder job creation. But she does so for just a single time point, rather than over a prolonged duration, and she ignores any consideration of whether, for example, France's citizens might prefer early retirement to low national unemployment.

But the book's biggest problem is its near-complete failure to engage with what ought to be the main question of any debate about the EU, which is: what is the ideal scale at which democracy should take place? Thatcher does make the occasional baseless assertion that, for example, the EU is inherently undemocratic purely because "there exists no pan-European public opinion", or that Europe is inherently divided because "it makes no sense at all to lump together Beethoven and Debussy, Voltaire and Burke, Vermeer and Picasso, boiled beef and bouillabaisse". But she makes no attempt to set out why it makes more sense for, say, defence policy or interest rates to be decided at the scale of the UK rather than that of Europe, or why Westminster should have total sovereignty but not Scotland, or why decentralisation is a good thing when it entails more power for nations but a bad thing when it means more power for regions (e.g. through the Committee of the Regions).

There may well be answers to these questions that make EU membership less attractive - it's a fascinating thought - but Thatcher didn't provide them, and nor has anyone else that I've seen, either prior to or since the referendum. Thatcher's arguments were a thin tissue full of holes that ought to have been shredded in the referendum. That they weren't says more about the nature of human decision-making and the state of British politics and journalism than we have yet dared to admit.

Book review: The end of the liberal order? Niall Ferguson and Fareed Zakaria, 2017

Two intellectual heavyweights debating whether liberal international order is on the wane. Ferguson argues it has been for about a century, whereas Zakaria argues it's still going strong and worth fighting for. At times the question seems academic: while Ferguson argues that globalisation has increased inequality, he doesn't dispute Zakaria's point that it has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty - which made me think: if something's working, does it matter what?

But actually, it's important for deciding where we should direct our efforts and resources to further global peace and prosperity: into things like the UN and EU, or into beneficent, cooperative nation states.

It's an interesting debate, but the downside of a debate is that it doesn't come to a tidy conclusion like a typical book, but rather leaves the audience or reader to decide which argument won out. Yet with a typical book you can choose to disagree, whereas here I was left agreeing and disagreeing with both debaters on certain points, and essentially just wanting more.

But still, a decent way to spend two hours.

Answering for Verhofstadt

The European Parliament's Brexit lead, Guy Verhofstadt, gave a talk at the London School of Economics on 28 September, on the future of Europe after Brexit. In the Q&A afterwards I asked him a question that he said was an "excellent" one he would return to later. He never did.

The question I asked was whether there was not a contradiction in the talk he'd just given: he'd said that the 48% of people who voted Remain in the Brexit referendum were "too large a minority to ignore", and then set out his vision of a deeper, more united future EU. I asked him how he could back the views of the Remain 48% while his vision seemingly ignores the views of, say, the 46.2% of Austrians who voted for the euro-sceptic Norbert Hofer in that country's 2016 presidential election. I also asked whether a more flexible, multi-speed EU might not be more democratic, given the breadth of opinion, and more robust to the ebb and flow of nationalism.

I would have been very interested to hear Verhofstadt's thoughts on this. But in lieu of his, here are mine.

It's not necessarily hypocritical to want to back the views of one minority but not another. Or rather, one could seek to back the views of every minority, but reluctantly decide one can't in a given case if doing so would be more damaging overall.

In the case of the Remain 48%, there's good reason for thinking that taking their views into account would actually better represent the desires of the biggest chunk of voters. The Brexit referendum was poorly designed, and told us nothing about the type of Brexit that Leave voters wanted. But we have good evidence from surveys to think that a majority of voters would like to remain in the single market, for example - a closer future relationship with the EU than the government is set to deliver.

I don't know much about the Austrian presidential election, but for argument's sake let's imagine that every one of the pro-Hofer voters would have settled for nothing less than Austria leaving the EU. In that case, backing their views would be less representative overall, since a majority of people voted for the pro-EU van der Bellen.

The alternative explanation is that Verhofstadt backs the Remain 48% and not the Hofer 46% simply because he thinks he knows what's best for everyone, and that the Remain 48% are right while the Hofer 46% are wrong. That might not be a stance he would be keen to admit to taking. If asked about it, he might dodge the question.

(It's interesting to contrast that hypothetical with the known stance of Theresa May, who is backing the most extreme interpretation of the narrow Leave victory even though she wanted a Remain outcome. She's neither taking on board the views of the 48% minority nor sticking with the courage of her convictions. Instead, she's hoping that by pandering to the extremists in the 52% even though she expects it to damage the country, she'll see off any challenges from within her own party. Her game is short-term personal and party politics, as opposed to what's best for the long term.)

That brings us to my second question. Whether a more rigid, united EU would be more or less robust to nationalist challenge depends on whether it would be sufficiently more effective to generate more additional positive feeling than the additional negative feeling that would be generated by ignoring the views of euro-sceptics.

I don't claim to know the answer to that question (unless you count this piece I wrote). Verhofstadt, Emmanuel Macron and Jean-Claude Juncker do. That's why they're politicians. And in fairness to them, they all won elections. But then, voters' views change: time will tell whether Verhofstadt et al are right, and whether those who voted for them last time around will stick with them and their federalist stablemates in future.

Book review: Europe's Last Chance, Guy Verhofstadt, 2017

Guy Verhofstadt is probably best known to most non-Belgians (he was that country's prime minister from 1999 to 2008) as the anti-Nigel Farage, the man at whom Farage's anti-EU tirades are perhaps most often directed, given that Verhofstadt and Farage face off in the European Parliament, whereas Jean-Claude Juncker, Farage's other bete noire, presides over the European Commission. Verhofstadt's designation as the Parliament's Brexit representative has thrust him further into the limelight recently, a position he certainly enjoys.

He's a pro-European, but also a reformist, and Europe's Last Chance is his diagnosis of and prescription for the EU's ills. As such it's wide-ranging, covering EU governance, financial union, an EU army, the rise of populism, the migrant crisis and Russia. I expect it's therefore an almost perfect book for someone looking for a middle-distance contemporary guide to the EU. As someone who reports on the EU for a living, I'd have preferred a more warts-and-all, microscopic examination of everything from which Commissioners take sugar with their coffee to what national heads of state spit when they talk, but probably that's just me.

The book starts weakly, with a subjective and unconvincing attempt to solve the problems of nationalism and European identity. That the EU Verhofstadt envisions - as he later reveals - is essentially just a nation writ large undermines his attempt to dispel nationalist sentiment as wrong-headed. "That Europe is suffused with social bases and values so different as to be incompatible is nonsense", we're told, rightly, but then Verhofstadt declares that: "The entrepreneurial spirit is not northern European, it is European [his emphasis], as are solidarity with the vulnerable, the pursuit of justice...", as if North Americans or Africans were not entrepreneurial, Central Americans not empathetic, Middle Easterners not concerned with fairness. This crude if well-intentioned assertion is then undermined later by Verhofstadt himself, when he notes that "many French people still hold monarchist, rightist, and downright anti-semitic opinions".

It's not so much that Verhofstadt is wrong - later he says that "everyone should be able to become European" - it's just that he's better at handling the technical details than the emotional reasoning, and unfortunately the emotional part of the book comes first.

Later chapters are more convincing. The problems with the currency union lacking a fiscal union are well-known but quite clearly presented here, and the problems with the Greek debt crisis and the fractured and sclerotic EU governance even more so. Likewise, Verhofstadt's plans for dealing with these problems and others are clearly presented: he wants the Eurozone to be a genuine union; Greece's politicians to institute sweeping reforms; and the EU government to be shrunk and elected on a continent-wide basis and executive powers to be transferred to the Parliament and Commission, with a nationally selected senate acting only as a legislative check.

For those not already well versed in EU politics, this will all be informative and interesting stuff. For me, the most interesting parts were those that were less familiar and more personal: Verhoftstadt's take on the rise and (moral) fall of Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orban, the difficulties his cleaner had securing asylum in the EU, the wall he himself ran into when trying to secure a loan in Italy to set up a vineyard.

The book isn't perfect: in places it feels a touch shallow (minus the index it comes in under 300 pages), it could've done with more raw data and insider examples, some idea of how broad Verhofstadt thinks the EU should ultimately be would have been interesting (should Turkey be a member?), as would some indication of how he thinks the EU should deal with Brexit outside of his ideal scenario of a two-tier EU with an inner Eurozone and an outer associate layer in which the UK might find a home, plus there are too many typos, but over its course it slowly gains authority as it covers more ground, and by the end it's hard to imagine any but the most fixedly anti-EU readers not agreeing that the EU needs to succeed if Europe is to compete on the world stage, and that the only way it can do so in the long-term is through reform and closer unity.

A final thought: as a Brit, it's depressing to read a plan for European success in which Britain realistically will play no part. If a close-knit market of half a billion people and a European army are needed to compete with the US and China, repel the threat of a rampaging Putin and bring stability to north Africa, where does that leave the UK? A lone outsider, desperately trying to keep upper lip stiff while the realisation of increasing irrelevance and backwardness slowly dawns...

Brexit #2: what is and what might be

Vote Leave figurehead Boris Johnson has been taking flipflopping to new lows in his hijacking of the EU referendum, but even the most decided of the rest of us would probably admit to thinking there are pros and cons to being in the EU (although for us those pros and the cons will be different things).

I wonder though how many of us would admit that at least part of our inclination to vote one way or the other is due not to some fixed aspect of the EU's setup, but to our desire to either keep or change some temporary political circumstance that just happens to be the way we do or don't want it to be for the time being?

For example, I'm more in agreement overall politically with the current inhabitants of the EU institutions than I am with the current Tory UK government, due to our stances on issues like the refugee crisis, climate change, workers' rights, etc, and I can't deny that that's one of the attractive prospects about voting to remain. Of course if we were to vote to leave the EU then the UK government could theoretically reinstate many of the things I like that the EU currently gives us, like the maximum 48-hour working week, but would it?

In this FT article Joshua Chaffin wrote about how "Cornwall took in more than €654m from Brussels during the EU’s 2007 to 2013 budget cycle" (as part of the EU's scheme for taking money from wealthier areas and giving it to more deprived ones), and whether that's having an impact on Cornish residents' voting intentions. Boris has said the UK could redistribute money like this on its own without cycling it through Brussels first if we vote to leave, but one resident told Chaffin that "The EU’s been a much better mechanism for getting money from the wealthier parts of Britain to the poorer parts than our own government’s ever been”.

Likewise, when I spoke to an academic for a Brexit piece I contributed to for work, and put it to her that the UK government could, if we vote to leave, choose to more-than replace the research funding we currently receive from the EU with the money leavers claim we'd save, she said: "Nobody can convince me that if we weren’t part of the EU then the amount of research funding that’s available for the humanities around minorities or marginal groups would be increased under the present government. That’s absolutely inconceivable.”

In both of these examples, short-term thinking brushes up against long-term, and pragmatism up against wishful thinking. I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about these situations.

In his book And The Weak Suffer What They Must?, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis writes about how "Greek and Italian politicians [...] extended an intriguing offer to voters fed up with them" when their countries were considering joining the EU's single currency: "Keep voting for us and we shall soon rid you of ... our rule! Once monetary union is complete, our country will be administered de facto by Northern Europeans [...] Most Greeks I know secretly welcomed that offer [...]"

And look where that got them...

Maybe it isn't wise to make long-term decisions on the basis of short-term circumstances.

Right now I dislike Tory austerity (with the UK not in the Eurozone, we don't have to worry about Eurogroup austerity) and like EU's stance towards online privacy protection, for example, but in the future might I lament a more left-wing UK government being unable to introduce a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions because a more right-wing EU doesn't want one?

I think the best thing on June 23 will be to vote in line with whether you think the fixed aspects of EU membership or non-membership are good or bad: having a continent-wide system of governance, being able to influence that governance, being in some respects controlled by that governance; free movement; free trade.

But I suspect transient concerns will end up playing as big a role, if not bigger.

Brexit #1: sovereignty

In my flat we have a cleaning rota. There are five of us, and every ten days one of us has to clean all of the communal areas. The others don't have to do anything. And then we rotate.

In flats I've lived in previously we've done it differently. In my last place there were three of us and every two weeks we each did one of the three communal areas. When I lived with an ex we did everything between us once a week. In another place we had a cleaner.

My point is that nobody tells us how to clean up after ourselves: we get to decide for ourselves. The Mayor of London's office hasn't decreed that crumbs must be swept on Thursdays and hobs de-greased on Sundays. Boris didn't care, and neither does Sadiq.

But Islington North, the constituency I live in, can issue fixed penalty notices for littering. Islington North Council has decreed it doesn't want some streets deciding that the gutters are a good place to dispose of rubbish while other streets opt for the bushes. Everyone has to use the bins provided.

What you have there is an example of subsidiarity, a principle the EU runs on. It basically says that rules should get made at the lowest level that makes sense. At some point in time every nation on Earth decided that murder shouldn't be allowed, so they all made that illegal at the national level. In London, for example, I can't just wait for you to cross over to Islington South and Finsbury and then crossbow you with impunity. And not even Zac Goldsmith was campaigning to change that, even if only because he wouldn't have had the power to follow through.

We've been hearing a lot about sovereignty in the run-up to the Brexit referendum. "Vote leave to reclaim Britain's sovereignty", outers say. And yes, EU law does override British law, and yes, according to Full Fact, somewhere between 15 and 50% of new British laws are made in Brussels.

But are we all running around trying to remember whether murder and sweeping up crumbs on Tuesdays are illegal? No, we're not, because EU laws mostly involve trade - the EU's main reason for existing is the single European market - and the environment. Enough people have agreed that starving due to climate change is a bad idea for the EU to decide that Europe-wide laws are necessary to stop a few bad apples smothering the rest of the barrel in fumes.

Did you get a say in that? Well, you had a say in it in the same way you had a say in your local council's littering policies, or the nation's stance on murder. You got to vote for an MEP candidate for the European Parliament, and you got to vote for your national government, which is represented on the European Council, and together these are the two bodies that decide on EU laws. And the group of MEPs that got the most votes picked the head of the European Commission, which is the body that drafts the laws for the Parliament and Council to shape. And if you don't like what any of the candidates are saying, well, don't worry, because you get to run as one yourself if you want to.

Does Britain have more of a say over EU law than Germany? No. Can Britain be outvoted by the other EU nationals collectively? Yes.  Do I have more of a say over my flat's cleaning rota than any of my housemates? No. Can they collectively outvote me? Yes. That's democracy and that's subsidiarity and that's sovereignty in a globalised world where the challenges we face are no longer confined to 50-odd other tribe members. And if you ask me, that's a good way of doing things.

Book review: The European Identity, Stephen Green, 2015, Haus Curiosities

You'd expect a Tory peer to be Euroskeptic, but Stephen Green is also a former banker, and the finance industry is highly Europhile. Which is my roundabout way of saying: forget who Stephen Green is, unless you think it lends him authority.

The European Identity is a one- or two-sitting read that considers two things: how much Europeans have in common, and what that means for Britain. I suspect it isn't very original, but it is very well written and even more timely, given we British are 6 weeks away from voting on whether we want to remain in the EU.

Green is withering in his assessment of Britain's and even Europe's place in the world, setting out how the vast size of China and India will inevitably see Europe continue to decline. Some may find that unpatriotic; I found it refreshing.

He then provides a fascinating whirlwind summary of the philosophies that he thinks resulted in substantial differences in the characters of the people of the EU's big three: the UK, France and Germany. Brits are pragmatists, he says, the French are idealists, and the Germans are ... well, I didn't quite get that. Fantasists, maybe. But anyway, more importantly, he thinks we have more in common than we have in difference - namely:

"a commitment to rationalism, democracy, individual rights and responsibilities, the rule of law, social compassion..."

True of everyone, you might think, but social compassion and the US? Individual rights and Asia? The rule of law and Russia? Not so much.

If the book has a flaw, it's that it concludes with us exactly where we are today. With a loose alignment of European nations, cooperating where subsidiarity requires it and leaving well alone where national differences are cause for celebration or anyway too entrenched to quash. Which is all well and good, but a) people who aren't currently convinced are not going to read European Identity and b) even if they did, I don't think it would convince them. It's a great read, but it's more thought-provoking and informative than it is comprehensively or combatively convincing.

But then, it only professes to deal with identity: it leaves other books to deal with racism, job security, pressure on services, stifling bureaucracy ... And what it does it does very well.

Pity the poor arseholes

There are lots of talking points around whether the UK should remain in the EU. I want to get to the seat of one burning issue.

On The Andrew Marr Show today, discussing the referendum, Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said he was worried about British plumbers and electricians being "undercut" by workers from elsewhere in the EU.

But plumbing and electricity services can only be delivered in person, meaning everyone competing to provide those services faces the same living costs (unlike for telecoms services) - with the exception of the cost of supporting dependents. It costs less to support children living in Bulgaria than children living in London.

There are at least two solutions to this problem: stop British people having to compete on costs, as IDS wants, or support them to compete with a benefits system, specifically child tax credits.

Why might the second option be better? Because it's more progressive.

If you want to renovate your bathroom along the theme of a Roman thermae, filling your bath from the teats of a golden Venus, then you probably want the very best quality workmanship - no chipped nipples or asymmetrical streams of hot and cold to tarnish the effect. And you can get that, by paying through the nose for the plumber best able to handle lovely Venus, helping that plumber to build an empire and thermae of their own.

But if all you want is your bog repaired, cost is your main concern.

Under a protectionist policy like IDS advocates, everyone who wants their bog repaired has to support the plumber's kids to the same extent, regardless of whether they wipe their arse with Morrison's own-brand paper or quadruple-quilted Andrex.

Whereas, under a system of tax-based support, those who buff their anuses to a high sheen with the under-feathers of fattened geese contribute more to little Jim and Jane's alphabetti spaghetti than those who have to wait for the burn to subside before they can sit down after taking a squat.

IDS would prefer to see the goose baskets of the wealthy brim-full with goslings, whereas I'd like everyone to be able to take the weight off immediately after a strainer.

Where do you sit?