Some brief thoughts on Lisbon

1. The Lisbon Treaty itself is not a problem. It's largely a tidying-up exercise, streamlining the way the EU works and getting rid of a few anomalies. Far from being a Brussels power grab, it gives citizens of EU countries a greater say, especially by increasing the role of the directly elected European Parliament.

2. The way in which the Treaty has been ratified is a major problem. If the Irish voters do indeed say yes to Lisbon today, the Treaty will have been brought into law in the most underhand fashion. Nothing shows more contempt for democracy than asking a country to keep holding referendums until it gets the "right" result.

There's a gulf of mistrust between EU citizens and EU leaders; even a relatively straightforward Treaty such as Lisbon immediately raises people's suspicions. And that's the Catch-22 for Europe - if almost every change to the EU's structure is seen by citizens as undemocratic skulduggery, it makes it impossible for the EU's leaders to reform the system and make it more transparent.

The bungled handling of both the Constitution and Lisbon certainly hasn't helped matters!

3. Is the Lisbon Treaty suitable referendum material anyway? It's all very well talking about democracy, but most people haven't read the Treaty. We aren't exactly going to have a mature national debate on the finer points of EC law (or EU law, as it will be renamed after Lisbon comes into force and abolishes the confusing "Three Pillars" system).

The Lib Dem position (last I checked) was that Treaties such as Lisbon are not suitable referendum topics - they should be negotiated and ratified directly by the government. Our membership of the EU, on the other hand, should be put to a public vote, so we can choose to keep or reject the whole package.

This seems sensible, but the cynic in me thinks it's a purely tactical policy. There's a serious risk of a no-vote if we had our own referendum on Lisbon, whereas a referendum on EU membership is vanishingly unlikely. The Lib Dem leadership obviously wouldn't like a no-vote on either issue.

Quite how this all squares with point 2 (above) is anybody's guess.

4. This can't go on. If Ireland ratifies Lisbon, and it goes into force, the EU will have scraped through this latest crisis - but for how long? The mistrust certainly won't go away, and we will simply be saving the problems and the resentment up for a future generation to deal with. The current ostrich tactics help nobody.

The EU urgently needs to reestablish its relationship with its own citizens - on a basis of trust and respect - or else it may as well not exist at all.

A bit of restraint ...

The leader of the Conservative Euro MPs, Giles Chichester, has resigned over a serious error with his expenses.

The leader of our own Euro MPs resigned for making anti-Semitic comments. And then had the cheek to stand for re-election.

I suggest we keep very, very quiet about this story.

The EU treaty saga rumbles on ...

Lord McNally, Lib Dem leader in the Lords, is opposed to a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Lib Dem peers are going to vote against holding a public vote. This could be crucial: no party has a majority in the Upper House, which makes it quite possible for the government to be defeated. However, if the Lib Dem peers vote with the government, instead of abstaining as our MPs did in the Commons, Labour should comfortably avoid a referendum.

The fiasco over the Commons vote has cast a shadow over Nick Clegg's leadership, after an otherwise very promising start, and this latest development makes it far worse. We are now quite literally facing in two directions at once. Having an unpopular position isn't great, but appearing to have no position at all is far, far more damaging.

No doubt Lord McNally will come in for serious flak for this. The Eurosceptics will blame him for denying the British people a say on the treaty, and within the party, he'll be criticised for making us look inconsistent. But in truth, McNally comes out of this rather well - certainly better than Nick Clegg. Because, whether or not you agree with Tom Mcnally on this issue (and I don't), he has at least come to a clear viewpoint, and defended it in public. Clegg has deliberately abstained, and made himself look hesitant, petulant, and worst of all, weak.

My own view is this: our initial call for an in-or-out referendum was entirely right. People are kidding themselves if they think there would be a detailed, clause-by-clause public debate on the Lisbon Treaty. Much better to put the entire question of our EU membership to the people. But as soon as it became obvious that an in-or-out referendum wouldn't be forthcoming, we should have backed a referendum on the treaty instead, albeit as a second-best option. It would have been the closest we could have come to fulfilling our manifesto commitment, and would still have allowed us to debate many of the same issues as we would have discussed during an in-or-out ballot.

Alternatively, we could have taken the Tom McNally line of opposing the Lisbon referendum, and whilst I'd have disagreed with that position myself, we would be in much better shape now if we'd decided on it at the time and stuck with it consistently all the way through - because it is, at the very least, an actual position.

This continuing saga will reflect badly on the Lib Dems - but it says far more about Nick Clegg than about Tom McNally. McNally's decision may have led to a serious inconsistency in our approach, but only because he has deviated from the previous position of sitting on our hands and hoping the problem would go away. And the one person to blame for that is Clegg.

Holocaust denial: what happened to European principles?

In a climbdown from its earlier plans, the EU has decided not to introduce a blanket ban on Holocaust denial. The new proposal, a compromise agreed between Ministers, makes it illegal to trivialise crimes of genocide, but only if it has the effect of inciting hatred or violence. It sounds rather like a waste of time, as you'd have thought inciting hatred or violence was illegal anyway, but even if it's superfluous, it's still a considerable improvement.

Chris Davies, Lib Dem Euro MP for the North West, responded with this superb little nugget:

There are stupid people everywhere but in a free society they should have the right to be stupid.

Yes, quite.

I do wonder, though: why on earth does this sort of thing require EU-wide legislation? Much as I disagree with banning Holocaust denial, I can understand why it's a matter for debate in places like Germany and Austria. The different EU member states have very different histories and responsibilities, so why isn't it up to national parliaments to decide what's right for each country? This certainly isn't an area where the EU should have competence.

Angela Merkel, at the start of Germany's EU Presidency, talked about the importance of reviving the European Constitution. One of the good things about that Constitution was the emphasis it put on the principle of subsidiarity - the idea that everything the EU does should be carried out on the lowest possible level. If the members states can get something done on their own, the EU should keep its nose out of it. This entire episode shows a shocking contempt towards that key principle of subsidiarity. European voters have already rejected the Constitution in its present form, and if even the Council of Ministers can walk all over it with disdain, they can hardly expect people to accept a revised version.

A ban on Holocaust denial: music to the ears of the far right

In 1986, in his book The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi wrote about the difficulties in explaining Auschwitz to new generations:

I remember with a smile the adventure I had several years ago in a fifth grade classroom, where I had been invited to comment on my book and answer the pupils’ questions. An alert-looking little boy, apparently at the head of the class, asked me the obligatory question: “But how come you didn’t escape?” I briefly explained to him [about the malnutrition and starvation, the watchtowers and electrified fencing, the fanaticism of the guards, and the fact that there was nowhere to flee to even if I escaped]; not quite convinced, he asked me to draw a sketch of the camp on the blackboard …My interlocutor studied the drawings for a few instants, asked me for a few further clarifications, then he presented to me the plan he had worked out: here, at night, cut the throat of the sentinel; then, put on his clothes; immediately after this, run over there to the power station and cut off the electricity, so the searchlights would go out and the high tension fence would be deactivated; after that I could leave without any trouble. He added seriously: “If it should happen to you again, do as I told you; you’ll see that you’ll be able to do it.”

That little anecdote made me smile too, but it’s also worrying – it shows how difficult it was for young people to get their head round the Holocaust, even in the 1980s. With each generation, we’re further removed from what took place, and it’s an unsettling sign of the times that nowadays, people can claim that the Nazis didn’t systematically murder millions.

It’s an even more unsettling sign of the times when we start to take those people seriously. The EU is very wrongly proposing a blanket ban on Holocaust denial, as well as “grossly trivialising” other genocides. The suggestion has been around for six years, and since then, there’s been much debate about the exact wording, and which crimes against humanity should be included. (The Armenian genocide, for example, is specifically exempted, to avoid upsetting Turkey.)

There’s very little point in me going back over the classic arguments for unrestricted free speech. I believe there’s no idea so right, or so wrong, that it should be exempt from being discussed, but that argument’s been made for centuries, and much more convincingly than I could put it. What I am certain of, however, is that this sort of legislation will largely help the far right. You only need to look at what happened a couple of years back, when pseudo-historian and revisionist David Irving was arrested in Austria under existing Holocaust denial laws. The British National Party used the news story as a springboard for this very dangerous article, a classic example of the Trojan horse tactics of the far right.

I say “Trojan horse” because the BNP are making a legitimate complaint against a genuine wrong (in this case, a writer being arrested for suggesting a banned idea) – but at the same time, they’re allowing several outrageous claims to piggyback on a reasonable-sounding article. Half of the BNP article is a coherent defence of freedom of speech; the other half consists of subtle insinuations about the truth of the Holocaust, and a defence of David Irving’s deliberate forgeries.

Just over a decade after the Rwandan genocide, and in the middle of the genocide in Darfur, the BNP are able to get away with saying that the events of WWII are “matters of history, not of 21st century politics” – although these events couldn’t be more relevant to us today. And in a moment of extreme cynicism, the BNP claim that discussions about the truth of the Holocaust are irrelevant to the debate, purely a matter for historians, and that they are entirely neutral on the issue – despite the fact that they're sticking up for the reputation of an entirely discredited writer, and defending his debunked views! What coherence.

If we ban Holocaust denial, we’ll give the far right many more martyrs like Irving. And every time the BNP have a legitimate grievance to write about, they’ll manage to sneak in half a dozen revisionist, or downright racist ideas, under a veneer of plausibility. The BNP may claim to be appalled by a ban on Holocaust denial, but if the EU follows through with its idiotic idea, Nick Griffin and his ilk will be laughing all the way to the polling station.