27/05/2015
The story broke in
Handelblatt yesterday, only to have the likes of the
Express today with front-page hyperventilating about a secret Franco-German "plot" to "slap a crippling new tax rate on Britain".
This also gets the treatment from the
Telegraph, which blathers about the plans being "a direct challenge to David Cameron, who is calling for sovereignty to be returned to EU members". And their story, as do the others, comes complete with the usual vapid boiler-plate from talking heads. Yet not one of the darlings notes that setting a minimum rate of corporation tax â which is what this is all about â requires unanimity. Britain can stop this dead with a veto.
At least we get
City AM telling us that little bit of the story, advising us that the Government "has knocked back a move by German authorities to introduce a minimum rate of corporation tax across the European Union, saying that such proposals would not survive a vote involving the EU's 28 member states".
But even this deadbatting does not get close to telling us what is going on â after all why would the Germans seek to introduce this proposal, which is to be presented by the Commission as an Action Plan on company taxation on 17 June, if it could be so easily "knocked back"?
One might possibly rely for an explanation from
Open Europe's Raoul Ruparel, who tells
City AM that the Franco-German proposals were "mostly a political show" and unlikely to "go anywhere", except that this misses the point â as
Open Europe so often does.
We are, of course, dealing with old friend
enhanced cooperation, which was invoked with
Financial Transfer Tax. And the point here (as the Commission narrative shows) is that enhanced cooperation "may be undertaken only as a last resort, when it has been established within the Council that the objectives of such cooperation cannot be attained within a reasonable period by the Union as a whole".
Thus, the Germans will be submitting their proposal to the Council in the expectation that it will be turned down, so that the eurozone can adopt it under alternative treaty procedures. Furthermore, that this was the intention all along is signalled by
an earlier proposal in 2011 by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, aimed to introduce a "competitiveness pact" in the eurozone. So much for the "secret plot".
Had any of the papers been on the ball, though, they would have seen this as part of the ongoing Franco-German initiative, which had been
reported earlier. Clearly, joined-up reporting isn't their thing.
As so often is the case, therefore, we see the British media fundamentally incapable of reporting accurately or intelligently on EU issues, either going over the top with ludicrous claims of "plots", or simply missing the crucial details which are needed to make sense of events.
Yet these are the organs that are to be reporting on the EU referendum, and supposedly keeping us informed. Campaigners have every right to be worried. Neither the Fourth Estate, nor their prattling "talking heads" on which they rely, are up to the job.
