A new Ministry of Health report claims that one third of Spanish grandmothers have taken over the childcare duties during the week, worth up to 1% of Spain’s total GDP.

In the UK, grandparents provide 33 billion euros of free childcare every year.

eBay has told European lawmakers that more than three quarters of a million people have signed an online petition demanding changes to regulations that let luxury brand makers limit who can sell their products online.

The internet tat house is embroiled in a longstanding feud with luxury good firms like Tiffany & Co., Louis Vuitton, and Rolex, who say their brands are devalued by sales on ignoble auction websites like eBay.

The European Commission is amending rules on so-called vertical agreements between manufacturers and retailers. Existing guidelines are expire in May 2010. The current rules allow manufacturers to require vendors to have a brick-and-motor store before they are allowed to sell their merchandise online, while imposing stricter sales regulations on websites.

Luxury brands claim the offline retail “sales experience” is essential to their prestige and that online vendors free-ride on their promotion investments.

eBay calls the the restrictions an “unfair restraint” on the right to buy and sell goods in the European Single Market and are motivated on luxury brand owners’ desire to artificially inflate prices by eliminating competition from online sellers.

The company’s online petition was launched in early July. It has since collected 747,936 signatures from Europe, including 251,712 from the UK, 200,061 from Germany, and 103,666 from France.

eBay’s campaign is spearheaded by London MEP Mary Honeyball in the European Parliament.

“The presentation of this unprecedented petition should be a wake up call to the Commission to think again about its review of these regulations,” she wrote on her blog. “They are ten years out of date now and need to be made fit for the 21st century. The manufacturers and traditional retailers will be lobbying the Commission, working hard to protect themselves from having to compete with on a fair basis with internet businesses. Those of us who want a fair deal for consumers must lobby just as hard, and today we made a racing start.”

Honeyball is an admitted eBay fan, writing that she became convinced of its website’s value when she needed a last-minute “fancy hat” for a wedding.

eBay has run afoul of luxury goods makers many times in the past over the auctioning of counterfeit products on its website. Last year, eBay was ordered to pay £30.6m in damages to the handbag group LVHM over fakes.

In June of this year, a judge in London ruled that eBay has no legal duty to protect other companies’ trademarks or stop users from infringing them as a result of a lawsuit from cosmetic company L’Oréal (Via The Register)

On a wet and windy evening in early autumn, there must be better ways to spend your time than going to door-to-door in south-central Dublin.

But that is what 15 or so volunteers from Coir (which means “Right” in Irish) are doing, trying to persuade voters that the Lisbon Treaty should be given the boot a second time when the Irish vote again on 2 October.

Coir was hard at work during the last referendum too, but then was overshadowed by the publicity-friendly Declan Ganley, the millionaire businessman, and the party he set up to defeat the Lisbon Treaty, Libertas.

Libertas has come and gone however, and now it is Coir leading the charge with inflammatory posters about, amongst other things, how the Lisbon Treaty might send the minimum wage plummeting.

Coir’s spokesman Richard Greene explains how he thinks the campaign has changed.

“The politicians are taking a back seat,” he says, “because they are so frightened to go to doors, they are so discredited with having led the country into the worst economic crisis in Ireland’s history”.

“Big business is coming out for a ‘Yes’ because they know that if it is passed wages will drop and they will get cheap labour.”
Bleak outlook

It is not a good time to be a member of the Irish political establishment. The country is in terrible economic pain and no one can see anything but grim times for the foreseeable future.

Computer chip maker Intel is backing the Irish “Yes” campaign

Most of the blame is being placed at the feet of the governing Fianna Fail. If the opposition Fine Gael made this referendum a proxy vote on the government’s performance then the Lisbon Treaty would be going down in flames.

But neither Fine Gael nor the Labour party, nor the Greens, are willing to toss the treaty onto the pyre of the Irish economy. Of those parties represented in the Dail (parliament), only Sinn Fein is campaigning for a “No” vote.

Much of the party political campaign links a “Yes” vote to the economy. But some business leaders clearly think that this referendum is just too important to be left to the politicians.

Intel – the computer chip maker with a huge plant in Ireland – and Ryanair, the discount airline, have announced that they will drop a cool half million euros each into the “Yes” campaign.

That fits neatly into Richard Greene’s idea about why business backs the treaty. Such theories elicit a long sigh from Jim O’Hara, managing director of Intel Ireland.

“I’m an Irish citizen,” he counters. “I’ve worked in Ireland for forty years, my kids are in Ireland, my grandkids are in Ireland. So, this notion that big business has a big agenda which is scary for ordinary people… it’s a great example of the misrepresentation that’s been going on.”

Campaign makeover

Stepping into the breach alongside businesses like Intel and Ryanair are new campaign groups like Ireland for Europe and its little brother, Generation Yes. Again, the focus is away from politicians who invite little but scorn and onto a mix of media-savvy professional campaigners, celebrities and volunteers.

Media-savvy Declan Ganley is battling for a “No” vote again

Generation Yes members spend their lunch breaks dodging the rain and pressing brightly coloured leaflets into shoppers’ hands in central Dublin. Then they troop back to the office to target young voters – a group which voted disproportionately against the treaty last time around.

They run up repeatedly against the central problem of such a campaign – selling a dull treaty that deals with such topics as the weighting of votes in the council and the extension of qualified majority voting to an electorate more likely to have their attention caught by the scare stories of the opposition.

But at least this time the “Yes” campaign does not have Libertas to contend with. With pots of cash, and a telegenic leader, Libertas is widely credited with having pushed the “No” vote beyond the usual suspects – nationalists, deeply conservative Catholics and those who would vote against anything the main parties supported.

“What Libertas brought to the last ‘No’ campaign was respectability,” says Stephen Collins, political editor of the Irish Times.

As the campaign swung into the final three weeks there was good news and bad for supporters of the treaty. After a rocky few days when support appeared to be slipping away, two polls gave the “Yes” campaign an enormous 30-point lead.

But just as that was sinking in, Declan Ganley announced that he was rejoining the “No” campaign – without, it seems, the money he brought along last time, but still with the ear for a quote and eye for publicity that makes him an interviewer’s dream.

Mr Ganley may not be the game-changer that he once was. Ireland is in a very different state than a year and a half ago.

But the campaign has almost three weeks to run – and whatever the opinion polls are saying, no one on either side will be relaxing until the last vote is cast. Original Article

The European Union will present proposals in September on reforming its immigration policy, Sweden said Monday, amid a rising wave of people risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.
The proposals concern a ‘relocation’ policy, whereby refugees who land on the shores of Europe’s Mediterranean countries would be transferred to other EU member states, as well as a more efficient asylum policy, Swedish Immigration Minister Tobias Billstroem told AFP.

The EU member states’ application of the proposed policies would be voluntary, added Billstroem, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency.

“This relocation project is to be presented in September by the vice-president of the (European) Commission, Jacques Barrot,” who is also EU justice commissioner, Billstroem said.

Regarding the asylum policy reform, which is aimed at establishing refugee quotas in the EU, “we’re waiting for a proposal from the commission in September as well,” he said.

More than 67,000 people crossed the Mediterranean in 2008 to try to enter Europe illegally, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and some of them have died at sea.

Italy, Malta, Spain and Greece have asked the European Union to help them share the burden of refugees crossing the Mediterranean, usually from Turkey and Libya.

Last week, five Eritrean migrants rescued off the Italian island of Lampedusa said 73 other migrants had perished during the crossing from Libya and that their bodies had been dumped at sea.

European Commission spokesman Dennis Abbott, speaking in Brussels, said the role of the EU’s executive arm was a coordinating one, as it was up to the 27 member states to police their borders and set asylum policy.

“We are well aware of the extreme difficulties and the problems which some Mediterranean countries are faced with, and the need to better share the burden at the European level.” he said

“It is about finding the right balance, but we are talking about national competences,” Abbott added, stressing that directives from Brussels were not the only way to tackle the problem.

“We spend a lot of money helping third countries to improve facilities so that people do not actually want to leave them in the first place,” he told AFP.

The seriousness with which all EU nations treated the issue was demonstrated, he said, in EU summit conclusions which spoke of “firmness, solidarity and shared responsibility” on immigration.

“The commission will help member states to share the burden,” he promised.

However, one EU source admitted that immigration and asylum are not such major problems in some northern European member states and that those nations are keen not to increase the rules binding them on immigration policy. (Via Expatica)

The unemployment rate across the 16 countries using the euro rose to 9.5% in May from 9.3% in April, data from the Eurostat agency has shown.

It is the highest rate since May 1999. Fifteen million people were out of work, up by 273,000 from April.

In the 27-nation EU, the jobless rate was 8.9%, while the number unemployed rose by 385,000 to 21.5 million.

Spain had the highest unemployment rate at 18.7%, while the Netherlands had the lowest rate of 3.2%.

‘Likely to continue’

“May’s sharp increase in eurozone unemployment demonstrates that the ‘green shoots of recovery’ are not yet showing up in the labour market,” said Martin van Vliet, an economist at ING.

“It would have been higher still if not for the short-time working schemes in some eurozone countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, where recent increases in unemployment have been less severe.”

Short-time working is a system that allows companies to work less for up to six months while their loss of earnings is made up by the government.

“We think that unemployment is likely to continue to rise certainly through this year and actually through most of next year as well,” said Nick Kounis, an economist at Fortis.

“We see the unemployment rate peaking at around 11.5%… at the end of next year.” (Via BBC)

Industrial production in the 16 states that use the euro fell a record 21.6% in April, compared with the same month last year, according to Eurostat.

It was worse than had been expected and followed March’s figure of 19.3%. The month-on-month fall was 1.9%.

The figures contrast with the latest UK production data, which showed a monthly rise for the first time in more than a year during April.

Japan’s production grew 5.9% in April compared with March’s figure.

“The April industrial production data for the eurozone are very disappointing and raise concern that the region is lagging in terms of signs of recession easing,” said Howard Archer at IHS Global Insight.

Industrial production accounts for about 17% of total output in the eurozone and the figures have raised concerns that its economy could shrink by more than had been expected in the second quarter of the year.

The European Commission predicts that the eurozone economy will contract by 0.6% between April and June (Via BBC)

But in the European election results declared on Sunday, the equivalent figure was under 44 per cent, down from 49 in 2004. Britain’s ‘two party system’ is ebbing away. Indeed, the share of the vote won by the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats together has slumped from almost 96 per cent in the 1987 general election to 57 per cent in this year’s Euro poll.

Of course, Euro elections are fought using a proportional representation electoral system, while Parliament still uses first-past-the-post. PR invites electors to vote in a more plural way and, against the backdrop of the Parliamentary expenses debacle, has this year allowed voters to vent their anger with the major parties. The 44 per cent overall vote for Labour and the Tories is the lowest in any national election since 1945. But even in Westminster elections the two-and-a half major parties are under threat. In 2005, the ‘others’, who exclude the Lib Dems, exceeded 10 per cent. This share will undoubtedly rise at the next general election.

The weekend’s Euro results saw the Labour vote fragment into pieces that were inherited by Greens, UKIP, the BNP, English Democrats, the Christian Party, the Socialist Labour Party, No2EU and various others.

No fewer than 15 parties won 0.5 per cent of the vote or more. Cornish nationalists put on a good show. Voters used the PR voting system to express, simultaneously, aggravation with the government while providing a hint about what they might do if the country moved to PR for local elections in England and Wales and for Parliament.

Some of the Labour defectors will return to the fold for Westminster elections. But others will get used to casting votes in a less tribal way. Changed perceptions of ‘class’ and less ideologically-based political parties within Britain have weakened the grasp of the Labour and Conservative parties. People often find it hard to discern a difference between the positions adopted by party leaders, who then resort to ‘yah-boo’ exchanges to cover their similarities. Polling suggests the public do not much like this aggressive and adversarial politics.

Because their memberships are now so much smaller than in the past, the major parties will find it hard to re-build their base. Activism has long been in decline. As successive governments have weakened local government, there is less of a political culture beyond Westminster than there used to be. In a country as centralised as Britain, people may well start to support exotic parties in an attempt to get noticed inside the bunkers of Whitehall.

Sunday’s European elections provide a flavour of electoral consequences the fragmentation and individualism that has evolved in Britain in recent decades. Given the chance people will increasingly experiment with new political parties. PR, for good or for ill, encourages such experimentation. Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg will face a challenge to stop the continuing advance of minority parties and ‘others’. A genie is out of a bottle.

Prof Tony Travers is a professor within the Government Department at London School of Economics (Via Telegraph)

Spain’s opposition conservatives beat the ruling Socialists in European elections Sunday, seen as a test for the government amid the worst recession in 15 years and soaring unemployment.

With 99 percent of votes counted, the opposition Popular Party had garnered 42.25 percent and 23 of the 50 seats up for grabs, compared to 38.50 percent and 21 seats for the Socialist Party of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

In the last European parliamentary elections, in 2004, the Socialist Party won 25 of the 54 seats then at stake, against 24 for the PP.

The election was marked by another low turnout of just 45.81 percent, up just slightly from the all-time low of 45.14 percent five years ago.

“We have won the elections,” PP leader Mariano Rajoy told cheering supporters. “This is our best result in a European election.”

He said the people “expressed their desire for change,” in particular in the government’s response to the economic crisis.

The Socialist Party described the result as “reasonably positive”.

Campaign issues had focused on domestic rather than European matters, with the PP playing on concerns over the economic crisis and soaring unemployment.

The opposition also accused Zapatero, who was comfortably re-elected to a second four-year term in March 2008, of using military, rather than private, planes to travel to campaign rallies.

The PP has been hit by allegations of corruption involving regional leaders, but it had been encouraged by an election victory in the north-western region of Galicia in March.

Spain entered its first recession in 15 years at the end of 2008 and country’s unemployment rate soared to 17.4 percent in the first quarter of 2009, more than double the average of 8.3 percent for the entire 27-nation European Union.

The Coalition for Europe, composed of nationalist parties from various regions of Spain, had picked up 5.09 percent of the vote and two seats and the left-wing IU-ICV coalition 3.73 percent and two seats.

Another alliance of nationalist parties, Europe for the People – Greens, and the anti-nationalist UPyD each bagged one seat.

A total of 35.5 million people were eligible to vote. These included 284,000 citizens of other EU member states, mainly Romanians (76,000) and Britons (49,000).

Spain was one of 19 of the 27 EU nations to vote Sunday on the fourth and final day of polling to elect 736 deputies for a five-year term at the European parliament, which is the only directly-elected EU institution.

The parliament, which has struggled to strengthen its standing on the continent, is expected to stay under centre-right control. (Via Expatica)

Centre-right parties have gained ground in elections to the European Parliament, according to exit polls and initial results.

Results appeared immediately after voting ended in 19 EU countries at 2000 GMT. Eight other countries voted in the past few days.

All 736 parliament seats are up for grabs. Preliminary figures suggest the lowest-ever turnout, at 43.24%.

BBC correspondents say the figures will dent the EU’s credibility.

Fringe groups appear to have benefited, with far-right parties picking up seats in the Netherlands and Hungary, partial results suggest.

Several governments battling the economic downturn look set for a heavy defeat, says the BBC’s Oana Lungescu in Brussels.

However, governing parties in France and Germany appear to have done relatively well despite the crisis. In partial results so far:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP trounced socialist opponents, while greens from the Europe-Ecologie party also made gains

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling centre-right grouping lost ground but finished ahead of its rivals

In Italy, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right coalition finished ahead of the socialist opposition, with between 39% and 43% of the vote, exit polls suggested

In the UK, the governing Labour Party is expecting a serious defeat, possibly slipping to fifth or even sixth place

Spain’s governing Socialists were slightly behind the opposition Popular Party, according to partial result

BBC Europe editor Mark Mardell in Brussels says the parliament in Brussels has been buzzing with activity.

Party groupings have quite literally set out their stalls along the main walkway, alongside mini TV studios – some rather grand and gleaming, others little more than a stool and camera, our correspondent says

Voters have been choosing representatives mainly from their own national parties, many of which then join EU-wide groupings with similarly-minded parties from other countries.

The largest grouping has for the last five years been the centre-right EPP (288 seats out of a current 785), followed by the centre-left PES (216) and the liberal ALDE (100).

Provisional figures released by the EU suggested turnout was at an all-time low in some countries, including France (40.5%) and Germany (42.2%).

In Malta, on the other hand, it was expected to near 80%, and in Brussels, there were long queues outside a polling station on the Grand Place on Sunday.

Turnout has fallen at each European election in the last 30 years, from nearly 62% in 1979 to 45.47% in 2004. (Via BBC)

The European Union parliament has long had the image of being a gravy-train but an EU election is no picnic.

The voting system is as arcane as the 27-nation EU is widespread. The election for the 736 lawmakers takes four days and there will be weeks of bargaining afterwards to settle the assembly’s top jobs.

Voting starts on Thursday in Britain and the Netherlands. Ireland holds its election on the following day, the Czech Republic on June 5 and 6, and Slovakia Latvia, Malta and Cyprus vote on June 6.

France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the other 15 countries in the EU all hold their elections on the Sunday. The first reliable forecasts will come out about 2000 GMT on the night of June 7.

Each country uses its own preferred voting system.

While any EU citizen can stand as a candidate or vote in any EU country where he or she is resident and registered on the electoral list, rules such as the minimum age for voting changes from country to country.

There were 785 deputies in the old assembly. The Treaty of Nice ordered the cutback but this could be only temporary. If the Treaty of Lisbon is ever ratified by every member, the number will go up again to 754.

Each country’s representation is roughly in line with its population. Malta, the smallest member, has five deputies. Germany, the biggest, has 99. The other main powers — Britain, France and Italy — have 72 each, while Poland and Spain elect 50 each.

One of the big unknowns is how the extra 18 deputies will be shared out, if the Lisbon reform treaty comes into force.

The first meeting of the new assembly will be on July 14 to 16 in Strasbourg.

It will have to elect a new parliament president to take charge of the assembly for the first half of its five-year term.

As the centre-right bloc is expected to gain the upper hand in the election, their candidates, former Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek, and Italian Euro Deputy Mario Mauro, a close ally of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, are favourites.

One of their first duties will also be to approve the European Commission president nominated by an EU summit at the end of June. Jose Manuel Barroso, the former Portuguese prime minister, is widely expected to get a second term. (Via Expatica)