Omnibus II moves again - accelerating the inevitable?

No sooner has the holiday season drawn to a close (and by that I mean everyone else's holiday season, as we don't 'do holidays' at Governance Matters...) than our good friend Omnibus II has jogged down the road another month - the procedure file has just been updated to show it will be hitting the November parliamentary Plenary (by my count, the 5th postponement since 2011).

Not entirely sure of the rather abrupt nature of this movement, bearing in mind the main players are probably still wearing their 'budgie smugglers' in the Med at the moment, but Gideon over on the Wire picked up on an issue which may have led to an early concession that October was simply too early, with an impact assessment on LTGs likely to roll off the back of the next trialogue.

We are also close enough to the finish line (don't laugh) to be getting into the national political cesspits, so a whiff of sabotage and national interest may also be coming to bear. Not only have the UK political opposition decided that Solvency II is controversial enough to start point scoring on, but last month Sharon Bowles (current Chair of ECON) gave an astonishingly frank interview to Risk.net (subscription only I'm afraid) where Das Küchenspüle was thrown at the German contingent. Quotes included;

• "...certain leading German MEPs have publicly said that Solvency II is never going to happen anyway" and
• "...I think there is a subtext here that the Germans - and I think this is well known - are trying to jettison the whole of Solvency II"

Well if Der Wahnsinn really is eine schmale brücke like the song says, its probably best not to cross it!