EUROPE’S PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN BUT WHO LISTENS?

[Copyright Cedric Pulford, 2005. This article may not be reprinted or distributed either electronically or on hard copy without permission]

Contempt for the people lies at the heart of the European Union, argues CEDRIC PULFORD. After rejections in France and Holland the European constitution is not dead, merely sleeping. A leadership that made voters in Ireland and Denmark vote again when they reached the wrong decision won’t give up that easily. Britain has much to learn from Switzerland, whose citizens see the EU’s democratic deficit as an affront.

FOR the liberty-loving Swiss the European Union’s lack of democracy is reason enough not to join. In fact, many of its procedures are widely seen as an affront to the sovereignty of the people. Britain can learn from this.

While EU leaders lecture the rest of the world about democracy, the union itself runs a substantial democratic deficit:

-- The law-making role of the bureaucracy (the European Commission), whose directives and regulations become the laws of member states. The process is supposed to obtain democratic legitimacy mainly from the oversight of the Council of Ministers, representing member states. However, as Christopher Booker and Richard North show in The Great Deception (2003), the reality is different.

When they examined the process closely, they found that 80 per cent of commission proposals were placed on the “A list”, which meant that ministers did not examine them and they went through on the nod. Meetings were held behind closed doors, and how each country’s representative voted was not announced. The legislative process is as secretive as those of Cuba, North Korea and pre-invasion Iraq, they comment.

Lord Hesketh, a former Conservative minister, told the authors of his surprise to find the final communique was the first item for a council meeting. He protested, and was told: “Oh no, minister, all the other items have already been agreed at last week’s Coreper [Committee of Permanent Representatives].”

Such is the appetite of the Brussels law factory that the Confederation of British Industry was driven to complain that London’s position as a global leader in financial services is under threat from a “tidal wave” of regulation emerging from Europe.

The blue-chip CBI, in its report, Financial Services: Promoting a Global Champion (October 2004), pointed out that the financial services industry, including banking and insurance, is one of Britain’s greatest assets. It employs more than one million people in the UK and generates over 5% of the country’s GDP.

CBI deputy director-general John Cridland said relentless new regulation was “forcing a dramatic and wasteful diversion of effort away from the daily battle to keep the UK ahead of its competitors.”

The British government’s statutory regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), often seen by business as part of the problem not part of the solution, was quick to position itself as the good guy. It said: “Although the majority of the FSA's current policy effort is driven by European policy initiatives, our general approach is not to impose obligations beyond what is required by directives.”

But the CBI report stated that some European legislation was “gold-plated” in Britain.

The powers of the Brussels commission were the very heart of the supranationalism projected for the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the ancestor of the European Union. The nature of ESSC institutions has persisted and deepened to the present day. This approach to making laws is deeply alien to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of parliamentary origination of legislation. Britain in the post-war era has never lacked interest in Europe, but it has consistently preferred intergovernmental co-operation to supranationalism.

-- The centralised focus of the EU would be reinforced by the European constitution, taking power and accountability even further away from the people. The constitution, which was signed into being on October 29, 2004, is currently becalmed – not in force – after it was rejected in mid-2005 in referenda in France and Holland. The Eurocracy still aims to resurrect it, or bring in its provisions in other ways.

The constitution establishes vast areas of policy and governance as “competences” to be shared between the centre and the states, even including an area so pre-eminently appropriate for local decision as town and country planning. Competences can be released to the states in their entirety if the centre so decides - in other words, it has the final say.

The language of much of the constitution is very vague, particularly around the Charter of Fundamental Rights, where rights like education, employment, social security, healthcare and environmental protection would need to be interpreted by the European Court of Justice, which must be expected to follow an integrationist agenda.

-- Disregard of the will of the people. All member states have to ratify the constitution for it to be lawfully introduced. After its rejection in France and Holland, European leaders started looking for ways round the decision. What we never heard was: “The people have spoken. That’s the end of the matter.” Among the more distasteful reactions was the idea that rejection in a small country was survivable (despite EU law and all that was told to electorates beforehand) but rejection by France, being a big country, was not.

This dismissive view of democracy had already been demonstrated in the second ballots held in Denmark and Ireland after the people did not vote in the elite’s desired direction the first time round. In 1992, the Danes spurned the Maastricht Treaty; nine years later the Irish did the same with the Nice Treaty. The instant response of the national and European leaderships was that these setbacks would not affect the treaties coming into force, even though the assent of all countries is legally needed. The Danes and the Irish “corrected” their mistake in repeat referendums.

The same disregard for the ballot box was shown in 2000 when EU heads of government threatened a member state, Austria, with political and diplomatic sanctions if the ultra-rightist Freedom Party was allowed into government. Their stance was backed by the European Parliament. Joerg Haider’s party had planned to form a coalition with the People’s Party. Whether one likes Haider or not is beside the point; the fact is that his party was democratically chosen.

-- Endemic corruption and venality among the Eurocracy, which led in 1999 to the resignation of the entire commission headed by Jacques Santer. No-one supposes the problems ended there. Brussels is in the same situation as London 150 years ago, before the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms cleaned up British government. Democracy cannot flourish in such a poisoned air. Just how poisoned was illustrated by the case of whistleblower Marta Andreasen, the accountant who refused to sign off commission accounts because of fraud concerns. In 2004, she was rewarded not with praise but with the sack.

-- The inbuilt limitations of the European Parliament. It cannot initiate legislation, and approves it only jointly with the Council of Ministers – a process called co-decision. Among the areas currently excluded from co-decision are taxation and the annual farm price review (although the Common Agricultural Policy takes up the lion’s share of the EU budget). If the parliament and the council don’t agree on a measure, it goes into a conciliation procedure and, if that fails, the measure lapses.

The parliament has been directly elected since 1979, and has evolved from little more than a talking shop with limited powers over the budget and the composition of the commission. In a key way, however, it is at an evolutionary dead-end. Co-decision means that it cannot fulfil the prime purpose of a genuine legislature in the modern era: sole and final approval of laws.

The parliament is required to confirm the European Commission en bloc, and can also disconfirm it. The threat of rejection precipitated the resignation of the Santer commission in the 1999 corruption scandal. The parliamentary power was used again in October 2004 in a controversy over the choice of anti-gay, anti-single mum Rocco Buttiglione as justice commissioner. The incoming Barroso commission ducked its rendezvous with the ballot rather than meet certain defeat in the confirmation vote.

These apparently impressive examples in fact underline the limits of the parliament’s power. In 1999 and 2004 the rumpus was over two commissioners and a single commissioner-designate, respectively. But Euro-MPs cannot reject individual commissioners. It’s all or nothing, and this (despite the two examples above) makes it more likely that nominations will go through: it gives a built-in advantage to “nothing”.

None of these are democratic deficiencies that can put right by more negotiations, or another treaty. The structure of this house is beyond repair or alteration. The British public’s sustained lack of enthusiasm for the “European construction” may be because it instinctively offends our long-established sense of democracy and due process.

The continued economic success of the UK outside the single currency can be seen as a pointer to what would happen if the country withdrew from the European Union. In 2003, according to Britain’s Department for Trade and Industry, the country was Europe’s top destination for inward investment, with foreign holdings up 18 per cent to $672bn.

The situation of Switzerland is another pointer. It thrives outside the EU, although in the Sixties it belonged to the European Free Trade Association (Efta), the trading bloc then led by Britain. The difference? For the Swiss, democracy is a crucial issue. They have a deeply rooted democratic system that surpasses Britain’s, with frequent referenda at various levels of government. They see little reason to exchange this for a remote, Brussels-based autocracy.

The main difficulty for Britain in withdrawing from the EU would be unravelling vast areas of law and public administration, including agriculture, fisheries and regional government, say Booker and North. For a start, there are 97,000 pages-worth of directives and regulations in force. Yet when the time comes there will assuredly be no lack of hands to dismantle the “European construction”.

Britain’s many friends around the world are bemused by the country’s perennial willingness to be the stooge of the United States, and almost as puzzled by its leaders’ attempts to lose its identity within a European super-state. They value the United Kingdom for its tolerance, good humour, sense of democracy, respect for privacy, civil and criminal laws, and uncorrupt administration. The picture is a little dated because some of these qualities are under threat from within, but foreigners still find much to admire.

For years I believed it was a choice between Washington and Brussels, that in the modern world Britain needed to be part of a larger sphere of influence. The example of Switzerland shows us that this is a non-existent dilemma. Freed from both an over-mighty United States and an alien Europe, Britain would be able to repay its friends' regard as well as serve its citizens better.

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