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The dishonesty of the EU debate

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Over at his Economist blog, Charlemagne asks “Why it is anti-EU to suggest that the European Parliament does not work very well?”

Herein lies one of the most fundamental problems of the EU debate – something to which I seem repeatedly to return.

The EU is an incredibly complex socio-economic political experiment – a type of regulatory/governmental body unlike anything that has ever been tried before. It is made up of myriad institutions and semi-official bodies, many of which have vast areas of overlap both with each other and with national governments. Good chunks of the EU machinery work only through sharing staff with the agencies, civil services and governments of the member states (the Council being made up of ministers from the member states, the Commission relying on the law-drafting powers of civil servants from the member states, and so on).

At the same time, the EU works across a vast array of policy and regulatory areas – agriculture, fisheries, monetary policy (in some member states, at least), migration and immigration, trade, security and justice, competition and business, aspects of education, sporting and cultural events, and on and on and on.

And yet, whenever the merits of the EU are discussed – especially in the mainstream media – it is presented in simple, confrontational black and white terms. You are either for the EU, or you are against. A eurosceptic or a europhile. Pro-EU or anti-EU.

Like Charlemagne, I’ve been accused of being both a eurosceptic and a europhile in my time – I describe myself as loosely pro-EU, so to some of those in the anti- camp, that makes me a europhile; yet I frequently criticise the EU, so to some of those in the pro- camp I am a eurosceptic.

Yet both europhiles and eurosceptics (and especially their most fervent elements, the withdrawalists and the superstatists) represent the extremes of opinion on the EU. It’s like presenting a jury in a trial with only two alternatives – either let the accused off Scott free or execute them, with no option for fines, community service, rehab or prison sentences. (To make matters worse, although there is a sizable minority of eurosceptics who are actively anti-EU and advocate either withdrawal or its abolition, I have come across very few uncritical europhiles – an imbalance that distorts the debate yet further.)

The presentation of the arguments about the EU in such a manner is not just misleading – it is also dishonest. The choice is not between a federal European superstate and complete withdrawal – yet it suits the extremes on both sides to play up this false binary choice. The europhiles warn of the dire consequences of international isolation should we not back further integration, while the euroscptics warn of a loss of sovereignty and national identity should we continue to allow the EU to expand its influence.

Neither option has to be the case – nor is either option likely in an organisation made up of 27 member states where vetoes and unanimity ensure that almost all decisions are watered-down compromises. Yet these extremes are pretty much all we are ever told about – the dire danger of passing the Constitution / Lisbon Treaty is to move ever closer to the superstate; the dire danger of not passing it is the breakup of the EU itself and a descent into the bad old days of national rivalries and protectionist squabbles. This is nonsense.

Yet in the public debates about the EU there seems to be no room for any shades of grey – indeed, in my experience of doing media punditry about the EU, extreme views are positively encouraged to “liven up” a subject usually (and correctly) considered rather dull.

The idea of a political system that works pretty much entirely via compromise and cooperation, as the EU does, seems anathema to a press that’s always keen to play up political differences and conflict. When faced with a political organisation that, on the surface, seems more or less monolithic (“the EU” being shorthand for the European Parliament, Council, Commission, Court of Justics, or any of its other institutions and agencies depending on the context – sometimes even individual Commissioners and MEPs, and occasionally even institutions that have nothing to do with the EU), the press – and in turn the extreme pro- and anti-EU groups who find such a situation to their advantage – has created a conflict between two artificial extremes in order to force the debate to conform to anachronistic preconceptions about how political discourse is conducted that are entirely inappropriate when approaching something as innovative and unique as the EU.

I remain convinced – and the continued falling turnout at EU elections tends to support this – that the vast majority of people neither really know nor care about the EU enough to form an opinion one way or the other, and that this artificial binary choice between pro- and anti- is serving only to put more people off. But at the same time, anyone who starts looking into the EU with an open mind – as I like to think I have tried to do – will end up (if they are not tricked by the vast amounts of disinformation that seems to swamp all EU debate into believing things that are simply not true) somewhere in the grey middle ground, neither supporting it entirely, nor wishing for it to be done away with. One of the reasons for the continuing decline in turnout at EU elections, I’d suggest, is precisely because voters feel they have to decide whether they are pro- or anti-EU, yet mostly feel neither.

These people, wavering halfway between supporting the EU and thinking it’s a bit rubbish in places, seem to lack a convenient moniker. They are neither europhiles nor eurosceptics. But there is a perfect term for them – they are the majority.

What percentage of laws come from the EU?

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Last week on the BBC’s Question Time, eurosceptic Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan mentioned 84%; UKIP leader Nigel Farrage said it was 75%, the figure most often mentioned by anti-EU types (such as French National Front leader Jean Marie Le Pen or the Libertas Party) is that 80% of our laws come from the EU, while in a speech elsewhere last week, Conservative leader David Cameron said that “Almost half of all the regulations affecting our businesses come from the EU”.

These figures (or, at least, figures in this rough ballpark) are widely accepted, with everyone from universities to charities seeming to accept them at face value.

But are any of them actually true? And which is it? 84%? 80%? 75%? 50%? Or some other figure? Because they can’t ALL be right.

Daniel Hannan: 84% of all laws come from the EU

Let’s take the biggest figure first. If 84% sounds ridiculously high, that’s because it is. Even eurosceptic thinktank Open Europe have dismissed this claim as unrealistic – explaining in detail where the calculation originated.

In short, it comes from a reply by the Parliamentary Undersecretary of the German Parliament, Alfred Hartenbach, given on 29 April 2005 – relating specifically (and exclusively) to Germany, where he stated that from 1998 until 2004, 18,187 EU regulations and 750 EU directives were adopted in Germany. During the same period the German Parliament passed in total 1,195 laws (as well as 3,055 “Rechtsverordnungen” – which are like Primary and Secondary legislation). This was seized on by former German President Roman Herzog and Luder Gurken of the Centrum für Europäische Politik, who used these figures to work out 84% of all German laws originate in Brussels. As Open Europe explains:

750 (directives) + 18,187 (regulations) = 18,917 EU legislative acts
1,195 (Gesetze) + 3,055 (Verordnungen) – 750 (directives) = 3,500 German legislative acts
= 84%.

The 750 directives were substracted as they require seperate implementing laws in Germany (assuming a directive/implementing law ratio of 1:1).

Open Europe goes on to explain why this figure is, at best, misleading. And remember, Open Europe is a eurosceptic thinktank:

to conclude that 4 out 5 laws originate in Brussels is probably a step too far. Germany, for instance, is a federal system, meaning that the individual Lander has substantial powers to legislate autonomously. The many laws adopted on the Lander-level would have to be included in any all laws count, which isn’t the case here. In addition, this count says nothing about the nature of the laws.

It’s also important to keep in mind that the EU’s powers are mainly regulatory, as opposed to budgetary. This means that most issues that relate to spending and taxation (health bills, crime bills, educational reform, pensions, welfare, etc) – the “wallet” issues if you will – are mostly beyond the realm of the EU, but must also be included in any count that includes all laws.

So, the 84% figure is based on a calculation about German laws (and is therefore not directly transferable to Britain, as Hannan and others would like us to believe), and that calculation in any case left out a huge chunk of German legislation, rendering the final figure utterly obsolete.

So the 84% figure can safely be discounted.

UKIP: 75% of all laws come from the EU

Next up, the second highest figure. Where did UKIP get their 75% claim from? Well, handily they provide a video on YouTube which shows it comes from Hans-Gert Pottering, EPP MEP and President of the European Parliament from January 2007 to June 2009:

“If we were not that influential,” the subtitles show Pottering as saying, “then we would not be the legislator of 75% of all laws in Europe.”

But where it suits UKIP’s purpose to interpret this as literally meaning that, EU-wide, 75% of ALL laws stem from the EU, had they included more of Pottering’s speech the context – and therefore the meaning – would have become far more apparent. For what Pottering was actually saying was that the European Parliament (not the EU) legislates on 75% of laws *passed by the European Union*. Not passed by EU member states – just by the EU itself, at EU level. Because the European Parliament has little say in something like 20-25% of EU legislation (something the Lisbon Treaty would rectify, but that’s for another day). German speakers will also be able to confirm that the subtitles on UKIP’s video of Pottering are not 100% accurate.

So the 75% figure does not apply to the percentage of laws in individual member states that stem from the EU, but the percentage of laws that stem from the EU that the European Parliament has a say in. That’s an entirely different kettle of fish – and so the 75% figure can safely be dismissed as based on a (deliberate?) misunderstanding.

David Cameron: “Almost half”

It is worth noting again here that Cameron says “almost half of all regulations affecting our businesses come from the EU”. Some laws may be regulations, but not all regulations are laws, so we need to tread a little more carefully here. Where did Cameron get his figure from? I genuinely have no idea. I can’t track down an original source for it anywhere – though it is a claim made on the website of the Institute of Directors – albeit with the qualification that “estimates vary”, something Cameron neglected to mention.

But what is the real figure? How much say does the EU have in business regulations? Well, handily enough, last month the British Chambers of Commerce produced a report (PDF) investigating precisely this issue, “Worlds Apart: The British and EU Regulatory Systems” – their seventh annual report into the subject, and the fifth comparing the British and EU systems. Their conclusion?

In terms of the number of regulations, the EU this year accounted for only 20%. The reduction from the previous EU level of about 30% is the primary reason for the overall decline in 2007/8.

Hmmm… Only 20%, you say? And the proportion of EU regulations is declining, you say? So where did Cameron get his “almost half” from?

The House of Commons Library’s 9.1% claim

Also on Question Time last week was Europe Minister Caroline Flint, who trotted out the usual defence against the above eurosceptic claims about the EU’s influence that just 9.1% of UK laws stem from the EU. the report in question can be found as a PDF in the depths of the UK Parliament site.

The study was conducted by the (politically independent) House of Commons Library between 1998 and 2005, based on the statutory instruments passed with references to European legislation, because “The vast majority of EC legislation is enacted by statutory instruments under section 2 (2) of the European Communities Act.” It also helpfully breaks these laws down by department – the most affected of which are Defra – which deals with the Common Agricultural and Common Fisheries Policies, so no surprises there – and the Department of Trade and Industry – hardly surprising with the Common Market and all. Both departments saw about 50% of their legislation having some kind of EU origin – which could, via the DTI, be where Cameron got his “almost half” figure from, perhaps?

But is the 9.1% figure accurate? Is just looking at statutory instruments fair, when this means that normal legislation, via parliament itself, can be left out? Open Europe (in the same post where they discussed and dismissed the 84% claim) make four key points:

1) They do not seperate between budgetary and regulatory legislation, therefore comparing apples and oranges.
2) They also compare apples and oranges in another respect: Directives are usually far-reaching measures with a big impact on the economy. SIs, in contrast, can cover a variety of issues, including public administration – for example a road closure or changing arrangements for parish elections.
3) EU Regulations (as opposed to Directives) usually don’t give rise to a new UK law but are directly applicable. Therefore, most EU Regulations are not included in the 9% figure.
4) One Directive does not mean one SI. The Motor Vehicles Regulations in 2007 implemented four different Directives, for instance, making a one-for-one comparison tricky.

On point 1), of course, the EU has no say in the British budget and has no revenue-raising powers, so I’m not sure what they’re trying to say. On point 2) they have a point – but how do you measure the “far-reaching” implications and economic impact of a directive, exactly? On point 3) they also have a point – which might explain why the British Chambers of Commerce have a higher estimate of 20%. Point 4), if we’re hunting down the percentage of British laws that have an EU origin, is irrelevant.

But considering that we’re looking for a percentage of the *number* of laws that stem from the EU, it is worth bearing in mind that Statutory Instruments make up the bulk of all UK legislation, with an average of around 3,500 passed every year for much of the last two decades. In 2008, 3,389 Statutory Instruments were passed, while the UK Statute Law Database lists 2,414 results for the same year. With no study (that I’m aware of) having been conducted on how many of those have an EU origin, it is hard to tell the percentage.

However, with Statutory Instruments making up the bulk of UK legislation, and with most EU legislation brought into force via this method (having already been passed at EU level, there’s generally no need for EU legislation to then be re-enacted at national level, after all), it’s no great leap to suggest that the final percentage wouldn’t be that much higher than 9%. Indeed, Labour MEP Richard Corbett has noted other studies in other EU member states:

6.3 percent according to the Swedish parliament, 12 percent according to the Finnish parliament and between 12 and 19 percent according to the Lithuanian parliament

This would suggest that something in the region of 10-20% would be a fair guess for the UK as well (a range that has the added benefit of being backed up by the British Chambers of Commerce’s recent study of regulations).

Bonus: How much does the EU cost us?

I’ve already discussed the actual costs of EU membership based on the UK’s annual contribution, showing that the net cost is around £4 billion a year. But what about the cost to business and to the economy?

This is, of course, a hugely complex issue. How to estimate the impact of legislation on an entire country’s economy? It’s practically impossible, as without a control sample we can’t tell how beneficial or detrimental any individual piece of legislation may be – let alone the impact of other pieces of legislation that may affect the same general area.

Nonetheless, the more enthusiastic among you may have noted, in the Open Europe piece quoted above, that the same post also gives Open Europe’s own estimate that “72% of the cost of regulation is EU derived”. Is this fair? Well, it’s only an estimate, and I haven’t seen their workings, so it’s hard to tell.

However, let’s return to that British Chambers of Commerce report, also linked above. What do they have to say about the costs of EU regulation?

By value, EU legislation was only responsible for about 0.1% (£1.9m) of regulatory net costs in 2007/8 and virtually all business burdening regulatory activity can be attributed to Whitehall.

Oh… would you look at that?

Conclusion

No one agrees on how much legislation and regulation stems from the EU. The 9.1% figure stated by the House of Commons Library is too low, as it only covers Statutory Instruments, not ALL laws; the higher figures of 84%, 75% and even 50% claimed by the likes of Hannan, Farrage and Cameron are based on miscalculations, misunderstandings, or sources unknown, and often derive from parts of the EU other than just the UK – and so with no hard evidence to support them must be dismissed as either too high or inapplicable to the British situation.

What is the true figure? No one knows. So any claims that state hard and fast percentages should – if we’re being intellectually honest – be treated with equal suspicion.

Not that any of this is likely to change the opinions of those eurosceptics convinced of the malicious and all-pervading influence of the EU on our daily lives, of course. But still. I’ve looked for the evidence, and this is what I’ve tracked down. If you know different, please do let me know – I’m interested in the truth of the situation, as without total transparency, such misinformation, misunderstandings and resentments are only going to grow.

Update, October 2010:

The House of Commons Library has published a new, much more comprehensive study of the percentage of UK laws that originate from the EU. It is freely available as a PDF and despite running to 59 pages I’d strongly recommend reading it in full.

Its conclusion? The true figure is around 15%.

(Rather sweetly it also references this post in the footnotes.)

If you’re interested in this topic, you may also be interested in these old posts:

- What are the economic costs of the EU?
- UKIP’s £40 million a day claim vs the REAL costs of EU membership
- The dishonesty of the EU debate
- Why legislating and regulating at an EU level is almost always a good thing

Why voting for a eurosceptic party is a good thing for the EU

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I’ve done a lot of UKIP bashing on this blog over the last six years. I’ve ridiculed and attempted to debunk numerous eurosceptic claims. After all, I think that the idea of European Union (in its broadest possible sense) is a good thing, and I firmly believe that as long as some form of European economic/political organisation exists it is in Britain’s (and every European country’s) best interest to be a part of it. I also hope that, down the line, such international/supranational cooperation can be expanded far beyond Europe’s borders. Nationalism is, for me, an outmoded way of doing business, and detrimental to the best interests of the people of all nations – just as are all exclusionary ideologies, be they racist, sexist, homophobic or whatever. I am an internationalist and a humanist – again, both in their broadest possible sense – and so cannot support what I see as the parochialism of the nationalist/”patriotic” parties of right or left.

However, despite my dislike of UKIP, the BNP and other withdrawalist/anti-EU parties (of which these are the principle two in the UK), anti-EU and eurosceptic voices have a vital role to play.

The makeup of the European Parliament during the last five years has been sorely unrepresentative. Its racial makeup is nowhere close to mirroring that of Europe as a whole, with groups with sizable minorities left with nothing like the percentages of MEPs that one would expect, were the EP to mirror European society. Women are, as in most democratic societies, still hugely under-represented at EU level; there are few openly gay MEPs; few Muslims; only one Roma MEP despite this group being one of the largest and most persecuted of Europe’s minorities.

Eurosceptics – using the term in its broadest sense – are also sorely under-represented. The no votes in France, the Netherlands and Ireland are proof that there is a groundswell of discontent with the present EU system, and this discontent sorely needs to be aired more frequently in the European Parliament. Do a trawl of the blogs and you’ll soon see that even the most pro-EU bloggers will often violently criticise all kinds of aspects of the way the EU currently runs, from the obvious travesties – like the Common Agricultural and Common Fisheries Policies – through to issues of democratic representation (it takes 800,000 Germans to elect one MEP as opposed to just 80,000 Maltese, for example). With the EU still seriously under-reported in almost every member state, and with so few sceptical voices around to form an opposition – one of the most essential elements of any healthy democratic system – little wonder that there is so much public frustration. The worries of the people are not, in the eyes of the people, being addressed.

The EU is currently in a period of crisis. The failure of the 2001 Treaty of Nice to resolve the transition to a union of 25 rather than 15 was followed by the failure of the Constitution and Lisbon Treaty to mop up the mess, yet now the Union is of 27, with yet more queueing up to join. The EU is now a Union of half a billion people, one of the largest and most powerful economic blocs in the world, and yet is working on mechanisms designed for a much, much smaller organisation. Resentment has been building for years – not just among the people, but also among the governments that head up the member states. The Treaty of Nice, the Constitution, the Lisbon Treaty – these were all meant to resolve these tensions, and all have failed.

Even if the Lisbon Treaty does end up coming into force, still countless problems remain unsolved. There are still some member states that long for closer political union, while others desire little more than a trading bloc based on the Common Market; the current system of budget contributions still sees relatively wealthy western European member states receive far more funding than the struggling post-communist newcomers of the East. France, one of the richest member states, still receives a hugely disproportionate chunk of Common Agricultural Policy money, while farmers in Romania struggle by on little more than a subsistence level. And all the while, there remains no consensus on where the EU is heading – on what the EU is actually for.

Over the next five years – Lisbon Treaty or no Lisbon Treaty – these problems are all going to have to be addressed, and it is the MEPs who we are meant to be electing in a couple of weeks’ time who are going to have to scrutinise the plans and proposals that are put forward to resolve them. If the European Parliament is made up of a majority of unthinking europhiles, of fervent internationalists, then this scrutiny is not going to be intensive enough. Imagine a House of Commons made up of 80% Labour or Conservative MPs. That would not be healthy for democracy, but more importantly it would not be the kind of check that is necessary to prevent bad legislation and bad constitutional reforms from being passed. But with the lack of eurosceptic voices in the European Parliament, that is effectively the situation we have at the moment.

We sorely need more critical voices if the EU is ever going to become the kind of genuinely positive force that it could – and should – be. We need more MEPs like Danish eurosceptic Jens-Peter Bonde (now sadly retired, though still active in the field of EU politics), and even like UKIP leader Nigel Farage – intelligent, sharp critics of the project who can home in on flaws and highlight things that the EU is doing wrong. Yes, they may have a tendency to over-egg the pudding, to play to the gallery, and to blow things out of all proportion to make petty political points – but they also highlight genuine concerns and, often, genuine problems.

If we don’t know the problems – and if these problems are not brought into the light – then abuses and mistakes will simply continue unnoticed. Until, that is – as British MPs have found during the last few weeks of the expenses scandal – something happens that shows just how bad the problem has got, and brings the entire system to the brink of collapse.

If you don’t listen to criticism, you deserve to fail. So though I may not agree with the anti-EU brigade, and though I will continue to mock them when they make mistakes and call them when they make unjustifiable claims, they have an essential part to play. They are the EU’s opposition, and in any respectable political system a vocal opposition is something to be encouraged, not suppressed. Even if they are wrong.

MP expenses, political corruption and the European elections

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Corruption starts here by Flickr user IntangibleArts (CC)(Alternate post title: Westminster MPs: Not as corrupt as UKIP MEPs…)

The last few days of revelations about Westminster MPs’ taking advantage of lax expenses rules – many of the allegations decidedly sexed-up, a number of them mistaken, but nonetheless indicative of a long-running problem with the way politics is conducted in the UK and elsewhere – have unsurprisingly been hitting the opinion polls hard.

As such, old predictions of UK voting intentions at the European Parliamentary elections, now just three weeks away, should now be entirely discounted. The latest polls shows both Tories and Labour taking a -4% hit (and that was conducted a few days ago – since when a whole bunch of new stories have appeared about alleged Conservative abuses).

The only likely impact of this constant stream of stories about Westminster MPs seemingly being on the make – especially coming as it does so soon before an election – is a major boost for the smaller parties, both through reduced turnout with a public now even more disillusioned with politics than they were before, and through misguided protest votes. Hell, even old Tory grandee (and bogeyman of the British left) Norman Tebbit has explicitly warned right-wingers not to vote for his party at the European elections to register their disgust.

This is, of course, entirely missing the point that if you want to punish the actual transgressors in this expenses scandal then to vote out MEPs is rather like spanking your niece because your nephew stole your wallet. “Ha! I’m punishing someone who’s got nothing to do with the wrong that’s been committed! THAT’ll learn them!”

Most likely beneficiaries of all this? Well, disgruntled Labour voters are likely to shunt either to the BNP or to the Greens, while disgruntled Tories are more likely to head to the other major centre-right eurosceptic party – often a leech on Tory votes in European polls in any case – UKIP. A party its hard not to see the strongly anti-EU Tebbit having a great deal of sympathy for in any case, and which was – until this little furore – likely to lose a good number of MEPs at the upcoming elections thanks to a combination of David Cameron (largely at the behest of Shadow Foreign Secretary and ex-Tory leader William Hague) taking the Tories in a more eurosceptic direction again and the loss of the Kilroy-Silk factor, which so boosted their media coverage and vote in the 2004 elections.

Ashley Mote and Tom WiseBut, lest we forget, UKIP is a party with only one competent elected politician – its articulately populist, platitude-spouting leader Nigel Farrage. It also has a tendency to pick candidates, like MEPs Ashley “convicted benefit fraudster” Mote and Tom “charged with money laundering and false accounting” Wise, who put even the worst Westminster politicians to shame. (And that’s not to mention the on-going infighting that has plagued the party since its inception, including ongoing allegations of seemingly institutional corruption.)

Yep, UKIP’s pound symbol logo does seem rather appropriate…

Then again, to be fair, a vote for the Tories in the European elections is a wasted one anyway. Having pulled out of the EPP, the largest centre-right group in the European Parliament, in order to have any influence at all in Brussels and Strasbourg they need to join another political group (as without EP group membership, securing the all-important committee places where all the real work goes on, Tory MEPs will be effectively powerless). The only other viable existing centre-right EP group? Independence/Democracy – leader? One Nigel Farrage… Which means the Tories won’t be able to join it, which means they’re stuck on the fringes with other outcasts like the former members of the right-wing Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty Group – such charmers as Jean-Marie Le Pen, Alessandra Mussolini and assorted other fascists.

The simple solution? Check out Votematch.co.uk to get an idea of which parties have policies you might like (as these are often rather different at European level), then check your local candidates for the European Parliament, visit the invaluable Votewatch.eu to check the performance of your local sitting MEPs, and cast your vote based on the character, policies and dedication the of candidates the parties are putting up.

No, you can’t vote for an individual candidate in the European elections (an horrific flaw in the system that needs rapid alteration), but you can make a moderately informed choice about the likely value those on offer are going to provide to their constituents. Have a poor attendance record, like UKIP MEPs Godfrey Bloom, Trevor Coleman and John Whittaker, the Lib Dems’ Baroness Nicholson, the Tories’ Jonathan Evans and Caroline Jackson or Labour’s Eluned Morgan? Think hard about whether they’re worth your vote.

Me? As ever, I’m not endorsing any party. In fact I’m still sorely tempted not to vote at all, thanks purely to the British electoral system for EP elections preventing me from endorsing an individual candidate whose jib I like the cut of. But that way, thanks again to the awfulness of the party list proportional representation system that the UK uses for these things, lies more seats for the likes of UKIP and even (possibly) the BNP. With the Tories out of the EPP, to vote for some sensible MEPs to represent the UK is essential lest the country become a laughing stock. The question now is how to play the system. And for that, the greater the turnout, the less the chance of the smaller, more extremist parties getting representation. I may not like the bigger parties either, but at least they’re (usually) not as mad.

In short: No matter what your political outlook, your vote is important. But your vote is for the next five years, not the last five days. Don’t let short-term disgust with an unpleasant scandal affect which box you tick when that vote is for members of an institution who have nothing to do with the scandal in question. Base your vote instead on the performance of those politicians and what you want to see happen at that institution – because the European Parliament, no matter how much national politicians like to use it as proof of their domestic support, is a very different beast to that in Westminster. Want to punish corrupt Westminster MPs? There’s a general election less than a year away. You’ll have your chance then. That’s the way democracy works.

/stating what should be the obvious…

Models for an EU superstate?

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The United States of Europe?For those coming in late, the superstate series so far:
- The danger of Jean Monnet
- Why EU superstate conspiracy theories are nonsense
- Four points and a question for eurosceptics who believe in the advancing EU superstate
- EU competence creep, the spectre of the superstate, and how governments actually work

As I’ve set out several times, I don’t see an EU superstate as a realistic possibility at any point in the next hundred years – not even the next three hundred years. For me, this isn’t a problem. Our grandchilren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren are unlikely to have any of the same concerns that we do today – and as the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707 has proven nicely, national/cultural identities are more than capable of surviving political union (hell, in Scotland’s case the national identity has arguably got even stronger since the Acts of Union). As such, if – over the course of the next few centuries – it proves to be in the best economic interest of the peoples of Europe for a “superstate” of some description to emerge from the present EU, so what? We’ll all be long dead.

But if such a superstate were to emerge, what would it look like? On one of those previous superstate posts (all of which have got healthy discussions in the comments – despite various sidetracks into insane detail about trucking and jam), helpful contributor French Derek argues that

“a federal state of 27 nations, each with their own languages, cultures, economic models, etc would be impossible to govern”

However, there are two cases where something similar to this has come about – Russia and India. Could these provide us with a vision of a future European superstate and clues about a model to follow?

Where the EU is made up of 27 member states with 23 official languages (and a bunch of other, less widely-used ones ranging from Cornish in the UK and Frisian in Denmark/Germany through more widely-used unofficial languages like Russian, Ukrainian and Romani), the Russian Federation is made up of 21 semi-autonomous republics (plus various self-governing cities, oblasts, okrugs, etc. making up a total of 83 federal subjects) and has 27 official languages), while India is made up of 28 states (and a few additional semi-autonomous regions) with 29 languages spoken by more than a million people (and 122 spoken by more than 100,000). Neither country – much like the EU – could be considered to be ethnically or religiously homogenous.

But the fact remains that both federal states continue to function, despite insanely complex internal demographics (far more so than the United States of America – the federal model most often used as a point of comparison with any future EU superstate). Naturally, the size of their populations are not entirely comparable – Russia’s population is c.145 million (about a third of the EU’s 500 million) and India’s c.1.17 billion (about twice the EU’s population), while the US’ population of c.300 million is about two thirds that of the EU. But still – India’s size is similar at 1.3 million square miles as opposed to the EU’s 1.6 million (compared the the USA’s 3.6 million and Russia’s 6.7 million) – so who’s to say that either population or geographical area is a factor in the functioning of an effective federal state?

Of course, in the case of both Russia and India (as well as, arguably, that of the US), their current situation came about after centuries of war and conquest – unlike the EU’s entirely peaceful formation – and whether either Russia or India can be considered to be effectively governed is another matter entirely. But Russia, India and the US nonetheless are all examples of large federal states that manage to work – in India and the US with more or less effective democracies that have both seen minorities elected to the highest office in the land (Obama in the US, obviously, but also Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a Sikh). In both India and Russia (and arguably some parts of the US as well, with the various secessionist movements), the various federal states and regions have often retained a strong sense of identity and autonomy – just as have Scotland and Wales (among others) in the much smaller federal state that is the United Kingdom. Both India and Russia also retain some violent paramilitary nationalist/minority elements that occasionally cause trouble (much like in the federal state of Spain with ETA, or the UK with the various Irish republican groups of the last few decades).

So large federal states with complex demographics can exist and function with the constituent parts retaining their own national/cultural identites.

But can they hold together? India was far larger than it now is when under British rule – once the Raj left 60 years ago, Partition tore the country in three in a bloody horror the tensions of which remain to this day. With the end of the Cold War and fall of the Communist Party, various parts of the old USSR (Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, etc. etc.) broke away from Russia – and other regions, most notably Chechnya, have continued as part of the federation only under threat of force. The United States was torn apart by civil war less than a century after its formation.

Indeed, it’s arguable that Russia and India continue to hold together largely due to fear of “the other” – the perceived threat of the West in Russia (hence the rampant popularity of the nationalistic Putin and co), and the genuine threat of Pakistan in India (the threat of India in turn acting as a unifying device for the fragile federation of Pakistan). The United States originally came together thanks to the threat of Britain, while England emerged from the Heptarchy under the threat of the Vikings, France from the threat of England, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, modern federal Germany from a series of unifying wars with various neighbours under Bismark – and so on and so on.

In all cases, the sense of identity – “I am Russian”, “I am Indian”, “I am American”, “I am English”, “I am French”, “I am German” and all the rest – emerged due to a growing sense that another group of people were both somehow different and a threat. (Welsh national identity is a prime case in point – such a thing didn’t even exist until England started to invade what is now Wales, with the entire region made up of little more than warring tribes and principalities until they were given a unifying force, and existed as one kingdom only once – and then for just seven years – until the English conquest was completed and Wales in its current form was created. The same unifying, nationalising effect can also be seen in Scotland, where medieval English invasions likewise fostered a sense of Scottish national identity that helped bring the warring clans together.)

But what is the European Union’s threat? Who is “the other” for the EU that can foster a sense of European identity? With the current ongoing arguments over Turkish EU entry – not to mention the rise in tensions between Islam and the West of the last decade, the Islamist terror attacks in Madrid and London, and the perennial Europe-wide tensions over immigration – is “the other” for the EU going to be Islam? With the increasingly frequent stand-offs between the EU and Moscow over energy supplies and the autonomy of states on the European fringe, could it be Russia? For a while under the Bush administration and in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, it even looked like it might be America.

But whatever the “threat” – real or simply perceived – might turn out to be, it is hard to see a truly European identity begin to emerge without a greater sense of what being European is *not*. “We are American because we are not British”, “We are English because we are not Viking”, “We are Welsh/Scottish because we are not English” – this is how national identity has always begun.

So, while I disagree that the EU is too big and complex to form a superstate, I do maintain that such a thing remains unlikely. You can legislate to create political and economic integration, you can forge agreements between different territories and different cultures – but you cannot legislate or negotiate to build a sense of identity. Without that sense of identity – “I am American”, “I am Indian”, “I am Russian” – none of those three existing sprawling federations would be able to hold together. Of the EU’s 500 million citizens, how many really feel “European” to the extent that an American feels American, a Russian Russian or an Indian Indian? Hell – we can’t even agree on what Europe is – how can we know what it is to be European?

EU competence creep, the spectre of the superstate, and how governments actually work

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In our last little discussion of the likelihood of an EU superstate (in amongst and partially as an offshoot of the rather silly sidetrack about jam), Josef noted that

there is a concern that this is how the EU will form itself into a “superstate.” Not through a series of demi-democratic treaties, but through a sort of slow, suffocating creep of boring, incomprehensible, impenetrable legislation. If you write a follow up post, Nosemonkey/J Clive, then I’d be interested to hear your take on this.

This is always a danger with any democratic system which relies largely on a more or less bureaucratic civil service to get things done. We like to think that all new legislation is debated and scrutinised by our elected representatives, dissected in minute detail and put to a vote considering only the best interests of the people – but it rarely happens like that.

In the UK, the vast majority of primary legislation is passed in the form of statutory instruments – new laws drawn up by civil servants and government ministers and put onto the statute books without (most of the time) parliament so much as being informed. In the UK in 2008 alone, there were 3,399 statutory instruments passed – that’s more than nine new laws a day that have come into existence without so much as a by your leave from an elected official. (That’s about average for the last 20 years, by the by – the number of statutory instruments began to creep up under Major, but have remained relatively constant since the mid-1990s, despite various claims that Blair used them more than any previous Prime Minister as another way of bypassing parliament.)

The vast majority of these statutory instruments are amendments to existing Acts of Parliament, fiddling with the details (most of them minor). Our last little debate got sidetracked on the use of apple geranium in jams other than those made with quince. Hardly the sort of thing – the logic goes – that it’s worth wasting parliament’s time with, and so precisely the sort of thing that would be sorted out in a statutory instrument. If the approval of British MEPs was needed for each of the law changes that statutory instruments bring in, then every one of the British parliament’s 646 MPs would have to go through more than five of the things every single day of the year – as well as all the major legislation, dealing with constituency concerns, being part of the government, holding the government to account and so on. (Remove those MPs who hold government office, it’d be more like 7 statutory instruments each to scrutinise and research the utility of per day – that’s a full-time job…)

In the EU, we have much the same problem. Having accepted the general principle that area X is best dealt with at EU level, it is impractical for MEPs to then scrutinise every subsequent tiny bit of legislation to ensure that it meets their high standards, and vote on every tiny clause about different types of fruit preserve in full session at the European Parliament. Because just as we, the people, delegate our powers of decision to our representatives at Westminster and Brussels/Strasbourg, so our representatives then delegate powers of drafting new laws to the various civil servants, be they in national civil services or the European Commission.

(At which point it’s worth noting that most EU legislation is not actually drawn up by the Commission – the EC only has a staff of c.38,000 – less than a third of that of the UK Department of Work and Pensions alone, and nowhere near enough to do everything that the Commission is accused of doing. Instead, pretty much all EU legislation is drawn up by the civil servants of the various member states, checked by civil servants in other member states, and then rubber-stamped by the Commission once it’s been looked at my enough bureaucrats in enough member states.)

And so in the normal course of events, yes – dozens of new laws will likely come into force every week without having been so much as glanced at by an elected official. But such developed social systems as ours could not possibly function any other way – unless you think that the civil service should be elected, and that it’s a practical possibility to find several hundred thousand people willing to campaign for such a thankless job (not to mention several hundred thousand people willing to turn out and vote on what would prove to be an almost daily basis as retirement and transfers necessitate by-elections to fill vacant posts…) And in any case, the general principles are already always voted on by elected representatives at both national and EU level – as long as they are doing their jobs properly, they shouldn’t vote through sweeping new powers that would allow unelected bodies or people to suddenly advance major changed without anyone checking them first. (Though that’s not to say that there isn’t always a danger that this could happen, as we found out in the UK only recently with the – thankfully defeated – Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which would effectively have made parliament obsolete and allowed any government minister to make any law they liked, when they liked.)

When it comes to the EU, the real fear of competence creep was epitomised by this glorious clause (Article 308 EC):

If action by the Community should prove necessary to attain, in the course of the operation of the common market, one of the objectives of the Community, and this Treaty has not provided the necessary powers, the Council shall, acting unanimously on a proposal from the Commission and after consulting the European Parliament, take the appropriate measures.

In other words, the EU could grant itself whatever powers it liked. Or, at least, it could after unanimous agreement from the governments of the member states in the Council, and after being passed by the elected representatives of the European Parliament – but most anti-EU types conflate Council, Parliament and Commission into one monolithic-sounding “EU” to make these things sound more scary.

So, for more powers to pass to the EU, even with the existence of the “competence clause”, you’d still need unanimous agreement between the governments of all 27 member states, plus a majority in the European Parliament. Hardly that scary – but even so, the Lisbon Treaty amended that same article (now Article 352) to clearly delineate (in line with the subsidiarity principle introduced with Maastricht back in 1992) just where competences lie between the EU and member states, as well as explicitly excluding common foreign and security policy as an area where the competence clause could be used to grant the EU more powers.

Oh yes, and Article 352 also introduced a new clause obliging the Commission to involve national parliaments in any moves to grant the EU more powers. So that’s unanimous agreement by all 27 member state governments, passing a vote in the European Parliament, and passing votes in the parliaments of all 27 member states before the EU can claim any major new powers for itself. Hardly a major worry.

In the meantime, life will continue as normal, with dozens upon dozens of minor changes to minor laws being brought into force merely by civil servants via statutory instruments and their equivalents across Europe – and then (despite some of the claims made in our last comment thread that alterations to jam legislation would require ratification by the Council, Parliament, and so on) amended just as easily if they turn out not to be workable.

Is there a danger that some of these laws will be bad ones? Of course there is. But at least they are generally being drawn up by civil servants who are experts in their field (rather than members of parliament who tend to be generalists), and at least they can be corrected with ease.

Is there a danger that such civil servant-drafted laws could slowly grant more power to institutions that we aren’t willing to give them? Well, a poorly-worded new law always has the potential to be misinterpreted. That’s what we have judges and courts for – if such poorly-worded laws are found, they can be challenged and struck down, if a simple amendment isn’t enough. After all, both the existing Article 308 and the proposed new Article 352 explicitly state that both the Council and the Parliament have to approve any new EU power-grab – and treaty law will always take precedence in such cases.

In short: Modern western liberal democracies are very complex systems, packed full of checks and balances that have been worked out over the course of many centuries. The EU is not a true liberal democracy, but shares many of its forms and functions. As such, I remain confident that there are enough checks and balances in place to ensure that the only way the EU will gain more powers is if the member states of the EU want to delegate more powers to it. It will not -can not – happen by accident. Unlike in the British system, where bad laws like the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill can easily slip through parliament if the government has a sufficient majority and MPs are sufficiently cowed, the EU has 27 additional chances of spotting them before they get anywhere near the statute books – something that the Lisbon Treaty would only have underscored by bringing national parliaments into the equation as well. Once again, it’s hardly the stuff of an impending superstate.

Exclusive: The danger of Jean Monnet

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Jean MonnetFor as long as there have been eurosceptics, there have been arguments that the EEC/EU is part of a grand plan to create a United States of Europe. Why? Well, largely thanks to the dreams of some of the organisation’s founding fathers (from a generation, it should be noted, which had mostly lived through two world wars – but still…)

The founding father most often brought up in this context is Jean Monnet, the first Deputy Secretary General of the interwar League of Nations, and one of the key figures in organising Allied supply-lines in both world wars (not to mention the Chinese railway system, bizarrely). Now, however, he is most often remembered as a key eurosceptic bogeyman for his postwar efforts to bring Europe together – and most notably mentioned in tandem with his 1943 statement of belief:

“There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty… The countries of Europe are too small to guarantee their peoples the necessary prosperity and social development. The European states must constitute themselves into a federation.”

Ah, the F-word… Federalism to a eurosceptic is like the proverbial red rag to a bull (despite the key attribute of a federation being, erm… the self-governing nature of the component states, with the central federal government’s powers often being highly limited – but sssh!)

The other favourite Monnet quote, of course, is that about “the superstate”:

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”

Ah! See the devious nature of the European elites, trying to guide us without our knowledge down a path we haven’t been consulted on! How dare they! (The fact that this quote is an entirely made-up load of old bollocks that Monnet never actually said or wrote is neither here nor there… If you repeat something often enough then it becomes true – or at least true enough to enable a justification of the ongoing belief in the veracity of the idea behind the belief…)

Perhaps because many British eurosceptics take a decidedly whiggish view of history – a teleological approach to the world that often also tends towards great man theory, in which providence and inevitability are seen in just about everything (and the Norman Conquest somehow marked the start of 1,000 years of English independence – despite it only being 944 years, despite the royal family being French Vikings from 1066, becoming Welsh in 1485, Scottish in 1603, despite the successful Dutch invasion of 1688, and despite our royal family having been German since 1714) – the fact that Monnet helped set up what was to become the EU more than half a century ago means, of course, that the EU is still headed down the path that he envisaged for it. Despite the fact that he died 30 years ago this week, and the EU is an entirely different beast to anything he had planned for the thing. (Hell – Monnet was a highly effective and efficient organiser, for starters. There’s no way he’d have come up with something as chaotic and inefficient as the current EU system…)

Anyway, even though the “Jean Monnet said it so it must be true” line of argument of the eurosceptic types convinced that the superstate is the EU’s final destination is utterly thwarted by the fact that a) Monnet didn’t actually say most of the things they attribute to him, and b) the fact that if a week is a long time in politics then half a century is an eon… Even though all these assumptions and beliefs about the much-misunderstood and mis-remembered Monnet can be shown to be based on nothing more than personal political prejudice, I can now exclusively reveal that we now have proof that Monnet is indeed a danger.

A headline is a powerful thing

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The European Court of Human Rights is not an EU body. You’re reading a blog that focusses on European poltics, so you almost certainly already know this. But, it seems, the vast majority of people do not. More importantly, far too many journalists and editors do not. This, from this morning, for example:

Press Association, 19th February 2009

News headlines are powerful things. They are, after all, the only part of the story that the vast majority of people will read – sometimes read without even realising it while passing news-stands (Ken Livingstone’s team, notably, complained about the subliminal impact of pro-Boris Johnson headlines in the Evening Standard during last year’s London mayoral elections) or, in this age of the internet, while skimming through a website.

Headlines exist for three reasons: a) (obviously) to act as markers for where new items begin, b) to convince people to read a story (increasingly important in the current age of page views and web advertising), and c) to pander to the audience’s prejudices (thus reaffirming the connection the audience feels with their publication of choice). This is why the Sun’s headline writers are notoriously paid such vast sums of money – no matter how much you may dislike that paper’s approach, they excel at the snappy headline that sells papers and builds reader loyalty. That’s why it’s the most popular newspaper in the UK.

But the vast majority of headline-writers are not well-paid Sun subs. They’re underpaid and – increasingly – overworked hacks. Along with writing headlines and checking the spelling, grammar and punctuation of lazy writers*, subs have also long been responsible for both fact-checking. When a sub cocks something up, that’s usually it. They are the last defence against error.

And yet more and more newspapers are dumping their sub-editors. More and more errors are starting to creep in. And more and more newspapers and websites are relying on agency copy rather than their own, original content.

This is why the above example of confusion about the status of the European Court of Human Rights is worth flagging. This originated from a Press Association newsfeed this morning. A Press Association newsfeed that is automatically reproduced on hundreds of websites, which in turn receive millions of page views.

“EU judges to rule on Qatada case”, it says – referencing the attempts of the suspected al Qaida organiser to avoid being deported from the UK to face possible torture in Jordan, a possibility thanks to breaching his bail conditions, even though he previously won an appeal against deportation under the terms of the UK Human Rights Act in April last year.

But, of course, with headlines the details are unimportant. Headlines are all about inspiring an initial, gut reaction from the audience to draw them in to read more. And for a certain section of the population, seeing that “the EU” is going to have final say over whether a man dubbed “the spiritual leader of al-Qaeda in Europe” gets to stay in the UK is likely to inspire one gut reaction above all others: anger.

Yet the EU has nothing to do with this. The Council of Europe, certainly; but not the EU. And yet for the casual browser of news sites, the impression will have been left that the EU somehow has control over the UK’s immigration and security policy; that the EU has powers that it does not possess.

Or, at least, they would have done had I not been on news duty this morning for one of those sites that relies on PA copy, and asked them to change the headline to remove any misleading references to the EU.

It is ignorance and misunderstandings like this as much as any deliberate effort to twist stories for political ends that is distorting the debate about the EU in the UK. If even the news agencies are making such errors, what hope for the increasingly under-staffed newspapers (the few staff that remain increasingly being young, inexperienced and cheap), or the websites that replicate agency copy – often via entirely automated systems?

If I hadn’t been on news duty for one of the sites that carried PA copy this morning, would anyone else have spotted the mistake? Would any other hack online news editor have known that it is the European Court of Justice that is the EU body? Would they even have bothered to check the body copy of the story? I doubt it. Because one of the other joys of this new age of agency copy is that if you alter it, it becomes yours*; if, however, you leave it as it is to publish through your automatic systems, you are immune from prosecution should that copy contain a libel. Editors are, in other words, actively discouraged from editing agency copy.

And so the power of the likes of the Press Association and Reuters begins to increase exponentially – and their ability to shape political debate grows with it. But while the public’s scrutiny of the press has grown massively in recent years with the advent of the likes of blogging and comments on articles, allowing readers to hold the press to account almost instantly, the press’ own scrutiny of its content is diminishing to its lowest ever level.

If an agency can get wrong something as basic as the international body a court belongs to, what else are they getting wrong? What other mistakes are slipping through the journalistic net now that the subs and experienced, subject-specialist editors are being jettisoned? And how are these mistakes going to shape our political discourse?

A headline is a powerful thing. A misleading headline can be a dangerous one.

* I’ve worked (and continue to work) as both writer and sub, so I can say this with confidence: subs are always necessary – and it’s impossible to sub your own copy.

** As an irrelevant aside, one of the joys of this is that I’ve read some of my own film reviews (done for an agency over the last several years) published in newspapers under other people’s names, with only one or two words altered.

Germany, the EU and democracy

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The Reichstag with EU and German flagsThe European Union emerged, as we all know, as a response to the Second World War. One of the earliest aims of the founding fathers was to prevent France and Germany from ever going to war again by integrating their economies so closely that to do so would become impossible.

As a result – as well as, arguably, thanks to prolonged feelings of guilt about what the country got up to during the 30s and 40s – Germany has long been at the forefront of European integration. Germany remains one of the most enthusiastic EU member states – despite also having the strongest economy in the EU, formerly having one of the strongest currencies, paying the most into the EU budget, getting the least back, and being by far the most under-represented (by population) in the European Parliament.

It’s long been the case – albeit usually unacknowledged – that if Germany got fed up with the EU the entire project would be in danger of tumbling down. The EU could survive largely unchanged if almost any other member state decided that enough was enough (hell, if France pulled out it would arguably be improved, as the vast chunk of Common Agricultural Policy money that gets syphoned off by Paris could be redirected to more needy countries – and many more enthusiastic europhiles argue that if Britain jumped ship then the brakes the UK keeps putting on closer integration would finally be lifted, and the EU could reach new heights). If Germany gives up on the EU, all kinds of problems would kick off – not least because the European Central Bank runs out of Frankfurt.

Well, Germany hasn’t yet got the hump, and doesn’t show any signs of doing so just yet – but it could still throw a spanner in the works. Because oddly for a country in which nationalism and national self-interest have been so deliberately, systematically repressed (unsurprisingly, considering…), its constitutional court could yet rule that the Lisbon Treaty – and, by extension, many of the principles of the way the EU currently works – is illegal for providing ways for the German national parliament to be overruled.

And so it is one of the few remaining areas of German law that looks to the German national interest could end up being the brake on the current mode of EU integration, which itself originally started to prevent Germans looking too much to their own national interest.* Whoops!

As much as the anti-Lisbon Treaty crowd have got a bad reputation in certain quarters of the Brussels beltway – not helped by the lunatic fringes to right and left (as so often) being the ones who have shouted the loudest, and the recent announcement of anti-Lisbon party Libertas’ proposed candidates for the EU elections (mostly hard-right and nationalists, making a mockery of the “broad coalition for democratic reform” claims) – the German politicians who have brought this case before the constitutional court do have a point.

After all, if a national parliament (especially one from a country with a population the size of Germany’s) – elected by the people based on long-standing principles of representative democracy – can be overruled by the EU, an organisation whose democratic legitimacy is disputed to say the least, then what place for democracy in Europe?

And so, where the last time German nationalism reared its head to threaten the peace of mind of European states it was in the form of fascist dictatorship, this time German nationalism could well be rising up in the name of democracy. Democracy based around the principle of the nation state (something I can’t profess to be overly happy with), but democracy nonetheless.

The very fact that such a case merits the constitutional court’s attention shows that the legitimacy of EU decisions and powers has not yet been universally – or even legally – acknowledged. The argument that the EU is a method of overruling democracy, meanwhile, will continue to be made as long as the European Parliament remains the weakest of the EU’s principle institutions. (Will the upcoming EU elections reverse the trend for successively declining turnouts and so strengthen the case for the EP to be given more powers? I very much doubt it. It’s a catch-22 – the EP is perceived as being weak, so people don’t bother voting, so its claims to be the people’s voice diminishes along with its ability to assert influence. Such is the joy of EU democracy.)

So I ask yet again – when is the EU going to go for the kind of radical, democratic reform that is so vital for it to maintain support, and stop tinkering about with unsatisfactory compromises like Lisbon and Nice? Without the people behind it, the EU is doomed to fail. If the people were behind it – and had a sufficiently large voice in its decisions – then cases like this German one could never be brought, and complaints about the EU’s democratic deficit would become the preserve of nutters alone.

European elections: UK voting intentions

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From the invaluable UK Polling Report, we have the first UK voting intention figures for the 2009 European elections, released in today’s Sunday Telegraph.

The results, plus changes from the 2004 EU elections, are as follows:

Conservatives 35% (+8)
Labour 29% (+6)
Liberal Democrats 15% (+/-0)
UKIP 7% (-9)
Green 5% (-1)
British National Party 4% (-1)
Scottish National Party / Plaid Cwmru 4%

As UK Polling Report notes, “this would lead to the Conservatives winning 30 seats (up 3), Labour 24 (up 5), the Liberal Democrats 9 (down 2), the SNP and PC one each and UKIP 4 (down 8). The Greens would lose both their seats, while the BNP would fail to secure one.”

Polling stationPlease note that the poll was carried out (between the 6th and 8th January) by a web-based polling organisation (YouGov) founded by a former Tory pollster, commissioned by the Tory eurosceptic campaign group Global Vision in partnership with the Tory-linked “small government” campaign group the Taxpayers’ Alliance – and the results were first published in the staunchly eurosceptic, Tory-leaning Telegraph. Whether this means that the questions were loaded and the results skewed is hard to tell, as I haven’t seen the full results or the questions asked. The sample was made up of 2,157 adults.

It is also unclear whether a vote for newly launched pan-EU political party Libertas was an option – or how many people said that they would not be voting at all. Considering turn-out for EU elections in the UK has averaged about 30% in the last two, if the figures above are only based on those who will definitely be voting, the final sample size could be as few as 650 people (30% of 2,157) – statisticians will be able to tell you if that’s statistically significant for a UK population of 61 million. Either way, only 1% is unaccounted for in the above figures, and I very much doubt we’ll see a 99% turnout.

The dramatic drop in UKIP support (with further drops for fellow eurosceptic parties the Greens and the BNP) is one of the biggest points of interest. How to account for it? A pro-Tory bias in the questions from two Conservative-leading organisations conducting the poll, or a general collapse in UKIP support thanks to the party being, well, a bit rubbish? As Polling Report notes,

Back in 2004 YouGov included minor parties like UKIP in the main question prompt and, as a result, ended up over-stating the level of UKIP support – it will be interesting to see exactly how this question was prompted. Either way, how well UKIP will do is a hard one to predict. At the moment they get practically zero publicity in the mainstream media, so a huge drop in support is not a particular surprise. At the last European elections they received a lot of publicity because of Robert Kilroy-Silk, something that won’t be a factor this time… Accorded to the Sunday Telegraph report 10% of those who say they would vote Tory in a general election would vote UKIP in a European election, which implies that straight voting intention questions were also asked.

There were also some more general questions asked about the UK’s relationship with the EU which, as reported in the Telegraph, reveal the following:

16 per cent of voters want Britain simply to withdraw from the EU, while 48 per cent would like to see a much looser relationship, with the government taking back powers from Brussels and ending the supremacy of the European Court of Justice over British law.

Added together this makes 64 per cent in favour of weakening Britain’s ties with the EU, compared with just 22 per cent in favour of keeping the UK’s current full membership including the Lisbon Treaty, which was passed by parliament without a referendum.

Much worth noting there. The mention of “taking back powers from Brussels” (a key Tory promise under David Cameron, though it’s unclear quite how he could achieve this) would suggest a pro-Tory bias to the questioning. The mention of the European Court of Justice is also odd – this is an institution rarely explicitly brought up in the UK EU debate (in fact, it’s more often the non-EU European Court of Human Rights that is bandied about by press and politicians alike), though “the supremacy of European [law]” is a favourite buzz phrase of the eurosceptic right. Please also note the final part of that second paragraph: if “passed by parliament without a referendum” was included in the poll’s own questioning, that’s almost certainly going to result in some pretty hefty result-skewing, as by all accounts the British public was overwhelmingly in favour of a Lisbon Treaty referendum, while remaining overwhelmingly ignorant of its contents.

One final statistic of interest, from the Telegraph:

Some 45 per cent of voters, meanwhile, believe none of the three main political parties adequately reflects their views on Britain’s future relations with the EU

That sounds about right – and you can count me in among that 45%. As EU elections in the UK are based on a party list form of proportional representation, I will not have the option of voting for an individual candidate come June – which is what I usually base my vote on. Given the option of ONLY voting for a party, I find myself genuinely stumped. Indeed, it’s increasingly looking like the upcoming European elections will well be the first elections of any kind for which I have been eligible to vote at which I will reluctantly find myself abstaining.

Yes, you read that right: Despite being one of the most engaged and aware people in the British Isles when it comes to the EU – and arguably one of the most prominent and persistent online advocates for the UK’s continued involvement with the European integration – I may not bother to vote in the EU elections. That’s just about as damning an indictment of the way the EU currently works as you can get.

The Economist, the EU and online media strategies

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The EconomistI’ve been rather busy this week, so have only just realised that The Economist’s superb EU-focussed blog Certain Ideas of Europe is – for reasons unknown – being cancelled.

Public Affairs 2.0 asks a few questions. Has the writer left? I doubt it – I’m pretty certain it was produced by more than one staffer. Has The Economist given up on blogs? Well, it doesn’t seem to be cancelling its other blogs – Free Exchange, Democracy in America, Gulliver or The World in 2009.

So, is it that The Economist has run out of ideas on Europe, as Public Affairs 2.0 asks, or is it something else? With the Summer’s European Parliamentary elections fast approaching, with Ireland likely to hold another referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, with the European Commission soon to change over, surely interest in EU affairs is likely to rise? Surely now, more than ever, is the time that regular daily analysis of EU affairs is vital?

Well, yes. But The Economist is a business, not a public service organisation. I for one would be astounded if Certain Ideas of Europe ever got anywhere near the traffic of the other Economist blogs – not due to any lack of quality (I often used to cite it as one of the best), but purely thanks to the subject-matter. Producing any kind of commercial publication – even a blog – about the EU simply will not make you much cash. Unless, that is, you target the obsessives. And that, generally speaking, means targeting the eurosceptics. Certain Ideas of Europe, aiming for balanced and restrained coverage, simply wasn’t angry or sensational enough to draw in the crowds.

EU affairs remain a specialist interest. Providing free information is not worthwhile, because there are so few people who care. This is why The Economist’s EU-focussed spin-off European Voice keeps so much of its content locked behind a subscription wall. By my calculations, I get a similar monthly readership to the print version of the European Voice (based on their paid-for sales – more likely to be read than the vast number of comp copies they put out). And that’s in a month when I’ve not been posting much.

Of course, the way European Voice survives is the complimentary copies that make up a good 89% of its 18,500 print run. Because as these are sent to so many EU bigwigs, free of charge, it enables the European Voice sales team to claim that 7,398 individuals in the European Commission, 505 in the European Parliament and 433 in the Council of Ministers are subscribers. “Ooooh!”, think the advertisers, “that means we can get our message in front of people who really matter!” It’s the same loss-leading advertising strategy used by fellow EU news weekly The Parliament Magazine, as well as UK-centred ones like The House Magazine and Total Politics, among others.

It’s a perfectly valid ad sales technique, and been going on for years. As long as you’ve got a decent sales team, you can pull it off. It doesn’t matter whether every single one of those complimentary copies is put in the recycling bin by some beleaguered secretary as soon as they arrive without even entering the same room as the political bigwig whose name is on the subscriber list – the fact that it *might* be read by them is usually enough for the advertisers.

Not so online. Online, statistics can be padded (using visitors rather than unique visitors, page loads rather than visitors, hits rather than page loads, etc.), but they are much harder to bluff completely. If an advertiser asks outright how many people visit your website and you give them low number, why would they bother advertising with you? You can’t possibly get away with “well, we may only get 200 visitors a day, but every single one of them is really important, honest” in the same way that you can with print.

What does this all mean? Well, by the European Voice’s own media pack’s figures (warning – PDF), fewer than 2,000 people a week are willing to pay money for that publication. That’s significantly less than most paid-for local newspapers in the UK. It could never survive on subscriptions alone – there simply isn’t enough interest.

Likewise, the lack of interest in EU matters means that online readership would be similarly dire even if they did put all of their content up for free, and this would not be enough to attract any advertising whatsoever. (Case in point – I’ve recently started a BlogActiv mirror for some of the content on this site. Even on days when I’ve been featured as Editor’s Choice on their front page and in the daily EurActiv email bulletins, it’s got less traffic than this place. Both BlogActiv and EurActiv survive off grants and sponsorship, not traditional advertising.)

So the European Voice survives purely through the advertising attracted by all those comp copies to the bigwigs – something almost impossible to pull off with an online-only publication. (Well, I could pull the same trick with this place if I wanted – I’d just have to enter the email addresses of everyone who works in the Commission and EP into my email subscriber list. 99% of them would mark all my emails as spam, but, by the same logic as works with complimentary print publications, who cares? They’re on the list – that’s what matters.)

Certain Ideas of Europe, of course, was online only. Without a print presence, it had no advertising potential – just as most individual blogs have no advertising potential (hence the plethora of blog advertising networks like BlogAds and its imitators that use strength in numbers approaches, grouping dozens of blogs together to offer a combined readership that might be of interest to advertisers).

As a commercial publisher trying to make money, for The Economist to continue publishing a blog about EU affairs evidently does not make any business sense. Because it is all but impossible to make money out of writing about the EU. No one is interested. No one cares. This place is one of the longest-running and better-known English-language EU-centred blogs, and it’s not even in the top 100 UK political blogs by inbound links or readership. And of those top 100 UK political blogs, only about five or six have enough traffic, capital and business know-how behind them to even approach being viable commercial concerns.

Last week media blogger Gary Andrews asked whether the current credit crisis might see local newspapers shift to online only publishing. As I noted in the comments, I can’t see it. Local newspapers may fold as the web removes traditional sources of advertising revenue (largely by offering alternatives to local newspaper small ads for free on sites like Craigslist and its clones) – but without a print presence to give the potential of at least some big buck adverts, I can’t see how special-interest websites (be they local newspapers or EU-centred) will ever be able to generate enough money to survive.

Online ads are still pretty much restricted to banner, skyscraper, MPU and text-based (either links or advertorials), with only a few other options for sound- and video- based sites. None of these have any hope of having as much impact as a full-page newspaper advert, even if they can be seen by many times more people. And for all of them, advertisers are canny enough to demand exact viewing/readership figures – something that will always be impossible for print. And all of this means that online adverts will always be restricted in the amount of revenue they can generate – because most advertising rates are based on little more than what the ad salesperson can get away with. Online, they can get away with far less.

All this, of course, means not just the slow death of proper scrutiny of borough and county councillors as local newspapers begin to die out, but also the continued lack of serious scrutiny of EU-level politics, and the continued lack of that kind of European public sphere or demos we’re always told is a precondition for genuine democracy.

Because if you can’t make money out of publishing something, no commercial publisher with any sense is going to try. This applies to the EU just as it applies to local newspapers or magazines specialising in knitting scarves out of human hair.*

And so it is that we are losing one of the best EU blogs just as we approach a crunch year for EU affairs. Unless you’re like the BBC, and forced to cover events that are deemed “in the public interest” (even though the public remains singularly uninterested), writing about the EU is never going to make you any money. Not until it becomes more interesting to the public at large, at any rate – and there’s no sign of that happening any time soon.

* There are (almost) always business models that will work for special-interest publications – but they will rarely involve much expenditure on either editorial content or publicity, being produced at minimal cost and very, very carefully targeted. There are several magazines devoted solely to alpaca farming, for instance – but when was the last time you saw a copy at a newsagent?

With a minimal editorial team and a skilled couple of ad sales people, it would be possible to turn a decent profit from a magazine devoted to EU affairs – if anyone’s interested in launching one, get in touch. But in the present climate it’d only be possible in one language – two at a push. Try to do a genuinely EU-wide magazine published in several languages? Not a hope in hell that there’d be enough interest to justify the expense of all the translators and language-specific subs. Just as it wouldn’t be worthwhile producing a magazine on alpaca farming with a 20-strong editorial team.

Libertas launches

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So, hot on the heels of its success getting a “No” in the Irish Lisbon Treaty referendum, Libertas has today relaunched as a pan-European political party. Look – it’s got a shiny new website and Twitter, Facebook and Flickr accounts and everything!

“If people want a strong and healthy Europe that is democratic and answerable to them, they should vote for a Libertas candidate”

All very well and good. Democracy, eh? Yep – I could go for that. Strength? Health? All sounds good. Because they’re platitudinous truisms. The same rubbish could be spouted by any and all parties.

So, what about the details of the new party’s policies and attitudes? What sort of people will be standing as candidates?

“A detailed policy document will be published in the coming months, and candidates’ names will be unveiled over a similar time frame.”

Ah… So, erm… This is a party with no policies and no candidates. Now seems a good time to repeat my comments about Libertas to a wider audience:

1) We don’t yet know how many candidates (if any) Libertas will be running, or where
2) We don’t know what their campaign is going to focus on
3) We don’t know what impact (if any) the shift from Republican to Democrat will have on them considering the allegations of their close ties to the current US administration

A genuinely pan-European pro-reform (but not anti-EU) political party could be exactly what’s needed. But there remain far too many unknowns about both Ganley and his organisation to be able to make any sensible judgements about it just yet. What is known of Ganley and his business dealings hardly makes me overly optimistic that his motives are entirely altruistic.

Having said that, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Libertas’ pro-democracy, pro-reform, pro-integration rhetoric is actually belief (the rumoured involvement of Jens-Peter Bonde is a promising sign, for example) – though I remain sceptical about the group’s motives, largely due to a combination of the secrecy that still surrounds its funding, the fact that its arguments against the Lisbon Treaty in the Irish referendum campaign largely consisted of nationalistic ones about Ireland losing influence, and thanks to most other “pro-reform” organisations in the past having turned out instead to be anti-EU. A reformist party I could get behind. Another anti-EU one in disguise? No thanks.

The clincher will be where Libertas decides to run. If it avoids putting candidates up against existing anti-EU/eurosceptic parties like UKIP or Denmark’s June Movement, that’ll be a good indication that the “reform” rhetoric is just fluff. If it DOES run against anti-EU parties, expect their share of the vote to go down. Which could, short-term, reduce the number of eurosceptics in the European Parliament – but which would, longer-term, simply lead to the current resentment continuing to grow, so that by the NEXT EP elections we might be ready for some serious changes.

I may be being unfair. The new party’s Facts page does, after all, tick most of my boxes:

“Libertas is not a Eurosceptic organisation… Our vision is of a united Europe, which recognises and respects the right of citizens and nations to choose their own destinies, but which encourages all Europeans to reach across the borders of nationality, language, and culture to participate in and invigorate a Union which equips us to meet the challenges of this next phase of European History.”

I hope I’m being unfair in doubting them. If Libertas is what it professes to be, it could be just the medicine that the EU needs to fix the ongoing stagnation and rot. But when it comes to EU reform organisations, far too many have turned out to be little more than anti-EU talking shops in disguise for me to accept this as face value just yet.

Looking to the future

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In a sign that everyone’s begun to realise that we’ve already hit the limit of economically-viable countries (if there is such a thing in the current climate) to join the EU, and following the lead of Sarkozy with his Mediterranean Union, it looks like Brussels is finally taking a more realistic attitude towards the old Soviet sphere.

Because, let’s face it, Armenia, Azerbaijan, (especially) Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine have very little of benefit to offer the EU in economic terms bar their strategic importance for the transportation energy supplies. They need to be kept sweet, certainly – but it seems that lessons have finally been learned: if you make promises you have no intention of honouring, resentment will build (cf. the growing euroscepticism of Turkey, repeatedly rebuffed since the carrot of membership was first dangled). Worst case scenario, you may end up having to make good with the promises and hand membership to countries – like Romania and Bulgaria – that simply aren’t ready for it.

This newly revamped Eastern Partnership is an overdue heir to the old Phare scheme, which did so much to prepare the 2004 Central and Eastern European accession countries for membership. If done right, it could bolster goodwill towards the EU among these near neighbours. It may, if we’re lucky, help bolster their flagging economies and strengthen their nascent democracies (or even help make democracy more likely in the dictatorship of Belarus). If done badly, it will breed only resentment – not just among the countries themselves (annoyed at being denied the chance for full membership), nor even in Russia (irritated at her old sphere of influence being infiltrated once again), but also among current EU member states (thanks to fears of a sudden influx of migrants from these regions).

It’s hard not to think that Bulgaria and Romania got rather lucky. They’ve only been in the club for a couple of years, and arguably fail to live up to a number of the Copenhagen criteria for membership. If this apparent new tendency to look to “partnership” arrangements as an alternative to full membership had been devised back when Romania and Bulgaria were first being considered as applicants, a lot of fuss could have been saved.

We’re also, perhaps, beginning to see signs of future EU ambition. The EU’s already expanded its partnerships beyond the scope of Roman Empire. These new models of relationships – the Union for the Mediterranean and the Eastern Partnership – could yet spread further: to Central Asia, further south in Africa, perhaps to South America via the EU enclave of French Guyana, possibly even to the Middle East and South East Asia.

For those who dream of a future of global free trade agreements, these moves – with their suggestions of trade partnerships and opening up of markets – are surely a promising sign that the EU is beginning to head in the right direction? Such partnerships could never have been negotiated (arguably imposed) by just one nation acting alone – but the collective bargaining power that the EU’s vast market has brought has given the organisation a genuinely powerful ability to broker such deals that should, in the long term, benefit everybody concerned.

I’ve never bought in to the idea that the ultimate goal of the EU is that mythical superstate. Instead, if you believe that global free(ish) trade is desirable – and if you’re going to go really utopian and over the top – it’s surely aiming for something along the lines of Star Trek’s Federation? Why, after all, aim for a common market on just one continent? If a common market is a good thing, surely it should be expanded globally?

Overly ambitious? Probably. But this sort of partnership agreement formed (or forced through?) by a pre-existing coalition is certainly a rather more realistic route to such an end goal than individual nations all bickering among themselves. If you want to see just how effective that sort of system can be, just have a gander at the increasingly ineffective United Nations or its League of Nations predecessor.

“Under the illusion that the borders are disappearing, they are actually rapidly growing”

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Interesting report over at Kosmopolito on a recent lecture by frequently controversial Slovenian lefty intellectual Slavoj Zizek. For followers of the post-Marxian philosopher, there’s probably not much new – but some of his ideas are well worth pondering at greater length, not least for those of us interested in the future of Europe. As Kosmopolito’s Tanchi notes Zizek as commenting,

“Under the illusion that the borders are disappearing, they are actually rapidly growing.”

These borders need not be the traditional lines on maps – they can be cultural as much as any kind of arbitrary physical boundary. Indeed, Zizek has much pondered the concept of multiculturalism, now gradually falling out of favour, as in this interview from back in August. Anti-multicultural right-wingers may be surprised at just how much they find themselves agreeing with this self-professed communist:

I think here we had enough of this multicultural ideology, which for me at least is often an inverted racism – namely for example when people come here – typically multiculturalists would say: “Oh I want to understand how you are different.” No… We need today codes of discretion, not more understanding. I think we should totally object to this liberal blackmail; we should understand each other – no the world is too complex we can not – I hate people, I don’t want to understand people. I want to have a certain code where I don’t understand your way of life and you don’t understand mine but we still can coexist.

Yet it’s not just a racial or national lack of understanding or rivalry that can be the problem – it can also be political. When the people become alienated from the political class, resentment can arise just as much (if not more so) than when fear or mistrust of “the other” leads to rising ethnic/cultural tensions. And it all stems from a lack of understanding on both sides – often coupled with a patronising tone from one or the other. The same tone that tells us that British National Party supporters join through resentment at lack of opportunity and personal failure is used to explain away the “No” votes to the European Constitution in France and the Netherlands (and subsequently the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland). As Zizek noted three years ago, after the French referendum,

The elite proposed to the people a choice that was effectively no choice at all. People were called to ratify the inevitable. Both the media and the political elite presented the choice as one between knowledge and ignorance, between expertise and ideology…

Patronise the people – even if they deserve it – and they will turn on you. Witness the recent kerfuffle in the UK on reality TV show Strictly Come Dancing, where the most useless contestant was repeatedly kept on by the public vote seemingly just to spite the expert judges.

Perhaps thanks to the weapons of mass destruction that never were, though the trend started long before that (Watergate, perhaps?) the world has become a more cynical, distrustful place – and politicians are among the least trusted of the lot. If a politician tells us that something is the case, we the people tend to believe the precise opposite. If a politician – sitting comfortably in their plush houses on their vast, taxpayer-funded salaries – tells us that they understand our concerns, our first reaction is to snort in derision.

And so the borders go up between the political elites and the people. Turnouts at elections drop year after year. More votes are cast for the winner of Big Brother than in general elections. Party membership tails off as even the most politically engaged lose faith and interest. Resentment grows along with populism, as politicians desperately try to re-engage with the public to the extent that Cabinet ministers feel the need to comment on The X Factor in parliament, or simply follow whatever mindless witch-hunt the tabloid press are up to this week.

If we’re alienated from our national politicians, what hope for those EU level politicians, about whom we know nothing?

And then, of course, there’s the psychological borders rising between the people themselves as opinions and resentments become entrenched and no amount of debate can change minds. Non-geographical borders along the purple America model, where resentment grows, and two ideologically wildly different nations live – literally – side by side in the same geographical territory.

Ignore the obvious race and religion based forms of multiculturalism – what happens when mutually-exclusive political cultures begin to arise within a democratic society?

But this post is already overlong and rambling, so perhaps that’s one for another day…