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The European Commission
What is the European Commission?
What powers does it have?
What is the relationship of EU laws to national laws?
Doesn't
harmonising laws spread best practice across Europe?
Is the Commission a democratic organisation?
Is it a trustworthy organisation?
How does it deal with criticism?
How does it advance its agenda?
The European Union
What does it cost Britain to belong to the
EU?
Doesn't Britain get a rebate from its payments
to the EU?
Doesn’t the EU fund valuable projects in Britain?
Isn’t belonging to the EU necessary for Britain’s
trade?
Don’t EFTA countries have to abide by legislation
that they played no part in framing?
So why do so many other countries want to join the EU?
What do the people of Britain feel about staying in
the EU?
Is the BBC fair and unbiased in its reporting of the
EU?
Isn’t closer European integration progressive?
Isn't political union better than the wars and nationalism
of the past?
Shouldn't Britain provide economic aid to the poorer
countries of eastern Europe?
Aren't EU laws sometimes better than the British laws they
supersede?
Is the goal a United States of Europe?
Isn't the EU just democracy on a larger scale than the
nation state?
Don't European politicians just represent
their country's interests in the European arena?
Shouldn't the different nations of Europe work together?
Aren’t Eurosceptics just xenophobic Little Englanders
and and/or racists?
The European Commission
What
is the European Commission?
The Commission consists of 27 politicians from EU member states, who have
been appointed to their positions rather than elected. In practice, they
are often the “also rans” of national politics – Britain’s
Commissioners, for example, have included Neil Kinnock, Peter Mandelson
and Chris Patten. No wonder the Commission has been described as “not
just undemocratic but anti-democratic, in the sense that you generally
have to lose an election to end up there".
What powers
does it have?
The Commission has the sole right to propose new European laws.
What is the relationship of EU
laws to national laws?
EU laws supersede national laws, whether or not the law in question has
been ratified by the national parliament. This is why the so-called Metric
Martyrs were successfully prosecuted for selling fruit and vegetables
by the pound when their customers requested it, despite Britain never
having ratified the EU law making this illegal.
Doesn't harmonising laws spread
best practice across Europe?
Unfortunately, the laws imposed across Europe are not necessarily the
best or wisest, merely those with the most political power behind them.
In fact, EU laws are often designed to disadvantage the states on which
they are imposed.
Consider for example the Working Time Directive, which limits the number of hours people may work. The French are keen on this measure, part of the "social model" they prefer to what they see as the unrestrained capitalism of the "Anglo-Saxon model". However, they know that whatever the benefits to lifestyle, it puts them at an economic disadvantage to countries where people can choose to work as long as they like. The solution? To impose the same disadvantages on every other European country and remove their competitive advantage.
Of course, there is no mechanism to impose the Working Time Directive on the rest of the world, so in the long term Europe will lose out economically to countries like the US, and increasingly India and China as well.
Is the Commission
a democratic organisation?
Quite apart from the undemocratic way the Commission is made up, it is
undemocratic in its approach to government. It has proposed legislation
that would discriminate against even moderately Eurosceptic parties in
the European Parliament by providing state funding only for those parties
that shared its federalist agenda. Not surprisingly, MEPs from former
Warsaw Pact countries have objected that this is exactly how the Soviets
governed their satellite states – allowing elections but ensuring
that only parties they approved of could take part in them. Click
here for more information.
Is it a trustworthy
organisation?
For 12 years in a row, the Court of Auditors has refused to sign off on
the European Commission's accounts because of massive amounts of money
not properly accounted for – more than 90% of the total. The EU's
Chief Accountant, Marta Andreasen, was sacked for refusing to ignore evidence
of fraud. She later described the "perverse incentive structure"
which rewarded staff who "managed not to discover financial malfeasance".
When Andreasen began her work she was astonished to find that, uniquely in the modern world, the European Commission did not use a double entry book-keeping system – rather its accounts were kept in simple Excel spreadsheets, so there was nothing to prevent them being retrospectively altered. A new system has now been adopted, but Andreasen considers it just as vulnerable to fraud as the one it replaced.
Interestingly, she also feels that the European Consitution would make the problem worse by "[increasing] the powers of institutions which have proved up until now to be totally unaccountable and lacking transparency." In particular, she feels that the proposed system of shared control of the budget "is equivalent to no control. It is basically a method of shifting the responsibility somewhere else... something in which the European institutions are very experienced."
How does it
deal with criticism?
In 2001 the European Court of Justice ruled that the European Commission
was entitled to sack Bernard Connolly, a British economist who had written
a book about monetary integration called "The Rotten Heart of Europe".
The ruling stated that the Commission had the right to punish individuals
who "damaged the institution's image and reputation".
Mr Connolly, who was ordered to pay the Commission's considerable legal costs, commented, "We're back to the Star Chamber and Acts of Attainder: the rights of defendants are not respected or guaranteed in any way; the offence of seditious libel has been resurrected." Significantly, during the trial a landmark British case concerning freedom of speech was dismissed as having "no foundation or relevance" in European law.
In 2004 the German investigative reporter Hans-Peter Tillach, investigating the notorious Eurostat scandal in which millions of euros went missing from Commission accounts, found himself arrested by Belgian police and all his written evidence and his computer seized. Meanwhile in the European Parliament, a motion to censure the Commission over Eurostat was met with such disproportionate hostility that 30 MEPs who had originally signed later withdrew their names. Some had been threatened with deselection as candidates.
Similarly, the European Parliament voted to ban the media from certain parts of its buildings. This was in response to a German TV crew filming MEPs signing in to receive their daily "attendance allowance" of 268 euros, then going home immediately.
How does it
advance its agenda?
The EU's method of leeching powers
from member states was summed up with admirable clarity by the Prime Minister
of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker: "We decide on something, leave
it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss,
because most people don't know what has been decided, we continue step
by step until there is no turning back."
Of course, public opinion cannot be neglected entirely, and the Commission has never been shy of abusing taxpayers' money to buy popularity for the European project, under such guises as "promoting active European citizenship". Quite apart from indirect advertising via highly visible EU-funded projects required to display the EU logo, the EU funds innumerable pressure groups, professorial chairs and even quasi-academic courses with titles such as "European Integration and the Future of Europe". It even maintains a fund specifically for flying journalists to Brussels and showing them a good time.
Sometimes it buys good publicity more directly, as with the Euronews TV channel, in which objectivity is abandoned in favour what have been described as "Soviet-style items about grateful workers getting higher standards thanks to the Commission". Then President of the European Commission Romano Prodi denied that this funding compromises the channel's editorial independence, but admitted that it was required to "respect the image of the European institutions and the raison d'être and general objectives of the Union".
Whenever faced with the inconvenience of having to ask the people of Europe whether they are in favour of further European integration, the Commission in conjunction with national governments will quite openly use taxpayers' money to campaign for a yes vote. The Europe Minister Denis McShane famously announced his intention to spend "serious money" on the yes campaign, were there to be a referendum on the European Constitution.
Most insidious of all is the way the EU targets propaganda at children, in direct contravention of rules forbidding political indoctrination in classrooms. The EU produces classroom materials such as "Let's Draw Europe together" (the opening section of which was entitled "My country: Europe") and classroom videos which proclaim that "to simplify things, they should make a Single Currency [so that] everyone is happy. See – it's better this way." There are also comic books – "Troubled Waters", which shows plucky MEPs fighting to prevent environmental pollution, was translated into 22 languages – and even a superhero, Captain Euro, who battles against the evil Dr D. Vider.
This strategy of targetting children should come as no surprise. The Working Group on Euro-Education noted in 1998 that “Children can perform a messenger function in conveying the message to the home environment. Young people will often in practice act as go-betweens with the older generations, helping them familiarise themselves with and embrace the euro.”
See also manufacturing consent and funded by the EU for more details.
The European Union
What does it
cost Britain to belong to the EU?
Britain pays £13.9 billion every year to belong to the European
Union, more than the entire Home Office budget. As MEP Daniel Hannan notes,
"If we stopped our payments, we could give the whole country a 60
per cent cut in council tax. Or, if we preferred, we could abolish capital
gains tax and inheritance tax and still have enough left over to scrap
stamp duty."
Doesn't
Britain get a rebate from its payments to the EU?
To call it a rebate is misleading, as it implies that every member state
was paying the same amount until Britain suddenly stopped paying its fair
share. In fact, even with the "rebate" Britain pays 2.5 times
as much as France, and without it would be paying 15 times as much, as
Tony Blair himself admitted (see quotes page).
The only member state that pays more than Britain is Germany, despite
already suffering from the massive costs of reunification with the former
East Germany.
Britain's rebate was partially given up by Tony Blair in December 2005, in return for the vague promise that reform of the disastrously wasteful Common Agricultural Policy would be "considered". (In the event, the EU budget for 2007-13 devoted an even larger proportion of spending to agriculture than the one before.) The cost to the British taxpayer of Blair's capitulation was initially estimated at £1 billion per year, though the Treasury later admitted the real figure was nearly double that.
Doesn’t
the EU fund valuable projects in Britain?
Yes. The EU spends £8 billion on projects in Britain every year.
This is why Britain’s annual contribution is sometimes cited as
£5.9 billion – this is the so-called “net” figure.
By the same logic, income tax would be described as nought because everything
we pay is "given back" in the form of public services.
Although many of these projects are wasteful and chosen mainly for their visibility and usefulness in promoting the EU and its agenda (see funded by the EU), some are undeniably worthwhile. However, if we didn’t give away £13.9 billion in the first place, we could fund everything the EU funds in this country and much more.
Isn’t
belonging to the EU necessary for Britain’s trade?
No. Four countries – Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Lichtenstein
– belong to the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) but remain outside
the EU. This gives them all the benefits of EU membership, such as access
to the single market, without the massive direct and indirect costs. Not
surprisingly, all four countries have a higher GDP per capita than the
EU average (even before the accession of 10 eastern European countries
in May 2004). They also export twice as much per capita to the
EU than does Britain, despite the supposed advantages of our membership.
(In fact, a useful definition of EFTA is that it is the Common Market the British people were told they were voting to join in 1975.)
The British Chambers of Commerce report that more than half the regulations affecting British businesses originate with the EU. Furthermore, the cost imposed by these regulations is disproportionately high – £24 billion since 1998, more than 80% of the total, according to a study by the House of Commons library.
In fact, the Commission's own statistics show that the EU has been bad for business. Commission Vice President Günter Verheugen admitted in October 2006 that EU standardisation now costs businesses €600 billion a year. This is a larger sum than the total spending of 20 out of the 27 member states. It dwarfs the EU’s €110 billion budget. On the Commission’s own statistics, it is nearly four times as much as the €180 billion savings generated by the single market.
Furthermore, EU barriers to trade with the rest of the world cost the UK economy £30 billion a year, according to the Professor of Economics at Cardiff Business School, and lead to prices within the EU being on average 40% above those outside. He also noted that cars, textiles and electrical equipment are twice as expensive within the EU.
Don’t
EFTA countries have to abide by legislation that they played no part in
framing?
There are two obvious problems with this argument. Firstly, there
are currently 27 EU member states – if the EFTA countries joined
as well, there would be 31. This would give each state a 1/31 voice in
any new legislation, hardly enough to guarantee that it will be designed
to suit them when there are 30 competing interests.
Secondly, the legislation concerned is entirely in the very narrow area of trading standards. If you want to sell your products to the EU, they must meet EU standards, just as they must meet American standards if you want to sell them there. Does anyone argue that we should become the 51st state of America just so that we can influence American trading standards to suit our exporters?
In return for losing a token amount of influence over EU trading standards, EFTA countries avoid the massive direct and indirect costs of EU membership and are free to govern themselves as sovereign democracies. By contrast, EU members find that 80% of their laws are dictated to them by Brussels. For example, since 1992 Norway has had to adopt 3,000 European directives, but most of these were so trivial – the right way to list ingredients on food packaging, for example – that only 50 Acts of Parliament were required. During the same period, Britain had to accept 24,000 directives, many of them far from trivial.
So why do so
many other countries want to join the EU?
Bertrand Russell famously asked, "If
you offer a man the choice between the vote and a bag of grain, how hungry
does he have to be before he prefers the grain to the vote?"
Many eastern European countries are poorer than the average EU member state (the reason being, of course, their forced involvement in another ill-conceived supranational union). On joining the EU, they therefore became net beneficiaries of the EU budget – they take more out than they pay in. They are at least financially compensated for ceasing to be sovereign democracies, unlike Britain, which pays handsomely for the privilege. For the moment, they consider the loss of independence a price worth paying.
Furthermore, the EU's external tariff barriers make it more difficult for non-EU countries to trade with EU countries – except by joining the EU themselves. This creates a kind of domino effect whereby (for example) eastern European countries, suddenly deprived of the ability to trade freely with neighbour countries that have joined the EU, must join the EU as well to put themselves inside the protectionist barrier.
One must also consider the question of who is making the decision. Politicians and civil servants based in Brussels enjoy huge salaries and perks, including expense payments that bear no relation to expenses actually incurred and which in any case are never audited. The EU shrewdly decided that functionaries from states that were thinking of joining in 2004 could spend a year in Brussels on full pay before making the decision. An Estonian newspaper calculated that a civil servant, moving from Tallin to Brussels at the same grade, would increase his salary twenty-two fold.
Not surprisingly, at the end of the year they were in no hurry to return to their former lifestyles.
What do the people of Britain
feel about staying in the EU?
The polling organisation MORI regularly conducts opinion polls asking
the question, "If there were a referendum on whether the UK should
stay in or leave the European Union, which way would you vote?" The
vote to leave has never fallen below 40% of those expressing an opinion
in the 20 polls conducted since 1992, and has been more than 50% on several
occasions.
These results are in sharp contrast to the 33% who voted to leave in the actual referendum in 1975. Perhaps the reason is that in 1975 people believed (and indeed were repeatedly told by a media propaganda campaign) that they were voting to join a simple common market – a free trade area – and resent the way this is being transformed into a political union without any further reference to their opinion.
Is the BBC fair and unbiased
in its reporting of the EU?
In 1999, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, Lord Harris of High Cross and Lord Stoddart
of Swindon commissioned the company Minotaur Media Tracking to conduct
six methodical surveys into the way the BBC reports matters relating to
the European Union. Their reports showed that:
- During the European Parliamentary elections in 1999, only 2% of BBC news coverage was devoted to the issue. None of it included any discussion of whether Britain should even belong to the EU, despite the BBC's charter and guidelines declaring that, "No significant strand of British public thought should go unreflected or under-represented on the BBC."
- During the same period, the tiny fringe Pro-Euro Conservative Party was given equal prominence to the actual Conservative Party. The UK Independence Party, which went on to win six times as many votes as the Pro-Euro Conservative Party, was given only one negative interview. No Labour Eurosceptics were on air at any time during 400 hours of news coverage.
- During three 30 minute long episodes of Radio 4's "Today" programme in 2000, which had been billed as a discussion of whether Britain should leave the EU, only one person, speaking for 35 seconds, put the case that Britain should leave. Lord Pearson commented, "[This was] perhaps because he was live and they couldn't cut him out."
- A broader survey of the "Today" programme for two months in 2001 found that it included two and half times as many people in favour of the single currency as people against it.
More details of these results can be found at http://www.globalbritain.org/BBC/BBC%20Front%20page.htm Interestingly, a report commissioned by the BBC itself came to similar conclusions – click here for more details.
Polling by the MORI organisation consistently shows that 80% of respondents in Britain feel they have not been given enough truthful information about the European Union, and would like more.
Isn’t
closer European integration progressive?
No. Truly progressive politics brings power closer to the people and makes
it more accountable. The European project is doing the exact opposite.
For example, one of the motivations for Scottish devolution was that, as a minority within the UK, the Scots tended to be saddled with whatever government the English had voted for, even when they had voted a different way themselves. The Scots now have their own Parliament, its members elected solely by Scottish votes. But instead of devolving to this Parliament, power is leeching both from this and from the Westminster Parliament to Brussels. Even if the Brussels machine were truly democratic, rather than just a veneer of democracy intended to disguise rule by an unelected oligarchy, the interests of Scotland – and every other member state – would inevitably be swamped in a polity that stretches from Ireland to the Baltic states.
In March 2005, 100 academics from all over the EU wrote a letter to the Financial Times outlining their opposition to the Constitution, saying that it "opens doors for the Union to pre-empt the role of other jurisdictions in an increasing number of fields", and "opens up numerous new avenues for increased regulation in Europe", which would "undermine Europe's competitiveness in the world economy." It concludes, "on balance it clearly makes things worse. It pushes people still further away from those who exercise power in their name. It must be rejected."
Isn't political union better than
the wars and nationalism of the past?
This tends to be the Europhiles' last ditch argument –
never mind how corrupt and undemocratic the Brussels system is, never
mind how damaging the Common Agricultural Policy is to Europe and the
third world etc. All this is worth putting up with because the EU has
prevented war between its member states for the last 60 years. The EU's
website explicitly makes this claim.
The trouble is, there is no correlation at all between whether different groups belong to the same nation (or supranational union) and whether there is conflict between them. Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, to take only the most obvious examples, show that you will not stop bloodshed by pronouncing from on high that two groups concerned are part of the same polity. Indeed, in Rwanda's case the legacy of imperial rule (by Brussels, as it happens...) was a major contributing factor to the slaughter of the mid-1990s. Conversely, of course, there are innumerable examples of nation states living side by side without any conflict between them, suggesting that something other than national identity must be the problem.
One of the motives for the unification of Germany in the 19th century was that individual states would no longer fight against each other once they were melded into one nation. Indeed they didn't – but the newly unified Germany fought three increasingly disastrous wars with its neighbous in the next 75 years. But rather than stopping to wonder whether their methodology is wrong, the integrationists simply want to apply the same principle on a larger scale.
Shouldn't Britain provide economic
aid to the poorer countries of eastern Europe?
Certainly an argument could be made for this. Although these countries
are not as poor as, say, much of sub-Saharan Africa, it might be argued
that we bear a particular responsibility to them, having condemned them
at the Yalta conference (1945) to live under Soviet rule in return for
Stalin's help in defeating Hitler.
However, if we do want to help eastern Europe, giving money to Brussels must be about the least efficient way we could possibly do it. Between the Eurocrats' salaries (and lavish expense accounts), the glossy architectural gems in which they are housed, the money wasted in moving the European Parliament lock, stock and barrel to Strasbourg and back every month, the money spent on pro-EU propaganda, the notoriously wasteful and fraudulent Common Agricultural Policy and a million other ways the EU wastes money, the amount that gets through to where it is needed is a fraction of what the rich countries donated in the first place.
In any case, money spent by the EU tends to reflect EU priorities (visibility, usefulness in promoting the EU) rather than those of the recipient.
Aren't EU laws sometimes better
than the British laws they supersede?
No one would argue that British law, or indeed the British system
of government, is perfect as it stands. No doubt there is a great deal
of room for improvement.
Then again, no one would suggest that India's government, for example, is perfect. But neither would anyone use this fact to argue for a reinstatement of British Imperial rule of India, on the grounds that Indians weren't doing a good enough job of ruling themselves. Imperial rule of Britain – or any other European country – by the EU is equally unjustified.
Is the
goal a United States of Europe?
The true nature of the integrationist project is denied in this country
in order to defuse public opposition, but openly admitted elsewhere. See
the culture of deceit for more details.
Isn't the EU just democracy on
a larger scale than the nation state?
"I personally call the type of government which can be removed without
violence 'democracy', and the other, 'tyranny'."
Karl Popper
In the EU, the sole right to propose new European laws lies with the unelected European Commission. These laws supersede the laws of nation states, whether or not those nation states have ratified them.
In theory, the European Parliament should act as a check to the Commission's power, as it must vote to accept any new law proposed by the Commission, but in practice it offers little resistance – the Commission rarely has to do more than propose an almost identical bill a second time to get it passed. In any case, as Danish MEP Jens-Peter Bond confirmed, the EU passed more than 3,000 laws in 2006, of which the European Parliament was involved in 57 (that's not a misprint, that's fifty-seven).
A system in which national parliaments continue to be democratically elected but the real power lies elsewhere is not a democracy. Interestingly, in the run up to the German election of September 2005, the government was forced to concede that it made little difference which party the German electorate voted for, since 80% of the country's laws were now imposed from above by the EU. A similar proportion applies in every member state.
Don't European politicians just
represent their country's interests in the European arena?
Quite the opposite. European Commissioners, for example, are required
to swear a formal Oath of Independence on taking office, declaring that
they are "good Europeans" rather than representatives of their
home countries. In fact, there is even a point of protocol that they should
not refer to their home country but to "the country that I know best".
Shouldn't
the different nations of Europe work together?
Of course, on a voluntary basis when it is in their interest to do so.
This is the enviable position in which the EFTA countries find themselves
(see above) – able to join in with Europe-wide
schemes when they want to, but also able to steer clear of lunacies like
the Common Agricultural Policy, which has been described as "a structure
by which Europe's poor transfer money to Europe's rich at the expense
of both themselves and Africa's impoverished".
Aren’t
Eurosceptics just xenophobic Little Englanders and and/or racists?
This line is often used by European integrationists such as European Commissioners
Neil Kinnock and Margot Wallström
and former Minister for Europe Denis McShane. It is interesting in that
it reveals that they have given up trying to find any merit in the project
itself, and seek to defend it purely by insulting anyone who asks awkward
questions.
In fact, almost all the arguments about how the EU damages Britain apply equally to all other EU members. Not surprisingly, there is a burgeoning Eurosceptic movement across the continent, as many countries start to wonder whether the European project is good for them or just for their political elites. Far from being narrow-minded nationalists or xenophobes, Eurosceptics in different countries are working together to achieve a common aim – see for example www.europeannocampaign.com