Tag Archives: European Union

They also serve… but don’t count?

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Ladies and gentlemen, today’s blog is dedicated to those who cannot make a difference to the general election today.

I’m not talking about people that did not register (their fault). 
Nor those who choose not to use the vote that others fought and died for them to have (and this debt is particularly great for women – yes, I would have been a suffragette). 
I’m not even talking about those in safe seats (after all, if enough votes are there percentage-wise nationally then it should be impossible to claim a mandate that ignores popular support for voting reform). 
And I’m not going to write more than this sentence about the scandal of our service personnel overseas who accidentally found themselves disenfranchised while on active service.

Today’s post does concern people who are effectively serving the interests of their country, but who are also exercising their rights as citizens of this country.  Today there are thousands of British people abroad, in other Member States of the European Union, who, because they have been abroad for more than 5 years have lost their right to vote in UK general elections.

The official explanation is that after 5 years – and it used to be 10 years – they are not sufficiently connected to the situation in this country.  And if they are so attached to living elsewhere, they can always apply to be citizens of the country where they are resident instead.

I can see that there might be something in this argument if you have, say, moved your entire family from Luton to a small village in Pakistan (although there are of course villages there where you can spend pounds). To move back to the EU for a moment, I can see that this might apply if you are living it up in the Costa del wossit, speaking English loudly at the locals and reading the Daily Mail.

But if you are a Brit directly employed by the EU institutions, the idea that you are that disconnected is… just weird.
Don’t get me wrong – on my return from Brussels I seriously considered (for about 5 minutes) a mini-memoir on recovering from expat life to be called “saying merci to London bus drivers”.
But living in Brussels, I was still intimately connected to the UK.  I not only travelled home for work, and for family, I watched the BBC (proper British BBC channels, not BBC World and BBC Prime), listened to Radio 4 in the mornings, shopped at H&M and Zara – and some people even had Sky (shh!)
Nothing about my life there made me particularly want to stop being British to become a Belgian national.
But that’s also a very odd suggestion for people who are actually engaged in one level of the UK’s governance (note that’s governance, not government, euroconspiracy theorists), just as if they were a public servant in local government or civil servant. 
The irony is that nationals from other EU countries can actually work in the UK civil service (except the Foreign Office, where they can only really be locally engaged at post).  For them, most of their governments allow them to vote – so they are not disenfranchised by living here.
But while we pride ourselves on being the cradle of democracy it actually seems that our starting point is not being expansive with access to the vote. 
Add to this the vagueries of a First Past the Post and the lack of a written constitution (where, watching Channel 4 news last night it looks as if either Cabinet Office guidance or the visceral right wing press will decide the way in which we get a new Prime Minister in the case of a hung parliament) and you begin to understand why no politician seems to care about those being left out while undertaking a role in public service at one of the UK’s constitutional political levels. 
So many of us don’t understand our political set-up and the potential wider implications of disenfranchising the Brits within it in the EU institutions, which help give it legitimacy (because there are Brits, who know and understand the UK in each of the institutions). 
Ignoring them gives succour to the europhobic idea that such people are somehow in it for themselves or traitors.  And that sort of rubbish denies us our right to see the EU as ours, just as much as it is French, Dutch, Portuguese or Estonian.   

But don’t hold your breath for this to be resolved.  No government can be expected to be motivated to change legislation for just a few thousand people, and the fact that they work in the EU institutions is hardly likely to motivate a great degree of sympathy.  Unless those that would benefit from the re-enfranchisement of the Costa Blanca expats might change it to get that extra support.

If you can vote, I hope you did.  On the Voltaire principle of course.

Having our say in Europe – but will we get anywhere?

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You may not have caught it on the main news bulletins today (though kudos to Radio 4′s World at One for covering it) but today saw the launch of the European Citizens’ Initiative. 
Despite the name, which has slight Orwellian overtones in English, the policy which was introduced under the newly in force Lisbon Treaty is actually designed to increase the direct access that citizens have to the EU level.

So what do you have to do to get your idea considered by the EU?  Well, the Treaty says you need:
- one million citizens;
- a third of EU countries represented amongst the million (so nine at the moment)..

But it’s not as simple as that.  Today’s announcement was related to the clarification of the rules that the European Commission has just launched following several months of public consultation. 
Presumably in order to stop the accusations of token representation of some countries by having one or two signed up (see the formation of the ECR Group in the European Parliament for the type of debate I’m talking about), the Commission proposes that the number of signatures from each country must be proportional to its size – “4500 for the four smallest countries up to 72,000 for the largest, Germany”.  So if I’ve got, say, 60,000 Germans in amongst my million, that may be an awful lot of individualsbut not enough to count as having representation from Germany and being able to tick off Germany as a Member State where interest has been expressed?
I guess what’s trying to be overcome is the idea of having 995,000 French farmers, or British hunt supporters or Greek public servants or Danish students or whatever on board with the remaining 5000 made up from a ragbag of other people who think the idea is interesting.
But is there anything so wrong with that?
Inside a country, if one part of that country felt so strongly about a specific issue, would it really escape discussion at the national level…?  Or are other Member States with more federal structures (that’s federal as it’s really meant, with decision-making at clearly defined and subsidiarity-applied levels, rather than the perjorative sense in which UK Eurosceptics tend to use it) immune to discussion issues at the wrong level of decision-making?  
And in the internet age, it might actually be quite straight forward to get 4500 Cypriots interested in something (via Twitter, Facebook etc.) whereas 72,000 is a big ask for anyone – this seems a small country bias? 

The Commission is proposing quite a sensible mid-way stage – “once at least 300 000 signatures from citizens in a minimum of three countries have been collected, the petition will be registered with the Commission and a decision made on whether the initiative falls within the scope of its powers. From that point, the organisers would have one year to provide the outstanding signatures”.
As Michael Mann pointed out on the radio earlier “if a million people called for Mickey Mouse to be President, we couldn’t do that as it is not within the Commission’s powers“. Quite.

The antifraud measures are likely to be the ones that cause sensitivity to this idea in the UK.  We’re used to having to provide our names and addresses for petitions but without a compulsory identity card we are unlikely to have passports on us and as for handing over our National insurance number for a petition… I feel slightly incredulous!  Expect to see headlines about the huge potential for identify fraud with this proposal, ironically just what the Commission are striving to avoid.  If anyone publishes anything on this at all in the UK, of course.

The “who’s the money?” point is a good one though.  It would not be good if this worthy intitiative became an exercise in big companies buying influence.

Finally, once all of the signatures are in place and the request meets the criteria (another is apparently being in the spirit of the EU so I guess that stops one million “federalists” fed up with UK recalcitrants getting together a proposal to kick us out? :) ), then the European Commission has four months “to investigate and decide to pursue legislation, launch a study or forgo further action. It will need to explain its decision publicly“. 
At this point there’s a new feature of decision-making.  Although the Commission is the only Institution with the right of intiative, the idea is that the “proposed rules must be approved by parliament and council”.  This is not the case if, for example, the Commission has some ideas in a White Paper – those might be presented at a Council but they don’t have to be endorsed (I’m happy to be corrected on this!)

I really want to believe that the Commission are going to get some initiatives under this scheme “potentially as early as 2011″.  After all the requirements are setting the bar quite high.
And I hope that there will be a technological level of support for this initiative – will there be a section of the Europa set up to enable this?
My starting point for this is the “petitions” section of the Number Ten website, the UK Prime Minister’s website named after the official residence.  While most petitions tend to get an answer along the lines of “yes the government recognises that this is an important issue and is doing x about it/  which is related to it/ which is nothing really to do with it but the civil servants really hope you won’t notice”, it is important that each petition is on there from a starting point of no one except the originator being signed up to it, and can grow virally (through promotion on subject related internet forums or social media campaigns, mentions in the press, friends telling each other, bake sales etc. etc.) and that the gvernment is seen to be facilitating this.

So that’s the challenge for the Commission now – it needs to be facilitating this process and making it as easy as possible for citizens to meet the criteria, and to be seen to be doing so.  If it succeeds, then it can genuinely say that it is bringing Europe closer to the people.  If not, then the EU remains that thing over there that imposes things on us in the popular perception.  That’s not a challenge I’d want to see end in failure.

What the EU has done for women…

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Have you ever tried to find a list of what the EU has done for women?
It’s International Women’s Day today… while Sarah Brown (in this odd unelected First Lady-type position that appears to have been evolving for Prime Ministers’ wives which rankles a little when celebrating issues of women’s equality) is leading the UK events for IWD, CSW (the UN Commission on the Status of Women) is meeting in New York, and the EU is… well, let’s see.

Did you know that the European Commission had launched a Women’s Charter on Friday, in advance of IWD?  Here it is.
The Charter was accompanied by a Eurobarometer survey on gender equality. Interesting for me was that, while the UK participants surveyed shared a common set of priorities with the other EU Member States for addressing gender equality, when asked which sort of organisation (NGO, EU institution, national government, or others) had done most for gender equality, only about 10% of Brits cited the EU institutions.
Not really surprising I suppose, given the UK ambivalence towards the EU and tendancy to simply bank any good thing that the EU does…
So I decided to try and help out and post a link to the Commission’s list of what the EU has done for women. I Googled the phrase (amazing how quickly that has become the first port of call for all information searches these days) but nothing came up from the Commission’s own website.

Actually, the best source of information has turned out to be the website of Arlene McCarthy MEP – from four years ago. So with apologies to Arlene (much of this is hers, but I’ve removed the party political commentary), here’s a quick list of what the EU has done for women:

1) Moving towards Equal Pay

  • Equal pay for women workers: this was included in the original Treaty of Rome, the first EU Treaty in 1957
    (NB this was 13 years before the UK legislation on equal pay. Given that the UK was looking at EEC membership at that point could it have been the prospect of joining the EEC that prompted the UK to adopt its legislation?)
  • Equal pay for work of equal value: despite the equal pay legislation, many companies classified jobs done by men and women differently, paying higher wages to men for doing jobs that actually required similar levels of skills. Many women since have won equal pay claims, some backdated years including school dinner ladies, hospital and factory workers.
    (Some people still seem to think that heavy lifting and digging is “worth more” than hanging out in a warm classroom with a bunch of snotty 5 year olds… despite the fact that the latter is sometimes like an exercise in germ warfare)
  • Equal rights for part-time workers, better rights for agency workers: nearly half of British women workers work part-time, four in five of the part-time workforce, and about 5 million women. In the past, many women lost out but since July 2000 part-time workers have had equal rights to pro-rata paid leave, pensions, maternity rights, access to training and other company perks and benefits.
    (Jolly good thing too. Ridiculous to assume that people are less capable and less clever if they have other responsibilities outside the workplace – unless the hidden job criteria is soul-selling and working all the hours God sends to the glory of the company?)
    And via the Agency Workers legislation, temporary workers have more clearly defined rights too (UK rules set out here).
  • Minimum wage: love it or hate it, there’s no denying that when the UK opted into the European Social Chapter the biggest winners were those on the lowest pay, for whom the basic rights it guaranteed brought about the minimum wage. This is particularly important for women – 70% of low paid British workers are women (including a disproportionate number working part-time hours) and over a million British women have since benefited.
  • Equal rights to a pension: Pensioner poverty is a real problem for women, many of whom were excluded from company pension schemes because they worked part-time or had career breaks to have children. EU laws prevent pension discrimination and guarantee equal rights for all to social security benefits.

2) Better rights for women as parents

  • Maternity rights: About 70,000 women have babies in Britain each year, and that number is growing. The EU sets a baseline of a year working for an employer in order to get maternity rights (but UK law is actually better and the directgov website has a fantastic calculator setting out the minimum requirements in the UK).
  • Parental leave: Since 2002, a new EU law means that any parent with children under 5 has the right to a minimum of 13 weeks parental leave to be taken whenever they choose over the 5 year period. That extends to 18 weeks for any parent of a disabled child under 18.
    (This is ideal if you have an ill child – though I wonder what would happen if just before a child hits 5 all parents who have not used the 13 weeks unpaid leave actually took the time to go once-in-a-lifetime travelling or similar? Seems a great opportunity, but is it even possible?)
  • Right to return to work: I take this so much for granted that the idea that this is a new element of maternity rights law is shocking. Discrimination against pregnant women is outlawed (doesn’t mean it is not still happening though) and, importantly now, particularly in the recession, a woman’s job (but not her specific post) must be held open so she can return to a post without loss of pay or status. Many older women will remember the days when getting pregnant meant losing your job (heck, there are people that remember when as a woman you had to leave the Foreign Office when you got married! And if you read any of the Jilly Cooper short stories from the 1970s you’ll see that it was a cultural expectation among the middle classes even if it wasn’t a requirement). EU laws have put paid to that.
  • Paid holidays and a shorter working week: Since 2000, workers have been given the automatic right to 4 weeks paid annual holiday, and a guaranteed at least one day off per week (which was not a given for part-time workers in sectors such as cleaning, who often only got one day off every fortnight). (How on earth do people function on less than 4 weeks holiday a year? I know it’s only 2 weeks in the USA, but when do working parents get to see their kids? And who looks after the children in the school holidays?)
    And under the Working Time Directive, employees can no longer be obliged to work more than 48 hours per week, are guaranteed breaks and night shifts are restricted to 8 hours. Despite the right to work shorter British workers work the longest hours in Europe. One in eight mothers work more than 40 hours a week, 30% of fathers more than 48 hours, taking its toll on family life.

3) Protecting women

  • Protection: the EU is working on legislation against Female Genital Mutilation, and Gender Based Violence as well as combating human trafficking (which is the fastest-growing criminal activity in comparison to other forms of organised crime).
  • International protection: by working together on relations with third countries, in EU foreign policy and within international organisations, the EU Member States can help women in developing countries too.

4) Combating the Gender Pay Gap

If you are a fan of bus campaigns, then you might have noticed the Gender Pay Gap campaign on the buses in capital cities across the EU. But what’s it all about?
One measurement of whether equality has been achieved is the gender pay gap, that is the difference between the average pay of women and the average pay of men.
The gender pay gap can be contentious when discussed with some businesses, so it needs to be remembered that it is a crude tool and the contributing factors are (in the words of the Women and Work Commission in the UK) “complex and multi-faceted”.
But if anyone tries to tell you it only exists because women take time out of the labour market to have children or to work part-time (and that part-time jobs “ought” to be lower paid as part of a lifestyle choice being made), then its worth noting that the National Equality Panel report out this year said that new graduates in the same subject from the same university experience a statistically significant gender pay gap within three years of graduation.
So the EU has also launched a gender pay gap calculator so you can measure the inequality where you work (the UK Government Equality Office has had a methodology on their website for a year).
The new Women’s Charter promises a number of measures, legislative and non-legislative, to tackle the gender pay gap – no idea what these will actually be (but it’s worth keeping an eye on this to ensure that the measures are about valuing women and men equally, because if the drive to get the headline figure down starts to become the end in itself then we could end up with daft ideas like restricting access to part-time work which would be to the detriment of women who would lose the ability to organise their family life as they would wish…)

So the EU has actually done quite a lot to the benefit of women.
And, as the Women’s Charter indicates, there’s still more that can be done.
I come from a Member State that is at the forefront of women’s equality, even if we’re a bit embarrassed to talk about it in those terms. And even here, women are still not able to live the fulfilled lives that they should be able to if we were truly free to balance our working lives and families lives as we wished without constraints forced on us by others (e.g. availability of childcare).

So a very happy International Women’s Day to you.
And, as it is a women’s day and we’re free to do things our way, an air kiss on both cheeks and a gentle hug to each and every one of you.

Bearing gifts to the Greeks?

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euro

Or Oi! Desmond! No!

So the outcome of the emergency meeting on Greece’s financial situation was – unclear.  A whole lot of commentary by the British press focusing mainly on whether:
1) Greece going bakrupt would mean the end for the Euro;
2) the British taxpayer would be bailing out Greece.
As it turns out, neither happened.  Yet.

A very sensible commentary from the FT’s City editor pointed out that, in the USA, cities and states go bankrupt all the time (California did so recently) but no one talks about the US dollar collapsing as a result.  It’s a big deal yes, but not a ginormous one.

But something had to be done.  Whether explicitly or tacitly, Greece needed to be helped by the stronger Euro countries.
In part this is a Treaty requirement. The Treaty of Rome set out that it is desirable that the Member States regard their economic policies as a matter of common concern. As EUpedia points out, Article 103 stipulated that they should consult each other and the Commission on the measures to be taken in the light of the prevailing circumstances. 
But in the end the risk of the “contagion” effect – making investing in the other Euro countries, which in turn would affect investment in economies such as ours in the UK which have such closely linked economies- meant that there was self-interest as well as altruism in acting. 

So self-interest dictates that something had to be done, and it will be, probably.  The agreement reached was not exactly a master piece of clarity.  But it will do as a starting point and the seriousness with which it is being taken was illustrated by stern words from Angela Merckel and the brilliant commentary by an unnamed German diplomat to the effect that other Eurozone members did not want to see their economies suffer so that the Greeks could have nice lives.

e15546507 image from the must-read www.mailwatch.co.uk

And will the UK have to bail out Greece? 
Peter Mandelson has been in the press recently saying that “talking down” the UK economy (whether that’s -say- to international audiences, for which also read competitors at Davos, or making unflattering comparisons between the UK and Greece’s economies) and he has something of a point, not least because of the contagion effect explained above.
And it seems that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, has been robust in saying that this is a eurozone rather than an EU problem.  But remember what I said about the contagion – it is not in the UK’s interests for the Euro to fail, particularly since – because of the way in which Treaties are written- we are still technically supposed to be lining up to join the Euro and therefore have a convergence plan.

I have not had a chance to read the agreement that’s emerged after the meeting, but I imagine that the text will not shut the door on whole-EU action at some unspecificed future point if the alternative was total economic collapse… and so in that way I suppose the UK taxpayer could at some future point still step in to support the Euro.

But I just can’t see how that corresponds into that headline “Now We Have to Bail Out the Euro”.
Firstly, define “now”?  As far as I can see that’s an inappropriate use of the word.  France and Germany, primarily, seem to be bailing out the Euro.  Not Britain.
But hold on… may be this is a new pro-European “we” that I would not previously have expected from the Daily Express where the impact of the bail out on the French and German taxpayers (amongst others) is being expressed as a kind of pan-European shared pain? Somehow I suspect not…

Was this all fair on Greece?  Criticism of Greece which the Prime Minister has angrily refuted covered everything from alleged lying in accounting to the fact that the retirement age for public servants in Greece is 47. 
47!!!  It’s currently 60 here, going to 65, but I can’t help thinking for my generation we’re going to be minimum 70 and probably til-we-drop before we can think of retiring. 
And Germany – due to a low birthrate and the complete lack of childcare that resulted in women having to make a choice between being out of the labour market and having children or remaining childless in order to work – is also facing a pension crisis.
No wonder that German diplomat was so scathing… not so much Greeks bearing gifts as what must be borne by others to prop their economy up…

The Greek Prime Minister blamed the previous administration for most of the problems – that’s par for the course from most public officials facing problems.
But he also blamed the European Commission for not having kept enough of an eye out and not having stepped in if it expected problems.

Interesting stuff.  That’s what some people I know would call a “Belgian” approach to the EU – if it’s hard to keep your own house in order you call for the EU to provide a solution.  But to blame the Commission for not doing something it’s not supposed to do? And somthing which, if it was proposed that it should do, we’d have an issue with?

Why can’t the British press do something useful like take the Greek prime minister to task for this sort of expansionist approach to the role of the EU rather than print what turned out to be a completely untrue story?  But that’s too much to expect.
 
Although the Daily Express did manage to put out an apology for the ludicrous “EU spouts off about our milk jugs” nonsense they published the other day… well done @EULondonRep!

A 5 point guide to UK EU reporting…

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eussrno2As you are probably aware, dear reader, UK EU reporting is something of a hobby horse issue for me.
The rather fabulous Mia at Cosmetic Uprise has just posted this, and therefore beat me to it on a critique of the Telegraph’s latest eurotrash.
So instead of repeating it, I offer you instead the updated version of my 5 point “guide” to the rules of UK EU reporting…

The first rule of UK EU reporting is that the most ridiculous nonsense can be published and called fact because few people know or care enough to correct it.

The second rule is that anyone that corrects it (or for that matter wants to share information about what the EU actually is and does) is “biased” or spouting “propaganda”.

The third rule is that no matter how stupid the reporting the UK public is so used to reading this sort of thing that even if proved to be false, the response is a “tut! Wouldn’t put it past them” (precisely who “them” is varies).  On this basis you can pretty much write anything.

The fourth rule is that if you want to get away with doing it, take something like Treaty minutiae that MIGHT be true (e.g. build on the fact that it wasn’t clear that Barroso being appointed under Nice and the others under Lisbon was possible but that it was highly unlikely that any MS would oppose it and that’s what counts under the rules of realpolitik, or that extending the term of the current Commission in order to allow for a Treaty referendum to take place so that it was clear which set of rules the EU should be operating under is somehow scandalous…) and make it scandal. It adds another layer of patina to the already stained and damaged view of the EU in the UK.

The fifth rule of UK EU reporting is that no matter how bad, ridiculous inaccurate (and against the UK national interest?) this sort of reporting is, it will never be as bad as the comments box contents below it will be…   You might need access to the rather excellent glossary from Liberal Conspiracy to understand them all though… (PS image above from the blog http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2006/06/no-more-eutopias.html - disagree with much there, but I think I and most broadly pro-EU bloggers would agree that it’s not a superstate as described that we’d support either.  But that’s an old argument we’ll return to ad nauseum)

Enlightened Euroscepticism requires the enlightenment bit…

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eu with light

Henry Porter in the Observer yesterday talked about enlightened Euroscepticism.
His argument would be easier to accept if he hadn’t confused the European Court of Human Rights and its ruling on the display of crucifixes in Italian schools with the EU and standardisation.
He says “the crucifix is none of the EU’s business” and he is right.  It isn’t and wasn’t.
(Even if the EU is about the accede to ECHR).

He talks about the the appointment of a President of the Council in these terms: “the point is that the coronation will take place without the involvement of the people at the very moment when Europe marks the most significant and peaceful revolution in history”.  This makes me feel unspeakably angry for a number of reasons:
i) appointing a Council President is not a coronation – Henry Porter has either bought the lie or has not actually bothered to do more that read the UK press coverage of the role;
ii)  there’s a number of Presidents in the European context (Commission and European Parliament Presidents already exist).  Each heads an EU institution, each has a specific role in the overall EU institutional and decision-making process.  It seems unlikely that they would respond positively to a huge swing of power and influence towards the role of the Council (one of the EP’s favourite experssions is “inter-institutional balance”).  So I would expect that the postholders would go some way towards keeping a new “upstart” President in his or her place if they start seeing themselves in a more monarchistic light;
iii) Electing a President of the Council would be rather like directly electing a Nancy Pelosi type figure – charismatic, known internationally but more influential than powerful so how many people would bother to turn out.  As far as I can see, a directly elected by the EU populace President could not be simply a President of the Council.
iv) to invoke the anniversary of being 20 years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall to imbue the declaration that it is a coronation with added significance as if it is the installation of an absolutist monarchy over all EU Member States, with echoes of totalitarianism is insulting to the reader, to common sense and to the memory of that incredible event.  

Look – there was a chance, in the Constitutional Treaty and then in the Lisbon Treaty to have a directly-elected President of the EU.  But the Member State governments, who agree a text and then seek ratification in their own countries depending on the system that they use for this sort of process (parliamentary approval or public referendum), didn’t go for that.  They agreed to a lesser role, in one of the three main institutions rather than sitting above them all and hardly a symbol of superstatehood. 
The constant assertion that the role is the supreme leader role needs to be challenged whenever it is made – that is an argument that has already been overcome. 
Why can’t sceptics accept that what they’ve got is already a victory? Oh yes. Because we’ve forgotten what scepticism means!
As Julien Frisch said in his tongue-in-cheek guide to becoming a successful Euroblogger, it seems to be generally assumed that the world is divided into “Federalists” that are pro-European, and sceptics/ realists that are anti-EU. 
I would argue – as would Julien, Jon Worth, Nosemonkey and a host of other Eurobloggers that enlightened scepticism is actually the position that we all seem to hold: we support the concept of the EU but don’t believe it necessarily operates in the ideal way. 
We may not have a shared view over how and what it should do things differently, but the sooner we in the UK come to terms with the idea that being sceptical about something is not the same as being hostile to it, and that you can be broadly favouable towards something in cencept as well as sceptical about its execeution then the more measured, sensible and ulitimately effective and constructive a debate we can have.
So Henry Porter is right: “scepticism is not about being a little England Tory or any of the other nonsense spouted by French Euro-enthusiasts last week; it is sounding a note of caution, reserving judgement and not being in the interests of the common good”. 
The behaviours the French Europe Minister described would certainly not be “sceptical” behaviours if we are using the word properly.
I would add that a decent dash of scepticism is vital to get an approach to life verging on “everything in moderation”. 
Henry Porter is also right that people have to take responsibility and that the role of the people in a democracy is something that should not ignored.

But detail matters too.  And how can the people take informed decsions when they’re given distorted pictures on which to form their views?
So please – journalists, subs, editors, proprietors.  We understand that your first job is to write stories that sell papers or get ratings.  This is not always completely compatible with accuracy.  
And sometimes, as I would hope is the case with Henry Porter’s article, it may be uninformed error rather than deliberate innacuracy that leds to this sort of rant from bloggers.
But democracy itself is affected by what you say, what you publish (you’ve even boasted about this in the past e.g. “It was the Sun wot won it”).  You owe it to your readers to act responsibly. And the occasional full article correction, rather than burying corrections away near the letters page or just not bothering would really be a start.        

Update: excellent guide to the various Councils now available on Nosemonkey’s EUtopia blog. Fab stuff indeed.

A sense of sovereignty…

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Ok, so there’s not going to be a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in the UK.
The Czech President has signed, ratifying the Lisbon Treaty and bringing into force the treaty over which there have been so many statements, bits of information and misinformation and more proposterous headlines in our press than even I could have imagined.

I can’t parody them well enough after a long day at work, (but who needs parody when you’ve got “Signed. Sealed. Delivered. Up Yours” at the Sun and “Britain: the end” on the Express). You’ll just have to read Nosemonkey’s Tweets, now gathered together in one place to get a sense of what’s being said.
The Q&A on the Sun’s website informs readers that “the aim of the Treaty is to build a federal united states of Europe” – must be a different Treaty from the one I read then.  The Daily Telegraph talks about more British powers being “surrendered to Brussels” but doesn’t directly cite any and instead offers this:

Daniel Hannan, a Tory MEP and leading Euro-sceptic said the signing was a step towards a European super-state. “The boot continues to stamp on the human face,” he said.

The Daily Telegraph also says that “one of the most visible changes the treaty makes is the creation of a new permanent president for the EU, who will chair European summits and set the union’s agenda”. 
Again with the President of the EU thing! 
The EU is awash with Presidents: President of the European Commission (Jose Manuel Barroso), President of the European Parliament (Jerzy Buzek) and this role, President of the Council.  This is not a Napoleonic high ruler of all Europe role but, as the Telegraph itself sets out, a role for chairing summits and setting the agenda (i.e. the work programme).  It’s likely also to have some overlap with the “Foreign Minister” (actually the High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy) and therefore have a “world stage” role.  But we’re not about to be ruled from Brussels with the President’s face on our Euro banknotes…

Oh what’s the use?  When that’s the quality of the information being given out, how are we ever supposed to have an informed debate in the UK?

I used to teach constitutional politics to people who really ought to understand it, but often really didn’t. 
I found the most effective way to bring the key points home was to run a constitutional quiz, with an element of competition between “teams” within the group, and a ridiculous prize (a handful of boiled sweets or losing team to buy winning teams in the bar that night).  I’m particularly missing the chance to teach the big constitutional change that’s been promised today.

Not completion of reform of the House of Lords – it seems that, with talk of Kirsty Allsop and others becoming new peers if the Conservatives win the next election, the chance of signing up sympathetic names with a recognised expertise is too attractive to an incoming government for any swift promise of reform. 
Actually, the idea of short-term peers appointed for one parliamentary term for a specific task rather than for life, while a big change constitutionally, is potentially quite attractive as a way of getting some real expertise into parliament without requiring them to be elected to a constituency (a system by which if we get expertise its incidental to being a consituency representative rather than by design).

No, David Cameron’s speech on Europe today was actually very radical.
Not the defensiveness on dropping the pledge on a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty – it’s been obvious for a while that that was going to come because, as he said, holding a referendum on a(n amending) treaty that has already passed into European law is a pointless exercise and most governments don’t want to use up all of their international negotiating capital on a big dramatic but ultimately futile gesture. 
The interpretations of the UK constitutional settlement are new, and definitely interesting. 

There are indeed some changes coming in the Lisbon Treaty – Ralf Grahn’s Grahnlaw blog sets these out comprehensively  and Euractiv does the same for the layperson- but its the changes proposed in today’s speech that I want to look at from the constitutional side.
Cameron proposes three UK constitutional changes:
1) a referendum lock, to require referenda on any future Treaties, which all parties would pledge never to overturn;
2) a sovereignty Bill, on which more below; and
3) a block on the use of “ratchet clauses” (known as “passerelle” clauses elsewhere in Europe) that would allow extension of QMV to areas on which there are currently national vetoes, without the backing of a vote in the UK parliament. 

David Cameron says

“if we win the next election, we will amend the European Communities Act 1972 to prohibit, by law, the transfer of power to the EU without a referendum.  And that will cover not just any future treaties like Lisbon, but any future attempt to take Britain into the euro.  We will give the British people a referendum lock to which only they should hold the key – a commitment very similar to that in Ireland”.  
“It is not politicians’ power to give away – it belongs to the people.  So at the General Election, we will challenge the other political parties to accept the referendum lock and pledge never to reverse it”. 

Three ideas to think through here:
I’m dubious about the idea of a “pledge never to reverse it”.  I guess such a pledge could have no weight in law, because in the UK we have a principle that no parliament can bind another – this a key point of our parliamentary democracy.  In that case, the only weight of such a pledge would be in the infamous court of public opinion.
Secondly, up until now, we’ve also had another point of parliamentary democracy that we are a representative democracy – we elect representatives to take decisions on our behalf and hold them to account through elections.
And thirdly, a quick aside if I can: I’m not a constitutional lawyer, but I’d be interested in a view on this one… the thing about the European Communities Act is that it is effectively a piece of the UK’s constitution.  I mentioned that we have a tradition in UK politics that no parliament can bind any future parliament.  Just like any other piece of UK legislation, the ECA could be repealed at any time.  Until now, you can speculate that would’ve taken the UK out of the EU (although of course there would’ve been a whole load of further work) if a future government have , but now there’s a clear procedure for so doing, an “exit clause”.   Actually, I’ve just heard Chris Bryant, the Europe Minister, say that. So it must be right.
Ooh – one more, having just heard William Hague on BBC Newsnight – why wouldn’t a referendum lock be triggered by accession of a new Member State?  This was explicitly excluded in the interview just now, but given that accession of, say, a big new Member State like Turkey would change the relative power of the UK in the EU – so why would that not be automatically subject to the referendum trigger?

The idea of a Sovreignty Bill immediately gave me a sinking feeling when I heard the term – was this yet again a “EU law must not be superior to UK law” argument of the sort that the tabloid press raised when the Lisbon Treaty was drafted to put into the text of the Treaty something that’s been case law since before the UK joined the EEC (the German courts tried to argue that their Constitution came above everything else, but actually tried to use this principle to block the single market – ironically one of the elements of the EU that is most acceptable to the UK eurosceptics)?

Actually, what is described makes some sense:

Take the sovereignty of our laws.  Because we have no written constitution, unlike many other EU countries, we have no explicit legal guarantee that the last word on our laws stays in Britain.  There is therefore a danger that, over time, our courts might come to regard ultimate authority as resting with the EU.  So as well as making sure that further power cannot be handed to the EU without a referendum, we will also introduce a new law, in the form of a United Kingdom Sovereignty Bill, to make it clear that ultimate authority stays in this country, in our Parliament.  This is not about Westminster striking down individual items of EU legislation.  It is about an assurance that the final word on our laws is here in Britain.  It would simply put Britain on a par with Germany, where the German Constitutional Court has consistently upheld – including most recently on the Lisbon treaty – that ultimate authority lies with the bodies established by the German Constitution.

Of course, what with this, the incomplete Lords reform and the idea of a British Bill of Rights, it might be clearer and more effective to establish a written constitution for the UK.  This would of course be likely to require a higher threshold for change – and that would protect citizen’s rights (and stop Councils (ab)using counter terrorism legislation to justify putting spy cameras in people’s bins).
But it seems no politician is willing to spend the political capital that could be spent pushing forward their policy agenda on a full-on tidy up of the UK’s consititutional settlement.

What about the rachet clauses?  Are they really so scary?

Furthermore, we would change the law so that any use of a ratchet clause by a future government would require full approval by Parliament.

According to the easy guide to the Lisbon Treaty (ok, Wikipedia) the treaty also allows for the changing of voting procedures without amending the EU treaties. Under this clause the European Council can, after receiving the consent of the European Parliament, vote unanimously to:

  • allow the Council of Ministers to act on the basis of qualified majority in areas where they previously had to act on the basis of unanimity. (This is not available for decisions with defence or military implications.)
  • allow for legislation to be adopted on the basis of the ordinary legislative procedure where it previously was to be adopted on the basis of a special legislative procedure.
  • A decision of the European Council to use either of these provisions can only come into effect if, six months after all national parliaments had been given notice of the decision, none object to it.

So essentially promising a full vote of parliament on the rachet clause is effectively required by the Treaty of Lisbon itself!  So that’s not actually that radical then…

If you look at the development of the EU to date, you’ll notice that there’s been a speeding up in recent years.  There was no new Treaty between 1956 and 1987 although the original 6 member states were joined by 6 new countries in that time. 
The Single European Act, in 1987, is still the most radical change to the powers of the EEC/EC/ EU that has taken place – and Thatcher thought majority voting was a price worth paying for a completed single market. 
We’ve had a huge number of new Member States (6 to 9, to 10, to 12, to 15, to 25 and now 27) and there’s always been a sense that enlarging the EU in terms of the number of Member States should be accompanied by a “deepening” of the sort of decisions taken collectively.  But I don’t think that we’re there any more.  When Lisbon was being negotiated, if you read the press reports afterwards, there seemed to be a bit of a sense that the Treaty better be as good as it could because there’d probably never be a chance to develop another one. 
So I’m not clear how much use any of this is likely to be anyway?

Finally, there are also three policy areas named from which a future UK Conservative government would seek to extricate the UK:
1) social and employment policy;
2) the charter of fundamental rights, and
3) criminal justice.
I have to admit that at the moment I can’t really understand why these are so totemic.
For example, a range of questions inspired by the social and employment policy field:  I’m not clear what the damage that eminates from Europe as opposed to poor implementation and goldplating? The example cited is the NHS and the Working time Directive, but don’t tired doctors make mistakes? Why can’t the BMA find an alternative approach to training that doesn’t require such long hours that e.g. parents of small children would never be able to train? And would the extrication go wider than just the NHS or public sector?
And presumably the price for extricating the UK might take into account the fact that UK-based companies would then be able to compete against those based in other European Member States by requiring their workers to work long hours? 
Happy to try to understand more on this one if someone can explain this to me, please. 

On the Charter of Fundamental rights – forgive me, but don’t we already have most of these rights via the Human Rights Act? 
Or indeed a British Bill of Rights, were such a thing to be introduced and the HRA repealed?  
I’m not going to deconstruct the argument that appears to have been revived today on e.g. the imposition of collective argaining or the right to strike, but would suggest instead that you read this excellent summary and take into account the “national rules apply” sections of the Charter’s text.

I’m going to stop now – after all I no longer teach constitutional politics.
But, it looks like there are going to be interesting negotiations if and when there’s a change of government in the UK, especially if the story the Guardian is running right now gives a taste of the likely tone…

Getting competitive… getting in to the European Commission

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Berlaymont building - European Commission headquarters

Who’d want to work in the EU institutions? 
Thousands, apparently, including me. 
It’s not easy to describe the job of a European Commission official, but in reality the actual work is not so different to the work of the civil service in any of the EU Member States.  And the pay, the tax rates and final salary pension – despite the recent reforms – are pretty attractive too.

So how exactly to you whittle down thousands of applicants to the couple of hundred you need to fill the vacancies that are available in the EU instututions?  Until recently the answer was essentially this: set a multiple choice quiz on EU related issues, and a numeracy test.  Put all prospective candidates through this in their second language (preferably English, French or German), then get them to write essays against the clock on EU-inspired subjects which, despite all the research and practice would not actually be marked unless the candidate passed the multiple choice and numeracy parts of the test sufficiently well…  there were further rounds with interviews etc, but as I didn’t reach them that aspect’s a bit less familiar to me.
Julien Frisch had a very interesting post over at http://julienfrisch.blogspot.com/2009/08/epso-criticised-by-european-court-of.html on the criticism of the European Personnel and Selection Office (EPSO – interesting to note that the Commission uses “personnel” long after other adminstrations have swtched over to “human resources”) by the Court of Auditors.  It’s worth reading, even if this post is a couple of weeks old now, not least because ESPO officials have actually joined in the debate below.
It is clear now that future methods of staff recruitment will be via Assessment Centres, a process familiar to many job applicants.  And the new approach is aimed at ensuring that it’s not just a way of identifying those with the time to study EU trivia (e.g. those still in educational environments).  Instead, the approach is supposed to allow demonstration of skills that would be required when doing the job.

So, with a decade of relevant experience, relatively good French (some remaining Spanish – and I’d have to improve at that in order to get a promotion within the Commission once in) and having entered my career for the purpose of gaining the skills to do this, am I actually going to enter the next concours?
I’ve been taking some time on my holiday to think about this.  Basically we’d be happy about a move to Brussels and I want to sit the concours.

But there’s a but.

I’m working part-time in the office and full-time as a mother.  While the UK Civil Service is actually pretty good about recognising the contribution that I can make, it’s not actually as easy as I’d hoped because face-time in the office does still count for something, especially as you get more senior. 
So I’m not sure the Commission would want me. 
Unless they’ve changed the rules that were in place when I did my stage that as Directives (e.g. those covering maternity rights) are addressed to the Member States so they don’t actually have to be exemplary in terms of employment law when it comes to part-time and flexible working?  They must’ve done – I gather there may even be some jobsharers now, but no one’s yet been able to point me to where within the Commission they work (and at what level).  
And with many highly qualified candidates attempting to find themselves the ideal post by appealing to the relevant DGs, who’d take on someone that only wanted to work part-time?  Several of the people I knew that passed the last concours have given up on trying to find a post – in other words they went through all of the stages I mentioned above, officially “got the ticket” but still have not got a job at the end of it.
Could I really put myself and my family through the extra stress of preparing for the different stages of the concours? And the extra stress of trying to get a job as a part-time employee?

The other thing is that, with 10 years experience, I’m not terribly keen on starting at the bottom again (moving from middle management to policy administration without a team).  Now, if there was to be a Head of Unit concours in the near future I can imagine that that would really be of interest…  So unlike my normal work-self, I’m feeling a bit indecisive.

There are probably people out there thinking that I’ve no right to expect to be employed as a part-timer.  That by having chosen to have a child and – let’s be honest about this- the likelihood that I’ll want to have another at some point, I somehow forfeit the right to be pursuing a professional career too.  Especially when you read some of the comments that are attracted by articles on this sort of subject on the Daily Mail’s website or even Comment is Free at the Guardian’s site. 
My brain hasn’t switched off.  I’m no less good at the decision-making or subject analysis or line management aspects of my job than I was before I had a child.  
What I can’t do any more is work more than my official conditioned hours, unless there’s a real emergency and/or I’ve had a chance to arange alternative childcare. 
My childcare is timelimited.  Even if it wasn’t, there’s a tiny little person who loves me and is dependent on me, and would not understand if he suddenly couldn’t see his mum.  
But the thing is, should there be an expectation that you’ll work more than conditioned hours on anything other than a rare occasion?

May be I’d better go and try to find the latest version of the Staff Regulations, and then think about it some more.  I’ve got a few months to find out…