"VESTED INTERESTS BLIGHT EUROPE'S FIG-LEAF DEMOCRACY" BY THE ALWAYS READABLE AND IMPRESSIVE MELANIE PHILLIPS.

Vested interests blight Europe’s fig-leaf democracy

Melanie Phillips (12th May, 2014)

As mainstream politics breaks down, the lobbying that corrupts Brussels is heading for the UK

Mainstream parties in the UK and across Europe are holding their breath (and their noses) over the likely success of Ukip and other Eurosceptic parties in the EU elections. Support for these politicians rests mainly on the widespread perception that the EU is a positive threat to democracy.

Democracy is rooted in national identity. People bound by common ties of language, law and culture express that shared national identity through self-government. The EU, however, has no such common ties and no such identity. It is a mammoth bureaucracy masquerading as a state, and seeks to disguise its intrinsically anti-democratic structure with the fig leaf of elections. 

Voters in its 28 member states do not feel the connections to the EU that validate government by consent, because there aren’t any. A recent survey shows that only one UK voter in 10 can name a member of the European Parliament in their region.

According to David Charter’s book Europe: In or Out?, the government estimates that about half of all economically significant UK legislation originates from EU laws. Yet, across the EU, turnout in direct elections has decreased from 62 per cent in 1979 to 43 per cent in 2009 (in the UK it went up slightly from a derisory 32.4 per cent to a marginally less derisory 34.7 per cent).

This gross mismatch between power and accountability helps to explain why the EU is a magnet for those who seek to bypass democracy by manipulating government behind the scenes. According to the transparency watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory, there are at least 30,000 lobbyists in Brussels. Some estimates say they influence 75 per cent of EU legislation.

Discussion of their activities tends to be dominated by disapproval of multinational influence on the EU, which is indeed formidable. About 200 representatives of three of the biggest tobacco companies, Philip Morris, British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco, spent more than £2.5 million last year on delaying a proposed directive aimed at make smoking less attractive.

But on many issues, such as energy policy, climate change, Israel and the Palestinians, and a host of others, there is frantic lobbying not just by business interests but by an army of NGOs.

A group called Culture Action Europe, which says it aims to establish a “new form of democracy” in the EU based on “the will to organise cultural life around a complex identity”, excitedly advises: “The most successful NGO platforms enjoy almost ‘insider’ status and have multiple entry points, thus influencing the process through informal contacts at the earliest possible stage.”

It’s not so much multiple entry, perhaps, as perpetual motion. According to the Taxpayers’ Alliance, a European Commission environmental fund has handed out more than £90 million to green groups over the past 15 years. As this fund enables these groups to influence and promote EU policy, the EU is effectively funding these groups to lobby itself.

Most of this dubious activity goes on out of voters’ sight. The European Parliament and Commission run a lobbyists’ transparency register, but this is not mandatory and only 6,000 organisations are on the list.

An attempt last year to make registration compulsory was abandoned after members disagreed. EU vice-president Rainer Wielandlamented (without irony): “After every meeting, members of the working group stepped out and made public remarks on the internal discussions.”

In other words, the group trying to reform EU lobbying was hobbled by pro-lobbyist lobbying. Yet another triumph for EU democracy, then.

When decisions are stitched up behind closed doors by officials working hand in glove with vested interests, this vitiates the elections.

Lobbying is also increasingly corrupting British politics. Cash for questions or honours, undercover stings revealing MPs and peers willing to accept money to influence legislation, the “revolving door” through which officials leave public office and instantly translate their inside knowledge into lucrative lobbying work — all this has blighted British politics in recent years.

Much of it is due to a breakdown of both mainstream politics and national identity. The erosion of both the big political narratives and the common ties that bind us has fuelled an exponential rise in pressure groups, as competing vested interests slug it out for dominance in a public sphere where money has increasingly supplanted the public interest.

The prime minister says he “gets” voters’ scepticism, and that in these EU elections he’s “thinking big” for Britain. But the biggest thing to think about — and it’s unthinkable for the EU — would be the restoration of the self-governing nation state and thus real democracy.