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European Parliament joins stampede away from democracy

Ellie Keen — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:49:05 +0000

The European Parliament changed its rules this month.

Anyone still reading?

Surely the European Parliament doesn’t have any real power anyway?

Surely it’s just a talking shop where pompous windbags repeatedly stand up to demonstrate their “European” credentials while the rest of us get on with our lives?

Well, not quite.

Certainly the “pompous windbags” part is true, though it’s hardly fair to the minority of Euro-MPs who have tried to stand in the way as the European Union has trampled over our rights as citizens, workers, consumers, as human beings.

The part about it not having any real power is nonsense, however. Increasingly, the European Parliament has what is known in EU circles as “co-decision power”, which means just what the phrase says. In a growing number of legislative areas, including virtually all environmental issues and most social and labour matters, the assembly is an equal partner with the Council of Ministers, the body which directly represents the twenty-seven member states. Its powers have grown with each successive treaty since Maastricht, in 1992.

The “europhiles” would have us believe that this means that the EU’s famous “democratic deficit” is being closed, but this simply isn’t the case. The new powers granted to the European Parliament have not been at the expense of unelected centralised institutions but, on the contrary, they have been transferred from elected national parliaments and elected national governments.

When I first worked as an assistant to a Labour Euro-MP 23 years ago, corporate lobbyists were thin on the ground. Now, you can’t move for the representatives of major corporations who use (sometimes quite literally) foot in the door techniques to get the attention of MEPs whose votes now exercise a huge influence on Europe-wide legislation.

So the fact that the European Parliament has just voted to do away with its own democratic procedures should concern us.

This is especially the case when you consider the response to the Irish people’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty. Just a few days later, the leaders of the 27 held a meeting on the implementation of this same treaty. Their response to the Irish vote? It didn’t even appear on the agenda!

The European Parliament’s rule change means that the two big political groups, the Tweedledum of the centre-right European People’s Party and the Tweedledee of Labour’s so-called Party of European Socialists, will now exercise complete control over business conducted in the assembly.

Firstly, twenty-five members from seven countries instead of twenty from six will be required to form a political group. Two existing groups, the euro-sceptic Independence/Democracy Group (ID) and the rightwing Union for a Europe of the Nations (UEN) would fail one or the other test.

The argument that the new rules will make it harder for fascists to form a group is a disgrace to anyone on the left that uses it. Fascists must be confronted politically in elected assembles as well as out on the streets, not by procedural trickery.

A further rule will exclude MEPs from forming groups unless they hold similar political opinions. The ID group would also fall foul of this, containing as it does MEPs from the right, as well as some who hold quite progressive opinions. They are bound together by a belief in the primacy of national sovereignty, but it is unclear under the new rules whether this will be enough.

Even the United Left Group could have problems with this rule. The full name of the group, which contains all MEPs to the left of social democratic and labour parties, is the Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL).

Its long-winded title reflects genuine tensions within the group to do with historic splits which go back to the range of attitudes to the Soviet Union found on the European anti-capitalist left. But it isn’t all history, and quite serious differences remain.

The group is held together, however, by its commitment to burying those differences in order to combat neo-liberalism, but when it comes, for example, to reform of the EU’s agricultural policies, parties from north and south will often vote different ways.

Hence the “confederal”. The individual national parties retain their autonomy.

The Greens form a group with progressive regionalists, the Greens/EFA. The latter element, which includes Plaed Cymru and the Scottish Nationalists, organises as a group-within-a-group, as does the Nordic Green Left within the GUE/NGL. Once again, it is unclear whether this will continue to be acceptable.

This aspect of the new rules will also make life harder for MEPs who are expelled from their groups for not toeing the line. As things stand, other groups will often invite them to join. Admittedly, this is largely out of self-interest. In the European Parliament, bigger means better. More money, more speaking time, more kudos.

Yet there is another motive, which is a desire to see men and women who were, after all, elected by the people of their countries, allowed to continue to do their jobs. This is apparently of no concern to the two big groups.

In another change, a totally undemocratic “filter system”, purportedly designed to eliminate “silly, irrelevant or offensive questions” was also installed. Who will decide which questions fall into these categories? The holder of the European Parliament presidency, a job carved out between the two big groups, of course.

As the European Parliament acquires more and more power, it becomes ever more important to the antidemocratic forces now ruling Europe to keep it under control. The rule changes may not seem to be of that much importance when set against the blatant contempt for democracy shown in the EU establishment’s reaction to successive referendum defeats, but they are another small but significant indication that, unless we wake up to what is going on, democracy may turn out to have been a whim of the twentieth century.

Steve McGiffen is Spectrezine’s editor. From 1986 to 1999 he worked as an assistant to a Member of the European Parliament, and then spent five years as a member of the secretariat of the United European Left political group.

Signing on in Brussels

Ellie Keen — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Members of the European Parliament were brought into discredit in a programme broadcast recently on German TV. The short documentary film dealing with the behaviour of Euro-MPs when it comes to their expenses is now circulating via the Internet. Euro-MP Erik Meijer of the United European Left-Nordic Green Left (GUE-NGL), the political group made up of all of the genuinely left parties in the European Parliament, was asked to comment. Meijer represents the Socialist Party of the Netherlands (SP), a true socialist party which in 2006 trebled its representation at national, regional and local level, hammering the centre-left Labour and Green Left parties. The SP’s success came on the back of theparty’s leadership of the triumphant ‘No’ campaign against the European Constitution.

The video in question shows MEPs signing the Strasbourg attendance register early in the morning and then later – but not much later – leaving the building, suitcase in hand, on their way homeward or, in any case, elsewhere. In this way, they are able to access the daily expenses intended for those who stay in Strasbourg and continue to work. (a British Tory MEP long ago dubbed this the ‘SOSO’ system – ‘Sign On and Sod Off’.) When they were asked by the broadcaster why they left, they dodged the question. One even put a hand to the camera’s lens. It must be impossible for a broadcaster to imagine better TV than that, a journalist’s revelations blacked out! Permission to film inside the European Parliament building was withdrawn there and then and the camera crew forcibly escorted from the premises. But what was not mentioned was that the whole thing happened several years ago.

Old news

SP Euro-MP Erik Meijer’s first reaction was to dismiss the whole things as old news. “These were pictures which had been recorded in 2003 or 2004. However, the abuse which they made public is still going on. The SP has for many years demanded that an end be put to the laughable payments made to Euro-MPs. Those elected as SP candidates distance themselves from this, by for example returning any unspent surplus of our travel expenses.

“From 1999 to 2004 I returned more than €50,000 to the Parliament. The SP’s Euro-MPs receive a monthly salary of roughly €2,300, a sum on which you can live well enough. The rest of our actual salary we hand over to the party, which helps, for example, to finance the SP’s activism, and such operations as the broadcast of our recent short film on home helps.”

The ins and outs

Members of the European Parliament receive various forms of income:

1..A fixed monthly salary from their own national Foreign Ministry, equivalent to that of a Member of their own national parliament, which therefore means that the biggest differences between MEPs result from differences in the salaries paid to their national MPs. These are very wide indeed, the lowest paid receiving €500 p.m. and the highest €11,000. Hungarians are amongst the lowest paid, Italians the highest.
2..In addition, all MEPs receive three kinds of repayment of expenses:
1. General costs ( a fixed sum, equal for all MEPs)
2. Travel expenses (depending on the number of kilometres travelled. Finns, for example, must generally travel a lot further than Dutch members.)
3. A daily allowance (which depends on the number of days a member signs the attendance book).

The daily allowance

Officially this money is designed to cover living expenses, such as the renting of a second home in Brussels, hotel rooms in Strasbourg and hotel costs for meetings in other places. In practice, the ‘reimbursement’ amounts to more than the actual costs. Most MEPs pocket the difference, but this does not happen in the SP.

It is this daily allowance which is discussed in the RTL documentary. Every working day that a MEP is present in Brussels or Strasbourg, or when the Member participates in a Parliamentary Committee meeting or foreign delegation in another country, he or she can also sign this attendance register. For each day that you are signed in you receive €287.

The attendance register for daily allowances is available to be signed each day in a certain room in the European Parliament building in Brussels or Strasbourg. As a result of earlier ‘camera incidents’, no-one is allowed to look at this book. It has, however, been agree that a daily allowance will only be paid for a Friday if the Member in question has also signed in for the Thursday before it, and that if the Parliament is closed for a public holiday, and during the week between Christmas and New Year, as well as in the first three weeks of August, the attendance list cannot be signed.

The current situation

In addition to this list, there is also a list of presence covering the plenary sessions, when in principle all Members should be in attendance. This list of those present is included in the minutes so that everyone can see which MEPs turn up and which don’t.

Until 2002 the Parliament’s Strasbourg plenaries stretched into Friday. During the 1997-1998 parliamentary session it was discovered that many MEPs were in the habit of arriving at around 9 o’clock on the Friday morning, signing the register and then immediately leaving the building, most likely to shoot off home. This led at the time to a scandal, all the more because the Parliament’s Praesidium had decided to move the register from the entrance hall into the meeting room itself, where neither journalists nor other visitors could see who had signed the list.

In 2002, on a proposal from the SP and others, it was decided that the poorly-attended Friday session, at which for the most part only 10% of the Members were present, would be done away with. Since then the only attendance list which can be signed on Friday is the general list described above, as on any other working day.

Abuse

In 2003 Hans Peter Martin, who in 1999 had been Number 1 on the list of the Austrian social democrats, declared that signing in for the daily allowance in Strasbourg on Fridays was an abuse. In support of his re-election campaign as an independent, he had placed a camera crew in the room where the register was and, as a consequence, plunged into scandal all of those who arrived with their luggage at around 9 o’clock, signed, and then immediately set off home. The pictures which are now being distributed via the Internet come from this period. Martin was thrown out of the social democratic group, the so-called Party of European Socialists.

Hated

Since his actions in 2003, Hans Peter Martin has been hated by almost all Euro-MPs, because he had accused everyone of being a cheat. One of the few still speaking to him is Erik Meijer, even though Meijer does not completely agree with him about what constitutes cheating and what does not. Where precisely do they disagree? Martin’s view is that now there is no plenary session on Friday, attendance allowances should no longer be paid for this day. But as Meijer points out, “I sign the list on Friday, but only if I intend to stay in Strasbourg to work, and I never do this any earlier than around noon. Until recently you could check this for yourself. I was one of the last, and you could see that from the number which appeared before my signature. But this too has now changed. About a year ago it was decided that the list of names would be arranged in alphabetical order. In any case, these lists were never made available to the public. Even Members could see only the last ten signatures. The rest were removed.”

Whit Monday

“An exceptional case was Whit Monday , I think it was in 2001,” Meijer recalls. “Following protests from Dutch Members the plenary session was delayed, because this is an important holiday in the Netherlands. Despite this, it turned out that the daily allowance list could be signed. I tried at the time to check which Dutch Members had signed, without signing it myself, but I was not allowed to peruse the register and was sent away. As long as the system is maintained under which there is an attendance list for every working say, I will sign the list when, and only when, I am present and working.”

New in 2009

After the next elections, from July 2009, every MEP from whatever country will receive an equal salary, higher than that for national MPs in the case of the Netherlands, but lower than that of the Members from the big member states. From then on, a MEP will be liable, just as is the case now for officials of the EU, to pay a special EU income tax which is much lower than that of the Netherlands. The SP has persistently – and in this it has stood alone amongst Dutch political parties – argued that Dutch MEPs should pay the difference between the EU tax and our own national tax to the Dutch state. “At the end of June, 2008, during a meeting with Guusje Ter Horst, Minister of Internal Affairs, I heard that she is prepared to put forward a legislative proposal under which Dutch Euro-MPs should pay Dutch taxes, and that they should continue doing so after 2009,” says Meijer. “In addition to the SP, the PvdA (Labour Party) has promised to support this proposal. Other political groups are arguing in favour of the EU tax.”

Paying Up

“My salary goes into the SP’s funds. I then receive €2,300 per month,” says Meijer. “As for my expenses, anything left over from my housing and hotel costs is also paid to the SP. I pay a monthly surplus of € 1,500 euro to the SP. When it comes to travel expenses, the reimbursement rate is a bit higher than the actual cost of my train tickets. Until 1999, when I was first elected, all Dutch MEPs could pocket the difference. In 1999 and again in 2004 it was agreed that all of us would pay it back to the EP. Starting in July 2009, only the actual costs will be reimbursed. The SP’s MEPs here in Brussels are well-known as people who pay a great deal back, but there are others who pay little or nothing back, for example because they like to travel in luxury.”

Erik Meijer was talking to a Socialist Party journalist.

The EU Empire

Ellie Keen — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:54:03 +0000

It will not surprise readers to learn that the European Parliament recently approved the Lisbon Treaty – the repackaged EU constitution already rejected by French and the Dutch voters.

What is perhaps shocking is the fact that MEPs also rejected a simple amendment asking that the European Parliament “undertake to respect the outcome of the referendum in Ireland” to be held in June. The amendment was rejected by 499 MEPs. Only 129 voted in favour and 33 abstained, meaning that the vast majority could not give a damn about what the Irish people say about the Lisbon Treaty.

Among those voting not to respect the referendum result in Ireland was Irish MEP Proinsias de Rossa, who revealed that his loyalties lay with the EU and not with the Irish people.

The hypocrisy of these latter-day empire loyalists was also revealed by European Parliament president Hans-Gert Poettering, who declared solemnly that the vote “was an expression of the free will of the peoples you represent.”

As long, of course, as you don’t actually ask them.

You may not be surprised to learn that this is not the first time that EU institutions have given mendacity a bad name. Lisbon is a revamped version of the treaty which gave the EU its own constitution superior to the constitutions of its member states, but rejected in referendums in 2005. Instead of accepting that decision, EU politicians decided to impose the EU constitution indirectly rather than directly, by not calling it a constitution, and on no account to hold referendums on it for fear people would reject it again.

Former French president Valery Giscard D’Estaing even told us how it would be done.

“Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly. All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way.”

However, the Irish constitution maintains that sovereignty rests with the Irish people and that only they can surrender sovereignty to the EU by referendum or not, as the case may be. Lisbon would make the EU constitution and laws superior to the Irish constitution and laws in all areas covered by the treaty, so the Dublin government must hold a referendum, much to the chagrin of the EU.

What is not commonly understood in this country – including the many MPs who recently opposed a referendum call on the constitution – is that, if the treaty is passed, EU institutions will have superior powers to the member states. The European Commission, which consists of nominated public servants, has the monopoly of proposing all EU laws. They are then imposed by the Council of Ministers mostly on the basis of qualified majority voting. The European Parliament, which is the only directly elected EU body, cannot propose any law. This so-called parliament can propose amendments to these laws, but cannot impose them unless the Commission and Council of Ministers agree.

The European Court of Justice interprets the treaties in specific court cases in a manner which tends to extend EU powers ever further over more than 500 million people. This unaccountable court has recently ruled in two cases that trade unions do not, after all, have a fundamental right to take strike action if it impedes business interests, which is the main point of organised labour.

Lisbon is also a clear power grab by the big states, as the constitution would bring in a new population-based voting system, giving larger members like France and Germany more power. It is also a self-amending treaty with escalator clauses to allow EU institutions to abolish further vetoes without recourse to asking member states.

Crucially, the treaty would further militarise the EU, something which would have a huge impact on Ireland, which has hitherto been a neutral state. When promoting the renamed EU constitution, European Commission president Jose Barroso said:

“Sometimes, I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organisation of empire. We have the dimensions of empire.”

And empires, of course, need armies. The common EU foreign and security policy contained in the Lisbon Treaty provides that “the union’s competence in matters of common foreign and security policy shall cover all areas of foreign policy and all questions relating to the union’s security, including the progressive framing of a common defence policy that might lead to a common defence.” The last phrase, a “common defence,” means a common EU army and military forces.

The driving force behind this constitution is the big corporations, organised in groups like the European Round Table of Industrialists. They are pushing the colonial and militarist agenda, along with privatisation and the removal of all forms of democracy from citizens.
The Irish people are at a crossroads. They can choose to remain a relatively young democratic nation or become a province of an empire once again.

Brian Denny is a spokesman for the UK group Trade Unionists Against the EU Constitution and writes regularly for the Morning Star, where this article first appeared.