The Thursday Briefing is a blog by Tom Redford about green things, especially if they’re political, and even more so if they are to do with Europe. What I write isn’t necessarily representative of any Green party.
There are times when you just have to despair at the degree of selfishness that people (even/especially important people who have to make big decisions) can display at times. I wrote the other day about the Polish objection to tougher CO2 emissions reduction targets, but now today the European Parliament decided that lunch was more important than voting on a report on raising emissions reductions targets.
Lets get this straight: some MEPs thought that it was more important to go for lunch, than to do their job, finish voting from this Part Session, and make progress on an important report on a hugely important topic. I don’t know what was in the canteen today, but judging from the usual fare they offer up, I struggle to see how those hungry MEPs were unable to resist it.
Perhaps it was just the novelty of it, or maybe I’m just too much of a political geek, but I was very happy to get the chance to sit in the back of the AFCO (constitutional affairs) committee in the EP today. I was mainly there for the morning’s discussion of the Duff Report, but seeing as I’ve previously blogged on the citizens initiative, I popped back after work to hear the concluding speeches on that. I kind of forgot to keep following what was going on with the Initiative over the past few months, but it seems it’s still doing the salami rounds, losing thin slices of legitimacy as a “citizens” initiative. Unfortunately I missed most of the summing up, as it was delivered by the Chair of the Petitions Committee, Erminia Mazzoni, and while I have nothing against her personally, she doesn’t half shout! She managed to drown out the interpreter on the headset I was using, even with the volume turned up.
Anyway, the Duff Report was my main focus, and seems quite interesting in its proposals. I hadn’t encountered it before today, but the idea of transnational lists for the European Parliament elections is one that has been floating around for a little while. Theoretically, I like the idea, but it looks like something that would be nigh on impossible to implement, requiring as it does, a treaty change, and by extension, consent from member states, which by even more extension means national political parties voting to give up some of their control over who can be the MEP for their ideological stand-point. Andrew Duff, the rapporteur on the Electoral Act, seems to think a constitutional convention is a good idea for bringing together the proposals on the matter of pan-EU MEPs into a concrete treaty change, but his enthusiasm for it begs the question of whether he paid any attention to the rhetoric that was flying around at the time of the Lisbon Treaty’s ratification. Frankly, I can’t see a way for a Europeanising treaty change, or constitutional convention to take place for a few years at least.
It’ll be interesting to see how this one pans out though. I quite like the idea of pan-European MEPs—especially if they could represent the interests of Europeans who’ve ended up living outside their own state—and some of his other proposals are amusingly outlandish (harmonising electoral procedures/dates, votes at 16 in European elections*, making the Belgians accept noticeably fewer seats than the Dutch).
* I’m for votes at 16, but to introduce for only one election, and to try to do so in all member states at once?! Not an easy place to start.
Thanks to very little BBC reporting on it, it wasn’t until I noticed the European Council lanyards on the other people in the pub last night that I realised that there had been a summit during the day (somehow, despite working in the centre of Europe, and dealing with EU related things all day, I manage to miss the big stuff), but with the reports today of a confrontation between Sarkozy and Barroso, I’m glad that for once we see some passion in a European summit. It’s just unfortunate that it was over the appalling treatment of European citizens.
I’m a bit surprised that Sarkozy is still pushing on, claiming support from other heads of state and government, despite the fact that he really does seem to be standing alone on this one. I suppose it shows a modicum of decency in the leaders in the EU that there have been public condemnations of the French Government’s actions, and it certainly is nice to see a Commissioner willing to publicly criticise a member state, but I can’t help but feel that it is all a bit too little, and a bit too late. I don’t want Europe to be tiptoeing around, with everyone playing diplomacy. The EU should be part of the rough and tumble of politics, just like any national capital or regional government. Maybe the next time a member state does something reprehensible—though obviously it’d be nice if whatever it was simply didn’t happen—the Commission and Parliament speak out sooner.
Well I was going to post something about the problems facing Roma people in the EU (and that post will work its way up here soon), but in the course of trying to find out what was said in a meeting of the Civil Liberties committee of the European Parliament on that very topic, I discovered an interesting fact about the EP Live service: it doesn’t work on a Mac!
I’m used to the idea that, when it comes to certain new software, especially if I have to download and install it on my laptop, then I might not be in luck with my Mac only set-up, but where on earth is the difficulty in delivering video to a Mac?! I regularly use YouTube, BBC iPlayer, and various other flash based formats to watch videos on the Web, so regularly that I rarely watch a real TV. So why can’t the EP deliver recorded coverage of debates in a format that works on all computers? I shouldn’t be surprised that the Parliament is incompetent with technology, parliaments tend to be a bit rubbish like that, but it’s still surely unreasonable that I can’t see my representatives doing their job, simply because I haven’t bought a Microsoft Windows PC?
Update
Well, it turns out the EP Web team do care about accessibility. After an email to the Web-master, I received a reply pointing to the possibility to view archived plenary sessions in MPEG-4 format. It seems ok in Google Chrome, but (and this is probably a problem with my Mac) it’s buggy and tends to crash. Also, if you try to download the video, you get all the translations at once on the audio track. Looks like things are moving in the right direction, lets hope this continues.
It might not be the best thing to start a post with, but I’ve come to a conclusion: the citizens’ initiative, currently being fleshed out by various civil servants and politicians in Brussels, is not really all that much about citizens. My conclusion has been prompted by the changes that the Council of Ministers has proposed to the draft regulation that will set out how the whole thing will work.
“… and enhances further the democratic functioning of the Union by providing inter alia that every citizen shall have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union and that not less than one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of Member States may take the initiative of inviting the European Commission, within the framework of its powers, to submit any appropriate proposal on matters where citizens consider that a legal act of the Union is required for the purpose of implementing the Treaties.”
Extract from the proposal for a Regulation on the citizens’ initiative.
A bit of background first: the Lisbon Treaty included a provision for a citizens initiative, essentially being a petition by individual citizens to get whatever the issue at stake might be, considered by the Commission. Lisbon however, left most of the detail for later. Now is later, and the details are here.
With the current Council proposals, a minimum number of citizens (in proportion to the number of MEPs from a state), in at least one third of member states, will need to sign the initiative for it to be accepted. I don’t know about you, but I certainly would struggle as an ordinary European Citizen to pull off something like that. Even with a movement of some form behind the issue being dealt with, it’d take a lot of international coordination (I’d say more than Twitter could achieve) to get the initiative off the ground, let alone successfully submit it to the Commission. There’s also a slightly sinister provision that, “the Commission should reject the registration of proposals which would be manifestly against the values of the Union.” From a legal perspective, that’s not too controversial a statement. It means that initiatives which contradict the positive and sunny opening articles of the treaties—where all the good things the EU wants to do and thinks are important are laid down—would be dismissed without the Commission having to publish the initiative on its website, or give it any serious thought at all. From a non legalese point of view though, the language is unfortunate. Politically, it could be thrown back at the EU, for it reserving the right to dismiss things based on values that it, not the people, decides. And to citizens thinking of organising an initiative, it is as clear as mud in its meaning.
The citizens initiative, as it is being proposed now, needs someone with a fairly well developed knowledge of how the EU works. Most people don’t have that sort of knowledge about their own political systems, but they aren’t barred at the door for that ignorance. In Scotland, ordinary people (am I using that term too much now?) can start or participate in a petitions system which triggers discussion on the topics in a committee of the Scottish Parliament. Knowledge of the intricacies of this system, and a reading of the Scotland Act to determine the details of reserved and devolved powers. or the ‘values’ of Scotland, isn’t needed. An interest in a political issue (and isn’t everything political?) and an understanding of how to get people to sign a petition means that any person in Scotland can “participate in the democratic life of the” country, to borrow a few words from the Council’s suggestions.
The Citizens’ Initiative will be pretty good for some though. Lobbying groups, NGOs, and campaigning networks will love this. It offers a way to get the EU to, at the very least, think about something. This is good to some extent, but it means that it is wrong to go about thinking that having this wonderful Citizens’ Initiative helps to lessen the democratic deficit of the EU. I still support the idea of the initiative, but it is not something that many ordinary citizens will ever have a chance of using to further a cause dear to their hearts.
You’d think I’d be writing something on the Irish ‘yes’ to Lisbon, what with this being a European politics blog after all, but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until Wednesday evening, by which point I will have been enlightened by a panel discussion on the outcome of the referendum with an Irish barrister, and some professors from the Law Department of my university. It’ll also be interesting to see what is being said in the European Parliament on the matter.
Anyway, what I did want to briefly post about tonight is related to Lisbon: specifically, the presidency of the EU. I keep hearing a lot about how ratification of Lisbon will open the door for Tony Blair to become the first new-style President. Now I can’t imagine he’d turn down the job, but the feeling I’m getting from people I’ve talked to about this, and media I’ve read about it, suggests that he’s not really the shoe-in that the British press claim. Anyone have any ideas?
The European Greens have had an anti-Barroso campaign going for a little while, as can be seen if you go to 09:50 in the video below (though the whole thing is quite interesting). It seems though that there might actually now be some hope of getting someone other than Barroso into the Presidency of the Commission when the post is elected. If the European United Left/Nordic Green Left can be won ’round, then it seems support from other groups behind Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian PM, could be enough to win the secret ballot in the EP. One to watch, I think.
