[A-List] EU integration struggles: Benn critique

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Reclaiming Euroscepticism

Tony Benn's passionate advocacy of democracy and his articulate criticism of
the EU gave Brussels' great and good a reality check last week, writes
Andrew Osborn

Monday November 18, 2002
The Guardian

Throwing stones at the EU, the European project writ large and the euro is
deeply unfashionable. It's a given that many Britons do think much is wrong
with the EU, but saying so aloud is fraught with difficulty.

Dissenting voices are often written off as paranoid Little Englanders,
closet members of the Tories or, worse, the British National Party. To
question the European project's gathering speed or direction is, in the eyes
of many, heresy.

EU critics are either dismissed as xenophobes overly hung up on the past, as
troglodytes ludicrously attached to the Queen's head on pound notes, or
worse still, as fools labouring under the misconception that Britain is
best.

They are deemed, in short, to be fearful time-warped reactionaries who can't
and won't recognise that the EU is the future - "they don't know what's good
for them" goes the refrain - and if they're not 100 % with us then they must
be 100 % against us.

But former Labour cabinet member and veteran socialist Tony Benn, a fervent
anti-nationalist, succeeds where many fail, and he did so in Brussels last
week with great aplomb.

Taking his highly rated one-man show Free at Last to the self-styled capital
of Europe, he laid bare his views on the EU with impressive force. And in
doing so he reminded many that Euroscepticism is not a dirty word (although
he intensely dislikes the label on the grounds that it has become
pejorative) and that there are genuine leftwing gripes with the EU which are
legitimate and deserve to be aired.

In the UK his show is normally attended by the converted, but here in
Brussels the audience was very different. Many of the 500 or so spectators
had come along out of curiosity. Eurocrats, MEPs, lobbyists, consultants,
journalists, thinktank-ers, research assistants and lawyers all crammed in
to hear the 77-year old reminisce about the past and fulminate about the
future.

Of course they expected a lively discourse - and they were not
disappointed - but what they heard about the EU was, in many cases, not what
they wanted to hear.

One of Benn's main criticisms was that there is not enough democracy in
Brussels, a point with which it is hard to argue.

The European commission, he reminded the audience, is not elected and
therefore not accountable, and the European parliament, he told crestfallen
MEPs, is not a parliament in the real sense of the word.

Its occupants are anonymous, since people vote only for parties and not
representatives (European elections use proportional representation), and
the assembly's powers to legislate are limited. (It has joint competence on
only a selected number of policy areas).

The real parliament and the real power is the EU's council of ministers, he
added, where many decisions are taken in secret and where ministers agree
laws unencumbered by national parliamentary scrutiny - despite the fact that
those same laws will have a profound and irreversible effect on the people
of Britain. And that, he suggested, is not democracy or anything coming
close to it.

The most important question to ask someone in power, he quipped, was how you
go about getting rid of them, and in the case of the European commission the
disturbing answer is you can't.

It was true, he conceded, that the European parliament can trigger the
collapse of the commission, but what good, he argued, was such a blunt
instrument. If there is a problem with the plumbing it is nonsensical to
tear down the whole house.

Spontaneous outbursts of applause punctured some of his discourse, but many
of the audience whose livelihoods revolve around the EU, and who believe in
it warts and all, shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

His words contrasted sharply with those uttered on an almost weekly basis by
the organisers of the official debate about Europe. That debate - called the
convention on the future of europe and chaired by another elder statesman,
former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing - is leaden and
impenetrable.

But Benn, puffing on his pipe and inclining his hearing aid towards his
questioners, cut to the issues which really matter and did so in a genuinely
engaging way.

The EU should, he claimed, evolve at the pace of national parliaments. A
passionate internationalist, he would like to see a commonwealth of European
states encompassing countries like Russia too.

However, in its current form the EU is, he believes, too big and too flawed
to be truly democratic. There is simply no room for real debate, street
politics or a meaningful link between the elected and the electors. And with
the union poised to take in 10 new countries as early as 2004, he argues,
things can only get worse from a democratic point of view.

A prominent Tory MEP who insisted on shouting "Hear Hear!" after any of
Benn's pronouncements he liked (and there were many of them) reminded the
audience that doubts about the EU and its direction are shared by the right
too.

However, if Benn did anything last week it was to remind people that the
Tories and the right do not and should not have a monopoly on so-called
Euroscepticism, and that it is not a dirty word.