Protected minority?

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Protected minority?

The House of Lords (though, of course, not the highly paid House of Commons) will be sitting tomorrow to debate several matters, including a report published by the European Union Committee in July, entitled “Initiation of EU Legislation”. Even if one disagrees with their choice of witnesses (though, to some extent, this is self-selecting) and some of the conclusions, it is a fascinating document to read as it lays out many of the issues of EU legislation very clearly and cogently, though often admiringly.

The word “accountability” is not mentioned, curiously enough.

At present, I am working on notes for the debate on which I shall report as soon as Hansard publishes the words spoken. In the meantime, let me bring up one interesting point made in connection with legislation to do with justice and the problems common law countries face. Incidentally, this is about the only part of the EU legislation in which Member States can initiate legislation. In all other sectors, it is the Commission.

Paragraph 51 of the Report says:

The Bar Council pointed out that the exclusion of national stakeholders from the Justice Forum carried the risk, in particular, that the voice of the common law systems would not be heard. They drew our attention to a lack of knowledge of common law systems among Commission officials, and problems which occurred where draft legislation, particularly in the fields of police cooperation and civil and criminal justice, was drafted without proper consideration of the implications for common law countries. They gave the example of the Commission's green paper on wills and succession.

Great. Let’s simply discard centuries of carefully built up and highly admired tradition because the bozos in the Commission Commission officials know nothing about it. Incidentally, this involves four countries: the UK, Ireland, Cyprus and Malta.

Then again, this is what Professor Steve Peers (Professor of Law, University of Essex) opined:

Professor Peers agreed that the Directorate General concerned with Justice and Home Affairs had relatively few officials from a common law background, and said it was relatively under-staffed. Many proposals have presented huge problems from a common law perspective even where, as in the case of proposals on criminal procedural law and on a European evidence warrant, they had been drafted by English and Scottish nationals, respectively.

English and Scottish nationals? What on earth does this professor of law teach his students? Just don’t send your children to study law at the University of Essex.

The answer to the problem seems obvious to most of us: it is not really possible to create a common system of law for countries that have such different traditions. But that is not the answer that the various witnesses gave to the Committee. This is what Paragraph 55 says:

Professor Peers thought the best solution would be to increase the representation of the common law within the Commission. He suggested that the Commission might consider how it is organised and the way in which it obtains information in the early stages of a proposal, to ensure that different legal traditions are represented. (Q 52) Vijay Rangarajan (Counsellor, UKRep) referred to the Government's work to raise awareness of the common law systems among Commission officials from civil law countries by promoting both training and the secondment of officials from the UK. (QQ 303, 305)

Raise awareness? Isn’t that the jargon the Home Office uses when they send police officers for diversity and sensitivity training? It seems that the Member States with common law traditions have joined the ranks of protected minorities. What none of this explains is that whatever awareness may or may not be raised, the policies developed for purposes of integration are unlikely to take common law into account.

The poisonous drip of misinformation

One significant difference between this recession and the last (and the ones preceding it) is the way newspapers are being hit – mostly through a devastating fall in the amount of advertising, although there are many other factors. 

Quietly, the big titles are downsizing, reducing the number of journalists they employ. Then, with the burgeoning number of pages and supplements they have to offer, plus podcasts, TV clips and the rest, journalists are actually being asked to do more and more, giving them less time to devote to research and real in-depth reporting.

An important side-effect of this is that, increasingly, the news is not generated by newspapers but by the various agencies. Much of the copy is now simply a "cut and paste" job, with a few tweaks, the less honest of the papers then simply adding their journos' names to the final result.

Where this gets important is that a very few news agencies (and then a very few journalists within those agencies) are essentially controlling the print (and indeed much of the rest of the electronic) media. 

Through this means, one sees insidious distortions and simplifications which completely change the context of the political debate. And, like water flowing through the cracks in the dam, they percolate everywhere, finding their way into thousands of print and online journals, influencing the way people think about the world.

By way of example, today we have today a comment by Declan Ganley and Jens-Peter Bonde on the scandalous behaviour of the Irish government, in forcing through another referendum on the constitutional Lisbon treaty. As to what is put to the Irish people, "Not one word or legal obligation will be changed," they say. "The same content will simply be put in a new envelope, just as Valery Giscard d'Estaing said about the change from the Constitution to the Lisbon." 

The we have AP briefly reporting on the same issue, under the heading, "EU: Ireland will vote again on treaty next year". This will be repeated a thousand-fold across the world, to be read by millions.

The distortions are well evident, but only to those who know. It tells us: "France, which holds the EU presidency, says Ireland would hold a second vote in return for changes in the treaty." Then, of course, we get the bog-standard formula for describing the treaty: "The document is meant to streamline EU decision-making and boost its role on the world stage…".

As the Ganley – Bonde duo rightly point out – the best the Irish can get is a few meaningless "declarations" which have no legal effect. There will be no changes to the treaty … there cannot be. But this is not what AP is projecting. Its idle simplifications are a complete distortion. They project something which is not true.

As for the intent to "streamline EU decision-making …" etc., we could write an essay on how wrong that is … in fact, we have, several times. But the canards survive, because they are convenient, mindless formulae for the agencies to churn out in their bid to supply the endless pap to fill the pages of the world's media.

At the receiving end, you have production-line journalism, concerned only with filling in spaces – not one whit of sentient thought between copying out the agency text and pasting it onto the virgin page. Worse still, this process is not a deliberate attempt to deceive. But that makes it all the more dangerous.

Media bias, in this context, has never been more real and more dangerous, but the source is not in the offices of the media so much as the agencies which supply them. And their poisonous drip of misinformation is endangering the political process.

COMMENT THREAD