This week the Swedes were at it again, bless them. They are now saying 'No' to the EU's Data Retention Directive, which came out of Brussels in 2006. The directive requires telecom operators to store information on all the phone calls, text messages and emails made by everyone. The point is that the telecom companies have to keep this private information for at least a year, so that the police and other state authorities can dip into it whenever they want. The Brown government introduced the directive into British law in April 2009 without a debate in either house of parliament. The Swedes aren't so easy to stampede. Yesterday the European Court of Justice told the Swedish government they had to implement the directive. At first, the Swedish government buckled and told the court that it would put the directive into law by April. But according to the Swedish on-line paper, the Local, just hours after the verdict was made public the Justice Minister Beatrice Ask told a news agency that the government would not be putting the directive into law before the general election due in the autumn: 'The extent to which private companies would be forced to store information about the activities of individuals is an important matter of principle. That's exactly what this is about.' She said the government would wait at least until an enquiry into police methods had been completed. 'There is good reason to exercise a certain amount of caution when it comes to gathering information.' Exactly. So the role of a government in such circumstances is to say 'No' to Brussels. It's not really hard. To paraphrase Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, 'You know how to say No, don't you Gordon? You just put your lips together and say...No.' Borissov and Kuneva are from different political parties, so deciding to appoint someone else to Berlaymont is usual: no one would have expected Gordon Brown to drop-in a Tory to Baroness Ashton's new job at the commission (the EU foreign minister is a vice-president of the commission, too). That's is Kuneva above, in a picture from her website as commissioner for consumer affairs. In other words, she is the nanny who has lately been finger-wagging over how loudly anyone should be allowed to play his i-pod. Other than that, you probably haven't been much aware of her much these last five years. Still, it seems the president of the commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, likes her and her work (international i-pod control?) so much he doesn't want her to leave. The head of the Bulgarian government may want her out of the commission, but these days, who in Brussels cares what any national government wants? So Barroso has appointed Kuneva to be head of the Bureau of European Policy Advisers now that her term as a commissioner is ending. The BEPA is yet another body of eurocrats not one in 10,000 people in Britain has ever heard of, though their taxes are paying fo it. It is described as 'the EU executive's own in-house think-tank.' The appointment means that Barroso will keep Kuneva at his side in commission headquarters, whether the prime minister and government of her own country like it or not. The appointment is so typical of the post-Lisbon atmosphere in Brussels, which is, that all the barriers are down now to a centralised euro-government. National governments are just euro-county councils (except for Germany, but again that is another story). A bigger issue is the determination now of the European Parliament to take control over the appointment of individual members of the commission. The appointment of a commissioner is supposed to be within the power of a national government. Barroso may decide which commissioner gets which portfolio, but the choice lies with the national government. Or has until now. The parliament has had the ability to question incoming commissioners, but if they were determined to keep one out, they would have to reject the whole commission. This was meant to protect the power of national governments to control who would be their man at Berlaymont: it has always been felt unlikely that the parliament would want to use the nuclear option of rejecting the whole commission. Indeed, they've only tried it once. This arrangement is supposed to be locked in by European law. But in Brussels, again -- who much cares about law? The parliament is hunger for power in this new unitary state. Indeed, note how the European Parliament tries to make its members cut off identification with their own nations. At hearings or in debates there is no reference to the home country of any MEP -- they are never identified by which country they come from. They are only identified by name and the political grouping with which they sit in the parliament. The power-grabbing parliament is cutting a deal with Barroso that he must 'seriously consider' shoving a commissioner out if the parliament says it does not have confidence in him. This would apply both at appointment of a commissioner and during the individual commissioner's five-year term. None of this will be any kind of new legal powers for the parliament - it will all be an 'informal' transfer of power. What in Anglo-Saxon tradition would be called 'a back-room deal.' Or in Brussels is called 'business as usual.'
05 February 2010 10:20 AM
The power of 'No'
What, national governments? Who cares what they think?
Sunday, 7 February 2010
I first became a fan of the Swedish nation's attitude towards the EU when I went to Stockholm to cover the referendum on joining the euro in 2003. The Swedes gave the single currency a roaring great 'Nej,' with a turn-out of more than 80 percent.
A small item, but it's the flavour of it that counts: according to a Brussels website, Euractiv (backed by, among other outfits, lobbyists, corporations and those things called NGOs, but that is another story) the new Bulgarian prime minister Boyko Borissov made it clear when he was elected last year that there was no chance he would re-appoint Bulgaria's European Commissioner, Meglena Kuneva.
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