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Daniel Hannan

Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the EU is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free. He is the winner of the Bastiat Award for online journalism.

Brussels establishes a new fund to promote European citizenship

By Daniel Hannan Politics Last updated: August 24th, 2010

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While urging its member nations to constrain their expenditure, the EU is simultaneously demanding that they cough up more in order to proselytise for the deeper integration. A new million-euro fund has been established to “develop a sense of active European citizenship“.

Politicians generally, and Eurocrats especially, tend to overestimate the effect of propaganda. Hundreds of millions of euros are spent every year on trying to convince school children, university students, professional organisations and NGOs of the merits of Euro-federation; yet almost every referendum throws up a “No” vote. Then again, propaganda is only the secondary function of these grants; their primary purpose is to provide a living for their recipients. And this they do very well.

Tags: eu, Euro-scepticism, Europhiles, Eurosceptic, NGOs, propaganda

How the EU pays to lobby itself

By Daniel Hannan Politics Last updated: November 8th, 2007

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It’s often said that the EU is undemocratic, in that its key decision-makers are unelected. But it’s worse than that. The EU is actually anti-democratic: it elevates busybodies, interest groups and lobbyists over the ballot box.

“The people” merely represent the Commission

Tomorrow, there’ll be a jamboree in the European Parliament called the“Agora”. Some 500 “representatives of civil society” will come together to discuss where the EU should go next. And who are these “representatives of civil society”? Well, there’s the Young European Movement, the Union of European Federalists, the European Women’s LobbyÂ… pretty well any organisation prepared to tell the EU that what “the people” want is for Brussels to take more power.Â

Nor are these organisations that just happen to support political union. They are, in most cases, creatures of the EU, wholly dependent on Brussels for their income. I have put down a written question to ask which of them get Euro-subventions, and how much they receive, and I’ll keep you posted. But I have a pretty good idea of what the answer will be. You see, we’ve been here before.Â

The European Convention, the body which, in 2002 and 2003, met to draw up the European Constitution, made a great show of inviting submissions from “the people”. Nearly 200 organisations were asked for their opinion. And you guessed it every one of these organisations was a puppet of the European Commission, reliant on the EU for its funding. No wonder they all told the Eurocrats what they wanted to hear. For their directors, it wasn’t so much a question of ideology as of paying the school fees.Â

It’s a trick the Commission pulls again and again. At our last plenary session a couple of weeks ago, we voted on new rules restricting the sale of pesticides. Before the vote, MEPs were bombarded by an organisation called Pesticide Watch which, it later turned out, was an amalgam of various Commission-funded front organisations. In the same way, the Commission pays Friends of the Earth to urge it to take more powers in the field of climate change, it pays WWF to tell it to assume more control over environmental matters, it pays the European Cyclists’ Federation toÂ… oh, you get the picture.

You see how the system works? The EU firehoses cash at these organisations to lobby it, they tell it what it wants to hear, and it can then turn around and say that, far from being undemocratic, it is giving a voice to the peoples of Europe. Millions are thereby drawn into the system, their livelihoods depending on the EU. And shall I tell you the best bit? You’re paying for the whole racket.

There will be at least one independent organisation attending the Agora: the Freedom Association, of which I am a council member, and my friend Roger Helmer MEP is chairman. Good luck to the Freedom Association delegates: they’re about to discover how it feels to be a souverainisteEuro-MP.