The EP Culture Committee blogging menace nonsense (below) points up a factor in the Lisbon Treaty which is not really discussed.

Namely that as more and more ‘areas’ become subject to voting rather than consensus at the EU level, member states lose two things:

  • the right to block at the end of the road ideas which are utterly fatuous; plus, even more importantly …
  • … the right to stop such ideas gaining credibility and bureaucratic momentum in the first place

Just say some proposal to qualify our basic freedoms (in this case the right to write what we damn well please on a blog without being subject to the pathological attentions of an EU Ombudsperson) starts to run around the European Parliament or EU Commission. Various Euro-busybodies take it up.

What can the UK do to stop it? If it is in an area which falls under consensus, we can simply say NO in a loud voice at the start and then wearily tell everyone that we mean it when we say that we will block it.

Then we hope that it crawls away to die.

And we also hope that if it lingers on, our willpower won’t be eroded as the gruesome thing trundles towards a final decision. Because once it starts to trundle, it takes on a pseudo-legitimacy of its own.

Even if as in this case only a seemingly modest ‘voluntary code of practice’ emerges as a ‘fair compromise’, a key principle will have been conceded (and winning that concession was actually the point – establish the principle, then haggle over the price) This opens the way to future inroads as and when the EU gets round to it.

However, if a proposal comes under a Qualified Majority Voting heading or can be tweaked to do so (ie just as the odious Working Time Directive was smuggled in via ‘Health and Safety’ provisions), we immediately have to start rallying opposition in the hope of defeating it in a vote.

Much more risky on the substance as zany ‘trade-offs’ start to appear, not to mention debilitating and wasteful. And all untransparent to citizens.

The answer comes, "Er yes, but so what? We can propose things which other MS don’t like, so it all balances out. And the threat that a big and tough MS like the UK will mobilise a blocking minority deters a lot of nonsense anyway"

To which I say, "Er no. There are too many MS out there who have quite different attitudes to basic human liberties and the balance of power between citizens and the state. The tendency in practice is to dumb down competitive differences for the sake of the European Social Model and Generalised Harmony. See eg the various Directives seeking to limit by EU fiat the number of hours we all work, and giving agency staff many of the rights of permanent staff, an explicit drive to kill off a flexible British success story." 

So, European bloggers.

Hit back. As hard as you can.

The tragedy is that Euro-processes have forced you to waste more than a second of your busy and productive lives thinking about how best to do so.