23/07/2013
At least the
Daily Mail has got it roughly right. James Landale of
the BBC notes that the first six out of 32 non-committal reports have been published deliberately without fanfare on a quiet Monday in July while MPs are not sitting with all eyes elsewhere.
There is lots of meat for eurosceptics and europhiles alike, he says. Each can choose what they wish to further their arguments. But that is all. The debate may be more informed but it has not changed.
The problem is, reviewing these reports is like paddling in a septic tank. The next one I've been looking at
Animal Health and Welfare and Food Safety Report, which covers areas in which EU policy density is particularly high. It is turgid beyond extreme.
Mercifully, the report is "only" 69 pages. With this and the energy stuff, I've looked at over 300 pages of officialese in one slug over the lest 24-hours. No one can really absorb this â and they don't. You dip in, fillet it and move on. But this is no way to run a railroad.
One interesting bit we pull out is in the introduction of this current report, from which we e learn that consumer survey data suggests that UK consumers are largely unaware of the role the EU plays in making food law. Only 11 percent preferred food law to be made by the EU, although this figure rose to 23 percent when people were given some information about EU legislation.
And there you go: in Europe and run by Europe, but most people don't actually realise. Yet, we sort of
knew that from the
horsemeat fraud. But if people don't even recognise
an EU failure when it happens, it is difficult to get informed comment.
In fact, that one thing â horsemeat fraud â illustrates the fatuity of this entire review. We could write (and effectively have written) hundreds of pages on evaluating just this one aspect of EU law. Thus, for all the length, 69 pages in this report can only glide of the issues. It cannot and does not do justice to them.
This we see especially in page 50, headed "International issues". Half a page is devoted to Codex, and the other half to OIE, and then another page looks at these organisations and the WTO. Look at how many pages on this blog we've devoted to Codex, and you immediately realise just how thin this report really is.
In six short paragraphs, the issue of "Global standards rather than EU competence" is rehearsed. Some respondents such as attendees at the Brussels Workshop, we are told, questioned whether or not being locked into an EU position at Codex served the UK's national interest. The Agricultural Industries Confederation was also concerned that UK interests were diluted by EU representation at Codex.
And then respondents such as Dundee City Council argued that the EU has a more powerful voice than the UK as it speaks as one united bloc of 28 different Member States. Similarly, Cefas argued that the EU was highly influential when negotiating within the OIE.
Look at three pieces we have done,
here,
here and
here, and there is far more argument and relevant detail than you will find in the entire report, much less these trivial little snatches.
What emerges is that the civil service, with the backing of the FCO, is reporting what it wants to find. According to the
Financial Times, a senior government official says: "In none of these areas did the balance of evidence suggest the balance of competences was not broadly appropriate". Another one said, "We are happy with the overall balance of evidence. The exercise is not to reach definitive Government judgments in these things". The review had not been "designed to produce recommendations or make EU policy".
The exercise is actually a complete waste of time and effort. By the time the EU referendum debate gets under way â if it ever does â this exercise will be gone and forgotten. The two reports we have so far looked at have settled nothing, and the others are unlikely to deliver anything of significance.
COMMENT: "REVIEW OF COMPETENCES" THREAD
