01/06/2014
In a good spot by
Mary Ellen Synon, she picks up a report from
EurActiv marking out the EU's chief scientific advisor as one of the good guys. This is Anne Glover who was
appointed to the role in December 2011, by Barroso, specifically to give advice directly to him, and to give regular updates on major scientific and technological developments.
At the time, Barroso said: "I am delighted to appoint Professor Anne Glover to the post of Chief Scientific Advisor. I believe her outstanding background and calibre will bring invaluable expertise to the Commission. She has a strong track record in leading the Scottish Science Advisory Committee which made her the standout candidate for this post".
This "standout candidate", however, is making what will probably be a career-changing error in biting the hand that feeds it, in a briefing organised on 21 May by Eurochambres, the Association of European Chambers of Commerce and Industry.
A big challenge for the next European Commission, she told the group, will be to disconnect its evidence gathering processes from the "political imperative" that's driving policy proposals, according to, the EU's chief scientific advisor.
Describing her role at the Commission, Glover said she enjoyed considerable freedom in providing scientific advice to Barroso. Although her opinions remain confidential, she has made widely-publicised comments on subjects as diverse â and controversial â as climate change,
GMOs and shale gas.
This, over the period, has made her
the target of
angry NGOs and
green interest groups, but â while she
has been critical of policymaking which lacks the backing of scientific evidence - she has so far focused her attention on member states rather than the commission.
Now, however, as the man who appointed her prepares to depart, Glover is complaining that she has also found it difficult to disentangle the Commission's evidence gathering processes from what she calls the "political imperative" that's behind them.
Illustrating her point, she uses a fictitious example of an EU-wide ban on the use of credit cards because credit cards lead to personal debt. A commissioner will say to his or her Director General, "Find me the evidence that demonstrates that this is the case" and the staff will "find the evidence" to prove the case, even though this may not be true.
To Glover, this is "â¦building up an evidence base which is not really the best", to which effect she tells us that, to back its policy proposals, the Commission often outsources the evidence-gathering to external consulting firms. They provide "impact assessment studies" or "research" that are often branded as "independent".
Says Glover, such consultancies have little incentive to produce evidence that contradicts the Commission's political agenda. "If they want repeat business, [they] are not going to go out and find the evidence to show that this is a crazy idea".
There are countless examples of topics where EU policymakers have bickered over the evidence, including on the safety of nanoparticles, the impact of biofuel crops over food prices or chemical substances with hormone-disrupting effects.
In fact, the battle over evidence extends far beyond the EU institutions and spills over to the private sector and non-governmental groups trying to influence policy, sometimes with the backing of EU member countries.
Perhaps the most politicised to date, she says, was the REACH regulation on chemicals, which gave rise to one of the most epic lobbying battles in the EU's history, generating dozens of impact assessment studies before it was eventually adopted in 2006.
At one point, EU officials arranged a meeting to try and make sense of 36 different impact assessment studies on REACH, most of them focusing on the legislation's projected disastrous cost on businesses. The Commission's own initial impact study, meanwhile, had sought to highlight the benefits of REACH to health and the environment. A final impact study ended up broadly confirming the Commission's original assessment.
To Glover, such drawn-out battles over the evidence on which policy decisions are grounded should become a thing of the past. She is going to propose for the next commission president a new system of evidence gathering that entirely disconnects evidence gathering from the political imperative. The "simple solution" is a special department at the Commission to assess policy proposals against the evidence â "a central service which would be the evidence portal".
This naivety, however, fails to recognise that the Commission is a political body with its own agenda â and is as prone to distorting evidence in order to get its way as is any member state or interest group.
What Glover has to say, therefore, is of profound importance, as she (perhaps unwittingly) calls into question the entire structure of and rationale for the European Union â and that is why she is probably dead meat.
Essentially, the Commission takes on the function of the disinterested "Platonic guardians", rising above "grubby national politics" to rule beneficently of the peoples of Europe without being distracted by the need to gain the popular approval that is needed to secure election. Because of this, the technocratic impartiality transcends democratic legitimacy.
But, what we are now reminded of is that the Commission is way removed from the Platonic idea, and thus â even in its own terms â cannot claim any legitimacy. If we are to have grubby, horse-trading politics, we might as well have it at a national level, where we have at least some control over the scoundrels.
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