EU Referendum


Booker: the EU no longer rules OK


22/09/2013



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Booker's lead story this week on the column is about the great global warming disaster, bringing the "climate contras" out in force on the comment thread. That leaves me to deal with the second story, almost completely ignored by the commentariat, the one headed: "Wake up guys – the EU doesn't rule, OK?".

The subject here is global governance, one of great interest to this blog, so much so that Booker relies entirely material published here, a fact acknowledged on the copy, with readers told to come here for a fuller analysis of this topic. They are recommended in particular to look at "a COOL revolution" and "the wrong sort of elephant", but they might also find interesting "independence through globalisation" and Booker's earlier piece on Geneva and world governance.

The two referenced pieces are used by Booker as "two more glaring examples of how at sea our media have become over the complexities of how we are now governed".

The first piece recalls how several newspapers, supported by UKIP, went to town over a story about how the wicked EU is trying to ban the use of Union flag logos on food products, which indicate to shoppers that they originate in Britain.

True, writes Booker, it has long been a scandal that, under EU law, these labels can be meaningless, so that it is quite legal to stamp a Red Tractor logo with a Union flag on chickens imported from Thailand, as long as they are processed in the UK. But the press got this story upside down.

What the EU is in fact doing is the very reverse of what these stories claimed. It is now proposing to insist that "country of origin" labelling should mean exactly what it says. But the reason for this U-turn is not that Brussels has grown honest. It is doing this to bring it into line with "Country of Origin Labelling" (COOL) rules laid down, at a higher level than the EU, by the World Trade Organisation and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (the parent organisation of Codex).

The second piece notes the excitement last week over a story headlined "EU's latest bloomer". This supposedly revealed that Brussels plans to make it illegal for garden centres to sell a swathe of popular plant varieties, such as Hidcote lavender and Nelly Moser clematis.

Again, though, what this scare story missed was that Brussels is only amending its directives on plant varieties to bring the EU into line with rules agreed at a global level, by bodies such as the UN's Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

What almost everyone has been missing is the startling extent to which regulation of all kinds, covering anything from food labelling to vehicle manufacture, from banking and insurance to fisheries, now originates from a network of global governance, forcing the EU to frame its own rules accordingly, thus downgrading it to a mere regional branch office.

In this sense, Booker concludes, as our lawmaking is removed ever further from any kind of democratic control, leaving the EU would scarcely make any difference – except that at least Norway, as an independent country, is represented on these world bodies in its own right, whereas Britain is often represented only by negotiators speaking for the "common position" of the EU.

But that is a crucial distinction. With more and more law being made at a global level, independent countries such as Norway get to sit at the "top tables", which are more often in Geneva, Basel, Paris and Rome than they are in Brussels.

The European Union in Brussels is turning out to be the backwater of the "little Europeans", with the Commission processing rules originated elsewhere into laws for its client member states. This makes it a "bureaucracy for hire" with a limited regional remit, downstream from the real centres of power.

As this realisation dawns, people will come to understand that the much-vaunted Single Market is a chimera. To take part in the global trading community, of which "Europe" is but a part, we need to be members of the global rule-making community. The "little Europe" of the EU, only ever a power in its back yard, is losing its grip.  As a rule-maker, the process of globalisation is making it redundant.

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