Lee Rotherham is author of the newly-published Ten Years On – Britain without the European Union, which is available for free via this website
while stocks last. Set in 2020, the book documents a “history” of
Britain between 2010 and 2020 in which, under a Cameron Government,
Britain regains power from Brussels and enters a very different
relationship with the EU. Here is the third of several abridged extracts of the
book, still using imaginary characters, which shows . The second extract was published yesterday afternoon.
Part of the reason why Britain’s so successful today compared with the EU member countries boils down to a single word: accountability. Or, put it another way, democracy. These are abstract phrases and their true meaning and value can often be hard to appreciate. But Sheila Jones’s and Ashley Grayson’s MP understands them perfectly.
Graham Peal was first elected for the constituency back in 2010. He’s a former deputy head teacher. Not surprisingly, he got into politics first and foremost because of education issues, but he was also concerned about the dire state of the public finances. He tells us his views on membership of the EU have changed completely. ‘I remember, before I was interested in politics, watching the television news back in the early 1990s when the Maastricht debate was tearing politicians apart. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, I thought they were arguing just for the sake of it. Once I turned to my wife and vented my irritation, “Look at that bunch of nutters. They just haven’t got a clue about the real world.” At the time, I thought they were like kids in the playground scrapping over trading cards or something.’
Peal’s view shifted when he got elected, thanks to some first hand experience of what the EU meant in practical terms. ‘I suppose I’d scarcely been in for a month. First there was the euphoria of getting in, you know the adrenaline of this great change in your life, and then all the paperwork and chaos about getting the office up and running. But then the constituency case work started to kick in. That’s when reality struck.
‘I got this letter from a constituent who complained that the local council was only collecting the dustbins every fortnight. By the second week, his bin, and everyone else’s in the neighbourhood, was overflowing and animals and birds were spreading the stuff around. He’d contacted the rubbish department, and then his Councillor, who’d told him they were following new rules. So he wanted to know if, as his MP, I could get these rules changed if the council couldn’t. Looking into the problem, I found the root of the issue lay in a European Directive on landfill dating back to 1999. OK, the object was to cut the amount of landfill, massively. The problem was the council didn’t have the resources to fund disposing of the waste in other, greener but more costly, ways. I had to tell him I had no power to do anything for his problem. I didn’t enjoy doing that.
‘Next was a phone call from this bloke who was concerned about something he’d read in his business trade magazine about changes to employment rules on short term workers. My researcher soon found out that at the bottom of this there was an EU Agency Workers Directive, so, again, there was nothing I, as his MP, could do to affect that one, either.
‘Next day, the one straight after the other, I had a lady complaining how she had been on a waiting list for a hip operation and she’d seen in the local press how someone had leapfrogged the queue, gone straight over to France and booked themselves in over there, but still expecting the NHS to pay, thanks to a ruling by the European Court of Justice; and then a fireman worried about the threat of including his stand by time in with the time he worked when calculating the amount of hours he was allowed to be on duty. And all that was despite us supposedly having an opt-out from the Working Time Directive. It affected doctors too, and on one of my colleague’s patch I’m told, the local lifeboat station, and even drivers in the armed forces.
‘It was a wake-up call. In the space of a week I discovered just how much Brussels really called the tune. Sure, MPs in our Parliament would sign things off on the dotted line as a formality thing, but the real decision making was being done by civil servants in committee rooms miles away from elected politicians. Even Ministers were generally out of the loop until the negotiations were well under way, by which time it was pretty difficult to do anything radical about them. Especially in all those areas where we had given up the veto.’
Mr Peal was not very impressed at the time with the attitude of some of his then colleagues who had lived through this experience. ‘One of my colleagues used to say that only nine per cent of Britain’s laws were made in Brussels. Well, that’s fine if you only count the British laws that were signed off in order to make EU laws formal. But that’s a tiny portion of the lot, so that’s a very cheeky deception. The Belgian Government put it at 40 per cent as coming from drafts in Brussels. Looking at the inspirations for laws increased the figure. The German President said that, adding all the direct and indirect root sources of lawmaking together, 84 per cent of laws originated from EU institutions.’
Graham Peal goes on. ‘The scale was massive. I made a list out of it. If you traded something, made something, sold something, ran something, policed something, protected something, transported something, communicated something, floated something, fished something, grew something, burnt something, buried something, stored something, repaired something, bought something, spent something, exchanged something, taught something, learned something, appreciated something, walked something, powered something, healed something, published something, sponsored something, researched something, reported something, supported something … well, you get the picture. The European Commission was everywhere, EU laws were everywhere, and the scope was getting bigger with every new treaty. MPs, Parliament, we came way down the food chain.’
Mr Peal backs up his point with some statistics. In 2009, there were 30,000 legal acts on the EU’s books. There were also 10,000 verdicts reached by the European Court of Justice at Luxembourg, interpreting how they were applied, and 40,000 sets of agreed international standards. That made 89,962 in total. He says, ‘even if you allowed that we wouldn’t want to repeal all of these after 2011, the scale of the problem was clear. Twenty or thirty items were going past ministers every month as “A Points”, in other words already passed at EU Council meetings, just on the nod. No wonder that the parliamentary scrutiny committee that rubber stamped the regulations used to meet in secret: the truth was too embarrassing for the public to be told.’
Graham Peal compares that with the situation now in 2020, with Britain free. ‘When our government in Parliament proposes legislation, a law’s drafted and it’s worked on by British civil servants from the outset. It’s tailored for British needs, rather than attempting to direct an economy that runs from Lapland to Benidorm.The process is mandated and managed by British ministers, who are responsible for it. Ministers go before Parliamentary Committees and are held accountable for bad laws. They can’t any longer fob off criticism by saying that this was someone else’s law and, while they didn’t like it, they could only vote it through and what else could they have done? Now that excuse has gone: bad laws can cost a minister their job and even a government its majority.
‘Constituents are aware of this now. And, you know, the perception that our law-makers are British and that the whole process is so much more transparent, has actually helped to clean up politics and make politicians more acceptable to the public. Only two or three years ago, you remember, we even had a former minister deselected by his own party association over one scandalously mismanaged Bill that some businessmen had tried to buy through. Over there, on the contrary, we’ve had European Commissioners in charge who’ve actually been indicted for fraud.’
Graham Peal concludes, ‘Ten years ago, Brussels was becoming like Washington DC; a Las Vegas for lobbyists and the big game hunters of transcontinental lawmaking, while the little man was kept waiting outside. Westminster, on the other hand, was on the way to being not much more influential than Cardiff. Today, when my constituents complain about waste management, short term contract work, the way the NHS works, working hours, they know I can get onto the case and do something about it.’