Let's have a closer look at the Sun's article (Wed 25 April) on the plans to have another go at changing the EU Treaty framework. My comments in Bold:
TONY Blair was accused last night of “smuggling” through a surrender of British power to Brussels without giving voters a say.
The PM was savaged for plotting with Germany to bring in a rewritten EU Constitution by the back door.
The deal, which would see an irreversible handover of power, was “stitched up” in talks in Berlin. He has said there will be NO referendum.
Critics say it will mean: No more OVERTIME for millions of workers; UNELECTED European judges with power over UK suspects and FOREIGN cops acting on British soil.
But a) the EC working time Directive can already be amended by a qualified majority vote under the existing Treaties, and there already is a proposal to this effect. b) very few countries elect judges c) the constitutional treaty would retain a veto for all Member States concerning cross-border movements of police forces
Firms will have JOB-destroying laws foisted on them and WEALTH-hitting laws will hamper the City.
Does it ever occur to Sun journalists and their readers to wonder why any UK politician would sign up to such a thing? In fact, the Constitutional Treaty would make only marginal changes to the EC's internal market or social law powers.
Mr Blair plans to put the finishing touches to the blueprint in June as virtually his last act as Prime Minister.
Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague said: “Tony Blair made a clear promise — to hold a referendum on the EU Constitution.
“And Labour promised it would not be brought in via the back door. This will be an outrageous breach of that.
“There should be a referendum on any treaty that hands yet more power to Brussels.”
It isn't yet clear whether the UK and other countries critical of the Constitutional Treaty will accept the creation of any 'new' EU powers (the new powers in the Constitutional Treaty in any event largely comprise powers that the EU already exercises in practice) or that they will accept any extension of qualified majority voting. To me these are the crucial questions in determining the importance of any revived attempt at Treaty amendment.
The EU Constitution was effectively dropped two years ago after French and Dutch voters rejected it. But last night Mr Blair and German leader Angela Merkel were drawing up a replacement.
They insist it is a treaty, NOT a Constitution, and Mr Blair says there is no need for a national vote on its contents.
Yet three years ago he said: “You cannot have a situation where you get a rejection of the treaty and bring it back with a few amendments and say, ‘Have another go’.”
One crucial change will be over our power to veto barmy EU laws. At present, we can do deals with other EU states to block laws. But the treaty will alter the “weight” of each country’s voting powers, making blocking far harder.
This confuses the two separate issues of shifting from unanimity to qualified majority voting on the one hand, and the question of weighting the QMV on the other. As for weighting QMV, the Sun's argument is simply astounding, for the Constitutional Treaty would INCREASE the UK's voting weight.
Let's look at the facts. At present Article 205 EC requires that most EC acts adopted by QMV need support from a majority of Member States and 255 votes out of 381 -- of which the UK has 29 votes, or 7.6%. As a back-up it must also be demonstrated that a measure has the support of Member States with 62% of the EU population. According to the annex to the Council's rules of procedure, the UK has 60m people out of 493m in the EU -- or 12%. The Constitutional Treaty would drop the second rule, which gives extra voting weight to small and medium-sized countries as compared to the big ones, and amend the first and third -- so that it will take 55% of Member States with 65% of the population to approve a measure. Clearly this would mean that it will be easier to block legislation for the biggest four Member States, since a) the threshold for a blocking minority will be lower (35% of the population instead of 38%); b) the second rule, which hugely reduced those countries' voting power as compared to their population, would be dropped; and c) the threshold for applying the first voting rule would go up from 50.1% to 55% of Member States.
Campaigners Open Europe say this could mean Britain having to accept a string of job-destroying laws. The Working Time Directive would see us having to adopt a maximum 48-hour week.
The particular example given is absurd, because the UK has struck an alliance with Germany and several smaller Member States in blocking the abolition of the individual opt-out in the working time directive, and, as the biggest Member State, German voting weights would increase by far more than any other's if the Constitutional Treaty were approved.
I invited the open people at Open Europe to correct the Sun's misapprehension -- they did not publish my reply to their blog...do carry on bravely fighting against inaccuracies and for democracy and free speech!
Trade ministers have warned this would cost industry £9billion a year and deny millions vital overtime cash.
There would be new “EU rights” for criminals, with European judges being given a say over large parts of our procedural criminal law.
The content of any EU criminal procedural legislation would depend on what legislation gets adopted, and whether the UK participates in it (see below). God forbid that the EU does anything to strengthen the right to a fair trial!
Our veto on criminal justice affairs will go, and the European Court of Justice would get sweeping new powers.
Our veto over criminal justice would be replaced by an 'emergency brake' -- so we could either block the adoption of legislation or not participate in it.
The treaty will also mean a permanent EU President and foreign minister, with a seat on the UN Security Council.
No, the Member States with seats on the Security Council would have to let the EU foreign affairs minister state the EU position -- if there is one -- in their stead.
An EU diplomatic service would be set up at a cost of billions to represent EU citizens abroad.
It is not clear whether this service would entail any extra cost, and if so how much -- the basis of it would be the Commission's existing external representations. The constitutional Treaty does not say that the external action service would have the function of representing EU citizens abroad.
But wait, let's look at the leader article too:
....The extended Charter of Fundamental Rights is being quietly finessed under existing clauses.
The Constitutional Treaty would not 'extend' the Charter in the sense of adding substantive rights to it.
And the decision not to give EU law primacy over Westminster’s is irrelevant because we lost that battle years ago.
Indeed, before we joined, and before 2/3 of the public voted to stay in...
So what’s left?
Just a few “meaningless” items, like a full-time EU President and a Foreign minister to represent us at the UN.
An even bigger inaccuracy than in the article -- as if the Foreign Minister would take over our seat in the General Assembly and UN committees!
We will lose our veto over criminal justice, immigration and the right to defend ourselves militarily without EU approval.
On the veto over criminal law see above; we would retain our opt-out over immigration law; and the third assertion is just absurd. The Constitutional Treaty clearly states that it is without prejudice to national defence policies and NATO; the veto is retained for military and defence issues; and there is only a requirement of consultation with other EU Member States before taking a foreign policy action which could affect the EU's interests.
Brussels will be able to pick and choose any new powers it takes from member states.
Where on earth does this idea come from?
Unaccountable Euro MPs will gain extra powers.
They are only accountable to the electorate, in direct elections...
And if we don’t like it, we’ll have to lump it because any act of protest which holds the EU up to ridicule will become an offence.
How on earth would the Constitutional Treaty accomplish this? If they are thinking of the recently agreed Framework Decision on racism and xenophobia, which is separate from the Constitutional Treaty anyway, how can it be seriously argued that it would have this effect? It requires only criminalisation of racist statements intended to incite violence, or condoning or denying the Holocaust or other genocide with the intent that it is likely that violence will result. This is a far cry from ridiculing the EU.
But perhaps telling porkies about EU law should be an offence. That would clear the streets of Sun journalists....
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12 comments:
Hi - there seem to a couple of things here.
Firstly "I invited the open people at Open Europe to correct the Sun's misapprehension -- they did not publish my reply to their blog...do carry on bravely fighting against inaccuracies and for democracy and free speech!"
When did you get in touch? Do you mean you left a comment on our blog? There shouldn't be any problem as it is unmoderated - we don't screen it in any way should it should just automatically go up!
Which leads to the weird bloggy question - do you want us to reply to what you were saying here or on our blog? Not sure!
The short summary is that all member states (except malta) will see their power to block legislation fall under the new system. You are right that Germany does better (though it still falls a bit) but other member states fall by quite a bit - e.g. on Coleman's measure the UK falls by 30%).
So its a legitimate point - sorry that our computer seems to have eaten your post!
I left about 4 comments on various openeurope blogs which did not appear -- although a couple of comments I made did appear, so I assumed that I had not made a technical error in posting the comments that were not shown (if you see what I mean).
There would appear to be a computer problem -- I will excise the comments accusing you of censorship if you wish. My apologies for reaching this incorrect conclusion.
As for qualified majority voting, where was the Coleman analysis published? There was an analysis several years ago in the Journal of Common Market Studies, which if I recall correctly, concluded that the bigger Member States were better off, the smaller Member States were worse off, and the medium-size States (Spain and Poland) were in the same position, if you compare their share of the vote under the weighted majority system to their share under a pure population-based system. The complication is that under the current rules we do have a population based criterion (ie states with 62% of the population must be in favour) although as I said, this is currently only a back-up criterion.
I just can't follow the argument that every Member State except Malta would be worse off. If you redistribute the share of the votes then it must follow that some will benefit and some will lose -- technically this can only mean that 24 (now 26) Member States agreed to reduce their voting power and give it to Malta. Why would they sign such a treaty? And why would 17 of them (leaving aside Malta) ratify it? Were they all tricked (despite all the computer software which was supposedly used by Member States during the negotiations to calculate these figures)? Or do they love Malta, or the EU, so much that they were willing to make the sacrifice?
Of course every pre-existing Member State has a lower share of the vote every time there is an enlargement of the EU -- but that is a different issue from the changes to the voting rules in the Constitutional Treaty.
The comparison between the current rules and the Constitutional Treaty rules is easy if you compare just the criteria of a) a simple majority of Member States, which would move to 55% of Member States under the Constitutional Treaty; and b) the requirement of 62% of the population in favour, which would move to 65% under the Constitutional Treaty. Both these changes would quite obviously mean that it would be EASIER for a 'blocking minority' of Member States to block a decision. The change to (a) would apply equally to all Member States, while the change to (b) would mean that while all States would find it easier to put to together a blocking minority with others, it would be easier still for the biggest Member States to do it, and easiest of all for Germany.
The abolition of the other rule, currently the main rule, requiring a blocking minority of 91 votes of 345 (not 381, sorry), on a weighted voting system that over-represents the smallest Member States and under-represents the largest Member States (as compared to their population), would of course have an impact. There are very likely a number of scenarios where a coalition of States falling short of a) a majority of Member States (or 45% of them under the Constitutional Treaty) and b) 38% of the population (or 35% under the Constitutional Treaty) could nonetheless get these 91 votes together to block a measure. But surely this is of particular benefit to small and medium-size states, since they are over-represented in this system in absolute terms (for the small Member States) and also relative to the biggest Member States (for all of the small and medium-size states, but particularly Spain and Poland, which is presumably why Poland has qualms about the changes). True, some big Member States would necessarily have to participate in such scenarios -- but it is still easier for them to do deals with each other to put together a blocking minority of 38% (35%) of the population.
To apply a practical example, the UK and Germany, the crux of the blocking minority against the working time proposal (and I certainly agree with you and the Sun that the abolition of the individual opt-out would be barmy) make up 29.0% of the EU population, but only 16.9% of the Council voting weights. On the current rules we need Member States with a population totalling 44.4 million to back us, in order to form a blocking minority (even Poland alone is insufficient). Under the Constitutional Treaty we would need only states with a total population of 29.6 million -- this could be Poland alone, or Romania along with any one of the smaller mid-size Member States (ie Netherlands, Greece, Czech Republic, etc).
Under the weighted majority system, the UK, Germany and Poland together have only 85 votes -- short of the blocking minority which we WOULD have under the population criterion as it would apply under the Constitutional Treaty (so you see, even the Poles have been whinging too much about this). The end result is that it would indeed be significantly easier for the UK to maintain a blocking minority against the working time proposal if the Constitutional Treaty were in force (or rather after 1 Nov. 2009, when the new QMV rules in that Treaty would apply) -- so the Sun is clearly wrong.
Admittedly the difference in the outcome of the voting rules would be less pronounced if our ally were France or Italy, but you (and the Sun) chose the example of the working time directive, where our ally is Germany -- such a good ally, in fact, that they have kept the proposal off the agenda entirely during their Presidency. (The proposal is not all bad, though -- it would overturn the barking mad case law of the Court of Justice, which requires Member States to pay doctors while they sleep!).
Have a look at
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000431/01/0406IGC.pdf
The last column of table three compares the power to black legislation under the Constititution rules with those under the Nice rules - for the UK the ability to block is 71% of the previous level.
Basically two things are going on: (a) a redistribution of the shares of the vote and (b) an increase in the threshold number of votes needed to block legislation.
They haven't been "tricked".
This bit is wrong:
The comparison between the current rules and the Constitutional Treaty rules is easy if you compare just the criteria of a) a simple majority of Member States, which would move to 55% of Member States under the Constitutional Treaty; and b) the requirement of 62% of the population in favour, which would move to 65% under the Constitutional Treaty.
.Part of the problem is that you are missing the third nice rule: 232 out of a total of 321 votes have been required to pass a proposal(72.3 %). The other problem is that you can't just look at each rule in isolation by the combined effect of all three, which requires the sort of maths that the paper I linked to is based on.
Re the working time case - you would need to know all the other countries currently in the blocking coalition to run the numbers. My impression is that the line up changes quite a bit.
FTR Getting support from Germany on this isn't costless either - see FT Brux editor George Parker's piece in E!Sharp
http://www.peoplepowerprocess.com/images/magflash/jan07/pdfs/pages34-36.pdf
He notes that
"In exchange for German support on the working time directive, Britain backed Schröder in his fight to water down an EU takeover directive, which would have left German companies more vulnerable to foreign hostile bids."
This tends to be the way of things. The lower the blocking power - the more log rolling.
Ah, I had overlooked the requirement in the final Constitutional Treaty that FOUR Member States are needed to block legislation. This does alter the mechanics of my argument, and means that generally almost any blocking coalition would seemingly be harder to form under the Constitutional Treaty.
But neither of us should be throwing stones in this glass house. Your comments suggest that you need to look again at the fundamental aspects of how the Constitutional Treaty would fiddle with the voting rules.
I did make the point in my article that there are currently three rules, and that doing away with one of them makes it hard to compare the total impact of the old voting rules with the new. My mistake was then overlooking the sub-rule that four Member States are needed as a minimum to form a blocking minority.
But it is NOT correct to say that the Constitutional Treaty would result in either '(a) a redistribution of the shares of the vote' OR '(b) an increase in the threshold number of votes needed to block legislation'. The only rule which could be described as a rule apportioning 'shares of the vote' is the rule which sets out the the weighted votes which each Member State has (ie 29 for Germany and the UK, 27 for Spain and Poland, etc.). But this rule is set to disappear. So it equally cannot be said that the threshold for the votes needed to pass a measure would be lower, since this rule would be abolished.
It is meaningless also to compare this rule with the rule based on population voting weight -- currently requiring 62% of 'the population' in favour -- because the weighted vote rules hugely over-represent the smaller MS and under-represent the larger MS as compared to their population, as I have already pointed out. (Also you are using the voting weight rules and percentages as they applied prior to the 2007 enlargement).
So there is no drop in the passing threshold from 72% of the votes to 65%, then, for that would be mixing up the thresholds in two different rules. There is instead an abolition of one rule and a RISE in the passing vote threshold from 62% to 65% in the population rule. But the effect of that change, which would be, as I said, to confer a greater possibility particularly for larger Member States to assemble blocking minorities, would be counter-manded by the rule that four Member States are necessary to constitute a blocking minority.
The impact on the working time directive issue begs the question. Last time the issue came up for discussion, the blocking minority in question was a group of states largely AGAINST the UK position, led by France, as evidenced by this excerpt from an online news article at the time, 7 Nov. 2006 (in double square brackets):
[[France has refused to back down over its opposition to a proposal that could have broken the deadlock over EU working hours.
The proposal offered “a little bit to everybody”, according to Tarja Filatov, minister of labour for Finland, which put forward the compromise in its role as the current EU president.
But a blocking minority of five countries – France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Cyprus – scuppered the plans over their insistence on setting a 10-year timeframe for the scrapping of the opt-out from the 48-hour working week.]]
This blocking minority would be finding it harder to scrape together enough votes to block the measure under the CT rules -- as it constitutes just 35.97% of the population (assuming that Bulgaria and Romania join the majority position). This is a rather slimmer margin than the 101 votes which these Member States have under the current weighted voting rules. In fact from this point of view the UK should be pushing to keep the threshold at 62% of the population, rather than 65%, since the French-led blockers fall short of this percentage. The UK/German blocking minority, if it were necessary to reconstitute it, is presumably in rather better shape under the CT -- since the paper you refer to concludes that Germany would retain 98% of its blocking power.
Of course this goes to the basic flaw in your argument -- that the UK should be trying to seek ways to block measures of which it disapproves, rather than trying to make it easier to pass measures which it approves over the objections of states like France. The underlying question is whether the Commission is more likely to be proposing measures that we want to see adopted than measures that we don't.
The four member states point is not generally the most relevant - it affects very few cases, though ironically it might affect the WTD case... good point.
Yes - you pointed out the third rule - I didn't mean to imply that you hadn't - but you only mentioned the two of them in the section trying to compare the two rules in percentage terms.
I was just trying to explain why that sort of argument doesn't work.
You say that "there is no drop in the passing threshold from 72% of the votes to 65%, then, for that would be mixing up the thresholds in two different rules." You are exactly right to think that you can't look at one rule in isolation. All the rules taken together define the total passage probability.
But the 72% clearly is relevant (generally the most relevant). It's a misleading simplification but you could think of the difference between the passage probability in the old and new systems as between.
0.5 * 0.63 * 0.72
and
0.55 * 0.65
respectively.
You say "It is meaningless also to compare this rule with the rule based on population voting weight -- currently requiring 62% of 'the population' in favour -- because the weighted vote rules hugely over-represent the smaller MS"
You are right that the distribution of weight/votes within each rule matters - and that is taken account of in the study I mentioned, using some fairly complicated maths.
That's probably why they avoid voting in council... its not exactly simple is it? :-)
I think that ultimately we largely end up agreeing with other. However, I think the 'four Member States' point would be likely to prove important in practice (assuming that the CT rules ever came into force), for if it were not for this rule, even if statistically only a small number of potential blocking minorities would be made up of 3 large MS, in practice I suspect quite a lot of them would be.
Rather like the mathematical argument in advance of accession that showed that QMVs would be hard to achieve -- but they haven't been.
The suggested formulae don't take account of the 'four Member State' rule or the different bases on which the two or three percentages are calculated, so I don't think they can tell us much.
I agree that the paper you refer to is indeed a very impressive analysis of the issue -- unless there is a mathematician somewhere who can demonstrate that there is something wrong with it?
Hello,
My name is Lucia Martin and I am a PhD student at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
I have just started a blog about the leading judgments of the European Court of Justice, the Court of First Instance, the Civil Service Tribunal and the European Court of Human Rights. Its main purpose is to summarize the recent EU case law, in order to help students and EU law researchers in their work.
Would you be interested in link exchange? My link is:
http://www.eucaselaw.info/
Best regards,
Lucia Martin
Hi Lucia
Yes, I will exchange links. Your blog looks like it will be very useful for students.
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