Of course MEPs can amend EU laws, as they were asked to do by many constituents in the case of the Copyright Directive which was finally passed this week. MEPs can also block proposals, though in both cases international cooperation is required, since no country has enough MEPs to achieve these results alone.
Unsurprisingly, the Copyright Directive has drawn much comment, including a characteristically late protest from Boris Johnson, who was UK foreign secretary while it was being debated, but can't be expected to remember that "The UK Government and British publishing/IP-intensive industries drove most of this", as the Institute of Directors' trade and Europe expert Allie Renison tells us.
And the forum for "driving" this process? It's the EU Council and the appropriate councils of ministers. That's British MEPs and ministers "having a say over EU laws". Ms Renison's further tweets in the thread give a flavour of how these things are done. She also seeks to establish (as I would like to) that explaining how something happens doesn't constitute an endorsement of that thing.
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I came across the tweet which opens this post while looking for a video from yesterday. It featured Richard Ashworth, one of the MEPs representing the South East region of England.Today, one of our British MEPs @RichardAshMEP spoke about #Brexit being a cautionary tale. He addressed young people all over Europe. His advice:— EPP Group (@EPPGroup) March 27, 2019
💬 Never take peace and prosperity for granted. Value it, fight for it and defend it every day.#EPlenary pic.twitter.com/17fI8jvWIp
"For over 25 years now, no British prime minister ever explained to the British people what Europe did, what were the benefits, and why it matters. They never defended against the untruths which were spoken and they never took ownership of the decisions that they took in council. And because of that the British press ran a 20-year campaign based on populist mistruths, lies and deceit. And the consequence of that, we see today, in Britain, is a sad nation, divided like never before, and a House of Commons in crisis.
"So let Brexit stand as a cautionary tale to the people of Europe. To the people of Europe I say this: You are the generation who have lived through the longest period of peace and the greatest level of prosperity ever. Never take it for granted. Value it. Fight for it, defend it every day."
Fine words, and an indictment of British governments of various flavours. The media too come in for criticism, as illustrated by yet another tweet, from a man who can boast long service at the World Trade Organisation.
I suppose this is news, @Channel4News. But one of the reasons why the British public don't know much about the European Parliament is because so much coverage of the parliament is about Farage misbehaving in it, and so little is about the work actually done there. https://t.co/Oby4nze0Fl— Peter Ungphakorn (@CoppetainPU) March 28, 2019
A particularly depressing aspect of this, apart from the main point that we so seldom see the EU Parliament on our TV screens except as backdrop to a Farageian pantomime, is yet another harking back to war. This time it's the Treaty of Versailles, from which Brexit Party... member Farage plucks the German "reparations bill" as a supposed equivalent of the financial settlement included in the Withdrawal Agreement.
That's dishonest - did war reparations cover the pensions of German politicians who had contributed to the disaster? - but we're used to that.
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The withdrawal agreement could be the only thing we really have to talk about, since it's a draft treaty with the EU and therefore a long term international commitment. It comes with a non-binding political declaration, and the agreement must be implemented by an Act of Parliament, the draft of which nobody but its drafters have seen.
"Comes with" is suddenly significant, as can be seen below from the process adopted for today (while this post was being written). Concerned lawyers point out that the two papers are not as separate as May might like us all (Labour MPs particularly) to think.
The act must go through all the stages of a new bill, through Commons and Lords, and the other two documents must be approved by the Commons and debated in the Lords before ratification can follow. That's British law.
The EU Parliament must also approve the two documents, which then pass to the EU Council - meeting as 27 - for approval and ratification. That's EU law.
It seems Theresa May intends to bring the withdrawal agreement alone to the Commons today, in the hope of winning majority support for it, before moving on to the political declaration in some unspecified way.
There's logic to that, since approval of the withdrawal agreement is the trigger for extension of the Article 50 period to 22 May, which May needs if she's going to get all the necessary laws through (though she somehow never told us that in her many strident repetitions of "We are leaving on 29 March") and, perhaps more important, to achieve Brexit with a deal (sorry, I nearly typed "plan") and make further extension look wrong because it would involve elections to the EU Parliament.
There's logic to that, since approval of the withdrawal agreement is the trigger for extension of the Article 50 period to 22 May, which May needs if she's going to get all the necessary laws through (though she somehow never told us that in her many strident repetitions of "We are leaving on 29 March") and, perhaps more important, to achieve Brexit with a deal (sorry, I nearly typed "plan") and make further extension look wrong because it would involve elections to the EU Parliament.
The motion to agree that the Commons should sit on a Friday (and, as somebody said, "We’ve known for 2 years that tomorrow was due to be the leaving date, but it was never made a day Parliament would sit. Really?") was passed yesterday with much anger, some perhaps confected but some very real.
What is "business" thinking? Yesterday morning we heard from Alistair Campbell, who's currently devoting his considerable (but possibly tainted) energies to the Peoples Vote campaign. His view is that business people "want it stopped". I know the owners of two small businesses, who I'm not going to drag in here, and who would constitute an inadequate sample to base any argument on, so I'll turn to the representative bodies.
The recent joint CBI-TUC letter said:
- avoiding no deal is paramount
- securing an extension has become essential
- 'the current deal or no deal' must not be the only choice; something that better protects workers, the economy and an open Irish border, commands a parliamentary majority, and is negotiable with the EU
Adam Marshall of the British Chambers of Commerce demands answers and decisions. Might I suggest certainty?
I've seen and heard so many of these statements, it seems No Deal is the demon to be avoided in just about all cases and, whatever individual business owners and managers think and have thought about Brexit itself ("bring it on" versus "just stop it") we've got this far and they don't want to be "political", so the answer has to be "May's deal" not "No deal" - just get it done. The stories about non-disclosure agreements and companies being shunned if they aren't sufficiently gung-ho will come out properly or die away over time.
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The unifying theme of all this is ignorance. Mr Ashworth described it in his speech, and Adam Afriyie MP demonstrated it on Wednesday night on his dismissive little tweet: "why MPs won’t just leave with a WTO transition beggars belief" which drew a quick response from a passing professor of EU, Human Rights and World Trade Law: "There's no such thing as a 'WTO transition'. It beggars belief that an MP thinks such a thing exists". I don't see Mr Afriyie in BBC Parliament coverage very often. It must be his hard work as "Prime Minister's Trade Envoy to Ghana and Guinea". Or the business interests and independent wealth which enabled him on election to proclaim he would take no expenses.
So many MPs seem to be surprised or even shocked that the prime minister has presented a deal which doesn't tell us what our future relationship with the EU will be. And they seem to have maintained that surprise for months, since the withdrawal agreement was finalised in mid November last year and the Commons was supposed to be ready to vote on it on 11 December, before May ran scared from her first "meaningful vote".
There are many reasons for the absence of a trade deal (expectantly referred to hundreds of times during 2018 by MPs brought in as expert commentators and almost never queried by their media interrogators) from the package which has finally been submitted to the Commons for approval.
The biggest and simplest reason is that there was never going to be a trade deal. The EU's negotiating guidelines, agreed in April 2017, didn't allow for one. They did anticipate "Preliminary and preparatory discussions on a framework for the Union - United Kingdom future relationship" (section IV) but "it was made absolutely clear", as the saying goes, that there would be no negotiation, not just no agreement, on trade and other future UK-EU relationships before what came to be known as "exit day".
Brexit secretary David Davis huffed and puffed and argued that this was unreasonable, not least because the resolution of the Northern Ireland-Ireland border questions should be handled in the context of the future trading arrangements, and promised the "row of the summer" on the issue. There was some merit in this argument, and a strong, stable, confident government which had not just needlessly thrown away its majority might have stuck to its guns.
May, Davis & co capitulated. In plain sight. I could see it, fellow tweeters could see it, the dogs in the street could see it, but some MPs seem to have taken two years to cotton on.
Much of the ignorance is fed cynically by campaigns. Look at the recent scare about "Lisbon 2020", or was it "Lisbon 2022"? Apparently, there are secret parts of the Lisbon Treaty which will remove every country's vetoes, force us all into the euro and the Schengen area despite treaty opt-outs and many other evil things. As Professor Steve Peers points out in his take-down, the weaknesses of the case are obvious as soon as you realise that there are no links to EU documents, "secret" or otherwise.
MPs and MEPs have joined in this viral chain of misinformation. They might be knaves or fools but, as in the case of Esther McVey MP, they do nothing to correct what they have broadcast even when their mistake is demonstrated. The offending tweet might be deleted from the public record eventually, when the damage is done, leaving the smell of knavery all around. And that's the point.
There are many other examples, but one huge but non-existent conspiracy, coupled with one councillor's misapprehension of the workings of the EU should serve to demonstrate the scale of the problem. How can this be happening?
As Richard Ashworth tells us, for 25 years no British government has thought to explain what goes on in the EU, or what it's for. Apart from the now long gone 30-minute slot in Friday's Daily Politics we rarely see British MEPs except those from UKIP (and the rather large number who have fallen out with UKIP but held on to the job). To quote myself: "Funny isn't it, MEPs who do the job we pay them for and actually know
something about what the EU is and how it works don't seem to appear in
the Westminster bubble media.
Unless they're from another EU country and are talking about Brexit of
course".
That little thread goes on to refer to work by the Labour leader in the EU Parliament on the "Common Market 2.0" proposal - EFTA/EEA membership plus a customs union with the EU, which was considered in the Commons "indicative votes" process on Wednesday. This kind of input would be useful when considering the proposals on TV or radio but I look and listen in vain.
Instead we hear Lucy Powell MP telling us that this is an "off the shelf" solution and Stephen Kinnock, Nick Boles, Robert Halfon and others proclaiming its simplicity. Unfortunately this "off the shelf" solution doesn't exist. No EFTA/EEA member is in a customs union with the EU. Channel 4 News has found a useful contributor to the debate - Heidi Nordby Lunde, president of Norway's European Movement, is not sure that we in the UK really want (or know) what we would be signing up to, and that our prospective EEA partners might well doubt, after the chaos of the Brexit negotiations, that letting such an "abusive partner" into the house would be a good idea.
"I think you would mess it all up for us, the way you have messed it all up for yourselves."— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) December 7, 2018
Heidi Nordby Lunde, president of Norway's European Movement, is sceptical about calls for the UK to strike a Norway-style deal with the EU. pic.twitter.com/uEpiO3yXPp
