John Humphrys asks: do the upcoming euro-elections matter?
Parliament has packed up for a while so that politicians can concentrate on fighting the local and European elections. Yet few of them seem to want to say much about Europe. And the signs are that many voters intend to use the elections to the European Parliament as a protest against what they dislike about what’s happening in Britain. So do the euro-elections matter?
Look at most of the election leaflets the parties are dropping through our letterboxes and you could be forgiven for failing to notice that the elections are for members of the European Parliament. They seem more like part of a dress rehearsal for next year’s general election. That’s particularly true of the two parties with the only credible hope of winning a majority next May.
Tory leaflets have a lot to say about how the Conservative-led coalition is getting Britain out of the economic mess they claim Labour got us into. Labour’s message is mostly about the cost-of-living crisis they say the government is responsible for and how only Labour can save the NHS. There’s little, if anything, about what your Labour and Conservative candidates would want to achieve in the European Parliament.
It’s true that the smaller parties are rather more prepared to use the word ‘Europe’. The Liberal Democrats, trailing badly in the polls, seem to have taken the view they may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. As far away the most pro-EU party in British politics, they’ve decided to be unabashed in their championship of British membership of the EU and how, in their view, it is in Britain’s interest for us to remain wholehearted members.
UKIP, of course, has no problem in talking about Europe since the EU is its chief reason for existing, its principal policy being for Britain to leave. But even UKIP appears to think it has more to gain by focusing its message on immigration, an issue only partly related to the EU.
So these elections to the European Parliament, held every five years, are a rather odd affair. Little is said by any of the candidates about what they or their parties would want to do inside the European Parliament if they got elected. It’s not hard therefore to understand those who ask what is the point of these elections in the first place.
The answer given by supporters of the EU is that the elections are essential if the EU is to be as democratic as it insists it must be. The history of the EU is one of countries coming together to pool their sovereignty so that, as a union, they can wield greater power in the world than any of them could do separately. But that coming together has taken place at government level: leaders of national governments have negotiated with each other, reached agreements on the institutions they think the emerging union needs, got their national parliaments to ratify those deals and then set about appointing civil servants, so-called ‘eurocrats’, to run the show. What the process has often seemed to exclude are the voices of the people the European Union exists to govern.
The European Parliament was invented to make good this ‘democratic deficit’. Initially its members were sent by the national parliaments of the member states. But many people, especially those who had a vision of the EU as being something greater and more unified than just a bunch of national states cooperating with each other, felt that this was too indirect a way for the voice of the people to be expressed. What was needed was for representatives to be elected straight to the European Parliament rather than be simply delegated from national parliaments, such as the House of Commons. So for the past thirty-five years we’ve had direct elections to the European Parliament such as are taking place next week.
But critics say you can’t create a democracy just by holding elections. They argue that whereas most people in Britain accept that decisions affecting the country should be taken by the British Parliament and that for it to be democratic that parliament should be elected by the people, there is much less acceptance that decisions should be taken at European level, so requiring a democratically-elected European Parliament to take them. In the language loved by political scientists, there exists a ‘demos’ at national level that does not exist at European level, so both the elections and the European Parliament itself are not really legitimate, it’s argued.
Combine this with the fact that few voters know what members of the European Parliament actually do, what their powers consist of, or even what their names are, and the elections seem fake, the mere form of a democratic institution rather than the real thing.
To which supporters of the EU and its Parliament say ‘we have to start somewhere’. Even if it’s the case that voters know little about the people they’re being asked to elect or what they will do if they get elected, surely it’s better to give voters some say on how Europe is run. And in time, as more powers are given to the European Parliament (as has gradually been the case), voters will start to take it all more seriously and then we really will be able to claim we have a democratic and legitimate EU.
If that is the ultimate goal, it is perhaps all the more surprising that the political parties in general seem to be paying such little attention to the specifically European dimension of this election and instead are using them to make the usual point-scoring against each other. A cynical observer might conclude that our political leaders feel as jaundiced about the European Parliament as many voters seem to be and that that’s why they want to talk about other things. In that case the question arises whether the EU can ever be made truly democratic and whether these five-yearly elections will ever really be felt to matter.
