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Europe, ahoy!

I have just returned from Strasbourg, where I led a group of Welsh Fabians to the opening day of the EU Parliament - last Tuesday, 11 March.  I was quite unprepared from the cavernous vacuity of the European Parliament.

It is a joke.  The issue is not merely a matter of scale, mirrored in the vast emptiness of the institutional "home" built by Pompidou to entrap the Parliament into its present Strasbourg location.  That is the least of problems posed by the Parlement.   The real problem is that it is not a poliktical institution which is fit for its purpose.  We must find other ways of doing European politics...

I have now had a day-or-two to collect my thoughts.  The early selection of the "parliamentary model", in the formation of the original "Common Market" was understandable, but it was nevertheless a mistake.  A diplomatic, nation-state-based model of structured negotiation would be better suited to the task - as with the WTO, or the UN.  The EU Parlement flags up its own peripherality in a number of different ways.  MEPs recognise that they are "second Division players", unknown to their constitutents, peripheral to their national political processes.  From the UK, young and ambitious MEPs strain every nerve to secure adoption as Commons candidates, so that they can contend for real political influence.  There is a telling disregard for the institution among its own members.  The very parleying processes of a "parley-a-ment" are negated by the sheer complexities of linguistic division.  Some 30% of the entire parliamentary staff are interpreters and translators, and those numbers will expand exponentially when the new Member States adhere, with they new languages.  Yet there can, without a lingua franca be no real debate: there can only be a series of set-piece addresses.  Linguistic diversity changes the nature of the institution - after all, even in the Welsh Assembly, English dominates Welsh, with less than 10% of all speeches being made in English, even by those speakers who are fluent in Welsh.

• This faultline is reinforced by structural problems.  Power is haphazardly divided between the Parlement, the Brussels Commission, and the Council of Ministers.  The Parlement struggles to assert its influence over the permanent civil service (the Commission) and the more powerful "political" representatives of the Member States (Council of Ministers).  The biggest issue this week is whether or not Parlement will "sign-off" the Commission's audited accounts for the year 2001 - the Parliamentarians are well behind the political game.

I now realise that, for the purposes of the European Union, the whole "parliamentary" model is misplaced.  Given the complexities of "national participation", and the inevitable dominance of national governments, there is simply no convincing constitutional space for the assertion of a notional "Parliament for Europe" - for that is what Strasbourg is.  "Europe" is not that kinda' entity, and never will be. The resulting institution is pretentious, insubstantial and ineffective, allowing form to take precedence over substance. 

Margaret Thatcher called it a "Micky Mouse parliament", because it did not wield any substantive political power - and although I dislike her terminology, I find her view convincing.  It is entirely right that we should engage elected representatives in pan-European politics, but we must find better ways of deploying them.  The very concept of a top-down "Parliament", going through the motions of a "legislative" process to pass laws binding upon 350 million people - the very institution fails to command credibility.  In spite of all the teenage visitors (and we swelled their ranks last week, with the Fabian delegation from Wales) the Strasbourg Parlement has no place in the hearts or minds of any national electorate.  Nor should it: even the nation-state is, for many, already too large a political entity to command effective personal allegiance.  If that is so (and I think it is) how can a remote polyglot talking-shop, with little power and much pretension, be expected to do so?

Let me suggest a comprehensive alternative.   My proposal is that, as part of a new constitutional settlement, we should solve the European problem, gender inequality, Regional representation, and the dilemma of House of Lords reform in one fell swoop.  We should simply elect two MPs from each parliamentary constituency - one male, one female. The resulting (say) 1300 MPs would be expected to staff the following four national Chambers -

• The House of Commons - retaining the primary legislative role, as at present
• A new legislative Revising Chamber - replacing the House of Lords
• A new Chamber of the Regions, with each region represented by an equal number of MPs, in the manner of conventional "federal" senates (US, Germany)
• A new European Chamber - charged with the managing relations with the EU, independently of the Foreign Office, processing all EU legislative proposals

If 1300 sounds a large figure, let me remind you that there are already 4000 salaried politicians in the UK, and this change need not increase that number. The three new Chambers would be constituted to reflect the balance of the Parties in the overall General Election, and it would be for the political Parties to use their judgment in distributing MPs throughout the three Chambers.  It may be that an element of sortition could also be used ("Sortition?" - I hear you cry!  Yes, sortitition means "the casting of lots"...) 

All MPs would enjoy the same elective status, elected in the same way - and I would favour first-past-the-post, given the structural gender equality built into the system. There would be Government Ministers in each Chamber, and the winning Party would command a majority in all four Chambers.  These 1300 MPs would operate in parallel with Members of Regional Assembles, whose focus would be exclusively upon their own province (a more accurate term, in my view, than "region".)  If the pantomime of the European Parliament continued, the MPs assigned to the UK European Chamber would simply have to attend at Strasbourg and go through the motions.  But their political base would be here in the UK, perhaps taking over the Queen Elizabeth Conference Hall, leaving the old House of Lords to be used by the Revising Chamber.

Just a thought.