From Free Life, Issue 23, August 1995
ISSN: 0260 5112

Douglas Hurd has complained that the European Union Commission interferes in the "nooks and crannies" of British life. (How does that translate into French?). Plenty of examples of that phenomenon can be found in this Adam Smith Institute report, written by Russell Lewis, a former head of the EU Information Office in London, and Tim Evans, familiar to all LA members.

The paper states that the current debate is not about whether the UK should be in Europe, but whether the "Single Market and the European ideal is in danger of being strangled by red tape". [p.50] The EU should be based on the free market principles of the Treaty of Rome - the free movement of goods and services, people and capital - and not the interventionism espoused by the Brussels Commission.

A number of examples are provided of Euro-nannyism, of which the most amusing is the Directive that advises people how to communicate verbally! [p.9] Issues covered are safety equipment, vitamins, consumer compensation, toy safety, food description, condoms, women at work, culture, weighing machines and imports from Eastern Europe. There is a very extensive discussion of the war against tobacco conducted by the Social Affairs Directorate, which covers advertising, labelling, taxation, sponsorship and no smoking rules. The authors believe that "tobacco regulation is only the first wedge in the door to supranational paternalism". [p.29] They conclude that "the Commission's gradual politicization of science, its redefinition of public space to include private property, and its misuse of the concept of harmonization, all indicate a policy agenda based on highly paternalist principles.... Such policies represent a departure from the original free market aims of the Community... placing the European ideal in danger". [pp.31-32]

There is much here to concern all those who wish to promote the freedom of the individual and the principle of subsidiarity, that decisions should be taken at the lowest, most appropriate level, best of all the individual. Unfortunately, the examples given here appear to have little in common, and no evidence is presented to support the claim that the selection is representative. [p.9] I believe them not to be.

Firstly, the claim that "Nearly all the substantial `free market' advances achieved belong to the early 196Os" [p.7] ignores the enormous number of non-tariff barriers which the Single European Market is removing. "1992" was a major defeat for harmonisation because of the principle of mutual recognition, that a good or service produced in one country can be freely sold in any other. It is in reaction to the massive deregulation implicit in that principle that interventionists are seeking to recover lost ground. The harmonisation mentioned here should be vigorously opposed, but it pales into insignificance compared with the gains of the Single Market.

Secondly, the Commission includes some great defenders of the free market, as well as many interventionists. The Commission is not a monolith. The bulk of the cases presented here come from one Directorate General, Social Affairs, one of the weakest portfolios in the Commission.

Thirdly, blame is placed on the Commission when it should frequently be placed on the national governments. The absurd list of items excluded from the free trade agreement with Eastern Europe (most of the products in which they have a comparative advantage) was at the insistence of the national governments and against the vigorous opposition of the Commission negotiators. Fourthly, Mr Hurd's complaint that many accusations against the EU were unfounded is dismissed as "politically expedient denials". [p. 16] Yet some of these Euromyths are repeated here. EU rules do not require that all cheese be round or rectangle, or the removal of sawdust from butcher's shops. [pp.18-19] Many regulations which are attributed to the EU are the result of British law, as Christopher Booker has demonstrated in his Sunday Telegraph column.

Underlying this pamphlet is a public choice analysis of government, with references dotted around. This perspective is never presented in a clear and coherent way to the uninitiated to understand. Public choice writers argue that bureaucrats have a natural tendency towards "size-maximisation" or empire building, and that interest groups will seek to manipulate intervention to protect their own interests, eg the proposed ban on tobacco advertising would protect state tobacco monopolies from competition. There is the basis here for an excellent paper which would explain public choice theory in simple terms and use the case studies to demonstrate how this works in practice within the EU. The reader would then be provided with a tool of analysis to examine all Commission proposals with scepticism, and a reason to believe that there are many more examples of bureaucratic interference in our nooks and crannies. A revised edition please!

Nigel Ashford