To EU or not to EU?

With apologies to Shakespeare for a slightly tortuous title, I'm still working on a post about the current fascinating debate in Iceland about their future relations with the EU, specifically, is their current status as an EEA member sufficient or should they go the whole hog and join, and adopt the euro to avoid the yo-yo fluctuations of the krona. As I say I'm still working that up because there is a lot to it, but meantime paste below the speech I gave to the assembled parliamentarians yesterday. The debate has parallels for us in Scotland, lots of them.

(I'm trying to work out how to post a document to the blog, any tips appreciated)

Reading the speech, I'll clearly never make it into the Scottish Diplomatic Corps, but not a single one of them disagreed with me. Interesting times...

Speech to EEA JPC introducing report on functioning of EEA Agreement in 2007

Svartseni, Iceland 29 April 2008

Thank you Bilyana, Madame President, I’m delighted to introduce my report and pleased that so many of its themes have been ventilated by previous speakers in the earlier part of the meeting. I’m also indebted to the most effective functioning part of the EEA/EFTA Joint Parliamentary Committee, our fearsome secretariat and I would thank them for their work in producing it.

Given that it was circulated prior to the meeting, I’ll let it in its 33 pages stand as read, and only give a few personal highlights and observations.

Forgive me if this comes as across as a little less diplomatic than we might be used to, but I do think when we’re amongst friends I would be doing you a disservice if I did not give you my honest view of the functioning of the EEA Agreement and how I fear it will go.

The one line summary of the report is, as we’ve heard, that the EEA Agreement governing relations between the EU and Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein is functioning pretty well.

Fair enough, I agree, so long as you ignore the fact that it has degraded your parliaments and makes you bonded client states of the EU legislative machine. And so long as you ignore the fact that from an EU perspective the EEA looks increasingly odd, your position is increasingly weak and you risk falling off our radar altogether. In a very short term, I fear, genuinely fear, that the EEA Agreement which has been a pretty good comfort zone for you in recent years will become increasingly less comfortable and I’m not sure that is good for us or you.

We have heard frankly pretty rosy accounts of the “resolution” of last year’s points of dispute. The main dossiers of conflict were of course the Food Law and the role of the EU Food Standards Agency; the implementation of the EU Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading system; and the freedom of movement for family members. All of these dossiers were points of real significance for you, and, again, forgive me if this sounds rude, but as far as I can see the disputes were resolved by the EEA side doing as it was told and implementing the dossiers lock stock and barrel without any changes whatsoever and no achievement except delay.

I appreciate that you had difficulties with the provisions, that is your right, but at the end of the day the disputes were “resolved” by your three parliaments implementing the packages word for word. I’ll tell you frankly, I would not want to try to justify that to my voters in Scotland. We may have difficulties with some EU measures, but we were part of creating them.

But while we’re glad that those logjams were broken, as we look a little into the future, I can already see about five dossiers of greater significance than these, the Services Directive being just one, and I am frankly not sure the EEA Agreement will take much pressure.

I would refer you to paragraph 21 of the report, on page 5, where we say:

“The co-rapporteurs highlight that the EU is evolving both the scope of issues covered and its working methods”

That is putting it mildly! That is a diplomatic way of pointing out your very real risk of falling off our agenda altogether. The EU is now 27, varied, complex and competing states, and we’re only going to increase. I fear the EU will of necessity become even more self obsessed with making things work within our borders and you’ll find even less patience with the EEA, and you’ve not found much so far as things stand.

The Lisbon Treaty, regardless of the Irish referendum, is going to have a massive effect on the working of the EEA Agreement, because it will massively change the way the EU does business. I personally think it will put the EEA under considerable strain, because you risk the worst of all worlds: shut out of the decision making but obliged to implement the end product facing an EU less interested in excuses.

I’m telling you no secrets when I confess that I find it quite hard enough to keep track of what is going on without taking any of your interests or concerns into consideration.

And as a Scot, as a friend of your countries, I do not want to see that happen. There used to be those even in my party who would describe the “EEA as Scotland’s plan B”! As things progress it seems quite quite clear to me that the EEA is an utterly unattractive option.

As we digest the new procedures of to be implemented under the Lisbon Treaty, I think even the legal basis of the EEA and actions under it will become increasingly unclear, and I’m not sure there will be much appetite within the EU to do you favours because we’ll have our own problems. The long and the short of it I think the EEA, and EFTA, are increasingly less comfortable comfort zones.

And as one of the first symptoms of that, of course, the financial aspects of the Agreements are clearly going to change also. The contribution already made by your countries, worth hundreds of millions of euro, to our EU cohesion budgets is under active review. The Commission negotiation mandate should be signed off next month by the member states. It is of course a negotiation, but we are already hearing predictions of for example Iceland’s contribution increasing threefold.

Which brings me to the one Amendment today to the report, proposed by my MEP colleague Mrs Panayatopoulos, efharisto, to the effect that we need to have a clearly defined deadline to the conclusion of negotiations over the financial mechanisms and the deletion of the word “possible” before your contribution on the basis that it is quite clear you will be making a contribution of some magnitude. I’m frankly relaxed either way, I appreciate that in theory there is no obligation for your states to make a contribution, but it is hardly credible to suggest you will not be in reality. I’d agree though that we could have been clearer on the timescale, things need to be tied up by April 2009, so here we had left that as implicit the explicit amendment adds to the text so I’m happy with that.

But with that, the report is a pretty decent factual summary of how last year went, and I’m pleased to commend it to you and welcome your comments.