EUROPEAN CO-OPERATION should be based on a short treaty of no more than 25 pages which every citizen can read, understand and use. Only elected representatives should make EU law. Commissioners should be accountable to (and be able to be sacked by) the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament.
Meanwhile, all MEPs and commissioners’ expenses should be published. All EU laws should be negotiated and decided in public. Savings of €10 billion should be made by the commission in the next financial year.
These are just some of the “pledges” made in the draft electoral programme for the forthcoming European elections by Libertas, the anti-Lisbon Treaty, pan-European party founded by Irish businessman Declan Ganley.
In Rome for the party’s first convention, to be held today, Mr Ganley gave the media a sneak preview of the programme at the Foreign Press Club yesterday: “Libertas is the pan-European movement dedicated to creating a new, democratic and open European Union. Libertas wants a strong and successful Europe. A Europe for, and of, the people. This is not how Europe is today.
“Unelected and unanswerable bureaucrats in Brussels are making laws, behind closed doors, that change your life. But you cannot change these laws. Europe once gave us hope, but now it is failing. Brussels is renowned for its red tape, corruption and inefficiency,” reads the programme introduction.
Based on five principles – Have Your Say, Hold the EU to Account, Full Disclosure, Make Savings, A Lean And Flexible EU – the Libertas programme is sharp and short, running to just 10 pages, in which pertinent issues are identified and then addressed by way of a party “pledge” to enact the appropriate reform.
For example, in the Have Your Say section, the party is committed to ensuring that every country holds a referendum on any future constitutional treaty, while future presidents of Europe should be elected by European electorates. The commission’s monopoly on the initiation of legislation would be removed.
On accountability, the programme states that “only elected representatives” should make the law, while it argues that all EU laws “should require the approval of a simple majority in the European Parliament and three-quarters of the member states in the Council”.
The national veto should be reintroduced in all policy areas “except in the regulation of goods, services, capital and labour moving between member states”.
Libertas also calls for all EU legislation to be “negotiated and decided in public by our democracies”. All EU working groups should be opened up to the public, while prime ministers and presidents “should fully disclose their discussions when they discuss legislative and constitutional affairs”.
When it comes to savings, Libertas argues that “every cent” spent by EU institutions should be published on the internet.
States should also be free to “compete with one another as regards tax levels, tax structures and levels of public service spending”, while the number of EU meetings in Brussels should be cut by half by 2010.