The EU versus the UN: who makes the rules?

 

My column in the Times:

 

In today’s speech on the European Union, previewed in
this morning’s Times, Owen Paterson, the former
environment secretary, will make a surprising and telling
point.

It is that many of the rules handed down to British businesses
and consumers by Brussels have often (and increasingly) been in
turn handed down to it by higher powers. This means, he argues,
that we would have more influence outside the EU than within it. We
could rejoin some top tables.

One example is the set of rules about food safety: additives,
labelling, pesticide residues and so on. The food rules that
Britain has to implement under the EU’s single market are now made
by an organisation that sounds like either a Vatican secret society
or a Linnean name for a tapeworm: Codex Alimentarius. Boringly,
it’s actually a standard-setting commission, based in Rome.

Codex is a creature of the United Nations. Its rules are in
theory voluntary but since the EU turns Codex’s decisions into
single-market law, and since the World Trade Organisation (WTO)
judges disputes by Codex’s rules, Britain in effect is lumped with
what Codex decides. But it’s Brussels that represents us on many of
the key committees, so we have little chance to influence the rules
in advance.

Codex has two sister organisations, which deal with animal and
plant health. As environment secretary, Mr Paterson discovered on a
visit to New Zealand just how powerless other countries perceive us
to be. There was a particular new rule about a sheep disease that
the New Zealand government wanted to persuade one of these bodies
to amend. It had got Australia on side, and planned to enlist
Canada and America, but when asked by Mr Paterson if Britain —
Europe’s leading sheep producer — could help, the New Zealanders
replied: no point, you’re just part of the EU. He felt stung by the
implication of that remark.

In effect, if an organisation such as Codex changes its rules
about food labels, Brussels is powerless to do anything other than
follow suit. This goes much deeper than just a few veterinary and
food issues. In 1994 the EU adopted the world trade system that
required all signatories to adopt international standards in
preference to their own.

Take another example. The rules followed by the banking industry
when assessing asset risk are decided not by the EU but by a
committee based in Switzerland. Then there’s the Financial
Stability Board, chaired by Mark Carney and based in Paris. It’s a
creature of the G20. It is supposed to set the standards for
financial regulation worldwide.

Britain’s car industry is vital to our economy. Yet the single
market standards of the EU for motor manufacturing are derived from
regulations produced by (take a deep breath) the World Forum for
the Harmonisation of Vehicle Regulations, a subsidiary of the
UN.

Ask yourself: is it likely that Britain, with its
disproportionate interest in fish, car manufacturing, banking and
sheep, will have seen these topics aired to our best advantage by
some suave suit from Malta or Lithuania acting on behalf of the
entire EU? Not a chance.

There’s plenty of other supranational bodies on which we are
represented separately, and don’t need to leave the EU to join.
There’s Nato, and the UNclimate change framework, whose chief
(Christiana Figueres) says she wants to use it to achieve
“centralised transformation” of the world economy if she can get a
world treaty. So, to an increasing extent, the EU is just one of
the spider’s webs in which we are entangled — but it’s often the
only one that represents our interests.

At the weekend I looked up the latest review of the WTO’s
Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement (I’m a sad case,
I know, but it was raining and there was not much on the telly)
and, sure enough, it lists lots of comments it has received from
countries such as New Zealand, Malaysia, Japan, Switzerland, even
Cuba. Not a single EU country is mentioned because of course our
comments were relayed by the European Union.

In the past, “ministers had to travel to Brussels to make their
case, and to keep an eye on new laws”, Mr Paterson will say in his
speech, “but with the advance of globalisation we now need to be
represented in Geneva, Paris, Berne, Rome and elsewhere.”

No wonder Eurosceptics (including Nigel Farage) say we have less
international clout than Norway, which sits on all these
committees. It plays a big role in the Codex Alimentarius, hosting
a key committee about fish. Very few of these international
rule-setting bodies are based in Britain. If we left the EU, we
would at least get to be like Switzerland — a place favoured by UN
agencies to base themselves. There’s jobs in polishing the shoes
and limos of UN-crats.

This is good news for those Europhiles who sound so touchingly
worried that they might lose the opportunities for racking up
room-service bills while on business in Brussels. They can relax,
and vote “out” in a referendum. The hotels in Switzerland are just
as good.

And conversely, the supranational world is not an entirely
comforting point for Eurosceptics to make. If we left the EU, we
would not find ourselves in some sunlit meadow where we could make
up any rules we wanted, as Ukip likes to imply. We would be still
be just as subject to all these international standards and
intrusions if we wanted to trade with other countries. And although
we might get a bit more influence over rule-making in the areas
that matter to us, we would still be regularly outvoted.

We are often told to fear leaving the EU because it would lead
to “fax diplomacy”: learning about new laws without having had a
chance to comment on them first. (The MEP Daniel Hannan has
memorably expressed his puzzlement at the archaic way that
Europhiles express themselves: who still uses fax?) But Brussels is
also receiving such faxes. Leave the EU and we could be sending
some of the faxes to Brussels ourselves. And perhaps even hosting a
few of the fax machines.

More generally, the EU is increasingly a problem in the
multilateral, supranational world. The inexorable drift towards
co-ordinated world government is indeed happening, but the European
Union is looking more like an oxbow lake, rather than the stream.
Let’s get back in the main channel.