Never do today what you can put off until the IGC

Date: 14/03/1996

EVERY home should have an Intergovernmental Conference.

Every domestic dwelling should have a corner, a cubby-hole, a discreet room where everything you aren't quite ready to tackle can be dumped for as long as you want.

What a wonderful concept the IGC is: a vast repository of all your troubles and nightmares and, with any luck, by the time the IGC cupboard has to be opened and its contents confronted, half of them will have evaporated and the other half will be someone else's responsibility.

The IGC bandwagon is now rolling, perilously close to going out of control, and you can't blame government ministers and civil servants for taking advantage of it, because they're just like the rest of us.

Give them an excuse and they'll prevaricate. Give them a cop-out, an opt-out, a way-out, and they'll seize upon it with great gusto.

In other words, give them a file labelled IGC and they'll stuff it full of papers marked 'pending'. Give them a cupboard with IGC on the door and it will be stacked to the ceiling within weeks.

Look, they will say to all-comers, proudly displaying the bulging folders and creaking cupboard doors, everything is being dealt with, progress is being made.

For the IGC is a heaven-sent gift to the ditherer, the waverer, the vacillator, the can't-quite-decide-how-to-approach-this-one school of diplomat and bureaucrat who has run out of standing committees and sitting members of Parliament to hive things off to.

Tricky problem? Dodgy dossier making life difficult? Don't Panic! Get yourself an IGC, today!

New go-anywhere-do-anything IGC! It's a vote-winner! No issue too big or too small! One size fits all! Makes all your troubles disappear for as long as you want! Pacifies the public too! Keeps the electorate quiet for months on end!

The IGC is manna from heaven for every hard-pressed politician, lobbyist and soothsayer, a convenient parts-bin in which all sorts of unwanted banana skins can be dumped. It offers a ready-made answer to the world's ills: insist on action at the conference.

Virtually every press release burping out of the fax machine in these heady days during the run-up to the Turin launch rave-up in two weeks' time contains a timely urge for something or other to be on the agenda, a stern warning that the IGC must get to grips with the harmonisation of hot dogs or the approximation of dry-stone walls.

Basically, the motto is: “Never do today what you can put off until the IGC.”

That's why the shopping list is getting longer and longer. So long, in fact, that the IGC will soon become an RDB, a Real Dog's Breakfast, which will provide us all with ghastly leftovers for years to come.

Has the European Court of Justice interfered in your fishing rights? Raise it at the IGC. Under pressure over equal rights? Stick it on the agenda. Hormones in beef? CAP waste? Euro-budget in crisis? Mark them all 'IGC' and keep the desk top clear.

MEPs in particular can gain a lot of mileage when faced with awkward demands from frustrated voters who think something should be done about this, that or the other. The politician can save an awful lot of aggravation and earn an awful lot of credit points simply by reassuring the electorate that a resolution has been tabled for consideration by the IGC.

It certainly sounds impressive.

The nice thing about it is that when nothing happens on these issues, when they simply fade away and are just forgotten in all the euphoria about the results of 'Maastricht One-and-a Half', our worthy elected representatives, our Eurocrats and our independent campaigners can all honestly claim that at least they tried.

It's perfectly possible, of course, that whatever emerges from the IGC process will contain a little nugget to suit all-comers, a sop to factions who want some token of recognition in amongst the passages about social protocols and national vetoes and Super-Dooper Extra-Whizzo Qualified Majority Voting.

After all, 'Maastricht One' is full of vacuous clauses and worthy statements of intent which might as well not be there for all the legislative impact they have. But they are there because people want them there. These paragraphs are comforting. They are declarations, if not of intent, then of a determination to intend to do something at sometime in the future.

And that's all you need really. IGCs are convenient and tidy. Like I say, every home should have one.

The latest missive on the issue to reach me has added Europe's 200 million women to the list of expectees fighting for great IGC things. “The IGC must listen to the 200 million women of Europe ... The IGC should set a firm deadline and demonstrate that Europe is determined ...” it insists.

Poor old IGC. Such a lot resting on so little, a glorified mini-summit followed by a series of talking shops which will keep us scribes in business virtually every week for a year or more.

So we head off to Turin with more on the agenda than most of us have had hot dinners and sky-high expectations of what is to come.

Do you know how long the Turin meeting will last, by the way? Two hours, according to the usual highly-elevated sources. Two hours. That's just enough time for 15 heads of state and governments to read 15 prepared texts which will summarise well-entrenched IGC positions which everyone interested already knows about.

Oh yes, and then foreign ministers will have their own meeting, having travelled all that way, in which they too will make one set speech each. Speeches, we can assume, which will reflect rather closely the speeches made earlier by their commanding officers.

And then we will all come home again, safe in the knowledge that everything is locked up tight and out of harm's way in the IGC.

If I had my own personal IGC, it would contain all household bills, questionnaires, local authority forms, supermarket mail shots, and reminders from the dentist. It would be piled high with unpalatable decisions about the children's education, house moves and whether or not to strangle the neighbour's yapping dog.

When my daughter asks if I've decided whether she can have a hefty clothing allowance, I will tell her it's being considered in the IGC. That should shut her up. After all, it's working for everyone else.