UK barrage is countered by the EU’s Rapid No-reaction Force

Date: 02/05/1996

NOW be honest. If you were not an employee of the European institutions, a Euro-lobbyist, a Euro-hack, a consultant or merely one of that very rare breed, the lesser-spotted amateur Euro-nerd, just how much would you know about what goes on?

The answer, once you've stopped umming and ahhing and tilting your head this way and that, is absolutely nothing.

Oh, you may say, I'm a highly intelligent person, I'd still be pretty au fait, even if I was a lecturer on the psychology of industrial waste at Heidelberg University. But, in fact, you wouldn't have a clue.

There is a myth that clever people, at least, know the difference between a commissionaire and a Commissioner. But it has nothing to do with intelligence. It has to do with need-to-know.

Normal people with their own lives to lead, from plumbers and hotel porters to brain surgeons and rocket scientists, don't need to know any of this. They don't have the time. Life is too short to keep up to speed on the nuances of an alien world. Ask the average Euro-junkie about the working practices of the United Nations, or to name the number of states in the OAU, if they know what that is, and you will get a blank look.

Just as blank as the chap who bowled into town from London last week on a mission to tear the EU apart, journalistically speaking.

His brief was clear: slip in under the Rapid Reaction Force radar beam and knock out the motor of the European Union.

It is not a novel concept, but it is one which has gripped the entire British nation in the wake of mad cow disease. The message from the British press in the last few weeks has been: you have curved our cucumbers, you have bent our bananas, but you cannot, must not, ban our beef.

We know things have become serious because the Rapid Reaction Force has moved to Red Alert One, its highest state of readiness for war.

Never before, in the history of public relations, has the European Commission been under such sustained assault. Even in the dizzy dazzling days of Mrs Thatcher, the I-want-my-money-back saga, the Bruges speech, the whole United States of Europe episode, has there been such a threat to peace-time stability.

And even then, the thermometer rating down in the Mass Communications bunker never moved beyond Blue Rinse Intermediate.

This time it's different. The entire British nation has turned its wrath on Brussels.

This is not a passing whinge, a momentary irritation, another transient dig at bureaucracy and Euroland.

This time the blip on the screen is more sustained, more insistent. It is not going away and its monotonous, high-pitched tone is getting louder.

But the Rapid Reaction Force is in danger of making a big mistake. It is in danger of believing that as long as it remains at status Red Alert One, it doesn't have to do anything else. It may also believe, wrongly, that the threat is containable because the enemy doesn't know what it is talking about.

This, of course, is nonsense: there is nothing more deadly than a frightened, panicking animal lashing out in all directions without rhyme or reason. When it has destroyed everything in its path, it is of little comfort to the survivors to be told: “It's alright. It doesn't matter. They didn't know what they were doing.”

I think what I am saying, Mr De Silguy, in a nutshell, is that this is no time to be frittering away 19 million ecu on a jolly little promo-job on the Euro, when the cash should being going into the Rapid Reaction Force war chest.

Surely there is less imperative to convince the Euro-philes that the single currency is an absolutely splendid idea than there is to zap the Euro-phobes every time they take a pot-shot at you.

But where was the Rapid Reaction Force last week, when the full panoply of British opposition to Europe aimed every weapon it had at the Berlaymont? (I told you it didn't know what it was talking about).

Did we hear a squeak out of anyone in the face of a barrage of insults, abuse and scandalous allegations against the Euro-body corporate?

No. As the British media filled page after page with full unabridged details of how everyone's life was being destroyed by what appeared to be a nasty resurgence of the infamous Schuman Youth, all we got from the bunker was a missive on eco-labelling plans for bed linen and T-shirts.

There seemed to be very much an attitude of, to misquote Marie Antoinette, “Let them write crap” in the non-intervention of the Rapid Reaction Force.

Anyway, it was at this point that a man from The Sun newspaper landed in town. He might just as well have come from Mars.

“Which floor is the Commission on?” he enquired as we stood on the third floor of the Espace Leopold building. No, no, I explained, having had years to work out the distinction, this is the European Parliament. The Commission is somewhere else.

Ah yes, he said, the Commission! That's the lot that passes all the laws we have to live with. And they're not even elected!

We then spent ten minutes or so on the inter-relativity between the proposal-making Commission, the disposal role of the Council of Ministers, the pillar structure, QMV and so on, and, of course, the democratic wedge that is the European Parliament, with its negative powers of assent, its second reading procedure and its welcome - if wholly informal - involvement on the margins of the Intergovernmental Conference.

We touched lightly on the WEU, in contra-distinction to NATO, not an EU body, and the place for CFSP in a future post-Maastricht-Two enlarged Europe scenario. We chatted, too, of judicial powers, and the role of the ECJ in Luxembourg as opposed to the totally different and non-EU role of the Human Rights Court in Strasbourg.

To flesh out the picture, I noted finally that the EFTA Court will be located in Luxembourg from September, with its three judges and 20 or so civil servants presiding over the legal interests of four member states compared with the ECJ's 15 judges and heaven knows how many civil servants looking after 15 countries, all of this of course having nothing whatsoever to do with the Strasbourg Court as guardian of the Council of Europe's convention to which 39 nations adhere.

Tell me about bent bananas, implored my eager listener, and curved cucumbers, and lawnmower noise, and gross interference by barmy loony squillion-pounds-a-year Eurocrats.

And so I did that too, but none of it has appeared in The Sun, not even the last bit.

The reason is now clear. My dissertation was so tedious, so mind-numbingly dull and nerdy, that within 24 hours my Sun man had been dispatched to somewhere in Germany to squabble with a team from The Mirror about which paper was buying up the 1966 World Cup football, snatched by the Germans after England's victory and never seen since.

I know because I saw him on the television news the following night, filmed yelling into a mobile phone for clearance from London to offer £5,000 to ball-snatcher Helmut Haller.

Sure enough, the next day he was emblazoned all over his paper's front page, writing about real issues a million miles away from QMV and extended powers of the ECJ.

There is, I feel sure, a message somewhere in this for all of us in Euroland.