07/05/04

Ways of Making you Shut Up 

Daniel Hannan

The Spectator 

The police seized the computer and files of a German journalist for the ‘crime’ of investigating an EU financial scandal Brussels

Tony Blair’s referendum announcement has understandably crowded other European stories off the news pages. But, now that we know we shall have the chance to vote, it is worth standing back and considering how the EU actually works. Before handing over any new powers, let us look at what Brussels is doing with the powers it already has.

Contemplate, then, the case of Hans-Martin Tillack. Mr Tillack is a respected German reporter who has written extensively about the Eurostat scandal. This convoluted affair really deserves a column to itself but, briefly, it involves allegations that millions of euros have been diverted from the budget by Commission officials. More recently, Mr Tillack had started to investigate the broader failure of EU authorities to act on tip-offs. It was this that triggered the reaction. Last month police swooped on his flat. He was questioned for ten hours without a lawyer, while his laptop, files and address book were confiscated. Even his private bank statements were ransacked.

The raid was ordered by Olaf, the EU’s anti-corruption unit. Needless to say, no such treatment has been meted out to the alleged fraudsters. In the looking-glass world of Brussels, it is those exposing sleaze, rather than those engaging in it, who find themselves in police custody. Mr Tillack was implausibly accused of having procured some of his papers by bribery. No formal charges have been brought, and he is now planning to sue. In the meantime, though, the notes he had built up over five years of meticulous work have been seized and his sources put at risk.

The lack of interest in this incident is bewildering. Journalists, after all, are usually exercised by the mistreatment of other journalists. When similar things happen in Zimbabwe, they are the subject of stern editorials. Yet here is the EU intimidating its critics with all the crudeness of a tinpot dictatorship. A message is being semaphored to the Brussels press corps: stick to copying out the Commission’s press releases and you’ll be looked after; make a nuisance of yourself and you’ll regret it. As the EU correspondent of a British newspaper told me mopily last week, ‘If they can do this to a German Europhile and get away with it, people like me might as well pack up and go home.’

Once again the EU has shown itself to be unable to accept criticism, even when it comes from broadly pro-European quarters. Like the recent whistleblowers Paul van Buitenen and Marta Andreasen, Mr Tillack has been careful to confine his critique to the issue of financial impropriety. ‘I believe that the EU must be closer to the citizen,’ says Mr Tillack with ponderous Teutonic wit, ‘but when the police dragged me out of my apartment, I felt that it was getting too close to this citizen!’ Yet, as he has now discovered, even Europhiles can become enemies of the state. To the EU apparat, someone like Mr Tillack is what Lenin would have called ‘objectively counter-revolutionary’: he may not be acting from malice, but he must be squashed all the same.

At a meeting in the European Parliament shortly after his release, Mr Tillack was heckled by angry MEPs who told him not to give any more ammunition to the anti-Europeans. Ah yes, the anti-Europeans: a useful phrase to cover anyone with the slightest qualms about how the EU operates. Someone says that there is too much waste in the structural funds? Well he would, wouldn’t he: he’s a bigot. A newspaper is calling for the CAP to be scrapped? That’s just its way of saying it hates foreigners. As Commissioner Kinnock memorably told The Spectator, critics of the EU are xenophobes at heart — and no less so ‘just because they happen to speak fluent Catalan or whatever’. This is, of course, a very comforting way to think. It gets you out of having to ask awkward questions about your own performance.

One of the reasons that the Eurocrats have acted so clumsily over l’affaire Tillack is that they are unaccustomed to critical scrutiny. Many Brussels correspondents are in the pay of the Commission, editing EU-funded newsletters or acting as consultants on media issues. Some of them have been at their posts for so long that they have rusted on to the institution they were sent out to investigate. One EU official even told me that he expected to have copy submitted to him in advance for approval (I think his exact phrase may have been ‘to check for factual errors’). Meanwhile, millions of euros are spent on freebie trips to Brussels for national and, particularly, local reporters.

And, of course, the Commission can always buy itself good news directly. If you have stayed in a hotel on the Continent recently, you will probably have come across a television station called Euronews. It is quite a decent channel, offering news and sport in several languages. But when it reports directly on the EU, impartiality goes out of the window and we are treated to Soviet-style items about millions of workers waking up to higher standards thanks to the Commission. I found the contrast suspicious, so I put down a written question asking Romano Prodi whether he gave Euronews any money. His reply was beyond parody. Yes, he said, he did give it grants, but such grants ‘in no way restrict the editorial freedom of the beneficiary, who must, however, respect the image of the European institutions and the raison d’être and general objectives of the Union’.

Accustomed to such coverage, Eurocrats simply don’t know how to handle robust journalism. British newspapers have always been an exception, of course, and are heartily loathed by the Euro establishment. What is unsettling them is the recent tendency of Continental, and especially German, papers to make specific, technical criticisms of their performance.

In the Tillack case, we see perhaps the EU’s most worrying tendency: its belief that its cause is self-evidently right, and that this justifies virtually any action against its critics. If you think I am exaggerating, cast your mind back to an article in this newspaper by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard a couple of years ago. It concerned the legal case brought by Bernard Connolly, who had been sacked from the European Commission for opposing the euro. In giving his judgment, the EU’s Advocate-General pronounced that freedom of speech was not an all-encompassing right; criticism of the European Union, like blasphemy, lay outside its remit.

Senior Eurocrats are unwilling to accept even mild and qualified rebukes. They are so accustomed to getting their way that they react like spoilt children on the rare occasions when they are checked. But children with unnatural strength: woe betide you if, like poor Mr Tillack, you get in their way. These, remember, are the people to whom Tony Blair wants to give substantial new powers through the constitution. It’s worth bearing in mind.

Daniel Hannan is the MEP for South East England.