‘I’m not going to make the best of it’ Britain’s last MEPs retreat from the European parliament
In the course of packing up her office, Green MEP Molly Scott Cato has decided to give away a collection of books accumulated throughout her time in Brussels, offering them for free to any takers. “They give you fifteen boxes but I’ve only used four,” she laughs.
One thick tome stands out in the selection: Greens For A Better Europe: Twenty years of UK Green influence in the European Parliament, 1999-2019. Another is titled Surviving The Future.
From Friday night, Britain won’t have any MEPs, a commissioner, or seats on the European Council. It will lose any say over EU laws, though still be affected by many – some possibly well into the future.
It’s nearly a year now since the UK’s Brussels-based journalists first did their rounds and wrote pieces about the last days for British MEPs. As it happened, they faced another election, and were joined by many new colleagues – albeit largely from the Brexit Party. The intervening period has for many of them felt a bit like squatting, with their future uncertain.
“I had already packed up and moved a lot of things last February and March, then obviously we didn’t leave and I was re-elected,” says Julie Ward, Labour’s MEP for North West England.
“But I’d already been through that process, so I suppose in a way what we’re doing now is finishing that.” Ward had told The Independent for a previous article last year when MEPs’ fate was uncertain that she would be back, and indeed she was – though perhaps not for as long she would have liked.
“You’re in my office: I’ve got lots of things on my desk, but I don’t have lots of things on my walls. In our other office our walls were completely covered with things that we did: campaign posters, events – if you’d seen my office a year ago you’d see at least the walls were full of things.”
Like many MEPs, Ward is working right up to the deadline – not on Brexit, but her regular work as an MEP on human rights and the arts, as well as her workload as vice committee chair of the parliament’s Culture and Education committee.
“I’ve been very busy because I’m continuing to do my job,” she says, staring at the overloaded desk in front of her.
“Monday was the deadline for submitting amendments to the culture and education committee which I’m still vice chair of, and there are a couple of reports about the European Institute of Technology...”
She adds: “I’m European so I want to be making progressive social policy for all Europeans. I hope that my country will benefit from the work that I’ve done, but if it chooses not to then at least the other Europeans can benefit from it!”
Ward isn’t the only one taking that approach: as well as the feeling of public service, it’s not impossible to believe some MEPs want to keep busy to take their mind off things.
Antony Hook, a Lib Dem MEP elected just seven months ago, says he’ll be working right up to the deadline. When he meets The Independent just days before Brexit, he’s just come from a meeting of the parliament’s home affairs committee on which he sits. He’ll be going back again afterwards.
“I’ll be here, probably until the afternoon,” he says of his plans for Brexit Day. “I’m just going to answer as much correspondence as I can, put down some written questions, and then make my way home after. It’s the last chance to do it. Up until then I can still put questions to the Commission, I can still sign documents as an MEP – so I’ll keep doing that until the last minute.
“In a way it’s kind of how the last seven months have been, in that we are a valued and important part of the parliament and colleagues want our contribution to debates and all the other work that goes on here. It’s just a real shame that on Friday...” – he clicks his fingers – “we all turn into pumpkins and it all comes to an end.”
Hook has also been campaigning against Brexit, but he says he sees his regular parliamentary work as closely linked to that.
“In a way the existential fight to try and slay the dragon of Brexit went hand-in-hand with actually doing the day-to-day work. I think the best argument we could try as MEPs to make against Brexit was to say look, as MEPs we are making a difference.”
The Liberal Democrats have faced a particular problem in the last few months, although it’s arguably a nice one to have: they won so many MEPs in May – going up from just one to 16 – that’s its been difficult to recruit enough staff to work for them.
In a way the existential fight to try and slay the dragon of Brexit went hand-in-hand with actually doing the day-to-day work
Antony Hook, Lib Dem MEP
Because of the potentially short and precarious nature of the job, and the fact that many British people will find it harder to put down roots on the continent after Brexit, suitable applications from the UK have been few. Nationals from other countries have stepped in to fill the full the gap: one staffer with the delegation estimates that there are actually more Irish nationals working for British Lib Dems than Brits. The party has also looked at using agencies to support its media operation here.
British interests won’t stop being represented in Brussels entirely after Brexit, Hook says – but they’ll only be interests of a particular type.
“Lobbyists here have told me that they’re expecting a huge explosion in UK-funded lobbying, because whereas now a stakeholder might come to me or one of seventy-odd UK MEPs to help represent their interests – now they can’t.
“So they’re going to have to pay for lobbyists to do it for them. Of course, that means only people with bags of money can do it – not some of the charities, NGOs, good causes, and just ordinary people with problems.”
Despite only being in parliament for such a short time, Hook feels he has made a small difference: he’s been a “rapporteur” – effectively given responsibility for steering a proposal through the parliament. The rapporteur system is one difference between the EU’s legislature and Westminster: backbench MEPs may not get as much time to talk in the main debates as MPs, but they are given a significantly bigger role in scrutinising the technical aspects of EU law than their counterparts in Britain.
The Lib Dem MEP’s job was steering through plans for a visa agreement with Belarus – perhaps not glamorous, but important to the people it affects: “I got to present the file as the rapporteur, and it’s been supported by six out of seven political groups – everyone apart from the far-right.”
He continues, slightly wistfully: “Then it’ll come before the parliament in March to be voted on. I said to the committee: ‘I’m not going to be here in March but I’ll be watching on TV and look forward to you all passing my file.’”
Most MEPs speak very positively about the parliament’s processes and the power they are given – which is not always the case when you talk to MPs in Westminster.
“I wasn’t interested in Westminster politics, but when I watch the debates in Westminster I find it really worrying that that mostly seems to be about personal politics,” says Ward, the Labour MEP.
“If you look at the way the parliament is set out it’s basically two groups of white men shouting at each other across an empty space. That is not how we do politics here: most of our speeches in the committee and the plenary begin with the words ‘I want to thank my colleagues for their good cooperation’. That sets the tone for everything.”
She says the parliament reminds her of her time as a mature student at university, a place for debate where people are open to ideas.
“It’s about throwing lots of balls up into the air, some you catch and some you miss. Some are never going to land at all. I am going to miss that, because it’s that incredible jostling of people from so many walks of life, from so many different countries,” she says.
This isn’t the case for everyone, of course. A relatively small – though growing – chunk of MEPs are eurosceptic and highly critical of the EU – though there are not really any other than the Brexit Party that actually advocate their member state leaving.
Brexit Party MEP Rupert Lowe this week said he was “delighted” to be “the first turkey to vote for Christmas” – his role on the European parliament’s constitutional affairs committee meant he was first to vote on the Brexit deal here (which he also says “stinks”).
All the MEPs The Independent spoke to who supported Remain believe the UK can, and probably will, eventually rejoin. But none of them advocate an active rejoin campaign – for now the battle has been won by the Brexiteers, and they are unlikely to face much immediate practical resistance.
That doesn’t mean there’s going to be a sudden outbreak of national unity, however.
“I’m not going to make the best of it – why should I? It’s a disaster,” says Green MEP Scott Cato.
I’m European so I want to be making progressive social policy for all Europeans. I hope that my country will benefit from the work that I’ve done, but if it chooses not to then at least the other Europeans can benefit from it
Julie Ward, Labour MEP
“I’m not in a state to say ‘oh never mind, we can salvage this or that’ – we’re losing a huge amount of power in the world, we’re losing institutions that maintain relationships with our closest neighbours and we’re going to have to rebuild different kinds of relationship.”
For the Greens, the loss of MEPs is a particular political blow: the party only has one seat in the UK parliament thanks to the first past the post voting system, and has long relied on its steadily growing contingent in Brussels (now numbering seven), elected under a proportional system that is kinder to smaller parties. Despite regular complaints of a democratic deficit at the heart of the EU, in at least this sense the European Parliament may have been papering over deficiencies in British democracy.
“It really sets us back to 1999 in terms of our representation. One elected parliamentarian: we had Caroline [Lucas] and Jean [Lambert] here from 1999, then Caroline in parliament from 2010, and now we’re going back to just Caroline,” says Scott Cato. “It’s absurd and it doesn’t reflect the way people would choose to vote if we had a fair voting system.”
The Greens are now one of the most pro-EU parties in the UK, but it wasn’t always the case: in the run up to the EU’s foundation in the early nineties, like much of the political left, it worried that the union would benefit big business and be unaccountable. But Scott Cato, once “sceptical” herself, says seeing it up close convinced her of the merits of integration.
“It’s an amazing project here: I was sceptical myself before I came and I think the way people from completely different cultures, and languages, and political systems find a way to work together – it’s really inspiring. It’s really what people want democracy to be about. It’s an example of the world.”
She says Brexit will be like “a cold wind blowing” through Britain’s perception of itself that will “make us a country that recognises the limits of our power in the world”, perhaps even eventually, a “better” one that realises it needs to work with its neighbours to prosper.
“I don’t think now is the time to argue to rejoin,” she says. “I accept that there wasn’t enough energy in the country to stop Brexit and we’ll now have to go through what will be a painful process of economic damage.
“And let’s hope we can move from national hubris to national self-awareness-building. We haven’t done that in a long time, and we’ve gone along with this Global Britain post-colonial fantasy and that’s gonna burst now.
“We’re going to see we’re a middle-sized country with some pretty skilled people, some pretty good advantages in terms of creativity and the English language, and we’re going to have to find a way to use those outside the protection of the European Union. We’re going to find that’s really tough.”
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