Jonathan Faull warns of 'continental system built largely on German principles' if UK stands to one side in EU
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Michel Barnier, the European commissioner for the internal market, pictured above, is advised by Jonathan Faull, the UK's most senior EU official. Photograph: Thierry Roge/REUTERS
In the run up to last week's EU summit David Cameron frequently claimed that Brussels appears hell bent on devising regulations to harm the City of London.
Ministers blame Michel Barnier, the French European commissioner for the internal market and services. Some British sources have criticised Barnier for "acting as if he were still a member of the French cabinet", David Wighton writes in the Times today.
Barnier certainly maintains close links with the Elysée Palace. But British ministers rarely acknowledge that a Briton guides the machinery which supports Barnier in the European Commission. Jonathan Faull, the director general of Internal Market and Services at the European Commission, is the most senior British official in Brussels employed by the institutions of the EU.
Faull, who is also a professor of law at the Free University of Brussels and who once served as the main European Commission spokesman, usually limits his public pronouncements to academic tomes on EU law. But he has written a piece, published this morning, explaining how the commission is not ganging up on Britain and how Britain needs to be careful not to marginalise itself.
Faull, whose article is published on the website of E!Sharpe (a Brussels magazine which commissioned pieces by me in my days there), has a central message: Britain is a European country whose economy is bound up with other EU countries. Britain should therefore be shaping its future, not standing apart. Faull has this warning:
So what should the UK do? Stand by and watch a continental system built largely on German principles develop? Here is the challenge for British eurosceptics: what is your strategy for the country in the 21st century? We hear incessantly what you don't like or want. From the xenophobic rants of the blogs and the tabloids to the reflections of those who question EU policies and are more deserving of the honourable adjective "skeptical", I see little constructive thinking about the future.
Hong Kong, Canada, Norway? Who are we and where are we going? Is this a British problem or an English one? These issues are bound up with national self-consciousness, a sense of self which the UK needs to define more clearly for itself and in its dealings with the rest of the world.
Europe has too often been a scapegoat for post-imperial disappointments and failings. It can be a catalyst for serious thought about where the UK is going. The pro-European view is clear. Britain is a European country with similar challenges and opportunities to those facing its neighbours. It should be involved in major political developments, the latest of which is likely to be a thoroughgoing coordination of economic policies. It should influence that process, not suffer it. Otherwise, Britain will be the Channel Islands of the EU. Formally apart, with lovely pageantry and some economic successes, but following rules and policies made elsewhere.
The article was written in mid-November as Cameron was involved in preparations for last week's EU summit where he became the first British prime minister to exercise Britain's EU veto. Faull put pen to paper shortly after Cameron had attended the last EU summit on 26 October where the prime minister tried to forge an alliance with some of the other nine EU countries that are not members of the euro. That alliance appears not to have withstood the events of last week.
Faull's article predicts with uncanny precision the way in which Britain's natural EU allies will head in the direction of France and Germany if they believe that the UK is vacating its seat at the top table:
The eurozone countries are moving (some would say slouching) towards a system of coordinated economic decision-making. The other nine non-euro member states will not want to be isolated. Nordic and Central and Eastern European countries are often allies with the UK in EU affairs. The emphasis in that sentence is on "in EU affairs". They are unlikely to follow the UK to the sidelines.
Faull addresses Cameron's central criticism of the European Commission: that it is directing regulations unfairly at the City of London. He writes that Britain is "deeply involved" in shaping EU and international financial regulations because it advocates a single European market for the sector. Adopting "uncoordinated national regulation" would work against British interests because other member states would demand emergency brakes, vetoes and opt-outs from core single market policies:
That way lies the end of the common market, to use the original jargon, leaving Europe prey to protectionism and resurgent nationalism ready to be exploited by already well-established xenophobic parties. The promises held out to the countries which joined the EU in 2004 and 2007 would be torn to shreds, abandoning them to an uncertain future in a hostile environment.
Faull, a Brussels "lifer" who joined the European Commission in 1978 after studying at the College of Europe in Bruges, will no doubt be criticised by eurosceptics as a eurocrat who has no interest in defending his own country. But when Britain lost an economic portfolio in the European Commission in 2009 Gordon Brown highlighted Faull's position. Nobody ever accused Brown, who kept Britain out of the euro, of going soft on the EU.