Letter: Curb Eurocrats
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Sir: The European Parliament should have stronger supervisory rights over the Commission, including the right to sack individual commissioners for incompetence or corruption. But the changes we need now go much further. We must break up the Commission.
The Directorates General should be relocated around the EU member nations as separate Common Institutes - the Common Institute for Trade and Competition in Birmingham, say, and in Dublin the Common Institute for Fisheries, and so on.
This would not only put an end to the gang mentality, the collusion of closed minds behind closed doors, that the collegiate nature of the present Commission encourages. It would also give every nation a chance to have a piece of the EU operation. The Parliament is in France, the bank is in Germany, the regular Council meetings are in Belgium. Why not spread some more bodies around the other countries?
Doing so would more easily allow the Council to evolve into a cabinet government, presenting bills that require a majority in Parliament - an arrangement that is surely clearly visible as the evolutionary endpoint of the EU. It would also knock on the head the idea that we are on our way to being a "federal" entity, with a federal capital like Washington, to which all power converges.
BOB WHITEHOUSE
London N7
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