Lord Who? The case for electing Britain’s EU Commissioners

Yesterday we watched this government’s final reshuffle unfold, one which delivered some great news, some shocks (Hague moving, IDS staying in place) and which increased the number of women in the cabinet by a grand total of one on 2010. At the very same time, the government also ended months of speculation about who would be Britain’s next EU Commissioner. Andrew Lansley, an early favourite, will not be sent to Brussels, despite being moved on as Commons Leader. Instead, Britain will be represented by Lord (Jonathan) Hill of Oareford, the Conservative Leader of the House of Lords. Baroness Stowell will replace him in the Lords, though in an unprecedented move that smacked of lingering misogyny, she will not be full cabinet member and will be paid less than her predecessor.

Lord Hill of Oareford, Britain's new European Commissioner (from Flickr)

Even many fairly close politics watchers, myself included, knew relatively little of Lord Hill until now. Perhaps his biggest claim to fame was being the one who tried to resign the government a few years ago, only to be kept on inadvertently because Cameron failed to notice. His selection came as a surprise to some, though a Telegraph article as early as April did foreshadow it. Lord Hill has also had a long career in business and public service and seems like a decent enough person to go to Brussels for us. Indeed, if anything he’s a tad too honest – in a classic "Kinsley gaffe", he told ConHome that the government might nominate him simply to dodge the by-election that the selection of Lansley or another MP would have triggered.

Update: sources close to Commission President Juncker have claimed, presumably half-jokingly, that they had to Google who Hill was, according to the FT. There's also been some emerging controversy over Hill's possible lobbying conflicts, requiring him to sell his shares.

But nevertheless, his selection is a cause for concern in a respect. It is true that EU Commission members are meant to act within the interests of the wider EU rather than just of their home state, per se. But Hill’s selection still means our sole member of the commission is someone completely unknown to our own public and who has never faced any sort of election in Britain, a point that was sometimes made about his Labour predecessor Cathy Ashton as well (someone like Lansley wouldn’t have been much better either, with him generally being known to the public as either “who?” or “that tosser who tried to privatise the NHS”). I can’t help but feel that having an unknown commissioner therefore only serves to exacerbate the EU’s democratic deficit and overwhelming public feeling that the institution is distant, elite and opaque. We do of course have an elected, accountable presence in Brussels in the form of our 73 MEPs. But they are elected via regional list, leaving them too largely unknown and severed from constituencies, and the process by which we elect them is all too often treated as a “free” vote against the political class, as we saw in May. We can do better.

So here’s an off-the-cuff proposal. Instead of being nominated solely at the behest of the prime minister, Britain should elect its EU commissioner in a nationwide vote. Our role in the commission is far more important to our national interests than the elected Police and Crime Commissioners the government cack-handedly rolled out in 2012, and we increasingly see direct election to be a virtue in the case of city mayors, even for some relatively small communities such as Copeland and Torbay. National elections will allow a focused debate over Britain’s key role in the EU and the personalities who represent us within it, heightening public awareness and increasing the quality of our national dialogue over Europe.

The notion of executive control over our choice for commissioner should still be partially retained, to ensure a substantial degree of strategy remains in the way Britain approaches Brussels and to prevent excessive partisanship or blind protest votes of the kind that blight the existing EU elections. But instead of choosing simply one name from among those he knows and clearing it solely with the Commission President (Juncker, who also now lacks accountability in the eyes of the UK public), the prime minister should submit a list of three or four nominees to a national public vote. Each candidate would then have to be willing to go and campaign across the country for a couple of months, convincing voters that they are the most suited for the job.

To ensure a degree of diversity, one of these candidates should be required by law not to be a member of the prime minister’s own party, though the election should be conducted by AV to prevent vote-splitting against the government and ensure consensus. Candidates would be given a small allocation of public election funding to jump-start their campaign, though they would be encouraged to fundraise separately and political parties would be allowed to endorse specific candidates. The most recent nationwide vote in the UK, the AV referendum, cost around £75 million, as did the PCC elections. The new election for our commissioner nominee could be part-funded by scrapping PCCs, which have failed to capture the public’s imagination.

This wouldn’t fix all our problems in the EU, of course. We need to look at “red card” veto for national governments, get our national media to actively cover Brussels the same way it covers Westminster, examine the EU’s budget to ensure it is spent wisely and, most of all, we need to hold an in-out referendum on our membership to settle the matter properly. But this is a proposal in line with the current vogue for more direct forms of democracy and it might start to improve the way we understand and discuss our vital role in the EU. Worth a punt?