Bryan Cassidy

I sat in on a working lunch meeting between Lord Graham Tope, a member of the Committee of the Regions, and Bryan Cassidy, the President of the EESC’s Section on the Single Market, production and consumption. Lord Tope is preparing a CoR opinion on better lawmaking – a theme that Bryan has specialised in for a long time now.  One of the fascinating issues they discussed was the problem of ‘translation’ of EU legislation into domestic law. Bryan Cassidy is forever thumping the table about the trend for national civil servants to ‘goldplate’ EU legislation when transposing it into domestic legislation, adding on restraints and conditions that were not in the original and that help to give EU legislation a bad name. But he and Lord Tope recognised that there is a genuine cultural problem for local and regional civil servants, a further step removed from ‘Brussels’, in trying to understand the spirit of some EU laws. There are no easy solutions. Better mutual knowledge and understanding would help, but there is still so much progress to be made at the level of national civil services…

This afternoon I had a chat with Anita Pollack, who was a Labour MEP (for London South West) from 1989 till 1999, when she lost her seat. She had come to see me because she has just finished penning a book about Labour MEPs in the European Parliament in that decade. Her book will be an important political record of a period of great transition in terms of the Labour Party’s relationship with its sister parties on the Continent. It also, I suspect, will be full of the sort of political stories that fascinate political anoraks like yours truly. Anita has long since come to terms with her electoral defeat in 1999 , but she gave me a graphic description of just how it felt. For all those with political ambitions, not to win in the first place must be frustrating and galling. But to win, and then to lose, though it may be the lifestuff of democratic parliamentary politics, must be very, very tough indeed.

One of the members of my writers’ circle, Vincent Eaton, has had a short story published online in the Barcelona Review. You can read Ledge here. Well done, Vincent!

Early this morning I accompanied the President to a working breakfast in preparation for a trip he will be making in the autumn. The nature of the trip remains confidential for the time being. In due course, though, when it has taken place, I will come back to this subject. For this morning’s meeting was quite the most fascinating I have sat in for a very long time. Indeed, it was a privilege to be there.

I had been invited to a garden party in Waterloo. The problem was that the Wimbledon men’s singles final – a battle royal between a rejuvenated Andy Roddick and an on-form Roger Federer – had not finished by the time I set off. I tried to follow the match on my mobile phone and the radio. As I drove out on the Chaussée de Waterloo I passed a tennis club called ‘Wimbledon’. That was it. The temptation was too strong. I stopped the car and went in, certain that the match would be on a big screen, and it was. I was made very welcome and was soon part of the crowd, ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’ as the game went this way and that. There were chats during the time outs and they off course discovered I was from London. I was even offered a beer. It was a great experience. When it was all over, and King Roger was about to start the interviews, I said my thank yous and made my farewells. ‘It’s not bad, your Wimbledon,’ said one of the lovely ladies. ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘yours is not bad either!’

There was a high German contingent at the garden party and the subject on all the EU insiders’ minds was the German constitutional court’s recent ruling. ‘Brussels’ has greeted it with a certain euphoria because it seems to have unblocked one of the few remaining stumbling blocks for the ratification and implementation of the Lisbon Treaty. But, as several guests explained to me, the euphoria is misplaced and only understandable because people have not yet read the full judgement nor digested its implications.

Bike Friday again. This time the organisers ran a photograph competition. The photographs were all taken by colleagues. My favourite, shown on the left, is of a school bus in Pakistan. I shall add the author’s name just as soon as I have found it out.

Taft - an enlarged President

No; the enlarged Presidency is not a medical condition. As I have sought to explain in previous posts on the subject, it is an informal body (composed of the President, the two Vice-Presidents, the three Group Presidents and the SG) that prepares the political ground for the Committee’s Bureau (its formal decision-making body). The enlarged Presidency met this morning, with a heavy agenda to cover and, almost inevitably, some agenda items had to be postponed to an additional meeting. Not for the first time, I found myself pondering the consequences of what I would call a ‘professionalisation’ of the Committee’s role and activities. Put another way, the Committee is busy, and getting busier, and yet its members are part-time volunteers. The limitations on our members’ time – which is only the flip side of their unique authenticity – can pose practical examples. Today was a good example of that.

In the afternoon we had a coordination meeting about SYSPER2. What, you ask, is SYSPER2? It’s a very sophisticated and high-performance software programme developed by the European Commission to handle the management of its human resources (think ‘system’ and ‘personnel’). Parts of it are still under development but it is expected to come on stream pretty soon. Until now, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions have managed their HR with their own software programme, Centurio, developed in-house. But Centurio is coming to the end of its life and anyway SYSPER2 is much better. Would it make sense for the Committees to direct scarce resources towards the development of a new, tailor-made programme? The answer is clearly ‘no’. At the same time, we need to know how we would be obliged to adapt if we took over SYSPER2 lock, stock and barrel, since the Committees have very distinctive HR policies. To what extent would the Commission be prepared to ‘tailor’ a version of its programme? To what extent can we tailor an in-house interface or plug-ins? The meeting was designed to explore those questions and start coming up with operational conclusions. It is a truism, of course, but economies of scale come at a price.

Noelle-Anne Sullivan, one of the members of the audience when I gave my little speech to the Oxford Society (see 18 June post) came to see me this morning for a chat. I am supposed to be writing a book about the communication challenge facing the EU and its institutions. The writing has had to be put on the back burner for a while, but I am still very much interested in amassing material and experiences. With regard to the latter, Noelle-Anne has had a very interesting experience indeed. She started up a blog on the European elections in Belgium. She began it because she had a vote and wanted to know how to exercise it. She started to make inquiries and realised that it would be useful for other people like her if she put the material and information she had gathered into the public domain. Before she knew what was happening, her blog had become the port of call, not only for expats living in Belgium but also for Belgians themselves. And because of the interest her blog was generating, Noelle-Anne was able to interview politicians and she, in her turn, was interviewed frequently by the media. As it happens, I have been slowly making my way through Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point. According to his analysis, Noelle-Anne is a classic example of what he calls a Maven (from a Yiddish term, meaning one who accumulates knowledge). I quote: ‘The critical thing about Mavens, though, is that they aren’t passive collectors of information. … What sets them apart is that once they figure out how to get that deal, they want to tell you about it too.’ What interests me in particular about these modern, mainly net-based, phenomena is that they are messy, by which I mean that they cannot be structured, let alone controlled. They just happen. This (it will be one of the big arguments in my book) poses a major problem for bureaucracy-based structures such as the EU institutions and, indeed, national governments or any administration.

This afternoon took on a distinctly sad tinge. First, we had a farewell lunch for Jean Lapeyre, who has been working as a detached national expert in the SG’s private office for the past two years. Jean, who began life as a glass blower and ended up, through his trades union activities, as Deputy Secretary General of the European Trades Union Confederation has a distinguished career behind him and, I am sure, a very active retirement ahead of him. Then I went to the farewell drinks of a longstanding and very popular Italian member of the administration. He came to Belgium as a young immigrant and worked in the steel industry and as an electrician before shifting across to more administrative work, ultimately ending up in the Committee’s administration. From there I went to say goodbye to a young Portugese colleague who had been working for the Committee as a temporary agent. And then I had the tremendously sad duty to sign an information notice to all staff about the untimely death, at the age of 53, of another popular colleague. In a small institution at times the role of SG is a bit like that of a vicar or a parish priest, ministering to his flock. Well, today the vicar was very sad.