The Countryman: There’s just too many of them

10 mins read
Bob Neal
Bob Neal

When asked why they were voting to leave the European Union, many Brits used the words “too many” in their answers.

Pundits have focused on the “too many” that preceded the word immigrants. Another “too many” deserved more attention. “Too many” bureaucrats in the EU.

Too many, and too powerful, and too remote, and too arrogant and too well paid. Line up the “toos.” There were plenty of them, in the end maybe too many.

Most of the analysis has said that older, less educated, white Britons wanted to leave the EU, and thus voted for Brexit (British exit from the European Union) because they see too many “others” entering the UK. Other meaning brown, black, Muslim, etc. Just another anti-immigrant vote.

News media have shown tons of photos of folks who voted for and against Brexit. I noticed quite a number of photos of Brexit backers with black, brown and young faces, some of them wreathed in scarves.

The “too many” that looms as more important in the minds of Brexit supporters was not “too many” immigrant “others” but too many bureaucrats. David Brooks (New York Times) has written that the bureaucratic overkill coming out of Brussels contributed hugely to the Brexit victory. Other pundits are coming around to that point of view.

Scott Simon, on National Public Radio, aired interviews two days after the referendum in which voters said the EU bureaucracy was a huge part of their yes vote. A couple used words almost so strident as those from the late Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, who railed against “the bureaucrats and intellectual morons trying to manage everything for them.”

Wallace’s deepest contempt may have been reserved for “pointy-headed professors who can’t park a bicycle straight” and the “briefcase-totin’ bureaucrats (and) the beatnik crowd that run Washington.”

Wallace was a racist demagogue. But his descriptions of bureaucrats and other public employees struck a chord that resonated with a lot of folks. In the Democratic primaries, he pulled 43 percent of the vote in Maryland, where thousands of briefcase-totin’ federal bureaucrats park their bicycles every night. He got 34 percent of the Democratic vote in Wisconsin, 31 percent in Michigan. His policies were morally bankrupt, but he may have expertly analyzed what was bugging a lot of folks. Still is.

Just as the Brexit campaign found what was bugging a lot of folks.

(In 1982, Wallace ran again for governor. In black churches, he apologized for his segregationist past, seeking forgiveness and votes. That year, he carried all 10 Alabama counties that had a majority black population, some by more than two-thirds. A lot of folks accepted his amends.)

Every western society has a problem with too many bureaucrats, too much control of people’s lives ceded to the unaccountable. The problem may have reached an apex in the EU. Consider these.

Every EU member state gets to appoint one commissioner of a department of the EU government. So, whenever a country enters the EU — the count is up to 28, including the UK — a new bureaucracy has been created so the new member can pick a commissioner. They could cut an existing bureaucracy in half and give one of the halves to the new commissioner. But bureaucrats don’t think that way. They are always finding new tasks that “must” be done.

One of those tasks is regulating the curvature of bananas. The EU wanted bananas to be straighter. Brexit backers seem to believe they can decide for themselves the amount of “bend” in a banana. I expect someone to start making porn movies on this topic.

Another task that “must” be done, in the eyes of the EU, is regulating pesticides for all of Europe. The morning after the Brexit vote, a high level meeting was held in Brussels, not to deal with the departure of the UK, as you might have expected, but to renew permission for residents of member countries to buy the pesticide Roundup.

Some on the leave side said 60 percent of the laws affecting the UK were being made in Brussels, the vast majority made in secret by the too-many bureaucrats. Sixty percent is a lot. Verifying the figure would take parsing. For example, is a book of regulations on the curvature of bananas a single law or is it one law for each subsection in the book? Still, Brits felt strongly that they had lost control of their own law-making processes.

Finally, the EU spends way too many of Great Britain’s pounds sterling. An analysis showed that many mid-level bureaucrats, after their tax breaks are factored in — EU bureaucrats pay taxes at lower rates than do people who work for a living — were taking home more than the UK prime minister. That’s not unlike the head of, say, the health engineering branch of Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services (known by wags as the department of hell and human sacrifice) taking home more than the governor or more even than the president of a campus of the University of Maine system.

The EU requires that all of its activities be conducted in all 24 languages of the EU. Even the United Nations, which has written the book on a lot of over-bureaucratization, requires everything published in only six official languages (English, French, Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Spanish). Lots of UN activity happens in languages other than those six, but only those six are official and require a language staff.

The result, the Maine Sunday Telegram reported, in an article generated by The Washington Post, is that the European Commission employs 1,750 linguists, 600 full-time interpreters and 3,000 freelancers. How many of those 5,350 people take home more money each month than David Cameron, prime minister of the UK? English will no longer be an official language of the EU, but don’t hold your breath waiting for one-twenty-fourth of the language bureaucracy to get pink slips.

Brexit supporters do complain about the number of immigrants. But it appears to be not the Pakistanis — London just elected a mayor of Pakistani origin, after all — and Kenyans and Jamaicans who immigrated as citizens of British Commonwealth countries. Those folks are largely accepted as members of the British tribe.

Brits are complaining about the 300,000 citizens of France who got unquestioned access to UK residence through the EU. Or the 850,000 Polish citizens. All told, 3 million EU citizens live in the UK, and 1.3 million Brits live in other EU countries.

The objection was not to immigrants per se, as it way too often appears to be in our country, but to immigrants who could not be screened by British authorities, owing to the UK’s membership in the
EU. Loss of control, again, over their own country’s destiny.

The temptation is strong to compare the revolt of the Brits against the EU to what is going on electorally in our country. Bite your tongue for now. It is entirely too early in our process, and there are entirely too many factors, to make clear comparisons. Wait a couple of months, then we can look again.

Bob Neal lives in New Sharon. In previous lives, he lived for five years in Canada, a member of the British Commonwealth, where he learned a bit about Britain and Europe, and three years in Tennessee, heart of Wallace country.

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12 Comments

  1. An interesting fact is that the youth voted to remain in the EU by a 3-1 margin, as did the more prosperous areas like London, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The reason so many regulations are made in Brussles is because if you have a single market (goods and services can be bought and sold across the EU without any tariffs or controls, and labor can move as well) you need one set of regulations. Before, for instance, France couldn’t sell some mowers in Germany because Germany required quieter lawn mowers. Now that’s all uniform. National governments can influence the regulations, but it’s a result of 28 countries involved so no one sets their own. I think that the “Leave” vote is a rejection of a world that has already been fundamentally altered by globalization and the information revolution. The youth want to be part of Europe, to work all over the continent, and be connected, they benefit from that. They represent the future. If Britain really does leave (there is a real chance they won’t, though that’s still unlikely), I suspect they’ll be back. The future is an interconnected global market economy – but the path there does mix populations, create a loss of sovereignty, and is hard for many to digest. I think the key for the EU is focus on devolving more power to regions and localities – the same information revolution allows local authorities to do things that once required a centralized bureaucracy. If they can do that – thus assuring people that power isn’t being sucked up to a big bureaucracy – they can have a sustainable long term future. The EU can’t try to be a sovereign super state – it has to be a system wherein markets operate and people still have power over their affairs.

  2. By the way, if you click my name’s hyperlink it takes you to my blog – I’ve written more about Brexit (and probably will have more in the future). My bias is that my academic specialty is European politics, especially German politics and the EU. What’s happening is truly fascinating – we live in interesting times!

  3. Bob, Thanks for writing a great article. Our entire family enjoyed reading it. Keep up the good work!

  4. Prof. Erb’s contention that the common European market can’t integrate without direction from a central bureaucracy runs into the fact that trade has been somehow coordinated for centuries without any central direction at all. I’m thinking of steel arrow heads for beaver pelts, New York state ginseng for Chinese porcelains, among innumerably examples.

    More, the theory of effective bureaucratic coordination runs into the history of bureaucratic rigidity, self-interest, corruption, pettiness, and actual inanity

  5. One other factor which I believe many overlook when commenting on the age demographics of the vote is the fact that for many of the younger voters, English membership of the EU is something they grew up with.
    For many of them, it’s all they have ever known.

    Which means that they have no direct experience of the Britain that the older voters wish to return to…even if that Britain existed to a large extent only in their rose colored memories.

  6. BEEN THERE has an important point, i.e., the bias toward the status quo vs. happy memories. The old folks have the advantage of some basis for comparison, and the materialistic preoccupations of the young may not prevail over the loyalties of the old.

  7. Having lived in Holland for 5 years and been married to. Dutch girl for 30. I am fully aware of the desire of the Europeans for free movement and not having to change currencies with each border crossed. Been there done that. I was there when the Dutch Belgium border came down, Bernadette was doing her practicum in Antwerp weeks after our marriage. I also was on Christmas New ears holiday in 2001-2002 when the Euro came in.

    Europeans though never identify with Europe they identify with their countries. Ask an American where we are from we say America, ask a European they mention their country. And the Nations states demise isn’t likely to create European unity but rather tribalazation, hopefully not the kind Karl Barth mentioned following WW1. Europeans wanted free movement of Europeans not the immigration policies they are seeing, this is evidenced by the debate over allowing Turkey into the EU.

    But if any evidence against the EU and the vast bureaucratic growth it has spawned be needed Scott gave it above. what kind of regulatory state would be needed to set a policy for lawnmower decibels? I assume the same that upset the sweedes when cinnamon rolls and the amount used made headlines. Europeans wanted freezer movement of Europeans and and easier currency that didn’t require a bank stop after every border crossing what they have gotten is so,etching quite different and without major reform my guess is we haven’t seen the last exit. Austria will be fun to watch new elections have been ordered. In all countries the post war status quo parties are under assault it will be interesting indeed.

  8. And lawnmower regulations also beg the question how did lawns get mowed before the EU? They seemed mowed before. Countries work out these details all the time the problem is rather the vast bureaucratic enterprise the EU has become. With an EU parli,met with essentially no power, they cannot introduce legislation the power is all with the bureaucracies. While the European skeptic message is an easy one wrap yourself in the flag of your country. And while many in power love the EU I have never seen any wrapping themselves in the blue flag and not because blue isn’t a pretty color. To do so would be to openly embrace this bureaucratic hated entity not exactly a vote getter.

  9. I would be interested to hear the thoughts of the commenters, thus far, on the Trans Pacific Partnership, or TPP. My limited understanding of the TPP makes me think that it would be a disaster for the U.S.

  10. On regulations: they simply need common regulations on health, safety, etc., in order to have completely free trade. That’s what we have in the US with federal regulations, and limits on what the states can do. On the larger issue I’d say the key is subsidiarity. That’s the EU concept replacing sovereignty. Like sovereignty, it was originally a theological term, interestingly. It says basically that powers of governance should be exercised at the lowest level possible. The locality, the region, the state, and only when necessary, at the supranational level. I think the EU needs to take subsidiarity seriously. More power should be devolved to regions and localities, and only tasks necessary for the exercise of the free market (trade and monetary policy) and some other broad issues be done supranationally. This would empower the people at local levels, reducing the angst that so much power is exercised by the Eurocrats. It would create, I think, a sustainable EU for the long run. Sovereign states would lose out – they’d see power devolved to levels lower than the state, as well as the supranational powers they’ve already sacrificed (out of self-interest). The info revolution and globalization are changing politics and society at a level not seen since the reformation (and that led to a long period of tumult before a new political order was created). The old order can’t survive, but we’re not sure what will replace it.

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