Britain’s other election: 81 seats in E.E.C.

Press, 19 April 1979, Page 18

Britain’s other election: 81 seats in E.E.C.

By

DAVID WOOD,

European political

editor of “The Times,'” London

The procedure will be familiar when United Kingdom voters go to the polls on June 7. It will be a Thursday, the traditional day for a British election. Voters will enter the same school or local hall and find inside the same presiding officer and officials, and ballot papers, ballot boxes and voting booths.

they will mark their crosses against the names of candidates representing the major political parties, even though many of the names will be unknown in a political or electoral context. But behind all that is wholly familiar and habitual will lie something that is new and, for some politicians and voters, controversial. For in June United Kingdom citizens aged 18 years and over will not be electing a Member of Parliament to the House of Commons, or a member of the local borough council. For the first time they will be voting to elect one of the 81 members who, for the next five years, will represent Britain in the European Assembly — or Parliament, as the Assembly has resolved to call itself — which meets alternately in. Strasbourg and Luxemburg to play a part, defined in the Treaty of Rome, in the management of the European Community. Those 81 M.E.P.s, as they are known to distinguish them from Westminster M.P.s. will make up rather less than a fifth of the first European Assembly — 410 strong — to be directly elected. It is the direct democratic element, the immediate link between voters and M.E.P.s, that is new. There has been a European Assembly from the earliest days of the Treaty of Rome that created the European Community of the Six: France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg.

The Westminster Parliament began to send a delegation of 36 members from the House of Lords and the House of Commons to the Assembly’s meetings in January, 1973, the date of the

United Kingdom’s entry to the enlarged Community of the Nine. (Denmark and" the Irish Republic joined at the same time).

But until now the Westminster delegation has been either elected or nominated from within the political parties, and therefore consisted of M.P.s or Peers. The Rome Treaty, from the beginning, envisaged a directly elected European Parliament, and the European Council — consisting of Heads of State and Prime Ministers — set the period of June 7 tp 10 for a total of 180 million electors throughout the Community to choose the men and women to represent them.

The new directly elected Parliament will meet for the first time in the Palais de I’Europe at Strasbourg on July 17. Seats have not been allocated to the nine member States on a strict population basis.

Luxemburg, for example, will have six M.E.P.s for an electorate of less than 250,000. Britain, France, West Germany and Italy, with electorates of between 35 and 42 million voters, will have 81 members each and will be dominant in the Chamber. The Netherlands will have 25 members, Belgium 24, Denmark 16, the Irish Republic 15. Of the United Kingdom’s 81 seats, England will have 66 with an average electorate of 514.000, Scotland eight with an average of 470,000, Wales four with an average of 344,000, and Northern Ireland three with a single constituency .of one million. Apart from one Danish member who will represent 25,000 voters in Greenland, the only countries to use the “first past the post” electoral system in June will be England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland will elect its three M.E.P.s by proportional representation. For international reasons only the three members representing West Berlin will continue to be delegated, and therefore indirectly elected. Elsewhere throughout the mainland- countries of the

Community some form of proportional representation will be used. In three countries — Belgium, Luxemburg and Italy — voting will be compulsory. In accordance with present practice, the United Kingdom M.E.P.s will not sit as a national bloc, but as members of party groups occupying a clearly defined section of the Chamber, or “hemicycle,” at Strasbourg and Luxemburg. All successful Labour Party candidates from Britain will sit with the European Socialist Group, and any Liberals elected will sit with the European Liberal Group. However, the British Conservative M.E.P.s since 1973 have run their own independent group, with one or two Danish allies, partly because they could not see wholly eye to eye with the strong Christian Democrat Group, with its clericalist undertones, or the French Gaullists, with their nationalist overtones.

But the British Conservatives have drawn closer to the Christian Democrats and established an informal working arrangement with them. This has provided a counterbalance to the strength of the European Socialist Group in the Parliament, and may do so again after the June elections.

As the first multinational elections in which the United Kingdom has participated, the European direct elections have created problems for political parties that are already committed to local government elections and a General Election. Not even the Government or opposition parties, for all their size and resources, can spare central finance for a European campaign. There also is the organisational strain of fighting elections in European constituencies made up of between seven and nine national constituencies — often covering a wide urban

and rural territory — caused by reducing 635 Westminster constituencies to 81 European constituencies. Any money allocated by the European Parliament or the European Commission for factual publicity cannot be spent on the campaign itself.

The size of the European constituencies means that all United Kingdom candidates must deposit $l2OO (compared with $3OO in a Westminster election), although this will be returned to any candidate who gains a minimum of one in eight of the valid votes cast. The allowable campaign expenses for each candidate also are increased proportionately to a maximum of $lO,OOO, with $2 added for each 50 names on the constituency electoral register. It thus would be possible for some European candidates to spend more than $30,000 on their campaigns.

The British political parties vary in their attitude towards candidates holding

joint membership of the Westminster and European Parliaments.

The Labour Party has ruled against what is known as “the dual mandate’’; the Conservative Party has allowed some experienced sitting members of both Parliaments to stand for both; and the Liberals and minor parties accept membership of both.

But it is generally recognised that new men and women must be found for European candidatures, and direct elections have brought forward several candidates of national distinction.

Among them are Sir Henry Plumb, former president of the National Farmers’ Union; Sir Fred Catherwood of the British Institute of Management; Basil de Ferranti, chairman of Ferranti; Dr Ernest Wistrich, director of the European Movement; and several former diplomats and officials of the European Commission.