For too long, decisions have been taken behind closed
doors - tablets of stone have simply been posted down people without bothering
to invlove people, listen to their views or give them information about what we
are doing and why.
Peter Mandelson
Only in the European Union could a twice-disgraced Cabinet minister find
himself elevated to one of the most influential jobs in global politics –
but that is what has become of Peter Mandelson.
A master of the black art of spin-doctoring, Mandelson was a natural choice for
an organisation which says one thing, but means another.
Mandelson says his role is to open the European economy up to world trade
– in reality, his job is to build a protectionist fortress around the
crumbling walls of the continent's inefficient industries.
The former Blairite cheerleader's task is not to defend Britain's commercial
interests abroad, but to speak on behalf of 25 very different and divergent
economies. Inevitably this produces confusion, messy compromise and
hopeless delay.
While other countries are forging bilateral trade deals with the booming
economies of the Far East and Latin America, the lumbering bureaucracy of the
European Union moves at what one pro-European business leader called a 'glacial
pace.'
The collapse of the recent Doha trade talks was widely blamed on the European
Union's refusal to open its markets to global competition, and its insistence
(under heavy pressure from France) to maintain the hugely expensive and
wasteful subsidies for rich landowners.
Yet Peter Mandelson said recently that he 'certainly believes that we gain
through open trade and liberalisation.' He also said that trade liberalisation
was about creating fair trade and helping those in some of the poorest
countries to help themselves through trade.
Oxfam's Make Trade Fair head Celine Charveriat took a very different view of the
EU position in the trade talks, however, when she said that:
"the EU ……..has signalled its willingness
to sacrifice poor countries in order to protect its own dated and grossly
unfair farm policies."
Oxfam Press release May 2006.
Sadly, all those in Britain who want to make poverty history, can do nothing
while our trade relations with the rest of the world are in the hands of the
European Union and men like Peter Mandelson.
The only alternative is to demand a referendum now on returning this - and other
vital powers - back from the European Union to our own elected MPs in our own
Parliment. That is the way to make poverty history and the way to make Mr
Mandelson listen to the voices of those who have had enough of decision being
made by unelected Commissioners in secret behind closed doors.