Bruno Waterfield’s excellent post hits the nail on the head:

The focus on “transparency” and lobbying entirely, spectacularly and, one suspects, deliberately misses the point about what is wrong with the EU. It shifts the focus from the EU’s lack of democracy and accountability to a priggish, childish obsession with money and the corporate world.

This is the point.

None (that’s N, O, N, E) of the executive bodies of the EU, European Council, Councils of ministers, Coreper, the Commission, all bodies that exercise power over us the people, keep a proper public record of their debates or decisions.

Most of the documents related to the exercise, of what are told is, public authority here in Brussels belong to the private, closed world of bureaucrats and diplomats. Requests for access are invariably countered with contemptuously smooth refusals in order “to protect the decision-making process”. From who? From us, the public.

At the moment, for example, there is an intense debate on the creation of an EU president and a euro-diplomatic corp. Every body is talking about it and there are plenty of (secret) documents. But where’s the public record?

At some point there some “Council Conclusions” will emerge recording the fact of a decision. But there will be no record of the debates, who said what or the alternatives that were on offer.

There’s more.

To be fair, the Greens have taken something of a stand on the narrower issue of lobbying Parliament. They abstained from voting on the resolution, says Caroline Lucas.

Commenting on the result of the vote, UK Green MEP Dr Caroline Lucas: “The vote on new rules for lobbyists in the European Parliament today showed just how powerful and effective the lobbyists really are. Although the adopted proposal is a step in the right direction, requiring all lobbyists to register for the first time, it is far from guaranteeing full transparency.

Today, the EU Parliament will be voting on a proposal to set up a register of lobbyists.

The text and amendments are here.

Commentary from EUractiv is here.

I’ll post more about this later today.

Here is the press release from yesterday’s meeting of the EU Parliament’s constitutional affairs committee.

“A mandatory public register for lobbyists, common to the Council, Commission and Parliament and providing for “full financial disclosure”, was proposed by the Constitutional Affairs committee on Tuesday. Lobbyists would also have to comply with a code of conduct and face sanctions if they infringed it.”

The proposal was passed with three abstentions, eighteen in favour, and one MEP voting against. I’m curious to know who that one MEP is…

In a Spiegel interview published today (link in German), MEP Martin Schulz is defending the current plans to keep a register of the 15,000 lobbyists operating in Brussels are adequate. A parliamentary committee will be voting on the proposals today.

Critics say the register will be toothless, since it won’t include the names of individual lobbyists and won’t require information about how much lobbying firms are being paid. Even worse, it’s a voluntary affair, and the unscrupulous lobbyists won’t have much incentive to sign up.

But Schulz is upset by criticism from people like the European Greens and Alter-EU, the lobbying transparency group, who say that the register doesn’t go far enough.

Forgive the title, it was just to get your attention. But it has a grain of truth.

“Americans may not know this, but like everyone else on the planet, they are increasingly living by European rules without knowing much about who sets them. Microsoft has already learned to its cost the European Union’s clout, having been hit with a record $1.3 billion fine for breaching Europe’s competition rules.

Now American food companies, including Wal-Mart and McDonald’s and the Wegmans supermarket chain, are following Europe’s food-quality standards and buying only food that has been certified to exacting EU standards by the Germany-based GlobalGap inspection firm. (”Gap” stands for good agricultural practice and imposes strict limits on pesticides and fertilizer use and farm hygiene.)

In June the toiletries industry will follow suit with the unveiling of EU standards for natural and organic cosmetics, and clear labeling rules. A similar measure for organic foods 15 years ago is credited with kick-starting the organic food movement. The global chemical industry has already had to learn to abide by the EU’s Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals system for production, use, storage and transport of chemicals, designed to make companies prove that substances in everyday products from cars to clothes to computers are safe.”

It goes on. The point for our purposes is that these rules are introduced in a non-transparent way.

The well-funded EU propaganda machine is happy for us to think that European laws are made by the European Parliament following a period of open consultation and debate by elected lawmakers.

This is rarely the case.

It would be impossible to explain the complexity of the system in a single blog post. But everyone ought to be aware of two important forces that influence EU law-making beyond Parliamentary debate:

1) Comitology

2) Lobbying

Comi… what!? Comitology is a word invented to describe how laws are processed by expert committees. In 2005, Jens-Peter Bonde discovered there were around 3,094 expert committees helping Parliament make law. They’re not elected, and usually we don’t have the right to know who is on them.

Lobbying. Anyone familiar with Washington politics is familiar with lobbying. But Washington has much tighter and more effective rules about declaring interests and naming lobbyists (the Lobbying Disclosure Act). Brussels has around 15,000 full-time lobbyists, all clamouring to make themselves heard, and they often have a big say in the success or failure of legislation, as well as how it’s actually worded. The system is closed to scrutiny and likely to stay that way - it’s openly admitted that until there’s a big scandal, reform won’t happen.

There are other forces at work besides, such as trade associations and unions. But the above will give a flavour of how things work.