The human face of the EU

To The Guardian

Some of the most persistent myths surrounding Brexit concern the size and aims of the EU Secretariat, which is, according to one of your correspondents, a “vast bureaucratic machine peddling an American neo-liberal agenda”. The Secretariat is actually tiny. The number of civil servants at the European Commission is 33,000; at the European Parliament, 6,000; and at the Council of the European Union, 3,500. At a total of 42,500, it is about a tenth of the size of the UK civil service in 2015: 439,000 in total, or 406,000 full-time equivalents. In fact, the EU employs fewer people than many UK departments on their own; two-thirds of HMRC (60,900 full-time equivalents) or the Ministry of Defence (56,800), and less than half of the Department for Work and Pensions (81,200).

Having worked there for a short while, I can confirm that European civil servants are not heartless American stooges promoting unrestrained capitalism. Yes, they do want to make the single market work better – something that I suspect most people in the UK would like to see, whether pro or anti-eu. But they also spend a lot of time on developing workers’ rights and environmental sustainability – neither of which are prominent on the neo-liberal agenda. More generally, as individuals coming from all the nations of Europe, they are committed to making the international experiment that is the European Union work. That noble experiment should not be derailed by nonsense concerning hordes of faceless bureaucrats serving a vast impersonal machine. Professor Julian Le Grand, Marshall Institute, London School of Economics