Marginalised Britain? Positions and Influence of UK Actors in EU Decision-Making

Lord Lawson, writing in the The Times in May 2013, argued that:

"Not only do our interests increasingly differ from those of the eurozone members but, while never 'at the heart of Europe' ... we are now becoming increasingly marginalised as we are doomed to being consistently outvoted by the eurozone bloc" (Nigel Lawson, "I'll be Voting to Quit the EU", The Times, 7 May 2013)

With the core project of the EU now deepening EMU and building political union alongside EMU, many share Lord Lawson's fear of UK marginalisation in this "new EU". For example, the defeat of the UK on the cap on bankers' bonuses is often cited as a case of "Eurozone caucusing" against British interests.

Nevertheless, other analysts argue that now that the infrastructure for saving the Euro has been built, the EU is back to its core business of strengthening and reforming the single market. In this project, British actors - ministers, MEPs, and the new UK Commissioner - are part of the EU mainstream and perhaps even "leading from the front" in building support for reform and further liberalisation of the single market.

So, the key question for the Fellowship is: has the UK become more or less marginalised in EU decision-making over the past 10 years?

To answer this question I will look carefully at the empirical evidence relating to the positions and influence of UK "actors" in EU decision-making between 1 July 2004 and 31 December 2015. The project will look at the behaviour and influence of UK ministers in the Council, UK officials in COREPER, UK MEPs, and UK parties in the European Parliament. I will use my own existing research and data (on voting in the Council and European Parliament), and will supplement these with data from a large number of sources as well as existing research by other political scientists. The project aims to assess a number of issues, including: how often have UK actors been on the winning or losing side in the EU legislative process; whether the patterns of influence and power of UK actors, relative to the actors from other member states, have varied across policy issues; and whether there has been an emerging Eurozone (plus "pre-ins") caucus, in general or on specific policy issues (such as financial services, justice and home affairs etc.).

The project will use a range of advanced analytical techniques, such as scaling of recorded votes in the Council and European Parliament to identify the "distances" between UK actors and the average members of the Council, the European Parliament, and the key political groups in the EP. The project will also look at several key legislative case studies of apparent UK "marginalisation", such as the cap on bankers' bonus, and will assess whether the patterns in these cases can be generalised.

The results of the project will be disseminated through outputs aimed at policymakers, the media, opinion multipliers, and the wider public. The project will produce a major policy report summarising the key findings. During the project I will write 10 blog articles (one on each of the key elements of the project) on the LSE's EUROPP and the British Politics and Policy blogs, the ESRC's UK-EU website and will try to have several of these pieces syndicated on The Guardian blog (the LSE BPP blog has an on-going agreement with The Guardian). I will also promote the policy report and the blog pieces by social media, via my own Twitter account (with c.6,000 followers) as well as the LSE Government Department and VoteWatch accounts.

The project will organise an off-the-record briefing for UK policy-makers, where the policy report will be presented and discussed. There will also be a high-profile public event at LSE: a public roundtable debate, where the key findings in the policy report will be presented and discussed with politicians and/or policy-makers from the main political parties in the UK as well as from several other EU member states.

In terms of who will benefit from the project, the outputs from the project and the two dissemination events - the off-the-record briefing, and the public roundtable debate - will be aimed at the following end-users:

- senior UK policy-makers (civil servants) in the European divisions of the Cabinet Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Treasury, and the Home Office;

- elected UK politicians in Westminster, Edinburgh, Cardiff, and the European Parliament, and in particular MPs on the European Scrutiny Committee in the House of Commons, and members of the EU Select Committee and its sub-committees in the House of Lords;

- senior policy advisors in all the main UK parties (Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dems, UKIP, Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru, and DUP);

- Directors of European think-tanks, including OpenEurope, the Campaign for European Reform, and the Foreign Policy Centre;

- opinion formers in the traditional TV and print media in the UK, including chief political editors, European editors, and Brussels correspondents, as well as in the social media, such as Conservative Home, Labour List, Lib Dem Voice etc.

- key interest groups operating in the field of UK-EU relations, including the CBI, IoD, and TUC;

- politicians, policy-makers, interest groups, and key media players in Brussels and several other capitals in Europe, particularly in Berlin, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Warsaw, The Hague, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki; and

- interested private citizens.

In terms of how these individuals and groups will benefit from the research, the key aim will be to increase the understanding amongst a wide array of actors involved in making and influencing UK-EU relations of key empirical regularities (facts) relating to the role of UK actors in the EU institutions. This better understanding of the empirical evidence should help politicians and policy-makers form their own views about the costs and benefits of UK membership of the EU and also how UK politicians and civil servants might act strategically to change certain patterns of behaviour, for example in the policy areas where there is evidence of UK marginalisation.

The project will aim to reach these different individuals and groups of end-users, and raise their awareness of key empirical facts, via variety of channels, including:

- well written and highly accessible and publically available articles on widely read platforms, including the ESRC's UK-EU website, the LSE's EUROPP and British Politics and Policy blogs (who together regularly have more than 15,000 readers), The Guardian blog (the LSE blogs have a syndication agreement with The Guardian blog), and blogs of other British newspapers;

- use social media to promote each article and the final policy report, such as my own Twitter account (with c.6,000 followers) and the LSE Government Department and VoteWatch Twitter accounts;

- use the extension media contacts I have built up over the past 18 years working on these issues to promote broad media coverage of the key findings in the final policy report - in particular the contacts I have made over the past 3 years as Head of Department at LSE and Chairman of VoteWatch, which include in London contacts in the BBC, Channel 4, Talk Sport, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Evening Standard and The Economist, in Brussels with European Voice, EU Observer, and EurActiv;

- increase understanding of the key results elsewhere in the EU via the contacts I have built up in national capitals elsewhere in Europe, via former students in think-tanks, politicians I know (e.g. Alexander Stubb and Helle Thorning-Schmidt), and media contacts from my previous interviews for TV and newspapers in other countries; and

- deposit the key data I use for the blog pieces on The Guardian data website - I have built up a close working relationship with Alberto Nardelli, the Guardian Data Editor, from his years at Electionista.