Special interests should pay their own way

Give me your money or democracy dies. That has been the message from the vast array of NGOs that orbit the European Commission this week. The EU has been splashing taxpayers’ cash on political pressure groups for years. If you have a penchant for social change and are prepared to pepper your literature with terms like “sustainability”, “fundamental rights” and “active citizenship”, you have every chance of pocketing an EU grant. Applications from people who are anti-growth, far-left and (obviously) pro-EU are particularly welcome. If you throw a rock in the air in Brussels, the chances are it will land on someone living high on the hog on the taxpayers’ dime. Try it. Please.

To take some examples almost at random, the European Public Health Alliance received €785,707 from the EU last year. The European Women’s Lobby got €1,625,164. The European Network Against Racism got €1,639,448. Solidar (“working to advance social justice through a just transition in Europe and worldwide”) got €442,640. Transgender Europe got €524,819. The Smoke Free Partnership got €424,000. Climate Action Network Europe got €1,639,501. Young European Federalists got €300,000. Friends of the Earth Europe got €700,000. I could go on and on and on.

This looked like it would continue forever, but last November the European Commission told NGOs that LIFE, a €5.4 billion slush fund for environmental projects, could no longer be used to lobby the EU. LIFE grants could still be used for “policy briefs or other research papers” and for “workshops, conferences, trainings or awareness raising campaigns”, but if they wanted to hob-nob with policy-makers they would have to do so on their own time. Last week, the German MEP Monika Hohlmeier said that “EU funds must be spent on clearly defined objectives that are in line with EU legislation” and that “we must be able to track the transparency of how the money is spent.”

These are pretty modest requirements when large sums of public money is being given to third parties, but it is a big deal in Brussels where, incredibly, some NGOs have been required to sign an agreement promising to lobby MEPs in order to get their grant. According to an investigation by the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, the European Environmental Bureau, which received €1,955,910 in EU grants last year, “was explicitly tasked with providing at least 16 examples where the European Parliament made green legislation more ambitious thanks to their lobbying efforts.” That is the name of the game with sockpuppet funding. The whole point is to amplify the most extreme voices so that the government’s position looks moderate by comparison. 

Needless to say, the prospect of having to use their own money to lobby politicians sent the environmental blob into a frenzy. BirdLife Europe, which received a €460,000 LIFE grant last year, called it “a dangerous challenge to democracy”. The aforementioned European Environmental Bureau yelped that it was an “orchestrated attempt to muzzle democracy” and “reminiscent of many authoritarians’ playbooks”. The director of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) European Policy Programme, which relieved EU institutions of €957,121 last year, said that the handouts were “vital for the survival of a thriving democracy”. 

They would, wouldn’t they? A system in which the government pays people to lobby it might strike some people as corrupt but Socialist and Green MEPs have lined up to defend it on the basis that big business spends a lot of money lobbying MEPs and NGOs are therefore needed as a counter-weight. Aside from the implicit admission that environmental NGOs are anti-business, this argument would only stack up if NGOs needed millions of Euros from taxpayers to spend on “public affairs”. But while many NGOs receive handsome payments from the EU and a few are dependent on EU grants, most have plenty of money to lobby without the European Commission giving them more. The European Climate Foundation, for example, had a staggering budget of €262 million in 2023 and got nothing from the EU. ClientEarth got €350,000 from the EU, but this was trivial in the context of its €40 million budget. There is no shortage of money swishing around the world of environmental NGOs. 

Moreover, lobbying politicians does not actually cost a lot of money. If an MEP wants to hear from you, they can invite you to Brussels for a cup of coffee and listen to your concerns. It will cost you the price of a train journey — and if your organisation can’t afford that, you need to work on your fundraising. Businesses spend a lot of money on public affairs, but only a fraction of that goes on face-to-face meetings. The rest is spent on events management, marketing, research, drinks receptions, hospitality, concert tickets and goodness knows what else. In practice, that is also what NGOs spend their money on and there is no reason why taxpayers should have to pay for it. The European Commission wants MEPs to hear from civil society? Fine. Invite people to Brussels and pay their expenses. 

In any case, do the pressure groups that receive EU grants really represent civil society? The WWF, the Climate Action Network and the European Environmental Bureau have more meetings with the Commission than almost anybody else, but they have a very particular view of the world that is not necessarily shared in the cafés of Toulouse or the bars of Warsaw. Where are the grants for ordinary consumers who have to suffer the consequences of EU directives? The nearest thing to an EU-funded consumer organisation is the Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs (BEUC) which got €2,400,000 from the EU last year and only seems to represent consumers who really like red tape and regulation. In recent months, BEUC has called for “an EU action plan for plant-based foods”, it has opposed the EU-Mercosur trade deal with various South American countries for reasons to do with “sustainability” and it has been cheerleading for both the EU’s AI Act which will make the bloc a digital backwater and for the deeply annoying and unnecessary GDPR law. It has warmly supported the insanely expensive and unrealistic EU Green Deal and lobbied for a ban on “unhealthy” food advertising as well as legal limits on how much sugar, salt and fat can be put in food. I haven’t seen its official position on those bloody plastic bottle tops that are attached to the bottle and poke you in the eye, but I bet they are in favour.

It is not undemocratic to tell these special interests to pay their own way. On the contrary, it makes a mockery of democracy for the European Commission to give large sums of money to NGOs who agree with it so that they can persuade MEPs and the public that the European Commission is right. Surely everybody can see this except those who are neck-deep in the Brussels blob?