Who describes pigs as "the porcine species"? Who calls flowers "non-edible vegetables", lakes, seas and rivers "the aquatic environment"? Who writes sentences 250 words long and prefaces its documents with a couple of pages of "whereas" clauses?
Who loves abbreviations, sometimes appropriately dignified like SOCRATES and ERASMUS for educational programmes, sometimes dynamically meaningful like NOW, dealing with new opportunities for women, sometimes lacking in humour, like the WEEE programme for waste disposal of electrical and electronic equipment?
The European Commission - that’s who!
The European Commission is the executive civil service of the EU and it comes in for a lot of stick for being a vast Bruxelles-based bureaucracy - even though there are fewer officials looking after it than we have for Scotland alone - and for its Eurospeak.
Its small size is no excuse for poor language, especially as Europe, the organisation, sets out to bring itself closer, more relevant and more understandable to the citizens of Europe. But matters are getting better. The Council of Ministers Resolution stating that "wording should be clear, simple and concise, unambiguous, avoiding unnecessary abbreviations, jargon, and excessively long sentences" is at last having some effect. I particularly welcome the Commission's current practice of including a relatively simple executive summary at the beginning of many of its proposals for new legislation. This can save enormous amounts of time.
Take for example the proposed regulation for the reform of pharmaceuticals. I was faced with having to read and respond to more than 200 pages of technical and potentially controversial prose in the space of two days. But summaries highlighted the essential points and I was able to prepare my case for the first meeting of the
Economic and Social Committee's (ESC) study group. Controversy appeared because the industry wants to be able to provide consumers with information about, and ultimately advertise, prescription drugs. Consumer organisations are strongly against this.
!also note that a spot-check on "readability" using the Fry chart shows the Commission's language going off the scale much less frequently at 18+ than used to be the case.
Positive actions are also taking place outside the Commission itself, like the Luxembourg-based interpreters and translators who have started a "fight the fog" campaign. Moreover, our Minister for Europe, Peter Hain, has set out to simplify the EU treaties in 300 words so that ordinary citizens can have a clear idea of their aim. He has called on the Plain English Campaign to help achieve a better understanding of the point and purpose of the European Union.
The Plain English Campaign was started very humbly in Salford many years ago when the local Groups were in their infancy. We gave our support by simplifying abstruse language, reflected in the style and approach of those early magazines in the 1960s.
I was delighted to discover that "consumer" organisations of some of the candidate countries, seeking to belong to the EU, are also campaigning for simplicity. In a recent trip to Malta, as a member of ESC's study
group on enlargement, I found that Dr. Micaleff, the legal advisor of the Consumer Affairs Council, was already "translating" EU law into simple language, and The Times of Malta was publishing his translations.
But it is not just simplification of language which is at stake; it is also a matter of structural simplification of procedures. For example, the original 1994 General Product Safety Directive needed to be revised and clarified last year, only seven years later, because the Centre de Droits at the University of Louvain said in its analysis "You would need a degree in European Law to understand it". But it is interesting to note that, as Commissioner Bolkenstein said to the ESC in January, "it is Member States who are a large part of the problem." So it is not necessarily the EU which creates difficulties by adopting most of the rules in "the highest burden" areas, the biggest problem in the context of the internal market being product conformity. A recent ESC report estimates that that the Community is actually responsible for less than 10% of the rules and regulations applicable to companies in Member States.
The Commission's own independent survey on the working of the Internal Market, carried out last September, suggests that companies could save an average of 15% of their total compliance costs if legislation was better designed. And the money saved could be passed on to the consumer!
Do we need sanctions if there is no action? Sanctions, under the principle of subsidiarity, are a matter for individual member States. So how about this one for transgressors in the United Kingdom. The Chancellor of an English Court, sitting in Westminster 400 years ago, had a great punishment for offenders. He ordered that a hole be cut in the centre of a particularly wordy document and then had the author's head stuffed through it. A pillory of prose!
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