MEPs should censure this Commission

Amid all the chaos of Friday night's announcement by the European Commission that the power to control vaccine exports would also hit Northern Ireland and that to make this happen, the Northern Ireland Protocol would have to be partially suspended through Article 16, some Brexiteers were crowing that the Commission could not be held to account for its mistakes.

This is not true. The European Parliament has the power to approve a 'motion of censure' against the Commission. It requires 10% of MEPs (71) to support it before it can be voted on and needs the support of two-thirds of MEPs (470) to pass. And if it passes? Then all members of the Commission must resign. 

The last time that this power was really used was with the Santer Commission in 1999. Allegations of corruption and fraudulent practices within the Commission had been passed on by a whistleblower to the European Parliament. Following some political jostling over whether to censure only particular Commissioners or the whole body, and due to the unwillingness of national governments to recall the individual Commissioners who were truly responsible, MEPs finally agreed to demand the resignation of all the Commissioners. In the end no vote was required as the Commission resigned voluntarily.

The time has come for the European Parliament to make use of this power again.

On what basis should the demand be made that the Commission must resign? While the handling of the vaccine roll-out has not been ideal, it has also not been entirely the Commission's fault. National governments were reluctant to significantly increase the funds available to purchase vaccines and some were overtly critical of the amount being invested in the new mRNA technologies. Although some today voice their frustration with the speed of the vaccine purchasing, little or less was done at the time, a reality which simply can't be avoided given that it is national governments who actually hold the policy levers and resources to deploy 'war-footing' levels of vaccine development and investment. The reluctance of richer, larger states to simply bankroll the smaller, poorer ones reflected exactly why the latter wanted a collective approach and lobbied to prevent each state from doing their own thing. A certain degree of bad luck, in terms of which vaccines delivered first and where production problems have arisen, also reduces the culpability of the Commission in this area.

Where the Commission cannot direct blame to anyone else, however, is in the handling of the current vaccine shortage and the dispute with AstraZeneca. If problems that had arisen from a mixture of factors put the Commission under pressure, the real failure was the inability to cope with that pressure. 

The start was not so bad, even if the tone was tense. AstraZeneca dropped a bomb on EU states' vaccination plans at very short notice and the anger in response was totally unsurprising. The Commission decided to demand answers and it's true that the company seemed somewhat uncooperative, brushing aside this huge disruption by saying that it was really the Commission's fault for not having spent more and earlier. Regardless of whether this accusation was true, it certainly didn't help in easing tensions and it's unlikely that AstraZeneca's handling of this will be used as a model for corporate communications classes of the future.

Problems then stepped up a notch when the question of the company's UK factories came into play. There is both a moral and a practical angle to this. On a moral level, of course it grates to see the same company ramp up its production for your direct neighbour while you're told that expectations for your order have been slashed. The UK's decision to write this exclusivity into its contract with AstraZeneca, something which would inevitably disadvantage others and is in contradiction to any understanding of a multilateral, international approach to vaccine supply, along with AstraZeneca having failed to disclose that it did in fact have a commitment to the UK that could impact on its ability to supply the EU, likely contributed to the Commission feeling it had been set up. But on a practical level none of this really mattered. The reality is that the UK factories have a massively smaller output compared to those in the EU. Even if AstraZeneca had decided to divert supply from there, the impact on its deliveries to the EU would have been minimal. For the Commission to therefore launch this attempt to, as the Commission sees it, force the company to honour its contract was always going to be not just acrimonious but a waste of time. It acted as little better than displacement activity in favour of real solutions. 

It did not have to be this way. The Commission could have said that this kind of disruption to supply was unfortunate but was out of its hands. It could have put forward a road map to national governments to subsidise more expansions for existing production sites. It could have tried to coordinate and set up more partnerships between pharma companies, whereby those that have no vaccine currently agree to produce for those that do (as France's Sanofi will now do). Importantly it could have leveraged the anger at the morality of the situation to lead an international agreement to ensure that developing countries would not be hit by the same problem and that richer countries could not simply write vaccine exclusivity into their contracts any longer. 

Instead, the mistakes continued and the Commission moved ahead with an emergency proposal to limit the export of vaccines. While this kind of behaviour has not been unusual anywhere in the world during the pandemic, it remains hard to see what problem this could really solve. Only a small amount of the AstraZeneca vaccine was exported from the EU to the UK. Export controls are not a useful tool when the real problem is the vaccine simply isn't being produced in anywhere near large enough quantities. But trade is the Commission's go-to policy. It's one of the few areas where the Commission has exclusive powers to represent the whole EU and when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Rather than admitting that the problem required intervention from the Member States (who, incidentally were encouraging the Commission here or saying very little), the Commission tried to tackle the problem on its own with the limited policy leavers that it has. 

This then, of course, culminated in the decision to exclude Northern Ireland from protection against export bans, logically requiring the activation of Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Procotol. Amid all the mistakes on vaccines made so far, this one stands on another level. The EU had just come out of years of difficult negotiations with the UK where time and again it backed Ireland's insistence that there could be no hard border on the island of Ireland. The EU correctly criticised the UK government's suggestion that the Protocol could be broken through the Internal Markets Bill just last year. For the invocation of Article 16 to be casually thrown in at this point was a staggering act of carelessness. To have not consulted with the Irish government or with anyone dealing with UK-EU relations is equally impossible to understand. These are not run of the mill errors. They suggest that the Commission essentially did not grasp what was being proposed or its seriousness. Such an attitude bodes ill for the exercise of its other powers.

The only response, therefore, is to insist on accountability. If some select Commissioners would be willing to resign or if their national governments would recall them, so much the better. But the memory of Santer in 1999 should caution any expectation that this will happen. 

In light of this sad reality, it is down to MEPs to make proper use of their powers and to approve a motion of censure against the Commission. Now, there is obviously no time to reappoint an entire Commission now, right in the middle of a pandemic which still kills thousands by the day right around the world. The Commission would have to stay in post until likely the autumn or even the end of the year to make sure that the wheels keep turning. In this interim, national governments should take on the crisis management role at the European level which they should have always had, meeting much more regularly to ensure that policies are corrected and can continue on a better path. A new Commission (which yes, could include the return of those Commissioners who have managed their portfolios well) should then be appointed and confirmed by the European Parliament, ready to oversee the post-crisis recovery.