The Last Ever British MEPs

Since I moved to Brussels, I often found myself wondering what exactly British MEPs were getting up to all day.

Thanks to Brexit, they’re the last of the kind. They have 9 months left and most of the country they work for is either angry at their existence or indifferent to them. So I reached out to a bunch of them and asked. I think you’ll be surprised and impressed by some of their responses.

Many thanks to the MEPs who spoke with me. They are:

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The UK officially leaves the European Union on March 29th 2019. On that day, 73 MEPs from 12 electoral regions will be out of a job (although some reports suggest they could be allowed to stick around for another 8 weeks when the 2019 European elections happen) and with them all representation of British voters in the EU institutions.

It is a unique situation.

We wanted to know what those MEPs are doing now, how they’re preparing for Brexit day and what things have changed since the referendum result was announced back in 2016.

We interviewed 6 British MEPs from various parties and parts of the country. We purposefully did not reach out to the headline grabbing UKIP MEPs because we wanted to hear what about a typical day in the life of an MEP, and anti-European MEPs don’t have a typical day-to-day.

“Our frustration is that the mainstream media only want to hear from the Eurosceptic MEPs… They get a totally disproportionate amount of airtime compared to the vast majority of British MEPs.” — Jude Kirton-Darling

It’s obvious that the referendum changed everything. Did the rest of the Parliament stop talking to them?

“From MEP colleagues there’s probably been an element of sympathy for our plight… The vast majority of people at the Parliament are baffled and perplexed by what the UK chose to do and moreover the way the current Government are handling it”. — Rory Palmer

Most rich European countries ignore their MEPs, the only directly elected representatives in the EU system. When I was researching this feature, most people I spoke to in Britain had no idea what an MEP even does.

The European Parliament is an interesting institution because it sits in the middle of a larger EU institutional setup.

The EU’s broad priorities are set by the European Council, which brings together national and EU-level leaders. Directly elected MEPs represent European citizens in the European Parliament — which doesn’t propose laws or budgets, but scrutinizes and passes/rejects them. The interests of the EU as a whole are promoted by the European Commission, whose members are appointed by national governments, and that is the legislative and policy making engine of the whole thing.

For me, the stranger thing was that we never hear from British MEPs (beyond the anti MEPs like Hannan and Farage) about Brexit, how it’s going to happen and what they’re doing to influence it. When I asked them, most told me it was because the EU institutions were aligned behind Michel Barnier and his negotiating team — there’s not much space for infighting when you have such an important set of negotiations to deal with.

(Domestic British politicians haven’t figured that bit out).

Most of them were focused on dealing with the massive and rather thankless responsibility of representing so many Britons — each MEP represents on average 839,194 constituents, far more than MPs.

I thought some of them might have an eye on the future. Once March 29th comes about, they’re out of a job. But everyone was focused on Brexit and how it will impact the people back home.

It struck me time and again that these MEPs — a bunch of half-ignored Brits in Brussels — are strangely driven to serve their constituents. It is a thankless and massive task, and they never got the recognition for doing it. The only MEPs we ever actually hear from are the ones who didn’t do their jobs.

So what happens next?

As far as the European Parliament is concerned, everything is settled. It was agreed in January 2018 that, 27 of Britain’s 73 seats will be redistributed among the remaining member states. 46 seats will be available for any new countries joining the EU.

For the MEPs themselves, it’s a little more interesting. The funny thing about Brexit is that all things British are going to be incredibly important in Brussels for the next few years — there’s a lot of work to be done to finalize the minutiae of Brexit, renegotiate old agreements and generally figure out how Europe will work with Britain going forwards.

Which means that, after Brexit, British people with European experience are going to be in higher demand in Brussels than ever before.

As another MEP Sajjad Karim pointed out in Episode 28, the influence of British policymakers and experts will simply shift from being representative — working on behalf of British voters — to personal. In all likelihood, Brexit will be a boon to the British MEPs who want to stay in Brussels. The opposite is true for the country.