Quick blogs, 2 of 2

The funniest thing about the endeavours of the Council of the European Union to make itself more transparent, is that when the Agriculture and Fisheries Council (yes, I mean that) decided in December to adopt a rather opaque set of conclusions on this, ostensibly opening up more meetings to the public, they did so behind closed doors. And what is more, the Ministers "decided" without debate, the agreement itself having been previously thrashed out between high level civil servants and diplomats. In other words, even if the TV cameras had been there, we couldn't have known what were the reasons for the decision (and any arguments against it), precisely because the Ministers didn't exchange these reasons amongst themselves. Now that to my mind is the type of thing which makes people cynical about the European Union.

I've written about this at greater length here.