Britain and Brussels: what the Foreign Office found

It’s always wise when looking at the European Union to imagine that you’re an alien (it’s the sort of thing MEPs probably do on away days, anyway) coming to the administration for the first time. If a friendly alien had pitched up on earth this afternoon and read the Foreign Office’s first tranche of Balance of Competences Review reports (clearly the sort of thing any sensible alien would do, after a period of revelling in the labyrinthine beauty and inefficiency of the gov.uk website), what would they think?

The first of reports – there are three more to come – were published this afternoon, delayed, it was claimed, to stop uproar on the Tory backbenches. It’s not difficult to see why this might have been a concern. Our alien chum might reasonably conclude from this batch that things were largely hunky-dory with the balance of power between Britain and Brussels. On taxation, for instance, the report said most respondents felt the current situation was largely the right one, aside from some grumbles about keeping legislation up to date, and the European Court of Justice, which some said had produced rulings which ‘had undermined the sovereignty of member states over their tax systems’.