Back in 2013, I wrote a report titled Euro Puppets: The European Commission’s remaking of civil society which gave chapter and verse on the EU's epic funding of NGOs and pressure groups. The UK did this too but the EU's sockpuppetry was on another level. It struck me as a scandal but I didn't expect anything to be done about it and nothing was.
This looked like it would continue forever, but last November the European Commission told NGOs that LIFE, a €5.4 billion slush fund for environmental projects, could no longer be used to lobby the EU. LIFE grants could still be used for “policy briefs or other research papers” and for “workshops, conferences, trainings or awareness raising campaigns”, but if they wanted to hob-nob with policy-makers they would have to do so on their own time. Last week, the German MEP Monika Hohlmeier said that “EU funds must be spent on clearly defined objectives that are in line with EU legislation” and that “we must be able to track the transparency of how the money is spent.”
These are pretty modest requirements when large sums of public money is being given to third parties, but it is a big deal in Brussels where, incredibly, some NGOs have been required to sign an agreement promising to lobby MEPs in order to get their grant. According to an investigation by the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, the European Environmental Bureau, which received €1,955,910 in EU grants last year, “was explicitly tasked with providing at least 16 examples where the European Parliament made green legislation more ambitious thanks to their lobbying efforts.” That is the name of the game with sockpuppet funding. The whole point is to amplify the most extreme voices so that the government’s position looks moderate by comparison.
Needless to say, the prospect of having to use their own money to lobby politicians sent the environmental blob into a frenzy. BirdLife Europe, which received a €460,000 LIFE grant last year, called it “a dangerous challenge to democracy”. The aforementioned European Environmental Bureau yelped that it was an “orchestrated attempt to muzzle democracy” and “reminiscent of many authoritarians’ playbooks”. The director of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) European Policy Programme, which relieved EU institutions of €957,121 last year, said that the handouts were “vital for the survival of a thriving democracy”.
They would, wouldn’t they?
