Brussels fiddles while Rome burns

In a week the UK will have voted to leave the European Union – this is what we have to assume. Britain’s biggest newspaper is backing Brexit and the latest poll gives the Leave campaign a seven point lead – the fifth in a row to put them ahead.

Will Brexit create a domino effect as countries with strong anti-EU parties seek to renegotiate their EU relationship or leave entirely? Quite probably, says a German minister and an authoritative multi-national survey says EU approval ratings have declined steadily to just 51 per cent.

The staff of the European Commission are some of the continents’ finest minds, but what have they done while their edifice teeters? In the spectrum world they have been considering ways of removing power from national governments and giving it to European bodies.

The Commission may make elegant arguments for the economic benefits of perfecting the single market but they are missing the bigger picture. In the survey cited above, just 19 per cent of Europeans wanted to give more power to Brussels.

DG Connect is no different to the other departments of the Commission: it pushes on with measures designed to boost the EU single market regardless of the wider political environment. Brussels may say that is their institutional mission, but someone needs to take a step back and consider the wider effects.

In a increasingly sceptical environment, when the Commission calls for extra powers this doesn’t strengthen the EU project, it damages it.

In our field, public money is being spent examining the benefits of giving the Radio Spectrum Policy Group regulators group new legal powers over spectrum – or even going as far as establishing a new European spectrum regulator. How ridiculous will this look if we wake up on 24 June and discover that the EU’s GDP is nearly 20 per cent smaller thanks to the UK’s exit? Particularly ridiculous, when grand plans like these have stoked the Brexit fires.

Whenever the Commission suggests a diminution of national powers it sends out the message that it isn’t listening to the concerns of the public. It is time for a moratorium on any Commission suggestion which expands centralised power. Whatever the merits of individual proposals, at the moment they are political suicide.