Make a call in Australia on your sim-only Vodafone mobile from Cairns to Perth – a distance of 2,140 miles – and the price is included in the AU$60 (£27) a month package, which includes “infinite standard national calls”. Oddly enough, Vodafone has an almost identical sim-only, unlimited national calls package for its British customers, also priced at around £27 a month. But if British customers make a call from London to Paris – a mere 213 miles – they pay a lot more. Even if they use Vodafone’s “EuroTraveller Plus” deal, they have to pay £3 a day to use their unlimited calls deal in mainland Europe.
Pricing for cross-border mobile calls and data has always been idiotically high in Europe. It is at its most non-sensical on the Irish border, where if someone in Newry (in Northern Ireland) calls a friend a few miles away in Dundalk (in the Republic), they are charged international rates. But if they ring overseas to London, they are charged standard national rates.
This week the EU finally hammered out a deal with the mobile phone companies to try to clean up this mess. From 2017, new rules should mean the end of mobile roaming charges , and no more holidaymakers returning home to the nightmare of a massive phone bill racked up on their travels.
Some are hailing it as evidence that “this is what being in the EU is all about” and “what we can achieve when Britain plays a leading role in Europe”. They make a decent point. But let’s not get too excited, as it emerged that some clauses in the deal – such as restrictions on frequent travellers – may mean it’s not quite as attractive as claimed.
What’s depressing about the EU deal is how long it has taken to arrive – and for how long European consumers have been overcharged. A report by the OECD in 2013 named Australia as cheapest for mobile deals, with Germany and the Netherlands the priciest, and the UK not far behind. Over the past decade the mobile companies in Europe have made huge profits from cross-border calls and data, and have lobbied forcefully against the end of roaming charges.
Too often, Brussels falls victim to the corporate lobbyists who are now said to equal or even outnumber civil servants in the EU bureaucracy. Estimates of the number of lobbyists, mostly representing business interests, vary from 15,000 to 30,000. And like government ministers in Britain, many of the outgoing EU commissioners exit via the revolving door straight into corporations or other organisations linked to big business.
As someone who is part-English, part-Irish and whose early career was in Madrid, I’m by nature pro-European – but I’m wavering. Has the institution gone from a coming-together-of-nations into a club representing the interests of big business? When the loudest cheerleading for British membership of the EU comes from the Institute of Directors, and the In campaign is led by a big businessman, anybody on the centre or left should start asking questions about who this is for.
The card currently being played by the pro-EU lobby is that we would end up like Norway, with laws faxed to us by Brussels without our say. Apart from the obvious retort – if it’s so awful, why hasn’t Norway joined? – it betrays a naïvety about how EU policy is formulated. Who are the two biggest companies in Europe by market capitalisation? Nestlé and Novartis. Where are they based? In Switzerland, outside the EU. When there are EU directives on the likes of chocolate or pharmaceuticals, these companies will be in Brussels vigorously pushing their interests. If Britain quits the EU, then British companies will simply carry on doing what they and Swiss companies already do – and lobby in Brussels for outcomes that suit them. When the fax comes over, they won’t be too upset, as they helped to write the law.
If the In campaign wants to convince the British to stay, can we please hear less about what’s good for business, and more about what’s good for consumers?
