The claim is that very few people are employed by the EU, relative to the size and responsibility of the organisation. The claim is often made that the Commission employs fewer officials than any large British local authority.

As far back as 1975, Margaret Thatcher herself used this argument, pointing out that there were 'only 7000 officials' working for the Commission, mainly in Brussels. In later years, this number has crept up to 'only 15,000 officials', then 'only 18,000', then 'only 22,000', then 'only 25,000'.

It is true the number creeps inexorably upwards. But to see only these officials as the totality of the employed staff in the EU is completely to miss the nature of the way the EU is structured.

The point about 'Brussels' is that it acts as a nexus. It is the centre of a network, linking organisations throughout the Community, not least the civil services of all the member states, to the extent that -- in all but name -- a substantial proportion of the civil servants of member states are in fact EU employees, in that they are tasked, wholly or mainly, with enforcing EU law.

Furthermore, on any given day in Brussels there are not only the officials of the Commission itself but also thousands of visiting national civil servants, from every country in the EU, all in one way or another engaged on 'building the Community'.

Add to those the tens of thousands more at work in their national capitals, all participating in what has become the most complex legislative machine ever known, and you have a 'machine' of gigantic proportions.

This point has been acknowledged by Mrs Thatcher in her book Statecraft, published in 2002.

She notes that the figure given for the Commission staff -- which by then had increased to 30,000 -- 'leaves out the much larger number of national officials whose tasks flow from European regulations'. (London: Harper Collins, p. 324.)

Furthermore, while not directly comparable, there are plenty of historical examples of very small numbers of people dominating large populations, not least the British Raj. At the end of Queen Victoria's reign, 300 million Indians were ruled by barely 1,500 British administrators of the Indian Civil Service, and perhaps 3,000 British officers in the Indian Army.

Excluding British soldiers, there were probably no more than 20,000 Britons engaged in running the whole country -- fewer than the number of permanent officials currently employed by the Commission. (Dennis Judd, Empire: The British Imperial Experience From 1765 To The Present, [London: Harper Collins, 1996], pp. 79-80.)

The point about the Raj is that 'local labour' was used to do the day-to-day administration, just as is the case with the EU.

The Commission also makes widespread use of academic institutes to assist in the drafting of legislation, adding thousands to what amounts to a 'hidden' payroll. This is a doubly useful device, since contracts are often issued under the 'research' budget, which automatically compels member states to contribute 'co-funding'.

By this means, not only is the Community able to increase its spending at the expense of member state taxpayers but it is also able to call on the services of a much larger workforce than is represented by its own employees.

Similarly, much of the technical harmonising legislation is now drafted by European standards institutes, particularly CEN (Comité Européen de Normalisation). Because these are funded mainly by national institutes and governments, this also provides the Community's integration process with an extensive hidden subsidy.

And now we have the many agencies being established by the Commission, all with their own staffs, none of which appear on the official Commission payroll. These also have their own income stream, from fees charged directly to the people who are regulated by them, creating another hidden subsidy.

The number of people directly or indirectly employed by these agencies is not known, but this is a highly fruitful area for further study, especially as the EU agencies instruct and co-ordinate the activities of the various national agencies which perform in the same fields, effectively acting as national 'branch offices' for the central (EU) agencies.

Furthermore, Sovereignty would add that we need to consider the amount of extra work to which our own local government is subjected by the EU. English "Regional Assemblies" could increase that workload even more.
Maybe the number of British civil servants wouldn't be so great if they didn't have so many petty EU Directives and Regulations to implement!

Lindsay Jenkins, author of The Last Days of Britain and Britain held Hostage (see www.lindsayjenkins.com), has also said on this same subject :
"The civil service argument is false. It is as false as the peace argument. Approximately 30,000 work for the EU Commission. The Commission has also deliberately taken over the civil services of all Member States in part. This is a long standing policy first devised in the late 1940s so that the huge Empire could be run without having a commensurate number of civil servants in one place, unwieldy and highly visible. From the outset in 1957, Brussels arranged for tours of Brussels for civil servants followed by joint committees to encourage the Brussels mind set. There are now over 300 such committees, described as comitology, and they were the subject of a House Of Lords Select Committee report in February 1999. Indeed you can crudely measure the erosion of national sovereignty by the number of joint committees within each British government ministry. Those ministries which are to all intents and purposes totally within Brussels control have the most committees."