ON THE LAST DAY OF AUGUST 2016, MARGRETHE Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, caused a minor political earthquake in Dublin. Two years previously the commission had publicly launched an investigation into Apple’s tax affairs in Ireland, suspecting that the country had struck a sweetheart deal with the US technology giant in return for jobs and investment. When the investigation concluded that in 1991 and 2007 Apple had negotiated two separate accords with the Irish Revenue enabling it to avoid paying billions in corporate taxes, the commission ordered the Irish government to recoup €13.1 billion plus interest from Apple. Although the Irish government and Apple both deny wrongdoing and have launched separate appeals, the tech giant eventually paid the Irish state €14.3 billion into an escrow account in 2018.
Vestager had used all the tools at her disposal to take on one of the biggest companies in the world. And by ordering the Irish government to recover the money allegedly bestowed on Apple through state aid, she was employing a template developed by Peter Sutherland when he was competition commissioner.
Sutherland made no public pronouncement on Vestager’s move, but he must have had conflicting thoughts on events. The government felt humiliated, while the decision prompted a furious backlash in Dublin. There had been an expectation that the commission would find against Ireland, but senior government sources had been briefing in the days before the decision was made public that the amount would be in the order of a few hundred million euros, or possibly a maximum of €1 billion.
Nobody, in even the most senior political circles, suspected what the actual amount would be. Enda Kenny, the Fine Gael Taoiseach, made the unprecedented move of attacking Martin Selmayr, the secretary general of the European Commission, at the first EU summit following the Apple decision. The feeling in Dublin was that the Apple decision was the opening salvo in a broader and potentially much more dangerous offensive by the commission, and that the target was Ireland’s corporate tax regime.
Ever since corporate tax in Ireland had been lowered to 12.5 per cent in the early 1990s, it had been a lightning rod for disaffection on the part of other member states. The view was that Ireland’s corporate tax regime fostered unfair competition and had facilitated very aggressive tax planning among US multinationals. It was an argument that Sutherland had repeatedly dismissed. Ireland’s low corporate tax and business-friendly regulatory regime chimed with his broader vision for Europe. Two months before the European Commission’s decision on Apple, the UK had voted to leave the European Union. Both events reflected the evolution of the bloc over the previous three decades.
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When Sutherland officially took up his position as European commissioner for competition in January 1985, the UK government was trying to create, rather than exit the single market. The Treaty of Rome had been signed in 1957, yet twenty-eight years later it had failed to deliver in its efforts to create a common market. The EU at that stage was a single economic zone in theory only. Individual member states still retained their own internal barriers to trade. The UK had become impatient with the potential economic benefits that were being squandered because of national and sectoral self-interest.
It underlined the differences in approach to European integration. The UK saw the EU purely in transactional terms, as a convenient market on its doorstep. Mainland European member states, particularly France and Germany, had a much deeper emotional attachment. Their watchword was the forging of closer ties between countries that had twice in that century plunged the continent into war. Ireland’s enthusiasm for EU membership lay somewhere between the two. It was an underdeveloped country desperately looking for economic patronage. But it was also looking to overcome its dependence on the UK.
Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, sent Lord Arthur Cockfield to Brussels in 1985 to drive the establishment of the internal market. She trusted Cockfield, who was dour and dependable, but most importantly had a reputation for being mildly Eurosceptic. Her rationale was that he would not stray outside the strict remit she had given him of creating a single market for British goods. The following passage is taken from a British government paper prepared at the time of Cockfield’s departure for Brussels:
The Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community (EEC) on 1 January 1958, had as its objective the creation of a common market through the elimination of internal trade barriers between Member States. The free movement of goods was to be accompanied by the free movement of persons, services and capital as the ‘four freedoms’. Despite the subsequent removal of tariff barriers, the free movement of goods and services continued to be hampered by non-tariff barriers such as national technical rules governing products and the requirement for service providers to comply with a wide range of national regulations in each Member State. Anti-competitive practices such as the use of state aid also continued. These barriers meant that the common market continued to exist in name only.
In March 1985, the European Council approved the aim of creating a fully fledged internal market and asked the commission to prepare a programme and timetable for implementation. A white paper, Completing the Internal Market, proposed by Cockfield was published in June 1985. It detailed 300 legislative proposals, including measures to eliminate a series of physical, technical and fiscal non-tariff barriers. The approach was given added impetus with the signing of the Single European Act in February 1986. As well as setting a deadline for the completion of the single market by 31 December 1992, the Act made Council decision making more effective by introducing qualified majority voting (QMV), removing the requirement for unanimity in some areas which had previously hindered the adoption of legislation. Alongside the greater use of the principle of mutual recognition, which enabled member states to recognise the rules of another member state, rather than a strict reliance upon the harmonisation of national rules, this allowed the EEC to overcome bottlenecks and make progress in completing the single market. For the first time the European Parliament also became involved in the legislative process through the co-operation procedure.
Unfettered competition was the sine qua non of the internal market, and that is why so much hinged on Sutherland. Competition had always been a powerful portfolio, but previous commissioners, mostly for political reasons, had rarely exercised its powers. Albert Borschette had been Commissioner for Competition from 1970 to 1976. Even by the drab standards that prevailed at the time, Borschette was seen as particularly grey and uninspiring. The competition commissioner briefs the European Parliament once a year on developments in the portfolio. Elections to the European Parliament started in 1977, but before then member states nominated candidates to sit in the Parliament. John Prescott, the firebrand Labour MP for Hull who was to become deputy leader of the party under Tony Blair, and who infamously engaged in a physical altercation with a protester before the UK general election in 2001, sat on the Economic Affairs Committee of the European Parliament at the time. Following Prescott’s unsparing style, a number of members savaged Borschette during the commissioner’s appearance before the committee on 8 December 1976. Borschette felt unwell during the bruising encounter and asked to leave the committee room to take a break; having done so, he promptly collapsed of a heart attack and died.
‘If you read the Treaty of Rome, the chapters on competition are extremely developed,’ says Pascal Lamy. And the reason for that was when the Treaty of Rome was being negotiated, Germany had been heavily brainwashed by the Americans and the Brits. So, at the time, the Germans wanted a very precise, legal structure in order to root the principle of a firm competition policy. And Peter Sutherland pushed on the accelerator with the consent of Delors.’
From 1957 onwards, competition had largely been a fiefdom controlled by the core member states. These countries recognised the potential impact of competition; as Lamy says, ‘The reality is that from 1957 to 1985, the potential of the competition portfolio was not used.’ The process of pivoting the EU towards a more fluid internal market involved many politically sensitive steps, the foremost of these being the removal of state aid. Some governments used state aid for economic purposes to prop up industries that were no longer viable but were seen as strategically important, while others used it for overtly political purposes to support sectors or regions that would deliver an electoral advantage in return. In some cases the removal of state aid would lead to the collapse of companies, and inevitably thereafter to job losses.
A social dimension to European integration was therefore required, as there had to be a safety net for the workers and regions affected. Structural funds were the commission’s answer. Ireland, which in the 1980s was one of the poorest member states, benefited significantly from structural investment.
Member states had always been obliged to notify the commission when they intended to extend state aid, but it was seen as a formality that permission would be granted. In many cases governments went ahead with state aid programmes well before they had received formal approval. In some cases, no formal application was ever made. According to Claus-Dieter Ehlermann, director general of the legal service of the European Commission when Sutherland became commissioner, state aid was not a politically sensitive issue, or something that gave member states undue concern. ‘Member states were not too fussed about getting formal authorisation because it was seen as a noble cause not to allow workers to lose their jobs. The percentage of state aid cases approved of which the commission were told was very small.’ That, says Ehlermann, changed under Sutherland, who insisted that any such aid that had not been given approval was paid back to the state.
The scale of the challenge facing Sutherland was formidable. Dutchman Frans Andriessen had been in charge of competition in the previous regime, but according to Ehlermann ‘he didn’t get very far. He didn’t have the stamina to fight for a decision which obliged the member state to claim the money back [from the recipient].’
How Sutherland would fare as a commissioner hinged on his relationship with Jacques Delors. The Frenchman was sixty-two when he took over as president of the commission. Having been an MEP between 1979 and 1981, he had spent the following three years as French Minister for Finance. A committed socialist, he had spent his entire career in the public sector. He had a formidable reputation – he was not known for suffering fools gladly, he placed a great deal of heft in his own opinions and he was immensely headstrong – but very few would argue that he wasn’t the right person to take over the commission in 1985. At that stage, people were rightly questioning the role of the EU. Without a properly functioning single market, it would never be able to deliver the economic benefits which were the most compelling argument for European integration.
Bold decisions needed to be taken. Although he was perhaps tin-eared to political sensitivities, Delors had never publicly shied away from a fight. It is one of the great ironies of European politics that in 1985, Margaret Thatcher was one of the most vocal champions of the single market and the ambitious reform programme of the Delors Commission. Yet the Frenchman’s decision to speak at the British Trade Union Congress in 1988, where he pledged robust labour laws for member states, was probably the starting point in the Brexit debate. Delors’ intervention prompted a furious backlash from Thatcher, whose speech in Bruges on 20 September 1988 became a bible for Eurosceptics.
At the outset, Sutherland and Delors seemed like uneasy bedfellows. According to Lamy there was a very interesting subtext to their relationship. ‘Irish politics doesn’t work right or left. There are many other components and both men had something in common, which is that they were Catholic. Delors never raised his Catholic belief anywhere, but it has had an influence on his particular way of thinking. That is true of Peter as well.’ But, adds Lamy, in terms of politics, Sutherland leaned towards the right, while Delors was more a man of the left.
Catherine Day agrees, saying that the relationship between Sutherland and Delors was complex and at times very fraught. ‘They both had enormous respect for each other, but they differed in their political philosophies; Delors was coming from the trade union left and Peter was very much a Christian democrat in the European sense. He very much oriented towards markets being allowed to do their thing.’ When it came to issues like state aid, Sutherland’s approach was quite strict; his view was that a lot of state aid was wasted money. ‘He didn’t agree that it was a sort of compensatory mechanism which didn’t have consequences. Whereas Delors thought of state aid as necessary in cases where Peter did not. So they had clashes, but I think Peter saw the opportunity, sized it up pretty quickly and went for it.’
At the first meeting of the Delors Commission, it was obvious that the president had one eye on the history books. There was a woman seated at a table at the back of the room. When one of the commissioners asked what her role was, Delors said she was there to catalogue every detail of what took place.
During his first week in office, Sutherland forensically went through the Treaty of Rome, demonstrating the ability to master a brief that according to former colleagues in the Law Library was one of his most impressive attributes. He then considered all the European Court of Justice rulings that had been made on competition, which provided him with a roadmap of what he could and could not do. Until the mid-1980s, the commission had been interpreting the rules on competition in ways that were politically expedient. Coming from a small, poor country, Sutherland had a very strong view that Ireland could never compete with the kind of subsidies offered by the larger member states. When the college of commissioners convened for the first time, Sutherland therefore had a very clear idea of what he wanted to achieve. He also knew that it would pit him against Delors and many of his fellow commissioners. If he was to prevail then he would have to lay down a marker.
The first item on the agenda presented the perfect opportunity. Andriessen, the Commissioner for Agriculture, read out a few lines about the commission’s policy on milk quotas. When Delors sought to wave it through, Sutherland objected. He felt there had been insufficient time to review such an important policy. Delors gave him two minutes to make his case. Sutherland took twenty minutes, concluding that in deference to the president he would stop there, before demanding that a vote should be taken. He lost narrowly, but the other commissioners sat up and took notice. ‘He made his mark from the word go,’ says Eugene Regan.
Agriculture was the setting of many of Sutherland’s more interesting tussles as commissioner. The way the system worked was that Ireland would be offered a concession, say on milk quotas, and the UK would object. Ireland would eventually be granted the concession, which enabled Irish farmers to produce more milk than the official quota, and the UK would insist that Northern Ireland farmers be allowed the same. However, on the first such occasion, the British government took the concession earmarked for Northern Ireland farmers and spread it throughout the UK. After the Northern Ireland Farmers Union went to Sutherland to protest, he made several representations to Andriessen, who turned the screw on the British government. Eventually London relented and the concession for Northern Irish farmers was restored. According to Regan, the head of the Northern Ireland Farmers Union, which would have been a heavily Unionist organisation, told Sutherland that they saw him as ‘their commissioner’.
Sutherland soon developed a reputation among the commissioners, and before long he was being noticed more widely. It was a tussle with the French that brought him to the attention of the media. France had been operating a system whereby it would give interest-free loans to cereal producers who were exporting to the Egyptian market. The French government extended this to all agriculture products destined for Egypt; the country had always been a big market for Irish beef, and the French support strategy was seen as an interference with competition policy. Sutherland managed to secure a proposal to bring France to the European Court over the scheme. Having gone through a few committees, it finally went to the commission – at which Delors was not present – for a vote. There was a show of hands, and all hands shot up in favour of taking France to court.
Delors would meet the French media every Wednesday for a lunchtime briefing, but he failed to appear on the day of the vote, and his fellow French commissioner, Claude Cheysson, deputised. Cheysson was furious with Sutherland and called him ‘Le petit shérif’. On the back of the French broadside, the Financial Times ran a prominent story on Sutherland.
In the first year of the Delors Commission it was not unusual for meetings to go on all day. Neither was it uncommon for Delors to have too many drinks at lunchtime, which made afternoon sessions colourful and sometimes turbulent affairs. Catherine Day reports that at times, Delors would let his frustrations get the better of him, and would lash out at various commissioners he believed were underperforming. On more than one occasion Delors singled out Grigoris Varfis for the hairdryer treatment. Among the many less than affectionate terms he used included ‘glorified Greek innkeeper’.
Sutherland tried to intervene on a number of occasions in an effort to defuse the situation. ‘Delors would say “I’m not talking about you, Peter, you are a man of principle,” recalls Day. ‘He put him into a different category,’ she adds, ‘he clearly respected Peter.’
The personal relationship between Delors and Sutherland was not the only factor that would determine the success of the competition portfolio. Delors’ cabinet and Sutherland’s would also need to develop a good working relationship. According to Day, that relationship was harder to bed down. ‘But we kept pushing. We thought if we could have a long meeting with Delors and his cabinet we could explain where we were coming from. They were very resistant to it but eventually they agreed and we were convinced they did this deliberately. They always felt superior, that they were harder-working than anybody else.’ And so, she says, they deliberately picked the Friday morning or the Saturday of the typical Brussels bank holiday, which lasted from Thursday to Sunday, saying they would be available for such a meeting. ‘It was a way of saying that we don’t take holidays, we are working. We felt they were daring us to say oh well, it’s a bank holiday weekend so we can’t. So we gritted our teeth and said of course we will be there.’
Sutherland’s first major skirmish with Delors was over the car industry. In 1985 the German government had introduced fiscal advantages for clean energy cars, whereupon Renault, Peugeot and Citroën complained because they felt they had ceded an unfair advantage to the Germans. Feeling that the environmental benefits outweighed the level of aid, Sutherland decided not to take a state aid procedure, on the basis that the French were free to introduce a similar system and there was no constraint on them doing so if they wished. There was a tussle with Delors, who was sensitive about anything to do with France. When a vote was held in the commission, Sutherland won.
He then took on the Germans. The case was an investment subsidy for an industrial facility which Sutherland deemed was an unnecessary waste of public money. But it was politically important because the prime minister of Baden-Württemberg, where the facility was located, was a key ally of Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The move did not go down well in Berlin, but Sutherland stuck to his guns.
Next came his first skirmish with London, when Sutherland took the view that support extended by the British government to the textile industry contravened state aid rules. At a meeting with Norman Lamont, the UK Minister of State for Trade and Industry, Sutherland argued that he was creating a level playing field; his intention was not only to remove such aid from the UK textile industry, but to target similar support in other member states. Lamont accepted his argument.
With a few early victories under his belt, and with Delors’ backing, Sutherland set his sights on much bigger prizes. At the time, there was a paucity of competition in airlines, energy and telecoms; the three sectors that most affected the lives of Europe’s citizens were mostly dominated by state-controlled monopolies. Sutherland went about breaking up these cartels. For example, the national airlines of member states had been allowed to set the price of plane tickets between countries. By 1987, he had not only removed restrictions that enabled governments to protect national carriers by blocking the introduction of low fares, but successfully encouraged new entrants to the market. He thereby put the necessary building blocks in place for the creation of the single aviation market, which was completed in 1992.
Opening national markets and creating an EU single aviation market spurred competition, providing more routes and more destinations to places in the EU and further afield. According to the European Commission’s factsheet on aviation, today there are almost eight times as many routes as there were in 1992, giving the consumer more choice and ensuring more places are connected regularly. A good example is Dublin airport, where the number of intra-EU routes grew from 36 in 1992 to 127 in 2016. Consumer demand has driven the continued expansion of new routes. In 2015 for example, almost 920 million passengers passed through 450 EU airports, nearly three times more than in 1992. In addition, smaller regional airports continue to expand, helping to contribute to more balanced economic growth in all parts of the EU.
Perhaps the most tangible evidence of the dismantling of state control of aviation is the emergence of Ryanair – in the late 1980s a one-pilot operation – as the largest airline in the EU and one of the biggest in the world. Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s colourful chief executive, is not known for holding politicians or public servants in high regard. In fact, most of the time his relationship with politicians would be similar to that between a dog and a lamppost. Sutherland was one of the very few exceptions. In a 2017 interview with the Irish Times, O’Leary credited Sutherland with reforms in the airline sector: ‘Peter Sutherland drove all of this in the face of massive opposition from the German and French flag carriers, who did everything in their power to stop him. It’s very much an Irish success story in Europe. It broke up the flag-carrying monopolies and ushered in competition.’[1]
O’Leary pointed out that Ryanair would be unlikely to exist without Sutherland’s intervention. Europe’s open skies regime allows an airline registered in one member state to operate freely throughout the bloc. ‘In 1987 Ryanair had no passengers. This year we will have 130 million. We’re an Irish airline but we are the world’s biggest international airline by passenger numbers.’
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When Sutherland also blocked the merger of British Airways and its smaller rival British Caledonian, as well as the Rover takeover of Leyland in the car sector, the two cases received full headline treatment across the UK media. In many ways they highlighted tensions between the UK and the EU that would fester for thirty years and would ultimately lead the country to leave.
Even though Margaret Thatcher was an unalloyed supporter of free markets, she was not averse to depicting Sutherland as a potentate impinging on UK sovereignty when he cited her government for anti-competitive practices. She was particularly incensed over his ruling on Rover, as he described in a speech he gave at Gresham College in 2011:
At the time I was Commissioner for Competition, and I remember one day shaving in my house in Brussels and listening to the news, and there was a G5 meeting taking place in Toronto. I had been a rather turbulent priest in Brussels as well as in Dublin, and I had blocked the British Rover takeover and I had also been rather difficult over the merger of the Scottish airline – Caledonian and BA. Mrs Thatcher had not enjoyed this, and she was asked something about interest rates on the radio, and as I was shaving, she said, ‘Oh, I do not want to talk about interest rates,’ she said, ‘I want to talk about that man in Brussels!’ and of course, I am afraid it was me!
I had the revenge of at least being able to laugh at the following situation. When she came to give her famous Bruges speech, which was the denunciation of all things European, she gave it in the European University Institute in Bruges. It was in a very ancient hall, and the Rector of the University was a German, who was very much a European integrationist, and when she finished her speech, out of four speakers in the hall came the blaring movement of ‘Ode to Joy’, the European national anthem. Mrs Thatcher, immediately, with her Ambassador, jumped to attention with everybody else, she thinking, as it transpired, that she was standing to the Belgian national anthem whereas, the rest of us, with tears rolling down our face, were standing to the European national anthem.[2]
One senior EU official who was in the commission the same time as Sutherland says that he was successful because he was able to articulate his policies very clearly to other commissioners. His rationale was not that he was taking an anti-French view or an anti-German view, or that he had any agenda other than ensuring there was fair competition across the region. After initial resistance the other commissioners, and by extension other member states, would grow to trust and respect him.
Eugene Regan describes Sutherland as a force of nature in the commission. So well briefed was he not just on his own area but on most issues that the commission was dealing with, says Regan, that he shaped the entire commission agenda.
‘None of the commissioners since have tried to row back on what Peter achieved, so it was a clear victory for Peter and for neoliberal thinking,’ says Ehlermann. ‘I got on very well with him. I remember one disagreement between him and me, which was rare. We had a very delicate case where Directorate General (DG) for competition and legal services were not on the same wavelength initially on the extent to which competition law limits intellectual property copyright. I don’t know why, but he was emotionally on the side of an Irish newspaper.’
The case Ehlermann is referring to related to Magill magazine and concerned the copyright on TV listings. Back then, if a newspaper wanted to publish TV listings, it had to get permission from each individual broadcaster, on the basis that broadcasters had exclusive rights to their listings. Vincent Browne, the editor of Magill, started publishing the listings without permission. The Irish courts held that the broadcasters did indeed own the copyright on their own listings and found against Magill. The magazine took its complaint to the European Commission, and was successful: the commission found that this was an abuse of their dominant position by the broadcasters and they must license their listings.
Ehlermann comments of Sutherland’s approach to the case: ‘He thought that in that case the use of copyright was abusive. It was the sort of copyright that should never have been granted, but largely that is a matter for a member state and not the commission. The only lever was competition law. I found that to be interfering with intellectual property rights, because it is property, and we were opening up a Pandora’s box.’
Nial Fennelly says he remembers discussing the case with Sutherland when he returned from Brussels. Fennelly stated that Sutherland didn’t pay much attention to the copyright law in the Magill case. Sutherland agreed. Fennelly remembers, ‘I always thought that personified Peter. He knew what the outcome should be and he just went for it’
Dermot Desmond was the driving force behind the creation of the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC), a specially designated zone with tax incentives to attract financial services companies, in Dublin in the 1980s. He persuaded Charlie Haughey to back a proposal to establish the IFSC, and it became part of government strategy. But first it had to get clearance from Brussels. The decision was considered by the commission to see whether it involved state aid. The Irish corporate tax rate of 12.5 per cent was not considered to be state aid since it was the general tax regime and applied to all corporations. However, if applied on a selective basis, say to one region or sector, then it would be state aid. After examining the situation, the commission agreed that the inclusion of all financial companies in the 12.5 per cent rate was not sufficiently selective to be state aid, and so Ireland was free to go ahead. Sutherland effectively gave the IFSC the green light.
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The first pillar of competition policy is the removal of illegal state aid. The second pillar of competition policy is anti-trust legislation. Sutherland had developed a comprehensive legislative framework on mergers and acquisitions. Margaret Thatcher had meanwhile grown increasingly disillusioned with Lord Cockfield, accusing him of going native. Even though it was expected that he would serve two terms, he was called back to London after four years and replaced by Leon Brittan – although Thatcher also quickly turned on Brittan. The final touches and formal approval of merger legislation occurred under Brittan, who was to succeed Sutherland as commissioner.
Leon Brittan had been elected as a Conservative MP in 1974 and while serving as British Home Secretary in the mid-1980s, he took a hard-line approach during the miners’ strike. He had originally been close to Thatcher, though she lost confidence in him because of his underwhelming media performances. He was moved from the Home Office to Secretary of State for Trade, before being shunted off to Brussels in 1989.
Ehlermann says it was extremely interesting to compare the two men. ‘I would say Sutherland was a total success. Leon was a peculiar product of neoliberal thinking in theory, but while Peter always remained pragmatic and knew when to stop, Leon did not. I don’t think Peter ever had any problem with his colleagues. Leon had. He was too doctrinaire, too ideological. Peter was much more collegiate. Sutherland did not have any case to decide on mergers because legislation was not approved until he left. But he struck the essential compromise. He raised the threshold on whether the matter remained the concern of a member state or whether it should be decided by the commission. That was a very important breakthrough. His main legacy is really a credible and sustainable fight against state aid. In anti-trust, he had an important contribution, but not as important as his fight against state aid.’
This is how Sutherland concluded his 2011 speech on his time at the commission:
I remember that day in Chez Edgar when Jacques Delors said to me, with a wry smile, that, as a theme for this first Commission, we would have a very specific one – we were going to try to create a functioning internal market of free movement of goods, persons, capital and services by 1992. He said that one of the strongest advocates of this, for once, if I may say so, on the positive side of the argument vis-à-vis Europe, was the United Kingdom, which is why it appealed to him as an idea. It appealed to the United Kingdom because it was the crystallisation of a pragmatic, rather than an airy-fairy ideal, as some of the European thinking is often described. This was something practical and something that fitted in with the British concern about free markets and the opening of markets.
I think that Jacques Delors had a somewhat different intention to that expressed at that time by Lady Thatcher, or Mrs Thatcher as she was, because he recognised, and I remember him saying it to me, almost in a conspiratorial way, that the only way that you could ever have an internal market was by having more European legislation, and the only way you could have more European legislation, binding member states, was by having more majority voting. If you had majority voting, which could outvote individual member states, you were attacking the very core of national sovereignty, which is exactly what Jacques Delors intended to do, and, ultimately, it became apparent that he was right.
That was driving him to a view, not merely that European integration was desirable, but that the more you could have sharing of sovereignty and the voting across the interests of individual member states by majority voting, the more you would get that integration.[3]
As Sutherland was quick to point out, it could be seen as ironic that the Single European Act, which provided for that majority voting, was adopted during the time of Margaret Thatcher.
Sutherland’s success as a commissioner was a double-edged sword for Britain’s membership of the bloc. On the one hand, his drive to create an efficient, competitive single market chimed with Thatcher’s vision of European integration. On the other hand, he was responsible for increasing the importance of the commission – which was ultimately one of the driving forces behind Brexit.