Brussels: more snouts, bigger troughs........

The excellent Open Europe pressure group (www.openeurope.org.uk) reports that MEPs have voted overwhelmingly for a 5% rise in the EU's budget for 2014-2020, an end to national rebates, and the introduction of EU taxes. The Telegraph notes that, under the plans, Britain will have to pay an extra £5.2bn in contributions to the EU between 2014 and 2020. Open Europe’s Research Director Stephen Booth is quoted saying, “Until the EU budget is spent in a rational and sensible way, there cannot be any increases. Radically reducing the amount of money spent on the European Parliament and its 736 MEPs would be an excellent place to start.”

The UK has called for a budget freeze, while France and Germany have called for any increases to be limited in line with inflation. Guy Verhofstadt MEP, the former Belgian Prime Minister and leader of the European Liberal Democrats, said that if “Her Majesty’s Government wants to make savings in the British public sector, it can do so by increasing the role of the EU…If the British government wants to make savings it can join the euro.”

 

 

Obnoxious squirt; Belgium doesn’t even have a Government. (It was General de Gaulle who famously said that Belgium was invented by the British to annoy the French. Which was historically correct!

 

 

A comment piece in Handelsblatt by EU correspondent Thomas Ludwig criticises MEPs’ demands for a 5% increase in the next long-term EU budget, noting: "It's like a reflex of Pavlov: when it comes to money, only the word ‘more’ can be heard from the mouth of the MEPs.” Carla Joosten writes in Elsevier that “the wasteful mentality of the European Parliament is feeding euroscepticism.”

 

 

Meanwhile, a separate article in the Telegraph reports that the European Parliament still refuses to release the internal ‘Galvin report, number 06/02’, despite Tuesday’s ruling by the EU’s General Court that that there is "overriding public interest in disclosure". The report, written by Robert Galvin the European Parliament’s chief internal auditor, uncovered abuse of £185m in MEP staffing allowances and general expenses, paid without receipts.