THE EU HAS CHOOSEN not to cut back on its spending like the various nation states that make up the union, but rather, to increase it. As far as Britain is concerned this means having to pay an extra £600 million into the wasteful coffers of the EU.
We have been told that this amount has to be paid regardless of the feelings of the people in Britain who are paying it. For, like all other laws and regulations made and administered by the unelected commissioners and civil servants in Europe, our government can only nod its ascent without even questioning the amount.
Commissioners, MEPs, and civil servants will be the main beneficiaries of this increase, in the form of enhanced pay and pensions.
All representatives of the EU are fast becoming a European oligarchy answerable to nobody; this is because national governments have given away so many of their powers that the people of Europe are beginning to question whether there is much point in electing what is fast becoming sterile national parliaments, whose lawmakers are increasingly having to look over their shoulders to Brussels before legislating.
If the EU managed to spend the people’s money wisely and judiciously, then at least they could find an argument for keeping the whole show on the road. But sadly, politicians and civil servants overseeing the European continent have an unconvincing record on spending our money that cannot be equalled, even by national governments.
At least the people have the ability to change national governments. The European commissioners on the other hand, are literally a law unto themselves. A commissioner has a salary and expenses envied by those who had to take to the stump and win the support of the people in an election. They are then rewarded with an equally generous public pension. At least the City bankers create prosperity, pay generous taxes, and are not reliant upon a percentage of the working man and women’s monthly salary to pay their wages and finance their retirement.
IT IS TO THE EU’S eternal shame that the continents’ auditors have produced16 years of critical reports into the way European finances are spent and managed. Of a budget that in 2009 totalled £102 billion, £94 billion was “materially affected” by irregularities according to the auditors. Irregularities that included the one reported by the Daily Telegraph of spending £350,000 “improving the lifestyle and living standards of dogs” in Hungary.
Now there is no greater animal lover than myself, but I am left wondering whether, in the first instance, this money should have ever been given to such a cause; and secondly, whether this money actually found its way to such a cause. For there is another issue regarding European spending. This is, just how much of the money ends up where it is intended to go and attends to its described purpose?
All sorts of financial shenanigans have corrupted the EU. When billions of public money are handed over to EU politicians and bureaucratic place men to distribute as is their want, without accountability to national governments: under rules that can be ignored completely or, in extremis, deliberately bent or, more subtly finessed.
Corruption is a dirty word and requires hard evidence to substantiate it. But the auditors found “systemic weaknesses” and a high proportion of “quantifiable errors” meaning, according to today’s Daily Telegraph, “irregular payments, in 214 audited transactions of agriculture and rural development subsidies”. In one incident, according to the same source, “the same sheep were counted for two different farmers". According to the president of the Court of Auditors, Vitor Manuel da Silva Caldeira, "Errors come mainly from incorrect claims for payment and public procurement errors."
Of the £102 billion EU budget quoted above, the agricultural part of the budget comprised £48.5 billion in 2009. It is in this area, and, in the main, in southern European countries, where many of the abuses occur. It is the region where most of the EU budget is spent: and it is in those same regions where help is being sought from the rest of the EU and the IMF to help repair their deficits. First of all Greece and then Ireland made a claim for financial help from other European countries within the Euro zone to relieve their deficits. The next in line for such an arrangement are reported to be Portugal, Spain and, in extremis, Italy.
Many Eurosceptic MPs in this country warned against the implementation of a single currency, but, in a display of rapturous idealism, the continent went ahead anyway - there were even politicians within this country who wanted us to join a single currency at the time.
Now the most successful and wealthiest country in Europe has been put upon to help bail out those countries that should never have been part of a single country in the first place. Germany is now shouldering most of the financial demand as a consequence of introducing a single currency for the whole of Europe, instead of a two track system supported by many at the time.
THE BUDGETARY INCREASE DEMANDED by Europe to its annual budget totals a further £5.5 billion in extra spending, and the EU will get whatever it demands from national governments as national governments become mere cantons within the continent of Europe. This, I fear, is what the main parties in this country have long since wanted - a United States of Europe; a cornucopia of idealism that is meant to wipe away the memory of all European wars and leave us resplendent in our European brotherhood on a continent made up of milk and honey.
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