| Faced with allegations of impropriety, the European Parliament has acted decisively. It recently emerged that many MEPs were in the habit of claiming their €268 daily attendance allowance without actually spending the day in Brussels. One of my British colleagues was photographed signing the attendance register at 7.30 am, and then immediately going home to his constituency.
The parliamentary authorities have been quick to respond: from now on, journalists and photographers will be barred from most of the building, allowing members to clock in in peace.
Meanwhile, MEPs are quietly increasing their other expenses. A few weeks ago, our secretarial allowance was raised by €2000 a month. It now stands at €14,865 – enough to employ a genuine secretary, and a researcher too, and still have over €100,000 a year left over for your wife. I am embarrassed to say that the habit of hiring family members is especially widespread among British MEPs, almost all of whom have immediate relatives on their payroll. A French colleague once asked me: “What is it about you English? You employ your wives and you sleep with your staff”.
Then there is the extraordinary system of travel reimbursement, whereby we are paid the equivalent of a full fare, plus an additional mileage allowance, whatever the actual cost of our ticket. If you are prepared to use low budget airlines, you can easily trouser another €1000 a week – tax free, of course, because it counts as expenses rather than income.
This comes on top of the so-called “general expenses” allowance, recently raised to €3785 a month. This is notionally to pay for petrol, postage and the like, but is never audited, and is often paid directly into members’ current accounts – again, tax-free. All these allowances are in addition to our formal salaries.
Why am I telling you this? It certainly won’t make me any friends. Indeed, by writing this article, I am more or less guaranteeing that the parliamentary authorities will trump up some allegation against me.
But I feel that, before we hand substantial new competences to Brussels, we ought to stop and look at how it is exercising the powers it already has. If this is how the EU administers itself, are we wise in entrusting it with control over foreign policy, policing, immigration and so on? If MEPs cannot clean up their own finances, are they the right people to assume the huge new powers bestowed on them by the European Constitution?
Such questions are rarely asked because the EU enjoys that most precious of political commodities, the benefit of the doubt. The fact that it is meant to embody the ideal of peace among nations makes people reluctant to look too hard at how it operates in practice. Carping about corruption seems petty-minded next to the rhetoric in the Treaties about ending war and spreading human rights. The trouble is that, rather as has happened at the United Nations, this attitude has encouraged a level of malpractice that we would never tolerate in an elected national government.
The exception is Britain, where the EU has never enjoyed the benefit of the doubt, and consequently is exposed to the same media scrutiny as any other organisation. Eurocrats, who are unaccustomed to criticism, go purple with anger when they talk about the British tabloids, which they accuse of printing a series of lies in order to discredit the European project.
There is, if I am honest, some justification for their anger. From time to time, British papers do indeed publish one-sided stories about Brussels. But the converse point is never made, namely that the EU is treated with extraordinary deference by most Continental newspapers. This, in the long-run, has been more damaging to it than the hostility of the British tabloids, since it has fostered an attitude of complacent self-righteousness in Brussels. If this column helps to puncture that complacency, I shall be doing the Eurocrats a favour; but I don’t expect their thanks.
Daniel Hannan is a British Conservative MEP. In the future, he will write fortnightly for "Die Welt". |
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