Greediest snouts in the EU trough
Not sure how to vote? Read about the stinking wealth and hypocrisy of those Brussels fat cats the Kinnocks and it may help you decide!
This week you might be forgiven for thinking that a wellknown political dynasty was all that stood between Britain and disaster. You simply could not escape them, or their alarmist rhetoric. if we vote to leave the EU, they argue, we will have chosen ‘devastation and destruction’.
Take the family patriarch for example. sporting a bizarre combination of dark glasses and a beige mac, the ageing windbag told a youth rally in London that the promises of the Brexit campaign were ‘pants’, ‘pure fantasy’ and ‘didn’t add up’. Clearly, the years have done nothing to diminish his verbosity.
Meanwhile, the formidable clan matriarch was urging female voters to consider the benefits she says EU legislation has afforded their gender.
in Westminster, meanwhile, the couple’s enigmatic son and heir was threatening what sounded like a parliamentary coup in which MPs will effectively ignore a win for Brexit if the British public has the temerity to vote against the family’s wish.
All in all, the trio is expelling a lot of hot air for the cause. And the family in question? it could only, of course, be the Kinnocks.
Former Labour leader Lord Kinnock of Bedwellty, his wife Lady Kinnock of holyhead and son stephen Kinnock, Labour MP for Aberavon, have all been busy banging the drum for Remain.
it’s amusing to remember, however, that it was not always so in their household. Forty-one years ago, Neil Kinnock was a leading figure in the campaign for Britain to vote to leave the then European Economic Community. he believed then that it threatened British jobs and industry. Now, he is vigorously promoting the opposite view. so what could he possibly have seen on the EU gravy train — which has enriched his family by many millions of pounds — to make him change his mind?
Almost 25 years have passed since the crown at Westminster slipped through Kinnock’s fingers. But that was not the end of his political career. Not by a long chalk.
since that devastating 1992 General Election defeat — Kinnock’s second in a row — he and his family have existed in a lucrative public sector bubble, notably in relation to the European Union; highly paid, publicly funded jobs followed by mega-pensions for the parents, and what amounted to sinecures for their children ( their daughter Rachel has also enjoyed the fruits of the public purse).
The figures are astonishing. Between them Lord and Lady Kinnock are entitled to draw six publicly funded pensions, with a total income estimated to be worth around £250,000 a year. some of that comes directly from the British taxpayer. But the key to the riches was their Damascene conversion from Europhobes to Eurocrats. Former school teacher Glenys Kinnock — that original classroom profession provides one of her pensions — was the first to reach Brussels. in 1994 she was elected to the European Parliament as the MEP for south Wales East. it was the safest European seat in the country.
she received a salary of £31,686 — almost as much as a Westminster backbencher at the time — but was able to claim expenses totalling well over £100,000 a year.
NEiL Kinnock stepped down as a Parliamentary MP in 1995 (a job that also gave him a pension). he left to take up a £140,000-a-year post as the European Commissioner for Transport.
The perks included a £ 21,000 allowance for living abroad, a £6,000 entertainment allowance, generous pension scheme, and free life and health insurance. First-class travel on business trips, plus his own chauffeur and limousine — available round the clock — and relocation expenses for the move to Brussels completed the package. They bought a ‘modest’ house in the city — a property once the home of the then newspaper correspondent Boris Johnson, who, of course, is now leading the Brexit campaign.
Mr Kinnock served his five-year term, and was reappointed for another five, as a vice-president with responsibility for administrative reform. By then, critics suggested, he had morphed into the classic Brussels bureaucrat.
he left in 2004 — entitled to a second pension which, with his Westminster pension, brought an estimated annual income of £115,000 — and the next year was elevated to the house of Lords by Tony Blair’s government. This was another jaw- dropping — some would say deeply hypocritical —
volte face. For the Lords (like the EU) was another institution he had once held in contempt. in 1977, he and Left-winger Dennis skinner remained resolutely sitting in the Commons — as a socialist protest against the monarchy — while the other MPs went to the Lords to hear the Queen’s speech at the opening of Parliament.
Today, as we shall see, he is part of the Upper house’s furniture.
When Lady Kinnock stepped down as an MEP in 2009, it was calculated by think tank Open Europe that she and her husband had pocketed more than £10 million in taxpayers’ money from the Euro gravy train.
This did not include a calculation for daily attendance allowances claimed in Brussels.
The then Mrs Kinnock was embroiled in controversy in 2004 when a fellow MEP claimed many colleagues signed in at the parliament building to claim their daily £175, only to leave almost immediately. he claimed to have caught Mrs Kinnock doing so 26 times in two years, though she denied any wrongdoing.
Mrs Kinnock was entitled to two EU pensions for her time as an MEP, worth in total £67,000 a year.
As soon as she returned to Britain she was elevated to the house of Lords in her own right and appointed a Minister of state in Gordon Brown’s government, which came with a salary of £83,000. she kept the post till Labour’s election defeat in May 2010. That entitled her to — you guessed it! — another pension.
Examination of the latest house of Lords expenses data shows that between the summer of 2010 and January 2016 — the most recent returns are from that month — the couple, now both in their 70s, have also received approximately £340,500 between them in tax-free attendance allowances at Westminster.
it’s the equivalent of their collectively earning a gross salary of more than £500,000 over that period.
According to house of Lords rules, allowances can be claimed only if the peer has undertaken ‘parliamentary work’ that day. The peer then has the choice of claiming a maximum of £300 per day, waiving half, or taking nothing.
A study of the Kinnock figures suggests Glenys more often than not
claimed £300 a day, while Neil was more usually a £150-a-day peer.
Nice work if you can get it. But as we know, if you are a Kinnock there is always a plum job to be had. Rachel Kinnock, now 44, was taken on as a member of staff by her mother while she was an MEP in Brussels. The post was funded by Welsh taxpayers.
When Lady Kinnock returned to London in 2009, a position was found for Rachel on Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s political staff. When he lost the 2010 election and stepped down from politics, Rachel Kinnock became ‘events manager’ for Ed Miliband.
We all know how his campaign to become PM ended, though Rachel is still being tipped to be yet another Kinnock Labour MP.
Which brings us to her older brother, Stephen Kinnock MP — with his controversial embroilment in EU-related tax matters, and his very unconventional marriage.
It may not surprise you to learn that Master Kinnock has spent much of his working life in the upper echelons of the public sector.
As a Cambridge modern languages graduate he attended the College of Europe in Bruges, described as a ‘training ground for the Eurocratic elite’. It was there that he met academic’s daughter Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a fellow leftist who is three years his senior. He is now 46 and she is in her 50th year.
They married in 1996, by which time he had joined the British Council — which represents this country’s interests abroad — and was working at its EU relations department in Brussels, around the corner from his parents. In 1999, his wife Helle was elected an MEP — joining her mother-in-law in the chamber — on the same salary as a Danish MP, plus Brussels’ incredibly generous expenses package.
Then in 2005, she returned home and became a Danish MP. Months later she was leader of the country’s Social Democrats, and in 2011 she was elected prime minister, a post she kept until her election defeat last summer.
The couple have two daughters (now 20 and 17). Controversially, given their parents’ socialist politics, the girls were sent to private schools in Copenhagen.
Their mother was also given the nickname ‘Gucci Helle’ because of her love of designer wear, which was deemed insufficiently socialist by some. ‘We can’t all look like s**t,’ she told one heckler.
How much time has she spent with her husband in the past decade or so has also been a moot point.
Indeed, it became central to a tax investigation which threatened to derail Ms Thorning-Schmidt’s 2011 general election campaign.
For much of the time since 2005, the couple have not lived in the same country, let alone the same house. Stephen Kinnock had taken up British Council posts in West Africa and Russia, and in 2009 became a director of the World Economic Forum, an £110,000-per-annum job which necessitated him being based in Geneva, Switzerland.
With Denmark’s Social Democrats pushing a high taxation manifesto, attention was focused on Ms Thorning- Schmidt’s own tax arrangements. So why was the potential Prime Minister’s husband paying no tax at all in Denmark?
It emerged that by claiming she was the sole owner of the £500,000 three- storey family home in Copenhagen, and that her husband was non-resident, Ms Thorning-Schmidt had been allowed to deduct about £40,000 in tax from the mortgage repayments.
The authorities were told Stephen Kinnock only spent some 33 weekends a year in Denmark, which meant he did not have to pay Danish income tax, which can be
charged at a rate four times higher than that in Switzerland.
But in another document, Ms Thorning-Schmidt had stated that her husband was in Copenhagen every weekend.
So what was the truth, and had any laws been broken? Tax inspectors launched an inquiry and the Danish press inevitably declared the ‘scandal’ Taxgate.
In the end, the couple were cleared of any wrongdoing. She apologised for having made ‘sloppy mistakes’ in her tax returns. But she had also, extraordinarily, felt the need to tell the world her husband was not gay.
She did this because she had heard that the explosive substance of an interview between her accountant, one Frode Holm, and a tax official was about to be leaked.
Copenhagen’s tax inspector had sent a text after the meeting with the accountant which read: ‘After prolonged discussion, Frode Holm explained that SK [ Stephen Kinnock] is bisexual/homosexual.’
In other words, that was why he spent so much time away from his glamorous blonde wife.
In a pre-emptive interview, Ms Thorning-Schmidt said that the story was untrue and upsetting for the family.
Four years ago, Mr Kinnock moved to London to take up a job with a green energy consultancy.
At first he lived with his parents at their £1.5 million Victorian house in Tufnell Park, before moving to Kilburn. For the past two years his registered home has been a tiny, one-bedroom rented flat, worth around £60,000, next to a derelict pub in a suburb of the Welsh steel town of Port Talbot.
This is because he was preparing to take on the mantle of a ‘red prince’ — a scion of Labour privilege — as MP for Aberavon, which he did last May.
His wife, who lost her job as Danish PM last summer, recently took up a London-based post as chief executive of Save The Children, with an annual salary of nearly £240,000, a sum the charity felt it had to defend in a statement.
This week, Stephen Kinnock sparked controversy by suggesting that even if Brexit won, MPs could push for a compromise in which Britain still had open borders and paid subsidies to Brussels.
‘If the British people voted to leave the EU that’s one thing,’ he said. ‘But can we really say that they voted for the devastation and destruction of the entire exporting sector of our economy?
‘I don’t think you can necessarily say that there’s a democratic mandate for that.’ But there is a mandate in South Wales, where the economy is already on its uppers.
UKIP came from nowhere to win seven seats at the recent Welsh Assembly elections, and made huge inroads into Neil Kinnock’s old constituency.
There is no welcome in the valleys for high immigration when life there is already difficult enough.
As for Stephen Kinnock’s wife, she is now tipped to become an EU Commissioner. So whatever the result on June 23, another generation of Kinnocks could be sitting in the first-class compartment of the EU gravy train.
Plus ça change. Or sådan er det jo, as they say in Denmark.
They may be aggressively campaigning for Remain, but given the extraordinary largesse they’ve received from taxpayers — especially via Brussels — could the Kinnocks be the family that persuades Britain to vote Leave?