How Brussels spends YOUR money as if it grows on trees
In a devastating dispatch, we reveal how Eurocrats live a life of staggering excess — 10,000 earn more than the PM’s £150,000 — while taking decisions that affect all our lives in secret
ASTRANGE atmosphere hangs over Brussels. On the one hand, there is Donald Tusk, President of the European Council (representing all 28 EU governments), warning of Armageddon if Britain votes to leave the European Union on Thursday. As he told a German interviewer last week: ‘I fear Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also Western political civilisation in its entirety.’
But you won’t hear a squeak on the subject from most people in the vast glass-and-steel bureaucratic palaces across this city. As an EU fromage of great magnitude, Mr Tusk can get away with saying this sort of thing. Lesser Eurocrats are under strict orders to say nothing on the subject, for fear of adding any further heat to the issue. There has even been a ban on using the word ‘Brexit’ in official communications.
Given the whopping great perks and privileges bestowed on those who work for the European Union, no one is going to step out of line. In any case, most people here still cannot really believe that we pesky Brits really would have the temerity to abandon the Grand Project. But then, if you live in this hermetically sealed bubble — a world of long lunches, long weekends and retail discounts worth 36 per cent — your grasp of normality is somewhat distorted.
During a week here in the gilded capital of Europe, I have been amazed by the gulf between this place and the real world.
Just take the wage bill of the 47,000 people who work inside the bubble. Since 2010, it has been British policy to disclose the number of government officials earning more than our Prime Minister, who gets paid just shy of £150,000. In Britain, the latest figure stands at 319.
And the equivalent number for the EU? According to documents leaked ahead of the last European elections two years ago, EU tax perks mean that at least 10,000 EU employees are taking home more than David Cameron.
Many are mere middle managers. Among the extra perks are the £240 monthly allowance for stay-at-home spouses and the £100-a-month allowance per child. On top of that, European taxpayers spend an estimated £80 million each year in school fees for Eurocrats’ children.
You need not spend long in the palace of pointlessness that is the European Parliament to sense the institutional arrogance of this entire project.
Take a trip up to the fifth-floor library, as I did the other day, on the morning that The Sun had formally declared for Brexit. I went in search of a copy of the newspaper among those imported from all 28 EU countries every day.
There was no shortage of dense reading material from Hungary, Spain and Slovenia, along with assorted French and Belgian rags — and The Guardian, of course. But The Sun?
‘It’s not deemed to be a serious newspaper,’ explained the librarian, neatly encapsulating the European Union’s attitude towards the ordinary European voter.
Perish the thought that the European Parliament might be interested in the second-biggestselling newspaper in Europe on the day that it formally endorsed leaving the EU.
But the European Parliament had much more important things to consider on that morning.
A huge throng of media had gathered outside the main entrance to cover the big story of the day — the arrival of Prince Albert of Monaco for the launch of European Bee Week. This year’s catchy slogan: ‘Bees Caring for Europeans. Europeans Caring For Bees.’
There is precious little going on in Brussels right now. It may be parliamentary term-time but it feels as if most people are somewhere else. There is a palpable sense of inactivity. And that is hardly surprising.
Last week, the European Parliament should have been hosting a review of the ‘Multiannual Financial Framework’, the long-term budget for the entire EU. But the two-day conference has now been postponed until after the British referendum — with good reason, according to British Euroscpetics.
‘They’re already £20 billion short, they have multiple crises and they are going to need billions more,’ says the pro-Brexit Tory MEP Dan Hannan.
His colleague David Campbell Bannerman, Tory MEP for the East of England and another Brexit supporter, has been tracking another issue that has vanished from the agenda.
The Parliament’s foreign affairs committee was about to demand that the EU be given a seat on the Security Council of the United Nations. Such a move would not only have grave implications for Britain’s permanent seat on the council. It would also highlight the EU’s determination to be treated as a proper country in its own right. Conveniently, all that has been shelved for a fortnight.
In contrast to the ‘Project Fear’ campaign which the Remain camp has been operating in Britain, it has been a case of ‘don’t mention the war’ here in Brussels.
So much stuff has been locked away until after the British vote that cupboard doors are bursting at the hinges. In private, however, senior officials admit that once Britain has had its referendum, the bureaucrats will be back with a vengeance.
Ukip MEP Roger Helmer says he has no doubt what is coming, regardless of which way we vote: ‘I was in a meeting the other day with Sefcovic [the Slovak European Commissioner for Energy], who said there will be a “tsunami of measures”.’
It is the unelected Commission, of course, which is really in charge here. Each of the 28 EU nations dispatches a commissioner — a senior politician or a crony — to supervise a department within this bloated behemoth of 33,000 bureaucrats.
Once here, they answer not to their country but to the Commission and its president, Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker.
And, crucially, it is the Commission which draws up new EU laws behind closed doors.
The elected MEPs in the European Parliament can propose amendments, along with the Council of the European Union (representing the national governments, but not to be confused with the Council of Europe or the European Council — pay attention). If the MEPs and the Council cannot agree, then there is a further negotiation with the Commission — behind closed doors.
Finally, when a deal has been thrashed out, it falls to the Commission to enforce the new law.
I drop in at the Commission’s midweek media briefing.
In the windowless bowels of the mighty Soviet-style Berlaymont building, a few dozen hacks have gathered to hear one of the most senior commissioners, Jyrki Katainen, talk about ‘endocrine disruptors’ (chemical triggers
‘They’re waiting with a tsunami of new measures’
that can harm our hormonal systems). I imagine that Mr Katainen might get a grilling on other issues. As a former prime minister of Finland, he is, after all, a grown-up politician and a Commission vice-president.
But that’s not the way things are done here. When I ask if he agrees with Donald Tusk that Brexit would be the end of Western civilisation, there is much tutting and rolling of eyes.
A media minder bats away the question. ‘Let’s hope there is not a need for an experimental test,’ says Mr Katainen. And that is that.
For politicians who have made their names in the rough and tumble of party politics back home, life as a European commissioner is not just rewarding — with a £200,000 basic salary, personal staff, platinum pension and even £8,000 a month in ‘transition payments’ for three years when you eventually step off the gravy train. It is simply much more congenial.
Next up is the Commissioner for Migration, Greece’s Dimitris Avramopoulos, with an update on the migrant situation in the Aegean. During questions, however, there is an illuminating outburst which goes to the heart of the whole EU debate.
Asked about the slow pace of relocating some of the 160,000 immigrants due for resettlement, he has a swipe at politicians who make ‘not helpful’ statements and warns: ‘Member states have to speed up their efforts. Very soon I will be even more vocal, naming and shaming the countries that do not comply.’
In other words, he’ll lean on nations to take more migrants, or else!
Here is a neat illustration of the way things really work around here. The unelected Commission is not, as some still imagine, a civil service which answers to the elected representatives of the people. It’s the other way round. And if any lowly MEP wishes to take a commissioner to task, he or she must submit a question in writing and then wait six weeks for a reply.
It is the reason a British MEP such as Andrew Lewer has sided with Vote Leave. A former Tory leader of Derbyshire County Council, he was elected as an MEP in 2014.
‘I arrived here with an entirely open mind and I’m only just on the side of Brexit,’ he explains.
It was, he says, the intransigence of the EU towards David Cameron’s proposals in the run-up to the referendum which tipped him over the edge. He also acknowledges that the British ‘just aren’t very good at being European’.
The hypocrisy in Brussels doesn’t help, either.
Any ordinary office building in Brussels would be subject to a strict smoking ban. But here at the European Parliament, I find a huge smoking room next to the main bar. No huddling outside the back door for the 20-a-day Eurocrat, if you please.
I walk down to the room where MEPs simply have to sign a register to claim an automatic £240 daily allowance (on top of their £80,000 salary). There is a pile of expenses forms by the door. A short stroll down the corridor is the in-house travel agency that makes arrangements for MEPs to travel to and from their other parliament building, 300 miles away in the French city of Strasbourg.
For the perfect illustration of EU waste, just watch this vast institution pack up and move house for four days a month. It’s a travelling circus which costs £150 million a year.
Down at the MEPs’ restaurant, lunch is under way (it’s foie gras and lobster for starters today). Everything is subsidised — by taxpayers, naturally — in this place. Where else could you find a coffee for less than £1?
Lunch operates on traditional continental lines here — from 12.30 to 3pm, whereupon a few committees resume their discussions in vast semicircular chambers, each bigger than some national parliaments.
Half-a-dozen members of the Foreign Affairs committee have turned up to discuss a new report on Greece.
Like every meeting in this place, it is translated into 23 languages by a vast army of interpreters who can earn up to £800 a day. Unfortunately, the Greek interpreter hasn’t made it, to the irritation of a Greek socialist MEP, who has to talk in English.
I drop in on the budgetary control committee, the internal affairs committee, the industry committee and others. They are fascinating and stultifying in equal measure. There is precious little discussion of anything. MEPs take turns to read out their prepared statements while everyone else does emails and other stuff.
With everyone hunched over their papers, there is little eye contact and even less in the way of oratory. Nor are there any screens to say who is talking. It could hardly be less user-friendly to the outsider. Which may explain why there are so many empty seats in the public gallery.
I find a handful of ordinary punters exploring the Parliamentarium, a shameless £17 million EU propaganda exercise which opened five years ago. You enter via a dark tunnel lined with photos of European misery back in the days before this blessed project took shape.
A voice on a loop recites the words of the long-forgotten British politician Lord Lothian, in 1939: ‘The only final remedy for this supreme and catastrophic evil of our time is a federal union of the peoples.’ There is no mention that he was an arch-appeaser who wanted a deal with Hitler.
We walk through an audiovisual display of all the landmarks in EU history, and into a room with a map of Europe on the floor. Place a scanner over a particular spot, and a video screen tells you how it fits into the European project. London, it explains, is home to the European Medicines Agency. Scotland, we learn, is home to Europe’s North Sea Oil (I had no idea we had the EU to thank for that).
In the next room, sofas and armchairs are clustered around more screens showing video messages from grateful EU citizens. I gently nod off as I listen to Carla from Portugal telling me how the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund gave her the money for a children’s petting farm.
Finally, we all leave via a photo gallery of every MEP and emerge in the gift shop, where you can pick up a pair of EU cufflinks for £10.
No British visitor could possibly walk through this place without a fit of the giggles. Yet I follow a small group from France who are nodding earnestly throughout.
As if this were not enough, a new attraction is due to open next door in a few months — a £43 million museum called the House Of European History. Teams of workers are busy adding the finishing touches to this gleaming six-storey temple to the EU dream.
According to Ukip and Eurosceptic Tory MEPs, it is a ‘monstrous vanity project’. According to the blurb, it will be ‘a centre of excellence in which reflection on the history of European integration and its position in our daily lives will be encouraged, enabled and sustained’.
Unless, of course, European Council president Donald Tusk is right. There won’t be much point in encouraging and sustaining all that wonderful European integration if our entire Western civilisation is falling apart come Friday morning.
The MEPs get foie gras and lobster for lunch