This week’s news that MEP’s voted down cost saving measures, which would have frozen their salaries, and cut their travel allowances, was shameful.
At the same meeting, they voted the European Parliament a 2.3% budgetary rise, taking its expenditure to £150 billion a year.
They also agreed upon a multi million pound ‘House of European History’ museum project.
This, remember, during austere times.
Perhaps, understandably, MEP’s have recently topped a poll of the most hated professions in Britain.
If the EU were a country or a corporation, it would now be bankrupt. Accountants have refused to sign off the toxic EU accounts for the past 18 years.
Indeed, as Marta Andreasen, former chief accountant at the EU said: “This proves categorically and unambiguously that when the European Parliament speaks of austerity measures, it applies to everybody else except the institution itself.”
But why should they care? No one in the EU is accountable.
At the last European elections, only a third of the British population bothered to vote.
Proportional representation meant they barely knew what they were voting for.
And look what we got in exchange for our apathy:
A bloated bureaucracy, dedicated to a federal Europe; a deluge of EU laws which our so-called sovereign Parliament is unable to scrutinise properly; our courts subjected to the whims of remote judges; an arrest warrant which sees our citizens thrown into jail in far off lands, often without charge; our diplomatic influence downgraded as embassies are closed around the world, while millions are lavished on new EU establishments; and, the final straw, our enforced contribution to bail-outs for eurozone member countries, with £7 billion going to Ireland and a possible further £6 billion to Portugal, even though we never joined the euro.
Almost daily, constituents ask me whether we will ever hold a referendum on leaving the EU.
Not soon enough, I reply. Polls show that most of the country agrees.
We cannot ignore the wishes of those who elected us forever and, one day, we will get that wish, and the rotten EU edifice will come tumbling down.