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Tory Snouts In The Trough
More than half of Britain's 28 Conservative MEPs appear to be refusing to comply with rules on how they spend and register their expenses.
Newspapers report that MEPs and their families have made "hundreds of thousands of pounds" from scams based on the European Parliament's free-for-all expenses system. While only the Tories have been subject to scrutiny this weekend, Labour and Liberal Democrat MEPs are likely to be shaking in their boots as the focus turns to their nice little earners later in the week.
Most of the scams are based on the British Euro favourite, employing friends, family and close associates as "advisers" and "assistants." One particularly juicy number involved MEP Sajjad Karim paying his Missus £26,000 a year as an assistant, despite the fact that she was employed as a schoolteacher at the time. Another paid her children's nanny to be her constituency secretary. A Scottish Tory did better, pouring a million quid into his firm. The Tories' Chief Whip in the parliament, Den "Ben" Dover paid nearly three quarters of a million to a family owned company over a decade.
The revival of Tory Sleaze, a feature of 1990s Conservative rule which led to the sinking of John Major's government is bad news for leader David Cameron. Indeed, this, rather than the fact that MEPs have had their noses in the trough for so long, is the central plank of the Telegraph's complaint against the scandal. Cameron has sent in his "compliance officer" to get to the truth of the matter, but really this is beside the point.
Even the party's "sleazebuster" has had to resign following revelations he paid nearly £500,000 into a family firm.
Cameron has had two and a half years to tackle his rebellious MEPs in Brussels, but has failed to do so. He came to power on a promise to shake up Brussels, and in particular to remove the Eurosceptic Conservative party from the Federalist, Pro-integration EPP-ED centre-right grouping in the European Parliament.
Shortly after becoming leader, Cameron sent his man William Hague (shadow Foreign Secretary) to Brussels to figure out how to extract the Tories from the EPP-ED. He was sent back with a flea in his ear by disgruntled Euro Tories (a breed apart, it seems, from their lowly British counterparts). Pulling the Conservatives out of the federalist right grouping would do untold damage to the Tories' standing and influence in Brussels, they complained; Cameron would be faced with a rebellion; his plans for a moderate Eurosceptic grouping would never get off the ground, he was warned. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is the centre right's most powerful figure in EU governments, muttered dark threats about how the Conservatives would be sent to Euro-Coventry should they dare to leave the EPP-ED - a grouping which supports pretty much everything that British Tories claim to oppose.
A Conservative leader buckling under threats from a German Chancellor? Who'd have thought it? But Cameron withdrew, mostly, it's said, because of counsel from Euro-Tories warning of isolation in the parliament.
EURSOC wonders: Which of those Euro-Tories who threatened dire consequences should Cameron pull out of the EPP-ED are now under investigation for fiddling expenses, which are often supplied by party groupings? Were they simply defending their scams, rather than a higher principle of Euro-Unity?
It's a fair bet that these crooks were among the majority of MEPs who have voted again and again to block any transparency or reform of the dodgy European expenses mechanism.
The Telegraph warns that Euro-MPs have become a distant elite, a paid political class in Brussels. It hopes, alongside many other Eurosceptics, that the Irish reject the Lisbon Constitution Treaty in Thursday's referendum (interestingly, there has been little news of sleaze from Irish MEPs... are they of stronger moral fibre than the British?)
Perhaps, though, MEPs deserve more cash. After all, they're making most of our laws these days. Conservative MP Peter Lilley made a clever point last week, when he argued that in most occupations, salary reflects responsibilities. Today's Parliamentarians make only around 20 percent of British laws; the vast majority emanate from Brussels.
Lilley said that every time MPs hand over more responsibilities to the EU, their pay should be cut accordingly.
"Few voters, or even members of this house, fully realise how many powers have been, or are about to be, transferred elsewhere" Lilley said, "There are three reasons for this. The first is that governments of all persuasions deny that any significant powers are being transferred.
"The second is that, once powers have been transferred, Ministers engage in a charade of pretence that they still retain those powers. Even when introducing measures that they are obliged to bring in as a result of an EU directive they behave as though the initiative were their own.
"Indeed, Ministers often end up nobly accepting responsibility for laws that they actually opposed when they were being negotiated in Brussels."
