Lullabies for the colicy voters…..
European elections this Thursday, and apart from the Europhile FT, and its decidedly narrow readership, I can find no serious comment in national newspapers discussing the main issues.
Do you know who you are going to vote for, what they believe in?
This is a parliament that makes 75% of the laws that affect your life. Can you name your MEP? Can you name any MEP apart from Dan Hannan?
Come to that, why is Dan Hannan so famous? Over 2 million Youtube views of a speech in which he lambasted Gordon Brown, he is the idol of the blogging world, the man who put the flea in Gordon’s ear. Is that good enough, is that worth €400,000 a year? Hannan has asked 51 Questions in the European Parliament, against Robert Kilroy-Silk’s 1921 Questions, who is really working hard for your money? Hannan says ‘When I meet people at weddings, I never volunteer what I do for a living’ – really? We pay the best part of half a million Euros out to each and every MEP every year, and they don’t want to discuss what they do for a living – some living! – at each and every opportunity?
An MEP has a five year term of office – which means that your MEP will have consumed an average of €2m Euros by the time you get the chance to vote him out of office. That is 2m of your Euros, for each member state pays for its own MEPs.
Your MEP is an expensive hobby of yours then, and yet the media, your media, that you pay for, ignore what they are really doing, or not doing, in favour of endless coverage of Big Brother, Susan Boyle’s mental health and a preoccupation with bent bananas and populist video rants from the kid at the back of the class who told the headmaster he was a twat.
We are daily being trivialised, marginalised, encouraged to look at the petty and irrelevant. Tasty little bits of gossip dangled over our cots to send us back to sleep.
You have four days left to get the answers that the media should have been giving you – go to http://www.votewatch.eu/- look up your MEP, and his e-mail address, and send him an e-mail right now, ask him about the issues that matter to you – your child’s education, assisted suicide, civil rights, whatever matters to you – and see what the reply is before you decide whether to vote for him again – don’t vote on the basis of a popularity contest or tribal loyalties.
This isn’t ‘Big Brother’, it isn’t ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, whether you think Britain should have joined the Common Market in the first place or not, the fact remains that we did, and these expensive playthings we call MEPs have more to do with your day to day life than any numbers of minor backbenchers and their plasma TVs.
Wake up! You are being sedated, the grown ups want to go out to dinner……
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1
June 1, 2009 at 12:52 pm -
I went to vote watch and still couldn’t find out who my MEP is.
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2
June 1, 2009 at 1:55 pm -
Nor I David. But go here instead.
http://www.europarl.org.uk/section/your-meps/your-meps -
3
June 1, 2009 at 1:57 pm -
The trivilisation, the short sightedness, the incompetence, the low standards, the politicisation of performance targets over the realities of the work involved, and the sheer volume of rubbish legisation and regulation, have left a wasteland of government. Just where does anyone begin?
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4
June 1, 2009 at 3:05 pm -
Thanks View from the Solent. Have traced the MEPs covering the Southwest (which apparently includes Gibralter) – sadly none come from Cornwall, where I am, or Gib. Inexplicably, one lives in Abingdon nr Oxford.
I suspect the system of PR in use is not necessarily the most representative one.
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5
June 1, 2009 at 3:24 pm -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8076000/8076636.stm
If you didnt catch McBroon Harbinger of Doom this morning on Today you might want to have a listen and a laugh
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6
June 1, 2009 at 4:33 pm -
If I wouldn’t – thanks to these posts and comments – have developed an unhealthy interest in other countries’ politicians, I would have thought that he was quite reasonable
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7
June 1, 2009 at 5:06 pm -
I heard the broadcast this morning and I did think he was quite reasonable – I’m sometimes easily swayed though.
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8
June 1, 2009 at 6:46 pm -
Excellent stuff. It has not had enough publicity considering how vitally important they are to our way of life. I am still favouring voting Tory at this late stage. By the way, I had forgotten what an immense salary they earn! Christ almighty. Term of office and they are bloody millionaires.
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9
June 1, 2009 at 8:14 pm -
10
June 2, 2009 at 9:02 pm -
Here is what I have read about our MEP’s.
.. MEPs have been quietly clocking up hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in expenses without so much as showing a receipt
.. On top of a basic salary of £83,282 a year (representing a huge pay rise for UK MEPs from June onwards), £41,573 in “transition payments” when they leave office, and pension rights of up to £30,000 for a single five-year term, MEPs can claim an enormous £363,000 a year in expenses – not a penny of which requires a receipt
.. MEPs can spend their allowances on holidays, duck ponds, moats, mortgages or whatever takes their fancy, safe in the knowledge that neither the dreaded media nor taxpayers will ever find out
.. MEPs voted to keep secret revealed that one MEP had paid his entire staff allowance — £183,776 a year — to a suspected relative
.. MEPs sign in early in the morning to claim their £259 daily allowance, only to dash straight off for a long weekend
.. British MEPs voted against key proposals to make the expenses system more transparent, including requirements to produce receipts to back up travel expenses
.. Gordon Brown announced over the weekend that he would force Labour MEPs to publish receipts for all their expenses in future …….. But it still only applies to office expenses, which account for only €50,000 of the €400,000 total available expenses pot
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/27/expenses-meps-european-parliament
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11
June 2, 2009 at 10:57 pm -
I’ve just been making myself feel queasy by re-reading just how much Mandleson got to pocket by being brought back into this wonderful Government after 4 years as European Commissioner for Trade on an annual salary of £182,500: let’s call it a minimum of £1m in ’settlement expenses’, ‘transition allowances’ and pay-offs/pensions/parachutes, all in addition to a Peerage and a comfortable salary of £104,000 AND a plum new job as Business Secretary. Nice.
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12
June 2, 2009 at 11:37 pm -
The whole of civil service needs an over haul, public sector departments dole out money as if its going out of fashion.
I’ve heard of administration staff in the health service, being offered money to buy bicycles and saftey helmets if they fancy cycling to work.
British embassy staff are given money to furnish ’short term’ accommodation, because they don’t fancy the furniture the embassy has in that accommodation. -
13
June 2, 2009 at 11:51 pm -
I would like a recliner chair if anyone knows a governmet department that would buy me one. Maybe I could claim ne on expenses from the COI for all the media to which I have contributed and my analysis of government spending.
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14
June 3, 2009 at 7:32 pm -
I would suggest the problem isn’t the money lavished on the MEPs in and of itself, but the very fact that MEPs are being lavished upon by a ruling board within EU that is barely 2-dozen in size, totally unelected but appointed from some higher source above and with the MEPs beholding to whatever that unelected board declares as law onto the millions living within EU who are thusly non-represented what-so-ever.
The monies being lavished on the MEPs are more of a pay-off for their unbridled loyalty to and support of the small inner-clan of the unelected bureaucrats who are really in charge of EU and can literally dictate the law affecting disenfranchised hundreds of millions.
The money issue is one thing; the loyalty, support and one-way form of commuication that extreme payoff is buying that 2-dozen unelected and in control is another.
What MEPs are being paid for is to be spokespersons and sales-people, to take what is already pre-decided by the 2-dozen non-elected appointees from above and then literally translate that into something digestible to the MPs who must then accept the decisions given to them and push them onto the citizens.
With MPs then lavished upon to respect the will of the MEPs who bring this back with them from Brussels and not the other way around, then who is doing the communication from the level of the soverign citizens upwards to the MPs, let alone upwards to MEPs who are working outside and above whatever happens on national level and in a one-way direction from the unelected appointed 2-dozen sitting in Brussels.
So that concerns me more than just the individual cases of overly lavish treatment the MEPs are receiving, it’s what they are being paid-off to do; as their job, to bring back from Brussels what are literal dictates and have the MPs apply this to our lives with scarcely anyone seeming to care or complain.
At this rate we are going, we will soon have a steady one-way mandate from an unelected 2-dozen sitting in Brussels and the whole idea of election nothing but a sham, other than to make look proper that there is some sort of democracy in place with MPs and MEPs playing musical chairs every four years in the illusion that change is always on the horizon, which never comes.
Such a system could last into perpetuity once established.
It is like receiving the carrot in illusion while actually beholding to the stick in reality.
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15
June 3, 2009 at 7:45 pm
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