The European Parliament's MP's are determined to keep their inefficient and corrupt expenses system just the way it is. This means many MP's will continue to defraud their taxpayers, as they are not even required to justify their expenses! Not surprisingly, the corrupt ones among them (and there is obviously no way of establishing how many) treat their travel expenses simply as an addition to their salaries.
The system thus actively turns weakwilled MP's into freeloaders.
In a separate vote yesterday, the MP's voted to retain the ludicrous system of having a "seat" in Strasbourg as well as in Brussels. This is important symbolically for France, we are always being told. It costs taxpayers some 200 million euros a year to bus the MP's, their assistants and and all the files and paperwork between Brussels and Strasbourg, but so be it, it keeps "the French" (which French? one always wonders) content.
The contempt with which these squalid European MP's treat their voters and taxpayers is so blatant and blithe that it goes far beyond mere folie de grandeur. The blog is certain that the depressing and disgusting turpitude which MP's seem to acquire as part of the job spec will be punished and corrected in due course - natural justice and fairness require it, even if politics don't work on that basis day-to-day.
But if EU insitutions themselves cannot bring themselves to do it, who will? It is a terrible indictment of our current European decadence and pusillanimity that taxpayers have not leapt up to prowl the Parliament's corridors with loaded shotguns, demanding a refund and an instant end to the sleaze.
A major scandal of some sort will be needed before politicians and policemen are impelled to put things right, and to stop them doing what they currently do, which is actually persecuting the brave, foolhardy people who expose such crimes!
EUobserver.com
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