[Comment] The parliament that prefers avarice to power
PETER SAIN LEY BERRY
29.02.2008 @ 06:06 CET
EUOBSERVER / COMMENT - If there is one European institution that needs root and branch reform, it is the European Parliament.
This claims to be the Union's democratic showpiece, the vital organ that connects a vibrant 27 nation partnership with its citizens. Its 785 members are supposed to have their fingers on the pulse of the Union's 300 million voters and to use this knowledge to enact or amend European legislation.
A question of money (Photo: European Parliament)
Above all, it is supposed to be a shining example to the world of openness, transparency, wisdom and service to the community.
Regrettably, it is actually very few of these things.
Rather it is, collectively, a bloated and uncouth thief of our money that is in large measure, ineffectual at doing its job.
Dressed in the finery of an emperor, with all the trappings of a Parliament, it deceives our trust. No wonder, then, that so few people feel sufficiently impressed to vote in its elections.
While it may be embarrassing that Europe's voters prefer to sit on their hands come polling day, having a weak parliament suits the members of the European Council well enough. They would prefer democratic debate to remain within the nation state. It maximises their own power and legitimacy.
This particularly suits Europe's larger member states who enjoy great influence on the Continent's affairs. And if smaller countries object, they can usually be managed with a concession here, or some extra largesse there.
Trappings of democracy
That sort of interference is predictable. But should the European Parliament, with its notionally vast democratic mandate, ever start to mobilise against the Council, that would be seriously disrupting.
Europe could spin out of control!
So it suits the other institutions to ensure that the European Parliament has all the trappings of democracy, while remaining largely impotent to bring about significant change.
'Let me have men about me that are fat,' Shakespeare has Julius Caesar say. ‘Young Casca has a lean and hungry look.' Casca, of course, was a conspirator who would later murder his chief.
Keen not to make the same mistake as Caesar, the European Council has created a Parliament that is fat and contented and so largely unchallenging. Not by any stretch of the imagination could it be called 'lean and hungry.'
That is not to say that there are not a great many members of the Parliament who work extremely hard and conscientiously on behalf of their constituents and who voice robustly their political persuasions on behalf of those that elected them. But this cannot be said of the vast Parliamentary mass.
Nor can it be said about the ethos of the institution as a whole, which smacks of self-aggrandisement and petit-bourgeois tyranny.
So it was no surprise this week to learn via the report of the Parliament's internal auditor that there appear to be some extremely shady practices going on in the matter of payments of members' staff allowances.
Now we knew already that the Parliamentary authorities took a rather lax view of members' accountability and that there were shameless abuses of the system, the 1.3 billion euro parliamentary budget big enough to accommodate all sorts of unsupported demands provided these fell loosely within liberally set boundaries. And though outsiders asked questions on many occasions these were usually diverted either with bland reassurance or obfuscating silence.
MEPs know that this goes on and what's more, know, or ought to know, how corrupting are practices of this sort.
Therefore when the Budgetary Control Committee received a particularly damning report of the internal auditor making some of the most serious allegations yet made the Committee should have welcomed this opportunity to cleanse the Augean stables that they had been inhabiting for so long.
Instead, of course, they voted by a margin of three to two to keep the report secret.
Some brave souls, including Chris Davies, the British Liberal MEP, have been jumping up and down trying to draw attention to this. Despite being a member of the Committee and having read the report he has nevertheless been forced to swear an oath of secrecy as to its contents. Such is the Parliament's paranoia about its own financial affairs.
As might have been expected, Mr Davies has been roundly abused for his pains, though he has managed to alert the EU's anti-fraud office.
Whether they will be motivated sufficiently to penetrate the Parliament's dark defensive carapace is not at all certain.
External damage
What the Parliament collectively cannot seem to see is what damage this does in the eyes of the electorate, the people the members are there to serve.
What is more this is damage that rubs off on other institutions as well.
The members cannot seem to comprehend that these sorts of secretive attitudes are precisely the ones that limit the Parliament's political and, even more important, moral authority. A Parliament frightened of a probe into its finances will never be a Parliament that is prepared to stand up and be counted.
For instance it is this corrupt supineness - rather than the Treaty of Amsterdam - that keeps the Parliament shuttling back and forth at great expense between Brussels and Strasbourg. Apart from those with vested interests in the current arrangement, everyone else thinks it a nonsense.
What is more 1.2 million Europeans have said so in petitions.
Constitutionally, of course, the matter is one for the European Council to decide by unanimity and France is not going to be the turkey that votes for Christmas.
But parliaments with the wind of popular opinion behind them have never paid much heed to constitutions. They are sovereign bodies and they know it; they have only to act.
If the European Parliament were to pass a motion settling its seat in Brussels, that would be the end of the matter.
Of course there would be a lot of huffing and puffing - but just as Louis XVI could not move his Assembly out of its tennis court and finally had to give in to its demands - so the European Council would have no option (we assume they would not send in the army!) but to accede to what Parliament decides.
But as this Parliament lacks even the courage to publish an internal audit report, I don't think we should hold our breath. The European Council can sleep easily.
This parliament prefers avarice to power.
The author is editor of EuropaWorld