Fishy business
Worse, this is the eighth year in a row that the Court has refused to sign off all but a fraction of the EU's annual accounts as "legal and regular." European taxpayers are sending their money to Brussels to be swallowed by the bottomless swamp represented by the common agricultural policy, or to other disparate fates which are the consequence of intriguing scams and bureaucratic buffoonery. The bulk of the money is stolen, through fictional claims for subsidies from farmers and agribusinessmen: the remainder sinks into the sands of wanton mismanagement, which include fantastical adventures in the developing world. Africa is littered with unfinished infrastructural monuments which might readily serve as a tribute to the gigantic megalomanias of any communist regime. There is a famous story of an EU tribune who needed to urgently unload an unspent portion of his budget: "Build me a fish farm in Somalia and be quick about it" was his instant edict.
What the European Union has is a truly virtual budget. This was the conclusion of no less a person than Marta Andreasen, sacked from her job as chief accountant of the European Commission after little more than three months in the job because she blew the whistle on the distasteful mess she discovered around her. In the Orwellian world of the EU, she was instantly suspended and now faces the EU equivalent of the firing squad, "disciplinary procedures."
Ms. Andreasen is not the first victim to discover that informing your employers, the European Commission, that wrongdoers are stealing your money in vast quantities is to earn retribution, and not congratulations. Her mistake, as an outsider new to the culture of the institutions of the European Union, was to assume a dedication to transparency and honesty. It would be unremarkable if vast, rambling organisations such as the European institutions were not exposed to a certain degree of bumbling and pilfering: such is human nature. But to lose nearly all of €98 billion year after year is testimony to shuddering contempt for any sense of public accountability.
The culture of incompetence and criminality has developed inside the European Commission because the institution has no effective control over the people it employs. There are no effective sanctions against misbehaviour by the over-patronised coterie of civil servants because the theoretical guardians of fiscal propriety, the 20 Commissioners, are terrified of union power.
Four years ago, Euro MPs became sufficiently sickened by the stench of corruption to deploy their doomsday weapon and fire the entire executive commission. But the majority was permitted to slink back into office. The ineffective Neil Kinnock, a British socialist who led his party to defeat (and yet was not without stout political courage against the militants in his own party) was charged with cleaning up the mess. The persecution of Ms. Andreasen is the result.
There are many people in this country, perhaps even a majority, who believe that by voting for Europe in next year's referendum, they will choose to identify with a system of ethics and morals they perceive to be conspicuously absent here. In the sense that they yearn for an accord with the wider European consensus, measured by the general standards of ethical behaviour in public life in the 15 present member states, they will be rewarded. Insofar as the warped and corrupted institutions of the EU itself are concerned, they will be disappointed. The distinction is rather important.
