ALL ABOARD....

As our own Members of Parliament are continuing their seventeen day Easter break, attention has turned to the latest outrage to beset the taxpayers of the European Parliament.

Buried away in the internal documentation of the EU, it has emerged that the 785 `members` have awarded themselves yet more eye-watering allowances. On top of yesterday`s announcement that they have awarded themselves a 20% salary increase (while the rest of the `employed` world have to settle for an average of 1.5%) today comes news that they have invented a new `allowance` for themselves which pays them whilst they are travelling.

From June, MEPs will be able to claim up to £257 per journey under a `duration allowance` which reimburses them for the time spent travelling between their homes and European Parliament buildings. This will be in addition to all the other allowances they get, including free business class travel to anywhere in the EU and a `distance allowance` which is supposed to cover the costs of meals, taxis and any other expenses incurred whilst they are travelling.

A couple of things, apart from the obvious, occur to me. The first is that these things are a million miles away from the original concept of the EU, which was basically formed by the German/French axis to stop them going to war with each other and the rest of Europe. Konrad Adenauer, one of the driving forces behind the EU `project,` foresaw it as the only way to achieve supremacy having failed twice to achieve it by military means. The more that self-serving `initiatives` like this one come in by the back door, the more the needs and wellbeing of the people are ignored, the more likely that goal is to be achieved. On a more pragmatic point, if there are 785 MEPs to cover the whole of Europe, isn`t it about time we looked at why it takes as many as 658 Members of our own Parliament to represent the good folk of just this country?

It seems more and more to be the case that members of Parliament, either national or European, inhabit a parallel universe where the taxpayers are there simply to be taken for granted and squeezed relentlessly so that a comfortable lifestyle can be guaranteed in the corridors of power, especially in Brussels. Maybe somewhere in a distant galaxy far, far away, there is a system whereby the taxpayers have elected representatives whose first and most important function is to do the representing, rather than the blatant, shameless nest feathering that goes on down here.