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Chris Heaton-Harris MEP: A Rough Guide to the EU Budget

Chris Heaton-Harris writes A Rough Guide to the EU's Draft Budget for 2009.

For the past nine years or so I have been a Member of the Audit Committee of the European Parliament (known as "Budgetary Control") and have been trying to make some sense of the Budgets of both the European Commission and European Parliament.

We all know that every year the European Court of Auditors fails to sign off (or as they say “give a positive statement of assurance on”) the accounts of the European Commission and one question every candidate for the European elections next year will be asked is “what are you going to do to stop all the fraud, waste and maladministration, so that the accounts get signed off?”

Well, this time of year is budget time! Cannily, the process was designed so that just about everyone in the European Parliament who might care about the Budget is away on holiday around the time amendments for the budget should be submitted. This year most Committees of the Parliament (which only returned from recess on 25th August) have deadlines for the tabling of amendments around the 27th August. As you will see later on, almost every item of expenditure has its own “budget line” and this is what MEPs will try to amend. This is where MEPs, if they wanted to, could try to tame the beast.

Every year, helped by my poor members of staff, I go through the budget over the summer months and table dozens (occasionally hundreds) of amendments to try and prune out some of the rubbish that I have found contained within it. Every year I lose most of these amendments in the Committee and Plenary votes, thanks to EPP, Socialist and Liberal MEPs defending the status quo. And every year I still get asked by hundreds of different people why am I not doing anything about it!

This year is my last attempt, as I am standing down from the European Parliament next June and moving onto pastures new. However, I don’t want to leave this subject alone; I want to try and translate the Budget into plain English to explain how much money is spent by the European Institutions, where it goes, and why it is mightily difficult to make any amendments to the Budget at all. Whilst I have made the occasional political comment, the whole point of this exercise is not to say that all this is a complete waste of money and we shouldn’t give Europe a penny (although, given the accounts are never signed off, I do subscribe to that argument) – the idea here is to try and describe how big the beast is and how the scrutiny process works.

Chris Heaton-Harris MEP: How to Select Tory MEP Candidates for the June 2009 election

Chris is a Conservative MEP for the East Midlands. The opinions of other MEPs are featured on ToryDiary today.

There are obviously dozens of ways the Party could choose to select its lists of MEP candidates for the June 2009 election. Below I mention just two – the one I prefer as a Party Member and the one I would prefer if I was in the Party’s leadership team.

As someone who was “given a chance” by a single meeting of Party members, all of whom were given a chance to come and vote for their favourite candidate on a one member one vote basis, way back in April 1998, I have to say that is the system I hold closest to my heart.

Although there is always room for improvement; in fact, I think we should enhance this system and have proper US style Primaries to rank MEP candidates.

I was Chief Whip of the Conservative MEPs back when the rankings/selection meetings for MEP candidates were taking place back in late 2002 and early 2003. Thus, I do understand how the appalling system of proportional representation that gives us the list system can cause problems where you have more than one MEP in a region – but nothing that can’t be overcome by sensible Primary rules, a strict check on spending and equal access for candidates to an up to date membership list (preferably held by the Party centrally) and a postal ballot at the end.