You may have noticed (although, being a story about something that happened in the European Parliament, you probably haven’t) that Bill Clinton made an appearance yesterday at the Party of the European Socialist’s annual Global Progressive Forum in Brussels.
Speaking for just under an hour, Clinton shared his views with delegates on the state of the world economy, climate change and international development. Other conference participants included former European Commissioner Pascal Lamy, former Democratic Presidential candidate Howard Dean and former Danish Prime Minister and PES President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen.
For sharing his views, it is widely rumoured in the corridors of the European Parliament that Clinton was paid the princely sum of £80,000 - the going rate for a one hour speech by the cigar-lovin’ former President.
At £150,000, a one hour speech plus fifteen minutes of media questions, was deemed too expensive for the PES to justify.
Clinton's fee was paid from a general fund replenished each year by the generous 'information allowance' slush fund provided by the Parliament - and then 'top sliced' by the individual political groupings - to each MEP.
Is this really the kind of thing, in the middle of the present economic crisis, that the Party of the European Socialists should be squandering taxpayers’ money on?
And given that we’ve spent the last week listening to socialist heads of government complaining about the economy collapsing due to unrestrained greed; why should an ethically-challenged former politician get paid £80,000 per hour from public funds; when bankers, operating in the private sector, have just been told (by these same politicians) they will have their pay and bonuses more-closely regulated (again, by these same politicians).
Welcome to the tawdry world of international socialism.