28 January 2016
Pot and Kettle
The irony of Brussels pointing fingers at Warsaw and Madrid.
by Neil Tidmarsh
Last week, MEPs investigating EU spending on foreign aid and development delivered their report to the European parliament.
The Times managed to get hold of a copy of the report. It seems that many of the EU’s 139 offices around the world have broken EU budget rules and overspent massively, and the deficits may have to be paid for by extra contributions from member states. It also seems that half the money spent (£11.5 billion out of £23 billion) fails to reach its target, due to poor management or local corruption, and is thus wasted. The Times quotes from the report’s conclusion: “Every second euro spent by the EU does not achieve what it pays for.” It also quotes Ingeborg Grassle, the chairwoman of the committee producing the report, telling the EU’s foreign affairs chief that money is being “thrown down the toilet”.
Imagine the equivalent happening at a national level. It’s as if the UK’s embassies around the world are independently spending huge sums on overseas aid and development in breach of government rules and without reference to parliament or the electorate, but knowing that the tax-payer will cover the cost anyway. And wasting half of everything they spend along the way.
Such profligacy. Such financial irresponsibility. Such disregard of the principles of democracy.
Also last week, as it happens, the EU slapped Warsaw’s wrist for the Polish government’s disregard of the principles of democracy. Following attempts by Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his Law and Justice Party government to take control of the courts and the state media, the EU has mobilised its previously-unused “rule of law mechanism” to monitor Poland’s constitution and threaten sanctions.
And this week, equally ironically, the EU threatened to slap Madrid’s wrist for the perceived potential of a Spanish government for financial irresponsibility. The ruling conservative Popular Party was defeated in Spain’s elections last month, punished by the electorate for (among other things) following tough austerity measures imposed by the eurozone. No party won a workable majority, and coalition negotiations are becoming protracted. But the most likely outcome now seems to be a coalition between the Socialist party and the far-left Podemos party (supported by Catalonian and Basque nationalists). These left-wing parties have protested against austerity in the past, and now the EU is concerned that such a government may abandon the austerity measures to which Spain committed itself when it narrowly avoided an international bailout in 2012. So it has drafted a European Commission report warning them of the dangers of such financial irresponsibility.
An additional irony is, of course, that the EU is at least indirectly responsible for the dangers it is so exercised about in Poland and Spain.
Due to a fact of geography, Poland has found itself bullied by more powerful neighbours throughout its history; by a tsarist Russia and a unifying Germany in the nineteenth century, and by Nazi Germany and Communist Russia in the twentieth century. With the fall of communism at the end of the twentieth century and entry into the EU at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Poland hoped that at last it had found its true place as a free, democratic, European nation. Alas, it soon found itself bullied by the EU too; last October’s electoral defeat of prime minister Ewa Kopacz’s centrist government (her Civic Platform party is liberal/conservative/Christian democrat) by Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his right wing nationalist Law and Justice Party was largely the electorate’s expression of disgust and disillusionment at the EU’s attempt to impose compulsory migrant quotas on them against their will the month before.
Disgust and disillusionment at the perceived deafness of the EU’s distant political elite to their voices are turning European electorates towards newer, more radical, grass-roots parties which are promising to listen carefully and look after their own. Greece’s Golden Dawn is a particularly sinister example, as is the revelation in France’s recent regional elections that the National Front is now running neck and neck with the country’s two mainstream parties. In Spain, such disillusionment and disgust helped to make the two new anti-establishment parties, the left-wing Podemos (‘We Can’) and the centrist Cuidadanos (‘Citizens’), the real winners of the election. And Podemos, riding a wave of protest against EU-imposed austerity, now appears to hold the balance of power.
The EU sees itself as the latest manifestation of Europe’s great civilisations, the guardian of their traditions and heritage. So, having placed its warnings to Poland and Spain in the context of its overseas offices’ spending, let’s conclude with some comments from that heritage for its consideration:
“But who polices the policemen?” – Juvenal (Satire VI, 347-8: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”).
“Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? … Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of they brother’s eye” – Jesus Christ (St Matthew 7, 3-5).
“An example of the pot calling the kettle black” – anonymous medieval celebrity chef.
