100 posts
Your staffing budget is fatter than my staffing budget! EP has no right to grumble at the Commission
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Oh the irony! A Member of the European Parliament – Inge Grässle (whose name sounds rather like graisse, the French word for fat) – has had a go at the European Commission for creating its hundredth Director...
Financing Agriculture
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The 20th Brussels Development Briefing will be on ‘Financing agriculture and will take place on the 15th of September 2010. As an input to the UN Summit on MDGs to be held in New York on 22-26 September 2010, we will discuss issues related to f...
The Budget Group
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There was an interesting and at times impassioned discussion in this morning’s meeting of the EESC’s Budget Group about the post-Lisbon Treaty budgetary procedure. I have bored on about this in previous posts. Suffice it to say here that...
Home truths
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A great report on EUobserver today features some very revealing comments by a, disappointingly, anonymous EU official about the "mushrooming" cost of the EU institutions, and their total disengagement from the debates going on across Europe about the...
EC to recover € 265.02 million of CAP expenditure from the Member States
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A total of € 265.02 million of EU farm money unduly spent by Member States is claimed back as a result of a decision adopted today by the European Commission. This money returns to the EU budget because of non-compliance with EU rules or inadequate...
Biting The Fiscal Bullet In Poland
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There is a good deal of speculation in the press at the moment over the tricky issue of whether or not Poland will be able to comply with its agreed deficit-reduction deadline on the basis of the latest budget proposals announced by the government th...
Back to the slashers…
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My flight arrived at 09.20, Belgian time, and I went straight to the office and back into the brutal reality of a probable zero growth budget and its consequences. Already, in New York, my President and I discussed strategy and tactics. Back in Bruss...
Commission gives details of who received EU funds in 2009
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The European Commission has disclosed who in 2009 received EU funds in policy areas like research, education and culture, energy and transport or external aid. The online database, now containing more than 114 thousand entries going back to 2007, has...
Our organisation does not tolerate failure?
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Re my earlier post, in case you were wondering if there were any actual cases of politicians making ambiguous calls for market reassurance, well, here’s a nice example from the G20 Toronto Summit Declaration: There is a risk that synchronized f...
The real cost of Osborne’s Budget
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David Cameron is today spending huge amounts of taxpayers’ money holding a Cabinet meeting in Yorkshire. When Gordon Brown took his Cabinet to Leeds at the end of 2008, West Yorkshire Police spent £138,000 on extra security. Add travel, ho...
Kaufman on the Graun on the budget
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From today’s Graun: • Re your leader, Seumas Milne’s article and all your other moans about the budget (24 June): you wanted this government. You’ve got it. Stop whining. Gerald Kaufman MP Lab, Manchester Gorton (NB: Mr Kaufman is...
Tomorrow’s budget shows huge lack of empathy for middle income families
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The Treasury is hurriedly preparing papers and briefing those who need to know in anticipation of tomorrow’s emergency budget. This budget will be searingly painful to millions of people across the country and will finally signal to the Bri...
Budget Support and MDG Performance
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The first Development Paper has been presented by the European Commission staff at ODI, in London this week. It intends to increase awareness of the EU policy thinking on development issues and to seek comments and suggestions for further analyses.
How to set the national budget
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I was on the radio this morning discussing with eurosceptic Tory MP Bill Cash the proposal that there should be some kind of common discussion among the member state governments and the European Commission about the national budgets of the member sta...
Reforming the EU Budget to Promote Sustainable Growth
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Reforming the EU budget offers one way to promote sustainable development in Europe. Even given the current limited size of this budget, substantial resources could be channelled into a broad carbon mitigation and adaptation programme with a European...
Report on the Public Finances of the EU
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The European Commission has published the 2010 Report on Public Finances in EMU. The report reviews how Member States’ fiscal policies have evolved in the wake of the financial and economic crisis. It assesses the prospects for public finances...
£60 million fine for Northern Ireland for CAP Errors
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Northern Ireland gets some £300 million per year in CAP subsidy payments, but now the Executive (regional government) will be fined (or disallowed) £60 million for what seems to be a list of serious errors. The BBC has reported that claims were awa...
MEPs should set an example
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The European Parliament on 19 May voted themselves an additional €9.4 million for staff salaries, to help them cope with the additional work created under the Lisbon Treaty. Monthly staff budgets are currently €17 540 per MEP. However justified...
European Parliament considers controversial ban on siblings
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After receiving a top secret report from OLAF (the European Commission Anti-Fraud Office), the Bureau of the European Parliament, with the consent of Presidents Van Rompuy and Barroso, is to consider a highly controversial move that would prohibit...
More or less control in the supervision of EU funds? - On the Commission Communication
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It is no secret that the EU is spending a good amount of its budget through funds that are given to diverse recipients all across the Union, and so a discussion on how these funds are spent is always worth having. They are worth having because almos...
Ex-EP president Pöttering loves his privileges
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German news report that former European Parliament president Hans-Gert Pöttering still has the right to use his car and driver. In addition, Spiegel Online informs, the rules have been changed right when he left office and were confirmed by his for...
European Commission hit by crisis as staff training courses get cancelled
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The BJ reporters received an internal email from a trusted source within the European Commission demonstrating that cost cutting is now also affecting the training programme of European Commission civil servants. The email, circulated to DG RELEX (Ex...
The cult of austerity
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How quickly should public spending be cut? Who would have imagined just a short time ago that this would be the central political argument in Britain. No political party disputes that the scythe must be taken out of the shed....
Young, dynamic, creative? It’s time to join!
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The rumours were louder and louder in the last weeks… And now it's official. The new competition to enter the European institutions has been launched this week. I was in this situation about two years ago, I know how it is, how people feel... Let's...
The Bureau and the 2011 Budget
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This afternoon’s Bureau meeting adopted the EESC’s draft budget for 2011. In a sober and consensual debate, the Bureau members recognised that all EU institutions are facing a difficult task in this context. All are painfully aware of t...
A flag
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We were walking up a snowy mountain on this cold Sunday morning in a small town in western Germany. Half way up the mountain, there was a blue flag with 12 stars waving on a silver pole in front of a private home. The sun was shining brightly. And...
The rise of budget support: a false panacea
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European aid donors are delivering a higher share of development aid directly to governments in the form of budget support. While this offers potential for enhancing local accountability within developing states the way it is being implemented in pra...
Does Anyone Really Know The Size Of The Greek 2009 Deficit?
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While investors are generally aware of the dire state of the western economies’ accounts, quite a few of them are optimistic that these large budget deficits can be closed through a combination of fiscal discipline and expenses reduction. Such opti...
Conclusion: Hearing on EU Budget Commissioner
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Janusz Lewandowski performed well at his interview before the joint meeting of the Budget and Budgetary Control Committees of the European Parliament. A Pole from the governing centre-right Civic Platform, he studiously avoided offending most MEPs an...
2.5 million tonnes of EU waste
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Few things represent the absurd and outdated nature of the EU's budget as well as the weird butter and grain mountains. These mountains consist of surplus produce that Europe's farmers have been unable to sell on the market and that is instead bought...
“Fraud, chicanery & rule-bending”
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The New York Times dubbed it “the mystery of the sugar triangle” – the huge subsidy fraud discovered when Belgian and European investigators raided the offices of Belgian sugar maker Beneo-Orafti last spring. The case belongs to a long traditio...
Parliament adopts EU budget for 2010
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Parliament adopted the final EU budget for 2010, which will be €141.4 billion in commitments and €122.9 billion in payments. The main challenge for this year's budget was to find the funding for the already agreed but not yet financed economic re...
2009
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Image by mugley via Flickr What a year! 2009 is approaching its end and its been and up and down year for me. Blogging What a year for me and blogging! It started off great being selected for the first Th!nk about it competition and then that led...
Predictions for 2010
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It is that time of the year again – the time that pundits like to gaze into their crystal ball and divine a few predictions for the year to come. Never one to be left out, let me offer a few here. • First, for the first year since 2005, the...
Sharp Turn on the Rock Road.
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I’ve been asked to repost this little fictional wandering I wrote. It’s 1943, and Eamonn De Valera is dead in a car crash. Young new Taoiseach Sean Lemass is faced with a choice which could change the destiny of the nation. ...
The Naughties – A Valediction
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Tomorrow we say goodbye to the first decade of the new millennium. And the last ten years were troubled ones. The 1990s were characterised by a captivating optimism that the new world after the Cold War would bring peace and prosperity for all. The t...
The Noughties – A Valediction
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Tomorrow we say goodbye to the first decade of the new millennium. And the last ten years were troubled ones. The 1990s were characterised by a captivating optimism that the new world after the Cold War would bring peace and prosperity for all. The t...
EU accounts dodgy? You’d think people in British glasshouses would know better…
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The always excellent Jon Worth makes a very valid point here about the old eurosceptic chestnut of the EU’s unsigned accounts.
What planet is the EU on
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Marta Andreasen points out that increasing the EU's budget by 6% this year is from "another planet".It is obscene she says to vote to increase MEPs salaries. Here here. Stick it to them Marta.
Dear Dirk
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Last week, we were told by journalists that Dirk Ahner, the Commission's Director-General for regional policy, had apparently sent a letter to the members of the European Parliament's Budgetary Control committee, criticising Open Europe's 50 examples...
On another planet Part 585
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In his PBR today Alistair Darling has announced a public sector pay freeze for 4 million UK workers, including vital frontline staff such as nurses, police and teachers.Meanwhile, over in la-la land, the Dutch, French and Spanish press report that EU...
Politics and time zones; a few vague reflections
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My thingy got blocked and so I had to reset it. According to the factory settings, it gives a loud ‘ping’ whenever I receive an e-mail and a similarly loud ‘dring’ when I receive a text message. I haven’t had the time to...
Don't cut public spending
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From the TUC website A dozen leading economists have urged the Chancellor not to undermine...
Stuck in the past
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Following the revelation last week that 38,000 civil servants working for the European Commission are in line for an inflation-busting 3.7% pay rise for salaries, pensions and allowances this year, 15 EU member states have recognised that this is a s...
Sick of “EU doesn’t sign off books, therefore corrupt/evil/useless/nasty” (delete as applicable)
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Ho, ho, here we go again. A question posed in the House of Commons by Philip Davies (Con) as cited by the Open Europe blog: Given that the accounts of the EU have not been signed off by the auditors for 15 years running, why do the Government ke...
Avoiding the issue
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Within the next year, the UK Government (whoever it will be) will find itself in crucial negotiations over the next EU 'financial framework', which will decide who pays what into the EU budget over the period 2014 to 2020.You will remember that Tony...
How come Ireland's public finances are so bad?
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Something I don't understand: we're constantly told here that our public finances are unsustainable, while...
CAP budget report has been 'binned' - or has it?
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A controversial draft report which advocated cutbacks in CAP spending after 2014 has now been ditched according to Farm Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel. She denied having backed the report which called for agriculture to account for a lesser share...
Expensive President of the European Council?
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Dignitaries are expensive, as we all know. Open Europe quotes the Belgian daily De Netto with regard to the president of the European Council. Open Europe press summary 19 November 2009: New EU President to cost taxpayers €6 million a yearBelgian...
LOL - Sarkozy's grand public national bond not to be open to public
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Sarkozy, who had run on a campaign to reduce government deficits and public debt is...
MEPs back big budget for EU farm policy
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The first exchange of views on the post-2013 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) last week showed that the European Parliament may well use its new powers to block any significant budget cuts for the policy. If EU farm policy is to address important new...
ICTU, lobby groups demand magic fairies solve economic crisis.
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NGOs, lobby groups and Congress have all demanded that the government use little magic people to address the issue of possible cuts in public spending in the upcoming budget. ICTU spokesperson Sean Beard told us: “If the government really cared...
