Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Labour elects new leader for Europe


Gordon Brown has today welcomed the election of Glenis Willmott MEP as the new leader of the Labour Party in Europe. She will replace Gary Titley at the head of the European Parliamentary Labour Party (EPLP) now in order to give her time to settle in ahead of the European elections.

It's a mixture of good and bad news.

The good news:

Glenis very publicly supports an end to the 'travelling circus' (which we've been banging on about for the last few days and will continue to do so), and has made some interesting revelations about attempts by the authorities to silence the campaign.

The bad news:

Glenis neglected to reply to Open Europe's Transparency Initiative last year, which aimed to give MEPs the chance to show that they were spending their taxpayer funded expenses fairly and transparently. Over the course of two months, Open Europe repeatedly asked Glenis, along with all the other UK MEPs, to answer six simple and uncontroversial questions about how they spend their staff allowances, and whether they are properly accounted for. She failed to reply, but we do know she employs her husband.

No comments:

Post a Comment