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Thursday, January 15, 2009

Travelling clowns

According to reports, only 268 of the European Parliament's 785 MEPs have signed the declaration calling for an end to the 'travelling circus' which sees MEPs moving from Brussels to a second seat in Strasbourg every month at enormous cost to the taxpayer (not to mention the environment).

393 signatures were needed for the declaration to become official EP policy.

Earlier this week we wrote to MEPs urging them to sign the declaration and help put an end to this scandalous waste of time and money. But clearly their hearts are just not in it.

We've heard some MEPs argue that their objection to the declaration was that it would scrap the Strasbourg seat, instead of the Brussels one. This is a poor reason for failing to give support in principle to ending the circus.

Nevertheless, it should in theory at least mean that they would support a new declaration which does not specify either Brussels or Strasbourg, but which simply calls for an end to the circus.

But will anyone draw one up?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hardly likely after all the MEP's claim travelling expences, and no doubt make a lot of money out of it on a personal level. Closing brussells would be the best idea, as the real rulers of the eu, the commission are based in strasbourg.

Anonymous said...

What did you expect ? These jokers are there for the money. The European Parliament exists for no other purpose than to provide exceedingly well-paid jobs for the otherwise unemployable and useless political trash of Europe; often for their families too.

Anonymous said...

Most people in the EU agree with every word you say, but because of the non democracy in the EU no one gets a chance to put their point of view across.

Anonymous said...

which MEP initiate the written declaration ?

Open Europe blog team said...

Initiators are MEPs Alexander Alvaro, Piia-Noora Kauppi, Frédérique Ries, Catherine Stihler
and Helga Trüpel.

The text of the written declaration is to be found here:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+WDECL+P6-DCL-2008-0075+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN

Anonymous said...

Actually over 1 million people, the cut off point signed the petition, but it was binned by a single unelected commissioner who decided that he was more imprtant than the people.