Well done Margot

Credit where credit is due.

Regular readers of this blog will know that we're not the biggest fans of the former Commissioner for Propaganda Communication, Margot Wallstrom. Margot and her office too often acted like outright lobbyists trying to promote ever closer union - including spinning facts on the Lisbon Treaty and trying to silence and slander dissenting voices - rather than civil servants charged with providing factual information (they are funded by taxpayers after all).

But Margot, who now holds a UN position - Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict - has recently done a rather principled thing. Unlike most of her former colleagues, she turned down the controversial 'transitional allowance' that Commissioners are entitled to for three years after leaving office. We've looked at this issue before, but the transitional allowance is again hitting the headlines, as it emerged that ex-Commissioners such as Charlie McCreevy and Peter Mandelson receive hefty pay-outs from the EU despite holding lucrative jobs or making money from book sales.

The allowance is worth a lot of money - for Margot it would have been up to 60% of her final annual Commission salary for three years, or the difference between her current salary and her salary as a Commissioner (€270,376).

Now, Wallstrom won't starve - having made €2,991,313 during her ten years in Brussels and with an annual pension of €113,486 - but you still have to give her credit for doing the decent thing here (given that she did turn it down for ethical reasons and not, for example, because she makes more than what she did as Commissioner in her new role, which would be a scandal in its own right).

So well done Margot - as taxpayers we salute you.

Infuriating and fatal

Over on Comment is Free we take a look at the simmering EU pay dispute, which took a new turn yesterday when the Commission decided to take all 27 EU member states to the ECJ over their refusal to increase their offer of a 1.85% pay rise for EU officials to 3.7%.

It seems it is not only us that think this is a ridiculous situation. An article in Die Welt by Brussels correspondent Hannelore Crolly argues that,

"It is a fatal decision for the EU Commission to argue over the increase in payment to 50,000 already well-paid employees in the face of objections from the debt ridden member states in court…In a deliberately insensitive and almost frightening way, the Commission is again sending the wrong message to the people, who it should be trying to win over for the European cause."

Similarly an article in Kölner Stadt Anzeiger argues: “The EU is fighting against the countries that support it. It is not just painful, it is infuriating.”

In today's WSJ Charles Forelle takes a critical look at the "compulsory method" that was used to arrive at the 3.7% pay increase demanded by EU civil servants and which has become central to the dispute. He notes that,

"To crunch the civil servants' cost-of-living adjustment, the EU's statistical office doesn't rely on Belgian data for housing costs. Instead, each year it surveys its own staffers, asking them how much they pay. The purpose isn't lost on those surveyed. A privacy statement attached to the survey says the data will be used "for the calculation of the annual salary adjustment."

He adds,

"Rent-survey data accounted for nearly all of the increase in the EU's
bespoke cost-of-living figure…Had the EU used the Belgian consumer-price index -
which fell 1.1% - to adjust the civil-servant salaries, the raise would have
been a more recession-friendly 1.7%, instead of the now-vilified 3.7%."

As we've argued before, with civil servants in Latvia seeing their pay cut by 25% and Ireland slashing 1.3 billion euros off its public sector wage bill, EU officials' refusal to accept a compromise wage increase of 1.85% does seem rather churlish, to put it mildly.