European Union (Amendment) Bill

I fancy that the noble Lord would agree with the other three noble Lords that we really need not worry about this question of the EU budget because it amounts to only some 2 per cent of GDP and so is not worth bothering about. That canard is closely associated with that other line that we generally get from Europhiles, which is that there is really nothing much to worry about with the European Union because there are only 30,000, or 40,000, or perhaps 60,000 civil servants employed in Brussels—fewer than the Scottish Office used to have. Of course, the answer to that is that those 30,000, or 40,000, or 60,000 civil servants, whose number is difficult to discern accurately, make the law supported in the Council that is then executed by the civil services in all the member nations, which control the democracies of hundreds of millions of people. I hope that we will not get too much more of that in these debates. On the amendment itself, it is of course good that the European Parliament will now have more control over the budget, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, explained. Well, it would be good if the European Parliament were actually going to use its new powers. The basic point here is that no European institution—not the Parliament, the Commission or the Court—wants to halt, inconvenience or hold up the gravy train that is the European Union. We have the clearest possible demonstration of that in the story of Marta Andreasen, who, as your Lordships may know, is now treasurer of the UK Independence Party. Mrs Andreasen was the first qualified accountant ever to be appointed to the position of chief financial officer in the European Union and, under the treaties, the chief financial officer had the power to control and be responsible for the budget. What happened? When she refused to sign off the first set of accounts that were put in front of her, she was first suspended and eventually dismissed. She is now appealing, so I do not want to say much more about her case, except that the first stage of that appeal—at some form of staff court in Brussels—found entirely against her and merely parroted the Commission’s position. There is no hope, then, of reform coming in this area from the European Union institutions. As other noble Lords have mentioned, the accounts have not been signed off for 13 years. I remind the Committee that that process has been undertaken by the EU’s internal auditors; this is an organisation whose internal auditors have refused to sign off its accounts for 13 years. If that happened anywhere else in the normal world, the directors would have been locked up at least 10 years ago, so I have a proposal that I hope that the Government will take seriously. I am sure that they will put this to the appropriate channels in Brussels. It is, quite simply, that the Court of Auditors should be abolished and a leading firm of international accountants appointed in its place, for perhaps five years. That leading firm should be selected by the donor nations to the EU’s profligate coffers. In other words, the countries that produce the money for that absurd circus should be the ones to select a major firm of international auditors to get inside Brussels and see what is happening. Then the taxpayer might begin to get better value from this project and a greater understanding of it—and thus a greater determination to leave it. I would be grateful to know what the Government think of that considered suggestion.