Newsletter February/March 2011

More EU waste and expenses

The EU spent £230m last year on travel to meetings held in exotic locations including the Seychelles.
75 MEPs will be going to Montevideo in Uruguay in May at a cost of £1.2 million to strengthen links between EU Parliamentarians and their Latin American counterparts.
The EU has funded a Spanish sex shop with money coming from the European Social Fund. The shop received 611 euros in order to “improve the employability of the unemployed”.
Countries in the Middle East and North Africa receive around £1.4bn a year from the EU’s European Neighbourhood Policy. The UK’s annual contribution is estimated to be £180m.
The EU has given Croatia an unconditional 472m euros to help them prepare for entry into the EU. When they join, they will be given a further 4bn euros.
EU civil servants earning up to £185,000 a year can travel on public transport in Brussels at half price. Around 5,000 staff receive this subsidy.

EU judges have passed an equality ruling making it illegal for insurance companies to set premiums according to a person’s sex. Young women, who are less likely to have an accident, will have to pay the same car insurance as young men who are at greater risk.

Conversely, older men will receive smaller pensions to bring their pensions down to the level of women, even though women are likely to live longer.

Libya ...
Libya has threatened to end cooperation with the EU on immigration if they continue to support protestors. In October the EU offered Libya 50m euros to combat illegal immigration.

Italy, Spain, France, Cyprus, Malta and Greece have appealed to the EU for help to cope with the massive flow of migrants from Libya and want to speed up moves towards a common EU asylum policy but have faced resistance from other EU member states.

Britain has paid what one senior government figure called “bribes” to Libyan officials to get British citizens home. Officials were forced to hand over more than £11,000 for every rescue flight that has landed at Tripoli airport. The cost is already more than £70,000 and could well rise to 6 figures.

... and Tunisia
Lady Ashton, the EU’s foreign secretary, has announced that Tunisia will be given 17m euros immediately and a further 258m over the next three years to support democratic reforms.

Votes for prisoners
MPs in Parliament voted against ECHR proposals to give prisoners the vote by 234 to 22. This means that 394 MPs failed to vote. One of those who voted for enfranchisement of prisoners was our own Labour MP for Edmonton, Andy Love.

585 prisoners who claimed compensation for not being able to vote in last year’s General Election had their case thrown out of court and they were told they had to pay their own costs of £76 each.

Inmates at Broadmoor, the prison for the criminally insane, have launched a claim to the ECHR for full state benefits.

Other ECHR rulings which have been in the news this month and which are detrimental to Britain:

Convicted rapists and paedophiles should have the “right” to ask to be removed from the sex offenders register on the grounds that being on the register for life infringed their human rights.
Written evidence submitted by witnesses who cannot be present at a trial breaches a defendant’s right to a fair trial because the defendant cannot cross question the witness.
Suspected terrorists, likely to be tortured in their home country, cannot be deported even if there is the risk of harm to British citizens. Only the human rights of the terrorist can be taken into account.

The ECHR have demanded a ban on smacking children in the home in Britain. Out of the 47 member states which contribute to the ECHR, 21 of them have outlawed smacking children.

Sales (and purchases!) of the family silver
John Wood, an Aberdeen oil services group, has been sold to US General Electric for £1.75bn.

Another American group, Advent International, bought rehab clinic Priory Group for £925m.

British energy firm International Power has fallen into foreign ownership when GDF Suez of France bought 70% of its business. Britain owns just two independent energy producers in Centrica and Scottish & Southern Energy.

The London Stock Exchange is planning to merge with Canada’s TMX but the provincial government of Ontario is looking at all the implications. They have a zest for scuppering deals with overseas partners.

Cambridge computer chip maker CSR has agreed to buy US Zoran Corporation for £429m. It adds imaging and video to its wi-fi and bluetooth technologies.

Day-to-day news from February

1st - The Daily Express handed in to 10 Downing Street 373,000 petition coupons from readers saying they want Britain to withdraw from the EU.

1st - The maximum weight (44 tonnes) and length (54ft 1in) of lorries using UK roads is likely to increase to 60 tonnes and 82ft 10in in future under EU plans to harmonise lorry weights across Europe. Currently foreign lorries pay nothing to use British roads although the Government is considering making a charge. Most EU countries charge British lorries to use theirs.

2nd - D-Day veterans are angry at a French proposal to erect a windfarm off Juno Beach which will be visible from the shore.

4th - The Government has opted in to an EU directive on cybercrime, despite MPs on the House of Common European Scrutiny Committee refusing to clear the proposal late last year. The directive sets “a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 5 years“ for certain cybercrime offences. Under the Lisbon Treaty, the European Court of Justice will have full and ultimate jurisdiction over the application of these rules in the UK for the first time.

7th - Two men robbed the post office inside the EU Parliament building and got away with at least 8,000 euros. It is the third robbery over the last 2 years.

8th - The Foreign and Commonwealth Office launched “EU Careers Month” to increase the number of UK graduates applying to the EU Civil Service’s recruitment drive. Only 6% of the EU’s workforce is British although we represent 12% of the EU’s population.

8th - Under new EU regulations, factories must equip new cars and small vans with Daytime Running Lights, which automatically switch on when the engine starts.

10th - The UK’s “most useless” wind turbine near Reading worked at just 15% of its capacity last year. Although it generated electricity worth an estimated £100,000, it was subsidised with £130,000 of public money. Its owners, Ecotricity, have received £600,000 in subsidies since it was switched on in 2005. Holland has announced it is cutting its subsidies for wind turbines.

10th - Prince Charles spoke at the EU Parliament criticising those who deny “man-made” climate change.

12th - As many as 1 million innocent people will have their DNA profiles removed from the police database. Laws introduced by the previous Government to allow fraud trials to take place without a jury will be scrapped.

16th - Germany’s stock exchange, Deutsche Borse, has taken over US stock exchange NYSE Euronext, making it bigger than the London Stock Exchange.

17th - Herbal and Chinese medicines that faced an EU ban are to stay on sale under plans to register UK practitioners for the first time.

17th - Irish banks are issuing bonds to themselves under a government guarantee to use as collateral in order to borrow cheaply from the European Central Bank. Four banks issued bonds worth 17bn euros to themselves last month.

17th - Today marks 249 days of political deadlock in Belgium, hitting the world record for lack of government.

21st - Ministers are looking at the possibility of adopting Central European Time which is one hour ahead of GMT. We tried it as an experiment in the winters of 1968/9 and 1969/70 and nobody liked it. Children were going to school in the dark for the two months December and January.

23rd - The humble Cornish pasty has won protected status. The EU has ruled that only pasties made in Cornwall to the traditional recipe can be called Cornish pasties.

24th - The EU is considering establishing a committee to vet foreign bids for EU companies following concerns that state-backed enterprises from China and Russia could swallow European firms.

25th - The Polish government is struggling to meet targets on landfill waste reduction and recycling and since July 2010 the EU has charged Poland 40,000 euros per day for non-compliance. This is due to be increased to 250,000 euros per day from 2013.

25th - Wikileaks’ Julian Assange will be extradited to Sweden under the European Arrest Warrant.

28th - The new Irish government is to seek a renegotiation of the terms of the 85bn euro EU/IMF bail-out. A leader in the Observer said the deal for Ireland “is punitive, unjust and unsustainable ... It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Irish interests are being sacrificed to the larger cause of saving the euro.”