EU Expenses

The Open Europe blog has an item on the above subject, in which it reports that the Conservative Party - bar one MEP, Weasely Beazely - has published full expense accounts for the last four months. It is to be hoped that every party will follow suit and that, in the case of one particular party, they will also include staff and salary costs too, in the spirit of total transparency!

From that blog, a few statistics:

"By our calculations, Conservative MEPs have on average cost the UK taxpayer £36,303 each for expenses, travel and allowances in 4 months alone. So over a year that is £108,910 each. It's a fair bet that this will be no different for all our MEPs.

If you times that by the number of members of the European Parliament (785) you're looking at costs per year of an eye-watering £85,494,350 for the whole of Europe.

And that's not allowing for the fact that many MEPs will be spending far more than British MEPs on travel between home and the European Parliament.

It also doesn't even begin to cover their salary and staff costs, of course."

No further comment!