Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2016-11-30-Speech-1-029-000"
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"en.20161130.11.1-029-000"2
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"Mr President, when we come to this point in the year, I sometimes wonder why we don’t just replay a recording of last year’s budget debates rather than repeat the entire performance. Because it is the same thing that happens over and over again.
As it’s Christmas, let’s compare this to an annual pantomime. The Committee on Budgets, the Commission, the Parliament – well we all vote, don’t we, for more EU, more spending, more taxpayers’ money being thrown at this project? Then along comes UKIP and our colleagues in the EFDD – the Five Star Movement and others – and we suggest saving the taxpayer billions of euros. We show how it can be done, we show costs that can be cut and we show victimless cuts, saving money for ordinary people. Well, that makes us the pantomime villain. So you lot all boo. Oh yes you do. And Labour and Conservatives vote against whatever we come up with, and that sometimes shows how much they seem to care about saving money for ordinary people. And then the Council comes and proposes a smaller budget increase, and we have the ‘will they, won’t they?’ moment where the audience wonders if a compromise can be reached. So we go into the early hours of the morning almost every year, wondering whether they can find a new trick to find more taxpayers’ money without actually breaching the budget ceilings. And, after nail—biting tension, the audience on the edge of their seats, a compromise is always reached, the day is saved and everybody lives happily ever after – everybody, of course, except the general public, who have to pay for all of it despite, in the UK’s case, having voted for Brexit. Never mind a 3.3% backdated pay increase for EU Commission officials that went through the Committee on Budgets last time, never mind draft amending budget No 5, which means that the UK will have to fire off another EUR 700 million cheque off to Brussels, and never mind the repeated Court of Auditors reports. You know what? I sometimes don’t know whether this is a pantomime or a Kafkaesque farce. Well, the British people voted for Brexit and we’re going to write the last chapter, we’re going to play the final act and we’re going to lower the curtain on this tragedy."@en1
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