20 September 2006
Blog Home : September 2006 : Permalink
David Rennie's Torygraph blog has the story of the recent naming of an EU building after the Sun's favourite EUrocrat - Jaques Delors. As Mr Rennie explains the offices that will henceforth be known as the "Jacques Delors Building" are those for two particularly pointless EU talking shops: the Committee of the Regions, and the European Economic and Social Committee - committees which seem to be designed to let lucky politicians and trades unionists get their trotters in the trough and which host[] all kinds of crushingly dull seminars, with titles like: "Social Dialogue in a Stakeholder's Europe for Citizens", or "Citizens and Stakeholders in a Social Europe of Dialogue" or even "Citizens' Dialogue within a Social Europe - a Stakeholder's perspective". Their reports are then sent to the Commission, the European Parliament, national governments and all, and filed under B for Bin.
You have to think that there is a certain amount of schadenfreude going around to see this former VIP with his grand plans for integration, diktat from Brussels etc. etc. getting such a pointless building named after him and according to David Rennie - practically the sole journalist who shoed up for the naming and its free luch - Delors wasn't exactly upbeat about his legacy either as well as bitching about globalization and makign an "interesting" comment about Europe and democracy:"...And yet, given the poor performance of Western democracy, the quest for greater transparency and participation remains a viable solution, at both the national and European Union levels." ...
He concluded: "The scale of the current crisis facing European integration is significant and worrying. This is neither the time nor the place to discuss this point, but I do want to state my conviction that we will not make progress unless we return to the values of political, economic and social democracy. This is the project, scattered with pitfalls but nonetheless crucial, that underpins the work of the European Economic and Social Committee and of the Committee of the Regions."
I love how he asked for greater transparency in the EU but I despair at his apparent recipe for the failure of government - more government.
Tracing the future of the Jacques Delors Bulding and its inhabitants would, I think, be a great way to track progress within the EU.Because of the unauditablitiy of the EU accounts we do not of course actually know how much these institutions cost - transparency anyone? - but I can't see any downside (except for anyone associated with them) if they were abolished and maybe the EU could use the money saved to build a few roads in Poland. Unfortunately it seems more likely that roads in Poland will be sacrificed for refurbishment of office blocks in Brussels