A lost opportunity to reform the EU budget

By Glenis Willmott MEP

Later today the European Parliament will vote on plans for a bigger EU budget. Labour MEPs will find ourselves in a small minority voting against the proposals.

Our decision to oppose the whole EU budget package won’t make us popular within the European Parliament, but the scale of the cuts currently being inflicted on people back home mean it is impossible to consider any other option.

The debate has raised some interesting questions for us as Labour politicians.

We certainly don’t support the way the coalition government is risking the economy by slashing public spending. But that doesn’t mean we should therefore automatically support an increase in spending by the European Union.

Let’s be clear: the EU will be doing a lot of important work next year. From fighting global poverty to backing green jobs, there are many ways in which it makes sense for us to cooperate with our European partners, getting more for our collective buck than if we acted alone.

In many cases EU money will be providing support for projects in the areas that will be hardest hit by the coalition cuts.

There are also new tasks for the EU next year. New structures to regulate our banks have cross-party support and will play a vital role in monitoring the institutions so that we don’t find ourselves back in the same predicament in the future.

However, it is undeniable that there is also waste. The EU institutions could certainly find ways of making savings (first on my list to go would be the European Parliament’s ridiculous travelling circus between Brussels and Strasbourg) and there is still a long way to go in tackling outrageous agricultural subsidies.

Labour MEPs are campaigning to cut one billion pounds from the EU budget – it could all come from subsidies, many of which are damaging the economies of the very countries we are looking to help via our aid budgets.

The pressure on domestic budgets could have been a crucial factor in forcing these issues onto the table. With important new work to be done, a budget freeze would have meant that savings would have had to be found. That wasteful expenditure would have been the prime target.

But in the end, for all his tough talk, David Cameron relented and agreed to the same deal that he had publicly rejected back in August.

Given Cameron’s rhetoric elsewhere on the cuts, that simply doesn’t seem to be a credible position to me.