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What else do these shysters have to do before you believe me? Every time I write that the EU is a racket, a sophisticated way of redistributing money from the people who work for it to people who do not, I receive cross emails telling me that I am a Europhobe.
Well, all you cosmopolitans, look at what's just happened. More than 100 police officers have carried out a series of dawn raids in four EU states. Three people have been charged with corruption, and further arrests are expected. The charges hinge on the organised diversion of tens of millions of euros, and involve Mafiosi as well as Eurocrats.
How has Britain's supposedly jingoistic press reacted? Have newspapers splashed with the story, adding helpful sidebars about the many previous Euro-scams: the dodgy |
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accounts, the silencing of whistle-blowers? Not a bit of it. Eight of our national dailies ignored the story entirely. Even the Independent, which swanks about being the one paper in Britain that gives the EU proper coverage, found space only for a three-line report noting that some Italians had been taken into custody. The terrible truth is that Euro-corruption is no longer newsworthy. We take it for granted - the Euro-enthusiasts among us as much as anyone else.
Brussels is not unique in having fraudsters, of course, but it is peculiar in having no link between taxation, representation and expenditure. The EU expects bouquets when it spends money, but not brickbats when it raises it, since taxation is carried out on its behalf by national authorities.
At best, this set-up encourages a blase attitude to public funds; at worst, it encourages outright theft. Federalists regard a degree of corruption as the price for deeper integration, and sceptics dismiss it as inevitable. Either way, it no longer causes a stir. But it should, my friends. It should. 
FIRST POSTED MARCH 29, 2007
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