International

This week I received an email from the Vice-Presidents of the European Parliament responsible for ‘Communications’. From now on all Euro-MPs are to be assisted on their way to the European Parliamentary elections next spring via a ‘download centre’ - http://www.europarl.europa.eu/downloadcentre - where all kinds of ‘information material’ can be found. The material currently available is quite pathetic, and I have never once made use of it in my work as an SP Euro-MP. A bunch of amateurs have been working on it and the completely unusable results are now being urged on us by email. Utter wastefulness.

Not to be missed is a ‘second-life’ project, Citzalia, which the EP came up with a few years ago. You can still see the video clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KAMAJrdzkQ. The commentaries on there are quite nice and can be recommended to all, but the film itself is deadly dull and certainly not communicative, which is also the case with the information material for the coming EP elections. The Citzalia project was stillborn – at a cost of millions of euros. The cost of the new information material is, according to the Dutch state broadcaster, some €6.6 million, and the chances are that this will also be stillborn.

Decisions about the information campaign were taken by a small group within the EP. The two Vice-Presidents directly responsible represent the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP)and the centre-left Party of Socialists and Democrats (PSD), the two biggest political groups. This has been the case for years, giving no room for voices in the Parliament critical of these activities.

In the Budgetary Control Committee you can call the Secretary General of the European Parliament to account over expenditure. Every year I denounce such things as EuroparlTV, the EP’s TV station which almost nobody watches, or the building of the House of European History, which serves principally to demonstrate that Europe has its own identity. Every year numerous Members agree that too much is wasted on communication and information. And yet it simply carries on.

For the 2014 budget I have once again put forward proposals designed to put an end to this waste, and in the Budgetary Control Committee will continue to denounce projects. As long as the establishment in the EP is dominated by centre-right and centre-left groups, nothing will really change, however. Communication is the number one hobbyhorse of the Parliament’s centre-left president. The download centre shows that the EP needs a new wind to blow through it, and also that it’s important to vote on May 22nd, 2014: a new wind will only arrive if the PPE and PSD lose their collective majority. So it would still be useful to take a look at the download centre, but probably not in quite the way its makers would like.