International

The SP team in the European Parliament, along with lobbying watchdog ALTER-EU, were intending to organise a meeting in the Parliament on how the Code of Conduct for MEPs is functioning. We had concrete proposals to put forward for debate. But what do you know? All of my fellow Members who sit on the various EP committees and other bodies which concern themselves with this Code of Conduct and whom we had invited to attend well in advance, turned out to have prior engagements. Bad luck or evasive action? I fear it was the latter.

On the back of the Volkswagen emission tests fraud (‘dieselgate’), a great deal of publicity has been given to the issue of moonlighting by MEPs. In addition, auto industry lobbyists turn out still to have huge influence within the Parliament, and not because of their sound arguments, but simply as a result of conflicts of interests: ‘you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.’ What you get is at the very least a steep discount on a luxury car, at best a gilt-edged position during or at the end of your term of office.

Together with ALTER-EU and the cross-party Transparency Intergroup, we made a number of concrete proposals to get rid, once and for all, of conflicts of interest in the EP. No more moonlighting in paid positions, monitoring of MEPs’ financial declarations, an accessible European Parliament website where people can clearly and instantly see which Members have what jobs on the side, surveys of contacts between Members and lobbyists, and monitoring of possible conflicts of interest when it come to the allocation of rapporteurships on legislative proposals.

None of these are unreasonable or impractical ideas and after all of the negative publicity over dieselgate, you might have expected that there would be a great deal of interest in this matter. Yet only our actual supporters stated their intention to attend. European Parliament president Martin Schulz isn’t among them, which I understand well enough. The man has a lot of calls on his time. But that his right-hand man, EP secretary-general Klaus Welle also isn’t going to show up, and not only that but no-one is going to be able to come along and represent him, is rather stranger. And even the working group charged with drawing up proposals for amendments to the EP rules of procedure turns out all of a sudden not to be able to send anyone along. Is integrity then of such small importance, or do people think that a boycott of this kind will make the whole issue of tightening up the rules of conduct itself simply disappear?

Fortunately more instruments exist which may help us reach our goal. In relation to the debate on the approval of the accounts for 2014 I’ve put a number of questions to secretary-general Welle. He’s obliged by the rules to answer and he know that vague answers will lead to criticism in the Budgetary Control Committee. Finally our proposals will be included in the motion to the EP on the budgetary accounts for the year 2014. The ladies and gentlemen of the European Parliament have not heard the last of the SP, but anyone who knows our party will of course already be aware of that.