The EU institutions are in the middle of their annual budget ping-pong. The European Commission proposes the annual budget, and then the European Parliament and Council of the European Union (where Member States are represented) decide on the budget.

The Commission’s opening shot for the 2012 budget, published in April this year, proposed a 4.9% increase over 2011. The Council rejected this in July, arguing for a 2% rise in line with inflation. The European Parliament has today hit back, trumping the Commission even, by proposing a whopping 5.2% increase.

Rather predictably Labour MEPs in the EP voted against the increase, with Derek Vaughan MEP saying “Given the tough economic times, our constituents expect us to deliver a responsible EU budget, and Labour MEPs believe that means it should be frozen next year” and in the EPLP press release he goes on to state some vague words about budget re-prioritisation.

The thing is the EP’s budget proposal does re-prioritise, keeping administrative spending down and proposing increases in Research and Development (+10.35%) and Cohesion and Structural funds (+8.8%). The EPLP press release even says that the UK Labour MEPs backed those increases, but rejected the whole position due to inadequate cuts elsewhere.

What exactly are Vaughan and his fellow Labour MEPs playing at? They know full well that CAP spending cannot easily be reduced in the annual budget, so they symbolically reject the budget proposal, but back important increases elsewhere.

As for the budget vote in the EP overall I can’t make up my mind about it. The EP’s rapporteur – Francesca Balzani – is from the S&D group, but at the time of writing there is no news on the S&D website about their position. Further, there’s not a hope in hell that the Council will agree to 5%, nor that cuts to CAP will be agreed there so as to allow the R&D and Cohesion funds to increase. So, despite all these words, and plenty of bluster, I am still far from sure this is going to make much of a decisive difference in the face of austerity in budgets at national level. Perhaps not pissing in the wind, but this all looks like a case of excessive moral righteousness from the European Parliament…

Labour MEP for London Claude Moraes in today's @guardiannews on lack of Tory support for EU crime fighting agency http://bit.ly/eGHVhk

07.04.2011 10:44 via ÜberSocialReplyRetweetFavorite

@TheBrianDuggan

Brian Duggan

I followed the link to the letters page of The Guardian, and this is what I get:

Your report on the conviction of John Sweeney should be essential reading for some of my colleagues in the European parliament who have consistently argued against the very programme that brought this murderer to justice (Report, 4 April). Last year the Guardian reported that the UK requested Eurojust’s help in more cases than any other EU country. Yet time and again, the Conservatives and Ukip in Brussels have refused to support the organisation, a body set up to help the police work more effectively with their colleagues in other EU countries. Perhaps they don’t see the link between abstract agreements in Brussels and the reality of fighting crime.

Claude Moraes MEP

Labour’s European spokesperson on justice and home affairs

The link on the Guardian site leads here, not exactly informative about the processes behind the case. So how about Moraes’s website? That has just a copy-paste of the letter. His briefings page contains no information about Eurojust or this issue more widely. The link to his Twitter account from his website is broken.

So what do I learn from all of this? Well it shows my MEP is at least active – he’s writing to the newspapers. But I don’t actually learn anything. How are the Tories and UKIP blocking Eurojust? Does Labour, the EPLP, PES or S&D group have a proper policy? How should Europe-wide judicial cooperation work? Not a clue.

Now I can understand why a letter to a newspaper has to be short, but surely the website or Twitter account of a politician should be just the place to add that extra context?

Martin Schulz - CC / Flickr

There has been a bit of debate on Twitter this morning between @eurosocialiste and @boriswandoren about the ongoing behaviour of politicians in the European Parliament, specifically with regard to the behaviour of the socialists who have caved in and agreed with the EPP to carve up the positions in the EP between them (see Jean Quatremer in French), an agreement that has lead to a load of measly words from Graham Watson who is withdrawing from the running to become President of the EP. This decision of the socialists is especially annoying – I would have rather seen the development of a genuine opposition in the EP, rather than some messy compromise.

But is all of this, as the Twitter debate suggests, something to do with generations of politicians?

Frankly, I think not. Blogs, Twitter and e-Communications more generally have given people like Eurosocialiste, Boris Wandoren, Kosmopolit, Julien Frisch and I the kind of public voice we would never otherwise have had. We’re young(-ish) individuals, answerable almost uniquely to ourselves, people with strong views. In times past we would have been the annoying, nagging people at party political meetings, trying to hold everyone else to account. The internet means we have a wider audience to rant air our concerns. We’re fine to argue back and forth on Twitter, because we’re the sort of people who would be arguing about how to make the world a better place over a coffee or a beer anyway; doing it online is hence really natural.

If you’re a party politician your motivations are inevitably different. The nature of party politics across all the mainstream parties and in all EU Member States means you have to play the long game, keep your views to yourself, and manage to make sure you do not offend too many people on your route to the top. You want to one day become Martin Schulz, or one of his ilk, and even if – as a younger person – you did have a burning ideology, you’re going to have to mask it in order to manage to get anywhere. Frankly it is hard to run a political party if there are too many people in it who are too intelligent, determined or opinionated, so you can get somewhere precisely because you are not any good, not a threat.

So the pickle in which party politics finds itself, especially on the left, is not in my mind a question of generations. It’s much more important and central to that. How can political parties accept risk takers, leaders, people with drive, people with ideology, and bind them into a party structure rather than making them annoyed and demoralised? For me that’s the central question, not some vague notion of generational change.