The EU's pants are well and truly on fire

By Alex Singleton , The Telegraph, November 19th, 2010

The European Commission is making false claims about its accounts

If you enjoy reading fantasy, you might like to check out this page on the European Commission’s website, which claims that the EU’s accounts have been given a “a clean bill of health from its external auditors” – and for “the third consecutive year”.

This is the same set of accounts that, you might recall, the auditors actually attacked. This year, they said that 92 per cent of its budget was “materially affected” by irregularities and that £4 billion of contracts had been improperly awarded. Puzzled by the discrepency, I asked the Commission’s office in London, which tries to pursude us to be good Europeans, how they could justify making this obviously false claim. “Perhaps this is just the way things have been interpreted,” they explained.

How revealing: when the European Commission doesn’t like reality, it just chooses to interpret it differently. Now I understand how its staff can justify to themselves putting out propaganda attaking “euromyths”, such as the supposed canard that it tried to ban bananas from being too bendy, when in fact the “myths” are invariably true.

If the European Commission has to resort to such low-quality propaganda to paper over its fraud-riddled accounts, is it any surprise that so many of us want Britain to have nothing to do with it?