EU elite lead lives of Renaissance Princes

MailOnline, 02 June 2011 8:20 AM

Commission spending: EU elite lead lives of Renaissance Princes of the Church

The last time a pan-European power lived like this was when the Renaissance popes controlled the Continent. Yet now it is all happening again, at a time of what is supposed to be democracy: the unelected elite of the European Union are using your tax money to live in the gilded style of 16th century Cardinal-Archbishops.

According to a new report by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism -- see the news pages today for details -- there have been cocktail-fuelled international soirées at £66,000 a time. Guests of the eurocrats have been tucking tax-payer funded solid silver trinkets and elegant fountain pens from Tiffany into their pockets on the way home. And sometimes it has been a long way home: this new investigation has turned up the shocking fact of a European Commission five-star junket for officials and their families to Papua New Guinea.

Yes, and their families. The eurocrats took their families along: you paid for them and their wives and children to have a holiday on beaches lapped by the Coral Sea. Even the families of the Medici popes never had such luxury. (By the way, some of those children would have been on break from one of the exclusive European Schools, where their tuition of up to £13,000 a year is paid by – yes, by you, the taxpayer.)

But is any of this shocking anymore? Not to those of us who have been up close and watching the Brussels gravy train for years. It is what we have come to expect from the unelected, unaccountable euro-elite. These people do not consider themselves to be public servants. They consider themselves to be an anointed priesthood of the Church of the European Project. By their thinking, anything that furthers the power or the prestige of this new Church must be a good thing.

This leads to the relentless examples of arrogance, led from the top by José Manuel Barroso, the president of the commission. This arrogant Portuguese former Maoist politician and eight of his assistants ran up a bill of £24,600 at the Peninsula Hotel in New York in the space of just four nights. And you can bet they didn’t get there from Brussels flying tourist class.

Consider this. Right now the EU and their partners in the IMF are screwing the eurozone periphery countries down into penury with their demands for austerity -- all to save the eurocrats' sacred currency, the euro.

Yet meanwhile the European Commissioners alone have run up over £6.6m on private jet travel in the last four years. And now these same eurocrats are demanding that the commission’s budget be increased by almost five percent next year, despite governments across the Continent cutting back spending.

You can understand why the eurocrats want the extra money: those five-star hotels in the South Pacific aren’t getting any cheaper.

The only question that remains is this. How much longer are we and the other taxpayers of the EU member states going to let this extravagance go on?

Of course, complain about it and you will be smeared as ‘anti-European,’ rather in the way the reformers who complained about the extravagance of the Renaissance Papacy were condemned as heretics.

Fine, call me a heretic. I still say, ‘Roll on Reformation.’ If not revolution.