The EU is an unreformable swamp of corruption and hypocrisy

“European values” is the oxymoron cynically employed by the Brussels kleptocracy when it takes to the so-called “moral high ground” to sermonise everyone else on their supposed ethical deficiencies. The European Commission was in the process of denying Hungarians €11.5bn rightfully due to them, on the pretext there were problems with “the rule of law” in Hungary, when the Belgian Federal Police unearthed the first bags of cash in the flat of European Parliament vice-president Eva Kaili.

This particular set of European values was assessed at €150,000. As the homes and hotels of 18 other MEPs and officials were searched, yielding in one instance a suitcase stuffed with banknotes, European values increased to €1.5m and rising. Four people, including Kaili, have so far been charged with criminal offences, including corruption, but the net is being cast ever wider. If it were to be conducted on the scale the Brussels swamp requires, it is questionable whether the European Parliament would be quorate by the end of the year.

Self-awareness is not the Brussels apparatchiks’ strongest suit, as was demonstrated by the pantomime reaction of Roberta Metsola, the president of the European Parliament. Transparently, though unsuccessfully, attempting damage limitation, she put out chaff in every direction. “The European Parliament is under attack,” she declaimed. This was a pathetic attempt to depict the European Parliament as victim when it is actually the perpetrator. Apart from the Belgian police, belatedly feeling the collars of socialist chancers, who is attacking that over-privileged body?

“European democracy is under attack,” was another mendacious mantra. This is the latest claim of the globalist left. When a bunch of elderly German Jacobites allegedly concocted a pipe dream to put Heinrich XIII Reuss on the throne of Germany – an episode straight out of the pages of Anthony Hope – the shrieks of horror from the political class suggested it was a more serious and violent episode in German history than the Night of the Long Knives. This spurious narrative has its origins in the absurd over-reaction of American Democrats to the “insurrection” (Aw, puleeze!) at the Capitol.

What does the European Parliament, or any other organ of the Brussels kleptocracy, know about democracy? The parliament is not even allowed to initiate legislation: that and every other exercise of power is reserved to the European Commission, elected by 29 people and approved by a minimum of 353 in the eunuch parliament – more democratic than throwing the voting open to the EU electorate of more than 400 million, running the risk of “populism” rearing its ugly head.

Bereft of power, except to rubber-stamp legislation handed down by the Commission and to utter woke platitudes to which nobody is listening, MEPs opt to joyride on the gravy train. Corruption is endemic in all EU institutions: it is in the DNA and incapable of ever being dislodged. That is what needs to be clearly understood: the European Union is unreformable.

The EU’s transparency register is as full of holes as a sieve and participation is largely voluntary. The parliament’s committee on human rights gave reporting status to the NGO Fight Impunity, founded by Pier Antonio Panzeri, himself a former MEP and chairman of the parliament’s human rights sub-committee, who was arrested last Friday. His NGO is now haemorrhaging board members, including former EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, former French prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve, former EU migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, former MEP Cecilia Wikström and current MEP Isabel Santos, all jumping ship.

The proposal to create an independent EU ethics panel has been held up in the Commission, with Vice-President for Transparency Vĕra Jourová pleading legal issues and lack of interest in establishing a powerful cross-institutions monitoring body. As they say in badly stocked shops, there’s not much demand for it around the Berlaymont building.

It is curious that a body so concerned about “the rule of law” in Hungary and Poland should be so relaxed about legal niceties in its own parliament and associated institutions. Hungary’s crime is to have refused to bow to the Merkel-initiated demands of Brussels to open its borders; unlike London and Birmingham, Budapest and Warsaw are not minority white cities. Viktor Orbán’s three successive supermajorities in general elections demonstrate that the Hungarian public approves his stance on migration, likewise his refusal to subject primary school children to “trans” indoctrination.

That only compounds his offence in Brussels’ eyes: pandering to the electorate, formerly known as “democracy”, is now stigmatised as “populism”. The Hungarian prime minister is having great fun satirising the naked emperors in Brussels who presumed to preach to him and the rest of the world on “moral” issues. Anyone with any nous has known for years that the EU is a den of thieves that makes Fagin’s kitchen look like a Sunday school.

In its most recent annual report, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) estimated that an average of 3 per cent of last year’s €181.5bn spending was “irregular”, up from 2.7 per cent the previous year. The auditors detected 15 specific cases of potential fraud, up from six the year before.

But that is a narrow assessment, covering only the actual audited spending of EU institutions; it does not take account of the indirect fraud, based on a culture of corruption, that pervades public bodies and businesses across the EU. As long ago as 2016, a study by RAND Europe, using three methodologies that included both direct and indirect effects of corruption, estimated losses to the EU’s GDP ranging between €179bn and €990bn per year. Even if the lowest estimate is accepted, that reflects a significant effect on people’s lives and living standards and a climate of incorrigible corruption.

Are the EU authorities concerned about this? For public consumption, yes – remember they occupy the bully pulpit of the most nauseatingly moralising entity on earth. Privately, their chief concern is to avoid scrutiny of their institutions. Remember the fate of Marta Andreason, the accountant who refused to sign off certain EU accounts, became a whistleblower and was sacked for “failing to show sufficient loyalty and respect”.

Five times the normally quiescent EU fraud watchdog tried to smear Nigel Farage with some kind of misconduct, failing abysmally at each attempt. Journalists, predictably, are trying to label the current scandal “Qatargate”. It is not Qatargate – why would we think only one country in the world was using bribery as a vehicle of realpolitik, by targeting the most corrupt institution in the world? It is Brusselsgate, for Brussels is the cesspool at the heart of the problem.

As the onion is peeled, as one revelation leads to another and the dominoes collapse, as the plea bargaining begins, this looks like a scandal that will just keep giving. In that context, the self-righteous payoff line to Roberta Metsola’s speech was intriguing: “We are Europeans, we would rather be cold than bought.”

Apart from the fact that statement is the reverse of the prevailing reality in the EU’s institutions, it is also thought-provoking. Qatar is not threatening to freeze Europe in an energy war; but Russia is. Does Metsola know of a further dimension of corruption about to surface? For that matter, is it likely that Vladimir Putin, increasingly beleaguered in Ukraine, would not reach out, via his intelligence apparat, to the notoriously venal denizens of Brussels? Did Metsola, in her quest for ever more hypocritical BS rhetoric, accidentally betray a concern preoccupying the aspiring globalist hegemons in the Berlaymont sump?

The most entertaining aspect of the scandal so far has been the supposed astonishment of commentators who, if they were genuinely ignorant of the scale of EU corruption, were unfit to function as journalists. For those who inhabit the real world, outside the Brussels and Westminster bubbles, nothing could have been less surprising. The realities that lie behind the sanctimonious term “European values” reflect a widespread culture (a term often misused, but in this instance accurate) of corruption.

Consider the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), an institution technically separate from the EU leviathan but imbued with a similar spirit. A 2020 report revealed that, over 10 years, 22 of the 100 judges were former members or leaders of the Open Society Foundations or of organisations funded by them. On more than 88 occasions in 10 years, 18 of those judges adjudicated cases in which their former NGO was involved. In the most outrageous example, Bulgarian judge Grozev ruled on cases brought by the NGO he himself had founded and directed.

Yet, with that standard of justice and transparency prevailing in the tribunal most closely associated with the EU, its leadership is more concerned about supposed issues with the rule of law in Hungary, or in Poland where the EU objected to the Poles belatedly ridding themselves of Communist judges inherited from the Soviet era, one of them put on the bench in succession to his father.

Truly, you could not make it up. However, there is no road back to credibility for the European Union after this scandal, which is likely to unravel into further revelations, possibly on an epic scale. For those who value genuine ethics, the question arises: why did British and European journalists not drag the Brussels swamp long ago and expose its barely concealed corruption and hypocrisy? For the same reason, one suspects, that the Tories, forecast to lose every seat north of Lincolnshire in the latest polls, are trying to draw Britain back into the toils of the Single Market.

Britain has not fared well in the past 70 years and its judgement has repeatedly been badly skewed. This country got one thing right, though, and it was a hugely important decision: thank heaven we broke away from the infamous European Union and its unreformable culture of corruption and hypocrisy.

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