There Might Be Such A Thing As A 'Free Lunch'

I read in this weeks County Times that Channel Four’s Dispatches programme has had the temerity to ask John Bufton MEP about the curious European Parliamentary practice, common on Fridays apparently, of signing the register, claiming the daily expenses and then going home. His defence of having “meetings to attend” or more expansively “I’ve got some work to do and meetings to attend” does, on the face of it, seem a little less than robust. No details of either the work done or the meetings attended are given, nor the names of the people being met, but to be fair to our illustrious MEP, perhaps he wasn’t asked the right questions. However, in the light of the recent difficulties over expenses experienced by Westminster MPs, one would have thought that Mr Bufton would have provided the interviewer with sufficient information to ensure that he was absolutely in the clear. Still, all this should be easy enough to check and as a result we might find out what the meetings were about. They must have been important to have been scheduled on a Friday.

What worries me is that we may still be electing representatives who think they have a right to claim expenses simply because they are provided for in the rules of the institution, rather than taking a minute or two to decide whether they have a moral right to those particular expenses on that particular day. It puts me in mind of County Councillors who used to claim back the cost of eating lunch at the Council’s subsidised canteen forgetting that had they been having lunch anywhere else on that day, they would have incurred some cost to themselves. Presumably that practice has stopped in the last couple of years.