Please, Please SACK ME! Euro MP DANIEL HANNAN on the Money and Perks he gets from Brussels for Making Britons’ Lives Harder.

by Daniel Hannan, Daily Mail:

Will jobs be lost if we decide as a nation to leave the European Union? Only mine.

I am a British Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and my simple plea to you when you vote in the referendum in June is this: Help me abolish my well-remunerated and comfortable position. Please, please sack me!

I still remember my utter, nerveless shock on my first day in Brussels after being elected as the MEP for South East England in 1999. Having found my office, I was invited by a very helpful lady to hand in my plane ticket from London for reimbursement.

The sum I was given in return was so large I assumed there had been a mistake. ‘I’ve only come from Heathrow,’ I explained. ‘No mistake, Monsieur,’ she replied brightly. ‘That’s the kilometre rate from London.’

I protested: ‘But there’s no way anyone could spend that sum travelling here from London.’ She put me straight: ‘That’s how the rate is calculated.’

MEPs travelled from their constituencies to either Brussels or Strasbourg (the European Parliament meets at both, at vast expense) and were reimbursed on the basis of the priciest notional fare, plus an extra ‘time and distance allowance’.

Even on a top business class fare, you could make a tidy sum. If you flew EasyJet, you could trouser the better part of £800 a week — tax-free, because it counted as expenses rather than income.

My next call was to the ‘general expenses’ official, who told me I was entitled to nearly £3,500 a month as a bloc grant.
Daniel Hannan MEP, left, said he was astounded by the expenses on offer to his colleagues in Brussels

Daniel Hannan MEP, left, said he was astounded by the expenses on offer to his colleagues in Brussels.

Was this to rent an office? I asked. No, no, he replied, we give you offices in Brussels and in Strasbourg.

‘For computers and equipment, then?’

‘No, you get that, too. It’s for other incidental expenses like postage and petrol.’ ‘Seriously? Three-and-a-half grand a month?’

‘As I say, sir, it’s an unconditional grant. You don’t have to submit receipts. You just nominate which bank account it goes into.’

T he bottom line — as I discovered — is that, without doing anything improper, an MEP who makes full use of his allowances can take home, net, considerably more than the British Prime Minister.

Why am I telling you about my first day at work? Because it’s a clue as to why I am inviting you to serve me with my P45. The expenses are a neat demonstration of the gap between theoretical ideals and practice. The EU was launched from exalted motives — peace and co-operation among nations — and there can be a temptation to give it the benefit of the doubt.

We often half-pretend that we are dealing with some fantasy EU, one that rises above the grubbiness of politics and embodies a lofty ideal. It seems almost bad taste to look in too much detail at the one which has, in fact, taken shape before us, with its dodgy accounts and its private jets.

The way in which MEPs are remunerated is one small example of how, rather than being pure, the EU is often, in the exact sense, corrupting — that is, it makes otherwise good people behave in bad ways.

I know several MEPs who came to Brussels without feeling especially strongly about closer integration, but who drank in federalist assumptions as they guzzled down their allowances.

What is true of the MEPs is equally true of the many giant corporations, mega-charities, think-tanks, professional associations and lobbyists who make a living out of the Brussels system. These groups are, as you might expect, the Praetorian Guard of the Remain campaign.

For their executives, staying in the EU is not about sovereignty or democracy; it’s about mortgages and school fees.

For Britain as a whole, though, there’s little doubt that we’ll be better off out. It won’t result in a radical overnight transformation. But we’ll begin to follow a different trajectory, less dependent on an enervated and declining eurozone and more focused on the rest of the world.

Read More @ DailyMail.co.uk