Too little, too late

During what appears to have been a stormy session in the European Parliament, addressed at length with a very large number of cliches but not inspiration by Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the EU Commission, the Greens came up with what EUObserver calls a “practical solution”.

Green MEP Philippe Lamberts came up with a practical solution, proposing that the EP’s Strasbourg building be given to migrants while sessions are held in Brussels instead.

The EP’s Strasbourg building is empty for the vast majority of the year and despite calls from MEPs to stop the travelling circus to France, plenaries are still held there once a month.

Too little, too late. This blog came up with a similar but far more extensive idea a little while ago:

However, there is a way in which the Eurocracy can be very useful. It so happens that both in Brussels and in Strabourg there are “European Quarters” with large buildings with many rooms and excellent facilities. Every year very large sums are allocated to the running of those Quarters and the paying of those who work in them from Commissioners and Members of the Toy Parliament down. No need to build new processing centres, no need to allocate new funds – take over the European Quarters, evict those who work there now, turn them into those centres and use the money allocated for their running to sort out the refugee (or migrant) crisis. If we also add this year’s salaries of all those who work there we shall have a more than adequate sum to house and feed people temporarily while we sort out who they are, where they will go to and what they might want to do there.

Until Herr Juncker or any member of the Toy Parliament proposes such a solution and starts putting it into place, I refuse to believe in their good intentions being anything but hot air and a desire to turn the crisis into another tool for strengthening central EU control over the member states.