Community Forum

FASCINATING 1962 FILM ABOUT THE EU,https://youtu.be/E0xakRbZQsc

The EU decided not long ago to help its Member States more heavily impacted by the covid pandemic with a trillion plus euro package of grants and soft loans. The EU Commission will sign some "operational arrangements" with Member States stating the conditions for spending European Taxpayers money. However, these operational arrangements have been classed as confidential, they will not be published and the taxpayer will not be able to directly scrutinise how public money, his money, will be spent. That´s right, the Commission considers these arrangements as confidential or secret in the same way as national security or defence strategies. In those cases secrecy is needed to avoid that some delicate information falls into the enemy´s hands. What is implicit here is that the European taxpayer, the European citizen, is considered the enemy by the institutions he pays for. This concept, the citizen as enemy of the Public Administration takes us back to a time when an elite bureaucracy managed public affairs with little regard to the ordinary citizen who was both the payer and the recipient of those services. The battle cry "no taxation without representation" is needed again, more than ever, and must be re-edited and updated to the new times as "no expenditure without transparency". That´s right. the EU Commission has spent millions of our money in campaigns to show us how transparent it is. However, transparency is of little help to legitimate an institution if it is only used in matters that are either irrelevant or not likely to become controversial. In those cases, public debate is the Commission and Member States´ enemy and transparency must be avoided at all costs. Surprisingly, citizens in countries with a long tradition of scrutinising government like Germany, the Netherlands or France have not raised their voices yet. In the end, the underlying problem is that the EU Commission can only spend money though the Member States (except in a very few fields where limited funding allocated) which raises a few issues in accountability and mutual trust.