Dan Hannan lets rip:
MEPs were at their most self-righteous last week as they raged against tax avoidance by multi-national companies. One after another, they stood up to pour out streams of abuse, their faces twisted with contempt.
‘We want our money back, but not in the sense that Margaret Thatcher meant,’ said the Socialist leader, Hannes Swoboda, before tearing into Britain and its island dependencies – which are especially resented in Brussels because they declined to join the EU.
The only way to deal with tax avoidance, agreed the Christian Democrat leader, a German-speaking French farmer named Joseph Daul, was through deeper European integration. The Liberal leader, Guy Verhofstadt, did what he always does on these occasions, namely to turn his speech into an attack on British Eurosceptics. There was remarkable unity across the chamber: everyone agreed that Apple, Starbucks, Google and the rest were disgusting Anglo-Saxon tax dodgers. No one would have guessed, listening to the debate, that the biggest tax avoiders of all were MEPs. Under a new regime, which came into effect in 2009, MEPs are exempt from having to pay national taxation. Instead, they pay a rather notional ‘Community tax’, equivalent to a flat rate of less than 15 per cent. Yet here they were shamelessly complaining, supposedly on behalf of ‘the hard-working people of Europe’ who had to pay higher duties to make up for the share of those evil companies.
‘How can we explain to honest households and businesses feeling the squeeze yet still paying their fair share of taxes that there are other parts of society which are deliberately avoiding paying up?’ demanded the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso.
How indeed, José Manuel? Perhaps you could make a start by volunteering to pay income tax in your native Portugal, which has been reduced to squalor by the austerity measures required to keep it in the euro – a policy which you keep insisting is necessary. While we’re on the subject, what do you reckon the ‘honest households and businesses feeling the squeeze’ make of having to fork out £500,000 a year just to cover your travel and entertainment budget?
To be fair, some MEPs do pay national taxes. When the new regime came into force four years ago, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark insisted that their representatives should pay the same rate as their constituents. Every year, MEPs from those countries write a cheque to their national tax authorities covering the difference between the EU levy and what they would have been liable for as ordinary taxpayers. Most MEPs, though, have no such obligation….
Good for the U.K., Sweden, and Denmark, none of which, I note, is in the euro zone.
Beyond the showboating and the simple hypocrisy there is, as Hannan explains, something else at play:
The French have a handy phrase, déformation professionelle, meaning attitudes that are dictated by your professional interests. If you depend on the EU financially, your answer to every question is likely to be “more Europe.”
The European Parliament has long been a blend of sewer and gravy train (nasty image, but it is what it is) and, with closer EU integration giving it more power, its greed, arrogance and contempt for democracy will only get worse. Quite why other domestic legislatures are not prepared to follow the example set by the UK, Sweden and Denmark in curbing the privileged tax status of ‘their’ MEPs is a mystery.
Or perhaps it’s not.
What was that again that Dan was saying about déformation professionelle?