One seat
This about Europe and the parliament. Some of you, especially if you are Finnish, might have received an email, about the fact that it costs some money to taxpayers when our representants have to travel from Brussels to Strasbourg on a regular basis.
You can visit the complainers main website here.
This website doesn’t give any more reason but the cost of this situation, ie: 200 million euros a year. If I count well, since there are over 500 million people living in Europe, that’s less than 50 cents per person and per year. Still, you may say, this is taxpayer’s money. Well, if they were drinking a bit less coktails everytime, we could save much more money than those 200 millions. If they were all actually working, it would surely save billions. A lot of them is just looking for more fame, or more power and more money. But how many are actually thinking about what they are supposed to do there ? I could go on with other irregularities and stupid spending, but I would like to make another point.
In that email I was talking about, it was basically said that the reason for Strasbourg still being a seat of European institutions is because France likes to show off … well, there might be a bit of that, but I think it would be a bit stupid.
I would like to remind a few things. At that time, the 6 members are : Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, Italy, Germany and France, the two last ones because of a true will to work together instead of fighting all the time, and the 3 first because they already learnt to work together as a team for some time.
It has been decided to separate the political powers in 3. In Strasbourg is the Parliament, deciding if a new law proposition is accepted, amended or vetoed. Strasbourg is a particular place : it is the main city of Alsace, a disputed region between France and Germany, where people had to suffer from the last 3 wars we had against each other. More than Luxembourg or Brussels, this city symbolize peace, reconciliation and partnership.
I don’t mind spending this money for people to remember.