04 June 2011 10:09 AM
Elite European Schools: how the eurocrats' kids get the gravy and you pay for it
Thanks to ‘JDF’ for taking the time to post a comment – and for asking about the elite European Schools for the sons and daughters of eurocrats, which I mentioned in the previous post about the luxurious lives of the European Commission staff. This will fill you in a bit:
The schools offer an aggressively ‘European’ education from nursery level through secondary level, meant to produce children who are – and this is their founding mission statement -- ‘in mind Europeans, schooled and ready to complete and consolidate the work of their fathers before them, to bring into being a united and thriving Europe.’
In fact, these superior multi-lingual international schools are producing a caste of taxpayer-funded euro-elite who will grow up with connections and networking skills denied to other children. The picture above, from the schools' website, is of the European School in the fashionable Brussels suburb of Uccle. Draw your own conclusions.
One ‘old boys’ organisation for the European Schools actually has bragged that its objectives are to ‘create contacts’ and ‘expand a worldwide network’ across Europe and around the world, based on ‘a past history in the European School.’ And, No, your kids can’t join the network – even though your taxes pay for the schools.
The 14 ‘European Schools’ run on a £237m annual budget. These elite multilingual academies were founded in 1953 to give guaranteed free places worth up to £13,000 a year to the sons and daughters of already highly-privileged, low-taxed EU officials.
You will not be surprised to hear that British taxpayers are being forced to spend more than £25m a year in subsidies for these exclusive free schools for the children of the European Union elite.
Selection of the nearly 22,780 pupils is based entirely on their parents’ connections in the EU. Children hoping to go to one of the schools are divided into divisions based on family status.
The most privileged class is called Category I. A child is Category I if one of his parents is on the staff of an EU institution or is a national expert seconded by an EU institution or is an official attached to one of the Permanent Representations to the EU. (These are the national embassies which negotiate in Brussels at European Council level.)
Because all Category I children are guaranteed a place, the four schools in Brussels are already at full capacity and a fifth taxpayer-funded school is being planned to meet the demand. Well over 90 percent of the children at the Brussels European Schools are the Category I sons and daughters of top eurocrats. For local Belgians, entrance to the school is a privilege which their children can never enjoy. Yet the European Commission insists the schools are ‘public’ – in the American sense -- like any other state school in any EU member state, and not private.
Category II children have parents who work for one of the international organisations such as Nato which pay fees to the European Schools. Category III children have parents who have no connection with the EU but are willing to pay up to £13,000 a year to secure a place. Category III children have no hope of admission until demand by higher-category children has been met.
Britain pays a disproportionately high amount of the cost of these exclusive schools, because of the insistence by the schools that only native English-speaking teachers be used to instruct the European children in English language classes. The UK Government must meet the cost of paying 247 British teachers and management staff who have been seconded from British schools, even though they are working abroad and teaching foreign children.
When I talked to Stephen Booth of Open Europe about this some months ago, he said: ‘It is completely unreasonable to expect British taxpayers to foot the bill to educate privately EU officials’ children. Why should the sons and daughters of well-paid EU bureaucrats be granted privileges that the majority of UK taxpayers cannot afford for their own children?’
Nigel Farage, MEP and leader of UKIP said: ‘The schools of highly paid Eurocrats have the very best facilities while the average child in Britain has to do with much less. Our money should not be wasted on the free education and salubrious facilities of well-paid untaxed bureaucrats. The EU is a racket run for the benefit of the pencil-pushers.’
And for the benefit of their sons and daughters -- not your sons and daughters.
Commission spending: EU elite lead lives of Renaissance Princes of the Church
According to a new report by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism -- see the news pages today for details -- there have been cocktail-fuelled internationalsoirées at £66,000 a time. Guests of the eurocrats have been tucking tax-payer funded solid silver trinkets and elegant fountain pens from Tiffany into their pockets on the way home. And sometimes it has been a long way home: this new investigation has turned up the shocking fact of a European Commission five-star junket for officials and their families to Papua New Guinea.
But is any of this shocking anymore? Not to those of us who have been up close and watching the Brussels gravy train for years. It is what we have come to expect from the unelected, unaccountable euro-elite. These people do not consider themselves to be public servants. They consider themselves to be an anointed priesthood of the Church of the European Project. By their thinking, anything that furthers the power or the prestige of this new Church must be a good thing.
This leads to the relentless examples of arrogance, led from the top by José Manuel Barroso, the president of the commission. This arrogant Portuguese former Maoist politician and eight of his assistants ran up a bill of £24,600 at the Peninsula Hotel in New York in the space of just four nights. And you can bet they didn’t get there from Brussels flying tourist class.
Consider this. Right now the EU and their partners in the IMF are screwing the eurozone periphery countries down into penury with their demands for austerity -- all to save the eurocrats' sacred currency, the euro.
Yet meanwhile the European Commissioners alone have run up over £6.6m on private jet travel in the last four years. And now these same eurocrats are demanding that the commission’s budget be increased by almost five percent next year, despite governments across the Continent cutting back spending.
You can understand why the eurocrats want the extra money: those five-star hotels in the South Pacific aren’t getting any cheaper.
The only question that remains is this. How much longer are we and the other taxpayers of the EU member states going to let this extravagance go on?
Of course, complain about it and you will be smeared as ‘anti-European,’ rather in the way the reformers who complained about the extravagance of the Renaissance Papacy were condemned as heretics.
Fine, call me a heretic. I still say, ‘Roll on Reformation.’ If not revolution.
EU rigs up 'opinions' in support of direct taxation by Brussels
You've probably seen the news coverage today of the EU's latest power-grabbing wheeze: members of the European Parliament want to hit millions of us with new direct Brussels taxes.
The European elite are salivating at the thought. At the moment, the tax revenue over which the EU has direct control is limited to some import duties; everything else is paid over by member states.
Which gives member states some control -- pathetically under-used control, but there it is -- over the empire-building plans of the commission, of Herman Van Rompuy the Haiku-writing Belgian president of the council, and of the power-hungry MEPs (go on, try to name a half-dozen of the 751 members of the European Parliament, I doubt you can do it: yet these unknown politicos from Bulgaria to Portugal want the power to reach into your money and take out taxes).
If the EU can get new and more lush powers of tens of billions of euros in extra tax revenue to fatten up their already gross five-year budget of 864bn euros -- well, there you go: it would create a powerful new central government whose spending plans could ignore the governments of member states.
But where did this sudden surge in demand for an EU tax come from? The member governments have been complaining about the EU's ever-increasing demands for budget increases (and pay increases for its eurocrats) despite cut-backs in national budgets. So clearly this didn't come from national governments. And you can bet it didn't come from some surge of support from taxpayers across the EU ('Tax us more!' is never a cry you will hear in the streets of Athens. Or in any other streets).
Here is where it came from: from a lot of reports written by staff at Brussels 'ever-closer-union' think-tanks.
And who pays for big chunks of such think-tanks' budgets? The European Commission and other EU institutions -- using of course money sucked from taxpayers across the 27 member states. Eurocrats put your money in this slot and out of that shoot comes a report calling for 'More power for eurocrats!'
Janusz Lewandowski, the Polish ex-politician who is budget commissioner, rather gave the game away on that one. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he admitted the idea of new direct EU taxes across the 27 member states runs against 'the mood' of European taxpayers. Too right it does.
Then he admitted 'the request for revolutionary changes is coming from the think tanks and not from the capitals of Europe.'
Though he didn't mention the think tanks are on the commission payroll. By Berlaymont standards, he'd already said too much. No doubt the commission president Barroso is even now pointing out to the Pole that Loose Talk Cost Loot.
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