BBC's report on MEP's expenses unbalanced

Many of you will have seen the lead item on the BBC news Tuesday night on the subject of MEP's expenses. I and most of my colleagues didn't, as we were in Strasbourg at the time.

The BBC interviewed me for this item, because I have published a comparative table of all the expenses and allowances provided to MPs and MEPs. The BBC's Mark Mardell asked me to describe the system, respond to questions on it and cover also the issue of governments obliging the Parliament to meet once a month in Strasbourg.

In the end, they didn't use one second of this interview, presumably because I was boringly factual and didn't reveal any salacious gossip or make any wild claims about abuse. I gather they took a instead a Conservative and a Lib Dem MEP (and Dan Hannan and Chris Davies are not even regarded by their party colleagues as representing mainstream opinion in their parties) denouncing the system and calling for further reforms, and my Labour colleague Gary Titley defending the right of MEPs to employ their spouses provided they are doing a proper job, for which they are qualified, that the pay is commensurate and that it is declared and transparent.

This, of course, made it look as though the Lib Dems and Conservatives were for further reform and Labour was against it. Yet the employment of spouses was not an issue dividing the three parties, who all accept it under correct conditions, and anyway is not the most important issue in the reform debate.

Nowhere did they point out that up to now Labour is the only one of the three parties to require its MEPs to have their accounts audited annually by an independent auditor to ensure that all monies have been spent properly and in accordance with the rules. In other words, Labour MEPs can claim to have more, not less, propriety than the others - the opposite of the impression given by the news item, according to people who saw it.

Nor did they point out that the Parliament has not chosen to sit in Strasbourg once a month - most members heartily agree that this is silly - but the national governments who oblige it to do so.

The report featured a decision not to publish an internal auditors report, again without mentioning that all three British parties voted for such publication.

Shame that the BBC was, tabloid-style, seduced by the attractions of sensationalism. Their journalists - Mark Mardell and his colleagues - had gone out of the way to get a range of material, including the boring facts, but the producers in London chose to use only that which would titillate rather than inform.

The Record Europe and parliamentry scrutiny

I'm on this week's edition of the BBC's Record Europe with the Chair of the Commons EU Scrutiny commitee, Michael Connarty MP and a Danish MEP, Dan Jorgensen. We were discussing how to improve national parliamentry scrutiny of EU legislation.

You can watch the whole programme on this subject (we come in at the end) online by clicking here of if you have digital it will be on the BBC Parliament channel once a day all this week.

It's been a rough couple of weeks for the BBC but despite the fact people often bemoan them for a perceived right-wing, left-wing, Eurosceptic or even Europhile bias, the reality is that the BBC is one of Britain's best exports and one of our most valuable institutions. So much so the French now plan to copy its successful model.

French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, worries that although the BBC has the same funding as French external broadcasters it is much more successful and told Patrick de Carolis, the boss of French Televisions, that he wanted his four channels to be "more creative and daring", citing the BBC as the model.

He has championed reform of France's public television network to mimic the BBC's structure. The first upshot of this proposed reform is to rationalise the separate external French televisions channels into a single large, BBC-like, corporation. This, he hopes, will raise French Television's world-wide visibility and influence to the level at which the BBC has enjoyed for decades.

We may grumble about the BBC from time to time, but it is pleasing to hear about the world-wide appreciation and envy for the BBC which is so often neglected by its detractors.

Click for more on the Times' website

I recently appeared on the BBC's The Record Europe programme debating the proposed treaty with three other MEPs and presenter Shirin Wheeler.

You can watch it here, though it may well be replaced by a new edition soon.

Hooray for public service broadcasting and its obligation to provide balanced reporting! It doesn't always work, but at least it tries.

After weeks of reading biased, factually inaccurate, 'briefings'
on the contents of the proposed Reform Treaty in much of the press, it was a relief to read the BBC's reasonably balanced briefing on the treaty.

It aims to provide readers with a good understanding of the main arguments about the Treaty - but that means that it, too, is drawn on to the territory of having to focus on myths that are already out there, such as whether it "gives Europe a US-style president", whether "an EU foreign minister will sideline national ministers" and whether legal personality makes the EU "like a country." It is also obliged, to avoid accusations of bias, to give due space and seriousness to some of these allegations.

Nonetheless, it does so in a reasonably dispassionate and above all jargon-free manner, so well done to its author, Stephen Mulvey.

Topically, it dismisses the nonsense put about this week by eurosceptics that Britain would have to give up its seat on the UN Security Council. Hmmm just a thought but perhaps William Hague and the Tory front-bench should give it a read before putting out any more misleading and spurious press statements on the treaty.

The Telegraph and the Mail claim today that the BBC is to investigate "allegations that the Radio Four 'Today' programme is biased in favour of the European Union"! That will be news to most objective observers, as Radio 4 is widely held to be a bastion of euroscepticism. This is clearly an attempt by the eurosceptics to bounce the BBC into adopting a more eurosceptic position. They are of course, irritated that in the main, the BBC is normally a source of factual and objective information and does not come out with a constant one-sided diatribe against the EU that they would like.

Lord Pearson of Rannoch, a UKIP member, has apparently claimed that only one interviewee in five supports British withdrawal from the European Union. I suppose he will claim that BBC coverage of Westminster is equally biased as only a minority of interviewees support the break-up of the United Kingdom. Come to think of it, 'flat-earthers' don't seem to get anything like 50% of the air-time either.

So, the deal has been done - in the early hours of this morning. Many of us in the Council building feared that Polish intransigence would last throughout the night and longer, but eventually they too compromised at about three a.m.. I've lost count of the number of interviews I've done for British, French, German, Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourg TV and radio throughout the long day and night, but hopefully there will be no need for another summit on these issues for many years to come.

The Constitutional Treaty has been replaced by a practical set of reforms to the current European Union. They will make it work more efficiently and will improve parliamentary scrutiny and democratic accountability. This is a result to be welcomed. Euro-obsessives that want Britain to leave Europe (and, presumably, become part of America) will try to scare people with their ususal froth, but any objective look at the agreement shows that their complaints are fibs or exaggerations. Indeed, UKIP leader Nigel Farage was looking distincly forlorn, not sure what he could complain about, when I debated with him on BBC this morning - he fell back on quoting an article that has been in the treaty since Maastricht, 15 years ago.

Indeed, of the issues that the Eurosceptics focussed on, almost all have disappeared or been neutralized:

* The term "constitution" has been abandoned.

* On the Charter of Fundamental Rights, a new clause says "In particular, for the avoidance of doubt, nothing in title 4 of the Charter creates justiciable rights applicable to the United Kingdom."

* On the Foreign Minister, the role stays as High Representative, as it is called already now, and EU foreign policy will be decided by "The European Council and the Council acting unanimously", without the European Courts having a say over it. It is specified that none of this will effect the "existing legal basis, responsibilities, and powers of each member state,"

* In the field of justice and home affairs, where there is a switch from unanimity to majority voting, there are opt-outs for Britain.

Curiously, two items which Eurosceptics continue to criticise are things that, if they thought about them for a few seconds, they might appreciate.

* One is the longer-term president of the European Council (30 months instead of six months). This could lead to a strengthening of the intergovernmental European Council presidency at the expense of the Commission presidency. That is certainly why the anti-federalist French support it.

* The other is the "External Action Service". At present, EU external representations across the globe are run by the Commission. This change is designeed to give Council (i.e. national governments) a say in running and staffing them. Another step away from, rather than towards, a federal system.

However, Tory and UKIP critics just don't want to know and are simply focussed on finding fault with any change.

On the other side, federalists will be disappointed. The Italian and Belgian governments are muttering about too much having been sacrificed to placate the Brits, the Dutch, the Poles and the French. The European Parliament will be unhappy, as will the 22 countries who wished to retain the Constitutional Treaty intact.

BBC Europe chief and blogger Mark Mardell's assessment is interesting. Although BBC impartiality means he has to treat the Eurosceptics seriously and give them coverage they don't deserve, he clearly proclaims a victory for the government, saying: "Tony Blair can claim that he has won all his red lines. Of course, many will feel this was utterly predictable and of course Conservatives and other will say that there is plenty here that deserves a referendum. But Mr Blair has made their job that much harder."

Indeed a referendum seems hard to justify. Britain has never had a referendum to ratify an international treaty, and it would be odd to start with a minor one. We similarly have never had a referendum on issues that are far more important and that really interest the public, like the creation of the national health service, compulsory education, university fees, the death penalty, the monarchy. We are a parliamentary democracy - a British tradition we are generally proud of. To argue that a referendum is justified because the president of the European Council will have a 30-month instead of 6-month term of office is ludicrous.

But I predict that it won't stop the Torygraph, the Mail, the Sun, the Express UKIP, the Conservative party and the BNP demanding one!