Nick Griffin MEP - What a guy
Andrew Brons MEP and Nick Griffin MEPMen of their words
The following article has been taken directly from the site; Nick Griffin MEP
I have taken the liberty of emboldening certain words. The rest is all:-
Nick Griffin MEP
It’s been a manic six months but now, at last, I have an opportunity to get back to blogging. I hope that this will be a regular feature on this website, letting you know the inside story of my work both at the European Parliament and in my North West constituency.
On the phone today to our newly approved (by the EU financial bureaucracy) Paying Agent – the accountant who will handle all the money provided to Andrew and I to pay for our staff and offices. It is a relief to know that an independent professional will both be doing the work of keeping things straight and carrying the responsibility for doing so.
He has heard from the EU asking for clarification over the deceitful story in the Daily Telegraph about our supposedly planning to use money provided for staff and offices to fund good causes in our constituencies. We discuss his response, which will be a letter confirming that, naturally, we will at all times remain within the law, and where necessary asking for clarification of that law.
The facts are these:
In addition to a gross salary of 7,665 Euros per month and the refund of money outlayed for proven travel connected to parliamentary business, every MEP receives a Staffing Allowance of 17,540 Euros per month, an office costs allowance of 4,202 Euros per month, and an Attendance Allowance of 298 Euros for each day spent in Brussels or Strasbourg.
Naturally, both Andrew and I intend to fulfil our election pledge to give 10% before tax to the special ‘English Fair’ funds in our constituencies. That amounts to 767 Euros (about £700 at present) per month, starting from July 14th, our first day as salaried MEPs. We are of course working on the assumption that not even the European Union can believe it has the right to tell people what they can and cannot do with their own salaries, although our accountant is writing to the Powers That Be to double check this point before we do anything.
So as to begin with the process of openness about all this which we promised during the election, I’d like to put on record the facts and figures on our salaries.
With a gross figure of 7,665 Euros, less income tax and other deductions taken by the EU, the monthly take home pay of all British MEPs is 5,969 Euros. From that, Andrew and I alone will – provided EU law permits it – be giving 10% of our gross salary, i.e. 767 Euros per month, leaving us with a take home salary of 5,202 Euros per month, just over £1,000 per week.
This means that I will henceforth not be drawing a salary from the BNP, but apart from this saving on my salary (£1,849 per month nett), the party will be no better off financially. Let me repeat that: Winning two seats in the European Parliament, while a huge political step forward, does not make any significant difference to the finances of the British National Party as a political machine.
This is because the Staffing Allowance money can only be used to pay for Accredited Assistants in Brussels (whose principle qualification has to be fluency in a second main European language) and Local Assistants in the UK constituency. Neither category of employee can do party political work during EU-paid time. Thus all the party political and administrative work which the party has had to pay for as we’ve outgrown the capacity of amateur volunteers in recent years will have to continue to be done by people paid from central party funds. We cannot use Euromoney to fund the BNP.
Of course we are taking on extra staff to do European Parliamentary work, and shifting certain individuals (such as Martin Wingfield, who is stepping down as editor of Freedom after eight years of tremendous effort) from party work to European Parliamentary work. But those who are being reassigned have to be replaced and their replacements on party work can only be paid with party money.
Hence the impact of around £400,000 per year between us in EU funding for staff will be felt massively in terms of what we are able to get done for our constituents as we deal with our parliamentary business, but it will have virtually no impact at all on the cost of running the central BNP machine. That must continue to be met from membership subscriptions, sales, fund-raising and appeals (without which we would be like all the other serious parties in Britain, perpetually in the red, except for the fact that, unlike all the others, the banks wouldn’t let us be).
The same lack of directly beneficial impact is true of the monthly funding of 4,202 Euros for each of us for office costs. This will pay to run our offices in Brussels and Strasbourg, and to rent and run our constituency offices in the North West and Yorkshire. While it is of course a huge and welcome boost, not one penny of this money can or will go to help defray the costs of running the party’s political administration.
The one genuinely possibly ‘grey area’ exploited by the Daily Telegraph report – which I have asked the accountant to check with the financial people in Brussels as a matter of urgency – is over what happens with any surplus from our daily attendance allowance of 298 Euros.
This is provided to pay for board and lodgings while in Brussels and Strasbourg – both of which are expensive cities, but not THAT expensive. Anyone spending that much is living high on the hog, and we have no intention of doing so.
Our understanding of the rules and regulations is that this money is a straight forward payment to every MEP as an individual, following which it becomes as much his or hers as the actual salary. Accordingly, whatever is left over after paying reasonable bills for accommodation, food and entertaining guests on parliamentary business, belongs to MEPs personally to dispose of as they see fit. In all other cases (with the honourable exception of one far-left party from Sweden) this appears to mean shoving it into their personal bank accounts, in ours we intend to donate it to good causes in our constituencies.
If it turns out that the rules really say that it’s ‘permissable’ to turn taxpayers’ money into champagne, but against the law to use it to help homeless ex-servicemen, then we will of course not break the rules. Instead we will give the unused portion back to the Brussels tax-eating machine, because taxpayers should not be forced to pay for anyone’s champagne. Assuming the rules are based on commonsense, however, we will indeed be making daily donations from this source of income to good causes.
Given the current uncertainty, no payments will be made anywhere until our accountant has confirmed the precise position with the authorities. Hopefully that will not be long, so that we can start giving our constituents back a symbolic proportion of what the entire EU monstrosity has taken from them in thirty five years of daylight robbery.
On the subject of my constituency directly, I was shocked to hear that the most likely cause of the car accident that killed four youngsters in Neston on the Wirral was a pothole. First, because given their ages and where they came from, it is almost certain that Jackie went to school with several of their now heart-broken parents. Even such a distant link brings home the fragility of human life and happiness, no parent of driving-age teenagers can read or hear of such a tragedy without it raising a nagging fear for their own, as well as helpless pity for those directly involved.
Second, because potentially deadly potholes are going to become the norm rather than the exception over the next few years. The suckers’ rally in the stockmarket should fool no-one, the smart money is now on a dollar crash in the autumn and a drastic slide in sterling as the money men finally get round to punishing Brown & Co for their grotesquely short-sighted response to the Bankers’ Bust – bailing out greedy financial institutions which should have been left to suffer the consequences of their own folly.
Pretty soon now we will all have to pick up the tab for bailing out a fundamentally corrupt banking system, and you can bet your life that the axe will fall on road maintenance, libraries, bin collections, schools, squaddies’ kit and hospitals used by ordinary taxpayers. No cuts in foreign aid, foreign wars, the quangocracy or the Equality Commission.
Cameron and Osbourne are now virtually admitting that the Tories will slash public spending and, of course, if the right (PC and nanny state) non-services were eliminated it would be a good thing. But they won’t be, because Cameron’s LabourLite party is almost as much in thrall to PC as is Brown Labour.
And as for their relationship with the other part of the relentless campaign to destroy the British nation state – the global corporations – is concerned, the Tories are even worse than the present shower. Osbourne’s comment the other day about bringing in “private business and charities” to fill in the worst gaps made by their planned attacks on essential services are not motivated by a sensible and understandable desire to reduce the burden on taxpayers.
Rather, it is exactly the proposal of the second generation Frankfurt School of revisionist Marxists, specifically Jurgen Habermas, to break the people’s stubborn loyalty to the nation state by removing it from public life. Institutions such as the National Health Service – which encourage people to think in terms of who has paid in, and who hasn’t, and whose benefits create social bonds and gratitude to the extended national family – are slated for destruction both by the Marxists and by the corporations which see rich pickings from the looting of our national commonwealth.
This, rather than specifically promoting the EU (though they do that too), is what sinister, semi-secret organisations such as Common Purpose are really all about. What Margaret “there is no such thing as society” Thatcher began, and Anthony Charles Linton Blair continued, David Cameron will conclude, using the fallout from the Bankers’ Bust as the excuse to let loose the final wave of the corporate looting of Britain. It will not be pretty, it will not be popular, and if we have our way, it will not last for long before those responsible are made to answer for their crimes in a court of law.
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