Bruton at odds with EU budget vote plans

Date:24/07/03

By Dana Spinant

FORMER Irish prime minister John Bruton will today attack the failure of the Convention on the EU's future to give the European Union the "necessary funds to do its work".

In a speech set to be delivered before the Irish parliament's European Affairs Committee today (24 July), Bruton, a member of the Convention's steering committee, the praesidium, will say that by keeping unanimity voting on the Union's finances, the constitution drafted by the Convention maintains the risk of blackmail by individual member states.

"The unanimity rule means that one country can hold the entire EU budget to ransom, unless it gets some pet financial project or concession to itself," Bruton warned.

According to rules outlined in the draft constitution, the Council of Ministers must pass a law unanimously to provide the Union with funds.

In addition, each member state parliament would have to ratify this law.

For Bruton, "far from protecting the EU budget from excess spending, I believe unanimity will encourage waste, misplaced priorities and an atmosphere of artificial crisis whenever major budget decisions have to be made.

"This will happen next in 2006."

The Irishman would have preferred decisions on EU funding to be taken by a four-fifths' majority of states, instead of by unanimity.

In a recent interview with European Voice, Jean-Luc Dehaene, the Convention's vice-chairman, expressed the same opinion.

Dehaene said the draft constitution will not last 50 years, as Convention chief Valéry Giscard d'Estaing claimed, because unanimity on EU funding is likely to lead the Union to deadlock.

The ex-Belgian prime minister added that the constitution may be up for revision as soon as 2006, "the year of all accidents in the Union", when a new multi-annual budgetary framework will be negotiated by 25 member states.

Bruton will also seek in today's speech to allay fears that the EU is becoming a superstate.

The former Irish premier believes the Union "is not within sight of becoming a superstate" as it has no right to raise taxes autonomously, "it does not even have the right to run a budget deficit" or to "raise a military force".

In addition, he points out that its meagre financial resources do not allow the EU to become a superstate.

"Whereas the EU central budget is capped at slightly more than 1% of GDP [gross domestic product], the United States federal government spends about 20% of GDP."

While he admits that future changes of the constitution will be difficult to achieve, as they require unanimous accord and ratification by member states, Bruton says that plans put forward in the Convention for a lighter procedure were "insufficiently precise to reassure voters in a referendum".

Proposals that the more technical Part III of the constitution, on EU policies, be amended by a vote of four-fifths of states would have made the constitution more flexible. But "people would have claimed that they were being asked to sign a blank cheque", he will warn.

John Bruton, a former Irish Prime Minister has criticised the European Convention's for maintain unanimity voting on the Union's finances in the draft EU constitution.