It was with a wry smile that I read Daniel Hannan’s blog post about how he feels he has been harshly treated by the Financial Times. I’m not sure about the pros and cons of the case itself, but welcome to the club Daniel – you’ve just faced a newspaper writing something about the EU that you think is wrong and twisted, something that europhiles end up feeling on an everyday basis when they read the British press. The FT article in question was surely a lot less twisted than The Times leader a few days ago about the EP that I’ve previously blogged about. A summary of the recent over-reactions to the MEP fraud allegations (demonstrating how europhiles can feel under siege) can be found in The Economist’s Brussels blog here.
Hannan’s whine about the FT also raises further questions about the role of his blog. When does a blog for a national newspaper cease to be a journalist’s blog and start to become a political campaign? Is it appropriate to have a dissident Tory blogging about his own personal issues with the EPP off the website of a national newspaper? OK, plenty of Telegraph readers might agree with Hannan’s line, but where does journalist blogging end and political blogging start?
I agree Ralf.
I understand that there might be reasons to not publish the complete report, but we should get at least a censored version. Especially if the findings aren’t that bad after all, it should be no problem to publish the report.
It is clear that Eurosceptics would try to use the reports to attack the EU as corrupt, but keeping it secret doesn’t improve the situation. Now we are left with Davies remakes that there is (I paraphrase) “corruption on a massive scale”.
Jon: I wonder at the over-reaction you describe concerning MEPs’ expenses, considering the deliberate cover-up voted by the EP Committee on Budgetary Control yesterday, by 21 to 14.
The majority could not stomach publishing even a censored version of the audit report.