Somehow this does not seem to have hit the English-language wires yet, so here is the story in Dutch about the moving costs of the European Parliament. It moves, you ask? Oh yea verily, it does. Quite a bit. Often, in fact. Regularly too.

The rational thing to do would be to have the parliament somewhere near to the rest of the bureaucratic apparatus. But the European Union is not exactly a paragon of rational thought, and pork being pork in all of the Union's languages, having a single Parliament building in Brussels was not good enough. See, Brussels has the big disadvantage (from a EUnuch point of view) of not being French. So to appease the French (appeasement is something the EU is really good at, if you hadn't noticed), we got a second parliament building in Strasbourg. So by European law, at least 12 meetings of the parliament have to be held in Strasbourg every year. The others are held in Brussels. And for some even more unfathomable reason, half the personel is actually stationed in Luxembourg.

The cost is a cool (if not positively frigid) 169 million euro a year. That's about $169 million too. That's just for the moving back and forth. And this is based on the parliament's own calculations. If more member states join, the cost will rise to 203 million a year. The Flemish MP Moerman has made this public, and demands an end to the waste.

I agree. Let's abolish the European Parliament altogether. It's an institution without any authority (moral, legal or otherwise), costs an insane amount of money, and is generally used as the refuse bin into which disgraced national politicians are retired. Nobody goes to vote for it anyway. Nobody'll miss it.