People's Republic of South Devon » Geoff Clams

The EU budget – South West MEP Giles Chichester puts the record straight

PRSD — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:52:32 +0000

EU Budget: there are plenty of misleading claims about the EU budget. Giles Chichester offers up some facts

There are a lot of misleading notions about the EU’s budget, and South West MEP Giles Chichester got in touch to put a few of them straight. For Europhobile and Europhiles alike, it’s interesting reading. Take it away, Giles…

The national press recently carried headlines which stated that ‘Whitehall blunders will cost UK taxpayers £1billion in EU fines’. The origin of these press reports lies in the seriously incompetent handling of the introduction of Single Farm Payments under the last Labour government. Whether it was Mrs Beckett, the then Secretary of State, or the officials in DEFRA who bungled matters I know not but she carried ministerial responsibility and this was not the fault of the EU.

EU Budget
This led me to reflect on the EU budget and a comparison with our UK finances. A look at the Court of Auditors Annual Report on the implementation of the budget for 2009, published in the Official Journal on November 9, 2010, reveals appropriations of €124.5bn, or about £105bn at the then rate of exchange. The UK contribution, after the Thatcher rebate, was just over €10bn or £8.7bn at the same exchange rate. That is before EU spending in the UK.

Europhobes and the get Britain out brigade frequently trot out the misleading statement that if we were not members of the EU our budget contribution would provide loads of schools and hospitals although not at the level of cost established by the last Labour government for public private partnerships or private finance initiatives for schools and hospitals they built, mostly in parts of the country where they had high levels of electoral support. The taxpayer will be paying for this for decades.

UK Budget
An even more telling comparison is with the UK budget in the current year. Overall expenditure is expected to be just short of £700bn (with only three quarters being covered by the tax revenues) and within that the second largest item is spending on the NHS at £97.7bn (per the Public Spending Review published autumn 2010). In other words our contribution to the EU budget is less than 10 per cent of what we spend on health or, to put it another way, the total EU budget is about the same as what we spend on the NHS. Our net contribution, ie after spending on agriculture, regional programmes and research etc, in the UK, is about a third of the gross figure.

These are large sums, but in the overall scheme of things they are pretty small beer. The EU budget is capped at 1.24 per cent of gross domestic product and is currently around 1 per cent or just under. Public spending in the UK, that £697bn figure, is well above 40 per cent of GDP and may be above 50 per cent, far too high a share of the economy for a competitive open market and trading nation like us. One more point. In addition to being capped, the EU budget may not borrow, in marked contrast to member states like the UK.

EU Accounts
The other gibe which is loosely if not promiscuously put about by those hostile to the EU is that its accounts have not been signed off. This is simply not true. Don’t take my word for it but look at the annual report mentioned above (follow a link from my website or visit www.eca.europa.eu). Paragraphs I-X (1 to 10) of the Court’s Statement of Assurance provided to the European Parliament and the Council are the relevant text on pages 10-12 of the Official Journal volume 53 dated November 9, 2010. In particular, read paragraph VII which states that the accounts present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the Union at December 31, 2009. A footnote points out that this is according to the International Standard on Auditing 700.

So why am I writing about this? Until the last two years, there has been an outbreak of indignation in the British press when the Court of Auditors publishes its annual report in November and I get a trickle of letters complaining that they (the EU) can’t get their accounts signed off and this couldn’t happen in a business. Well, the accounts are signed off, they do have a certificate of assurance and excuse me for pointing out the obvious but neither the EU nor HMG are businesses and it seems silly to pretend that they might be or should even be considered in that light.

More needs to be done
This is not to say all is rosy in the garden. We have plenty to do by way of reforming process as well as restructuring the substance of the budget but things are much better than 10 or 20 years ago. I want to see less money going to agriculture (that should please those farmers who want less interference) and more going to research and innovation for the future health of our economy. I would also like the finger pointed in the right direction when British officials and politicians (DEFRA and Mrs Beckett for example) bungle so badly that both farmers and taxpayers suffer.

(image: Money-50-Euro: Some rights reserved by Public Domain Photos)

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Geoff Clams: Exorcismus (part 1)

PRSD — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 08:58:18 +0000

A new chapter opens on Geoff Clams‘ life in his regular column.

We had been blessed with a period of relative calm during which the sunshine had been blistering, unbridled and unbroken for sweet weeks on end. The English summer had hit its brief stride and, for a while, the gardens of the valley had sprung back to life, teaming as they daily were, with relatives and visitors and children splashing in inflatable pools. My partner Judith and I were enjoying a rehabilitation of sorts. She seemed genuinely happy and, over those long days, I was somewhat freed from the feelings of dread that had been chipping away at my comfort and sanity too. Much-needed respite. While it lasted.

On Thursday the 25th of June it was Jude’s birthday. We had decided to hold a barbeque for about twenty-six friends that evening. The day had been perfectly bright and incredibly fine. Over the afternoon, I had been preparing food and inflating balloons, in between bouts of book-reading and cider-quaffing on the back patio. At teatime, Judith came home from work and I gave her a birthday card, a compilation disc of classical music and a gold necklace. We went to bed.

Not long after, people started to arrive with gifts and bottles of wine. In less than an hour, the garden decking was crowded with guests, their spirits audibly high. Summer is generally very good for people. Especially the English. It’s the one of those rare things we can all feel good about.

Our neighbour Hugh, who had brought over a large box of shrimp and some good bourbon, took over cooking duties at seven o’clock whileI went inside to change into a clean t-shirt. On my way to the bedroom, I was stopped in the hallway by one Geraldine Soaper as she emerged tearfully from the bathroom. Geraldine was a fellow committee member from Project Duvall in Buckfastleigh, a free-spirited woman in her mid-thirties who lives near Ivybridge with her thirteen cats. Like me, she had never nailed down a definitive career in any one vocation instead preferring to saunter from one thing to another with itchy, insatiable feet. From what I knew, she was mainly into healing and crystals and stuff. We are usually on the same side of most arguments when it comes to big committee decisions.

Unbeknownst to Geraldine at this particular time, she was about to set in motion the next chain of events. She gestured me towards the bedroom, asking if she could have a private word and I obliged her. We went in and closed the door behind us. I sat her down by Jude’s dressing table as her eyes welled up again. With my hand on her shoulder, I asked what the matter was.

‘Oh, where to start?’ she shrugged, wiping tears and mascara from her left cheek with a tissue, struggling with the right words; ‘Geoff, this is going to sound completely and utterly insane to you, i’m afraid.’

‘Believe you me Gerry, nothing shocks me anymore,’ I sighed, ‘please, go ahead and try me.’

‘Okay,’ she raised her eyebrows, crumpled the tissue in her palms and looked up at me with untamable sincerity. ‘There’s something very bad in your house Geoff.’

‘You mean Mr Gruff?’ I ventured after handing her a packet of wet-wipes from the windowsill.

‘Mr who?’

‘Mr Gruff is our pet name for him,’ I laughed, ‘the ghost who lodges with us. You’ve picked up on him?’

‘I have the knowhow Geoff,’ she said, rising from the chair and turning to face me with a burning seriousness that was incandescent. ‘I’d like to try and do a cleansing here, sometime very soon. Regardless of whether or not you or Judith believe in the paranormal, I am telling you that there is something incredibly nasty here, and it seeks to harm you.’
This was ominous. One mystery giving way to another. The dead wreaking mischief now. Yeah, whatever. Who will set us free?

‘Well, he’s been pretty quiet of late, apart from the other week when Jude was ill.’

‘What are the nature of the attacks?’ she asked as I stifled a weird, involuntary smile with my front teeth

‘I wouldn’t call them attacks as such. Having said that, he did knock a clock off the mantelpiece, which was a first. It flew quite a way through the air, landed near me.’

I had never really processed the implications of Gruff. In all honesty, I had never wanted to dwell on him. I’m open-minded enough to accept the existence of rogue energies and bizarre phenomena. To implicate disembodied spirits is pushing it. Especially for a psychiatrist’s son.

‘This clock,’ she asked, ‘did it have any sentimental value to either you or Jude?’

‘Yes. Yes, it did.’

Geraldine reached into her handbag and pulled out a small writing pad and a chewed red biro. She sat down on the bed as I began to recount all of the things I could remember. Two summers ago, my sister’s little boy, who was staying in our spare bedroom for the weekend, awoke screaming in the night. He said that he had seen an old man standing by the full-length wardrobe mirror, making a ‘funny noise like an angry dog’. He was so inconsolable that he had to be picked up a night early. There was the week when things kept going missing and turning up in odd places; the television remote control in the freezer and Jude’s bible in the bathtub surrounded by dried flower petals from the Pot Pourri dish on the windowsill. The night when the study door slammed so hard of its own accord that the bottom hinge came free from the doorframe. A Christmas dinner that turned embarrassing when the oven was tampered with. My 38th birthday, when a few of my friends and I were smoking cigars and taking brandy during the early hours; a gust of wind that blew through the front-room, free of context. Constant flickering light bulbs. Geraldine noted everything down with investigatory relish.

‘Thanks Geoff. We need to assess this correctly before we attempt anything. I’m going to pop by with a friend of mine on… Sunday, shall we say?’

‘If you insist. Sunday’s good for us. Who’s your friend?’

‘Look, there’s no way I can put this lightly but,’ she took a breath with closed eyes, ‘this could be beyond my level of expertise. On the quiet, I’ve been cleansing houses of trapped souls for most of my adult life. I’ve never had to deal with a demon.’

Against any kind of better judgment, my heart spluttered into a fast beat, ‘A demon?’

‘I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry. Please, just keep an open mind but also, try as best you can to forget everything that’s been said here today. Go back to the party and we’ll pick this conversation up on Sunday, okay?’ She pulled her things together and started quickly for the door. I got there first and placed my hand on it.

‘I don’t believe in demons Gerry. And I don’t want to bring any weirdness into the house, it wouldn’t be good for Jude. Mr. Gruff aside, we’ve had a bad time of it lately. Weird stuff happening.’

‘Geoff,’ she spoke with wizened brown eyes in fevered bursts of breath, ‘I’m telling you now to desist from naming this thing. Don’t trivialize it, don’t try to communicate with it. Certainly, never challenge it. Don’t let Judith become too aware of the situation until we can ascertain what the situation really is. This isn’t a trapped spirit or a remnant of someone who lived here before.. you understand?’

‘Go on.’

‘You have something elemental and inhuman in this house. It might well have chosen one of you before birth. It might be ingrained in the foundations of the building, or even in some inanimate object. Demonic hauntings are targeted and extremely dangerous for all concerned, Geoff’

‘How can you be so sure of what you’re saying to me?’

‘Because of what just happened to me in your bathroom. Don’t ask me to repeat what that was. I promise I’ll fill you in on Sunday… and please,’ she implored, pushing her left hand with its overlong puce-painted fingernails onto my chest, ‘keep a close eye to Judith.’

Old Mrs. Frattelli, breaking with her self-imposed quarantine, came through the back gate at eight to great fanfare and we wheeled the upright piano out onto the decking where she played some jazz pieces. The evening rolled on in a superficially pleasant manner and we all got quite drunk; lighting candles on the plastic picnic table as night began to fall. There was plenty to attend to. I buzzed around in the sweltering dusk, filling plates with expensive food and restocking wines here and there. Conversations continued in earshot; some banal, some worth sticking with and some barely coherent. In truth, my mind was jammed with thoughts of Geraldine’s demon. Perhaps there was a new enemy in my midst now. Fleeting premonitions about the coming night that danced impishly and mockingly to the tinkling of the blue piano; more empty threats from beyond the ether.

Hours later and with a majority of the guests now gone home, Judith came running out onto the decking with her mobile phone held aloft. ‘You lot aren’t gonna believe this,’ she gushed almost breathlessly into the night, ‘Michael Jackson’s bloody dead!’

After a murmur of disbelief and flustered chatter, we went inside with our drinks to watch the news channels, groping for what little info we could find on the matter. Of course, I had to recount my Jackson anecdote to all and sundry. I had met him in 1989. I was working at a Californian summer camp for children with leukemia when we were all suddenly invited to the Neverland Ranch to meet the man himself. I held a fifteen minute conversation with him, mainly about roller-coasters. He had given my young charge a gift, which I later inherited from the child when he sadly lost his battle. All true.

* * * * * *

Poignancy and dread permeated the hot night like a blanket of muggy sadness. There came a drunk dream featuring the dead King of Pop that seemed to progress in fits and starts. Some terrible thing pounding on the walls, scratching at thin wood; and, inexplicably, an hourglass that filled slowly with fright and death. His ghostly pallor looming out from a sea of murky, metal paint; front, right and centre-stage like an omnipotent mirage. The backwards walk. That glove. An ancient panic. Three o’ clock is the superstitious hour of evil, by some accounts. Waking to the sound of muffled growling, I made my way through feverish darkness, to the front room and to the telephone. Who you gonna call, Geoff?

It rained terror against the patio doors; the smell of wet, thirsty mud and bin insects hovered around the billowing white curtains. I crushed the window shut and sat by the phone in a square of soft, blue moon-glow. I couldn’t stop myself from phoning crazy Geraldine. There was no way I could ever hope to sleep again without knowing. I was sorry for waking her up, but I just had to know.

Upon washing her hands in the bathroom earlier that day, the entity had apparently yanked Geraldine’s hair back violently. In the steam of the bathroom mirror she saw the two words, scrawled like brutal, angular daggers: ‘Judith dies.’

To be continued…

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Geoff Clams and the Intimidation Game part 2

PRSD — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:15:06 +0000

The weekly column from the world of Geoff Clams continues with his investigation into alleged voter intimidation in Preston, Paignton

Read the previous instalment of the Intimidation Game

About a quarter of the way up the steep hill, with the top of the polling booth coming into view underneath the mid-afternoon murk and the hot, rising sea mist, everything fractured apart into crazy pieces and things got frighteningly odd again. These magical/terrifying happenings can self-initiate within seconds, you understand. Life is lately strewn with them. Mrs Frattelli’s arm tightened in mine intensely, before she broke off and jerkily clamped her left hand to her left ear, staggering backwards uneasily on her painfully swollen ankles.

‘Mrs Frattelli?’ I said as I moved in closely and quickly, catching her fleshy upper arm in my hand. The doughy coolness of her ancient skin, a strange comfort to me, as my thumb briefly slid under the material of her sleeveless summer dress.

‘Me eeaarrrs, Geoff!’ she wailed atonally, before turning on her heel and falling down onto her big undercarriage. After a moment’s recovery, Mrs Frattelli scuffled to her wrinkled knees and then to her feet. She started tramping back down the hill as fast as her chubby legs would go, calling back at me, and bizarrely seeking to reassure me as her voice drew into the distance: ‘You go awn Geoff, I’s gonna give ‘ee a miss in’um. See ya ‘morrow m’love! Don’ee worry about’um me ‘ansome… It’s just meh verdigo, in’um. Bleddy verdigo!’

As the Drone’s now-ingrained buzz returned to the skies around us, I found myself letting her go without further intervention. All freeze-dried to the spot as she inexplicably ran away, reeling in frantic shock from whatever had hurt her ears, I looked back up to the top of the hill. There were three Drones circling the polling booth in full view, emitting frequencies that I could not hear. Mrs Frattelli had heard them alright. Hugh’s hearing aid had been destroyed. Jackson Borneo at the corner bungalow has also mentioned the incident since. Could these inaudible frequencies have been engineered to affect only those of and over a certain age?

I trudged onwards and upwards as my calves started to tighten and the heat began to swelter. Some light rays were finally breaking through the shady blanket of grey cloud, one thousand feet above the crest of the hill. The robots were circling and clicking around the roof of the polling station; scaring away elderly voters with their secret dog whistles and belligerent beeps. I arrived at the voting booth just as the immaculate-white Opal Kadett rumbled to a stop on the hot tarmac, only ten meters away from me.

Slowing to a standstill and clutching my polling card in my sweaty fist, I looked on in disbelief as Malcolm emerged from the driver’s side and glared at me disapprovingly. Seconds later, the passenger door opened and Judith, pale-looking and weak, was helped to her feet by the brute. The card fell to the ground as horrible rage overcame me; my ears filled with sulphurous blood and I started towards The Patriarch with clenched teeth. The horrible moment tautened with each of my steps as Judith saw me coming and recognised the anger written on my face, something which had lain low and dormant for so long. I launched myself at him with a grunt and a thrown right-hook which landed squarely on his deformed mouth; catching him unawares and pummelling him back onto his car. The briefcase he was carrying flew out of his hands and fell open, spilling hundreds of BNP leaflets onto the sweltering breeze. He wasn’t Labour. The devil doesn’t do political loyalty.

I snatched the lapels of his suit and barked into his rotten face, ‘Who are you? WHO ARE YOU?’

He spat a giant incisor from his bloodied gob and broke my hold, scrum-barging me back into the middle of the road. Judith screamed with her hands to her face as I lost my footing and fell backwards. Before I knew it he was perched over me, all teeth and spattered scarlet menace, grabbing the scruff of my jacket and gruffly exclaiming, ‘I’m the one who watches over you Mr. Clams.’

‘I don’t need watching!’ I blurted, struggling to roll out of the way.

‘Yes you do. We all do,’ he asserted in strangely hushed tones before catching hold of me and pulling me clean off the ground. As I struggled to break free, The Patriarch carried me over to the polling booth and hurled me backwards into it. Some councillors with blue rosettes looked on in grave concern. The thud of my back against the plastic wall rang out in ever-decreasing echoes which danced in sultry summer gardens on the opposite side of the valley. Judith sobbed.

‘But who ARE you?’ I struggled to say from my heap on the ground, with no air in my lungs.

‘I’m the man who Judith deserves Geoff,’ he said almost calmly, standing over me. His face was riddled with the black dots now. He was completely infested too. ‘I’ve seen you making connections with everyone but her. You prefer the company of your codger friends; I guess they’re easier to please than Judie.’

‘But you dye seagulls blue,’ I retorted, shielding my eyes from the sun as it finally broke through the clouds behind his grizzled silhouette. ‘And you gave Judith thirty-three ticks!’

‘You just lie there in the gutter sweetheart. I’m going to take this lady to the polls. She’s had a change of heart.’

‘She’ll never vote for a fascist.’

‘She will,’ he asserted quietly as the hollow red eyes opened up like terrifying blood flowers and glinted into my soul.

Against my better judgement I rose to my feet and attacked him again. The ensuing fight was so vicious that the remaining bystanders were forced to take cover inside the polling booth. Judith ran to join them and they quickly slammed the door shut behind her. Under the omnipresent glare of flying robots, we tumbled over front lawns and through thorny hedges that tore clothes and skin, landing punches on each other as and when we could. He bit my forearm. I ripped out a clump of his tufty hair and forced it into his mouth as one of the Drones started to hover overhead, its front-light flashing red. He pulled me to the ground and head butted my face square on. I returned the favour and rolled over him, pressing my thumbs into his eye sockets and forcing his large head into a trench of compost. He administered a hobnail boot to my groin which gave way to a dreadful feeling, not unlike that of a wrecking ball trying to pass through my bladder. Staggering to my feet, I clutched my balls in agony as his eyelids peeled back and timid rivers of blood streamed down each cheek. Here came a pause in the proceedings as, through the muck in his eyes, he too noticed the Drone hovering excitedly above us. In one split-second he whipped a small device from his breast pocket, clicked a button down and held it to his mouth, barking: ‘Code 332! Code 332!’

I whirled around and looked up to see the Drone, just in time to catch its light switching momentarily to green and back to red again. It started downwards. Howling through the air and whistling in a fast-descending pitch like a dive-bomber; it swooped towards me. In a fight-or-flight moment, I hurled myself out of the way and it smashed into The Patriarch’s head. One of his ears was cleanly severed-off by a propeller and his face was almost destroyed.

The bloodbath calmed. The ambulance came and took him away. I was taken to the Police station where my story was treated with suspicion. I was tellingly not charged with anything. Instead, I was ordered to pay an £80 public order fine for disturbing some illusory peace. Needless to say, mine and Judith’s votes were lost in the ether.

* * * * *

In the weeks that have followed, Judith has made a full physical recovery, but Mrs Frattelli has kept a low profile. Hugh later informed me that one of the Drones had been targeting her explicitly; on one occasion, actually entering her home to scream at her for ten minutes. He also told of many elderly voters who couldn’t make it to the top of the hill to vote that day, because of the piercing noises they were subject to. Jude has been acting a little odd too. I think it will take us quite a while to erase the memory of Malcolm; whomever, or whatever he was. Mr Gruff, our poltergeist, thankfully went back to sleep. An eerie, shocked calm now pervades everything, following our three-day holiday from the Devonshire norm.

And, as for Geoff Clams? Well, I sit here typing still. A whole month after beginning this report, I’m still trying to tie up all of these disparate, loose ends into some kind of cohesive conclusion. I still hear strange accounts from neighbours about that week, but I’m resigned to the fact that I will probably never figure out the meaning of it all. Hugh is continuing his own private investigation into these matters, so I will keep you all updated on his progress as the weeks roll by. For now, I’m inclined to cast my mind back to how I started this report, wherein I began by talking about the Iranians and their political courage. I was bemoaning the boring, anodyne nature of British politics.

At this precise moment, my attention is somewhat diverted from the laptop screen and refocused onto the long face of Jeremy Paxman; he’s speaking at me from the television in the corner.

‘And later on in the programme… In the wake of the recent Iranian election crisis, we’ll be asking whether or not blogging now threatens to supplant political journalism.’

Relax Jeremy. If it happens, it happens. No skin off this nose.

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