British Foreign & Commonwealth Office now virtually redundant
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Baroness Ashton's empire: The EU diplomatic army that dwarfs anything our own Foreign Office could muster
- 7,000 Eurocrats in 137 embassies worldwide cost a mind-boggling £5.8bn
- Run by a £313,000-a-year New Labour apparatchik who hasn't been elected by a single voter
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The full staggering scale and cost of the European Union’s new global diplomatic corps can be revealed today. The so-called European External Action Service (EEAS) will have an annual budget of £5.8 billion and an army of ambassadors across 137 embassies, with up to 7,000 Eurocrats trained to pursue the EU’s foreign policy. It will be run by Baroness Ashton, the obscure Labour quangocrat and Blair-appointed peer who last year was surprisingly nominated by Gordon Brown to be the EU’s foreign secretary – even though she has never been elected by British or European voters.
The former treasurer of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, whose official title is High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, will launch the EU diplomatic corps on December 1 at her sleek new headquarters in Brussels, which will cost £10.5million a year in rent alone. The new corps – revealed as Prime Minister David Cameron was accused of a ‘Vichy-style’ betrayal for caving in to a 2.9 per cent increase in the EU’s total annual budget – will dwarf Britain’s Foreign Office, which employs 4,863 diplomats.
Perhaps significantly, the biggest diplomatic mission will be in Turkey – with 132 staff – which hopes to join the EU. The next biggest will be in America, where the EU will have 124 diplomats in Washington and New York. The EU will have a surprising 46 diplomats on the Caribbean holiday island of Barbados, 49 in strife-torn Pakistan, 57 in Vietnam, 95 in Ukraine, 31 in Yemen, 29 in Tajikistan, 92 in Morocco and 53 in Madagascar. In Afghanistan there will be another 85 diplomats, 96 in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 91 in India and 113 in Russia. Burkina Faso will have 59, Costa Rica 21, Egypt 90, Vietnam 57, East Timor 20, Djibouti 18, Mauritania 46, Mauritius 39, Namibia 26, Papua New Guinea 27, Laos 26, Sudan 58, Paraguay 16, and Swaziland 16.
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Serbia will have 103, Albania 63, Sierra Leone 48, on through more than 100 other countries to the Solomon Islands with 11 and Togo three. Even the tiny Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, which has a population of just 230,000, will have six diplomats. There will be hundreds more at EEAS headquarters in Brussels and at international organisations in Paris, Vienna, Rome and Strasbourg. Some 100 new posts have already been created, on salaries ranging from £44,882 to £190,000.
They, and the rest of the staff, will all benefit from a generous range of perks including expatriation allowance, installation allowance, resettlement allowance, removal expenses, cost of living salary weighting, daily subsistence allowance, travel expenses, car allowance/driver, household allowance, birth/adoption of child allowance, child education allowance, pre-school allowance, parental leave allowance, entertainment expenses, overtime, annual leave and pension – all calculated according to 18 pay grades.
The generosity begins at the top. Baroness Ashton, as EU foreign secretary, is being paid £313,213 a year – almost two-and-a-half times British Foreign Secretary William Hague’s salary of £138,000 Ashton’s annual pension after five years as EU foreign secretary plus one year as EU Trade Commissioner will be £62,925. When she leaves Brussels, she will get moving expenses and a golden handshake of an astonishing £445,674. However, the salaries for her ambassadors remain secret. According to a spokesman for the EEAS: ‘In agreement with staff regulations and unions we are not allowed to give out this information.'
Another greedy unelected pig who is unaccountable to the electorate - yet she and her unelected quango office are funded mainly by the British taxpayer and there's no way you can remove her - unless we leave the European Union of course. David Cameron may aswell cut William Hague and his Foreign Office completely if he's so committed to building a federal Europe, because surely the British Foreign Office is now nothing more than another layer of useless government?
Bare in mind always when you hear of EU funding issues, the European Union hasn't had its audits signed off for the last 15 years with billions suspected missing - and yet weak and useless Cameron has agreed to giving it a 2.9% rise in funding.
Thoughts?
