THE BOTTOMLESS PIT OF EU MISSPENDING

A big thank you to the Daily Telegraph for providing this information.

£3 billion: Amount of 'stealth taxes' to be levied on Britons under European Commission plans to generate one third of the EU budget by 2020 using direct taxation powers.

£682 million: The amount Brussels demanded British taxpayers stump up in extra contributions next year to meet a proposed £5.5 billion increase in spending.

£9.2 billion: Amount British taxpayers contributed to the EU in 2010.

£94billion: The nine tenths of the EU's budget in 2009 that was “materially affected” by irregularities, projects that included the spending of more than £350,000 “improving the lifestyle and living standard of dogs” in Hungary.

£2billion: The annual cost of paying pensions to Eurocrats by 2040, British taxpayers will end up paying £350million of the total.

£136million: The amount British taxpayers paid for EU pensions in 2010, giving the average retired Eurocrat an income of almost £60,000.

1,023: The number of unelected EU civil servants who pocket bigger salaries than David Cameron's annual income of £142,500.

!£328,000!: The annual pay and perks package for Baroness Ashton, the EU foreign minister and highest paid UNELECTED female politician in the world.

2,558: The number of senior EU officials, earning £185,000 a year, who were entitled to three months time off work on full pay last year.

£67million: The amount that the European Parliament’s 736 MEPs can collectively claim this year in “daily subsistence” and “general expenditure” expenses without having to provide any receipts or proof of expenditure.

£150million: The annual cost of moving the entire EU parliament hundreds of miles from Brussels to Strasbourg for a plenary sitting once a month as a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation.

£90million: The European House of History, to be built by 2014 by MEPs, despite a continuing argument over fundamental historical event, such as what happened during the Second World War.

£8million: The annual cost of EuroparlTV, a television channel, which highlights the work of MEPs, and has only 830 daily viewers, less than 10 per cent of the 9,000 people working in the parliament every day.

£410,000: Cash to train teenagers in Burkina Faso and Mali, two of the world's poorest countries, in “therapeutic dancing” because Africans find that “expression of feelings through the spoken word is often difficult and complicated”.

£162,000: The funding went to the London-based Flying Gorillas troupe, whose acts includes the “brilliant smelly foot dance”.

And what does all of this have in common? Yes, none of us have been given the opportunity to vote on whether or not we want to be party to this outrageous largesse, or, if we do, how much we would be prepared to pay for it.

Aelfred