Have a think about this "circus event" for a dull idea ?
The cost of the European Parliament decamping from Belgium to Strasbourg, France, once a month runs to more than £100m a year.
It is perhaps the most outlandish of the European Union’s excesses; a £130 million travelling circus that once a month sees the European Parliament decamp from Belgium to France.
Over the course of the weekend, some 2,500 plastic trunks will be loaded on to five lorries and driven almost 300 miles from Brussels to Strasbourg.
On Monday, about 1,000 politicians, officials and translators will then make the same journey on two specially chartered trains hired at taxpayers’ expense.
A few thousand more will go to Strasbourg by other means, as the European Parliament switches from Brussels, its permanent base, to its “official” home in northern France.
For the first time, the full detail of this “madness”, contained in official European documents, can be disclosed today and the price to taxpayers is astonishing.
In all, the EU admits that the monthly Strasbourg sitting, which lasts just four days, costs an additional £93 million a year. The Conservative Party in Europe, which is leading a campaign to abandon it, estimates the cost a little higher at £130 million, or about £928 million in the seven-year cycle of an EU budget.
Among the costs are £250,000 a year to transport the plastic boxes containing documents, diaries and other items from Brussels to Strasbourg and back again. The boxes are left outside offices in Brussels on a Friday evening, collected by a courier company and driven to Strasbourg, where they are unloaded and left outside offices there. The process is repeated in reverse on Thursday evening.
It is thought it costs up to £200,000 for the EU to charter two express trains to take officials, MEPs and others there on a Monday morning and back on a Thursday afternoon. The trains stop only once at an airport in Paris to collect or drop MEPs and no ordinary member of the public can get on board, for a train which arrives in time for parliamentary sessions beginning in the afternoon.
Many of the details are contained within a report into the “financial and environmental impact” of operating two parliaments, which was overseen by Klaus Welle, the secretary-general to the European Parliament, its top civil servant. Mr Welle had been requested by MEPs to give an accurate figure on the costs of two parliaments amid a growing clamour to scrap one of them.
The report shows how taxpayers foot the £2.5 million bill for relocating freelance translators from Brussels to Strasbourg and back again, including costs of travel, accommodation and other expenses.
Providing catering services in Strasbourg costs an additional £1 million, while extra medical support comes to some £330,000.
In Strasbourg, extra money is needed for computers and IT support and for maintenance and security of the sleek parliament building, which was completed in 1999. In total, the cost of looking after the French buildings and infrastructure and other charges comes to about £50 million a year.
One source suggested that before each session begins, a maintenance crew visits every bathroom and turns on and off every tap to make sure no pipes have been blocked since they were last used and to rid the pipes of stale water.
A spokesman said that the maintenance teams looked after the building just like any other.
About 100 people are employed in Strasbourg full-time, even though the European Parliament meets for 12 sessions, each lasting four days, a total of only 48 days each year.
But during those four-day sessions, the circus is in town. About 5,500 people pour into Strasbourg; not only politicians and officials but lobbyists, too.
Hotels in Strasbourg typically double their rates when the EU comes to stay. Last week, the Hilton Hotel in Strasbourg was offering rooms at £82 for Sunday night, but this rose to a cheapest rate of £161 a night for Monday, when the sessions begin.
One MEP said he booked his accommodation a staggering five years in advance to ensure obtaining a room at a reasonable rate.
For an EU obsessed by climate change and its possible effects, more embarrassing is the report’s admission that “10,200 tonnes of CO2 per year would be saved if Strasbourg were no longer used as a place of work”.
That is the equivalent of 12,000 cars driving around the circumference of the world.
There is no hope for mankind, it's just a question of when and what time of the day the end will come ?
Phil
Just remember, if you break it, you bought it. Might want to remind Germany that while they're shoveling money into Greece. And soon to be Turkey. Hope Germany's got deep pockets because the French will do everything they can to get out of paying their share, that's if they have the money in the first place
so vast amounts of tea are brewed in order to read the predictions in the pattern of the tea leaves that are left in the bottom of the cup ? 
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