Time to focus on Eurosleaze

With domestic budget reforms well under way and due to take concrete form in October, and with enough stories of ongoing sleaze and corruption amongst the political class bubbling up in the press to remind them that we haven't forgotten or forgiven them, it's probably now time to shift the national focus to Eurosleaze.

Eclipsed for a while by revelations of the Home Secretary's porn videos and suchlike, the fiscal misbehaviour of MEPs and officials in Brussels has largely escaped under the radar. With an efficiency that would have been admired by Goebbels, the EU propaganda machine effectively buried the 2006 Galvin report into MEPs' theft and corruption, peculation on a truly international scale, evidence of a shameless and blatant criminality amongst these bent Euroscum.

At £76,000 a year, MEPs are on a better basic wedge than their Westminster superiors, but that's not all; your MP pays higher rate tax, but under a special deal your MEP pays only 15% income tax under a special 'Eurotheft' deal. And then there are expenses on a scale that new Westminster MPs can only dream of.

With the most delicious irony, the Green Party's Jean Lambert MEP has recently called upon the EU to help tackle corruption in Nigeria; as ministers' mouths hang open in Abuja in disbelief, you can almost hear the response of "But everything we do we learned from you ..."

So let's keep our eyes and ears open for those tales of Eurocorruption.