Sunday, May 31, 2009

MEP expenses: UK Greens best, Ukip worst

OpenEurope is a think tank calling for reform of European institutions. it has published an important league table of MEP performance which can be downloaded from here:

MEPs have been ranked using two main categories:
‘Transparency, openness and democracy’ and ‘Fighting waste and misuse of EU funds’.

I have gone through the data for some of the UK parties - Green, Con, Lab, LibDem and UKIP and summated their scores.

In the ranking,1 = best, and 785 = worst possible, so the lower the score the better.

I used a ctrl+f search for Green, Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat and UK Idependence, selecting only UK parties that came up. I noted their position on the ranking, summated those position scores and divided by the number of MEPs found. So the lower the score, the better the political group has performed in terms of the investigation.

Here are the results :

Greens - 51

LibDem - 116

Conservatives 152

Labour 205

Ukip 343

This survey is vitally important for the electorate. People are understandably angry with the three Westminster parties, and at the moment, due to deficient information, UKIP is the main beneficiary of the disaffection, polling 10-16% at the moment. This research shows that voting UKIP in protest at MP expenses scandals is to jump from the Westminster frying pan into the Brussels fire.

If you are concerned about expenses claims and related issues, the logical thing to do is vote Green.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

See Ben Goldacre at http://twitter.com/bengoldacre - he is accusing the greens of being "anti-science"and pointing to: http://rly.cc/BjJ1r and with his large following this slur is being spread around. Can you perhaps comment on this?