For the thirteenth year in succession, the European Union’s auditors have refused to sign off on the European Union’s accounts, and, in doing so, has lambasted the EU’s accounting system for its systemic flaws.

The European administration has, as usual, buried its head in the ground, and mistaken a fleck of paint for a silver lining.  Apparently, the EU being found to be - once again - ungovernable and unaccountable is a good news story, at least for Siim Kallas, European Commissioner for auditing and former PM of Estonia:

I am glad to see the Court now gives its green light to over 40% of total payments, compared to roughly 1/3 last year, and only 6% three years ago.

Which, of course, means that 60% of the budget is completely and utterly unaccountable.  Is that really a good news story?

Despite this outbreak of insanity, I like Kallas a lot, and often cite the Reform Party that he once led into government as a working European libertarian party. In their own words (fortunately in English, because my Eesti is rusty):

We want Estonia to become a state of free citizens, where the Government intervenes as little as possible in peoples’ lives, doing this only where it is absolutely necessary for ensuring society’s security and preserving and developing the Estonian society and culture.

Sound!

But they also claim:

The policy of the Reform Party is based on the principle of open society.

Popper may not be entirely happy with them hijacking his work and claiming it works for them when their ex-leader, their ex-Prime Minister, defends the indefensible and presides over the worst-managed public accounts in the world.

Worse for claims of governmental transparency and the promotion of the free society, the European Union’s accounts continually fail, despite the EU having its own in-house auditing team, working by its own rules. This is illegal for any company auditing in the European Union. Perhaps more damning is the fact that it’s also illegal for any statutory auditor:

Articles 24 and 25 of this Directive require EU Member States to prescribe that statutory auditors do not carry out statutory audits, either in their own right or on behalf of an audit firm, if they are not independent.

And that’s because independence is critical to making sure that the numbers do add up, rather than relying on the institution employing wishful thinking and the honour system.  As far as the European Union is concerned:

Independence is also the profession’s main means of demonstrating to the public and regulators that statutory auditors and audit firms are performing their task at a level that meets established ethical principles, in particular those of integrity and objectivity.

So, there you go.  By not opening their accounts to external auditors, they’re proving themselves to have no ethical principles, integrity, or objectivity.  For an institution that styles itself as a ‘court’, they’re a bit hopeless, aren’t they?

The complexity of the European Union’s system of financial governance makes good accounting almost impossible, so it can’t come as much of a surprise that their accounts once again failed to make the final cut.

However, that complexity is the EU’s own fault.  The decision to rob European citizens of their right to know how government acts, supposedly in their name and certainly with their money, runs counter to the principles of responsible government and democratic values.

The inability of those in the ivory towers to justify their actions and spending is entirely in-keeping with the other policies of the European Union, which serve to obfuscate and deny a say to the people whom they are governing: the worst practices of the worst of despotisms.  That is not in the interest of the people or their governments, and must be addressed before it undermines what is left of virtue in the ‘European project’.  If, however, that is the EU’s intent, they must perish as would any despotism.

A couple of months ago, this blog made a plaintive call for the people of Poland to throw out their authoritarian government in favour of the Civic Platform, and for David Cameron to distance his Conservatives from the reactionary politics of President Lech Kaczyński.  Last night, the Poles came up trumps.

In elections to the national parliament, the Law and Justice Party (PiS), dominated by the Kaczyński twin brothers, were absolutely thrashed by the resurgent Civic Platform (PO), under pro-business Donald Tusk.  Both parties greatly increased their share of the vote, but whereas the PiS saw theirs increase by 5%, the PO’s jumped by an astonishing 17%, catapulting them into a large plurality of seats.

Moreover, the parties that have lost out are the very ones with whom the PiS’s association had caused classical liberals the most consternation.  Having dropped out of the governing coalition with the PiS, the right-wing Catholic nationalist League of Polish Families (LPR) and the left-wing ’sons of the soil’ Self Defence of the Republic of Poland (SRP) merged their lists.

And were annihilated.  Whereas the two major parties increased their shares of the vote by a total of 22%, the combined fascist-socialist LPR list won a miserable 1%: down from a notional 19% only two years ago.  I might well laugh.  I do.

The new government, under Tusk, will look vastly different to its predecessor.  First, the PO can form a coalition with the centrists, avoiding the disparate coalition that collapsed so spectacularly this summer.  There’ll be no vested interests forcing the government to adopt crazy pet projects on hammering homosexuals, banning Sunday trading, increasing farmers’ payments, and so on.  Instead, the PO can be held to its manifesto programme.

And what a refreshing programme it is.  A flat income/corporation/sales tax of 15%, independence for the central bank, decentralisation of budgets to local authorities, curbing labour cartel power, privatisation of large parts of healthcare and higher education, stripping MPs of their parliamentary immunity to reduce corruption, and liberalising abortion and divorce laws.

And, yet, the main issue that the international media focus on is the Europhilia of the party.  Do we not realise how backwards Poland is?  How threatened it was by the threat of a Piłsudski-worshipping fascist government sending the country back into the dark ages?

Given that, a more favourable approach to the Euro is a small price to pay, particularly when most of the regulation and oppression suffered by Polish people comes from domestic government.  Maybe, when the Poles give themselves freedom - as Tusk promises - they’ll realise that the EU is a hindrance, and adopt a more strident line towards supranational interventionism.

For that to happen required a change of government.  Fortunately, Poland has just that: out go the old guard of nationalists, socialists, and agrarians united, and in come the suited business-friendly liberty-lovers of the Civic Platform.  Given the programme on which the party ran, Tusk has a lot to live up to, but one thing’s certain about his performance: it can’t be worse than his predecessor’s.

As has been made very clear, the government doesn’t want to hold a referendum on the EU treaty that will usher in the EU Constitution by the back door. But, whatever the government says, the inhabitants of East Stoke, in Dorset, aren’t going to take it lying down. They’ve used a provision in the Local Government Act 1972 to hold a local, parish-wide mini-referendum on whether the UK should have a vote on the matter.

Libertarians must have very grave concerns about the use of referenda. The fact that 51% of the population supports a law doesn’t make it a good law if it hinders the 49% that oppose. Even if 99.9% of this country voted a certain way, it wouldn’t make the other 0.1% wrong, or the actions of the majority any more moral. The smallest minority is the individual, but we’re all individuals, so we all suffer if the minority is ignored.

However, in this case, the government is insistent on not having a referendum for other reasons. They’ve heavily exploited their electoral ’success’ (is winning 35% of a 61% turnout really a success?) to pass fundamentally immoral laws. Now the boot’s on the other foot.

Whatever you think of the European Union itself, the European Constitution must be considered a vile document: enforcing uniformity and destroying the individuality of both countries and persons themselves. A referendum is the only way it can be thrown out, but a sure-fire way of guaranteeing it.

Sadly, we’re not going to get a referendum any time soon, are we? Not on Gordon Brown’s watch. The result is we’re denied a proper chance to throw out this travesty of a constitution, and left supporting mini-referenda in parishes like East Stoke. In Dorset? I certainly do.

If there’s one thing most libertarians in this country love to whinge about, it’s the control exerted by Brussels over the lives of British people. Undoubtedly, the European Commission’s (confirmation of its) decision to allow traders to continue to use non-metric units - including the Imperial system - is a great victory for liberty.

I don’t like the Imperial system. It’s unwieldy and unpractical, uneconomical and unscientific, and leads to all sorts of confusion, inaccuracy, and cost. The result is that I rarely think in terms of any non-metric units for any reason: pounds are the things in your wallet, and feet are the things you keep your shoes on. To be honest, I’m quite relived I don’t know what a shaftment is.

However, if someone else wants to buy, sell, think, and exist within an unwieldy and unpractical Imperial bubble, that’s their loss, and their associated confusion, inaccuracy, and cost. The idea that it’s the responsibility of the state - national or international - to tell us how to use numbers is just a smidgeon on the authoritarian side. Effectively, it means that the state’s role is now to discourage bad maths and to promote the good stuff.

We’ve had people convicted for disobeying an EU law on this issue, so it’s only a matter of time before we have people imprisoned for not knowing their times tables or forgetting that dividing by zero gives an undefined result. Maybe we’ll get mathematicians clogging up the country’s prison cells for failing to prove the Hodge conjecture. Naughty them.

This debate touches the heart of the raison d’être of the European Union. It may well be necessary for the EU to create and maintain a single European market. However, it can’t do so at the expense of individual liberty.

Instead of banning people from using minority systems, they should ban countries from doing exactly the same thing. The single European market ought to mean not that one must use metres everywhere, but rather that one must be allowed to use metres, feet, or Smoots. Provided, of course, that the vendor agrees. The result would be that, instead of having an EU that libertarians decry, we’d have an EU of which we can all be truly proud.

That’s never going to happen, is it?