You can only have one per month...

So; now we know. Budgetary talks between the Council and the Parliament broke down in the early hours of this morning and, in the probable continued absence of an agreed budget for 2011, all EU institutions and policies will have to move to a system entitled ‘provisional twelfths’. More about that in a moment, but first a clarification. The Council and the Parliament reached complete agreement about the draft 2011 budget – that’s right, complete. Their differences were about the recondite issue of voting methods (unanimity or QMV) for the so-called ‘reallocation flexibility’ mechanism and the slightly less recondite issue about mechanisms for future financing as from 2013. The Parliament had climbed all the way down from its initial position of a 6.19% increase in 2011 to the Council’s position of a 2.91% increase. Its negotiating quid pro quo was concessions on the other issues and these a minority of member states were not prepared to grant. Whilst the issue will be discussed at the 16-17 December meeting of the European Council, the Budget Commissioner, Janusz Lewandowski, thinks it could take a few months to resolve the situation. In the meantime, the EU budget will remain at its 2010 level and be disbursed in 12 equal instalments. I’ve called a crisis meeting for our administration for tomorrow although, frankly, I don’t think ‘provisional twelfths’ will be a major managerial challenge for us; at least, not in the beginning. But spare a sympathetic thought for Baroness Cathy Ashton and her colleagues, busy trying to establish the new European External Action Service, and probably without a budget to recruit staff…