I was co-chairing a regular joint management meeting this morning with my counterpart from the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl, when a friend texted me the news that the European Court of Justice had ruled against the Council in the ‘salaries’ case brought by the European Commission. Well, we saw this one coming. It’s easy to be wise after the event but I cannot help but feel that a little more foresight and a more imaginative approach could have enabled us to avoid the bad press we are now understandably going to get. Basically, EU officials’ salaries are adjusted each year according to a method which essentially follows adjustments to the salaries of civil servants in a basket of eight different member states. By its nature, this method involves a time lag, and so alas it threw up a 3.7% increase in the middle of an economic and financial crisis. It was, quite understandably, politically impossible for member state governments, particularly those imposing harsh austerity programmes at home (including cuts to civil services), to approve such an increase although, as the Court has now confirmed through its ruling, the Council in effect had no margin of discretion. At a managerial level, the potential problem (assuming the Council now approves an increase from the 1.85 it had originally decided to 3.7%) has four parts. First, the institutions will have to find the necessary credits to pay the difference as from 1 July 2009, a budgetary year that has closed. They’ll have to do the same for 2010, a budgetary year that is almost over. They’ll have to do the same for next year (because the Council could not accept that the institutions anticipate the Court’s possible ruling in their draft budgets). And they’ll have to incorporate the relevant full increases into their draft 2012 budgets. Since we are under a legal obligation to pay the salaries of our officials, ways will have to be found. Understandably, however, none of this will play well out there in the ‘real world’. I hope that we collectively learn our lesson from this experience.

Sad news. Stanley Crossick, a solicitor, think tank leader, political analyst, writer, speaker and media commentator, and a well-known figure in Brussels circles, passed away yesterday. Stanley was also a very active blogger. His last post was on just 23 October – ironically, it was about the sad passing away of Max Kohnstamm. Stanley was the Director and Founding Chairman of The European Policy Centre, in its own words, ‘a proactive, Brussels think tank, driven by business and the other economic and social actors, which focuses on key internal and external issues of European integration’. Stanley was a passionate believer in the process of European integration and in the goal of European Union. Latterly, he was a fervent believer in the importance of Sino-European relations. He was generous with his advice, learned advice that I sought eagerly and he gave generously as I took up the cudgels as Secretary General. But I am sure he will be remembered primarily for what he always was; a thoroughly nice and decent human being.

At one end of our street there is a traditional Asian corner shop. In the beginning, it was run by a lovely old Pakistani couple. After a while, they went home and their son, Taseer, took it over. In time, he refurbished the shop and took over several others. Taseer is one of the quarter’s guardian angels. He is in part barman, parish priest, teacher, and urban security officer. He has a friendly wink, smile and chat for everybody. He is very active in the local neighbourhood association, organising street parties and other initiatives. This morning we ate an opening Oxfam breakfast in his latest venture; Bread and Breakfast. The neighbourhood has been crying out for such a coffee shop/snack shop for a long time and if the crowds this morning are anything to go by, Taseer is onto a winner – and he deserves it! Bread and Breakfast, Taseer Mirza, 50 rue Thomas Vincotte, Schaerbeek.

This evening we went to see an amateur performance of Frank Loesser’s great musical, Guys and Dolls. The Brussels Light Opera Company, an amateur group bringing together people of many nationalities and ages, has existed since 1975 and is now an unmissable part of the Brussels expat community’s landscape. On this occasion they brought us Loesser’s witty music and lyrics and, behind that, the keen observations of Damon Runyan, on whose short stories about Prohibition New York the musical was based. We had great fun. The two leading ladies, Laura Ford as Sarah Brown and Lisa Armetta as Miss Adelaide, turned in wonderful performances. For my money, Miss Adelaide, with her romanticism undiminished by occasional bouts of world-weary pragmatism, is the story’s strongest character. All of the characters get some great lines but the public is always on Miss Adelaide’s side. When, on the fourteenth anniversary of her engagement (marriage has yet to follow), her fiancée forgets to get her a present, she remarks; ‘Oh, I don’t mind, Nathan, if you don’t give me a present. It makes me feel like we were married.’ There are still a few places left for tomorrow’s performance. Don’t miss it! Into the bargain you’ll see a brilliant tap dance routine from Grégoire Vandersmissen.

At midday I joined a human chain formed around the European Parliament to raise consciousness in this, the year of combating poverty and social exclusion. The event is part of the European Parliament’s communication campaign on its role in fighting poverty, social exclusion and the negative consequences of the crises, leading up to the Citizens’ Agora, in January next year, which is being organised by the Parliament with the support and very active participation of the European Economic and Social Committee. In a recent post I wrote about the poverty revealed in a local jumble sale. As European Vice-President Isabelle Durant put it, poverty and its consequences are all around us. In part, poverty is hidden. In part, the poor hide their condition through understandable pride. And in part we who are better off do not see. Events like this are an important way of reminding us about the reality ‘out there’.

Luca Jahier and the Vice-Presidents of Group III

This morning I went, at the kind invitation of Luca Jahier, the new President of the Various Interests Group, to an extraordinary Group meeting. I presented myself and spoke about the constraints, challenges and perspectives of the Committee’s Secretary General and of the administration he heads. It was an excellent and very positive occasion. There were a lot of constructive questions and clarifications and expressions of points of view. In my opinion, the EU’s institutions have still not fully thought through the cumulative implications of waves of enlargement from the most obvious point of view; geographical, by which I mean distances and time spent travelling. Clearly, a member who has effectively to spend three days out of the office in order to attend a meeting in Brussels (the Cypriots and the Maltese, for example) faces very different challenges to those of members who can hop on the Thalys, Eurostar or ICT in the morning and be back on the evening of the same day. I am intent on driving through a step-change in the mentality of our administration so that we are collectively far more attentive to logistical support and simple creature comforts.

This evening I gave a talk as a member of a panel at a Conference on European Democracy organised by the European Union Democracy Observatory of the European University Institute. The title of my talk was ‘Laeken Re-visited: the New EU Institutional Landscape After the Lisbon Treaty.’ My basic argument was to recall the twin challenges identified by the member states in their December 2001 Laeken Declaration – enlargement and bridging the gap with the European citizen – and to which the Lisbon Treaty was supposed to respond. Whilst enlargement ultimately happened long before the Treaty was ratified and implemented (and so the Union had to, and did, manage without), the gap with the citizen remained, and the Treaty’s provisions on the democratic life of the Union were therefore still of complete relevance. Whilst there were clear priorities in terms of implementing the Treaty – creating the External Action Service, notably – the institutions should not forget that all of the Treaty’s provisions should be implemented, including those concerning the democratic life of the Union. There were several old EUI friends in the workshop and some more recent acquaintances, including the EUI’s current President, Josep Borrell. In a conversation at the cocktails after the workshop he told me that he recognised that a Secretary General in office had to pull his punches but that the risk that member states and EU institutions – including the European Parliament (of which he was once President) would simply revert to their old, ‘normal’ way of doing things was high and it was therefore important to continue to remind people why the Lisbon Treaty came into being in the first place. You can read my written-up speech notes here.

At the invitation of Henri Malosse, President of the Employers Group, I spoke this morning to a visiting delegation from the Welfare Society Tibetan Chamber of Commerce (www.tibetancc.org). In characteristically humble manner, the Chairman of the Chamber, Mr Sonam Topgyal, spoke about learning from our (the European Union’s) wisdom. But, like Henri Malosse, I felt we had much wisdom to learn from our visitors.

We went to the Cinéma Le Stockel this evening with Italian friends to see La Passione, a film directed by Carlo Mazzacurati that was in competition at the Venice Festival this year. The Stockel cinema has a programme of occasional Italian films, in Italian and, as with the theatre last Friday, it is nice to sit in an Italian audience – there is, somehow, indefinably, a different atmosphere. The film has had varying reviews. One critic thought it brilliant. Another thought it full of joy. The consensus among our group was that the plot sprawled a bit and whilst the film had some great comic moments it didn’t live up to its potential. The basic story line is about a bevy of misfits, led by a fifty-something alternative film director who has run out of inspiration (Gianni Dubois, played by Silvio Orlandi), organising the passion of Christ on a Good Friday in a small Tuscan village. There are lots of in-jokes about the creative process and Giuseppe Battiston (as Ramiro) gives a wonderful performance as a last-minute replacement Jesus. Indeed, this situation gives rise to some of the best one-liners in the film: Ramiro, ‘I’m fat’, Orlandi, ‘Even Jesus would be fat today’ and ‘In this world nobody is indispensable, not even Jesus Christ.’ Good fun, then, but it could have been better.

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…