Text tabled : A6-0262/2008

  Christopher Heaton-Harris (PPE-DE). – Mr President, as your colleagues beside you will tell you, I always try to take the floor on budget matters.

I very much enjoyed working with Jutta Haug, the budget rapporteur, this year. It was when she had the budget the last time that I managed to table just under 500 amendments to her budget for discussion in committee, and a number of those came forward to plenary. She is a good person to work with and she understands many of the problems that I have with those elements of the Lisbon Treaty that are already being budgeted for, supposedly under the legal basis of financial perspectives agreed at Council – although I am pretty sure that is not correct. She understands that I have a big problem with lots of NGOs being funded by the Commission budget to lobby the Commission to do more things in a bizarre symbiotic relationship that should no longer go forward, and she knows I have a very special relationship with the Special Olympics movement, which should benefit from the European budget at some point in the future.

In all those matters I have great respect for the rapporteur, but I wonder whether anybody else in this place pays any attention to the budget, apart from the small number of budget geeks who exist in just a couple of committees in this place.