I've just spent a fortnight staying with one of those "un-elected bureaucrats" in Brussels. She's a UK citizen, speaks French and Chinese exceedingly fluently, and recently spent a week in China with her boss - an Italian ex-MEP - and a bunch of Brits, Germans, and Dutch whose backgrounds are also in national politics and civil service. It's really not the case that a bunch of "un-elected Belgians and Luxemburgers" are doing the work that in this country originates with the Civil Service. The secretariat aren't political appointees per se, but you don't really want an MEP to spend all his or her time researching, writing, and revising reports on the impact of crime on wildlife in each of the EU countries, and then arranging for translation into all the relevant languages.
(I went to the European Parliament while I was there, and spent quite a lot of time reading the titles of the various research papers that are available. Most of them are extraordinarily dull - useful in the scheme of things, but dull. You really do want civil servants preparing all that stuff, honestly.)
(I went to the European Parliament while I was there, and spent quite a lot of time reading the titles of the various research papers that are available. Most of them are extraordinarily dull - useful in the scheme of things, but dull. You really do want civil servants preparing all that stuff, honestly.)
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