It's a good thing we're leaving this European Union, isn't it?
A quite extraordinary intervention here into the appointment of an EU Commissioner:
Oettinger, previously the digital services commissioner, was named in October by commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker to take on the budget and human resources dossier from Bulgaria’s Kristalina Georgieva after she left for the World Bank.
The last one has moved on to another gravy train so a new one must be appointed. OK so far. And then we get this:
Germany’s EU commissioner Günther Oettinger is unfit to run the human resources portfolio because of his divisive record of racist, sexist and homophobic remarks, rights groups have said.
In an open letter to the European Parliament, which will publicly question Oettinger on Monday, NGOs including Oxfam International and Transparency International said Oettinger was not suitable for the new job.
Those NGOs are, of course, major beneficiaries of the budget process. So the claim here is, at heart, that the people receiving our money should be determining who it is that gives them our money? Perhaps he is all of those things alleged but we don't allow prisoners to appoint governors and if we want a decent body politic we don't allow the special interest supplicants to appoint the politicians.
Good thing we're leaving this mess of a system behind really, isn't it?