‘Hello. Is that the European Union? This is Earth.’ It’s a conversation that could have happened at any time in recent years, but if the EU’s planned global satellite system ever actually takes off it might yet become reality.
The plans for ‘Project Galileo’ were dreamt up in the late 1990s. They are intended as a rival to the Global Positioning System satellites, or GPS, used by almost all of today’s satnav devices. GPS worked well — but it was owned by the United States. This did not please Jacques Chirac, then French president, who thought a rival satnav project would make a fine grand projet.
Lift-off for Galileo has taken a while, with hopes for a speedy launch repeatedly thwarted. For a decade, as anyone with a passing knowledge of the EU’s track record for delivering projects might have guessed, the costs have rocketed. Indeed, they started doing so long before the project could.
Along with death and taxes, one of the saddest inevitabilities of life has become the demand by the EU for increased funding. And if there is anyone who remains under the illusion that this is money competently spent, Galileo should shatter that illusion.
The invaluable think-tank Open Europe recently looked at the projected costs of Galileo and revealed some of the all too predictable results: incompetence and infighting were the least of it. Study the financial escalation of Galileo and you find yourself growing silent as before a great wonder, struck dumb by the sheer magnificence and scale of it all, the majestic way in which Brussels financial arrangements transcend normal space and time. All that money glinting in the distance. You wonder whether ordinary mortals will ever be able to reach it. It makes you feel, as they say, very small.
When I phoned the EU to ask about the costs they said that it was still ‘too early to speculate in terms of amounts’. But Open Europe’s projections for the EU have proved more accurate than the EU’s before; in this case, they are based on leaked information from the European Commission and the German government. According to Open Europe, the deployment costs alone — officially estimated, with a comfortable margin of error, to be about €1.6 billion — will now be something more like €5 billion. The final total cost, from start to completion over a 20-year period, could come to an intergalactic €22 billion.
The EU’s estimates, drawn up ten years ago, predicted that of the then €7.7 billion total costs, only a third would be shouldered by the taxpayer; the rest would be covered by private investors. In 2007, the investment consortium — made up of telecom and aerospace companies — collapsed. Political interference was cited as a principal cause. Unsurprisingly, there is now talk of putting Galileo to military use.
But this is the EU. So even when the project fails, or the majority of the funding evaporates, there is always one glorious fall-back supporter who never fails to come up with the goods. That is the European taxpayer. Or rather, taxpayers from those EU countries that actually pay contributions to the EU, like the UK, as opposed to those countries, like Romania and Bulgaria, which elect MEPs but pay nothing.
The cost to the UK taxpayer for this political ineptitude has shot up from £385 million to an impressive £3 billion. That’s a difference of one of those aircraft carriers that our armed forces need. No organisation other than the EU could come up with routine budget discrepancies literally the size of an aircraft carrier. But what’s a rise like that between friends? After all, we’ll be paying an extra £387 million to the EU each year after our Prime Minister’s ‘spectacular’ victory in Brussels the other week.
A famous economist once said there are two types of money: mine and yours. The EU constantly reminds us that there is a third type: theirs. Without meaningful oversight, without sign-off, without limit and with no punishment for failure, it’s a deal which, as the Galileo fiasco reminds us, is quite simply out of this world.
David Cameron has already axed the Nimrod surveillance aircraft programme because the costs were surging, with no sign of delivery. By the same logic, he should have a straightforward message to the EU: ‘Over and out.’
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