In Brussels this week my hotel gave me a free copy of New Europe, a weekly European newspaper with a lively web presence.

See eg my former colleague Sir Stephen Wall on whether Britain (sic) is a European nation.

No surprise at his answer (Stephen was HM Ambassador to the EU): We have no choice but to be European.

Hmm. Who defines what ‘European’ is, and what ‘choice’ means in this context?

See also an interesting piece by Joschka Fischer on the search for an Arab Jean Monnet.

The New Europe back page features the somewhat eccentric thoughts of one Kassandra. I was intrigued by this piece on what looks like a good move to kill off a ghastly wasteful European Parliamentarians PR exercise, a clunky naff €5m(!) Facebook for MPs called MyParl:

Controversial blog England Expects first announced the death of MyParl.eu last Thursday: “The madness that is Myparl (myparl.eu), the facebook for MEPs is dead. I am informed that a letter has been sent by the European Commission to Mostra Communications cancelling the contract. Let there be great rejoicing. Indeed and step forward Jon Worth, Tim Worstall, Bruno Waterfield and others who have succesfully embarressed the colleagues into cancelling it.”

So far so unexceptionable.

That said, the hapless MyParl website is still alive and well as of this evening. Die, will you?

But Kassandra then continues:

We’d like to know how a budget for a project that has been approved can be cancelled (without the companies failing to fulfill the clauses of their contracts)? Also, assuming that the project was supposed to be launched in October (now!), wouldn’t that mean that all the cost-intensive tasks of making the website had already been incurred – making it very inefficient and wasteful to terminate the project? How can a project be terminated before even being judged? Who is going to own all the ‘code’ developed by the companies?

Is this meant to be a spoof? Or does Kassandra really believe that a self-evidently rubbish project should be continued just because lots of money has been spent on it? Has he not heard of sunk costs?

He concludes:

The project should probably continue. After all, if projects are initiated, funded, and then cancelled without the companies showing any results, people might begin to get the wrong impression and come to their own conclusions about the whole arrangement.

No.

They might at last start to get the right impression about the ‘whole arrangement’.