It seems that in the EU, an issue is never really dead and buried. Look at the constitution, for example. The Austrian presidency of the EU is now trying to revive this discredited document from its coma. We thought the French and the Dutch had killed it off - and many EU politicians will admit as much in private - but there are plenty of people who want to keep their vision of the EU's future alive.
We now have the same situation with the EU's budget for 2007-2013. This hugely controversial dossier goes by the seemingly innocuous name of 'Financial Perspectives'. No-one was ever suggesting that the budget as an issue would disappear after last December's summit of EU leaders. But the European Parliament's decision to reject the Council's compromise means that the budget will remain the foremost bone of contention in the EU, at least for the duration of the Austrian presidency.
The deal cobbled together at the December summit - under the leadership of British Prime Minister Tony Blair - has come in for a fair amount of criticism. In a sense, we could not have expected anything less. The agreement was the result of hours of horse-trading and tense behind-the-scenes negotiations. You can't please everyone all the time when the national interests of 25 member states are at stake. There were good bits and bad bits.
One of the bad bits was Mr Blair's surrender of part of the British budget rebate, secured by Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984. He repeatedly assured us that the rebate was not up for negotiation. Then he said it would only be on the table in exchange for reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). That was a brazenly opportunist strategy given that he was fully complicit in the 2002 Franco-German stitch-up which fixed farm spending until 2013. So CAP reform was never a possibility.
Surrendering part of the rebate was therefore totally unjustified and will cost British taxpayers an extra €10 billion over the seven-year budget period. The rebate exists for a reason. If you remove the reason for its existence, it stands to reason that you should also remove the rebate. In a sense, the rebate exists as a monument to the EU's inability to transform its budgetary regime.
I and my fellow Conservative MEPs also wanted spending to be limited to one per cent of gross national income (GNI). One of the positive aspects of the budget deal is that by 2013 the budget is predicted to fall to this totemic figure. But EU leaders could have been more ambitious and insisted on this limit immediately. We always argued that it is possible to have a smaller budget and boost funding for certain projects - like structural funds in new member states, or research and development which would give industry and jobs a much needed boost.
On the other side of the argument, many MEPs appear to think that the budget deal is not ambitious enough. They want to return to the Commission's proposal, which was to spend 1.24 per cent of GNI - an increase of some €110 billion on the summit deal. During the January plenary session in Strasbourg, the European Parliament rejected the Council's position and gave notice that it would drive a hard bargain in negotiations over the next few months.
There are elements of the Parliament's position that I can support. I think MEPs should be consulted more and have a greater role in the budgetary process. I think a review of the spending programme in 2008 is an essential part of making sure taxpayers' money is put to good use. I support making national governments more accountable for EU money they disburse - a move which would impose rigour and discipline. The British presidency of the EU under Tony Blair made no attempt to address this perennial problem, which has been of increasing concern to the EU Court of Auditors.
But the majority of MEPs seem to think greater centralisation of spending is the way to go, which is something I can't agree with. The Parliament, in resolution on the Financial Perspectives, also made a thinly-veiled attack on what remains of the British budget rebate: once again, putting the cart before the horse. And boosting the budget by €110 billion is a convenient way of avoiding the big issues - tackling waste and mismanagement in the EU, developing new ideas about agricultural policy and cutting red tape to remove crippling costs from business.
As usual, MEPs can agree on only one thing - to disagree. The run-up to May, when the Financial Perspectives dossier returns to the European Parliament, promises to be turbulent.