It is also worth pointing out that the shuttling to and fro has an environmental impact. According to the Green Party it creates, every year 20,268 tonnes of carbon emissions.

This is such an own goal by the EU. For as long as the shuttle continues, EUsceptics like me will continue to challenge the right of the Federal Institutions to make rulings about the environment when it is polluting the planet and wasting our natural resources by its own activities. We will point to it as yet another example of EU’s ‘do as I as I say not as I do’ mentality.

Treaties are not written in stone and in the UK at least, the there is a guiding principle that no government shall bind its successor. The EU Parliament should flex its puny muscles and hold the EU Government to account, otherwise we EUsceptics will continue to call it a puppet parliament and we will rant on and on about the cost of supporting a parliament which does not have any significant powers.

It is absurd that France has such power in the EU. It is not as though it pays for any thing, it is a net recipient of EU funding.

Perhaps the MEPs should just refuse to make the journeys and turn up for work in the Brussels building instead. There are plenty of Marxists in the Parliament, I am sure they would know how to organise a strike.