Like Christmas, the debate on a single seat for the European Parliament comes round once a year.

This time last year MEPs backed amendments calling for the Parliament to have a single seat. Today during the vote on this year’s budget report drafted by Labour MEP DerekVaughan, a whopping majority – 429 to 184 with 37 abstentions – voted in favour of a single seat for the European Parliament. Meanwhile, the Secretary-General of Parliament, Klaus Welle, will draw up a paper looking at the cost of maintaining the current arrangement before the summer recess in July. The most recent estimates put the annual cost of theStrasbourgtravelling circus at a fraction over €200m.

Yet despite its absurdity, there is precious little chance of MEPs getting the single seat they are after. This is because – as we all know – a single seat requires a treaty change, which requires the unanimous support of all member states and, guess what, there is more chance of seeing penguins on the moon than there is Nikolas Sarkozy and Jean-Claude Juncker giving up the Parliament buildings inStrasbourgandLuxembourg. Even the new Citizens’ Initiative with a petition signed by millions of Europeans will do little change the minds of the French and Luxembourg governments.

This is a shame because the problem is not going to go away. There are still a handful of people who open their well-thumbed copy of the EU treaties and remind us that the Parliament does have a single seat – inStrasbourg, but the reality is that the politicians and bureaucrats have already voted with their feet and chosenBrussels. The national embassies are all here; the Parliament buildings are well equipped and resourced; the European Commission and Council are across the road. The palace of glass and concrete on PlaceLuxembourgis a well-functioning, working Parliament.

Now don’t get me wrong -Strasbourgis a beautiful city, rich in culture, history and political symbolism. But its Parliament is simply not fit for purpose. To be honest, I don’t think anyone really enjoys the monthly travelling circus down to theAlsace. After spending a full-day travelling because the transport links are so poor, MEPs and officials arrive at lonely buildings on the outskirts of town, and to offices that are as inviting (and roughly the same size) as the average broom cupboard. Late night committee meetings and debates mean that you are condemned to a solid week’s sleep deprivation and caffeine induced frenzy.

When I think of the current ‘three-seat solution’, I’m reminded of ‘Yes, Minister’ and Sir Humphrey Appleby’s withering remark that basing the EU executive inBrusselsand the Parliament in Strasbourg is “like having the House of Commons in Swindon and the Civil Service in Kettering.”

But although the de facto seat of Parliament is inBrussels, the buildings inStrasbourg can still be used well. The Council of Europe sits next door and the Louise Weiss and Churchill building could easily support European Council summits or aEuropeanUniversity.

Over the past 30 years the European Parliament has been transformed from a talking-shop to one of the most powerful legislatures in the world. It deserves to be taken seriously. The current three-seat arrangement is a public relations disaster, a terrible waste of public money, highly inefficient and environmentally damaging. Let’s hope that one dayEurope’s leaders see sense and admit that it’s time to end this expensive charade.

Talk about the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ has been a popular debate amongst federalists for decades but, as the European Commission and Parliament have become more powerful, it has become a particularly acute problem. The Economist’s Charlemagne column devotes 1000 words to it.

The European Parliament undoubtedly has a legitimacy problem. Even though the Parliament has been transformed from talking shop to the most powerful legislature in Europe since direct elections were introduced in 1979, few people know who their MEP is and even fewer know about the pan-European political parties. In turn, the way that the Parliament works on legislation is baffling to all bar political anoraks.

The Parliament’s election system hardly helps matters. Most member states elect MEPs through the utterly impersonal closed party list system, where MEPs do not represent a local constituency and people vote for a party rather than a candidate. With closed lists the power of election lies almost exclusively in the hands of party bosses – the voters have very little scope to hire and fire their representatives.

Liberal Andrew Duff has led the charge to improve the efficiency and accountable of Parliament and is, quite rightly, one of the most respected MEPs in the House. But he has ruffled a few feathers with his latest report on the system for electing MEPs.

Mr Duff’s main proposal is to set up a new 25 MEP euro-constituency – a transnational list composed of candidates from at least nine member states and nominated by the European political parties. The idea is simple and has been discussed for years. He has also complained about the unhelpful role of national parties during European election campaigns.

Of course, Duff is right that European elections are not particularly ‘Europe’ oriented. The political parties do common manifestoes, but anybody who thinks national parties campaign on it is sadly misguided or touchingly naive. Moreover, since the College of Commissioners are appointed by the member states, the parties cannot seek a mandate to govern.

The question is whether the ‘democratic deficit’ exists because there isn’t a European polity, or because we don’t have transnational lists and strong pan-European parties. I suspect that it’s a bit of both.

There are obvious flaws to the Duff proposal. For example, it would create two classes of MEP, and a transnational list would probably favour candidates from the larger member states. But, on balance, there’s no harm in innovation. It’s certainly an idea worth experimenting with.

But it’s not the only avenue of reform. I would like to see MEPs elected through open-list systems – where people pick their favoured candidates from the list – which are much more effective and democratic. The evidence from the likes of Finland, Malta and Northern Ireland indicates that allowing voters to actually vote for a candidate leads to livelier campaigning, genuine accountability and higher turnout and voter engagement.

I would also like to see members of the European Commission being selected from the elected Parliament. Electorates have to be given the chance to ‘kick the bastards out’ and they need to have the opportunity to vote for individual candidates not party lists.

However, while there is a clear need to reform the way our MEPs are elected, let’s not overegg the pudding. Yes, turnout for European elections has fallen from 63% in 1979 to 43% in 2009, which hardly paints a picture of a healthy democracy, but this figure needs to be taken in context. Turnout for national elections has also been in decline, and the 43% figure is about the same as turnout for local elections and, indeed, for elections to the US Congress, the most powerful legislature in the world.

Unfortunately, I am sceptical about the chances of Mr Duff’s report surviving the plenary vote. There is nothing more frightening to a politician than the thought of losing their seat, and so I suspect that even Duff’s relatively modest ideas will look far too much like radical reform or turkey’s voting for Christmas.

But reform is needed. With a Parliament representing 27 nations and 500m people the lines of accountability are likely to be weaker than for national or municipal elections, but increasingly powerful EU institutions demand the most democratic control possible. Without it the Parliament will remain important, opaque and unloved.

The Danish Presidency launched a 12-person culture ‘taskforce’ in Copenhagen this week. Among an impressive bunch of luminaries are former European Commissioner Margot Wallstrom, and Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum.

The culture big-wigs have been given a pretty stiff challenge. Danish Culture Minister Uffe Elbaek says that he wants the Culture Team to seek examples of art stimulating “new ideas in terms of identity, community and economic growth”, and to draft a manifesto on the role of the cultural sector in the economic crisis that will be presented in June at the end of the Danish EU Presidency.

In an op-ed in the Guardian by Elbaek and Culture Commissioner Androulla Vasilliou said “Art is not only a pleasurable icing on the cake; it is also a way of thinking and a practice of working innovatively with reality that can inspire us all to do better.”

Amen to that.

It’s surely right that access to culture is more important than ever in times of economic struggle. Keeping museums, galleries and theatres open with good exhibitions and performances is an invaluable public investment.

But one of the ironies is that cultural spending is invariably one of the first sectors to be cut when governments tighten their belts. It also tends to fare less well with the public purse than sport, its sexier rival. For example, the UK government is expected to spend £24bn on hosting the Olympic games this summer. No doubt it will be a fantastic fortnight of sport and will, hopefully, have a lasting and positive legacy for some of the poorest parts of East London, but the London 2012 budget is still roughly 50 times the size of the entire annual budget for the UK’s Arts Council.

Slashing culture spending is also a real case of cutting your nose to spite your economic face. The experience in the UK, and doubtless across Europe, is that for every pound or euro in public subsidy, arts organisations generate three from the private sector. Indeed, the reality is that culture generates economic wealth in all sorts of ways, with intellectual property and tourism the most significant.

However, the European Commission wants the EU budget to buck the trend of budget cuts. Its Creative Europe project, which brings together the existing EU culture programs under a single budget heading, would allocate €1.8bn over seven years to cultural spending. This would be, in relative terms, a sizeable funding increase of just under 40% and works out at about €250m per year out of a total EU budget of around €130bn-€140bn. Not a huge amount of money in the grand scheme of things, but certainly a sum which, combined with national programs, should fund plenty of valuable projects.

It is too often the case that politicians’ lack of interest in the arts leads to a failure to articulate how art and culture contribute to a vibrant and innovative society. One of the results of this is that when budget cuts arrive, politicians think they can use the remaining funds to pick cultural ‘winners’. But really we should treat artists like any other innovator. For every big financial success, there will be failures – that is the way innovation works. Ideally, governments should treat artists like any other entrepreneur. They need to be given the  opportunity to succeed, but also to fail.

It will be interesting to see how the Creative Europe project works out. Hopefully, it will see more money going to artists and enhancing Europe’s rich cultural tapestry. After all, there is nothing wrong with art for art’s sake.

Last summer I wrote a piece about the phone hacking scandal which has engulfed Rupert Murdoch’s once all-powerful News International. More than six months later, the crisis still continues. The independent judicial inquiry into the state of the UK media, which has seen a string of newspaper editors give evidence, is still going on. It is quite possible that Justice Leveson’s inquiry will find that other papers – the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror are the ones most talked about – as well as Murdoch’s News of the World, were guilty of hacking people’s phones to get salacious stories.

While the scandal has sullied the reputation of all Fleet Street’s tabloids, it continues to do immense damage to Mr Murdoch’s media stable. Having been forced to close down the News of the World after it was revealed that the paper’s reporters had hacked the voicemail messages of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, Murdoch is now coming under pressure to do the same to The Sun, Britain’s best-selling daily.

In the last couple of weeks, a string of senior Sun journalists have been arrested on suspicion of attempting to bribe police officers, the information allegedly passed on to the police by News Corporation’s own management and standards committee. For the first time since a bitter industrial dispute in 1986 when Murdoch scrapped the Sun’s print unions and moved the paper’s headquarters from Fleet Street to Wapping in East London, disunity and rebellion was in the air.

With characteristic bravado, Murdoch responded by promising that the Sun’s future was secure and that he would soon launch a Sun on Sunday to replace the News of the World. A brave boast, but one that stands no chance of happening if there turns out to be concrete evidence of illegal payments to the police.

Amidst this soap opera lies an important issue, namely, the future of print journalism. Most papers in the UK, and across the rest of Europe, are losing readers and money. The Sun’s profits help subsidise the huge losses of the Times. Russian tycoon Andrei Lebvedev runs his revamped London Evening Standard and the Independent on a skeleton staff. The Guardian Media Group continues to lose money despite a very successful website as does the Trinity Mirror Group, which owns the Daily Mirror. The future of the dead-tree press is not helped by a scandal involving its own.

There have been some crocodile tears at the Sun’s travails from its rivals and victims. Understandably so, since the Sun’s ruthlessness, hypocrisy and mean-spirited editorial stance has always generated a handful of enemies for every new reader. But while I’m not a fan of the Sun, I hope it survives. Rude, lewd, bigoted, funny, and so jingoistic that I often suspect that one of the requirements to be on the editorial team is the ability to still be able to belt out God Save the Queen with a sofa stuffed down your throat, it is an important part of Britain’s media and cultural landscape. Seeing its printing press close would leave a yawning vacuum.

Most of the hoary diplomatic clichés have been trotted out since David Cameron’s bizarre performance at December’s EU summit. But while the Tory leader’s cack-handedness has attracted anger and delight – most of it synthetic – his determination to isolate Britain as the odd one out of 27 raises a pertinent democratic problem: should British MEPs and Ministers be involved in decision making affecting only the 26?

This question has been subject of a long running debate in Britain. Back in 1977 Labour back-bench MP Tam Dalyell raised the unfairness of Scottish MPs being able to vote on matters that only affected English and Welsh people during the debates on the then unsuccessful attempt to create a Scottish Parliament. Dalyell’s query, which quickly became known as the ‘West Lothian’ question, re-emerged when the devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were established by Tony Blair’s government. The West Lothian question became particularly prominent in the 2005-2010 government of Blair and then Gordon Brown, when Labour was reliant on its dominance in Scotland and Wales for its majority in Westminster. As an issue, it still provokes anger, particularly on the Conservative benches.

In reality, an EU version of ‘West Lothian’ has been a dirty, unspoken secret ever since the Maastricht treaty. When it became clear that the UK, Denmark and Sweden would not join the single currency – although the ‘euro group’ was set up to govern the euro area countries – this did not stop MEPs and ministers from those countries being able to vote on issues that would not affect them.  In recent years, other issues such as the rules governing the Schengen agreement (which the UK and Ireland did not sign up to) and justice and home affairs policies (where the UK has string of potential opt-outs) have also come into the equation.

However, the main issue, particularly in the context of the current debt crisis that threatens a number of EU countries and, potentially, financial institutions, is the Eurozone. Both Parliament and the Council spent most of 2012 working on the economic governance ‘six pack’, establishing a series of stiff fines for countries that fall foul of the excessive deficit procedure. Love it or loath it, the economic governance package is arguably the most significant overhaul of the Eurozone since it was established.

Of course, only 17 of the 27 Member States have joined the single currency, but all bar the UK and Sweden are bound by their treaty obligations to join at some stage. Most of the countries which joined the Union in 2004 are making progress towards meeting the convergence criteria with a view to joining the single currency.

Indeed, given that the UK will not join the euro within the next decade, unless there is a dramatic change of public opinion, it is questionable whether they should even be allowed to vote. While both Labour and the Liberal Democrats are, at European level at least, far more integrationist (and, indeed, have committed their parties to supporting euro membership) the Conservative party remains strongly opposed.

The Parliament’s Rules of Procedure, which offers surprisingly therapeutic bed-time reading for euro-obsessives with a masochistic streak, actually has a clause to catch this problem – Rule 2 states that “Members of the European Parliament shall exercise their mandate independently. They shall not be bound by any instructions and shall not receive a binding mandate.”

But although this and other sections of the rule book imply that MEPs represent European citizens rather than just their own country, is this good enough? As an over-represented Brit, I don’t think it is. It is profoundly undemocratic for MEPs to have the right to vote on and influence legislation that they will never apply in their Member States, particularly as we know how MEPs bat for their national interests. For example, some MEPs tabled amendments to increase sanctions against debt laden Member States, when the country they represent would not be liable for the same sanctions if they were in the same situation. Fair? Surely not.

It will be interesting to see the developments of the fiscal union treaty for the EU-26. Some MEPs already want to have sub-committees on policy areas where some Member States have opt-outs. What happens if they push to harmonise corporation tax and introduce a financial transactions tax? Will British MEPs be allowed to vote even if their ministers are locked out of the negotiations? Now that the fiscal union treaty defines a clear line between the EU-26 and Britain, it’s time that the EU’s barrack-room lawyers gather together to resolve our unspoken ‘West Lothian’.

Important elections took place this month – a new President of the European Parliament was elected, as were the heads of its legislative committees. However, while they generated plenty of gossip and back-room political fixing in Planet Eurocrat, few outside the Brussels bubble will have known or cared.

The European Parliament is not a sexy institution. With a couple of honourable exceptions, the Parliament is largely devoid of glamour politicians, preferring instead to concentrate on using its law-making powers and trying to increase its control over the Commission. This is fair enough – despite what some of its protagonists might think, politics is about law-making not showbiz – and, having worked in several other Parliaments, I reckon that the EP is often unfairly criticised, particularly in the British press. Although it can have the perception of being remote, the Parliament has made itself very accessible. Anyone can watch a plenary session or committee either online or in person, while Parliamentary reports, amendments, questions and speeches are also easily available.

But when it comes to the elections for its key positions the Parliament does not help itself. Politicians that laud themselves as being the elected representatives of the peoples of Europe divvy up the top jobs like a bunch of used car dealers or, much, much worse, student politicians. There are no open elections for the Parliament’s presidency – instead the EPP and the Socialist group take it in turns to put up the winning candidate.

Meanwhile, the rest of the positions are divided up in a grand deal at the start of the legislative term by the main political groups. After the EPP and the Socialist group have decided who’s going to be President, the committee posts are then divided up amongst the largest national delegations. It’s good news if you are German, French or British, but MEPs from the smaller member states are completely shut out of the picture.

The other problem with the system is that it creates far too many titles. By my count – albeit off the top of my head – there are over 100 Vice-Presidents in the EP, including fourteen Vice-Presidents of the Parliament. And that’s not to mention the five Quaestor’s, with their titles straight out of the Harry Potter novels.

Of course, most political deals are still done in smoke-filled rooms by ‘the men in grey suits’, and I don’t expect that many people are going to lose sleep over who the next Chairs of the Budgetary Control or Petitions committees are going to be. But the election of the Parliament’s President and the big committees – such as Foreign Affairs, Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Internal Market – should be open and transparent.

That is why the Parliament’s ‘elections’ need to be proper contests. No more stitch-ups, no more election by acclamation. The truth is that even without the deal with the EPP, Socialist Martin Schultz would have easily beaten British Liberal Diana Wallis and Conservative Nirj Deva as Parliament’s President. But MEPs and citizens deserve an open contest. So hopefully messrs Daul, Swoboda and Verhofstadt can get together in a smoke-filled room and make a deal to end the deals.

The Christmas season has been unusually mild for us north Europeans. However, our political leaders have seemed determined to bring a bit of chill. In fact, so gloomy have their new year’s message that I suspect Merkel, Sarkozy et al have organised a sweepstake to see which of them can come up with the gloomiest new year’s message. Merkel and Sarkozy started by warning that 2012 would be another very tough year, with the heavy rhetoric about saving and stabilising the euro and the European Union – not to mention the world economy. Europe’s getting poorer, more spending cuts are needed, economic Armageddon still needs to be averted.

Forgive me for having heard it all before. The eurozone has apparently been in the ‘last chance saloon’ for so long that I’m surprised there have been no sightings of one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Of course, Europe is in the midst of a difficult economic depression. Many of our banks are still teetering on the brink of bankruptcy despite hundreds of billions of euros in taxpayer bail-outs in 2007-8 (although scandalously they still think it’s acceptable to award themselves massive bonuses); unemployment, particularly amongst young people, is dangerously high; a number of country’s have high debt and budget deficits; and a few years of economic stagnation beckon.

But while it would be daft to underestimate the perils facing Europe are things really that bad?

The simple answer is: no. Average incomes in Europe have more than doubled over the last 40 years and increasing life expectancy means that we will live longer to enjoy it. Yes, it’s true that we won’t be able to retire in our 50s or early 60s like many of our parents did, and the job market is far less secure than 30 years ago, but compared with most (arguably all) European generations, we have a pretty good lot.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and enlargement of the EU to Eastern Europe, not to mention long overdue peace in the Balkans, with Croatia set to become the next nation to join the EU, demonstrates that Europe is more peaceful and prosperous than ever before. If, as seems likely, we are set for a few years – perhaps even a decade – of slow growth and budget cutbacks, then we will need to learn how to achieve greater prosperity without growth. This shouldn’t be too difficult. The economic pie may not get much larger, but we can easily divide its rewards more fairly.

As for the next year, I would expect the EU summit count to keep rising as leaders edge towards a new governance structure that stabilises the euro’s future and resolves the crisis of banks exposed to risky sovereign debt. Meanwhile, the elections for the French Presidency and German Bundestag will be fascinating. Will the post-crisis trend of incumbent governments being beaten continue with the defeat of Sarkozy and Merkel or will the European left continue to struggle?

2012 will be challenging, difficult and painful for many. But most Europeans will enjoy a happy and prosperous 2012. So my message to Europe’s leaders is to go easy on the doom-laden rhetoric. This year should be enjoyed not endured.