Budgets as turn-offs are by no means unique to the EU, national budgets suffer similarly. In the UK, where I come from, the press and commentariat traditionally dealt with this by making the annual national budget almost exclusively a story about the rise in the price of a packet of cigarettes, a pint of beer or a gallon of petrol, sometimes giving the impression that non-smoking teetotal cyclists were somehow unaffected by the national finances. There was also great scope for class-related distinctions. I recall earnest commentators pointing out that differentiations between the tax treatment of wine and spirits, as opposed to ciggies and beer, allowed governments of different stripes to target the middle or working classes, according to taste. Oh, glorious England! Times have changed, even budget procedures have changed, and now the UK budget coverage is all about the degree of savageness of the cuts, and who will suffer most (don’t worry, class consciousness has not died in the meantime – just listen to the coverage of child allowances).

Sadly, the EU does not levy taxes directly on booze and fags

Sadly (for communications purposes) the EU does not levy taxes directly on booze and fags, so we have our work cut out at the best of times. This year the problem is particularly acute. This is because this year’s budget is politically extremely important; it is not only controversial, with Parliament stuck between a rock (austerity and cuts across Europe) and a hard place (all the new things the EU has to do – and pay for – thanks to the Lisbon Treaty), but also significant in being the first “Lisbon” budget, with Parliament now empowered with a say over all expenditure, including agricultural spending.

Upshot, we are expected to do a big job on the budget this year. Rightly so, but I won’t pretend the prospect was met with unalloyed enthusiasm when announced to the editors. So it’s what people like to call a “challenge”.

There are many aspects to this, of course, but one thing we realise is that we have to be better at fancy graphics. One thing we are saying in our review of Parliament’s general web presence is that we need to be able to do more of the kind of thing leading online news organisations do all the time, those cool interactive graphics which can do a huge amount to explain this kind of thing. As an organisation of the word, a parliament, we are not set up to do this well at the moment, and you might even argue that we are not culturally predisposed to favour the image over the text. But we really have to expand our capacity in this area.

EU Budget: steam punk version

But what might we produce? We have already worked on a visual explanation of the annual budget procedure (picture). This helps explain our predicament. This is a radically simplified version of the actual process, and we have had to fend off hundreds (well, dozens) of objections from our colleagues specialising in budgetary affairs that it omits too many significant details and nuances. Yikes! Non-specialists who see it tend to laugh at its steam-punk complexity. Hmmm. Ultimately we’d like this to be clickable, with, say, each step revealing details of votes and figures, links to profiles of the key players, background information, etc. But we say that quietly, as the two guys who do this (and just about every other graphic element you find on our website) are still recovering from producing a version of this in 22 languages. (You try fitting the Greek versions of budgetary terms into those bubbles sometime, they politely suggest.)

We thought they didn’t make a bad job of it. So congrats comrades!

We spotted something from the Commission yesterday, which showed they are also on the case. It’s a explanation of the EU budget in two minutes. Frankly, notwithstanding the smart-aleck remarks of some team members, as to how, for example, she manages to take a hot pie out of the oven with her bare hands and as to the possible significance of her eating the administrative expenditure slice rather than any other, and after overcoming your curiosity as to what she keeps randomly smiling about as she peruses the EU budget, we thought they didn’t make a bad job of it. So congrats comrades!

Except for one thing – and this is me in my ex-linguist, pedantic, language-of-Shakepeare mode that my dear colleagues roll their eyes over – namely, how on earth did the offensively euro-speak phrase, utterly wrong in real English, “the whole European budget is controlled by the Court of Auditors” not get corrected in the editing process? The voice-over guy, a native speaker surely, is presumably labouring under the misapprehension that the auditors decide how the whole budget is spent.

Sorry, that’s my parochial gripe for the day, but otherwise we did think it was a jolly decent shot at the notoriously off-putting budget theme. Yes, we are slightly envious. So here it is (both uploaded and embedded, as I had some difficulty with both – if both fail, click here):

Commission Budget video