LABOUR MEPs are outraged at Gordon Brown’s attack on the draft European constitution and his attempts to rein in the European Parliament’s existing budgetary powers.

At a meeting in Brussels tomorrow they will accuse the Chancellor of indulging in a “freelance exercise” and of failing to stick to the Government’s agreed position on the European Union treaty that is to be agreed by the end of the year. “No one is happy with what he has been saying. He is tilting at windmills and it is not helpful,” one senior Labour MEP said.

Mr Brown’s critics are especially annoyed at his determination to elbow the European Parliament out of decisions on the EU’s spending plans. According to the draft constitution, MEPs would have to give formal approval to the budgets that governments will set for the Union from 2007. The Chancellor wants the Parliament merely to be consulted.

Mr Brown is also looking to remove the final say that MEPs already have over vast swaths of EU expenditure and transfer this power to himself and fellow finance ministers.

“This is a sudden attempt at power-grabbing by Gordon Brown. It is not the Government’s position and is not in the White Paper issued in September, which sets out the Government’s approach to the future constitutional treaty,” one Labour source said.

Richard Corbett, the Labour MEPs’ spokesman on EU constitutional affairs, insisted yesterday that it was imperative that the Government keep to the targets that it has already identified in the forthcoming negotiations.

“I and others involved in these issues are sticking to the line the Government set out in its White Paper, which we fully support. People should not be tempted to go off and raise red herrings,” he said.

Gary Titley, leader of the Labour Group of MEPs, said: “One thing we have all learnt in the Labour Party is the need for discipline. We must never forget that.”

Terry Wynn, the Labour MEP who chairs the Parliament’s budget committee, was less diplomatic last week. He said that if last-minute efforts to curb the Parliament’s budgetary powers were accepted, the institution would be “castrated with a blunt pair of scissors”.

Hans Eichel, the German Finance Minister, has been criticised by his own Social Democratic Party’s MEPs for joining Mr Brown in attacking the Parliament’s spending powers.

The battle is the latest source of friction between the Chancellor and Labour MEPs. He angered many this year when he proposed a radical reform of the EU’s regional policy to end Brussels’s financial support for industrial regeneration and training programmes in the 15 existing member-states.

Labour MEPs are also embarrassed at the Chancellor’s tendency to hold forth to his EU colleagues on the need to push through reforms and adopt the Anglo-Saxon economic model. “To us, the biggest problem is the way he constantly lectures other people,” one said. “It is a bit off when he lectures Finland, for instance, which has pushed through economic reform and kept its social standards.”

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