The European Union's executive Commission will carry out a thorough review of the bloc's budget in 2008/9, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said on Monday. "What we need to be doing is to have an overall revision of our entire budget, looking at it without restrictions or taboos," Barroso told a news briefing, saying EU heads of government had given the Commission "a strong remit" for such a review at their summit in Brussels last week. He was quoted as saying by Reuters that the EU must get away from making only incremental changes to its existing budget and go back to first principles, deciding what spending the bloc needed.
