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Wednesday 9 July 2008

Come off it, Denis!

I like Denis MacShane a lot. Politics would be better if there were more MPs like him. However, he's guilty of the most almighty whopper in his New Statesman piece today:

Mainstream Tory MEPs, such as Caroline Jackson, are in despair. In the Financial Times last month, she criticised the "bad manners" of her colleagues towards sister right-wing parties in Europe - in particular Daniel Hannan, a Conservative MEP and Hague supporter who had compared the mild-mannered German Christian Democrat president of the European Parliament to Hitler.

For a few weeks, I have been blogging about the protest by a handful of MEPs against the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty in anticipation of formal ratification and despite the cancellation of the promised referendums. “Filibuster” would be too grand a name for our little wheeze: “working to rule” would be more like it. After every vote, a group of us would demand the right to explain, in not more than a minute, why we voted as we did. I would end every speech, in playful echo of Cato’s “delenda est Carthago”, with “Pactio Olisipio Censenda Est” — “the Lisbon Treaty must be put to the vote”.

At worst, our protest would occasionally keep MEPs from their lunch for another 20 minutes. But even this was intolerable to the authorities. In plain violation of their own rules of procedure, they demanded — and, this morning, were disgracefully granted — the right arbitrarily to set aside the rules as they sought fit.

I made a point of order to protest. An electoral majority, I said, could not over-rule a constitution. Majority or no, the Parliament still had to follow its own rule book. To do otherwise would be to replace the rule of law with arbitrary government.

I repeated the point I made in this blog last week: that the 1933 Enabling Act had had a technical majority in the Reichstag, but that it opened the door to unconstitutional rule. Whatever else MEPs are, they are not Nazis: many of them have proud records of fighting totalitarianism throughout the world. That is why it was so disappointing to see them resorting to this appalling measure in order to silence dissent.

As I sat down, the EPP leader, Joseph Daul, sprang to his feet and announced that he wanted me thrown out of the group. He had lost patience with my filibustering, he said. Enough was enough.

That's his account. So was he being acurate? These are his exact words:

To disregard the rules under which we operate is indeed an act of arbitrary and despotic rule. It is only my regard for you Mr Chairman and my personal affection for you that prevents me from likening it to the Emachtigungsgesetz of 1933 which was also voted through by a parliamentary majority.

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