update on EU groups

present text

2. A political group shall comprise Members elected in at least one-fifth of the Member States. The minimum number of Members required to form a political group shall be twenty

Amendment by Richard Corbett

2. A political group shall comprise Members elected in at least one-quarter of the Member States. The minimum number of Members required to form a political group shall be thirty.

This amendment was voted down twice. The first time, Corbett stated in the Committee that the only group this would affect would be the Ind Dem group. That woke up the Greens and other smaller groups into realising that the plan here was to keep large groups who can be easily controlled in the same way that big businesses are easier to control than lots of small businesses.

What happened after this was voted down was that against the Parliament's own rules, the amendment was voted on again but without the specific details and MEPs were collected from around the parliament building to bulldoze it through. And through it went. So this amendment is part of the report which will be voted by all MEPs but it was allowed to happen without the details of what MEPs were voting on being actually written down. Andrew Duff, a Liberal Democrat and pro-EU politician who talks about 'post national governments' said that the committee had no right to do that. But who cares about the rules, eh? They're only there to stop people railroading the project of unification.

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

Just pop that in there for posterity, really...

But then the truth has never really been an issue to most of these people. A friend of mine wrote to the Daily Mail asking how the EU could pretend to be pro democracy when it was ignoring the wishes of the people three ft away from it. This was following the protests in the European Parliament calling for EU wide referendums. Corbett took this to mean that the person writing it, who was a member of staff, was illegally in the Chamber. He tried to get him fired for that without bothering to check the details. Four months after the protest had taken place his boss received a letter asking about this. It took all of 30 seconds to establish that the guy in question had been in the gallery observing and the complaint was just inaccurate vindictiveness.

But let's not let the truth and even more importantly, democracy, get in the way of the mission. Let's take a look at another amendment from the Constitutional Affairs committee:

'Calls on the Commission to take account of possible requests by the European Parliament to activate the infringement procedure against a State accused of having breached a parliamentary prerogative and requests to be informed by the Commission, in writing and in full detail, about the reasons in the event that the college decides not to take the action as requested.'

Which says, in essence, that if the Treaty of Lisbon isn't passed, they want the parliament to be able to take national parliaments to court for infringing EU law which the Treaty allows. Which does beg the question, how can some people like batshit say that this Treaty strengthens the role of national parliaments?