Godfrey Bloom was thrown out of the chamber of the European Parliament today after being gratuitously rude to the Euro-Socialist leader, Martin Schulz. Irked by Shulz’s complaint that the UK was standing in the way of European integration, the UKIP MEP burst out “
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!” There are times when British Eurosceptics cringe at the behaviour of one of their countrymen, and this was one of them.
Bloom was out of order: whatever else he is, Schulz is no Nazi. But the parliamentary authorities then reacted extraordinarily. The acting Speaker, Edward McMillan-Scott, told his fellow Yorkshire MEP that if he didn’t apologise, he’d be escorted from the room. Bloom replied that the only people who had the right to remove him were his constituents.
McMillan-Scott then called for a vote on whether to eject the red-faced former territorial. The motion was overwhelmingly carried, and Bloom was marched out, wearing with a thunderous expression. Several aspects of this episode should alarm us. First, there is the democratic objection. Surely it
is up to the electorate to decide who sits in a legislature. If Bloom can be denied his place by his fellow MEPs, what is to stop the federalist majority voting to expel every Eurosceptic?
Then there is the liberal objection. In a free society, the right to say what you will trumps the right not to be offended. We should allow people to be ignorant, ill-mannered, obnoxious; to condemn themselves by their boorishness.
Above all, though, there is the sheer one-sidedness. I’ve blogged before about the way in which Euro-integrationists routinely dismiss their opponents as Nazis.The leader of the European Liberals, Graham Watson, has said that Eurosceptics put him in mind of “the National Socialists in the German Reichstag”. In the run-up to the French referendum on the European Constitution, Margot Wallström, then Sweden’s Commissioner, travelled to the Theresiendstadt concentration camp to and told “No” voters that this was where their ideology
would lead. Only last week, Herman Van Rompuy, the Euro-President,
said “we have together to fight the danger of a new Euro-scepticism. Fear leads to egoism, egoism leads to nationalism, and nationalism leads to war”.
Indeed, it wasn’t so long ago that one MEP, furious because Eurosceptics were calling for a referendum, said this:
“During the Weimar Republic, some pursued a strategy of trying to shout down their political opponents. That was how Adolf Hitler behaved, and it was how I felt today”.
The author of those words? Martin Schulz. (You can watch him speak them
here).
Now Mr Schulz was being silly as well as rude: calling for a referendum is not the same thing as bringing down the Weimar Republic. But no one suggested that he should be forced to apologise, let alone expelled from the hemicycle. Freedom, after all, includes the freedom to make stupid comparisons. Good manners can’t be enforced by rules; they should be natural. So let me end – since I have
Ireland on the brain – with a piece of advice from Godfrey’s bowler-hatted lookalike and namesake, Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Joyce’s
Ulysses:
—Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the opposite of that that is really life.
—What? Says Alf.
—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
UPDATE:Thanks for drawing my attention to
this clip, in which Schulz can be heard calling a Dutch MEP a fascist because he, er, asked President Barroso to publish his receipts online. I mean, sauce for the goose, and all that...
