Europe: brave new democracy.

I like Europe, as a geographical entity and as an ideal. I'd love to be part of a democratic USE. More than that, I'd love to be a citizen of the USSE. I think that economic cooperation, environmental solidarity and the free exchange of ideas, citizens and fairly-traded goods are brilliant.

I don't think that distorting subsidies, imperialist expansion, hostility to Muslims and the world's poor, corruption, decades of qualified accounts, Buggins' Turn and secret deals are the way to achieve the Europe of which I dream.

Take the European Parliament. I am a political junkie. I can reel off candidates, failed candidates, interesting by-elections results and a host of other things without a moment's thought. I can't name my MEPs though (except for Michael Cashman - what an ironic name. He should be in the House of Commons).

I do know that the European Parliament has two parliaments (Brussels and Strasbourg, leading to convoys of lorries full of documents shuttling between the two, and MEPs guzzling carbon like it's crack) and no power to pass laws. What an utter waste of time and money: the only people we actually directly elect - and fund magnificently - have no authority at all. Lovely.

The other thing I know about the European Parliament is that its environmental committe delegation to the Copenhagen Climate talks includes one Nicholas Griffin. Yes, the British National Party (Nazi) leader, who has this to say about climate change (his qualification is a 2.2 law degree):

In a speech in the parliament last week, Griffin denounced those who warn of the consequences of climate change as "cranks". He said they had reached "an Orwellian consensus" that was "based not on scientific agreement, but on bullying, censorship and fraudulent statistics".

"The anti-western intellectual cranks of the left suffered a collective breakdown when communism collapsed. Climate change is their new theology… But the heretics will have a voice in Copenhagen and the truth will out. Climate change is being used to impose an anti-human utopia as deadly as anything conceived by Stalin or Mao."

I'd have thought he'd welcome climate change: an awful lot of poor black people are going to die horribly - which is the basis of his political creed. 

Fascists out -and in

Yesterday, some mischievous blogger posted the entire membership list of the BNP: names, addresses, phone numbers and occupations in many cases (oddly, workshy bigot wasn't one of the categories, but I assumed that those names without an occupation listed were in this category). 

I was going to link to this brave individual's site - it's the kind of thing that bloggers can do rather better than skittish, lawyered-up newspapers. We could all have paid a courtesy call to the fascist nearest our own homes, and had a 'quiet word'. 

By this morning, however, the blog had been closed down - presumably by blogger.com. So much for free speech. They don't seem to mind hosting all sorts of Nazi material because the US has a freedom of speech presumption, so why not in this case?

Thankfully, those nice people at Wikileaks have come up with the goods again, and they're very much out of reach of plod and Britain's courts.

A quick trawl reveals a shameful number in Wolverhampton (including a vicar), a disgusting 100+ in Stoke, and 40 in Shrewsbury.