We'll need a snappy term soon for the Euroweenies as Daniel Hannan reveals in the Telegraph - Back in the USSR for the EU's latest members:
What would it take to convince you that the EU is anti-democratic? It has brushed aside "no" votes in Denmark and Ireland. It has refused to accept the result of an Austrian general election. Now it is proposing legislation which could bar Eurosceptic parties from the European Parliament.Maybe it's time to stop being so polite?
For several weeks, I and my fellow members of the constitutional affairs committee have been chewing over a draft "Statute of European Political Parties". The establishment of state-funded pan-European parties is something that federalists desperately want. After all, they say, we are about to adopt a new constitution, turning the EU into a unitary state. It would hardly be appropriate to carry on with hundreds of little parties, each fighting a self-contained "regional" campaign.
To qualify for recognition, a party would need to secure representation in at least one quarter of the member states. It would have to fight elections on a common and binding manifesto across Europe (bye-bye UKIP). It would need to accept the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights (bye-bye Tories). And - most sinister of all - it would have to satisfy the other parties. If a majority of MEPs were to decide that a party was not abiding by their definition of human rights and democratic values, it would be debarred.
"This is exactly what our communists did," said a Polish MP as he read the text. "They did not ban elections: we had elections all the time. They did not even ban opposition movements, at least not by the late Seventies. All they did was to ban the dissidents from contesting the elections."
The federalists rushed to reassure him. The measure was not aimed at mainstream parties, they said, only at nasty ones, such as Le Pen's National Front in France. The Pole was too polite to press the point. But afterwards he told me that this was precisely the ruse used across the Warsaw Pact. Parties were initially proscribed on grounds of being fascist, he said, and, before long, this definition came to apply to everyone except the communists and their Peasant Party allies.
