EU is imposing apartheid-level discrimination on Non-Attached MEPs
OCTOBER 2010:I'm in my office in Brussels this morning and have just written the following letter to to the President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek (right).
Dear Mr Buzek
During your campaign for the Presidency a year ago, I listened as a newly elected MEP to your promise to respect the rights and listen "even to the skeptics - because the skeptics remind us that we can do better". On the basis of that sentiment and pledge, I voted for you and was pleased when you won.
Despite our political differences, I regard your transition from a campaigner with an 'illegal' trade union under a Communist dictatorship to President of the European Parliament as one of the great political motifs of our time.
So I am writing to you now to ask you to keep your promise to stand for the rights of the skeptics - in particular those who are Non-Attached. In the year since my election I have watched with growing anger and disgust over the hypocrisy of those who lecture various non-European states over their lack of commitment to democracy, while imposing apartheid-level discrimination against the skeptical majority among the Non-Attached minority.
First, we were denied our clearly defined constitutional right to choose our own representative on the Council of Presidents, thereby being shut out from much of the information that all other groupings and their MEPs take for granted.
Then we were foisted with a representative, who you have appointed to the Council to sit in a personal capacity, who is neither there to represent us nor to pass us back a shred of information. You have done me a particular injustice here, because Mrs. Dodds refused even to sit next to me in plenary. Could you please explain how can I be 'represented' in any way by an unelected bigot who treats me like a black man on a bus in Alabama in 1960?
Now we are told that the Non-Attached Members - and we alone - are no longer permitted to use our Budget 4000/400 Communications Allowance to maintain websites.
The Internet is the most effective way for politicians of all persuasions to communicate directly with the public, so it is outrageous that a grouping which is clearly regarded as 'dissident' should be discriminated against. If this is not the intention of the new regulation, it is certainly the effect, so I therefore respectfully ask you to intervene to restore the status quo ante in order to prevent discrimination against the Non-Attached.
Further, there is the monstrous proposal - almost certainly illegal under the Human Rights legislation of which you are so proud - to force all MEPs to supply lists of the names and addresses of every person in our constituencies to whom we send our communications. Perhaps, coming now as you do from an acceptable 'pro-System' party, you are genuinely unable to grasp just how outrageous this is, so please permit me to use an analogy from your own past.
Please imagine for a moment that both the 'acceptable' Communist trade union in 1988 Poland, and Solidarity, had been offered state funding to send out letters about their work to people who registered as interested, but only on condition that each union provided the authorities with the names and addresses of everyone to whom they were writing.
Would that have been democratic? Would that have been fair on Solidarity? Would it have been compatible with the inalienable human right to privacy and freedom of conscience and association? Would members of the public have been more or less likely to exercise their human right to involvement with a union and political movement of their free choice if that union had been compelled to notify the State of their interest in a politically incorrect cause?
Mr. Buzek, for a man who has experienced at first hand the injustice of political discrimination and repression to sanction measures which create the same evils barely twenty years later is shocking hypocrisy.
The Communists were at least open and honest about denying dissident opponents their rights; not even they were cynical enough to get elected on a pledge of rights for all, and to lecture others on the need to respect rights for all, while denying rights to those under their control. If you fail to act to restore and uphold the rights of this Parliament's dissidents, that will be what you are doing.
Finally, this is not fundamentally about the rights of the current crop of dissidents/demons sent to Parliament by electors who do not share the prevailing orthodoxy. If the European Union does not go the way of all previous attempts to create a pan-European government, this is about establishing a precedent for future generations of parliamentarians.
Who can tell that certain views now deemed wholly acceptable and mainstream may not one day in the future come to be regarded as offensive and beyond the Pale of proper political discourse? History is made up of such changes and, when the next one comes along, it could be MEPs with your views who are the ones that the majority think deserve to be second class citizens.
Fair rules and proper precedents that you could set now will serve as a shield and guard not just for the nationalist opposition for the rest of this term, but for every MEP sent here to represent minority views for as long as this Parliament exists. Or you could allow the present discrimination to persist, and so doom future dissidents to the same injustices.
I know which legacy I would rather leave at the end of my term if I were President. But I am not. You are, Mr. Buzek, so the choice to do the right thing is yours, and yours alone. I look forward to hearing of your decision to stand and act against discrimination, and for justice.
Yours sincerely
Nick Griffin MEP
