All Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary -- that's him on the left -- and his ministers will have to do is chair meetings for things such as fisheries, foreign affairs, and agriculture. The flashy jobs will be left to 'President of the European Council' Herman Van Rompuy. Flashy job number one for Van Rompuy: trying to make sure he elbows the other 'president,' José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, and the 'High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy,' Catherine Ashton, further down the receiving line when anyone genuinely important has to be greeted in Brussels. The only job left for 'President' Orban will be to hold the coats. Still, the Hungarian presidency may turn out to be a lot more interesting that this past six months of Belgians in the chair. Already members of the German left have called for Hungary to be stripped of 'the honour' (the what? I'll let that pass for the moment, and not just because Hungary holds the rotating presidency by treaty law, not by reason of particular virtue). Their grouse is not that the Fitch agency has just downgraded Hungary's credit rating to just above junk status, so that having Hungary in office will be embarrassing (which I find delightful: getting on towards junk status puts Hungary right into mainstream euroland, without even being a member of the single currency). No, the left, along with some of the sniffier eurocrats, are grousing because Orban's new centre-right government has passed a law that will expand the state's power to monitor and penalize privately-owned news media. There will be fines for websites which breach new rules on 'balance' and 'human dignity.' Sounds bad. But then you have to hesitate when you see who the critics of the new Hungarian law are. In the first place, I doubt whether the likes of confessed kiddie-fiddler (now retired, apparently) and left-wing Member of the European Parliament, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, would be in such a lather over Hungary taking the rotating presidency if a similar law had been passed by a left-wing government. Orban, you see, has a thumping two-thirds majority for his conservative Fidesz party. So the left want to throw as much muck as possible at the Hungarian ministers before they arrive to take up the rotating presidency in Brussels. As for the law itself, you are hardly going to expect me to support any legislation that lets a government fine or close down news media. But again, look who worries about whom. Remember, this multi-millionaire Democrat big-gun is chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. When he makes a public statement saying the government ought to shut down Fox News, that is an attempt at bullying (it is also a demonstration of the failure of Rockefeller's expensive private education: the FCC only regulates broadcast airwaves, while Fox is cable. Duh.) But I haven't heard anybody in the European Parliament demanding that Rockefeller be 'stripped of the honour' of, say, visiting the countries of the EU. Of course not. He is a Democrat, and the journalists he most wants to suppress work for rightwing Fox. So that's okay, then. Also, check out what these let's-protect-the-Press eurocrats actually believe. First they believe in trying to influence journalists by way of big chunks of the commission's annual €2.4bn annual propaganda budget (that is the figure for 2008, calculated by Open Europe, and at todays exchange rate equal to just over £2bn). Plenty of perks, free trips, prizes and 'training' courses in nice places are available for compliant journos. In some cases the European insitutions simply hand cash to reporters for unvouched 'expenses.' (And before you ask, no, this blog doesn't take EU dosh.) More to the point, look at the detail of the so-called Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union in the Lisbon Treaty. Article 11 is supposed to guarantee 'freedom of expression and information,' including 'the freedom and the pluralism of the media shall be respected. ' (Wouldn't the judges at the European Court have fun defining 'pluralism?' Is Britain soon going to be forced to subsidise a national Islamic newspaper to ensure 'pluralism' in journalism?) Okay, then keep going, past all the other 'freedoms,' until you get to the final article of the charter, Article 54: 'Nothing in this Charter shall be interpreted as implying any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms recognised in ths Charter or at their limitaton to a greater extent than is provided for herein.' In other words, far from protecting the right of each man to express his political opinions as he will, this charter limits the protection of the right to free speech and the right to the freedom of the press to the right to support the 'permissible' opinions defined by the charter. Example: Article 7 says: 'Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.' Yet just recently there has been outrage in Britain after Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, a failed asylum seeker who ran over a 12-year old girl and left her to 'die like a dog,' was saved from deportation because of the Human Rights Act. The Act, according to immigration judges, meant that Ibrahim, an Iraqi Kurd, could not be sent home because he had fathered two children in the United Kingdom. Expulsion would allegedly breach his right to 'a private and family life.' Now, plenty of people are demanding that Cameron repeal the Act, as he promised before the election. Obviously he won't, because he is Cameron the Wriggler. More to the point, even if Cameron did get parliament to repeal the Human Rights Act, criminals such as Ibrahim could still dodge expulsion by means of the Lisbon Treaty's charter. Which before the election -- oh, hey, I remember now -- Cameron also pledged to give the British people the right to reject by means of a referendum. But to the point about the freedoms allegedly secured in the charter (a charter which, I will repeat, has been secured by Cameron): since this so-called 'right to repsect for private and family life' is guaranteed in Article 7, that means that, according to Article 54, none of us has the right to campaign for the destruction of that article. In other words, while Ibrahim can kill and the charter will protect his freedom to stay in Britain, any British citizen campaigning against the ludicrous justice-dodging wheezes in the charter can be stripped of his right to free speech, and any journalist doing the same thing can lose the protection of the freedom of the press. So my advice to the British is: Hold on, my friends, to the great charters on which your own constitution -- and the American constitution -- stand. Hold on: Magna Carta of 1215, the Petition of Right of 1628, the Bill of Rights of 1689. And fight to destroy the Lisbon Treaty and its oppressive and undemocratic Charter of Rights which wants to sweep the ancient rights of the English-speaking peoples all away -- even though the EU law says you now have no right to engage in such a fight.
28 December 2010 1:42 PM
Orban to Brussels: who you calling totalitarian?
Sunday, 2 January 2011
January 1st means Belgium hands over the six-month rotating European Union presidency to Hungary --- or, what's left of the rotating presidency. Since the Lisbon Treaty created the post of permanent president, there is not much purpose or prestige left in the office.
Just last month, US Senator Jay Rockefeller (yes, great-grandson of the oil gazillionaire, that's him on the right) and powerful member of the Democratic party, said he wanted to see the US Federal Communications Commission shut down the conservative Fox News -- and leftish MSNBC as
well, for that matter: 'It would be a big favour to political discourse [and] to our ability to do our work here in Congress.' Well, of course. Muscular criticism from journalists is always a problem. Life would be so much easier without it, wouldn't it, Senator?
My advice to the British when faced with this EU creeping control over freedoms? I recall a line from Daniel Webster, the 19th century American Whig: 'Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again.'
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