Political balances in the new Parliament

As the dust begins to settle, what is the wider impact of the European election result on the European Parliament?

The most commented on aspect is the setback for the Socialists and the strengthening of the centre-right EPP - though the latter effect is negated by the loss of the British Conservatives, who hope to form their own, separate Group.

Yet the EPP cannot easily build a right-wing majority in the Parliament. The parties to its right are fragmented and are mostly people with whom they would not wish to be associated.

The fascist right, despite gaining the two BNP seats in Britain, lost seats in France and Belgium, gained some in Hungary and Romania, but overall cannot form a political group (a key to influence in the European Parliament), which requires at least 25 MEPs from a quarter (7) of the Member States, unless the Northern League of Italy joins them, which I hear is unlikely. Even if then, it is likely that their strongest common feature - hatred of foreigners - will make it difficult for them to work together for very long.

The eurosceptic right did not fare well in the elections. UKIP's "Independence & Democracy" Group failed to win enough seats to constitute a Group, having lost ALL its seats in Poland, Denmark, Ireland and Sweden. Even in Britain, despite the gift of the Westminster expenses scandal, it gained only a single seat. As to Libertas, it failed dismally, with even Declan Ganley's millions failing to win him a seat.

The Conservatives are desparately trying to build their own group - but finding it difficult to do so without taking on board some frankly embarrassing partners. Their flight to the fringes is still viewed as madness by most Conservative MEPs - see for instance Caroline Jackson's comments to the BBC yesterday (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8096297.stm). It is unlikely that the EPP will see them as a partner, given that they have just walked out on their former colleagues, slamming the door.

Finally, the UEN (Union for a Europe of Nations) Group could well disappear. Its mainstays, Fianna Fail is set to join the Liberals and the former Italian AN has been absorbed into the EPP member in Italy. Their main leftover, the Polish PiS, is one of the Tories potential new partners - though their overt homophobia might yet prove too embarrassing for the latter.

All in all, those to the right of the EPP have enough numerically to constitute one or even two political Groups (given that the European Parliament has a lower threshold than most national parliaments for constituting Groups), but actually doing so requires the creation of alliances that are highly problematic - and even if they are successful, they will not be natural allies for the EPP.

Instead, the EPP will have to deal with parties of the centre and the centre-left. Even with the Liberals, they cannot obtain a majority. They will have to bargain with the Socialists and/or the Greens. The left cannot by itself get its way in this parliament, but nor can it be easily circumvented.

Libertas a pan-European political party? What a farce!

The handling of whether Declan Ganley's private company Libertas, already masquerading as a pressure group in Ireland, should be allowed to register as a European political party and gain public funding, has been completely farcical.

On Monday, the European Parliament’s Bureau, made up of the President and the 14 Vice-Presidents, examined their application. To qualify for funding as a European political party, an organisation must have elected representatives in he national parliaments or in the European parliament in at least one quarter of the member states. Libertas claimed to have that, producing signatures from just 7 countries - all elected originally for other parties.

The bureau decided to approve the application. Although it seems perverse to award public money and recognition as a pan-European party to an organisation that has no members and has never put up candidates in an election before, the bureau presumably felt that they Libertas met the formal criteria. The decision at least allowed the Parliament to avoid any charges of bias against eurosceptics.

Since then, the waters have been distinctly muddied. First, an Estonian Liberal MP, Igor Grazin, who was one of the signatories to establish Libertas, and whose party is already affiliated to the European Liberal Party, denied having signed any such papers. Yesterday, he was joined by Bulgarian MP Mintcho Hristov. So far only one of the alleged supporters (Finnish MP Timo Soini) has admitted to having joined Libertas, stressing that he had joined in a "personal capacity" and that his national political party were definitely not affiliates!

There are also questions about the other alleged signatories. One, Lord Alton of Liverpool is a (crossbench) peer in the House of Lords and is therefore not elected, while the three MEPs (Phillippe De Villiers, Jean Marie Couteaux and Georgios Geourgiou) are all currently members of the IND-DEM in the European Parliament and,will, presumably be campaigning under that banner in the European elections this June.

The leaders of the political groups (Conference of Presidents) today took the only sensible decision and requested the Bureau to suspend the decision, pending an investigation of the signatures. If they are indeed false, it would amount to an attempt to defraud the taxpayer.

But the controversy over the signatures is still only part of the problem. In my mind, there is clear conflict if members who are affiliated to one party can simultaneously affiliate to another to get extra funding. It would effectively mean that, if I wanted to, there is nothing to stop me and a six colleagues from other countries, maybe all from the Socialist Group, setting up our own "party", and instantly gaining access to some 200,000 euros of taxpayers’ money for campaigning purposes, even if we intended to stand for our original party and not the new one!

It would be astonishing if the Bureau had approved Libertas’s application without verifying that signatories were genuine and without taking legal advice on whether a member affiliated to one party is able to count as an affiliate for another. If this is the case, then they have let down parties with genuine members and potentially wasted public money on an organisation that is really nothing more than a phoney pressure group.Post date and time

Why UKIP is just not credible in distancing itself from BNP

For all of UKIP's attempts to distance itself from the BNP, the latest being the high-profile announcement that it would not enter into an electoral pact with them, the fact remains that the two parties have overlapping membership, and similar philosophies.

It was telling that the electoral pact was proposed by UKIP activist Buster Mottram, whose links with the BNP are well known and long-standing. Indeed, Nigel Farage, when questioned about Mottram's past as a campaigner for the BNP's forerunner, the National Front, flippantly batted away the question, saying that these were no more than "youthful indiscretions". So much for Farage's claims to be watchful over BNP "infiltration" of UKIP if he can't even spot one in his ranks!

It seems that UKIPs indecision about their links with the BNP has reached the level of their National Executive. Although UKIP have claimed that the BNP pact offer was rejected 'unanimously' by their NEC, tucked away at the bottom of their press release was a note announcing that that two members of UKIPs NEC, Eric Edmond and David Abbott, were removed from their positions yesterday - presumably because they supported the pact. As UKIPwatch said yesterday, this is either a spectacular coincidence or yet another example of Nigel Farage's particular interpretation of the phrase 'party democracy'.

But this is no surprise to anyone who takes more than a superficial look at UKIP. After all, UKIP and the BNP have a habit of swapping members and candidates. For example, at the last European elections, four BNP candidates were former UKIP members or candidates: Dr Peter Lane - BNP candidate in the South East region, Dr Alan Patterson - BNP lead candidate in the North East region and a former UKIP parliamentary candidate in Hexham at the 2001 general election, Roger Robertson - BNP candidate in the South East region and Matt Single - BNP lead candidate in the Eastern region.

Two of UKIPs current MEPs, Jeffrey Titford and Mike Nattrass, are
former members of the far-Right, anti-immigration New Britain Party, which urged the repatriation of immigrants. It's also worth pointing out that a number of UKIP officials and candidates, for example, Andrew Moffatt (former UKIP parliamentary candidate in Beaconsfield at the 2001 general election) and Martyn Heale (Chairman, UKIP Thanet South), are, like Buster Mottram, former activists of the BNP's forerunner, the NF.

So closely intertwined are the two parties that, in 2004, John Brayshaw was found to be serving as the Chairman of UKIPs Vale of York branch (since October 2003) while simultaneously serving as BNP National Treasurer! Indeed, according to Andrew Edwards, a UKIP official who was expelled from the party for trying to publicise the links between the two parties, Brayshaw was also UKIP-BNP “pact liaison officer for the north”.

In some ways, UKIPs links with the BNP were neatly illustrated at last year's UKIP conference, when their fascist comrades paid a visit to hand out leaflets and literature to the several hundred delegates. According to a BNP spokesman at the time, "a substantial proportion of BNP activists are themselves former UKIP members". Meanwhile, Nigel Farage continues to parrot that UKIP are a 'non racist' party. Pull the other one Mr Farage, it has bells on it.

ITS all over

I was cheered by the news that the European Parliament's smallest but most poisonous and extremist political groups looks set to fold. The Greater Romania party has announced that it will leave the Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty (ITS) group after one of its members Italian MEP Alessandra Mussolini (the granddaughter of the Italian dictator) told a Romanian newspaper that - "breaking the law became a way of life for Romanians".

Under the Parliamentary rulebook, the minimum number of MEPs required to form a political group is 20 and they must include representatives from at least one fifth of the Member States. Political groups receive research budgets and administrative support and are better able to secure influential positions on parliamentary committees and the bureau of the Parliament than non-attached MEPs. If the five MEPs for the Greater Romania Party leave the ITS, the group will be reduced to 18 members and will cease to exist.

The demise of the ITS group is no loss to the Parliament. On the contrary, the ITS group is a rag-bag of assorted xenophobes, holocaust deniers and fascists, with its luminaries including Jean Marie Le Pen, Jörg Haider's Austrian Free Democrats and Ms Mussolini.

As a side-note, the ITS group includes former UKIP MEP Ashley Mote who is currently serving a nine month prison sentence for multiple benefit fraud offences. I wonder whether UKIP will welcome him back!

It was no surprise to see ex-UKIP MEP Ashley Mote jailed after being found guilty of benefit fraud, but his nine-month sentence means that, under UK law, he is able to continue as a Member of the European Parliament.

Mote then, has left us in the ridiculous situation in which he has been found guilty of fraudulently obtaining taxpayers’ money, yet will continue to receive his taxpayers’ funded salary while being incarcerated at the expense of the taxpayer.

I have therefore written to House of Commons authorities, as they are responsible for the payment of MPs and MEPs salaries, asking that Mote’s salary be witheld for the duration of his sentence.

Mote was the ultimate hypocrite, as he frequently made unsubstantiated claims about fraud in the EU, while he himself turned out to be a fraudster.

The Guardian’s diary writer Hugh Muir makes a pertinent point when noting that while Ashley Mote cannot attend his committee (Budgetary Control) one of his neo-fascist colleagues in the Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty Group can sit in on his behalf!

I’m sure the voters of the south east didn’t envisage that when they voted UKIP three years ago.

At the risk of sounding like Richard Littlejohn, you couldn’t make it up.

This was a special week in the European Parliament, as we had to elect or re-elect the President, Vice-Presidents and so on, ending (still to come) with chairs of all the parliamentary committees. This happens every two and a half years, neatly splitting the five year term of the Parliament in two halves.

Most positions, including Vice Presidents of Parliament and Committee chairs, are in practice settled in advance of the election by a gentleman's agreement among the different political groups to distribute these positions proportionally among them, according to the size of each Group. This reflects the tradition in a number of national parliaments, but differs from, say, the US Congress where the majority takes all such positions.

The creation of an extreme right Group in the Parliament (just reaching the minimum number required of 12 thanks to Ashley Mote, elected in Britain as UKIP) poses a problem for democratic parties: should the new Group be given their proportional share (which amounts to a couple of deputy Chairs of committees), raising the prospect of, say, Jean Marie Le Pen or Alessandra Mussolini becoming an official office holder of the Parliament? Most of the democratic Groups appear at this stage to agree that they shouldn't.

This would be perfectly within the rules, as such positions are elected and the gentlemen's agreement to support each others' candidates can perfectly well be an agreement among just some Groups (or among all but one). In any case, you cannot require individual MEPs to vote for a fascist (or indeed anyone) as chair of their committee if they don't want to.

Having been a political campaigner all my life, I know by now that the far right are always a constant presence, bubbling away just underneath the surface of civilised society, waiting for an opportunity to pop up and spread their malicious politics.

Sad to say, an opportunity has arisen, in part, because of UKIP's breakthrough at the last European election.

The French Front Nationale (including Le Pen), Alessandra Mussolini (definitely her Grandfather’s Granddaughter), the Belgian Vlaams Blok, the Greater Romania Party, and Ashley Mote (elected as UKIP) have joined together to try to form a far-right political group in the European Parliament - the smallest of what will now be 8 party groups. A minimum of 20 members is required to form a Group. As things stand, they look as though they may just reach 20. In other words, it would not have been possible without Mote and UKIP's breakthrough in the last European elections.