Sleazy, profoundly undemocratic and wary of real debate, the EU’s parliament is a grotesque parody of what a parliament is meant to be. Sometimes it doesn’t even try to pretend:

Nigel Farage has been fined 10 days’ MEP allowances – about £2,700 – following his attack on the credentials of the European council president, Herman van Rompuy, last week. The Ukip MEP was today summoned to see the European parliament’s president, Jerzy Buzek, who demanded that he apologise to Belgium, its people and its former prime minister for his remarks.When Farage refused, Buzek said he was considering sanctions, including possible suspension from the chamber, against him.

The fact that everything that Farage had to say about both van Rompuy and Belgium was accurate (if undiplomatic) seemed to count for nothing.

To put Farage’s comments in some sort of context, it might be helpful to remember (courtesy of Daniel Hannan) some of the guilt-by-association with which the EU’s elites attempt to smear those, like Farage, of a more euroskeptic frame of mind.

According to Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian Prime Minister who now leads the Liberals in the European Parliament, “The ultimate consequences of identity thinking are the gas chambers of Auschwitz”.
Politicians should be careful about dragging Holocaust references into everyday arguments. Even Churchill – who arguably had more right to make such references than the rest of us – suffered when he tried to draw a parallel between socialism and the Gestapo during the 1945 election campaign. Yet Euro-integrationists make the link so habitually and so matter-of-factly that they no longer realise what they’re doing.
During the last session of the European Parliament, both the Liberal and Socialist leaders said that Euro-sceptic MEPs made them think of the Nazis. And who can forget the words of Margot Wallström, then Sweden’s European Commissioner, at the anniversary of the liberation of the Theresienstandt concentration camp: “There are those today who want to scrap the supra-national idea. They want the EU to go back to the old purely intergovernmental way of doing things. I say those people should come to Terezin and see where that old road leads.”