Those who pay attention to the grinding machinations of the European Parliament (wake up there at the back!) will know that Dan Hannan MEP is one of the most principled, articulate, and conservative members there, always willing to stand up to the tin-pot little dictators who want to regulate every hour of the European’s waking life.

A few weeks ago, a small band of MEPs tried to organize the nearest thing they could get to a filibuster, by making a series of one minute (yes, one minute) speeches. The President of the Parliament was outraged and has demanded discretionary powers to stop such attempted outbreaks of checks and balances. As ConservativeHome relates, Dan was less than impressed:

This morning in the European Parliament, there was a vote on the Committee’s proposals to grant Gert-Pöttering these powers even though the proposals hadn’t even been distributed to members. In criticising this, Hannan paraphrased the argument in his blog post, pointedly saying that “a majority is not the same as the rule of law.” EPP leader Joseph Daul then stood up irately and declared that he wanted Hannan out of his Party, saying with an air of great concession that he had “no problem with you people calling for a referendum in Britain but I will not have you doing it on the Parliament floor as a member of the group”.

The EPP is the European Peoples’ Party, the umbrella group for supposedly center-right parties, and is therefore dominated by Christian Democrat types. Dan will be far better off expelled from this group of toadies and lickspittles.

Dan’s first-hand account of this splendidly sophisticated European display of petulance against him is here.