Image via WikipediaHi,
here is the text of Dan Hannan MEP's excellent speech in opposition to Tax Payer funding of PEPPs:
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Daniel Hannan, on behalf of the ECR Group:
To view the original text CLICK HERE– Mr President, democracy is not just a periodic right to put a cross on a
ballot paper. Democracy depends also on a connection between government and governed – an affinity. To have a
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functioning democracy you need a ‘demos’, you need a unit with which we identify when we use the word ‘we’.
If you take the ‘demos’ out of democracy you are left only with the ‘kratos’, with the power of a system that must compel by force of law what it may not ask in the name of civic patriotism.
You cannot create the institutions of functioning representative government by bureaucratic fiat. We have tried it in the European Union.
We have created all the attributes and trappings:the European Parliament, the political parties, the elections and so on, but you cannot make people feel European in the same sense that somebody might feel Norwegian, Japanese, French, Portuguese or whatever it is.
A party should grow organically because its members recognise a community of identity and common interests.
It is not something that we can do with public funding or at the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. So, to be clear, the ECR opposes this legislation, we oppose the concept of having transnational parties.
We form some of our constituent members into an alliance of parties but we oppose the single statute.
We oppose the increases in the budget – which seems to me an extraordinary allocation of resources in the present economic climate – and I oppose my compatriot and my friend Andrew Duff’s idea that these transnational parties should be allowed to spend effectively EU money in national referendum campaigns.
You will not create Europeans by spending public money. Not all the gold in all our national treasuries put together can serve to convince people of a false idea.
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