Airstrip One

Hear, Hear - 18th November 2002, 21.56

Tony Benn took his famous one man show to Brussels and precipitated a Bateman cartoon before an undistinguished audience of eurocrats and politicians.

One of Benn's main criticisms was that there is not enough democracy in Brussels, a point with which it is hard to argue.

The European commission, he reminded the audience, is not elected and therefore not accountable, and the European parliament, he told crestfallen MEPs, is not a parliament in the real sense of the word.

The real parliament and the real power is the EU's council of ministers, he added, where many decisions are taken in secret and where ministers agree laws unencumbered by national parliamentary scrutiny - despite the fact that those same laws will have a profound and irreversible effect on the people of Britain. And that, he suggested, is not democracy or anything coming close to it.

The most important question to ask someone in power, he quipped, was how you go about getting rid of them, and in the case of the European commission the disturbing answer is you can't.

Benn did get some support.

A prominent Tory MEP who insisted on shouting "Hear Hear!" after any of Benn's pronouncements he liked (and there were many of them) reminded the audience that doubts about the EU and its direction are shared by the right too.

The man was doing well until he proposed a Commonwealth of European Nations including Russia, probably as a counterweight to the US. Still, it discomfited the audience.