Airstrip One

The French for Democracy

Flawed democracies are everywhere, so I tend not to worry about them (so what if the other guy got half a million more votes - it's federalism baby). However this mention got my double standards outraged, and not just because it comes from France. Terrence Coyles recalls:

Cast your minds back to the Maastricht Referendum in France in 1992, and you feel like you are living withinthin the pages of Andrew Robert's Aachen Memorandum. The vote looked close, too close. Mitterand needed help, needed finance and was casting around in desperation. Mitterand announced his cancer a week before the vote to secure a sympathy ballot. Helmut Kohl, then the inassailable Chancellor gave him cash to help fund the referendum. In the end it was this cross party and cross national illegal funding that formed the case against Kohl, and the reason why he refused to testify.

Would Blair cheat in the same way, or would his sense of honour get in the way? Did it get in the way of backing a war despite insisting on a second resolution? Next question.