Posted on 06/19/2004 9:12:02 PM PDT by MegaSilver
These new politicians have an eccentric policy goal: to destroy the Parliament to which they have been elected. Annabel Crabb reports from London.
The new face of nationalism in Britain is unnaturally tanned, handsome and impeccably well known in Middle England.
It belongs to Robert Kilroy-Silk, the former daytime chat show presenter who has become the British emblem of vaulting dissatisfaction with the European Union.
The urbane, champagne-quaffing Kilroy-Silk campaigned in the European elections against abolition of the pound; his principal message is Save The Quid.
Mr Kilroy-Silk is not short of one himself. The comfort of his 40.5-hectare estate in Spain is exceeded only by the luxury of his $6.7 million Buckinghamshire pile, complete with deer park, formerly the abode of the Ozzy Osbourne clan.
He has harnessed startling support among British battlers with his loudly expressed suspicion of foreign control, political correctness and immigration.
When Britons cast their votes in last weekend's European elections, Mr Kilroy-Silk was richly rewarded. The United Kingdom Independence Party, of which he is the most celebrated candidate, quadrupled its standing and will be sending 12 delegates to Brussels, at the expense of both Labour and the Conservatives.
Britain is not alone in experiencing a renewal of anti-Europe feeling. It's happening in Europe, too. All but two of the 25 nations voting in the elections recorded swings against their governments. Analysts reported that domestic issues, apathy and cynicism fed the result, which has injected a new and turbulent element into the 732-seat European Parliament - an influx of minority and protest groups who either don't want there to be a European Parliament at all, think it's corrupt or want their countries substantially insulated from it.
Claiming around 130 seats in the Parliament, they include such oddities as Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen's anti-Semitic National Front, the Swedish nationalists' June List, various anti-corruption parties and the hardline Catholic Polish League of Families, which believes the EU is run by anti-clerical Freemasons.
"They're a rather motley crew," says Alasdair Murray, senior research fellow at the London-based Centre for European Reform.
"The chances that they'll all vote together are slim. There isn't a lot that they all have in common, and seeing as they don't believe in European politics they're likely to run mainly on a national basis."
This may result in a constantly shifting balance of power, negotiated by the swirling interests of small interest groups whose purposes are divided between destabilising the European Parliament and inflicting further punishment on their home governments.
"Wreck it," responded Mr Kilroy-Silk this week when asked what he wanted to do in the European Parliament.
"Expose it for the waste, the corruption and the way it is eroding our independence and our sovereignty. Our job is to go there and say, 'Look, this is how it gets corrupted, this is how they go on the gravy train and spend their time in restaurants and the rest of it. I don't want to go to Brussels. I don't want to be there. I don't want to be bogged down in the committees and all the rest of it."
But Mr Kilroy-Silk is certainly planning to pocket the salary - $A12,000 a month, plus an annual expense account of $A263,000.
(Members of the European Parliament get paid the same as politicians in their own countries, which means an MEP's salary ranges from $A20,000 a month for Italian delegates down to a measly $A1400 for the Hungarians.)
One of the three UKIP men elected to the Parliament five years ago, Nigel Farage, was said by a former staffer to have regularly "failed to turn up for morning appointments because he had been out on the tiles all night."
Mr Kilroy-Silk, 62, isn't even the leader of UKIP; it's just that he's the most famous and most TV-friendly of the all-male UKIP contingent. Hardly anyone can name the leader, Roger Knapman.
Mr Kilroy-Silk's patrician charm conceals some radical views. He was fired from his BBC chat show in January after penning a column alluding to Arabs as 'suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors'.
UKIP attracted 16 per cent of the British vote. When added to the 29 per cent garnered by the Conservatives, who are generally Eurosceptic but in a less extreme way, the result is bad news for both British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Europe: more than half the British voting public do not share their Government's enthusiasm for unification with the Continent.
Indeed, the result was a chastening slap-down for leaders like Mr Blair, along with Germany's Gerhard Schroeder and French Prime Minister Jacques Raffarin. With unfortuitous timing, debate in Brussels over the proposed new European constitution began on Thursday, only days after its participants had been savaged at the polls.
Mr Blair responded by insisting that unless Britain was guaranteed the right to keep making its own laws on tax and industrial relations, he would walk away.
This antagonised the integrationist German and French. French President Jacques Chirac was irritated.
"The ambitions foreseen (for the constitution) are reduced - especially on tax and social security - by the clear position of one country," he barked.
It's just that Europe holds the shrines of... well, all of my ancestors, and if they're trying to save it, I'd really like to help.
Of course the other member want to destroy the oldest representative body on earth, the House of Commons. Of course this goes unmentioned?
Those damn Freemasons again!!
MegaSilver, I would keep a low profile on your citizenship status. You'll most likely be pinned as a Yank anyway, just don't advertise. If pressed, swallow pride and say you're Canadian. When first on the ground, buy a pair of popular shoes. It lessens the American profile. Have fun!
How do you "wreck" the EU? Isn't it a wreck already?
Annabel Crabb doesn't say that the article attributed to Kilroy-Silk which says that was actually modified by someone at the Sunday Express without his permission and that there is currently a criminal investigation going on to find out who did it.
This is what Kilroy-Silk had to say about it at the time:
"I greatly regret the offence which has been caused by the article published in last weekend's Sunday Express. The article contains a couple of obvious factual errors which I also regret. The article was first written in April and had been republished last weekend in error. When the article was originally published last year, it caused no comment or outcry and, I was told at the time, generated only a couple of letters to the paper, I would never have wished it to be re-published in this manner and it is not what I would have said today. It was originally written as a response to the views of opponents to the war in Iraq that Arab states 'loathe' the West and my piece referred to 'Arab states' rather than 'Arabs'. Out of that context, it has obviously caused great distress and offence and I can only reiterate that I very deeply regret that."
Here's an article about it.
Left-wing journalists never tell the whole truth.
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