EU directives
MIROSŁAW PIOTROWSKI
It is forbidden to bring anything into the plenary hall of the European Parliament in Brussels and Strasburg. Even a small bottle of water, not to say about any banners or posters. These are our regulations. However, there will always be ‘but’….It mainly concerns the left side of the hall. The regulations are adjusted to it ‘elastically’. Whereas it is rigid towards the rights side of the hall.
A kind of a nuance but….I remember when an Italian euro-deputy Lega Nord raised a banner with the phrase ‘Free Padania while the president of his country was giving a speech. At once parliamentary services intervened, but without any shouts or scuffles. Finally, the unruly euro-deputy was taken out of the hall. A few years ago we voted in the matter of the Lisbon Treaty in the European Parliament, and euro-deputies from our political group prepared sheets of paper with the phrase ‘Not in my name’, ushers of the European Parliament were running among aisles, grabbing the sheets from our hands.
One of our English colleagues, Geoffrey Van Orden, the general, the former chief of the Staff of the British army in Berlin, had been prepared for it. For, he had twenty sheets with the same inscription. When he was deprived of one of the sheets, took out another one from a desktop and others. Obviously, services had to intervene, as it was an official prohibition. However, when on desktops of leftist euro-deputies posters appeared, our services react strangely phlegmatically or do not react at all. There were a lot of public comments to the chairman of the European Parliament about this asymmetry.
I saw it myself when after these interventions he was smiling to himself. Everybody knows that the picture speaks to imagination much more than a speech. It gets into memory very deeply. First of all, for this reason, I think, nobody of the parliamentary services intervened, when during the recent debate in the European Parliament in Strasburg on women’s rights in Poland, fighting leftist feminists presented posters with the inscription ‘Abortion is a choice and a right’ and ‘My body is mine and only mine’.
Honestly speaking, I did not even expect that one of the ushers would dare to take away the poster with such ‘progressive’ mottos, although, regulations oblige everybody. However, some people think that everything is unimportant. These are only EU directives.
AA
„Niedziela” 43/2016