Video: MEP Nigel Farage takes on EU bullies

19 Dec 2008
Baron at Gates of Vienna writes:

Daniel Cohn-Bendit is a no longer a wild-haired revolutionary, but a grizzled member of the European Socialist establishment. When he went to see Václav Klaus, it was to lay down the law: Mr. Klaus is obliged to recognize the supremacy of the European Union Politburo, and give up any lingering foolishness about liberty and Czech sovereignty. This is 2008, and not 1989.

But Václav Klaus persists in his intransigence, and refuses to fly the EU flag over Hradcany Castle. This aroused Mr. Cohn-Bendit’s anger, and he took the Czech president to task for his impertinence. Unbeknownst to the participants, however, the meeting was tape-recorded, and widely reported in the Czech media.

MEP Nigel Farage took umbrage at Danny the Red and his fellow EUniks for their bully-boy behavior. Here’s a video of the exchanges that took place in the European Parliament.

Farage is leader of the eurosceptic United Kingdom Independence Party.

Czech leader in shock after EU assault

14 Dec 2008
Christopher Booker at the Telegraph writes:

Imagine that a Franco-German MEP, invited to meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace, plonked down in front of her an EU "ring of stars" flag, insisting that she hoist it over the palace alongside the Royal Standard, and then proceeded to address her in a deliberately insulting way. The British people, if news of the incident leaked out, might not be too pleased.

Something not dissimilar took place at a remarkable recent meeting between the heads of the groups in the European Parliament and Vaclav Klaus, the Czech head of state, in his palace in Hradcany Castle, on a hill overlooking Prague. The aim was to discuss how the Czechs should handle the EU's rotating six-monthly presidency when they take over from France on January 1.

The EU's ruling elite view President Klaus, a distinguished academic economist, with a mixture of bewilderment, hatred and contempt. As his country's prime minister, he applied to join the EU in the days after the fall of Communism in the 1990s. But now Klaus is alone among European leaders in expressing openly Eurosceptic views, not least about the Lisbon Treaty, which the Czech parliament has yet to ratify.

Klaus was an outspoken dissident under the Communist regime, and he has come to regard the EU as dangerously anti-democratic...