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Roll Out The Barrot
On Wednesday France's Jacques Barrot was confirmed as the EU's Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner. What's wrong with that? Well, as our good friend on England Expects reminds us, Europe's new go-to man for justice is actually a convicted embezzeler. Barrot received a suspended jail term for fiddling party funds in 2000, but his slate was immediately wiped clean by France's dodgy Presidential Amnesty system put in place by Jacques Chirac, who knew a thing or two about covering his tracks.
"Under French law, no reference may be made to such a sentence, which carries no criminal record", the BBC reported in 2004, when UKIP's Nigel Farage brought Barrot's conviction to light during a hearing on his suitability to be transport commissioner. Liberal Democrat MEP Graham Watson, then head of the Liberal grouping in the EU parliament, added his disquiet to the decision, calling for Barrot to be suspended pending a full enquiry. He said that Barrot had been "seriously compromised" by the revelation.
His failure to reveal a past conviction, Watson said, "constitutes an unacceptable abuse of trust".
"An amnesty in France means that there was no offence in the first place, whatever it was did not occur, there is nothing to answer to. As a result no one in France may question the individual, there is no one to question, and the media are utterly forbidden to mention it in any way," Gawain adds.
Four years on, Barrot is shifted upwards to Justice and Home Affairs. This time, only UKIP's Derek Clark was able to confront him, despite the efforts of the parliament's Thought Police to prevent Clark speaking:
"In the current climate in which the financial probity of some colleague MEPs is in question, not to say the auditors once again refusing to sign off the EU books due to corrupt handling of funds, is this not a most untimely and inappropriate appointment?", he asked.
Few thought so. England Expects kindly provides a list of those British MEPs who supported Barrot for Commissioner, those who abstained, and those who voted against him.
All Britain's Labour MEPs backed the centre-right veteran; disgracefully, most of the Tories did too, though Dan Hannon and two others abstained. But who's this tucked in between his fellow Lib Dems and the unspeakable Sinn Fein's "Babs" de Brun? None other than Graham Watson, who's clearly been persuaded of the virtues of France's justice system, at least on how it is applied to that nation's elites.
As for the Tories, some of those linked to recent funding abuses are prominent among Barrot's supporters. England Expects gets it right:
"Come on guys you are under a great deal of scrutiny about misuse of funds yourselves and you vote for this shower. Or is it that you think you might get a better deal under him?"
