Glass and sea food: my EU fear is (not really) confirmed by the BBC
It took a BBC political reporter a week in Brussels to unearth the following about the EU:
1. It’s weird in Brussels
2. They use words I don’t understand (what with it not being in English)
3. MEPs don’t like being told they’re rubber stamps
4. And they understand the infrastructure of the EU as much as I do (little to not at all)
5. Love is in the Brussels air
6. Politician’s jokes aren’t funny
7. MEPs are not very powerful
8. Europe hates Brits
8. Brits hate Europe
10. It might be the con I always feared it was.
With regards to 10, my fear is this: a bunch of journalists and failed politicians decide they’re bored of national politics with its smelly corridors – they crave some glass and sea food. They enter into a secret pact (and perhaps perform a ritual dance) and promptly all move to Brussels to live the high life of glass buildings and mussels. They figure that if no one understands what they call “the EU”… no one will ever know the truth. Long live glass and sea food!
As such, 10 worries me:
But there is a sense that the whole thing is still an experiment. Even Graham Watson, one of the longest serving MEPs who is running to be the Parliament’s next president, said he had never been fully convinced by Strasbourg as a Parliament, something he hopes to change if he gets elected in July. There are plenty of people, and not just in UKIP, who would argue that it is a failed experiment.
The less said about 10 the better.
But the discovery of 1-9, I am sure, did not require licence fee payers to fund Brian Wheeler’s trip to Belgium. Some we’ve always known (1, 2, 8, 9 and most obviously 6) and the rest take a mere moment of arm-chair pondering to work out (4, 5, 7 and most obviously 3).
But what makes Wheeler’s article as frustrating as the infrastructure of the EU itself is not that the 2,262 words it took him to write 1-10 could have been written in Portland Place. It’s that if the article did what it promised in the standfirst it would be really interesting.
Wheeler shadowed British MEPs for a week – which should make for intriguing stuff. Or at the very least (let’s not get carried away) it should have resulted in something more intriguing than 1-10. Many of us have wondered what on earth MEPs get up to: surely there’s more to it that glass and sea food?
I have a suspicion as to why we are now none the wiser. Wheeler went to Brussels, with the genuine intention of finding out what the heck MEPs do. Then he found that all they do is revel in glass buildings and mussels. Shit, he thought. But not for long. Soon enough the MEPs offered him a few rides in a glass lift, and a dinner of mussels. Before he knew it he was performing a ritual dance, and lo..!
1-10 were published, leaving us no more knowledgeable as to what MEPs do after 2,262 words than we were before we stumbled across them on the maze that is the website of BBC News. Glass and sea food it is then.
Well, who can blame them?
Let’s hope we can find a little more grit in those tasty Belgian muscles.