James Haintalf

Remember how UKIP was compromised earlier in the year, when D Clark MEP, on the wishes of N Farage MEP, went to Bucharest with fellow Ind Dem Group gravy train passengers and signed "The Bucharest Declaration", aligning our party with support for a reformed but ongoing CAP and support for subsidiarity within an ongoing EU?

Remember how all this was then justified by Clark and Chairman Whittaker, on the grounds that we were wooing (some would say appeasing) a small Romanian party called PIN to join fellow continental anti-withdrawalists in propping up the Ind Dem Group?

Or as Clark put it on his website:

"Their leaders seem to have a similar attitude to the EU as the other continental parties in Ind-Dem, that is not for withdrawal.... but Ind-Dem needs more members and, I believe, UKIP needs friendly contacts across Europe."
( Derek Clark MEP in the European Parliament UKIP UK Independence Party East Midlands Region EU EU-sceptic EU-realist CAP euro )

Well, the results of this folly are now on full display, as yesterday Romania held its elections to the European Parliament and PIN seem to have recorded a big fat zero MEPs:

Romanian president's centrist party scores best in European Parliament elections - International Herald Tribune

So, where how has everything washed up after the Bucharest nonsense?

1. No new anti-withdrawalist Romanian MEPs to prop up the anti-withdrawalist Ind Dem Group. (Shame .
So no change there.

2. Ind Dem Group remains full of such desirable MEPs as the Europhile pro-Lisbon Treaty/EU Constitution anti-referendum Dutch coalition partners (see past thread), the French Le Pen fan Couteaux (see past thread), a Greek anti-semitic party whose leader and recent former Ind Dem MEP had spread anti-semitic rumours relating to 9/11 (see past thread), a Czech MEP found guilty of financial crime and facing further charges (see previous thread), a Swedish MEP exposed in a largescale tax-dodging scam who excused it by saying "everybody does it" (see past thread), all headed up by a co-president, Bonde (alongside co-president Farage), who went out of his way to appease his hoped-for new Romanian allies in a speech (see past thread)when he called for the abolition of the UK rebate and set out exactly what they meant in Bucharest by "CAP reform" - basically taking all the money away from countries like the UK and giving it all to countries like Romania - and then suggested giving structural funding only to the poorest half of EU countries (i.e. taking even more money from countries like the UK and giving it to countries like Romania).
So no change there either.

3. UKIP is on record as supporting subsidiarity and reforming, not scrapping, the CAP. And that's the only change to come out of this whole dimwitted misadventure.

Well done, Messrs Clark, Farage and Whittaker.

Just goes to show that if you sell your soul to the devil, you'll only end up in flames.