Why We Fight

This from the Sunday Telegraph's Christopher Booker I reproduce wholly without comment, since none is needed: res ipsa loquitur.

The fastest voters in the West

One of the wonders of modern democracy is the voting system in the EU Parliament. Most of the time, voting by the 785 MEPs in their vast glass and concrete chamber in Strasbourg is by show of hands. But on contentious issues they vote electronically. Visitors gaze in awe as MEPs punch away frenziedly at buttons, deciding issues they know nothing about, according to detailed lists supplied by their whips. In this way, as many as 1,500 amendments have been dealt with in 90 minutes. Thus are the laws that govern us made.

A keen student of this system is Graham Booth, a UKIP MEP, who describes a typical occasion this month when an amendment on a report on "EU Partnership in the Horn of Africa" was said to have been "rejected" on a show of hands. A call for an electronic vote proved that, on the contrary, the motion had been accepted - by 567 votes to 17. The chairman blamed this discrepancy on MEPs not "holding their hands high enough".

When Mr Booth and a Czech colleague last year presented the president of the parliament with a list of similar blunders, calling for electronic voting to be mandatory, it was pointed out that the average two seconds longer needed to record each vote electronically might cause MEPs to miss their lunch or even their flights home. Naturally, lunch won over democracy.

www.telegraph.co.uk