Funferal

EU commissioner in constitution/holocaust controversy

There’s a strange piece in EU Observer today about a controversial passage in a speech by EU Communication Commissioner Margot Wallström:

In the original version, Commissioner Wallström was to say “Yet there are those today who want to scrap the supranational idea. They want the European Union to go back to the old purely inter-governmental way of doing things. I say those people should come to Terezin and see where that old road leads”, according to the Financial Times.

The implication, for those not up on EU-speak, is that voting against the EU constitution (and the federal model the EU is moving towards) will lead us back to World War II and to holocausts. A claim that doesn’t go down well with anti-constitution campaigners. Where the EU Observer story enters the fray is in reporting that the text of the speech available online no longer includes that section. The Commissioner’s office claims that that is because she didn’t have time to use the full text in her actual delivery of the speech. If that is the only reason why it’s been removed it is a bit disingenuous of the Commissioner to dismiss critics by claiming that “the British press was lying, as she had not actually made the comments.”