Thursday, 6 May 2010

The disrespectful MEPs

Joe Biden, the Vice President of the United States was expected to speak at 12:00 in the plenary of the European Parliament in Brussels*.

Since Biden was late, the regular session continued for another 20 minutes, but many MEPs were already coming into the room.

But instead of paying respect to their colleagues speaking, most of them were chatting, telephoning etc. and making such a noise that it was hard to understand the speakers, even on the web live stream. Even two interventions - rather hesitant but still - of the EP session president didn't make them keep quiet.

This is an absolutely shameful behaviour, and although this will not be in the mainstream news today, European parliamentarians have lost a lot of respect in my eyes today.

This was not my parliament, this was a bunch of kiddies without education, and non of those chatting in the plenary today should ever demand that silence was to be made when he or she is speaking!!

PS: Usually the EP plenary is empty and one person is speaking, this time it was full and everybody was speaking. Both are communication disasters.

* Update: See my summary.