Following the summer break, the European Parliament will have this week resumed its conclaves. The most important issue to be coming up will be the establishment of the new European Commission. Nominees to it will appear before the parliamentary committees overseeing the areas for which they are to become responsible.
A committee could conclude that this or that Commissioner is not up to scratch and there will surely be a partisan tussle then between the political groups, so that if a nomination is objected to, difficulties in the path of some other nomination are likely to ensue, in a game of tit for tat.
Meanwhile, the Brexit convulsion will be reaching its finale; at least, so it now seems. I have no doubt that much will be said in the European Parliament about the goings-on.
But in reality, by contrast with the nomination of the Commissioners, the say-so of the Parliament regarding Brexit carries little wieght. Perhaps this is all for the better, since on the Brexit issue, the political and economic stakes are already just too mixed up.
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Civil society
We often listen to arguments by which people insist that civil society needs to be heard when matters of national interest are being discussed and decided. For instance, this point was made regarding the consultations that are proceeding about changes to the constitution.
If by civil society, one means genuine voluntary organizations of citizens who share certain common positions that they wish to promote in vital sectors of people’s lives, then I do not know how it would be possible to ignore or deny the claim.
On the other hand, we need to have transparent criteria that define how civil society is organizing and presenting itself, and as to how spokespersons for it should be accorded recognition.
For indeed, it is very easy for two or three individuals to get together, register a website, tag it with a slogan, and proclaim to the universe that they are projecting a particular vision. And yet, the same individuals could be accessing more than just one website, and they would all have their different slogan...
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Lady Chatterley?
It is quite odd: when writing this blog, it is on entries about which I expect there would be little to no interest that I end up getting the least expected reactions. Consider a comment I made recently about LP Hartley’s novel “The Go-Between”.
A friend of mine who’s always been a devotee of English literature took off on my remarks about “The Go-Between” (he must have been the only one to have read them): Is it possible you failed to notice? – he asked – that actually, the novel has the same theme as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” – written from a different point of view, true, and with a plot that has been sanitised but...
That made me curious. I have heard and read a lot about the novel by DH Lawrence and the reputation it gained for being pornographic, but I never read it. When it was written and for many decades later, it remained a controversial piece. Now I will need to check whether truly Hartley’s novel, written over half a century after that of Lawrence, does convey the same theme.