The European Parliament's presiding officer keels over during a marathon voting session
For more than two-and-a-half hours, MEPs ploughed, line by line, through proposed reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy. At first, our arms shot up for each vote but, as the session wore on, they barely twitched. A motion to suspend the sitting for lunch was tetchily proposed and tetchily rejected: many MEPs had afternoon flights. Then the presiding officer, a mild-mannered Greek Christian Democrat called Georgios Papastamkos, rose in his chair, announced a three-minute break and suddenly collapsed.
The politicians in the chamber did what politicians do best, crowding around and shouting instructions. Fortunately, there were three doctors present, including the London MEP Charles Tannock, who stabilised Mr Papastamkos while a team arrived with a defibrillator. The Deputy Speaker is now in a Strasbourg hospital, his condition reportedly serious.
Seeing a man keel over in front of you and fail to rise puts things in perspective. Like everyone else, I hope he gets better. Understandably, in the circumstances, MEPs are now urgently talking about whether to reform the way they hold their votes. Many of them feel irrationally guilty, having thrown out the motion to suspend the session a few minutes before poor Mr Papastamkos was taken ill.
In general, the aftermath of a tragedy is the worst possible time to amend the rules. On this occasion, though, there is a strong case for changing the way MEPs conduct their business. The problem is not so much the length of the voting sessions as the impossibility of being on top of the agenda. Although MEPs rarely admit it, they usually haven't the faintest idea what 95 per cent of their votes are about. This is not because they are lazy. (Indeed, the world might be a better place if MEPs were a bit lazier). Rather, it is because the system is designed to make it hard for individual members to make independent decisions. We are forced to rely on our party Whips, who are thus able to make trade-offs on a bloc-to-bloc basis. If every backbencher voted as he pleased, such deal-making would become impossible.
The obvious answer is to give the European Parliament less to do by devolving some of its functions to national assemblies, but such thinking is anathema to most Euro-federalists. Even so, the current system is becoming harder and harder to justify. To take just one example, a few minutes before Mr Papastamkos collapsed, MEPs had voted to subsidise the growing of tobacco. How many of them, I wonder, knew what they were doing? How many of them would have voted as they did had they known?
The truth is that, even in the supposedly democratic bit of the EU, power largely rests with the permanent officials. MEPs, or at least backbenchers, supply the trappings of democracy, but are kept too busy properly to affect what is going on. Not for the first time, I thought of some words by that great Whig, Edmund Burke: "Who that admires, and from the heart is attached, to true national parliaments, must turn in horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque and parody of those sacred institutions."
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