EU Parliament officials shut down UKIP blog

I've been working away for a few days, which it why the posting has been a bit slack here.

I need to get back up to speed before I comment on recent news but this nasty little story caught my eye.

Gawain Towler, who writes the England Expects blog and, as Eliab Harvey, contributes to the Brussels Journal, has been threatened with disciplinary action because his employer claims that his blogging has breached the staff code of conduct.

Now you might think that this sounds reasonable. However, Gawain's employer is the European Parliament, where he works as a press officer for one of the political parties. Problem is, that party is UKIP.

As Gawain says, it is probable that he has breached the code of conduct by slagging off his employer and disclosing an internal memo that his employer would rather not have had disclosed but, as press officer for UKIP, a party fundamentally opposed to the EU, surely that's part of his job.

Applying this employee code of conduct so rigidly to party press officers is clearly absurd. Having the party press officers employed by the parliament is absurd too, though there is, no doubt, some convoluted logic behind it.

Anyway, the upshot is that Gawain has been given a written warning. If he continues to write for his own blog or for the Brussels Journal, 'sanctions will be applied' - possibly including a four month pay cut.

This heavy handed and rule-bound response is just what we have come to expect from EU institutions. Sure, if you go by the letter of the code of conduct, Gawain Towler is guilty but, if the code were rigidly applied, a lot of party press officers would not be able to do their jobs, especially those from parties opposed to the EU.

As you might expect, all the anti-Europe blogs are up in arms about this but there has also been an outcry from those who are more favourable to the EU, among them Nosemonkey, Jon Worth, New Europe and the Liberal Conspirators.

This not just about an employer enforcing the rulebook. It is a shabby attempt to use those rules to stop someone saying something the employer doesn't like. If a pro-EU party press officer had disclosed a fairly harmless internal memo on a blog, he or she would probably have got away with a bit of a telling off and an order to remove the offending post, rather than the threat of docked pay and an order to shut down the blog completely.

The warning came from the top. It was issued by the European Parliament's general secretary Harald Rømer, a Danish conservative. Recently, we have come to associate the Danes with the defence of free speech.  Mr Romer seems to confound the stereotype.

If you have never thought of writing to your MEP, perhaps now is the time to start. The bureaucracy of the European Parliament should not be allowed to get away with closing down a political blog on a spurious pretext, whatever the views of its author.

After all, who knows what else they might decide to interpret as a breach of the code of conduct.