[pp.int.general] Political Party X (was: Uppsala Declaration)

[Mårten Fjällström]

Max covered the procedural questions well. If there is more questions as  
to how the document was produced, I will be glad to answer them. The  
important thing is that no matter what I called the document, and no  
matter how I phrased things when I was tired silly, it is still a  
non-binding starting point that you are free to use, or not use. If you do  
not want to use it, fine.

In general, I think documents has a tendency not to get finished unless  
you press the matter, therefore I am glad that we finished the Uppsala  
Declaration. Of course we can make further documents and make up fancy  
names for them too. I prefer to have a number of finished documents, and  
let later versions replace older ones, rather then having a number of  
unfinished documents.


Regarding the parliamentary group, unless we get enough seats we can not  
form a group of our own. The conference concluded that the prospect of us  
forming a group of our own after the election in 2009 is not very  
realistic.
(wikipedia: "To form a political group in the European Parliament there  
needs to be 20 MEPs from six different states."  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Inscrits )

There is of course the option of staying independent within the  
parliament, which is a rather poor choice if we want to affect any change  
at all.
(wikipedia: "Groups get money and seats on Committees which Independent  
members do not get"  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament_political_group#Heterogeneous  
)

As to the objection that we are going to be sucked up into the group and  
loose all identity, consider this: Are Convergència i Unió and Partido  
Nacionalista Vasco considered the same party in Spain? Is it even known  
that they are in the same european parliament group (ALDE)? I would say  
that the EP groups are barely known outside of the parliament and  
therefore the risk of getting considered to be a bad copy of a greater  
party or getting consumed by the group is very slim.


And finally, we did get quite some media attention with the conference, at  
least in swedish media. This morning almost all newspapers ran some  
version of news agency story this morning about 1) that Piratpartiet had  
had a conference in Uppsala with "like-minded parties" and was going to  
run for EP 2009 and 2) that Piratpartiets chances has increased due to the  
public resitance against the "FRA law" (the general wiretapping law) and  
Piratpartiets role in getting that resistance going. It is easier to get  
media attention if you have something to show (be it a roof, be it a  
chair) and this played a not insignificant part in the planning of the  
conference.

Regards,
Mårten Fjällström
Party Secretary
Piratpartiet, Sweden