[pp.int.general] Pirate Manifesto Reloaded

[Eduardo Robles Elvira]

Hi!

El Jueves 03 Julio 2008, Ole Husgaard escribió:
> And the declaration do not talk about endorsing the politics of other
> members in the group. 

The declaration says exactly that and it's a part of the declaration that have 
been quoted on this list many times.

> We will of course try to make the rest of the 
> group vote like we do on the issues that are important. In exchange it
> makes sense that we return the favor by voting like they want on other
> issues if we do not disagree.

Well that's definitely not what PIRATA will do as it has been stated =)

> Please note that if we are outside any group, we do not get seats in the
> parliamentarian commitees. And it is in these commitees most of the
> important decisions are taken. Also, by being in a group we get funding
> for staff.

Well it's the price of freedom.

> > - if we lose our ideological neutrality for nothing and, as ALOA5
> > pointed, become a party without personality, we'd follow the way to our
> > self-destruction -as it's happening with United Left in Spain (from 22
> > MPs in 1996 to 2 MPs ... and 1 of them is not really theirs but from
> > Catalonian Initiative-Greens) because of behaving as PSOE's vassals-
>
> I totally agree. In our last local election a new political party "Ny
> Alliance" entered our parliament. After being elected they stated that
> they would support our current government no matter what. Now they have
> lost most of their voter support, and most of the elected
> parliamentarians are no longer party members.

Maybe the parliament groups are not "political parties" by themselves, but 
it's very close to that. It's more or less the aglutination of the different 
similar political parties from each country. And everything Carlos said about 
the problems of joining a group are still valid in my opinion.


> Of course we should not give unconditional support to others. But I see
> no problem with the conditional support that the Uppsala declaration is
> talking about.

Read the text again. The text does not talk about conditional support. It 
talks about unconditional support (unless we have something really strong 
against supporting it).

> If it means I can get somebody else to support me on some 
> issues I really care about, I see no problem supporting them on some
> issues I don't care about.

As my brother Félix already stated, those are not issues that we don't really 
care about. That's a misconception: we *do* care about those issues, but 
those are simply not our core issues.

> So how come I agree with both you and the Uppsala declaration? Do we
> have some kind of misunderstanding? It looks to me like you have
> misunderstood something when you talk about giving unconditional support.

I think it's the other way round :-P

> I think your major issue here is about joining a group with other
> parties. If we do not get enough seats to form our own group (and it
> looks so to me), we have a choice: Either we stay outside any groups,
> and cannot make our voice heard in parliamentarian commitees. Or we join
> a group, so we can get seats and influence in the commitees. Please note
> that the groups in the EU-Parliament are not political parties.

You might have a choice, but PIRATA doesn't have one. Our statutes say we will 
abstain in non-core issues and thus it doesn't make sense joining any group 
other than then the independent group.

Regards,
       Eduardo Robles Elvira.
-- 
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the unreasonable man." (George Bernard Shaw)
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