The successful rejection of Rocco Buttiglione as EU Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security is a disaster.

Buttiglione is a committed Catholic and a close friend of the Pope. His views on abortion, the family, asylum, immigration and sexual practice are predictably conservative and have been a cause of concern in the past. Yet, when interviewed by MEPs in October, he said, ‘I may think that homosexuality is a sin but this has no effect on politics, unless I say that homosexuality is a crime.’

‘The state has no right to stick its nose into these things,’ he reasoned, ‘and nobody can be discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation... this stands in the Charter of Human Rights, this stands in the Constitution and I have pledged to defend this constitution.’

It was not enough. Despite the new president’s determination to stick by his commissioner, left-of-centre MEPs forced him to withdraw his entire team and it is doubtful that Buttiglione will survive the reshuffle.

Buttiglione’s hounding from office brings to light one of the most distasteful and worrying trends of our time. It shows how moral conservatives are increasingly debarred from office, even when they agree to leave their convictions at the door. And it demonstrates how, in bowing their knee at the altar of ‘tolerance’, elements of the liberal left are prepared to adopt aggressively intolerant measures, to turn their own tolerance into a kind of dictatorial ‘totalitolerance’.

Most worryingly, it marks the eclipse of the liberal vision that has been the guiding light of progressive politics since the days of John Stuart Mill. Buttiglione’s insistence that the personal and political can coexist while being at odds is the cornerstone of liberal democracy. The alternative is for the thought-police to patrol our personal opinions, to ensure they conform to the political norms of the day.

Many fought against this in the 20th century, yet the excommunication of Rocco Buttiglione shows that this is precisely the state in which we now live. As Matthew Paris wrote in an intemperate if honest article in the Times, ‘I say: enough of tolerance. I do not tolerate religious superstition, not when it refuses to tolerate me. Sweep it from the corridors of power.’

If this sorry affair leads to the unmasking of the god Tolerance, we will benefit from it. If not, we stand on the threshold of a worrying future.

Nick Spencer

additional resources

Different newspapers have, not surprisingly, covered the crisis at the EU differently. See, for example, the Guardian’s special report 'Britain and the EU' (www.guardian.co.uk) and the Times’ ‘EU in Crisis as Parliament Rejects New Commission’ (www.timesonline.co.uk).

A profile of Rotto Buttiglione from the BBC website www.bbc.co.uk.

A European press review of the crisis in Brussels.

There are some arguments that Buttiglione’s case is essentially no more than a casus belli and that the real war is between factions in the parliament, specifically between socialist MEPs and the incoming president José Manuel Barroso’s free-market ideology. See the Telegraph, ‘Cheering MEPs welcome Barroso climb-down’ for more details (www.telegraph.co.uk).

Links to European institutions: the European Union; the European Parliament; the European Commission.