I love the nutters you get posting on some web forums, and the BBC in particular seems to attract a particular type of specialist. On any given day on the "Have Your Say" boards the average poster seems to want to:
- pay no tax at all;
- get rid of immigrants;
- have a free NHS which does not prioritise children, the elderly or anyone other than them personally;
- tax the fat;
- not pay anything that allows parents to spend any time with their children. If they can't afford them they shouldn't have them. Oh and they shouldn't be allowed in art galleries, on public transport, in fact children should not be allowed out in public and all parents are selfish, irresponsible and probably teenagers in council flats using their benefit money to send the kids to private school;
- bring back hanging;
- lock up people for everything else including looking at you funny;
- get rid of the government (with particular vitriol reserved for Gordon Brown who they seem to regard as illegitimately Prime Minister because they didn't vote for him when he replaced Tony Blair).
Needless to say, I am not their average poster.

I've recently discovered that the journalists' blogs on the site are also open for comment. Both Political editor Nick Robinson and Europe editor Mark Mardell have excellent blogs, a chance to preview the sort of reports they'll be making on that evening's news and other short posts too.
And these attracted the nuttiest nutters.

For example there seem to be some people who think that by talking about the EU and its institutions, Mardell is promoting it. Not so.
There's a world of difference between saying that something exists and that it is operating, and expressing approval. And given that the majority of stories that actually make it onto the news tend to be negative in tone (corruption, loony legislative proposals, scraps and arguments are always news - any you can always find someone to disagree with something!) I hardly think that's the case.

But we've seen that any attempt to inform or educate the British population about the UK's place in the EU and how it all works is construed as propaganda by the sceptics (see this link for the sort of tone that seems to be prevalent) http://www.civitas.org.uk/blog/2007/12/the_europeanisation_o f_educati.html . You'd think that perhaps if they were so confident of their position that all is horror, they'd welcome the chance to have people know a bit more about the EU...

In any case I thought I'd share with you a comment on a post on the latest Mardell blog from a commenter with the tag jaws1912:
"The EU remains illegal.
Each of these six treaties are completely illegal under the British Constitution, our 1689 Bill of Rights, our treason laws, and under our common law. It is unforgivable that the Queen, her Ministers and our Parliament have committed the criminal act of treason by signing these treaties, and broken our laws to abolish our nation.
The EU will always be illegal in Britain; but once the EU has complete power and control here, we can no more get rid of it than we could Germany, had their planned illegal occupation of Britain in 1940 been successful".

I just don't know where to start.
I love the capitalisation of "British Constitution" (we do have one but it's not written in one consolidated document - and the European Communities Act 1974 is part of the package of constitutional texts!)
The point about being a parliamentary democracy is that once you elect a parliament they are there to take decisions. The right to sign treaties is a royal perogative, delegated from the Queen to Prime Minister.
The Queen by the way has said that if parliament adopted legislation to abolish the monarchy, she would sign it. She is not above the law, and does not consider herself above parliament (we had a civil war over whether a monarch was above parliament - the monarchy lost). Parliament has voted in favour of all six treaties.
So it's not treason, it's not illegal.
Get over yourself and get over it.
Oh and it's not a Nazi plot.  It's got so much equality in it it gets criticised for being over-PC instead...

If people like that commenter would only put their energy into working out how to use this amazingly unique and potentially powerful organisation to work to achieve our interests in the world rather than always complaining and having a seige mentality we could be a real powerhouse in Europe.