Controversial

EU assembly launches grilling of new Commissioners

The European Parliament launched two weeks of confirmation hearings Monday for the EU's incoming executive commissioners, with some of the more controversial figures braced for a hostile grilling.

So what do they regard as controversial? I wonder.

Kroes' extensive business links -- she has sat on the boards of more than 30 Dutch and foreign companies -- have caused disquiet over whether she can serve fully independently as the EU's chief corporate regulator.

Ok, I can see that this may be a problem, although my instincts tell me that it could just as easily be ideological. The women is a capitalist for Marx's sake. But this is outrageously controversial......

The cigar-chomping Buttiglione is a staunch Catholic whose conservative views on homosexuals and abortion will ensure him a lively reception from the PES, the Greens and other left-wingers at his hearing on October 5. Udre carries less overtly controversial political baggage, but she has aroused suspicions among some MEPs for professing to a "healthy euroscepticism".

One of them is religious, Shock Horror, whilst the other is sceptical about the 21st century secular religion of the EU. Next we'll have free marketeers nominated. Oh wait a minute...

Britain's Peter Mandelson faces opposition on more ideological grounds when he appears before the parliament on October 4. The twice-disgraced confidante of Prime Minister Tony Blair is expected to bring a free-market zeal to his post of trade commissioner, an agenda not shared by everyone in Europe.

So in the views of the 68 generation whose neosocialist views are strangling our civilisation, we now know what it means to be controversial.