The Agora system is a format by which the European Parliament can get a handle how the outside world is thinking, in particular about the whole Constitutional thingy.

There will be an Agora meeting just before the October summit in Lisbon, and I have the invite list in front of me.

I can tell you that 554 NGO’s and Quasi NGO’s have been invited along to this boondoggle. Going through the list I note that only one is coming from a eurosceptical perspective, and that is the Freedom Association. The others are either funded or unfunded fellow travellers.

Thus they pay people to come to tell them what they have paid them to say. They then can go and say that they have listened to civil society.