The No to the Treaty of Lisbon camp in Ireland have a new weapon – Dustin the Turkey, dumped out of the Eurovision Song Contest at the semi-final stage. The slogan goes ‘They didn’t vote for us. Get them back. Vote No to Lisbon’ – BBC News has an article about it here. While it’s a clever bit of campaigning to link the Treaty with Eurovision, and the slogan has undertones of the lack of solidarity etc., that plenty of EU countries probably feel, it’s really wide of the mark because the song was just rubbish. Sorry.

Beyond that if you compare the Eurovision song contest to the EU it makes the EU look quite fair. In Eurovision Russia (the most populous country, 150 million citizens) counts equally with San Marino (30000 citizens), and the EU has decent standards allowing a country to join – Belarus and Isreal participate in Eurovision. I’ve previously suggested an alternative voting system for the Eurovision final, and while I have not done the same for the semi-finals where Dustin was kicked out, I would suspect that his entry would still be rooted at the foot of the table.

So sorry Dustin – your song was rubbish, and the EU is fairer than Eurovision.