The co-presidents of the Green group in the European Parliament, Magda Aelvot and Claudia Roth, were up in arms in Strasbourg last week at proposals to name Parliament buildings after men only.
Instead of honouring Konrad Adenauer, Winston Churchill and Jean Monnet in this way, the Parliament would be better employed naming the buildings after women such as Petra Kelly, co-founder of the German Green party, Simone Veil, the French liberal politician and Rosa Luxem- burg, the German communist murdered in 1919. If those names wouldn't do, they suggested women such as Hildegard von Bingen, a medieval mystic, Marie Olympe de Gouges, a French revolutionary feminist or Queen Christina of Sweden, a philosopher, for the honour. The Parliament, they said, should apply "equal rights policy also to its symbolic acts". Watch this space.