Well, after an avalanche of words over the past few months
of this seemingly never ending debate, on whether the UK should remain or leave
the European Union (EU), the talking will end tomorrow as the actual vote takes
place.
I’ve
written before about the desperately poor standard of debate from both
sides of the argument, with ridiculous claims made about the effects of staying or
leaving, but I think the most interesting issue that the campaign has thrown
up, is the one about democracy. It is often framed as national sovereignty
against a perceived out of touch, remote and foreign bureaucratic entity which
is the EU.
One of the main failings of the EU, in my opinion, is in
terms of communicating with the European people. Hardly anyone of my acquaintance
knows very much, if anything at tall about how the EU works. Most people can’t name
a single MEP, and are fuzzy about the democratic processes of the EU at best.
This lack of understanding allows for all kinds of myths to take hold, and the
EU must take the lion’s share of the blame for this, although it hardly
constitutes a reason to leave the organisation.
Essentially, the democratic structure of the EU has three
elements, the European Council, the European Commission and the European
Parliament, which together covers all aspects of the way the union takes
decisions.
The European Parliament, which is elected by the people of
the various nation states of the EU, holds a non-binding vote on new EU
treaties, dealing with trade for example, but it does not have the power to
veto them by itself. However, when the European Parliament threatened to vote
down the Nice Treaty, the national Parliaments of Italy and Belgium said they
would veto the treaty on behalf of the EU Parliament. Changes were made to the
treaty. The EU Parliament can also have other indirect influence. It can amend
and reject legislation, but to make a proposal for legislation, it needs the EU
Commission to draft a bill before anything can become law.
The European Commission is responsible for proposing
legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the EU treaties and managing the
day-to-day business of the EU. Each elected nation state government appoints
one commissioner. The European Council can confer powers to Commission, but on
its own, the Commission doesn’t have any real powers.
Power resides with the European Council, which consists of
the heads of state of all nations within the EU, although in practice the national
representatives are usually the Foreign ministers. Of course all of these
people are elected in their own countries, so it can’t really be argued that the
EU is undemocratic. Each nation only gets a say in one of the 28 Council
representatives with no say over who the rest are, but would we in the UK want
the other nations selecting our representative? I think not.
So, that is how it all fits together, and I don’t think that
you can credibly say that is undemocratic, but it doesn’t stop the Brexit
brigade repeating the opinion, usually in the expression of ‘we can’t vote them
out’. This is true of the other nation’s representatives, but as I say, that is
perfectly reasonable.
I do wonder what the people of other EU countries, and
indeed the world generally, make of this new found pre-occupation of the
British (or some of the British anyway) with democratic governance?
This is a country, let us not forget, that has a monarchy,
and an unelected upper chamber (the House of Lords) and probably the most
undemocratic electoral system in the world, where the present government was
elected by only 24% of the voters. A nation with a history of supressing national
democracy in other lands, during the Empire days, and one that has overthrown foreign democratically elected governments, in Iran for example, when they refuse to do our bidding.
Hypocrisy perhaps? Or just good old fashioned using
arguments that suit your agenda at that time? By Friday we will know whether
the British people have been fooled by this line of argument. I do hope not.
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