I call bullshit. I keep it short. The ever closer union thing was the intention for the EU the get go. UK politicians didn’t like that, joined nevertheless and tried to transform/change the EU to conform to their wishful thinking ultimately blockading and sabotaging the EU all along. Meanwhile they sold their idea of the EU to the british voter creating the misconceptions you spout.
Unelected officials you say? Don’t you elect your government? The government you voted for represents you in the EU. The MEP are elected. It may be not ideal but it certainly isn’t entirely undemocratic. EU directives have to be ratified and codified by national parliaments to become law.
You parroting the half truths and lies idiots like Farage blinding the voters with.
The last thing you claimed was TTIP was imposed on you by the EU when it was exactly the other way round - the UK pushing for TTIP while other EU governments tried to stop it.
I’m not sure why EU governance was set up the way it was set up (someone thought it was a good idea), but I’m not sure I buy the idea that it’s less than democratic than, say, my national government. People often use the term “unelected” to try to signify a lack of democracy, but the majority of positions in any government I know of are unelected. Basically, to me, people appointed by democratically elected officials are part of the democracy, and the unelected body of the EU that makes legislation is appointed by member states (and confirmed by the elected EU parliament).
If there is a real breakdown in the analogy between the relationship between the UK and the EU vs. a state and the US, it’s that the government of the UK does have a say in what happens at the EU, whereas the government of California doesn’t get to say anything about the laws the US government passes beyond the ability to try to argue the laws are unconstitutional. If you take something like the war on drugs, a policy that states had no opportunity to shape aside from informal input that drastically affects crime and the lives of their citizens, I would say that states seem relatively more “oppressed” by the federal government than EU member nations are by the EU. Certainly UK municipalities are more “oppressed” by the UK than the UK is by the EU (and my liver is way more oppressed by my body).
I think the whole argument relies on a lot of romance about the idea of the UK, which is a little ironic since it appears that the “Leave” vote may well destroy the UK (break it in two if not three). Maybe in practice there are some real problems with member nations getting trod on, but the overall process looks sufficiently democratic to me (and probably more democratic than the roughshod way that majorities get to run over oppositions in Canadian parliament). It looks more democratic than the way we negotiate trade deals which are alternative to the EU.
Well, I would say that humanity in general has shown itself incapable of managing fisheries, but at least it seems the EU is no exception.
But you also can’t remove your diplomats or trade-deal negotiators in this way. When it comes to dealing with other countries, the bulk of the work is always done by those appointed by the elected or hired by the civil service rather than those who are elected themselves. I really don’t get the difference.
Or one with an unelected monarch and second chamber, or one with a FPTP electoral system that disenfranchises millions and produces majority governments with a minority of the votes.
But the result from last week makes me think democracy is overrated anyway.
… Aaaand there goes the UK’s AAA credit rating. So up goes the UK’s borrowing rates. Now we know where some of that £350M/week will be going.
Although, honestly, if you asked me whether I was more upset with the Brexit or more upset that people continue to pay even the slightest amount of attention to ratings agencies, I’d choose the latter. The only thing I want to hear about ratings agencies is who from them is going to be spending time in prison for fraud.
I wouldn’t blame your English, I have other sources to understand how EU governance works as well. I just really don’t see what the problem is from a democracy point of view. The body directly elected by the people of member states can’t introduce legislation, but the body appointed by the democratically elected governments of member states can. That latter body, to me, is a democratic body.
Freedom to execute criminals.
Freedom to apply cruel and unusual punishments.
Freedom to put unsafe products on the market.
I can only call it as I have experienced it.
I know this may come over as arrogant, but I spoke twice with the Vote Leave people in out town and not a single one of them was capable of putting together a coherent argument for leaving the EU.
In fact I am pretty sure that I could put together quite a good argument, without telling lies about bendy bananas. The argument would focus on the different GDPs of EU economies, the problems of corruption in other national governments, and the risk of contagion from a Eurozone financial crisis. It would also look at the way that the EU is overly influenced by corporatist technocrats.
The thing is, I have looked at the counter arguments and they seem to me to be stronger. I won’t bore everybody with them because the referendum is over, but from Cameron’s speech this afternoon it looks as if what is going to happen is that the whole thing is going to get buried in Civil Service bureaucracy - as one commentator has already said, it will take them two years to get as far as the PowerPoints about the areas to be covered, and it’s very likely that a general election will intervene before Article 50, or even that the EU itself will change in such a way that the next PM can claim enough has changed to forget leaving.
That’s if the markets don’t force a decision earlier.
So what? It’s a recent thing, a result of the Seven Years War and the American War of Independence.
I used to argue that once we had the EU there was no need for big nation states; we could have gone for an umbrella government and gone back to England, Scotland, Bavaria, Provence and so on. Democracy for small nation states that we could understand. But politicians want to run ever bigger units.
Devolution met this need to a degree, but I would prefer to see a Swiss model. And the rebirth of the Kingdom of Wessex. Because deep down inside I am a romantic.
All unemployment numbers are manipulated and, basically, lies. In the US, they don’t even count unemployed people that give up on seeking jobs because they can’t find any.
Haven’t you got any Sachsenhausens left? Today Ludwig II would be a big success - an openly gay king who opposed anti-Semitism and would make Bavaria the cultural centre of Europe.
In my opinion, people who say things like this underestimate the bankruptcy of British democracy. It’s more of an elitist oligarchy, with an entire branch of government that is in power through inheritance. For the last three or four decades at least it has a terrible track record for acting against the interests of the general populace and if anything the British people were probably better off with a higher authority to temper the worst excesses of their own government.
Also, where up to now British people had some sort of say over the governance of an entire continent, now they only have a say over the governance of their own nation. Isn’t that less democracy? This is the problem with simplistic ideologies like “democracy über alles,” with a bit of contortion they can be used to argue anything you like.
They also shed blood in order to maintain a union of federated states, so your point is pretty reversible. More generally I would say that the last half-century has taught us that just because the USA shed blood over something, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
Actually this is the international standard. It’s difficult to measure unemployed people who don’t register themselves as job-seekers, so they are left out to make statistics more comparable internationally. Even so:
To me it’s a question of finding the right balance of power between different levels of locality. Individual, neighborhood, city, province, nation, international collective, whatever. All exist it’s just how do they interact and which sets rules about what.
But since one of the driving forces for the “Leave” campaign was national sovereignty, I don’t think they largely think of it the same way (undoubtedly some do). To whatever extent this was about going back to the golden age of the UK as defined by the childhood memories of each individual voter, I think Scotland separating will put a real damper on that.
Legally, the UK is obligated to take in people as immigrants. I think that counts as a “really.” I don’t know what a “sovereign people” are. Brexit backers orchestrated a huge right-wing media campaign, and a political propaganda campaign fanning the flames of fear and resentment to create an environment of bigotry against immigrants to gain support for Brexit. Many things have screwed over working-class people in the UK. Brexit will be another thing to add to that list. Immigrants weren’t and aren’t part of their problems, but they were an easy target for callow politicians and the right-wing to exploit.
