Fair point Rev, but I just haven’t got the time or energy to make a complete mirror list of US contributions to ‘encouraging democracy’ around the world (in South America, Vietnam, Aghanistan, Iraq etc etc etc etc.)
1 Like
Oh yeah, no argument there. There’s no saints on the world stage and the world would be a better place if everyone was educated as to the difference between “good guy” in historical fiction and the historical fiction of the “good guy”. 
The EU’s formal decision making powers are vested in the national governments (but they only each get one vote) and in the commission (but each member nation gets one commissioner, apart at the moment from France - since Romania’s commissioner seems to be a naturalised Frenchman). As a result there’s a massive disparity in democratic representation between the large countries and the small. A Luxembourg voter has more than 1000x the influence on European affairs of a German voter (and not un-coincidentally gets more net benefit per capita than any other EU state). In the UK, Rotten Boroughs (minute, corrupt and unrepresentative constituencies) were abolished in the 19th Century. And yet we seem to have recovered them in the 21st.
Ah, you might say, but this balances against the influence larger countries can wield. In practice, that’s only applied to Germany and France. If the UK came into the “centre of Europe” (something rarely tried over the last 40 years, but it has been tried), France regards this as a threat (France exercises influence principally through its relationship with Germany) and acts to disconnect it.
Not to say that the UK “can’t win” (there’s an article in this week’s Economist about the UK’s emerging relationship with other Northern European economies), but it’s difficult to get there from here.
Personally, I don’t vote UKIP and have no intention of doing so (ironically, UKIP only has MPs in the European Parliament, and wouldn’t have been able to make a breakthrough without the EP’s proportional representation system, which is a different voting system to the UK parliament). But I don’t believe that the EU is even remotely democratic. I think that its collection of massively disparate interests (see here 1) means that it won’t get there without an exponentially more concerted attempt at homogenisation than we are seeing even now, and I’d prefer not to be there when that happens.
So if we can keep free trade and get out (and nobody at this point knows what they’ll be voting for in the referendum) that’s the way I’ll be voting. If we can keep free trade, govern ourselves and stay in, fine.
What value would a hunk of rock be to the Scots?
Hunks of rock are excellent for testing feats of strength.
Exactly. Do you really think it’s coincidence that Rupert Murdoch controls influential media in all those nations?
You know how they say nobody sees himself as the bad guy?
I find it really bloody difficult to see how that could possibly apply to a scumbag like Murdoch.
How can he possibly be unaware that dragging down the IQ of entire nations is a Very Bad Thing?
He even had the hide to refer to himself as ‘the billionaire tyrant’ on The Simpsons…
Fuck that guy. Fuck him with a chainsaw.
No link, I was just commenting on the article. I agree with you, there’s a large chunk of every population that looks on the rest of Europe with suspicion.
The idea that the UK is uniquely deserving of scorn is odd, because they’re probably one of the more serious sticklers for the rules, enforcing rulings from Brussels that other EU member states ignore or subvert through tortuous logic. Look at the state of EU politics and the UK is virtually a beacon of rectitude - which speaks more for how bad most of the others are, but still…
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
