Report comment

Please fill in the form to report an unsuitable comment. Please state which comment is of concern and why. It will be sent to our moderator for review.

Comment

Weird post. I'm perfectly happy to discuss the shortcomings of the EU in a rational way but this kind of rhetoric is about as sensible - and leads to the same kind of thinking - as the German or American terrorists of the 1970s who called the Federal Republic or the United States fascist states. The EU is not a dictatorship by any meaningful definition of that term. It has no police or secret surveillance system. It has no military. It can't arrest or jail anyone. Its only power to enforce its rulings depends entirely on a member state agreeing to abide by its treaty obligations (and we can see that several (e.g. Hungary) are backsliding with little consequence). The only ultimate sanction for non-compliance is expulsion. While it is true that the Commission has the right of proposing legislation, it like any other civil service can be and frequently is lobbied by interest groups saying what they would like legislation on. (Did you know that the Americans have four times the number of people lobbying in Brussels than the UK currently does - precisely because it doesn't have internal access to EU discussions?) Then the Council has to approve a proposal before it goes anywhere. The Council consists of government ministers who are appointed according to the terms of their own national constitutions; so it is as democratic as any national government (whatever view you take of that). Then proposals have to be worked up by committees of national civil servants each arguing for their own national preferred legal regime, with inevitable compromises - but where historically the UK has been pretty good at getting its own way. Then in most cases any final proposal has to be approved by a significant majority not only by the Council but also the Parliament - which consists of a large number of elected representatives. In short, the EU is no more but no less democratic than the UK. And the regulation is intended - it may not always work - to create common standards so that a number of competing interests operate on a level playing field - whether in relation to workers' rights, public health, ability to trade across the whole of Europe, or whatever. Other than the occasional Dickensian employer who would like to abolish minimum protections for employees, and possibly the MInister for Agriculture who seems happy to accept US food standards if that lets US farmers out-compete British farmers operating to EU standards, what 'endless regulation imposed on the unfree citizen' (incidentally a UK national isn't a citizen, he/she is a subject), would anyone like to see removed?

Your details

Cancel