I don’t know about other nations in the EU but judging from the percentage of the comments following his article William Rees-Mogg, like many other articles we have seen in the press, has echoed well the feelings of most voters in the UK - if they were allowed to vote! And there’s the rub. We have grown up with the idea of the UK being a world leading democratic nation, as any nation could be - up to more recent years anyway. But more and more we have seen British democracy being eroded with authority being handed over to Brussels - without the consent of the British people. My last post is just one of so many illustrations of that point. I am not a political animal, but I have prized being born a citizen of a country that has a history of being governed on democratic principles. Democracy might be a bad form of government, but Churchill once said something to the effect that it is the best we have got! Whether we Euro-sceptics have got it right or not, William Rees-Mogg speaks for me and for so many other British citizens, and perhaps rightly for many others in the other individual nations when he says,
“Most of the voters in the individual European nations do in fact feel that the institutions of the EU are too remote, too opaque and too bureaucratic. Their national parliaments may be unsatisfactory, but compared with the EU institutions, they seem immediate, transparent and democratic.
“The lack of the democratic virtues in the EU has been a core criticism of Eurosceptics, in Britain and elsewhere. Yet people do not want to move to a full federation, because they fear that that would transfer the remaining powers from national parliaments to federal bureaucrats. A common feeling in Europe is that the bureaucrats will always win and that they will take over any reform that is passed.”
Just reading through the posts following Rees-Mogg’s article it is interesting to see the greater percentage so downright hostile towards the EU, and towards Gordon Brown seen to have handed over so much authority to Brussels. It is so easy to forget how our democracy has been so hard earned. We may think it incredible that a nation could ever give up its democratic principles but Germany did do that once - and under its dictatorship it cost millions of lives in World War II. With Cameron also being seen to renege on the promised referendum - which might well explain Cameron’s recent drop in the polls after being on such a high - one can only wonder at what future fragile moment when it thinks it has got itself altogether, will the EU just break apart?
