Democracy and the EU
By MG Burt
It has been said, including in these pages, that the EU is undemocratic. I would advise anyone interested in finding out about democracy and the EU to read the recent article by Malcolm Turner in your sister publication The New European ( 15th March 2018) and a follow up letter by Richard Corbett MEP (28th March 2018) in the same paper.
They will find that labelling the EU as undemocratic, without qualification, is not fair comment. Its commitment to proportional representation is a strong point in its favour. However, one might argue, even if the EU is democratic, it is far inferior to our own democracy, which, after all, has the “mother of all parliaments”. But then our democracy is not perfect, a fact one becomes acutely aware of when one consults The Economist’s Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2017. Out of the world’s 19 full democracies, one finds that our democracy ranks only 14th.
But there is a much easier way of getting some idea of the relative merits of our own democracy and that of the EU. In the general election in 2015, UKIP won several million votes, but not one single seat in our “mother of all parliaments”. And yet in the European Parliament, which allocates 7 seats to our Eastern Region, UKIP holds 3 of those seats.