Tuesday, June 23, 2009
A Corruption of Democracy [Andrew Stuttaford]
Daniel Hannan MEP (the Gordon Brown-bashing YouTube star of a few months back) begins this piece by looking at the problems facing the British Labour party, but then moves on to a topic of less parochial interest, the way that the EU is corrupting the democracies of Europe:
The EU, as well as being undemocratic in its own structures, serves to vitiate democracy within its member states. British voters must be denied their general election so that Eurocrats can have their treaty.
It's an awesome phenomenon, this readiness of national politicians to place the EU's interests before their own. Think of John Major breaking his party over Maastricht. Think of Gordon Brown, who had been determined to present himself as an honest leader after years of Blairite spin, having to start by pretending that Lisbon was different from the European Constitution, the smoke billowing from his pants as he kept woodenly repeating the claim...Think of Bertie Ahern resigning as Ireland's Taoiseach so that the sleaze allegations levelled against him shouldn't prejudice the "Yes" campaign. Think of Belgium, which had been without a government since its election, cobbling together a ministry for a couple of weeks in order to ratify the treaty whereupon, job done, it went back to dissolving.
Herein lies what C S Lewis would have called the EU's hideous strength, its ability to make otherwise good people behave badly. The lack of democracy intrinsic in Brussels – the way it is run by unelected functionaries, the way it swats aside referendum results – has spilt over into its constituent nations. In order to make an undemocratic system work, they too must become less democratic.
06/23 06:07 PM
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