Euro musings, round 2
May. 26th, 2014 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rich_jackoNigel Farage, for all his faults (of which there are, oh, so very many...) was right about at least one thing. A couple of years ago, he said that when politicians don't listen to the people, extremism rises.
I didn't vote for UKIP last Thursday, but I don't think them topping the poll is a sign of the coming apocalypse. To all those moaning about how the result makes them somehow ashamed to be British, please don't be ridiculous. For a start, we should be celebrating the fact that the BNP got wiped out. For another thing, look at who the French voted for, FFS!
A large chunk of the electorate did not suddenly turn into racists overnight. Instead of blaming the voters, maybe we should think about the reasons why people across Europe voted in the way they did.
Being anti-EU does NOT make someone stupid, extremist, racist, a xenophobe, or a Little Englander ( / Frenchman / Danishman / Grecian / etc.). 'Against the EU' is emphatically not the same thing as 'against other Europeans'.
Yes, the EU has done some good, but it meddles far too much and it's disastrous currency union project has brought an awful lot of misery, particularly to Mediterranean countries. The answer to every crisis is more centralisation and integration. The Commission is on a continual power-grab and utterly ignores its own principle of subsidiarity (decisions taken at the most effective level - be it local, national, or supra-national).
Unfortunately, the EU's main unifying influence seems to have been to unite everyone against the EU...
Increased devolution, as well as independence movements in Scotland, Catalonia, Belgium and elsewhere, show that what a lot of people want is smaller government, closer to home and more in touch with their concerns, not some distant, centralised, one-size-fits-all bureaucracy.
Tony Benn's 'five questions for the powerful' are always worth repeating:
"What power do you have? Where did you get it? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And, how can we get rid of you? Anyone who cannot answer the last of those questions does not live in a democratic system."
When all the mainstream political parties are pro-EU; where we had an EU constitution rejected again and again in referenda, only to be re-badged and implemented anyway; when all the candidates for Commission President are pro-integrationist fanatics who think, "The day of the nation state is over"; is it any wonder that voters seek out alternative parties to make their discontent known?
This can go one of two ways now. The EU elite can finally admit that these results are the death knell of 'an ever closer union', and start to listen. If they do, this election may turn out to have been a very good thing, the start of proper reform of the EU so that it works for everybody. Alternatively, they can dismiss the results as domestic politics and fringe extremism, and plough on regardless. In which case, things will only get worse.
Let's hope they listen.
(I originally posted this to Facebook, where the UKIP-related hysteria has got a little, well, hysterical.)
I didn't vote for UKIP last Thursday, but I don't think them topping the poll is a sign of the coming apocalypse. To all those moaning about how the result makes them somehow ashamed to be British, please don't be ridiculous. For a start, we should be celebrating the fact that the BNP got wiped out. For another thing, look at who the French voted for, FFS!
A large chunk of the electorate did not suddenly turn into racists overnight. Instead of blaming the voters, maybe we should think about the reasons why people across Europe voted in the way they did.
Being anti-EU does NOT make someone stupid, extremist, racist, a xenophobe, or a Little Englander ( / Frenchman / Danishman / Grecian / etc.). 'Against the EU' is emphatically not the same thing as 'against other Europeans'.
Yes, the EU has done some good, but it meddles far too much and it's disastrous currency union project has brought an awful lot of misery, particularly to Mediterranean countries. The answer to every crisis is more centralisation and integration. The Commission is on a continual power-grab and utterly ignores its own principle of subsidiarity (decisions taken at the most effective level - be it local, national, or supra-national).
Unfortunately, the EU's main unifying influence seems to have been to unite everyone against the EU...
Increased devolution, as well as independence movements in Scotland, Catalonia, Belgium and elsewhere, show that what a lot of people want is smaller government, closer to home and more in touch with their concerns, not some distant, centralised, one-size-fits-all bureaucracy.
Tony Benn's 'five questions for the powerful' are always worth repeating:
"What power do you have? Where did you get it? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And, how can we get rid of you? Anyone who cannot answer the last of those questions does not live in a democratic system."
When all the mainstream political parties are pro-EU; where we had an EU constitution rejected again and again in referenda, only to be re-badged and implemented anyway; when all the candidates for Commission President are pro-integrationist fanatics who think, "The day of the nation state is over"; is it any wonder that voters seek out alternative parties to make their discontent known?
This can go one of two ways now. The EU elite can finally admit that these results are the death knell of 'an ever closer union', and start to listen. If they do, this election may turn out to have been a very good thing, the start of proper reform of the EU so that it works for everybody. Alternatively, they can dismiss the results as domestic politics and fringe extremism, and plough on regardless. In which case, things will only get worse.
Let's hope they listen.
(I originally posted this to Facebook, where the UKIP-related hysteria has got a little, well, hysterical.)
