Quote of the day - why the EU should be razed to the ground and the earth beneath salted

From Pete North...

"If you want to live in a top down technocracy where politics is reduced to consultative exercises for show, so that we are all free to live obedient little lives with professional politicians closing down ever more freedoms, then the EU is a nice and easy off the shelf answer."

This is the sum of it all really. I commented on a little online video of (mostly) young people marching in Germany over the proposed new EU copyright rules - an example of powerful business and media interests essentially buying protection from emerging forms of communication online.

I appreciate too that our Westminster government is little better and that the manner in which they have emasculated local government leaves it as essentially the agent of central government fiat.

Getting Brexit should be the opportunity to reassert popular control over government - as I wrote at the new year:

So when we leave the EU that should just be the start. The other shibboleths of our state need democratising too - from the House of Lords and the judiciary through the NHS, police and civil service, to the legion of unaccountable local council chief executives, social services directors and planning managers. If you are looking for a 2019 project, this should be that project - Brexit ought to be the launch pad for a renewed democracy. I fear the great and good - those with most to lose from more democracy and more accountability - will do their utmost do make Brexit into a vehicle for less democracy: they should be stopped.

I remain optimistic.

Addendum: from Samizdata...

MEP’s can not create, amend, or reject proposals. They can act as a method of slowing them, requesting changes or rethinks of proposed policies, but if the other (unelected) parts of the EU want to force through a proposal they can just keep pushing it until it gets through in the knowledge that elected MEP’s will not have the power to propose future updates, changes, or abolition of legislation.

The European Commission only has to win once and it can never be repealed without the European Commission wishing it so.

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