mtbc | EU membership referendum (Reply)

Poll cards have been arriving around the country for the coming referendum on the UK's membership of the EU. I quite like receiving such reminders; in the US, I think maybe I received a card relating to my annual voter registration but not one for specific elections.

Reminiscent of the oil-centric Scottish independence campaign I have thought that the remain campaign's arguments do not look far enough ahead: I think that many leave voters would accept an economic shock in return for more reassurance about the longer term. Decades ago when the UK voted to join the EEC I don't think the electorate had anything like Maastricht in mind and I suspect that the fear has been that this referendum might be the last good chance for the UK electorate to head off a future in a European superstate. Some might argue that it is better to have a voice from inside such a state: that we can share our strength with others who would seek to improve how the EU works and that we can have a say in rules that could affect us even from outside. Perhaps the retort is that we haven't managed to fix the EU yet and that our influence grows ever weaker as the EU expands.

In considering this fear of an EU superstate I wonder if some analogy is to be made with the US Federal government whose power today, at least for practical purposes, suffices to allow us in recent years to power a small village with Robert Bork's spinning corpse. In the context of subsidiarity I wonder if it is the ECJ who adjudge the acceptable extent of EU jurisdiction and what the trend has been.

One might also wonder if the leave vote is coming in part from the long-established white British who miss a time when they had a good life and respect, maybe a little like the American Trump-voters angry and confused at their reversal of fortunes and the apparent power and prosperity of the strangers in their midst. Still, I shan't thus segue to the immigration debate in this entry.

When I last wrote here on this I said, the European Parliament is underpowered in comparison with the European Commission, and perhaps that is also something of an issue: the UK electorate gets to choose a government who then get to choose one member of the EU body that originates legislation; I would guess that fixing that entails rather improbable treaty change. It feels as if the UK voter has barely a dash of indirect influence.

I had previously also suggested that, The Eurozone crisis and the Syrian refugee crisis have definitely been throwing some of the faultlines into sharp relief. I wonder if there is a more general political theme here: differences. There is of course an issue of scale where each voter must feel tiny if the whole of the UK is but a small fraction of the EU's principal bodies so their views are lost among the many. This is perhaps some of the force behind the campaign for Scottish independence: Scotland politically looks very unlike, say, Oxfordshire or Cambridgeshire, and probably feels underrepresented accordingly. This also probably relates to EU expansion: the newer members are probably expected to pull the EU consensus further still from what the UK may find comfortable.

The above may emphasize the wrong questions: sure, the EU will tend to impose on us legislation we'd not have chosen for ourselves, probably increasingly so. Does that make it bad legislation? It still has voters at the roots and a more dilute voice may better insulate against national populist fads. I can't help but note that, while I wish to return to the US, indeed would still be living there now if not for my family, I am not a typical American, yet I will agree to submit myself to the laws they choose and will indeed consider many of those laws to be in my interest.