It is bitterly ironic that now that the president of the EU and other 'ministers' or high representatives have been appointed for the EU that Britons are whining about the process. The British have in fact always favoured a less democratic approach to the EU as Tony Benn has long noted, there has been a 'democratic deficit'. This goes back to the period 1978-9 when the European Parliament was being created. It is not like most parliaments in that it is not the place for legislative initiative, this insteads come from the European Commission, effectively the civil service of the EU, and like most civil services members are appointed rather than elected. Britain was more than happy for the European Parliament to be toothless and by the early 1980s it was clear that the Council of Ministers, made up of the prime ministers of the member states was to be the real driving force of the community. This is why you tend to see legislation for the EU coming out of those meetings hosted by the prime minister of whichever country was currently holding the presidency of the EU. The British liked this approach because it made them feel they were yielding no sovereignty to the EU and in fact that they were pulling back some degree of sovereignty lost in simply joining what was then the EEC. It could be argued that the Council of Ministers is democratic as the members of it were elected in their individual countries, but in fact it meant the electorate did not have a say on how the EU is being run. In addition, this simple assumption that the prime minister was the natural person to sit on the Council created the kind of atmosphere in which last week's deal to appoint a president seemed quite natural.
Of course, new president, Herman van Rampuy was elected prime minister by the Belgian people and you could argue that he has gone through a partial democratic process. I think he should have his position ratified by the European Parliament. A better process would have been for the parliament to elect the president and the other ministers. Many countries have an indirect election of presidents, notably the USA where the decision comes through a college system rather than directly electing the president as happens in France. However, because of the sustained weakness of the European Parliament, encouraged by the British for the past thirty years, such an approach was ruled out for selecting a president.
The British are not a politically sophisticated nation. Most people have little understanding of the UK political system and a large majority of the potential electorate never votes. They argue that they 'don't do politics' but then turn round demanding very political changes such as the expelling of immigrants and the return of the death penalty. To the British the kind of balances which are sort when a coalition government comes to power are an alien concept. The UK has not had a coalition in 64 years so unlike in neighbouring states we have not come used to how these systems work, so they seem even more improper to us than countries which do truly engage with their political systems. Of course, the UK is currently the least democratic of all the member states of the EU in having half of its parliament appointed predominantly for life rather than elected. This is one of the comic things about Lady Ashton becoming high representative for foreign issues. She was appointed head of a local health authority an unelected position and then was made a life peer and appointed commissioner for trade before being appointed to her new role. Only in the UK where members of parliament, i.e. members of the House of Lords, can be appointed could such a career path happen. This is why it is ironic when right-wing commentators like Daniel Hannan whine on about the lack of democracy in the EU process. The problem begins here in the UK and its undemocratic system, something the Conservatives have always backed. Our undemocratic tendencies have led us to support rather than challenge when these things are built into the EU structure.
Of course, it is handy for the right-wingers to portray the EU as undemocratic. By being unwilling to engage with the European Parliament which has representatives directly elected by the British public, they have hampered the one element which could promote democracy. This is partly because they have a patronising attitude to the British public and as a result the electorate is going towards the demagogues of the UKIP and the BNP who offer politics on the level of the average person with lots of shouting and jumping up and down that Britons love. We want policy stemming from indignation rather than rational thought. All of these difficulties are great for those who want the UK to leave the EU. Some have a fantasy of entering NAFTA others want us to simply float on the edge of Europe trying to get our goods in passed the EU tariff barriers or expect to re-invent trade with former colonies the bulk of whom need development aid and are not in a strong position to buy from the UK certainly not when compared to the millions of well-off EU consumers. Even independent states Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein are in the EEA and Switzerland has numerous bilateral deals with EU, not its member states.
As always the British want to have their cake and eat it. They insist on democracy in the EU but have always favoured a structure which actually weakens the most democratic part of the union. They want democracy elsewhere in Europe but also want to retain half their parliament unelected and do not even get me on to having an unelected head of state and the fact that so much legislation is implemented and extended through royal prerogative (I know it is delegated to the prime minister who is elected, but it allows him/her to introduce numerous laws without parliamentary scrutiny which in itself is undemocratic). The bulk of British people have always been told the EU does them harm, but where would the majority of items in Lidl and Aldi be if we were outside the EU? If we want to have more of a say in what happens in the EU we need to engage thoroughly with it (the UK always has only half of its quota of European Commission staff because so few people apply and the number has to be made up by English speakers from other European states, even from ones outside the EU); heckling from the sidelines achieves nothing. Support the European Parliament and ensure it gains the powers it needs to democratically monitor and police the EU otherwise the back-room deals the UK has always favoured before will continue to dominate.
Showing posts with label European Parliament. Show all posts
Showing posts with label European Parliament. Show all posts
Monday, 23 November 2009
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
Dangerous Days for British Politics?
Well, I finally got to look at the European election results. They are probably the worst guide to what will happen in a general election than any other results because the system used differs so far from the electoral system used in all other elections in Great Britain (though not Northern Ireland). However, it is a good indicator of trends and attitudes. To some extent it has not revealed any particular disgust with politicians as the turnout at 35% is the same as it always is for European elections and shows the extent to which most people in the UK see no connection to what goes on in the European Parliament to their everyday lives, though they will whinge about the limits on working hours and the nature of their fruit. Of course, it is the European Commission and the thorough application by all UK governments (whether Conservative, even under Thatcher or Labour) of all EU regulations.
The UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) now have 13 MEPs, the same as Labour. There have been abortive attempts at parties which plan to get the UK out of the EU, notably the Referendum Party, but UKIP for all its problems has been the only one which has managed to grow. They have no MPs and are unlikely to get them with the system we use in our general elections, so there will be a disjuncture between our national parliament even after the next election, and our European representation. It is weird that a party that wants nothing to do with Europe will now have its members heavily involved there. What alarms me, and was apparent from the UKIP publicity, which in the areas I visit exceeded that of all the other parties combined in terms of quantity, is that effectively they are an extreme right-wing, nationalist party and given their views on 'protecting UK borders' they are like a light version of the BNP (British National Party) which itself has moved on from referencing illegal immigrants and asylum seekers to more racialist viewpoints. UKIP's discriminatory policies have now added a bridge between the right-wing of the Conservative Party and the BNP and most dangerously are another party for whom spouting such bigotry is normal.
Of course, as Channel 4 News highlighted last night, the support for the BNP (British National Party), who got two MEPs (and importantly the money that brings), came from old traditional Labour voters. This is not a new phenomenon, you only have to look at early support for the Nazi Party in Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. This was an important constituency for them, and you have people moving between the Communists (KPD) and Nazis (NSDAP) quite often, sometimes depending on what social facilities each party could offer. The fact that extreme left and extreme right meet is something long known. If you reject democracy, it then simply comes down to emphasis on which groups you are going to attack. What is interesting to consider is where votes came from for UKIP. Some it is clear came from the BNP whose share of the vote actually fell. The only reason why Nick Griffin got in as an MEP is because support for Labour fell too. This is precisely what I said about each individuals vote counting far more when turnout is low (and in this case turnout from particular voters). I said this on the day and many Labour voters need to feel ashamed that they allowed the far right to get such a bridgehead because they did not get out and vote. As the turnout itself maintained, this suggests Labour voters were also replaced by extreme right-wing voters who in the past would not have voted at a European Parliament election. Interestingly, in contrast to France and Germany where the extreme left have done well, there is no sign of that in the UK. Perhaps we need something stronger on the left than Scargill's Socialist Labour Party or certainly have a different leader with more credibility.
We have always had people opposed to the EU. Personally I think it is a good idea which sometimes works imperfectly and the way to bring about change is not to turn your back on it, but engage more and get efficiency in how it works. On a purely selfish basis, myself and many members of my extended family have benefited directly from the EU (especially those of my family who are farmers) and we would all be worse off if the UK had stayed out. However, millions of UK citizens benefit from the EU and never notice. If the UK left the EU a lot of labour and social legislation we enjoy the benefits of would be under threat, the price of many goods would rise immediately, especially food items (the UK has long been a food importer) and actually UK farming would suffer immensely as it would be outside its largest market. Of course we could put up stronger barriers to Polish workers coming to the UK, but that is as much about employers tempting them here with low wages (though higher than in Poland) and using even illegal immigrants especially in the boom of 1994-2007. If employers had paid decent wages and not tried to squeeze out even more millions of profits then this issue would not have risen. British nationalists like the BNP and UKIP seem to believe that there is something inherently attractive about the UK compared to other countries. There is the element that we speak English which is commonly learnt in many countries, but if employers had not been drawing on immigrant workers then they would have gone somewhere that was. It is about economics, but of course for the far right they ignore all that and think it is some mystical force.
The real danger now is that the language of the far right has become legitimate. I heard Andrew Brons, the other BNP MEP, talking on Channel 4 News last night about the 'indigenous people' of the UK (which in fact are the Celts, but he meant anyone white) as if this was a legitimate term. He dismissed the word 'racist' as being invented by a Trotskyite in the 1930s, as if that made it invalid (and in fact he seems to be ignorant of where his own views originated from in the biological racialism that developed in the 1860s) and was not challenged on his statement. Now that the BNP has a platform I can only hope that people will see how foolish so many of their statements are. However, where they succeed is by making their extreme views seem 'normal'. Again in the interview, Brons said that expelling failed asylum seekers and illegal immigrants was a given as if that had already been resolved. The UK expels many of these people anyway, but there is no sense that represents thousands of personal disasters and deaths that the UK government contributes to on a daily basis.
Most alarming they do not consider anyone who is non-white to be able to be British. I have not heard how they view the 700,000 mixed race people in the UK. Of course, supposedly liberal West Germany maintained the law that only those with two German parents could ever vote. They also tried deporting delinquent children (aged 14+) of second generation Turkish settlers to Turkey a country they had never visited (naturally Turkey refused to take them). Finally Germany was compelled to remove this racist law that dated back to 1913. However, it shows how easy it is for racist policies to exist even in the 2000s when all of us go on diversity training. I know people who lived in South Africa in the apartheid era and what people forget is in fact the regime affected everyone badly. Of course blacks got it worse, but everyone in South Africa of whatever ethnicity had to be classified and if suddenly you were reclassified you found yourself excluded from certain services. Such an approach as in Nazi Germany immediately leads to corruption of public services and inefficiency. Of course the identity card system envisaged for the UK will play right into the hands of the far right. One reason why it has not advanced is because of how difficult it is and how costly. An apartheid system will be far worse. Also people forget a key reason why South Africa ended apartheid was not political but economic, you cannot bring the best out of all your citizens if you put them into different boxes and enforce segregation. The UK transport system is in a dire situation, imagine if you had to have 'whites only' carriages. The UK is too inter-twined with Europe to be divorced and its population is too inter-twined to try to bring about some artificial segregation.
British society has always been full of bigots and racists. It also has people like my grandfather (a life-long Labour supporter) who grumbled about 'the darkies' but always complimented how hard working the Asian woman next door and the black men he worked with were and could never see the fact that these people made up the group he saw as the 'darkies'. Any group in society is made up of individuals that we know. Whereas last week bigots may have bitten their lip now they feel they can speak out and that is going to lead quickly to millions of individual tragedies as they feel heartened by the election result and the sense that the views of UKIP and BNP are held widely and legitimate. We cannot now avoid race riots in the coming months. The UK is going to become a very unpleasant place whatever colour you are, especially if you live in a city. We can only pray for a rainy summer rather than a hot one otherwise it will make 1981 look like a picnic in the park. All good people need to constantly contest racist behaviour and use the term 'racist' when we see it otherwise we are going to be living in a country of armed camps.
Clearly both UKIP and BNP have not thought anything about the economy. I have mentioned how employers have driven economic migration by their desire for cheap labour. However, if we even begin moving towards far-right policies then the economy will suffer immediately. People forget why West Indian and Asian immigration was encouraged in the 1950s (and the same applies to Turkish, Yugoslav and Italian immigration into Germany) it was to fill labour shortages especially in the service sector (which of course has become the dominant sector of our economy since 1974) and to start intimidating and removing people in those industries is going to send the UK economy rapidly back into the 1970s. Hospitals would close, shops in many towns would disappear, the transport sector would be cut back. The UK has had immigration for over 2000 years, to try and rip out certain people from UK society is going to be like cutting off an arm because it happens to be your right one.
The fight against racism now has to be stepped up a gear. We need to work to squeeze the bridgehead the bigots have established and challenge their behaviour so that it does not become 'normal', it is always abnormal and abhorrent. Of course, if the Conservatives win the next general election, their policies will be infected by the rhetoric of the hard right, partly because they have very few policies anyway; there is no indication of how they would have dealt with the credit crunch, the bank collapses or the MPs expenses scandals at all. Of course, disillusion with MPs is at its peak and this is a golden opportunity for extreme parties to play on that, as Hitler did in the early 1930s. The price for their success will be a very high one for the UK economy, British society and millions of individuals to pay.
The UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) now have 13 MEPs, the same as Labour. There have been abortive attempts at parties which plan to get the UK out of the EU, notably the Referendum Party, but UKIP for all its problems has been the only one which has managed to grow. They have no MPs and are unlikely to get them with the system we use in our general elections, so there will be a disjuncture between our national parliament even after the next election, and our European representation. It is weird that a party that wants nothing to do with Europe will now have its members heavily involved there. What alarms me, and was apparent from the UKIP publicity, which in the areas I visit exceeded that of all the other parties combined in terms of quantity, is that effectively they are an extreme right-wing, nationalist party and given their views on 'protecting UK borders' they are like a light version of the BNP (British National Party) which itself has moved on from referencing illegal immigrants and asylum seekers to more racialist viewpoints. UKIP's discriminatory policies have now added a bridge between the right-wing of the Conservative Party and the BNP and most dangerously are another party for whom spouting such bigotry is normal.
Of course, as Channel 4 News highlighted last night, the support for the BNP (British National Party), who got two MEPs (and importantly the money that brings), came from old traditional Labour voters. This is not a new phenomenon, you only have to look at early support for the Nazi Party in Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. This was an important constituency for them, and you have people moving between the Communists (KPD) and Nazis (NSDAP) quite often, sometimes depending on what social facilities each party could offer. The fact that extreme left and extreme right meet is something long known. If you reject democracy, it then simply comes down to emphasis on which groups you are going to attack. What is interesting to consider is where votes came from for UKIP. Some it is clear came from the BNP whose share of the vote actually fell. The only reason why Nick Griffin got in as an MEP is because support for Labour fell too. This is precisely what I said about each individuals vote counting far more when turnout is low (and in this case turnout from particular voters). I said this on the day and many Labour voters need to feel ashamed that they allowed the far right to get such a bridgehead because they did not get out and vote. As the turnout itself maintained, this suggests Labour voters were also replaced by extreme right-wing voters who in the past would not have voted at a European Parliament election. Interestingly, in contrast to France and Germany where the extreme left have done well, there is no sign of that in the UK. Perhaps we need something stronger on the left than Scargill's Socialist Labour Party or certainly have a different leader with more credibility.
We have always had people opposed to the EU. Personally I think it is a good idea which sometimes works imperfectly and the way to bring about change is not to turn your back on it, but engage more and get efficiency in how it works. On a purely selfish basis, myself and many members of my extended family have benefited directly from the EU (especially those of my family who are farmers) and we would all be worse off if the UK had stayed out. However, millions of UK citizens benefit from the EU and never notice. If the UK left the EU a lot of labour and social legislation we enjoy the benefits of would be under threat, the price of many goods would rise immediately, especially food items (the UK has long been a food importer) and actually UK farming would suffer immensely as it would be outside its largest market. Of course we could put up stronger barriers to Polish workers coming to the UK, but that is as much about employers tempting them here with low wages (though higher than in Poland) and using even illegal immigrants especially in the boom of 1994-2007. If employers had paid decent wages and not tried to squeeze out even more millions of profits then this issue would not have risen. British nationalists like the BNP and UKIP seem to believe that there is something inherently attractive about the UK compared to other countries. There is the element that we speak English which is commonly learnt in many countries, but if employers had not been drawing on immigrant workers then they would have gone somewhere that was. It is about economics, but of course for the far right they ignore all that and think it is some mystical force.
The real danger now is that the language of the far right has become legitimate. I heard Andrew Brons, the other BNP MEP, talking on Channel 4 News last night about the 'indigenous people' of the UK (which in fact are the Celts, but he meant anyone white) as if this was a legitimate term. He dismissed the word 'racist' as being invented by a Trotskyite in the 1930s, as if that made it invalid (and in fact he seems to be ignorant of where his own views originated from in the biological racialism that developed in the 1860s) and was not challenged on his statement. Now that the BNP has a platform I can only hope that people will see how foolish so many of their statements are. However, where they succeed is by making their extreme views seem 'normal'. Again in the interview, Brons said that expelling failed asylum seekers and illegal immigrants was a given as if that had already been resolved. The UK expels many of these people anyway, but there is no sense that represents thousands of personal disasters and deaths that the UK government contributes to on a daily basis.
Most alarming they do not consider anyone who is non-white to be able to be British. I have not heard how they view the 700,000 mixed race people in the UK. Of course, supposedly liberal West Germany maintained the law that only those with two German parents could ever vote. They also tried deporting delinquent children (aged 14+) of second generation Turkish settlers to Turkey a country they had never visited (naturally Turkey refused to take them). Finally Germany was compelled to remove this racist law that dated back to 1913. However, it shows how easy it is for racist policies to exist even in the 2000s when all of us go on diversity training. I know people who lived in South Africa in the apartheid era and what people forget is in fact the regime affected everyone badly. Of course blacks got it worse, but everyone in South Africa of whatever ethnicity had to be classified and if suddenly you were reclassified you found yourself excluded from certain services. Such an approach as in Nazi Germany immediately leads to corruption of public services and inefficiency. Of course the identity card system envisaged for the UK will play right into the hands of the far right. One reason why it has not advanced is because of how difficult it is and how costly. An apartheid system will be far worse. Also people forget a key reason why South Africa ended apartheid was not political but economic, you cannot bring the best out of all your citizens if you put them into different boxes and enforce segregation. The UK transport system is in a dire situation, imagine if you had to have 'whites only' carriages. The UK is too inter-twined with Europe to be divorced and its population is too inter-twined to try to bring about some artificial segregation.
British society has always been full of bigots and racists. It also has people like my grandfather (a life-long Labour supporter) who grumbled about 'the darkies' but always complimented how hard working the Asian woman next door and the black men he worked with were and could never see the fact that these people made up the group he saw as the 'darkies'. Any group in society is made up of individuals that we know. Whereas last week bigots may have bitten their lip now they feel they can speak out and that is going to lead quickly to millions of individual tragedies as they feel heartened by the election result and the sense that the views of UKIP and BNP are held widely and legitimate. We cannot now avoid race riots in the coming months. The UK is going to become a very unpleasant place whatever colour you are, especially if you live in a city. We can only pray for a rainy summer rather than a hot one otherwise it will make 1981 look like a picnic in the park. All good people need to constantly contest racist behaviour and use the term 'racist' when we see it otherwise we are going to be living in a country of armed camps.
Clearly both UKIP and BNP have not thought anything about the economy. I have mentioned how employers have driven economic migration by their desire for cheap labour. However, if we even begin moving towards far-right policies then the economy will suffer immediately. People forget why West Indian and Asian immigration was encouraged in the 1950s (and the same applies to Turkish, Yugoslav and Italian immigration into Germany) it was to fill labour shortages especially in the service sector (which of course has become the dominant sector of our economy since 1974) and to start intimidating and removing people in those industries is going to send the UK economy rapidly back into the 1970s. Hospitals would close, shops in many towns would disappear, the transport sector would be cut back. The UK has had immigration for over 2000 years, to try and rip out certain people from UK society is going to be like cutting off an arm because it happens to be your right one.
The fight against racism now has to be stepped up a gear. We need to work to squeeze the bridgehead the bigots have established and challenge their behaviour so that it does not become 'normal', it is always abnormal and abhorrent. Of course, if the Conservatives win the next general election, their policies will be infected by the rhetoric of the hard right, partly because they have very few policies anyway; there is no indication of how they would have dealt with the credit crunch, the bank collapses or the MPs expenses scandals at all. Of course, disillusion with MPs is at its peak and this is a golden opportunity for extreme parties to play on that, as Hitler did in the early 1930s. The price for their success will be a very high one for the UK economy, British society and millions of individuals to pay.
Saturday, 6 June 2009
Low Turnout? My Vote Counts For More
I have been keeping an eye on the BBC website but so far cannot see the outcomes of the European Parliament elections. They have the council votes, but very few councils had elections yesterday and none in my area. I suppose it has to do with just how many votes there are in any given constituency. The European Parliament constituencies in the UK vary between Northern Ireland with 1.7 million people (of course not all of whom are adults and/or eligible to vote) up to the South-East England region (London is its own region) with 8 million people. Around 80% of the population in the UK is over 18 (the figure is rising as the birth rate falls) so a constituency has potentially 1.3-6.4 million voters, but the turnout for European elections in the UK is often only 35%, but even so that means up to 450,000-2.2 million ballots to count.
We have now moved over to the d'Hondt method which means that you vote for a party list rather than being able to rate all the parties on the ballot paper as used to be the case with the STV (Single Transferable Vote) system we used to have. For British people used to putting a single cross on a ballot paper this might seem more comfortable, but it does mean a lot of the more marginal parties and especially independents will no longer get support and given that South-East England had a Green MEP, this may change. In addition, not all candidates are the same even if they are on the same party list. Given that between 3-10 MEPs will be returned from your constituency, it seems a bit bad that we cannot express our opinion on different individuals from a party. I know that the more votes the party gets the more candidates off their list become MEPs, but you might want their 6th listed candidate in place of the 1st listed. Of course in the past you just got to rate the party, but in my mind we are still not yet there with the best system for these elections with multiple candidate constituencies. People complain that proportional representation systems are too complex for UK voters, but given how few of us vote now, that should be no worry as it is only the 'expert' voters who turn out and we are a pretty sophisticated bunch.
In the UK for local and national elections ballot papers are small, but for European elections, in my constituency having 22 parties listed they are a long roll of paper that is too large to fit into the average polling booth in the UK. At least in the polling station I visited they had modern ballot boxes not those black painted metal ones that seem to have been used for decades and have slots too narrow to fit European election ballot papers in. One polling station I visited in London in the 1990s had a specially designed plunger to get the papers in.
I am an unashamed pro-European. Though I am sympathetic to the Socialist Labour Party, I dislike their anti-European stance. Arthur Scargill's claim that the EU is a capitalist club is terribly out of date and entirely misses the good that EU social and labour legislation has done for the ordinary people of the UK in the face of harsh opposition from UK employers. Scargill should take a leaf out of Tony Benn's book and campaign for true democracy in the EU. Currently the European Parliament is pretty toothless. Policy is made by the Council of Ministers made up of the national prime ministers and policy is carried out and regulation is enforced by the European Commission, an unelected civil service body. This kind of structure if applied to an individual country with such a strong executive would be seen as less than semi-democratic. The Parliament should have more powers and certainly be moving the legislative agenda. It does occasionally bring the Commission to account but probably not often enough. We need European Parliament select committees on the basis of the UK model. The ironic thing about the Commission overseeing regulation (which generally stems from EU legislation) is that the British whine about these regulations more than any other nation in the EU and yet whereas France, Italy and Germany quite often ignore the regulations the British government (whether Conservative or Labour) has the strongest record of enforcing the regulations. They let the Commission take the blame for their own adherence to the enforcement!
Sorry, this posting is rambling all over the place. My main point which I always say to the polling station staff is that when turnout is poor then my vote is more powerful. If in the South-East constituency only 2.2 million people vote then my vote contributes a 2.2 millionth but if all the electorate showed it would be 3-4 times less powerful. In local elections this effect has a greater impact though can be neutralised by the first past the post issue, but not if I back the winning candidate. Most wards for UK council elections have about 5000 people in them, and again taking 80% as eligible to vote, this comes to 4000 potential voters. When I lived in East London the population density was so high you could see 3 ward polling stations along a single main street. Anyway, if, for example the winning candidate wins with 1000 votes then my vote is 1/1000th, but if s/he wins by only getting 300 votes or less, which often happens, then my vote counts as 1/300th of the outcome. It is a minor point, but what I am saying is, if you do not vote you put more power into the hands of those who do and these might be people whose view on the world jars with your own.
People often complain that their vote is only a grain in a sandpit, if they represent only 1/2.2 millionth, what is the point? Well, of course each of those who actually elect the winner are similarly only 1/2.2 millionth. Democracy is still a pretty rare commodity in the world, ask anyone from China. People should vote if for nothing else, for the people who fought to have democracy in the UK and stop it being suppressed by the Nazis. Not bothering snubs those people. If you do not like the candidates, stand yourself. You have no right to moan about the political system, and more importantly, the policies it puts into action, if you have exempted yourself from the process. I do not advocate moving to the Australian system in which you get fined if you do not vote, but I do say to people, do not so easily deliver power into the hands who want you to be disinterested. Remember, you might strongly disagree with my perspective on things and yet by not voting you are giving my vote far more power.
You find out some strange facts, i.e. that Gibraltar (on the South coast of Spain) forms part of the South-West constituency of England. The UK has 78 MEPs like Italy and France; Germany, the most populous country in the EU, has 99; Spain and Poland are on the third tier with 54 seats.
We have now moved over to the d'Hondt method which means that you vote for a party list rather than being able to rate all the parties on the ballot paper as used to be the case with the STV (Single Transferable Vote) system we used to have. For British people used to putting a single cross on a ballot paper this might seem more comfortable, but it does mean a lot of the more marginal parties and especially independents will no longer get support and given that South-East England had a Green MEP, this may change. In addition, not all candidates are the same even if they are on the same party list. Given that between 3-10 MEPs will be returned from your constituency, it seems a bit bad that we cannot express our opinion on different individuals from a party. I know that the more votes the party gets the more candidates off their list become MEPs, but you might want their 6th listed candidate in place of the 1st listed. Of course in the past you just got to rate the party, but in my mind we are still not yet there with the best system for these elections with multiple candidate constituencies. People complain that proportional representation systems are too complex for UK voters, but given how few of us vote now, that should be no worry as it is only the 'expert' voters who turn out and we are a pretty sophisticated bunch.
In the UK for local and national elections ballot papers are small, but for European elections, in my constituency having 22 parties listed they are a long roll of paper that is too large to fit into the average polling booth in the UK. At least in the polling station I visited they had modern ballot boxes not those black painted metal ones that seem to have been used for decades and have slots too narrow to fit European election ballot papers in. One polling station I visited in London in the 1990s had a specially designed plunger to get the papers in.
I am an unashamed pro-European. Though I am sympathetic to the Socialist Labour Party, I dislike their anti-European stance. Arthur Scargill's claim that the EU is a capitalist club is terribly out of date and entirely misses the good that EU social and labour legislation has done for the ordinary people of the UK in the face of harsh opposition from UK employers. Scargill should take a leaf out of Tony Benn's book and campaign for true democracy in the EU. Currently the European Parliament is pretty toothless. Policy is made by the Council of Ministers made up of the national prime ministers and policy is carried out and regulation is enforced by the European Commission, an unelected civil service body. This kind of structure if applied to an individual country with such a strong executive would be seen as less than semi-democratic. The Parliament should have more powers and certainly be moving the legislative agenda. It does occasionally bring the Commission to account but probably not often enough. We need European Parliament select committees on the basis of the UK model. The ironic thing about the Commission overseeing regulation (which generally stems from EU legislation) is that the British whine about these regulations more than any other nation in the EU and yet whereas France, Italy and Germany quite often ignore the regulations the British government (whether Conservative or Labour) has the strongest record of enforcing the regulations. They let the Commission take the blame for their own adherence to the enforcement!
Sorry, this posting is rambling all over the place. My main point which I always say to the polling station staff is that when turnout is poor then my vote is more powerful. If in the South-East constituency only 2.2 million people vote then my vote contributes a 2.2 millionth but if all the electorate showed it would be 3-4 times less powerful. In local elections this effect has a greater impact though can be neutralised by the first past the post issue, but not if I back the winning candidate. Most wards for UK council elections have about 5000 people in them, and again taking 80% as eligible to vote, this comes to 4000 potential voters. When I lived in East London the population density was so high you could see 3 ward polling stations along a single main street. Anyway, if, for example the winning candidate wins with 1000 votes then my vote is 1/1000th, but if s/he wins by only getting 300 votes or less, which often happens, then my vote counts as 1/300th of the outcome. It is a minor point, but what I am saying is, if you do not vote you put more power into the hands of those who do and these might be people whose view on the world jars with your own.
People often complain that their vote is only a grain in a sandpit, if they represent only 1/2.2 millionth, what is the point? Well, of course each of those who actually elect the winner are similarly only 1/2.2 millionth. Democracy is still a pretty rare commodity in the world, ask anyone from China. People should vote if for nothing else, for the people who fought to have democracy in the UK and stop it being suppressed by the Nazis. Not bothering snubs those people. If you do not like the candidates, stand yourself. You have no right to moan about the political system, and more importantly, the policies it puts into action, if you have exempted yourself from the process. I do not advocate moving to the Australian system in which you get fined if you do not vote, but I do say to people, do not so easily deliver power into the hands who want you to be disinterested. Remember, you might strongly disagree with my perspective on things and yet by not voting you are giving my vote far more power.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
