captain red dog wrote:Moggy wrote:This is something I don’t understand with Brexit. You wanted more democracy? From the UK? The country with a Queen as head of state and an unelected (some are still hereditary or church bishops FFS!) House of Lords? With a FPTP system to elect MPs?
The EU is far more democratic than our system.
Well firstly the Queen is virtually powerless and as long as the monarchy maintains it's neutrality I have no issue.
Absolutely the House of Lords should be completely reformed and be entirely elected with no concessions to hereditary peers or the Lords Spiritual. That doesn't contradict Brexit at all, we just haven't had the issue put to vote. If we had a vote I would be 100% for complete reform.
Voting reform, yes absolutely. We had a chance when the Lib Dems negotiated a coalition but Clegg strawberry floated it with AV. That was another absolute catastrophic mistake by 'Sir' Nick.
Your points do contradict each other though.
I am assuming that you do not advocate the break up of the UK in order to achieve voting reform/House of Lords reform? Westminster appear to be unwilling to do anything about any of that. It’s exactly the same situation as the EU (except the EU is actually more democratic), so why would you want to leave one and not the other?
The EU needs severe reform and seem to be unwilling to do anything about it. Put a reformed EU on the ballot with an elected commission and elected MEPs and a significant chunk of the Leave vote would be won over.
If the nation states wanted reform, then the EU would be reformed. The EU itself will do what it is told by the elected governments of the European nations.
We’ve all been told by the right wing media about the evil nature of the unelected EU bureaucrats, but what about it needs such urgent reform in your opinion? The Commission is appointed by the elected governments of the member states and the MEPs are elected via proportional representation. What is so bad about that?
I absolutely guarantee that if we had elected EU commissioners then a large proportion of Leavers would still hate it, instead of moaning about the “unelected Commissioners!” they would moan that it being elected meant we were part of a federal EU. They would moan that Britain’s elected Commissioner could be outvoted by the other Commissioners. They would moan if the elected UK Commissioner proposed something in the EU that the UK Parliament didn’t agree with. They would moan if the UK elected Commissioner didn’t propose something that the UK Parliament wanted. They would moan if Poland’s elected Commissioner voted against us. They would end up voting in Farage as the Commissioner and he’d be there delaying and disrupting everything for his own end.
It’s very easy to say “it needs reform!!”, but reform into what? What’s wrong with it and what needs fixing? And why is it better to leave (at a major cost to ourselves) than to work from within to reform it to be more the way we want?
