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0 pointsandai8y ago0 comments

I enjoy many of the benefits of membership but I am troubled by the structure.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2016/06/21/is-the-eu-reall...

A popular claim by many supporters of the Leave campaign is that the EU is run by ‘unelected bureaucrats’. How much truth is there behind that claim?

This claim mainly refers to the EU Commission: the EU’s executive body. It is true that the Commission President and the individual Commissioners are not directly elected by the peoples of Europe. So, in that sense, we cannot “throw the scoundrels out”. It is also true that under the provisions of the EU treaty, the Commission has the sole right to propose EU legislation, which, if passed, is then binding on all the EU member states and the citizens of these member states.

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pjc508y ago· 1 in thread

"if passed" is doing a lot of work there, because the legislation has to be approved by two democratic bodies.

As opposed to the UK, which has one democratic house, an unelected one, and a (mostly) rubber-stamp unelected head of state.

Silhouette8y ago

One key difference in the UK is that the elected House can always both initiate legislation and then override objections from the unelected House eventually, if it chooses to do so. While in theory the monarch could also block a law by denying royal assent, if they ever actually did that, we'd probably be a republic the following year. There are plenty of reasonable criticisms of our system of government and democratic processes, but in this respect we're clearly better off than some systems, including the EU.

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