The UK’s in-out EU referendum: It’s all about Democracy, Including the Problem and the Solution
It’s arguably taken over a thousand years for the UK to arrive at the democracy that we now have. We should be rightly proud and not be surprised that the UK is the destination of choice for many whose own countries are riven by corruption, economic and social stagnation and injustice. It takes a special kind of strength and purpose to become a refugee and leave everyone and everything behind in the dangerous quest for a better life in an unknown land. Perhaps it’s this very vigour and pioneering spirit inherent in those who sought a better life in the US in the 19th and 20th centuries that’s led to that country’s dynamic economic success.
Without the alternative of leaving their own corrupt regimes, those more tenacious individuals seeking a better life could be putting their energies into changing their own country’s fortunes. Perhaps one day the UN could offer more help by having a much more robust approach to the democratisation of manifestly corrupt and exploitative states. But the fact is that there are destinations, no matter how dangerous to reach, for people escaping from such countries. Without the dynamism of those who have chosen to leave, it seems unlikely that their undemocratic and corrupt countries will change any time soon. And worse, there’ll be no foreseeable limit to the refugee problem. The humanitarian arguments for accepting refugees, although compelling, are just as valid for 100 million refugees as they are for 100. Such arguments offer no solution on how to limit the problem other than when life becomes almost as intolerable in the UK – due to overcrowding – as it is in the countries from which the refugees are leaving.
But unlike the problem, a county’s resources are limited. The feeling that the UK’s inability to control its own borders, and therefore the potential spreading ever thinner of its resources, has precipitated the referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU.
In many ways it seems a strange referendum: the EU should never have reached this stage without major referenda. The UK should have pulled out years ago when, without a referendum, the free trade “common market” area started to have political aspirations to eventual statehood. With the executive chosen by the member states and not voted for by the electorate, the EC isn’t democratic but is able to subvert the democratic process of the member countries with its law-making powers.
Perhaps those with political ambition for EU statehood should have been more honest from the outset. They should have admitted their aim of a United States of Europe, with the member states having the same local powers as the US states and the European electorate voting for an executive. In that way it would have at least been a democratic system with admittedly a reduced role for the member states in terms of sovereignty. A pan-EU referendum would then have made sense with two different, non-conflicting, democratic systems put to the electorate of each country. However, those in Europe with ambitions for a United States of Europe would likely have been rejected in such an honest referendum, and have therefore chosen the backdoor route, bypassing the electorate with various treaties. That the UK has been part of this inexorable path from free-trade region to an EU state seems a betrayal of the democratic process that’s served the UK so well.
I find it inconceivable that a referendum offering a choice between living within a hard-won democratic system or a non-democratic EU would produce anything other than a landslide victory for leaving the EU. It’s ironic that the referendum was precipitated by refugees fleeing from totalitarian, non-democratic countries. Why would we want anything to do with a reduction in democracy? The UK should vote to leave the EU.
