It is time to nail another lie: Britain is
not ruled by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.
So when Michael Gove says he wants voters
to take back control from organisations that are ‘distant,
unaccountable and elitist’, he is deliberately perpetuating the lie.
When Boris Johnson and Andrea Leadsom say, as they did
repeatedly during the ITV referendum debate last night, that ‘we can take back
control’, they are deliberately perpetuating the lie.
And when Brendan Chilton of the campaign group
Labour Leave says that one of the biggest reasons to vote Leave is that ‘we must be able to elect our lawmakers’, he too is
perpetuating the lie.
The Leave campaigners are clearly
convinced that ‘Take back control’ is a nice, snappy slogan that voters understand
and that resonates with those who are still undecided. And they are clearly
perfectly happy to run with it, even though they know that it is built on a Big
Fat Lie.
The people who make the EU’s laws in
Brussels are not unelected bureaucrats; they are elected politicians,
accountable to the people who elected them.
Virtually every law made in Brussels
must be approved by two sets of democratically-elected politicians: the Council
of the European Union, which is made up of government ministers from each
member state, and the European Parliament, every member of which has been
elected.
These are not unelected, unaccountable
bureaucrats; they are elected, accountable politicians. (There may be
occasional exceptions: the government of the UK, for example, includes 24
members who have not been elected by anyone – they are members of the House of
Lords, unaccountable to anyone except the prime minister of the day. In any other
country, the arrangement would be regarded as profoundly undemocratic.)
Ah, say the Leave campaigners, but the
UK can easily be outvoted, can’t we? We can be forced to adopt laws that our
elected representatives have not approved. They are right, so let us look at
some figures.
Between 1999 and March 2016, the UK was
indeed outvoted in the Council 57 times. It abstained 70 times, and voted with
the majority – wait for it – 2,474 times. In other words, over a roughly
15-year period, the UK’s elected representatives, members of a government that
has to face the electorate every five years, voted in favour of 95% of the laws
passed in Brussels.
(The figures have been calculated, by
the way, by Professor Simon Hix of the London School of Economics, who is part
of a group of academics called The UK in a Changing Europe, funded by the
Economic and Social Research Council and based at King’s College, London. He is
one of the expert speakers in the sovereignty and national identity podcast in
my EUTheJury series.)
I imagine these figures might come as a bit
of a shock to you. They certainly paint a very different picture from the one favoured
by Leave campaigners. Their great strength, of course, is that they are
empirically verifiable; they are, in other words, what so many people say they
still need in this debate. Facts.
Imagine you are a member of a sports
club, or an amateur choral society. New club rules are needed, and they are
voted on by members of an elected club committee. If 2.2% of the new rules were
not to your liking, would you regard that as reason enough to leave? I’m pretty
sure that I would not.
And while we’re in the business of
debunking myths, what about that bloated Brussels bureaucracy, living off the
fat of the land on our hard-earned taxes, that we hear so much about? Do you
know how many bureaucrats work for the EU? Fifty-five thousand. Do you know how
many work for the UK government? Four hundred thousand.
If you’re after some more facts, here
are some recommendations: the EU’s own website is here; the Full Fact website
is here, and the BBC Reality Check website is here. Just don’t make the mistake
of believing anything that the politicians say between now and 23 June.
And if you’re still undecided, perhaps
this statement from the Cornish Pasty Association will swing it for you: ‘After working so hard for so many
years to gain recognition for the Cornish pasty through the EU Protected Food
Names scheme, it would be wholly inappropriate for it to support anything that
could potentially impact on that status …the CPA supports Britain remaining in
the EU and being able to participate in that system.’
