13 June 2016
The Berlaymont, the European Commission’s headquarters in Brussels. Photo Workers.
There have been some attempts by the Remain side to convince us that the EU really is sort of democratic. Anyone wondering about this should take at a look at a new book published at the end of May by Giles Merritt, founder of Friends of Europe, an influential Brussels think-tank, Giles Merritt.
In Slippery Slope? Europe’s Troubled Future’, published by Oxford University Press, he pulls few punches in his criticism of the EU. But like many in his home town of Brussels, his solution is to make the EU yet more powerful. In that respect, the book is a warning of what the EU will do to us if we don’t vote to leave.
First, the criticism. Merritt calls the EU “distant, remote, inscrutable, politically unanswerable, untouched by the new austerity, and seemingly indifferent to criticism, the EU institutions have increasingly fewer friends or even sympathetic ears”.
‘Not a real parliament’
He notes that the EU’s Parliament “isn’t a real parliament; it can’t raise taxes, it can’t declare war, and it doesn’t provide the EU executive with any sort of democratic legitimacy.”
That, he says, is the nub of the EU’s problem: when things go wrong, there’s no mechanism for ousting those who have been responsible for taking far-reaching political decisions on behalf of the people of Europe.”
This friend of the EU calls it undemocratic and – as it stands – unreformable. But like a true EU-lover, Merritt sees every crisis as a good crisis, an opportunity to demand more power for the EU.
He suggests a huge range of new powers: he wants the EU to control our energy, taxation and education, which are all still national competences. He opposes any immigration controls.
Downward path
Merritt observes that the facts point to a downward path for the EU. He notes that the European Commission warns that we’ll see our share of the global economy shrink by mid-century to 15 per cent from today’s 26 per cent, a far cry from 35 per cent in 1970.
And then he tells us that closer integration is the answer. But closer integration, especially the single currency, is causing the problems.