Just when you thought it safe to return to the water, here's me over at Commentator on the astounding idea of the Consent of the Governed:
Back in Europe the many issues arising from the UK/EU debate are no less far-reaching, and boil down to this 'consent of the governed' question:
- To what did the British public consent back in that 1975 referendum?
- If the UK loses out systematically to the Eurozone majority across the policy spectrum under EU Qualified Majority Voting, is that democracy? Or tyranny? Who decides where the line between them is drawn?
- When the Eurozone states move to a radically centralised monetary and banking union run by intrusive technocrats in Brussels, at what point does the consent of the governed become so attenuated that we conclude that the EU system is no longer substantively democratic at all?
- And if we do conclude that the system is no longer substantively democratic (or even if we are not sure), are we not obliged to withdraw our consent if we want self-respect?
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the looming debate is the sense of Euro-collectivist menace that lurks behind some of the rhetoric. For a sizeable core of people the EU is not mainly an economic or political project – it’s a moral imperative. The Union represents Peace and Justice in their highest evolved forms, so anyone calling into question the Union’s existence even obliquely is undermining Peace and Justice. British calls for repatriating powers are intrinsically contemptible if not openly wicked.
Few European politicians want to stand out against this crude bullying even when they recognize it as such: the sheer intensity of the pro-EU-at-all-costs tendency funded lavishly by member states’ taxpayers’ money makes them look the other way.
This explains why the UK is now losing ground even with most of its supposedly natural partners (Danes, Dutch, Poles, Swedes) in the whole discussion. We come across – perhaps not inaccurately – as being not interested, non-committal in the whole thing for purely self-absorbed, banally utilitarian reasons.
Raising fundamental issues of democracy and the consent of the governed is seen as a self-serving distraction, the more so when the Europhiles have the glib answer ready to roll: more decisions taken in Brussels by politicians elected on an EU-wide basis, fewer pointy-headed anachronistic powers at the so-called nation state level...
What could go wrong?
