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**Hugh** · 11-06-2016, 11:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by papa smurf

what like wanting control of their own destiny

On that note...

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/robi..._10391770.html

Quote:

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.)