As a pro-EU citizen I feel more and more inclined to agree on some of the Brexit rhetoric.
Commissioners have shown multiple times that they are too permeable to lobbying, too willing to water down tough environmental regulation, and too keen on 'security' surveillance.
So far the EU parliament members have balanced the act with some sanity. But the power and lack of transparency of the EC both with regards to lobbying and conflict of interest is very concerning.
I am making the point that the parliament votes, and _rejects_ proposals that overreach.
My point is not Britain as an example, but that one of the Brexit rhetoric points was the rah rah 'unelected officials'.
Arguably we both know that EC comissioners are appointed by democratic governments but we see multiple times how permeable EC commisioners are:
1. Surveillance proposals such as posted in this thread
2. Net Neutrality exemptions - allowing Facebook/Youtube/et al. 'zero ratings' on metered connections
3. SUPD with guidelines that have so many Plastic exceptions that basically only q-tips and plastic forks got banned. Nestle, Coca-Cola, all the supermarket wrapping remain untouched.
4. 'Green Deal' was completely watered down on implementation. [0]
The UK has had 4 unelected PMs since 1990, and dozens before that.
And as pointed out before, the UK is ahead of the EU in terms of surveillance. You even have to opt in with your ISP to watch porn.
The UK has hundreds of thousands of government CCTV cameras and they can comprehensively track your movements through the entire country.
The Brexit rhetoric was more about nationalism than anything else, it was marketed as "we don't want the EU telling us what to do", but that just played heavily into nationalism.
All that aside, if you think any major political system in the west, or indeed globally is safe from lobbying and major corruption you are wrong. Corporate and industrial influence is rife throughout, IMO. When was the last time you saw any significant legislation come through to give working-middle class any kind of help or upward mobility?
I am wandering from your initial point, but I am angry and frustrated with our rapid decline. We trashed our economies over COVID and we're now splooging billions of dollars into an un-winnable proxy war which escalates monthly.
All of this shit is done in the same vein as this surveillance proposal "think of the children", I mean how could you not think of the children?? How could you not think of your neighbour? How could you not think of your fellow Europeans? It's all built to socially shame and coerce us into terrible policy that ultimately puts us in the hole unable to get out.
Anyways, yes I have an axe to grind and probably have some stuff wrong here, but I am frustrated with my economic decline. It feels like the middle class is constantly being drained for the benefit of oligarch, war mongering liars.
Apologies for a reactionary derail, it's cathartic at least. Please feel free to tell me how I am wrong, I genuinely want to be corrected because I feel depressed with my perspective.
Absolutely, every government is absolutely a bunch of corrupted criminals.
Totally onboard. The thing is the more layers of corrupted politicians you put on top of people, the more theft and harassment you'll get from the aforementioned politicians and - surprise! - less accountability or ways to complain / protest.
Brexit actually damaged me personally, but I'm glad for the British people that they won't be subjected to the extra EU rules. The UK government is bad enough, they don't need EU bureaucrats on top.
But at least those are the fault of the UK government itself. The people have greater likelihood of being able to fix it than if they have to defer to the EU commission for compliance. Brexit is expensive in the short term, but, in the long term, the nation is much better off for having preserved some of their sovereignty.
With the US govt. literally creating a Ministry of Truth[1], and no one batting an eyelid, 1984 is actually a reality.
Our media is compromised. The recent Pfizer scandal has been buried, NYT went to great lengths to dismiss it. The article was laughable.
The phrase "conspiracy theory" is slapped on any descent. We have lost our way while we sleep through social media. We follow the script or face social isolation.
10 years ago our current society would look like China, now the general pop is adopting that as a good thing.
We are fucked and it's going to take violence and death to claw back any sense of moral decency. No one wants that, and when all our wealth has been extracted we won't be able to compete with the robots that will keep us compliant.
I know this sounds crazy, but the writing is on the wall. I can see no reason it won't happen. Crazy shit becomes reality time after time and it's accelerating.
"The UK has had 4 unelected PMs since 1990, and dozens before that."
It has had zero unelected PMs. Every single PM was elected by:
1. Members of their constituency. You have to be an MP to be a PM.
2. Members of their party (at least to some extent).
If you mean the UK doesn't use a presidential system then yes but so what, everyone knows that. It's normal, lots of countries use a parliamentary system.
"The Brexit rhetoric was more about nationalism than anything else, it was marketed as "we don't want the EU telling us what to do", but that just played heavily into nationalism."
Wanting decision makers to be accountable isn't nationalism, that's just normal support of democracy. Besides, this criticism is off base because the EU is a nationalist project. The EU has its own flag, its own currency, its own borders, even its own national anthem. It is in love with the idea of being a nation. Replacing the nations of Europe with a new nation called Europe is the goal of the project. It is and always has been a nationalist project, which uses "nationalism" as an insult to mean love of the existing nations rather than of itself.
The idea that a continent full of people with different cultures and economies would benefit from following laws set by politicians elected by voters they can't even communicate with in their native language seems insane to me. I really just don't get it at all. Can't we just do the free trade thing without all the surveillance laws and other crap?
I'm all for European trade, but I felt I had to vote Brexit because obviously the goal of any political system should be to maximise the political power of individuals and local communities. The more you centralise and expand power over larger geographical areas the less tolerant of regional political difference your political system must become. This become obvious when we talk about a country like Turkey potentially joining the EU.
That said, I hate the UK government with a passion and they are arguably even worse when it comes to surveillance, but at least we can vote them out.
>Can't we just do the free trade thing without all the surveillance laws and other crap?
Basically, no. What you're asking for is what the EU has tried to do somewhat: become a confederation. It doesn't work. The USA tried it back in the 1700s and it was a disaster. The country couldn't defend itself, have any kind of central banking and currency, or any consistent policy. It was replaced in 12 years with the more centralized federal system that exists now.
The EU was created because the European nations wanted to be a powerful continent-sized political entity that could rival the US, and have the same benefits and power on the world stage. But there are costs to this: you need much greater centralization. Arguably, the US doesn't have enough centralization and this is causing many of its internal problems now.
Basically, if you want to be a world power, you can't just be a bunch of small, disparate countries in a loose trade confederation. You need more centralization of power, and the problems that come with that. If you don't want that, you need to just be happy with being a bunch of separate, sovereign nations with different currencies and trade barriers between them all. Pick one.
From my perspective, the EU's problems you see are because it won't just commit to a centralized system and eliminating national sovereignty, and it's trying to have it both ways.
The USA was hardly a disaster. Mutual defense is possible without unifying everything under a single government (see NATO), the US didn't even have central banking at all until the 20th century so not sure how you concluded the lack of that was a disaster within a few years of the USA being born, and "consistent policy" is something it still doesn't have in many key areas - without the USA being a disaster.
> The EU was created because the European nations wanted to be a powerful continent-sized political entity
It was created as a trading bloc, literally the European Economic Area. That project later got hijacked by federalists who wanted to do what you say, but they never had agreement on that from the actual citizens. That's one reason the UK left.
> Arguably, the US doesn't have enough centralization and this is causing many of its internal problems now.
Arguably the US's internal problems come from too much centralization, hence why Americans famously loathe Congress but like their own Congressman/woman.
The Federalist Papers explain both what was a disaster about the confederacy and why a confederacy had no possible outcome other than to be a disaster.
A quick skim suffices to get an overview of what the authors say are unavoidable failures in confederacies. Each paper focuses on a particular topic, giving examples from governments in antiquity and contemporary governments, with some exposition about how the way they were set up led them inevitably to failure in that area.
> The idea that a continent full of people with different cultures and economies would benefit from following laws set by politicians elected by voters they can't even communicate with in their native language seems insane to me
Yep but it's even more insane than that. The laws don't even come from elected people at all!
The EU is literally a government by committee. A kind of technocracy with very little accountability for those making these decisions. The UK has a lot of problems right now, but at least BREXIT helped preserve some sovereignty from that behomoth. That is good for the long term.
I had several discussions like that and always said something along the lines of: "Well, I am not so sure about it being a bad decision in the long term. I think time will tell." and every time people have valid arguments of why Brexit is bad for the UK, but still I will say something like "Lets see how it all turns out.", because we do not know the future.
When the EU cooks up the next surveillance law attempt, I am always reminded of those conversations. But where else to go, if even EU gets too crazy? There are probably only worse places with regards to privacy.
It isn’t a democratic system. It’s clearly been infiltrated by both lobbyists as you say but also foreign powers. Further integration should be halted in my opinion until the undemocratic elements are dissolved and replaced with ethical moral means of representation if that doesn’t happen then we are at an impasse for which I see no future in this system. Personally I will not donate the labor my life to it. Everyone is free (for now) to do what they wish. Nothing is perfect but society should benefit those who benefit society not oligarchs and tyrants.
Commissioners have shown multiple times that they are too permeable to lobbying, too willing to water down tough environmental regulation, and too keen on 'security' surveillance.
So far the EU parliament members have balanced the act with some sanity. But the power and lack of transparency of the EC both with regards to lobbying and conflict of interest is very concerning.