[cbeach]

When the UK was in the EU we didn't care about the EU elections. Turnout peaked in 2004 at 38.9%, but could be as low as 24%.

If you asked the average UK citizen who their MEPs were, they wouldn't be able to tell you. And if we didn't care enough to know their names, we certainly weren't paying attention to the policies they voted for.

That makes MEPs very susceptible to lobbying, and the EU system very susceptible to corruption in general.

I wrote to all the UK MEPs when the awful Copyright Directive was being proposed, with its completely impractical technical demands and chilling consequences. Most of the MEPs didn't have a clue what was going on, and they didn't seem to care, because they just parrotted the talking points that the Commission had put forward when it pushed the Directive through, and the MEPs planned to obediently vote for the Directive. The only ones that didn't plan to support the Copyright Directive were the Euro-skeptic MEPs, and thank goodness they were there in the mix.