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by mike_hearn
19 days ago
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Around ten years ago I watched some MEPs on YouTube talk about their jobs. A lot of them were scathing. The EP isn't a real parliament and the people in it don't have any real power, so it fills up with cheerleaders and hecklers. Attendance isn't just low before the summer break, it's low all the time. MEPs miss votes for reasons as trivial as there being a football game on, because why not? It's not like their votes matter much anyway. Everything important is decided upon long before they get involved, they aren't allowed to actually write laws or pass them or repeal them, and so nobody with any political ambition goes there unless they're using it as a springboard to national politics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=166SAhPB5-Q > "Mr President, our parliament in the United Kingdom sat for 142 days last year and it was criticized widely for only sitting for that amount of time yet we in Brussels and Strasburg in the plenary and mini plenary, we sit for just five days a month and on three of those days it's only part of a day that we actually sit for. So we end up with debate in this chamber where microphones of speakers are cut off after 60 seconds, 90 seconds or 2 minutes, and we have no way of expanding on a point, we have no way of properly challenging a speaker, we have no means of proper scrutiny of proposed legislation that comes through. Surely it would make more sense to have sufficient time allocated to proper debate to reason debate and those who actually believe in the structures and institutions of this place should surely welcome that. I think my 60 seconds is up." You can tell it's a joke institution because they regularly penalize MEPs for the content of their two minute speeches. Britain has the concept of parliamentary immunity but the EU does not, so you get "politicians" who are told what they can and cannot say by the leaders of other parties. |
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The Council, made up of heads of state, set the direction.
The Commission, made up of whoever is nominated by those heads of state, usually some mate of theirs with no democratic accountability or mandate of their own (see: Peter Mandelson), is the body that decides on and creates legislation.
The Parliament, made up of the actually elected members, seems to exist just to rubber-stamp the output of the other bodies. Or occasionally not, but look what happened here, they were asked again until they did * .
Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot that's good about the EU too, but it's in need of serious reform before it can claim to be a truly democratic set of bodies.
(* Which is incidentally another criticism of the EU, mostly centred around the time of the Lisbon treaty, which was first put forward as the new EU constitution but, after rejection in some popular referenda in some countries, was renamed the Lisbon Treaty and pushed through again. In the UK this caused waves because the populace was not asked at all about the treaty and Gordon Brown was reported to have snuck-off and signed it into law on the quiet)