Ignoring The Elephant
Something which never ceases to fascinate me is the way in which entire debates on UK politics can be held without so much as a mention or in-depth look at the incredible influence that the European Union has on a particular issue.
A few weeks ago I attended a debate on Devolution at the University of Bath. To my amazement the EU was actually mentioned relatively quickly, but then unsurprisingly was rapidly ignored and framed in such a way that it appeared to be an external irrelevance to the issue of devolution of powers – rather than as it actually is a fundamentally important element.
Now, interestingly enough we had someone on the panel from an organisation called Unlock Democracy – what appears to be a seemingly unremarkable group claiming to be interested in increasing democracy in Britain. Their representative was a member of its Bath branch called Tim Williamson.
Unlock Democracy evolved from Charter 88 and is an organisation which has its distant roots in the Communist party of Great Britain, so you can already guess what such an organisation’s views may be. However, I suppose its history is in some respects by-the-by – what is more important is the type of organisation that Unlock Democracy has now become.
And, yes, guess what, it is your absolutely typical left-wing pressure group that is interested in the usual fare of being in favour of proportional representation and noisily complaining about how ‘unfair’ and ‘undemocratic’ it is to have unelected Lords checking our legislation – but it would seem that they have no qualms with the fact that unelected bureaucrats and Commissioners in Brussels actually make many of our new laws and regulations over which we have no say or control.
In fact, Mr Tim Williamson made the point at least twice that he really had no problems at all with the European Union – which is strange really when you consider that the man was arguing for an English Parliament and ‘English laws for English people’ created by English representatives (ie. English MPs). The thing is though you cannot have English laws for English people made by English MPs if you remain a member of the EU, because the EU will legislate and create laws often without any input from our own Parliament (English only or not) and English people.
That which Mr Williamson was proposing is therefore impossible under our current political climate in which European Union institutions are absorbing ever greater powers from member states such as the UK and power is being centralised and decision-making taken ever further away from the electorate.
Still, it’s not as though Mr Williamson is alone in being content to endlessly discuss the implausible and the irrelevant and continually ignore the elephant in the room – such ignorance still persists at much higher levels.
