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Uber Member
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Woking
Posts: 31,103
Party: Libertarian Party
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What is the point of voting? (German Elections)
An occasional euro-briefng from Daniel Hannan MEP.
Quote:
The following is an English translation of Daniel's regular column in the German newspaper Die Welt, which appeared the day before the German election.
There is an elephant in the room. Your politicians pretend it isn’t there. They tiptoe around it, mouthing their slogans about unemployment and tax reform. But its great bulk leaves little room for any other issue.
The elephant, of course, is the EU. All the main parties agree about it, and it has therefore hardly featured in the campaign. But absence of this subject lends an unreal quality to the whole election. What is the point of voting Red or Black or Green when 80 per cent of your laws come, not from the German Parliament or Government, but from Brussels?
That is not my figure: it comes from the Federal Justice Ministry. In reply to a question by Johannes Singhammer, MP for the CSU, ministers were forced to concede that, out of 23,167 legislative acts passed since 1998, nearly 19,000 originated in the EU.
This proportion is not unique to Germany, of course. Similar studies in Britain and in other states have produced the same finding. But in most other countries, Europe is a lively political issue. What I find bizarre, watching your election campaign, is that no one has mentioned the EU at all – except tangentially through the question of Turkish accession.
You might argue that this is a good thing: that consensus is better than division, and that it is nice to see all the parties agreeing about something. But the idea that partisan bickering is harmful to the country has been the argument of every dictatorship in history, from Bonaparte onwards. When all the politicians agree, the rest of us should suspect a plot against the ordinary citizen.
Without all-party consensus – and this is true of all the Member States, not just Germany – the EU would never have got to where it is. Again and again, the EU has extended its competence INTO phpbb_a new area, and then, much later, regularised that extension in a treaty. In other words, the politicians have agreed among themselves to transfer a new area of policy to Brussels, and then presented their electorates with a fait accompli. We have now reached a point where almost every area of political life is, to some extent, subject to EU jurisdiction: transport, energy, trade, competition, agriculture, fisheries, regional government, immigration, asylum, foreign affairs, employment law, social policy, defence. Of all your national departments, only two are wholly in control of their own affairs: the Ministry of Heath and the Ministry of Education.
This centralisation of power might have been justified if Brussels had done a better job than the nation-states, but it hasn’t. Look at its record in the fields of policy over which it has had exclusive control for longest. It has run agriculture since 1960, and given us the most wasteful, expensive, bureaucratic, immoral system of farm support in the world. It has run fisheries since 1972, and almost eliminated the fish stocks in its waters. It has run trade policy since 1956, and has held many African countries in poverty by closing its markets while simultaneously dumping its surpluses on them. Yet, despite the mess the EU has made of the policies it already controls, we carry on giving it new ones.
The funny thing is that, when I ask pro-European friends to tell me the purpose of the EU, they usually reply: “to spread democracy”. In reality, the European project has involved the steady transfer of powers, over 50 years, from elected national parliamentarians to unelected Brussels officials. It is commonplace to observe that the EU’s own structures are undemocratic, in that only the Commission may propose new laws. What is less widely observed is that European integration is also devaluing the democratic process within the Member States. None of your candidates can honestly promise to revive Germany’s countryside (because of the Common Agricultural Policy) or overhaul labour relations (because of the Social Chapter) or regulate your borders (because of Schengen) or even adopt a radically different economic policy (because of the euro and the Stability Pact).
Whether you vote for Mrs Merkel or Mr Schröder tomorrow, it will not affect any of the big issues. Some democracy.
If you know anyone else who would like to receive these mailings, please send their email address to dhannan@europarl.eu.int
If you no longer wish to receive them, please reply using the word "unsubscribe" in your title.
For details of meetings at which Daniel Hannan will be speaking please see his website - www.hannan.co.uk - click News, then Forthcoming Events.
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22-09-2005, 01:30 PM
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