UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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Can I ask what specifically you think was corrupt/wasteful? As for unaccountability, we were able to vote for new members of the European parliament.
Thank you for not just swearing at me. It's appreciated :) So in terms of specific examples I can think of a few. The "Traveling Circus" was one where the EU was spending between 100 to 200 million Euros at an environmental cost of an extra 19k tonnes of CO2 annually moving their seat between Brussels and Strasbourg for the purely political reason of France insisting the Strasbourg remain a seat of power. Then there was also the Common Agricultural Policy that became infamous for subsidising farmland that wasn't even producing food. French and Italian farmers were accused of manipulating records and misusing funds. There were concerns over auditing and transparency too. Misuse or misallocation of regional development funds, corruption scandals in southern and eastern members states and just generally a lack of accountability in how EU money was distributed and monitored. There's lots more detail we could get into but I think those are some fairly representative examples.
I agree that moving the parliament between two different places seems dumb. If it's cheaper to remain in one place then they should do that.
As for corruption and misuse of funds, maybe that does happen. Maybe the solution though is to elect better politicians to run the EU, rather than leave the EU.
I've thought in the past that maybe the EU should have a directly elected president, in addition to EU citizens voting for European parliament members. This might allow for more democratic accountability of the EU. Someone might run for the presidency on a platform of stamping out misuse of EU funds.
What would an EU presidents authority be? The point is that currently all EU laws voted on in the European Parliament and are ratified by member states (that’s a legislative problem of its own when not all member states are leaning the same political direction, as Hungary demonstrates), while the EU executive is just that: executing member states decision.
Making the travelling circus an issue is akin to BJ’s 350mil bus. It’s a large number, but in a 400-450mil bloc, look at the context too. Did UK save it’s contribution to said circus by leaving?
And yes, bigger administration, bigger corruption (when people are caught). The world today, sadly, doesn’t favour the small and valiant.
Maybe the president of the EU commission could be directly elected by EU citizens. I just think it might involve people a bit more in EU democracy. They might feel they have more democratic control over the EU.
As for the "travelling circus", I was just replying to a post which raised that point, but I think he makes sense by saying that moving the parliament around seems wasteful.