Ross Clark
cent, is twice that in Britain. Government debt, at 132 per cent of GDP, is higher than ours.
Sunday’s referendum is unlikely to lead to an Italian exit from the EU, at least in the short term. The upstart opposition, the Five Star Movement, which may find itself the main party of government after general elections in 2018, if not before, favours remaining in the EU.
But it has promised a referendum on the euro. If Italy, the third largest economy in the eurozone, were to vote to leave the euro it is hard to see how the single currency could survive. And if its pet project were to fail how much longer before the EU itself imploded?
What will ultimately condemn the EU is the refusal to recognise the tidal wave of disaffection which is heading their way. For a decade the eurozone has been stuck in a cycle of low growth and repeated currency crisis. Italy, like Greece and Spain, has been bailed out but at a cost which many ordinary people feel weighs unfairly on their shoulders and rather too lightly on the shoulders of indebted banks.
Worst of all is the sense that decisions which once would have been taken by elected governments and parliaments have been taken out of their hands and made behind closed doors in distant capitals.
The germ of the EU’s destruction has been there since its birth in the 1950s. It was founded by a generation of European leaders who did not trust democracy because they blamed it for giving Germany Hitler and Italy Mussolini – an unfair charge because in both cases the problem wasn’t popular opinion but national constitutions which were not strong enough to resist being meddled with.
Post 1945, Europe’s leaders began to construct a political system which attempted to eliminate nationalism by pooling sovereignty. They built institutions, such as the European Court of Human Rights, which would introduce a permanent liberal infrastructure which they hoped could not be overruled by a future Hitler.
But in doing so they rode roughshod over democracy. The difference between the USinspired United Nations’ Universal Declaration on Human Rights, published in 1948, and the European Convention on Human Rights, signed two years later, is instructive. While the former declared that “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government” the latter merely stipulated that we should have elected representatives.
EUROPEAN leaders didn’t trust the people; they wanted leaders who would not hesitate to overrule the people if they felt that public opinion was wrong.
It is a distrust which was built into what is now the EU. We have elected representatives in the shape of MEPs – even if we cannot name them. But the sole right to instigate legislation – which in properly functioning democracies lies with an elected government – is vested in the unelected European Commission.
The shortcomings of the EU have been obvious for years – but the EU has shown no interest in reforming it whatsoever. The result is that Europe’s peoples, as in Britain over Brexit and as in Italy over the weekend’s referendum, will continue to express their anger in whatever way they can.
‘The euro is part of the problem’