EU suffering from a dearth of democracy

YOUR edition of August 3 included a number of comments on democracy in the context of the Brexit debate. Your editorial called for Parliament to thwart the intentions of the Government to take us out of the EU. So you are presumably urging Parliament to thwart the wishes of the majority of voters who called for just that back in the 2016 referendum.

Your correspondent Gareth Thomas of Swansea seems to argue that EU laws are made as a result of a democratic process. If so, he must have a very simplistic view of what democracy should be about. I believe it should be more than just being able to cast a vote every few years to elect just four people to represent Wales in the EU Parliament. One’s vote in that election counts for very little – and the votes of our MEPs count for very little in the EU Parliament as well. Most decisions seem to be made by Angela Merkel and whoever happens to be the president of France at the time.

Democracy should surely mean that we should all have a realistic chance of participating in the decisions about our future. Yet some years ago, when I asked the EU Commission for a copy of the Lisbon Treaty – which laid out a proposed new constitution for the Union

– I was told it could not be made available to an ordinary member of the public like me! So much for democracy!

Mr Thomas also makes much of the extensive power retained by individual state governments. He fails to point out that the central EU government has the power to centralise most of those powers if it wishes to do so, and can overrule individual government decisions they don’t like. It is true that such powers are not widely used at present, but with increasing centralising trends becoming obvious, who is to say when the EU will start to overrule the rights of individual governments with whom

they disagree?

At present, we have given them far-reaching powers over which we have little, if any, control. Democracy demands that we should rectify that situation as soon as possible. And I believe that can be done by building true democratic international co-operation – including with partner European nations but outside the confines of the EU. Emrys Roberts Canton, Cardiff