7 reasons why some people resent the EU
1. Pay for EU bureaucrats
Even as individual nations across Europe have had to impose grinding austerity measures, including slashing pay for government workers, most European Union employees get paid generous wages with special, minimal taxes. The Telegraph — an antiEU newspaper — found in 2014 that many midlevel EU workers were taking home more money than British Prime Minister David Cameron. 2. Wasteful travel By treaty, the European Parliament can only meet in full session in Strasbourg, France. But most of the EU’s operation is in Brussels. So one week a month, the whole apparatus — legislators, support staff, lobbyists, journalists and everyone else, 10,000 people in all — travels five hours to Strasbourg. It’s as though Congress could only pass laws one week a month — and it needed to do it in Cleveland.
3. Overreaching regulation
In Britain, the famous “bendy banana” came to be a symbol of Brussels regulatory overreach, when Brussels set guidelines that bananas should be “free from malformation or abnormal curvature.” Those advocating a British departure from the EU said Britons could decide for themselves how bent their bananas could be. 4. Lack of accountability The big decisions in the EU get hammered out behind closed doors, whether it’s inside the European Commission or at meetings of EU leaders or ministers. Unlike lawmakers in national legislatures, where much of the sausage-making happens in the open, EU leaders bargain in private, then announce their decisions afterward.
5. Ignoring rejections from voters
The EU has a long history of absorbing national ballot-box defeats, then moving onward to achieve roughly the same result through other means. When voters in France and the Netherlands rejected an EU constitution in 2005, EU leaders came back two years later with something called the Lisbon Treaty, which implemented many of the same changes but through a different legal path that didn’t require checking with voters first.
6. A Babylon of costly translations
Depending on how you read it, you might find the EU’s tendency to translate nearly everything it does into all 24 of its official languages a testimony to its internationalist glory or a wasteful use of resources.
7. Unnecessary bureaucracy
Every EU member state gets to appoint a commissioner, whose job is a bit like a cabinet secretary in the United States — a politician charged with administering an agency. But as the EU expanded, it needed to dream up new cabinet agencies to match the number of members. So it has one commission for international cooperation and development, another for trade, another for jobs, growth, investment and competitiveness, another for economic and financial affairs, and another for internal market, industry, entrepreneurship and small and medium businesses.