It has become an entirely predictable trope that, when forced to acknowledge that the EU has 'shortcomings', the typical EUphile will utter the same weaselish flannel about how they 'know that the EU isn't perfect' before launching into a qualification, beginning with the word 'but', that comprises a list of the reasons why they think that the EU is in fact pretty much perfect, most of them typically exhibiting a complete absence of comprehension of, or more insidiously a refusal to acknowledge, what the EU is about, and how it functions. These lists routinely offer the expressions 'democracy', 'human-rights', 'workers' rights', 'freedom' and 'civil-liberty', amongst other airy blandishments. In other words, and going right back to my post above, a profound and immovable belief that the EU stands uniquely for the utopian principles of peace, democracy, progressivism, tolerance etc...
The EU is not democratic, indeed, in the makeup of its institutions and governance it is actively anti-democratic. When, in advancing its political ambitions it has faced referenda in member States, it has routinely and without exception steamrollered on, ignoring unwelcome results, or rephrasing the question until it gets the result it wants. The EU espouses peace, indeed was founded in the ashes of world war, but is hapless and divided on foreign policy, and increasingly divisive in internal policy. Its powerful agricultural and fisheries lobbies have ensured policies that have wrought massive environmental destruction on land, and have laid waste to not only Europe's own seas, but far beyond, to those of West-Africa and the Indian Ocean, in the process collapsing the livelihoods of the coastal communites that depend on the affected fisheries. It places capital ahead of labour, permitting companies to move to regions of cheaper labour whilst prohibiting the existing labour forces from striking in response, or compelling workers in the poorer regions to migrate to the wealthier regions, depopulating and deskilling vast tracts of the eastern countries for the benefit of western capital. Working long, exhausting hours in disgusting conditions in a German meat factory for money barely sufficient to pay for the shoddiest of living conditions many miles from home is not 'freedom', it is virtual slavery, and the EU does nothing to prevent or ameliorate it, indeed actively encourages it. The EU does very little to protect your human rights, less still those meat factory workers, or your civil liberties. In fact your workers' and civil rights were hard won by the liberal, labour and trades union movements in this wretched little country which you seem to hate so much, and your liberty was won by a coalition government led by an old Etonian tory, whose force of personality was fundamental to the defeat of fascism and the subsequent halt of the march of communism, and created the peace in Europe in which the EU's foundations could be dug.
You were a 'subject' of the monarchy even within the EU, and that and the 'rigged' electoral system are matters to be dealt with within our own democracy, by encouraging and supporting worthwhile and effective opposition, and by protest. By outsourcing these things to the EU you are merely handing it to more distant and infinitely more unnaccountable power, power that does not, despite your fond musings, have your interests at heart.
