The European Parliament is demonstrably more democratic than the House of Commons...
Sure, on paper the EU voting system more representative. But that is, in the world of empiricism and practice, completely meaningless. The EU Parliament is unrepresentative because it is distant, remote and usually completely incomprehensible to the voter. Most voters have no idea who their MEP is, and what views they represent, which is reflected in the turnout figures. It is not democratic
per se because there is no EU
demos as such, because the EU is a vague, ephemeral notion far more than something that people can culturally, historically and tribally identify with or feel some kind of attachment to. The EU Parliament itself is organised as a number of political groupings from the centre right and the centre left European parties which have traditionally been dominated by the pro-integrationist EPP and S&D. The former has acted as the go-to source of EC Commissioners and Presidents, all of which has placed an overwhelmingly pro-integrationist majority across the EU major institutions. The Parliament itself has relatively limited powers, and is effectively the legislature rather than playing any serious executive role. To most cynics its most notable function is to take part in mind-numbing and utterly incomprehensible committee stages of EC proposed legalising, and to enjoy the benefits of the considerable number of excellent restaurants in Brussels and in its archaic and costly peregrinations to Strasbourg.
you only have to compare initial vote shares for the parties with the number of seats they fill to see that. This isn't because it's the European Parliament, just because they chose a voting system that avoids the amplification of tiny majorities that the UK's does. When you look at the voting percentages, it's pretty clear that there was no overwhelming national support for the Conservative government in the most recent election, just as Tony Blair's Labour did not convince the nation back in his 1997 landslide. In both cases, the majority of voters actually cast a vote against both of those options by a considerable margin, but their voices are discounted by a system that was designed for an electorate that numbered in the thousands, not the millions.
Sure, you can keep comparing it to the UK system, but I think we all agree that the UK system itself needs to be addressed, and hopefully focus will now turn again to that.
The communitarian idea (which I think is a very good one) was always possible under the EU - in fact most EU member states operate with very strong regional government structures, where a vote in your city or regional election is often something that matters more for your day-to-day life than one for the national parliament.
This upheaval of voting to leave the EU, and that of the actual practicalities of doing so, have I believe created the situation in which we will now begin to consider things that would never have been considered before, and perhaps, counterintuitively, thinking in a more traditionally European way. Sure, the EU
per se would not have
prevented us from doing this, but the EU itself is entirely antithetical to such thinking as its own instincts are always of progressive centralisation, of drawing power to the centre and then disseminating it in the manner of its own choosing.
You speak of what is possible with the EU. What could be possible without the EU? Most of the debate on leaving seems to circle around the economic costs of doing so in terms of the erection of barriers to trade. I would ask you why is it necessary to have the (or an) EU in order to trade freely? The EU is a utopian political project, dedicated to the political, fiscal and monetary union of the formerly independent European states, and it has progressively awarded itself both power and riches towards that end, with any number of Presidential appointments, a 'national' anthem, a supreme court, a central bank and firmly held intentions in the direction of a central treasury, foreign policy and police and armed forces.
None of this empire-building is necessary in any way at all for the sovereign European countries, and indeed any other countries, to be able to effectively and freely trade together, and to cooperate in any number of other ways that they should choose to co-operate in, for example as the UK and France do militarily and in areas of joint foreign policy. One might even posit that the EU is actually obstructive towards the causes of commercial and policy co-operation.
