A small point, but it's important to highlight a recurring mistake British people make about the EU: It's not the EU election system, it's the Government of the UK's... national governments decide on how Euorpean Parliament elections should be conducted - the EU only sets a minimum requirement that the results be proportional to the vote-shares. So in the UK, you use a simplified PR system, while we in Ireland use the exact same PR-STV system we use for parliamentary elections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_to_the_European_Parliament#Voting_system
That's how the EU works - its members agree a minimum acceptable standard, and memer states can legislate it however they want.
Representative means that its composition reflects the electors' choices - nothing more, nothing less. That's the lowest bar for an electoral system: everything else is down to the electors to some degree. Perhaps the if UK electorate took more interest in European politics, they'd have had better results. Apathy has always characterised the domestic parties' approach to the EP, leaving the field open for the fringes like UKIP, BP.
Sorry, this is bollocks. 400 million citizens of the 27 EU member countries are eligible to vote. That is the
demos.
You feel a tribal identification with your town council? Really? I couldn't give two shiny shits about mine, but I know that by not voting for competent people, I increase the chances of morons getting to run it, and things would stop getting done. Voting is not an expression of identity.
To most cynics the object of their cynicism serves no purpose whatsoever. Yes, I agree the Strasbourg jaunt is a waste of money - I'm no blind fan of the EP. I just don't see grounds for the Brexiters' disdain for it, although I understand their exploitation of it very well. (When Irish separatists were elected to Westminster after the First World War, they declined to take their seats; It's not often that anyone gets out-nobled by Sinn Féin*, but Brexit Party managed to gather all the nice EP salary, while doing nothing, rather than take a proper stand against the evil EU)
(* I know well it's not the same party, but he modern spoofers claim to be them)
The Parliament is only a legislature because it is subordinate to the national governments. The Commission, which is appointed by the national governments, and directed by them, holds the executive power
because is composition is controlled by the national governments.
And if the debates are mind-numbing (they are), it's because the EU has legal competence over the very boring things that make a trading economy work: standards, regulations, co-operations. Nothing as exciting as trying to shut down a parliament because you can't get your legislation through it, granted, but it's the boring stuff like not getting fleeced by your mobile company when someone phones you while you're abroad, or knowing that food you buy in Spanish/Greek/Belgian supermarket isn't loaded with toxic preservatives that makes a difference to people's lives.
If you see that as creeping centralism, fine, but as someone who's had to make a physical product, I'm glad that certifying its safety in Ireland was enough to allow it to be sold in 28 countries wihtout further modification.
It won't. Brexit is an intensely conservative project, with a small c - it's trying to destroy the present to recreate a previous Britain, a Britain before the 1980s hollowed out the North, before the 1970s destroyed its industry, before the 1960s' devaluation killed the Pound. Its sunlit uplands are the boom of the 1960s. It's a Britain that never existed, except in nostalgic memory.
That sentiment isn't going to drive any change the time-honoured institutions of British government. If the outcomes of Brexit fail the people, there will be much more appetite for change, but it will be fuelled by anger, and it will manifest in the sort of civil disorder not seen since the early 1980s. Personally, I'd prefer the UK not to go down that route.
You yourself will demonstrate in a moment that there's no binding EU foreign policy now, and I'll say there's none coming - it'll be guidelines and minimum standards again; and there is also no EU Army (unless you think NATO has an army too). As for treasury and currency, the UK was always outside of that - the nations who chose to form the Eurozone accept that a common currency implies a common treasury.
You're also the first person I've ever heard of complaining about Europol (of course, I don't know any criminals). Policing across borders requires a police force with agreements that allow it to operate across borders. The recent "County Lines" drugs cases in the UK show how criminals exploit boundaries of jurisdiction even on a small scale.
I'm confident that the UK will push to remain in Europol to the greatest extent that it can.
... while being subject to toeing the line on an "EU Foreign Policy"? How rebellious of them.
One
might posit that, but the longer one tries to argue it, the more ignorant they'd sound.
Over its existence, the EU has negotiated away thousands of the kind of trivial regulations that impede trade and political cooperation. Your typical British PM is too busy with "statecraft" and making big legacy statements to bother about the everyday small things, but it's these that allow trade and political cooperation, like making sure that shipping palettes manufactured anywhere in the EU are interchangeable in size, load and usable lifetime, or that health systems in one country can procure services from those in another, regardless of the funding models used in those countries, or ensuring that everyone agrees on the meaning of things as diverse as "full fat" milk or how a univeristy degree is recognised; or allowing a drug approval by any national approval authority serve for all countries in the EU, or for that matter assuring that pharmaceuticals are made to the same standards in Warsaw, Cambridge, Bratislava or Turin.
There's hundreds more examples.
Every complaint I've ever heard from British industry about the EU boiled down to "we're making substandard products, and these rules don't let us get away with it anymore!". That cry is not unique to the UK, mind you - stronger regulations always piss someone off, but only in the UK does the press rally behind the cheapskate and the fraudster and defend them against being forced to do the right thing.
But this is my last word on electoral systems and the
benefits of the EU. The OP was asking about what benefits there will be once Brexit happens.
So far, we've had your feeling of having a more direct control of government. That's one. Can anyone offer anything else? Something more tangible, perhaps.