Redwurzel
Well-known member
Thank you Lefty for your lengthy and thought through reply.Not just nations. There are competing interests which cross borders and are actually more important than national self interest, such as business, workers and consumers interests, or environmental ones. In truth, national interests largely boil down to the blend of those broader competing interests within a nations culture anyway. Depending on your personal politics it is therefore easy to find things to complain about regarding the EU. Those on the right can find examples where they dislike some of the constraints on business, those on the left that it could offer more protection for workers etc. The EU does a pretty good job of balancing all these things and the various national interests. And it is an evolving institution.
It does tend to be slow. What it does is consult widely, deliberate carefully, balance competing interests, engage experts and technocrats and generally come to pretty good technical and legislative solutions to the everyday issues in the end. That is because it realises that process is important. If you get the decision making process right then it only leaves the final value judgement for a mistake to creep in. If you don't get the process right, your potential for error is significantly greater. Getting the process right, means being thorough, which is slow. Speeding things up often means cutting corners on the process, so it can mean a wrong response implemented quickly. That might be worse than no response. Process is baked in to the EU. It has to be. All the competing nations and lobbyists insisted on having some representation and voice in it and they keep a beady eye that what was painstakingly agreed is stuck to.
Consequently the EU is not good at responding quickly to new crises. It's just not well set up for that. That wasn't it's purpose so that shouldn't be a surprise. Countries are jealous of their sovereignty so the EU is on the one hand hampered by curbs on its powers by this yet on the other expected to quickly respond in a way that requires powers it has not always been granted. If you want it to solve them it means giving it more powers. Until a crisis looms, no-one is prepared to do it, but at that point it is too late. Afterwards, it tends to learn lessons and devise something better to put in place for next time or even put measures in place to avoid the same thing happening again.
Post Brexit the UK ought to be able to respond quickly to new crises and quicker should equal better, but our long term everyday measures will probably be less well considered and legislated for, so ultimately will mean deficiencies compared to the EU. Neither of these has to be true, but probably will.
I was probably about 55%/45% about what to vote for in 2016 obviously some of the EU practices bring positive benefits such as guaranteed employee holidays, free movement of goods within the EU with limited red tape when processes have been agreed and implemented.
I do accept the EU has to bring a large multitude of interests together. I tend to believe this will be on going problem (opposed to a benefit), For example operating one currency and one economic policy does fill me with a lot of concerns which every EU nation will eventually have to be in, for full EU economic integration. I am not a big government fan and prefer more localised government that is closely to the people it is there for. To me overall it leads to better decision making and less bureaucracy than heavily centralised control. Centralised control to me is leading to a drift to an unhealthy drift to metropolitan centres.