Is it just me or...

I heard not so long ago that Tony Blair was considering running for president of the EU (the post is actually president of the European Council), and whilst this depressed me deeply, it seemed quite fitting in many ways. It seems that Tony Blair has reached that stage in his life where he is so completely divorced from reality that the only place for him really is somewhere like the committee rooms of European government. There he can continue the charade of his self-delusional self-belief, safely cosseted away from the evils of public opinion and the democratic process. Am I being too harsh? Possibly on the EU. Perhaps it is more democratic, more in touch with its constituency than I give it credit for, but that is not the perception. To most people, the governing structure of the EU is as opaque as the personal logic of Tony Blair.

Now I don't pretend to understand the structure of government of the EU completely myself, I don't pretend to be an expert on Europe, but it has always struck me as something one should take an interest in. It is, after all one of the three major forces of government in our lives.

I remember a few years ago that a group of Cornish fishermen were protesting against EU fishing quotas by sailing up the Thames to Westminster. This struck me as seeming quite odd at the time, because if the quotas were European, surely they should be protesting to the European Parliament (although I'm not sure one can sail a fishing boat all the way to Brussels) rather than Westminster. Now again, this may be due to my lack of understanding of the finer points of the power structures; perhaps the fishermen felt that they should make representations to the UK government because they select the most powerful UK representative in Europe: their commissioner. Perhaps the fishermen felt that it was easiest to make representations to Westminster because, like me, they are baffled by the labyrinthine complexity of the organisation that would have faced them in Brussels.

Whilst I cannot lay claim to being a expert on the EU, I think I can fairly justifiably say that anything so opaque cannot be very democratic. I am willing to be swayed on this, I am going to try and learn what it's all about, but I should make my starting position clear: I think that the EU is a fundamentally flawed and wholly undemocratic institution. So I'm going to try and learn what I can about it, partly by reading about it, partly by posing theories, and hopefully by getting into debate. I want to find ways that we can genuuinely make the EU something that the people of Europe are proud of, rather than a bureaucratic nuisance and drain on our resources. I'm not saying it's all bad by any means, I'm just sure it could be a whole lot better.