The Spectator

Letters | 10 March 2016

Plus: world’s best superpower; the Althingi; evil Rob Titchener; radiation; raincoats

issue 12 March 2016

Democracy or bureaucracy

Sir: Professor Garton Ash makes a scholarly appeal for us all to be content with government from Brussels for the foreseeable future (‘A conservative case for staying in’, 5 March). The alternative would involve possible risk. Very true. But the professor skates animbly round two words: governmental system. After numerous combats and enormous suffering, the British live within and are ruled by an elective democracy. In a reference to his Churchillian quote, it may be an imperfect system but it is better than all the others. Read the works of Jean Monnet and one will understand why the governmental system of the EU was never designed to be a democracy, is not a democracy and never will be. It is a non-elective bureaucracy.

One can choose to be governed by one system or the other but not both, or part of both. One has to dominate the other and we know which has the primacy.

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