European Elections

On Monday May 11, Radio 4's 'Today' programme ran an item on the forthcoming European elections. The jist of it was "people aren't interested in the election and are ambivalent about being in the EU in the first place". It wasn't terribly difficult to produce evidence of this : a reporter had gone out on the streets somewhere in the Wirral and asked people what they thought of the EU. The only person who offered anything like a fact was a man who said it cost us too much : "40 million pounds a day". This was a quote from a UK Independence Party billboard, if I'm not mistaken - except I think the actual billboard says euros, not pounds. UKIP runs on a 'Britain out of Europe' ticket, although looking at the actual speeches and tabled questions from the UKIP MEPs for our constituency they seem to act more as a 'loyal opposition', querying budgets &c.

What would have been far more interesting would have been if they'd asked people what they actually knew about the actual work of the EU. My guess is (based partly on my own lack of knowledge despite having been involved to some extent with EU affairs in the past, and having visited the Parliament twice) that most Brits know next to nothing about what it does.

Compared with our own secretive government and the general user-unfriendliness of its websites, the European Parliament's website http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/public/default_en.htm, is a doddle and very informative.

Most of what the EU does, it seems to me, is terribly tedious background work on harmonisation which is absolutely necessary and could only be done by something like the EU. Maybe that's why nobody knows what it does - it's just too boring to report. I'm sure that to some extent it's a gravy train - but, hey, nobody does the gravy train like a British MP!