Abstract
The Leave campaign slogan of “taking back control of our laws” contained a double message: that EU legislation was done by bureaucrats in Brussels and was therefore undemocratic and that EU laws covered virtually all aspects of our lives, so that our national sovereignty was gone. This chapter debunks the first of these myths by showing that the “bureaucrats,” the European Commission, only propose drafts of laws and it is the member states’ representatives in the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament which, democratically, decide them. The Commission is the EU’s administration and has multiple tasks. The Council of Ministers and the Parliament are specialized legislators. Parliament also holds the Commission to account, for example, on its budget management. The chapter shows how the democracy of EU lawmaking has been progressively improved. The challenge now is to improve cooperation between the European Parliament and national legislatures.
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Notes
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Lewis, Jane. 2016. Stay or Go? All You Need to Know in One Concise Volume, 22. London: Connell Guides Publishing. The book goes on, on page 23, to say that the European Commission is “the EU’s principal legislative body,” but that it submits its proposals for approval by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament, leaving the picture unclear.
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- 10.
Daily Telegraph. 2017. Give EU families in the UK open-ended right to stay. 30 May. The introductory words to the article concerning the first two working papers published by Commission’s Brexit Task Force for discussion by the Council Working Party entitled “Essential Principles on Citizens’ Rights” and “Essential principles on Financial Settlement” are “European Union bureaucrats are demanding…”
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Critics like Jacob Rees-Mogg (Rees-Mogg, Jacob. 2013. Debate in Oxford Union on the EU as a threat to democracy. 11 November. Available on YouTube) have claimed that this was not only undemocratic, but smacked of the EU’s fundamentally anti-democratic instincts shown by its reaction to the rejection of its policies in referendums.
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See Sect. 6.4.
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- 24.
The Maastricht and Lisbon judgments of 1993 and 2009, respectively: BverfGE 89 155 and BverfG 2 be 2-08.
- 25.
Particularly Moravcsik, Andrew. 2003. In defence of the “democratic deficit ”: Reassessing legitimacy in the EU. Harvard University Centre for European Studies Working Paper 92.
- 26.
Robert Cooper made a similar point and said that the obvious voter apathy in European Parliament elections bore it out. He therefore advocated returning to a system of appointing representatives in the EU’s assembly: Cooper, Robert. 2014. The EU does not have a democratic deficit—it has a democratic surplus. LSE blogs.
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ITV Good Morning Britain . 2018. Nicola Sturgeon: People Have a right to change their Mind. 8 October.
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Rawlinson, F. (2019). “Taking Back Control of Our Laws”: I. Democracy. In: How Press Propaganda Paved the Way to Brexit. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27765-9_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27765-9_4
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