NATURAL ANKLING wrote:In law we never had to sign article 50.
We could just leave, then notify the EU.
We alone would decide what or not to pay...................
notify under, not sign. Regardless the UK did sign and ratify the relevant EU treaters so in a strict international law sense, yes it does have to use the formal methods. Obviously being a sovereign country it could decide not to, but such actions aren't exactly going to put the UK in a good light when its looking for trade deals with other countries.
UK law is democratic (as much as it can get) EU is not!
UK law is as democratic as it gets, really? We have a lower house elected by an antiquated FPTP voting system which means people in safe seats have much reduced voting power (e.g. I'm in a labour seat so safe that even when May called the last election and the polls had 17% tory leads it was expected to stay labour). Where the votes in the most marginal constituencies are effectively worth 30 times more than the votes in the safest, this is pretty obvious at election time. Live in a marginal? Pretty much every senior politician will visit at some point. Safe one like mine? *tumbleweed*.
Meanwhile the upper house is entirely unelected and has 92 members as a by-product of birth, and 24 from beliefs in the unprovable. The rest are supposed to be effectively nominated on merit but in reality have many members who are there because they donated money to a party. The UK, particularly England also has one of the most over centralised power structures of any western democracy.
I'm struggling to see how the EU is less democratic?
The commission is comprised of someone from each member state, that someone is sent by the, democratically elected, government of each state. The commission has to be approved by the EU parliament.
The council of ministers is comprised of a representative minister from the, democratically elected, government of each member state (the ministers tend to vary based on what is being considered)
The EU parliament is directly democratically elected by citizens of EU member states by a proportional system.
A commonly levelled complaint is that the EU parliament is not a real one because it cannot make it's own laws as only the commission, under the direction of member states, initiates any regulation or directive. However that is a rather disingenuous red herring. In Westminster it's effectively the same. In theory, MPs can introduce private member's bills but the reality is that, unless such a bill has government (i.e. executive) support (in which case it might as well be a government bill) it'll do nothing but waste a bit of time while it gets filibustered out in a private member's bills session. There are plenty of soft power routes for the EU parliament to exert pressure on the commission if something has popular support so it's not really any different.
Both the council and parliament can amend or reject entirely any proposed regulation or directive from the commission.