I NOTE that Dr Barry Worthington has felt the need to comment further to responses contained in the March 2 edition of the Bury Times.

While I have no wish to prolong this debate, nevertheless his contention that the EU is a democratic organisation, in the literal sense of representing the people, is hard to swallow.

It’s labyrinthian and byzantine power structure does not fit with any known democratic process that I am aware of.

At its head is the European Council made up of the national leaders of the member states which sets out the priorities.

The next layer is the unelected and appointed European Council which alone proposes legislation and sets budgets which the European Parliament (the only directly elected body) has the opportunity to vote on, but only if it can agree with the Council of Ministers (appointed by each member state). If that is what Dr Worthington considers to be democratic, then perhaps I am not alone in wanting to reject this idea.

Our country’s system of government may be imperfect, but is 29 times (the number of member states) more representative than the European Union. To compound matters we have a two-tier EU, those in the Eurozone and those outside like ourselves.

It is the bureaucratic nature of the functioning of this organisation that makes accountability to the ordinary voter so remote.

Take England for example which, on present trends, is set to become the second most densely populated country in the EU by 2031.

It has witnessed an enormous and continuing influx of immigration into this country which requires a large increase in infrastructure spending to provide the services, housing, etc, to cope with its popularity as a favoured destination for other EU nationals.

Because we cannot control our borders we can do nothing about it under EU rules and our partners in Europe were unsympathetic to our plight in wishing to have controls on EU immigration.

However, when it comes to breaking the EU rules to help Greece with a bail out then that is a different matter.

The interests of the Eurozone come first and are dealt with quickly. It is one way for them and another for us and in our case the highway as a result of Brexit.

Had the rest of the EU countries been more sympathetic to the issues facing us, I am sure we would not have had a referendum. It is the failure of their ‘democratic’ process in not taking into account the democratic wishes of the people that has prompted our exit from the EU.

In his final paragraph, Dr Worthington seems to agree about the illogicality of having the euro without having a common structure of economic control throughout the Eurozone for example a central bank, common fiscal policy, etc, but is fixed in his belief that this will be ‘ironed out’ eventually to create a ‘truly integrated European economy’.

The only problem from our point of view is that we are not in the euro and were unlikely ever to be so.

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