No sovereignty no democracy

No sovereignty and no democracy.

This was the corner piece of my decision to vote to leave the EU. It was not about immigration, although our dreadfully poor record of building for an expanding community in this country made the decision, to have a hand in who comes here very important. It was not the "Employment Market" taking the opportunity to reduce the cost of labour which worried me because, by taking back sovereignty we could address these problems and if they were not addressed, then politically we had the opportunity, through the democratic mandate, to change the government.

Dr Schauble's Europe has little or no truck with the need for sovereignty or a democratic mandate.

While members of the European Council and the Eurogroup are individually elected politicians answerable theoretically to national parliaments, the Council and the Eurogroup are not collectively answerable to any parliament. Moreover the Eurogroup where all the important economic decisions are taken is a body that doesn't even exist in European law, that keeps no minutes of its procedures and who's rule is that it's deliberations are private and confidential and not to be shared with Europe's citizenry.

Just as Prussia enticed and then swallowed the smaller German states encouraging them to believe they would be stronger within Zollverein only to dismantle it soon after so the Euro project, very much under the sway of Germany has historical precedence.

Surely it is argued, there is no room for small sovereign states in this global society. Yet small sovereign states like  Iceland retain the authority to make there own laws and hold their elected officials to account. There is no similar sort of accountability shown by the European Council or the Eurogroup. Everything is done behind closed doors and in secret without public scrutiny.

Surely this is enough reason for our wanting to leave. Never mind the economic down-turn, that can be remedied but the democratic fault lines built into the "project" from its conception are much more dangerous since, without accountability who knows where events, conceptualised in smoke filled rooms will take us.