Quote Originally Posted by WES View Post
Ad hominem

And you have refuted very little of the article including some points that directly contradict the 'undemocratic' view. As an example:

'The Commission can only propose laws in those areas where the EU governments have unanimously agreed to allow it to do under the EU treaty. Put another way, the Commission can only propose EU laws in areas where the UK government and the House of Commons has allowed it to do so.'
Those permissions are not granted on a case by case basis. They were granted in perpetuity by treaty at Maastricht (and subsequently Lisbon) and were never subjected to public approval or disapproval. Blair promised a vote on Lisbon, of course, but then withdrew that commitment as he knew he'd lose badly.

You surely cannot be arguing that a decision taken unilaterally by governments that left office years before many voters were even born and which is effectively immutable (other than by leaving the EU, of course) can remain democratically legitimate in perpetuity? A key principle of the British constitution is that no Parliament may bind its successors in perpetuity and yet that is - in effect - precisely what signing these treaties did. As such, those 'permissions' are not democratically legitimate. The price paid to remain part of the EU was to abandon our system of democratic and parliamentary scrutiny over vast swathes of our statute book. To those of us who believe in democracy, it was not and is not a price worth paying.

Dismantling those treaties - because they subvert our domestic legislative process and allow laws to be passed pretty much in perpetuity without proper democratic scrutiny - is very much where the impetus for Brexit came from.