On Wednesday, 6 July, the EU Parliament voted to confirm that gas and nuclear energy are to beclassified as sustainable – in other words as “green” - in the EU taxonomy. I have never utilised this reference before, as it is has become cant, but it does not get much more Orwellian than this.
So our non-democratic EU Parliament (is there any other parliament in the world that cannot even initiate legislation except maybe in a Gulf autocracy?), has once again demonstrated its loyalty to the EU oligarchy and disdain for Europeans whose nations are EU member states. In best EU parliamentary drama play book tradition, a few weeks before the two responsible parliamentary committees vehemently objected to the inclusion of nuclear and gas in the list of environmentallysustainable economic activities. This was followed by a celebration in in corporate media of how a non-existent EU parliamentary democracy was brandishing power and courage it in reality does not possess. As usual, in the end the EU rubber-stamp parliament rubber-stamped the EU Council’s decree, making the two fossil fuels “green” (I shan’t go into the endemic corruption in Brussels). And once again EU oligarchy is portrayed as a dynamic democracy.
To add injury to insult, as I recently wrote, maybe half of the citizens in EU member states vote for this faux parliament and most of these see such elections as a sort of plebiscite on the performance of their national government. A conservative estimate is that only one percent of citizens in EU member states even know what powers the EU Parliament has.
Which brings me back to a topic that is little understood concerning Brexit. In the UK there is a vibrant parliamentary tradition that goes back round half a millennium. The British see their parliament as supreme and more important still, their voice. The EU political system, which has nothing to do with direct representation of the people and whose parliament has nothing to do with a real parliaent in a real democracy, was for the majority of UK citizens non-democratic, thus the slogan “Taking back control”, which meant re-establishing democracy and the people's will.
In corporate media on the continent one has little concept of just how vibrant British politics has remained, resulting in the current political crisis.Everyone there knows the names and faces of those responsible for the current political and economic disaster in the UK. Which of you can cite a single name responsible for the EU taxonomy disaster?