Mike Causey – Wrecclesham and Rowledge
Waverley Borough CouncillorArchive for Europe
Begrudging Thanks
I’m really not sure whether it’s come across in my blog in the past few years, but just in case it hasn’t: I’m not a fan of the European Union and the continued drive for economic and political integration.
So, it’s with some begrudging that I recognise how very much easier it is to travel the continent by car when the borders are open and the currency is singular. Since leaving the UK on Wednesday morning, we’ve cross an international border 8 times, and not once had to produce our passport, or patronise a currency exchange.
Useful? Yes. A good reason to pursue further integration? No. Convenience has no place in determining such weighty matters.
Planning Applications 20th October 2010
(Click here if you want to go the Waverley planning search page, and select ‘Ward’ from the left hand list of options)
No new applications this week. However, I’ve been thinking about planning rules today as we’ve been passing through a number of European countries on our way to Germany to stay with friends. Seeing alternative designs for homes, communities, transportation and urban-rural boundaries, makes one reconsider how strongly one holds to what the UK might think as normal. In fact, the home that we’re staying in is simply amazing: the use of a basement, and one floor of living space in mostly open plan, makes us yearn for something like this in the UK. Unfortunately, even buying just the land on which to build such a home would be prohibitive in South West Surrey. Sigh.
On Referenda
Once again I find myself agreeing [almost] wholeheartedly with Melanchthon, a writer for ConservativeHome. However, on one point I may disagree with him, and so I have posted the following response to his article this morning:
We elect our representatives within the existing framework of sovereignty and law. If they wish to sign away the very legal and political framework within which we elected them to serve us, surely this would be solid and natural grounds for a referendum to establish the people’s view.
One could argue that a general election could do the same thing. Well, perhaps – but haven’t we had the perfect example of that being incorrect? A manifesto that explicitly guaranteed a referendum on the European Constitution was ignored. Unless manifestos are required by law (and enforceable by law) to contain specific policies and bills, which once elected the party will pursue, they are not considered by the electorate as worth the paper they are written on. (And by the way, that’s the tiny percentage of the electorate that actually read them, not the masses that think they know what they contain by way of the terribly biased interpretation of the mass media.)
Of course, there’s no way that a law could be sophisticated enough, or have sufficient teeth, to hold political parties to account to their manifesto, and we’ve learned anyway that our party leaders are not powerful enough to quell the mentality of ‘entitlement’ that pervades our political class. Entitlement to power; entitlement to expenses; entitlement to mortgages and property; entitlement to employ one’s family.
So, back to referenda – what part of the reality of our parliamentary democracy and the natural fragility of man’s honesty in the temptations of power, leads you to believe that referenda do not have their place?
