EU Rules OK

Two years ago I was on Malta, population about 500,000, and more recently Estonia, population 1.3 million.

To digress, Luxembourg is another tiddler, 0.7 million, where I have only been once, for a picnic lunch in a beech wood driving to a ski resort about half a century ago. If Scotland were to secede from the UK and join the EU with a population of 5.5 million, size-wise it would be about level with Ireland, Slovakia and Finland. To digress, there is some new spell check programme on my Apple product that makes super-unhelpful changes. It has just changed “secede” to “nectar”. It seems to hate new words and alters them to something it recognises but it does eventually get to learn a new word. It would have driven John Donne crazy.

As you know Parliamentary constituencies in the UK are supposed to have between 70,00 and 77,000 voters on the electoral roll, with exceptions like the Isle of Wight and the Highlands and Islands. The IoW since 2024 has two constituencies, each with fewer than 60,000 voters. Previously it had been too big with one MP for more than 110,000 voters. Anyway, although democracy in the UK is imperfect and sometimes illogical, the Boundary Commission do a pretty good job.

So how fair is democracy in the EU with 27 member countries of such varying size? The short answer is I don’t know. The long answer is there are mechanisms both to stop tiddlers wielding to much power and the whoppers (Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland, in descending order) bossing around the others. Now I know how Estonia created such a complicated election process to choose a song for Eurovision. The three main democratic institutions in the EU are the European Parliament, the Council of Ministers (confusingly aka as the Council of the EU) , and the European Council.

The European Council defines the EU’s general political direction and priorities. Ir doesn’t adopt EU legislation. Its members are heads of state, presidents of the European Council and the European Commission. Typically it operates by consensus or unanimity, granting equal influence to each head of state.

The Council of the EU negotiates and adopts EU legislation, usually with the European Parliament. Its members are representatives of each member state at ministerial level. A decision requires 55% of member states (15 countries) representing at least 65% of the total EU population to pass. This means larger countries have more influence. But a group of at least four member states can block a decision, preventing a few large countries from dominating.

In the European Parliament seats (there are 720) are allocated based on “degressive proportionality”. This means larger countries have more seats, but smaller countries have more representatives per citizen than larger ones. For sensitive areas like foreign policy or taxation, all countries have equal, absolute veto power.

So that’s all quite clear, innit? There was a BBC journalist last night who suffixed all her questions with “Isn’t it?”. I wanted her to go the full hog and say Innit.