I regret to say that I had never heard of MP Gisela Stuart until a fascinating essay by her was pointed out to me by fellow "Wittangemot" member John at The England Project. The article is worth reading in full; even though it is likely to cause disagreement here and there, I find the overall thesis to be very good and to explain very well why "Unio Europaea Delenda Est"
The essay tries to answer the question about what is needed for democracy to be successful and I think her summary at the end is spot on:
The key elements for a functioning democracy are: a liberal market economy, the ability to remove by peaceful means those who govern us, and knowing who we mean when we say “we”. I suspect that the most difficult question to answer is the one which asks: who are “we”?
This comes immediately after the reason why we inhabitants of the EU fail to consider ourselves part of an EU democracy is explained, a reason which is why the EU should be treated with the greatest suspicion by any believer in democracy:
institutions which pretend to be democratic, but lack the most fundamental requirement of democracy, i.e. the voters can get rid of them
institutions where it has become impossible to locate who takes responsibility for decisions
a system which pretends that actions have no consequences, that politics is not a battle of ideas and that political choices are like shopping in a supermarket – pick this or the other off the shelf, and never bother about coherence and consequences of the individual choices
She is more directly scathing of the EU higher up and I rather like that part of her analysis. The EU is a democratic failure because we can't "kick out the rogues" and we have no idea who makes decisions. The fact that the proposed EU constitution intended to weld a single political viewpoint on us all (the third bullet point) is merely icing on the cake, it is the total unaccountability that is the real problem, as witness the 11 years of unauditable accounts.
The problem that John has is the earlier paragraph where she states:
Yet it has only been in the last five years or so that I have heard people in my constituency telling me, “I am not British – I am English”. That worries me. British identity is based on and anchored in its political and legal institutions and this enables it to take in new entrants more easily than it would be if being a member of a nation were to be defined by blood. But a democratic polity will only work if citizens’ identification is with the community as a whole, or at least with the shared process, which overrides their loyalty to a segment.
The trick here is that Gisela fails to analyse why people might say they are English not British. It seems to me that she should blame Phoney Tony and his Scotch pals for creating the Scotch Parliamant and (for that matter) the naff Taff Assembly. English people, actually I extend that to all British people, are keen on fairness (it is why we like bloated failures like the NHS because they appear to be fair - we all die equally of MRSA) and the problem is that at present there is a huge unfairness in the system that the Scotch get to elect people who decide things for the English but not (or at least not to the same extent) in reverse. I suspect that English self-identification is also a reaction against the multiculti crowd who are love ethnic minorities apparently at the expense of the rest. To put it bluntly until we expect the Welsh and the Scotch to identify themselves as British not as Welsh or Scotch it should not be a surprise that the English do likewise.
If Gisela wants her constituents to refer to themselves as British instead of English she could usefully look at why the English people are not identifying with the "community as a whole" and possibly try to fix it. However while she is right bang on with the problem of the EU and its democratic problems she fails to perform the same analysis on the United Kingdom and realise that the English find it hard to get rid of the labour rogues because the other parts of the UK are more solidly labour, find it very hard to find anyone in Labour Nouveau who will take responsibility for anything and a political system that seems to demonstrate that pals of Tony do not in fact face any consequences for stupid actions.