Potholes.

That’s doubtless why the EU parliament is the only one on the planet that can neither initiate nor repeal legislation.

It’s true that they can go cap-in-hand to the Supreme Soviet to ask, but that hardly makes them sovereign, even if the request arises from the very open consultation process.

He's right, a consensus is vital, given that any member state can veto anything it disagrees with. That's a hangover from de Gaulle, who insisted on it or else France would pick up its marbles and go home.

The EU civil service (i.e. the actual rulers of the EU empire) have been trying to get rid of it ever since de Gaulle left, but without success, as the EU would then become two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for lunch, and the smaller countries understand this.

It already is.

In message <10r2cj5$2luc2$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, at 08:43:33 on Tue, 7 Apr

We are (or were) indeed blessed. Remember, I spent about eight years doing it.

In message snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>, at 09:10:16 on Tue, 7 Apr

This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the EU process.

And achieved precisely what?

But it is still true.

In message <10r33ea$2sp9k$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, at 15:13:30 on Tue, 7 Apr

Most important for geeks here perhaps, fending off a "blank cassette levy" for every otherwise free web browser downloaded.

But many other things to do with data protection and telecoms deregulation.

In message <10r33g4$2sp9k$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, at 15:14:28 on Tue, 7 Apr

But in whatever context you claim that to be true, irrelevant to the overall process.

As the EU gets larger, having all countries able to veto any measure produces inertia - since there is always likely to be one country (Cough/Hungary) which will use this as a weapon.

Didn't they shift to qualified majority voting for many things to prevent vetos?

Well exactly. Democracy is irrelevant in the EU,

And the point you make is that without the veto, the people of Hungary would have been forced to put up with Mama Merkel's mass immigration fixation, against their will. The people of the EU largely agreed to sign up to a trade organisation, not an empire. We saw that when two founder members of the EEC, France and the Netherlands, were invited to agree to an EU Constitution, they chose not to, but it was forced on them anyway.

Should government be carried out with the consent of the governed, or not? Is tyranny now considered OK?

Yes, but not the most important stuff.

Is inertia better or worse than uncontrolled tyranny? Were we not governed better by the recent coalition, which couldn't agree on anything, than by any government since?

Perhaps we need one of these:

Was that the point I was making? No it was not.

Many of those measures vetoed by Orban had little or nothing to do with the people of Hungary - but they could be used as a means of trying to force concessions from the EU.

the problem with inertia and incessant argument is that while it introduces stability, it also resists needful change.

So many things that are argued ideologically are really simple engineering problems without any moral dimension at all.

Free movement in a ship is ideal until it's sinking, and then you want to divide it up with watertight borders...

Too much government is tyranny and too little is anarchy.

(Right now we seem to have arrived at the worst features of both)

If there had been any way to vote for the coalition to continue for another term, I probably would have ...

:-)

I remember that campaign.

I was given a handout from the antis in the form of a cassette containing argument as to why the levy should not be introduced. I tried to listen to it again recently (maybe a year ago), but the mechanism kept jamming, even on an expensive standalone cassette deck and in a ghetto-blaster type CD/radio/cassette unit.

But I kept the case... you never know...

So the countries who wanted to veto just disobey.

We don't really have a United States of Europe.