Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-09-14-Speech-3-172-000"
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"en.20110914.24.3-172-000"2
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"Mr President, thank you for your kind words.
It is sometimes said that the European Commission is undemocratic in that none of its members is elected, but actually I find that it is rather more than that. Uniquely in the western world we have contrived a system which is anti-democratic, in the sense that you generally have to have lost an election before you are appointed to the European Commission.
If I think of the British appointees over the years – Chris Patten, Neil Kinnock, Peter Mandelson – it was only when they had been expressly rejected by their constituents that they were invited to come and legislate for them at European level.
I think of the career of our current UK Commissioner, Baroness Ashton, who has never once in her entire life taken the trouble to present herself to her fellow countrymen and ask for their support in an election. She is a product of the British quango state, having flitted from bureaucracy to bureaucracy, becoming an appointed peer and then arriving here.
Is it any wonder that a system based around this insulation from public opinion should be so contemptuous of democracy when, for example, a referendum goes the wrong way?"@en1
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