Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-04-18-Speech-4-014-000"
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"en.20130418.2.4-014-000"2
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"Madam President, this is just a public relations exercise to paint a veneer of democracy over the undemocratic European Union. The best definition of democracy that I know of was given by Abraham Lincoln, who said that it was ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people’. There are no common people in Europe; there is no political identity with which they can identify, so you can never have a true democratic system in the European Union as a whole.
The only democracy that makes any sense is the democracy of nation states, where people identify with a common political identity. All democratic governments in different countries take different forms. They all have different structures. But in order for a country to be called a democracy, it must have one single characteristic: the ability not only to elect the government but also to sack the government and replace it with a different government.
Of course, that is the one thing you cannot do in the European Union. The people do not select the Commission, who are the effective government of the European Union, and they cannot sack them. Therefore no country that is a member of the European Union can claim to be a functioning democracy. We are seeing our democracies destroyed. All the governments of the western world, and in particular those of the European Union, are disconnecting from their own people and imposing policies on them which they do not want – like mass uncontrolled immigration and idiotic climate change legislation, which is destroying their economies.
The only Citizens’ Initiative which makes any sense is the initiative to leave the European Union. People in Britain have the opportunity to do that by voting for the UK Independence Party, and they are doing it in increasing numbers."@en1
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The resource appears as object in 2 triples