MR HIGSTON writes to tell us that UKIP wants to restore self-governing democracy to Britain. This is quite impossible.
The reason is very simple: we never lost it in the first place so you can’t “restore” it – Britain is a self-governing democracy!
The European Union is a voluntary association of sovereign nations, not someone’s empire.
The European Parliament has its HQ and civil service in Brussels, and any regulations from there have to be agreed by a vote either in that parliament or in the parliaments of individual countries.
We are not in the EU because we lost a war and were conquered. We voted to join it. The EU is itself a democracy, not of course a perfect one, any more than that can be said of democracies elsewhere – there are elections at the moment in Iran, but most of us would hesitate to call Iran a democracy when it has a Supreme Leader who can decide who’s allowed to stand for president and reject those he doesn’t like (something our head of state, the Queen, cannot do).
Leaving the EU would not make Britain any more independent or self-governing than it already is, and would not increase the power of our own House of Commons.
MARTIN KYRLE, Chandler’s Ford.
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