Madam,

Chris West creates a false impression when he suggests that the EU is democratic because the European parliament is involved in law-making and can return proposed laws to the commission for reconsideration.

The problem is that the com-mission doesn’t have to adopt changes suggested by the European Parliament and, if agreement is not reached, the legislation cannot proceed regardless of the views of MEPs.

In effect, nothing goes through that isn’t proposed and agreed by the commission. It is the commission’s members, therefore, who are the ones who make the laws.

The European Parliament is not a parliament in the normal sense of the word, but is essentially a review body akin to the House of Lords in the UK.

The critical difference is that in the UK the laws are proposed and agreed by the members of parliament who are elected and can be replaced, whereas in the EU the laws are proposed and have to be agreed by the commission which is unelected and therefore cannot be replaced by the electorate.

Hence the UK is a democracy and the EU is essentially a dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

In any event, for many who voted to leave the EU the workings of the EU, even if they were democratic, are irrelevant as they want the UK to run its own affairs.

With regard to the CAP payments to farmers etc, the point I was making in my previous letter was that if all the payments back from the EU out of the £350m-plus which is placed under EU control each week remained unaltered after Brexit (ie they were paid by the UK Government), there would still be £170m a week left over to spend on other things.

So long as we are in the EU that £170m a week of UK taxpayers’ money simply vanishes and is supposedly spent on projects in other EU countries.

Yours etc,

Alan MacMaster, Barmouth.

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