Tychy is a switherer on the upcoming Scottish referendum, and one point which would help decide for him would be the possibility of a restructured relationship between the EU and all its member states. In November last year, he wrote
Let us think the unthinkable. Just imagine for a moment that the supranational institutions of the European Union were functionally democratic and actually accountable to us, the voters. In such an unlikely world, the EU Commission might be obliged to make it clear to the Scottish electorate whether their nation could or could not (re)join the EU following an independence vote. But this is not the world that we live in: the EU’s democracy is simply PR, its inner workings are the hostage of only remotely democratic power struggles, and the notion that the EU should have to respond to normal democratic pressures has apparently not penetrated the current independence debate.
Take, for example, the leading pro-independence website Wings Over Scotland, where the Reverend Stuart Campbell complains that “Better Together” “scream about uncertainty around Scotland’s membership of the EU, yet the answer to that question is in their gift and theirs alone.” There you have it. The EU is a faraway foreign power, which can only be approached by Westminster intermediaries, rather than a democratic organisation which has to occasionally chat to its voters.
As a democrat, this seriously winds me up.
Read the rest. A follow-up is here.
