“John Major contemptuously signed us up for the Maastricht Treaty without a referendum,”
Indeed. And that is why, as I’ve said once or twice, that I have said that 1992 marked the point when I believed more than ever that the UK needed to quit.
“And I don’t buy the ‘because we can vote them out’ argument as believing there are some more honest less Machiavellian MPs waiting in the wings is naive in the extreme.”
So basically then, it doesn’t matter whether or not we can elect our MPs because we don’t have a very good choice of candidates. Far better, presumably, to have no choice whatsoever and simply be ruled by a bunch of unelected foreign civil servants.
Of course the system of democracy in the UK is imperfect. There’s not a perfect system anywhere in the world. But to suggest that because of those imperfections we should sacrifice it entirely is not, perhaps, the most agreeable of solutions.