What a 'democratic deficit' costs us  from Christopher Bookers notebook  Oct 28 2007

Twice last Tuesday we were given chilling glimpses of the workings of that
curious form of government Gordon Brown has just signed up to even more of.

The European Parliament was discussing a major new pesticides directive, with
enormous financial and other implications.

A Tory MEP, Christopher Heaton-Harris, protested that MEPs had been deluged with
emails by a lobby group which was apparently funded by the European Commission,
the directive's sponsors.

It emerged that the Commission pays out €800 million a year – more than half a
billion pounds – to 10,000 lobby groups, such as Friends of the Earth.

According to the environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, this is necessary to
remedy Europe's "democratic deficit" by ensuring that their voices are heard "at
European level".

How strange that Mr Brown and his colleagues seem so determined that our views
on the EU treaty should not be heard "at European level".

Then MEPs came to vote on 700 amendments to the directive in an hour, mostly by
show of hands.

Some, led by the UK Independence Party's Graham Booth, were howled down when
they protested that the chairman, Vidal Quadras, was not reading the votes
correctly, asking for them to be checked electronically.

When he occasionally allowed this, it confirmed that his readings were
astonishingly inaccurate. One amendment had in fact gone the opposite way to
what he claimed, by 499 votes to 136.

When Mr Booth then repeated his earlier plea that all votes should be
electronically counted, Mr Quadras waved this aside, saying that mistakes of
this kind "we have to accept".

In such a farcically cynical fashion are many of the more important laws which
govern our lives now being made.http://www.brussels journal.com/ node/2122
The Brussels Journal
How Can Anybody Trust This Parliament?
From the desk of Elaib Harvey on Fri, 2007-05-11 10:24

One of my regular rants about the European Parliament is that it is almost
entirely unaccountable. Over 80% of the votes are by show of hands, thus there
are no possible records as to how people vote. This in turn means that the
electorate have no way of knowing what their MEP has done, and cannot judge them
on their actions.

Remember what they vote on becomes law. And breach of laws created here in
Brussels can be prosecuted with prison and/or fines. Therefore it would be nice
to think that the votes are accurately counted.

Yesterday this happened,

“During voting on a report by Mr. Kaczmarek on EU partnership in the Horn of
Africa, amendment No. 5 was declared ‘Rejected’ by the chairman Vidal-Quadras,
having assessed the show of hands ‘for’ and ‘against’ the amendment.
The call for an electronic check revealed that it had actually been APPROVED
by no less than 567 votes to 17 (with 18 abstentions) .
He blamed the MEPs for ‘not holding their hands high enough’!
I close my case.”

This came from Graham Booth, UKIP MEP for the South Western Counties who has
been running a campaign to have every single voted electronically counted (What
we call RCV – Roll Call Vote). When he wrote to the president of Parliament he
was told that to count the votes would, first take too long, after all many
members have flights to catch. Better still it was pointed out that they would
also miss their lunches.