'Big Problem': Analyst Says Stopping Brexit Would Be Disastrous for UK Democracy

With Boris Johnson’s speech seemingly infuriating members of the European Commission, such as President Jean-Claude Junker; Sputnik spoke with Tara McCormack, Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester, to get her take on the issue.
Sputnik

Sputnik: Do you believe that the EU is on the path to becoming a so called European Superstate as Boris Johnson claims?

Tara McCormack: Boris Johnson didn’t exactly claim that in his speech, but no I don’t think the EU is a super state. I think it’s a very undemocratic institution but it’s not a super state. I mean you’ve seen over several years attempts to draw up a constitution, to at least symbolically create some kind of a sense of demos, but these things have really fallen flat.

I think what the EU does, it provides a forum in which national executives can have their decisions protected from their own national electorates rather than being a super state as such.

Sputnik: Do you agree that stopping Brexit would be disastrous?

Tara McCormack: I think stopping Brexit now would be quite a big problem, in terms of British democracy, in that the majority of British people voted to leave the European Union in an extremely high turnout.

To overthrow that would be essentially to say fairly explicitly to the majority of the voters in the country that their votes are irrelevant. Of course that was one of the drivers; that people’s voices are becoming increasingly unheard, behind the EU referendum in the first place, so I think it would be a really problematic move.

Discuss