Screenshot: Bozar Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, Saturday, September 9.You don’t need me to tell you BREXIT is a dangerous mess. Ever since Theresa May – in that common sense tone which is a sure sign of ideology in Britain – uttered the fateful words “BREXIT means BREXIT!” – we have been trapped on a roller-coaster of unknowing. Grim rumours that the UK might become “the tax haven of Europe” or the “hostile environment” apparently preferred by the Home Office, come and go and come again like flashes of lightning over our benighted landscape. The process hitherto seems designed to show us and everyone else just how deeply polarized but also poorly represented we are as a people, and how broken our democratic system.
On the eve of the EU referendum, I happened to find myself in a showing in London of David Bernet’s quintessentially European film, ‘Democracy’, about the heroic struggle within the European Parliament to secure key digital laws protecting citizens and consumers from big data mining. Katarzyna from whom we heard earlier, stars in this epic tale, alongside the heroic German Greens Jan Philipp Albrecht and Ralph Bendrath and Joe McNamee, Director of European Digital Rights. This David and Goliath story is actually a rare, gripping account in all its multilayered complexity, of a triumphant democratic law-making process.
Remember that Dr. Schauble mantra from the Eurogroup meeting that Yanis quotes – that “elections cannot be allowed to change an economic programme of a nation state”? Well for those who haven’t seen the film, Albrecht’s mission as rapporteur is the direct opposite. He argues, “99% of the lobbying in Brussels is by companies… but millions of citizens have their interests too… No one has the right to claim their interests are worth more than that of the citizens.”
