The sad thing is that these progressive ideas seem to come from the ivory tower of the EU, and are then pushed onto the member states, sometimes against their will.

Whilst these are great ideas, this is not really democracy. I think it's also the source of much anti EU sentiment. I wish more of this stuff would be decided in public debates. I wish elections had more of an effect on the EU.

At the moment it feels like policy is being made by academics and beurocrats. And whilst it is good policy, it still feels wrong. I am afraid we are keeping it this way because we think otherwise we would have shite policy.

>this is not really democracy

Literally every single part of the EU apparatus is democratic. Every single bit.

The European Council consists of the Heads of Government of the EU states. If your Head of Government isn't democratically elected then you're already fucked and the EU isn't making anything worse.

The European Commission is chosen by the European Council, so derives its mandate from that.

The European Parliament is literally elected.

The Council of the European Union is basically 'all the agricultural ministers' or 'all the finance ministers' or 'all the defence ministers' etc. Obviously these people all have democratic mandates in their home countries, thus the body as a whole has a democratic mandate.

By no means in any way is there any possible justification for describing the EU has undemocratic. It's actually much MORE democratic than many of its members.

Agreed, but there are differences between the GDPR per members country, for example, in the Netherlands we are not free to use data derived from people that specifically said their data would be usable for science (data like tumor gene expression values). You need to ask for consent again. Or if you can't, you need to prove you can't and then you need to publish everything you derive from the data. This is different in the UK.

In the UK "0.6% of our public spending goes to the EU"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-3647034...

And the bananas that don't bend, don't forget about it

It's easy to be a brexiter, just make up some random BS and repeat it out loud until exaustion

The EC maintains a list of myths that UK (mainly the right wing press) have invented about the EU:

https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/

Even in countries where your share of taxes and social security fees approaches 50% of your salary, most of it goes to your national state, not the EU.