BREXIT MEANS WE RUN OUR OWN COUNTRY AGAIN
UK citizens had the worst representation ratio in the EU Parliament, with one MEP per 915,500 people – compared to smaller nations like Malta who had one MEP per 84,000. With powers returned to the UK our citizens have ten-times the representation in decisions and law-making.
Explanation:
Estimates of the amount of UK laws controlled or influenced by the EU vary wildly depending on how they are calculated (and by whom), but efforts by The House of Commons Library in 2010 placed the figure at somewhere between 15-50%.
Despite the difficulty in pinning down a more robust estimate, FullFact made the observation that “In agriculture, fisheries, external trade, and the environment, it’s fair to say that EU legislation and policy is indeed the main driver of UK law and policy.”
The EU allocates MEP seats based on the populations of each member state, but gives a higher proportion per capita to the smaller member states than to the larger states. For the UK in 2019, there were 73 MEPs – that’s the equivalent of 1 MEP for every 915,500 people, and the highest in the EU. For Malta, the smallest EU member state, they had 1 MEP for every 84,000 people – which means that Maltese citizens through their MEP had over 10 times the say in EU laws as UK citizens did.
In the UK Parliament, MPs represent approximately 90,000 people and constituency sizes are routinely adjusted to ensure they remain balanced. So for those areas where EU legislation is the main driver of UK law, the UK voters are now back in control of the policies which affect them, and have 10 times the level of say in those policies in terms of constituency representation compared to the representation in the EU Parliament.
Reference: https://www.statista.com/statistics/974861/number-of-members-of-parliament-in-the-ep/
Reference: https://fullfact.org/europe/uk-law-what-proportion-influenced-eu/