Observations

The EU Commission won't like this

In political terms, the people of Estonia produced an electoral result at the weekend which is not exactly favourable to the EU Commission. Whilst most Estonian parties are pro-EU, (why wouldn’t they be, given the EU money they receive and the worry about Russians on their border?), Estonian views differ from those of established and more liberal western European countries such as France and Germany.

On Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, Estonia has been one of the strongest advocates of the EU doing more to assist the Ukrainian people. Having been under the yoke of Russian Communist rule for generations, they might be said to have a better understanding of the plight of the Ukrainians than the corridor-dwellers of Brussels have.

From a UK and NATO defence perspective, Estonia is an important front-line country when faced with an aggressive and expansionist Russian Federation. All the Baltic countries live with the threat from the East and it certainly informs their thinking. For the UK, Estonia is a strategic ‘trip-wire’. Russia may currently be over-extended militarily in Ukraine, but this has not stopped Russian MiGs from testing the EU’s borders on a regular basis.

Finally, on EU ‘democracy’

Without any disrespect to Estonia, it must be said that it is a very small country, numbering 1.3 million inhabitants. In population terms it is more than 50 times smaller than the United Kingdom. As we pointed out above, a general election in Estonia is equivalent in voter numbers to a local election in South Yorkshire.

Despite this, when the UK was still an EU member, Estonia’s vote in the EU Council carried equal weight to that of the UK except on the occasions where ‘Qualified Majority Voting’ (QMV) was allowed. The Commission has long been pressing for QMV to become the norm in the EU Council but unsurprisingly many of the eastern bloc and other smaller EU states have resisted this move.

This ‘democratic deficit’ in the EU is just one of a great many issues which the UK Rejoin campaigns need to explain to the British people.

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