To find someone complaining that within days of an election, that the results have been ignored by those in power is hardly a shock. However the person complaining here is not an angry Conservative voter upset that despite a promise of no top down reorganisation of the health service, that the Government has embarked on exactly this. Nor is it someone who helped elect a Lib Dem MP who is complaining about their decision to increase tuition fees. This is a Conservative Cabinet Minister complaining that the leaders of other nation states, have not been influenced in their decision making regarding the name of the next European Commission President. Iain Duncan Smith appears to be frustrated that the heads of the European Nations are ignoring a general sense of disquiet expressed through the votes for MEPs a month ago.

The words of Mr Duncan Smith reported in this Guardian article are  “If they give Jean-Claude Juncker a job this is like literally flicking two fingers at the rest of Europe and saying to all the people out there, ‘We know that you voted the way you did but you are wrong and we are just going to show you how wrong you are by carrying on as though nothing happened.'” Its important to point out that whilst Mr Juncker may well be a Euro-phile rather than a Euro-sceptic, and although the Euro elections returned a more significant minority of Euro-sceptic MEPs than previously, that no one who voted in the last week of May 2014 was offered a choice between Mr Juncker and any of the other three candidates in the contest. Indeed as I wrote previously, we had no way of understanding the contest itself because our terrestrial broadcasters chose not to show the only debate between the 4 candidates.

The real irony is that the Euro-Sceptic Conservatives and Euro-Phile Lib Dems who both appear to reject Mr Juncker, as do the Labour Party, have done very little to make us aware of the contest taking place for the President of the Commission. The 4 candidates are all people in favour of a stronger European Union. This may seem to be an imbalance, and of course it is. The reason is that none of the Euro-Sceptic groups in the EU put forward candidates. This includes the group to which our Conservative Party MEPs belong. So there we have it. The Conservative Party which has clear form on breaking election promises within days of elections, wants to challenge a democratic process for its failure to respond to a political mood swing, yet the same party is unwilling to participate in the very same process itself.

When the debate in Westminster is getting testy, sometimes one side or another, when being challenged makes the statement “We won’t take lessons in …………….. from the party opposite”. As a form of debate it is barely above sticking out a tongue or putting ones fingers in our ears. However that could be the response from the EU to the coalition Government. As far as you and I are concerned, we are faced with a Government that tells us it opposes  Mr Juncker. It cannot tell us who they would prefer in his place, yet it wants to go to the EU and claim that Mr Juncker is the wrong man for the job, and that in saying so, they are speaking on behalf of you and I. Here is a Politician and a Party whose capacity for flicking two fingers at electors appear to know no limits, and yet they wonder why we are disillusioned with democratic politics, Westminster style!