As Malden Capell has already covered the main points of your response and as I’ve been asked to dial it back, I’ll just pick up on one more point from your original email.
Here’s the thing: the European Parliament was also “our own government”. We elected Members to it. We were represented on all major decision-making bodies within the EU. The EU was not “the Other”. The EU was, in part, us too. And we had a vast amount of influence on it, as I’ve already mentioned, despite some of the representatives we sent on our behalf.
That a disturbing number of Brits chose to elect corrupt buffoons to represent us in the European Parliament is not the fault of the EU, most of whose members sent intelligent, capable representatives. That’s all on us - or at least on the people who believed Nigel Farage was anything other than a cowardly little chancer (this is a man who threw fish into the Thames to protest EU fishing policy but didn’t turn up to the EU Fisheries Committee meetings where he could actually have had input into those policies). We have done much to drive EU policies and we could well have had a stronger voice…but we decided not to. Not the EU. We, democratically, did that. And we did it out of pettiness and spite.
Again - if you want to argue that the various EU bodies were democracy at too far a remove, that’s one thing - but that’s not the argument you’re making, and if you were it would be an argument that supported greater and greater degrees of devolution. But the argument you *are *making - well, it isn’t really an argument other than “I don’t like the EU”.