My name is Jon Worth. I write a blog about the European Union, and that's just under my own name, so www.jonworth.eu. So that's the main way I'm involved in European Union politics, is explaining to people how Brussels works and how the political game works here in this city. My academic background is in European Union affairs. My undergraduate degree is in Political Science in the U.K. and I have a Masters in European politics from the College of Europe in Bruges as well. And then professionally, I work as a communications consultant helping European Union institutions to better communicate. I'm also helping different organizations and campaigns in Brussels to find their place online in the European Union political debate. A lot of people take for granted the things that the European Union has bought for them. Very few people in our societies now know what it was like for Europe to be facing a state of war, for example. I have never experienced that in my lifetime, neither of my parents even either. So that's the first thing. Europe has had a great period of peace and people have kind of taken that for granted. Even with the other things about freedom of movement, for example, those are things that we've been enjoying now for 15 or 20 years. And only when politicians like David Cameron start to call that into question, do we begin to realize quite how lucky we'd be. I personally find that when I'm outside the European Union it better helps me understand what the benefits of the European Union may be. I think there's a wider question, which is, citizens in politics want to see something change and want to have some kind of notion of control, that basic idea. You go to an election, I vote for a party of the left and I'll get a European Union that's more of the left. If I vote for the Christian Democrat Party, I'll get a more Christian Democratic European Union. That sort of thing we have not achieved yet. European elections don't really matter in the same way as national elections matter. And that's the thing we need to change in the coming years. Basically if I go to vote in a European election what is the demonstrational change going to be? Whether I vote left or right or liberal or green or conservative, or far left or whatever the choice may be. So that's what we've not really achieved. The European nation remains sort of a Technocratic project, but it's not the project which the citizens feel they have any control over. Add on to that the problems of the financial crisis from 2008 in the way the European Union has behaved, which essentially said, we're going to basically do everything we can to stay below zero on economies. And there's been a lot of high personal cost associated with that. That kind of personal cost has not had its political manifestation coming out in response. So I think we need to pay attention to that. So that can only be done. Well there are two options, one is to take the European Union apart which I think would be a disaster. And the other way is democratize it and make sure citizens are better involved and so that's the way I would look to solve that sort of problem. We need proper representative democracy at European level and we haven't achieved that yet. I think the basic good political communication comes from politicians themselves that communicate in a compelling way. Individual people who have got an interesting story to tell can connect European politics back down to the practicalities in people's everyday lives. We lack that. The institutions themselves put a lot of money into European information centers, big campaigns of the European Parliament trying to motivate people to vote. But that doesn't relate to everyday people's lives very clearly. And it doesn't contain that sort of everyday ideology. We can all be in favor of the European Union for different reasons and I think that is very, very important. The EU institution has kind of assume someone sort of stodgy pro-europeanism. Of course if you think about it the European Union makes sense. But there are actually different ways it makes sense. It makes sense to me as a kind of lefty green I think the European Union is vital for most environmental sustainability and sustainable transport. But equally you might think the European Union is great to promote precisely the opposite. An airline like Rhineair would not exist were it not for the European Union. Now both, we can both be right. And unfortunately our debate about the European Union doesn't really account for that. So I'd like to see in the future more emphasis being placed on communication, on the individual politicians. That's individual MEPs, individual commissioners, rather than institutions themselves. So the commissioner, not the commission, doing its communications, or individual MEPs, not the European Parliament placing so much money and so much activity in its communications. So that's the way that I'd like to see things go. Help those individual people to communicate rather than communicating as institutions and there I think we'd be going in a better direction.
