{"id":329,"date":"2004-06-13T23:58:34","date_gmt":"2004-06-13T23:58:34","guid":{"rendered":"tag:owlfish.com,2004:colinweblog.20040613235834"},"modified":"2004-06-14T05:45:57","modified_gmt":"2004-06-14T05:45:57","slug":"13062004","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/2004\/06\/13062004\/","title":{"rendered":"EU election results"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Prior to the European elections it was expected that turnout in the UK would be the lowest ever.  In practise the actual turnout was the highest ever at 39%.  Meanwhile across Europe as a whole the turnout fell to an all time low of 45%.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/2004\/06\/venetian-bridge.jpg\"><img src=\"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/2004\/06\/venetian-bridge-small.jpg\" alt=\"Metal Venetian bridge\" title=\"Click for larger view.\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-12\"><\/a>The large turnout in the UK, not surprisingly, corresponded with the UK Independence Party <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/uk_politics\/3803505.stm\">marginally beating the Liberal Democrats<\/a> to third place.<\/p>\n<p>The news certainly isn&#8217;t good for those who, like myself, want to see the UK retain membership of the EU.  The best I can hope for is that the success of the UKIP may provide a wakeup call to pro-EU politicians.<\/p>\n<p>As I&#8217;ve noted before, governments are keen to blame <a href=\"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/2003\/06\/06062003.html\">unpopular but necessary legislation<\/a> on the EU, despite those same governments being the ones that approve them at the EU level.  Conversely EU legislation and initiatives that many people would agree with are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/2002\/03\/17032002.html\">played down or badly presented<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Prior to the European elections it was expected that turnout in the UK would be the lowest ever. In practise the actual turnout was the highest ever at 39%. Meanwhile across Europe as a whole the turnout fell to an all time low of 45%. The large turnout in the UK, not surprisingly, corresponded with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.owlfish.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}