Lots of things I hear about the EU leave me thinking, “that’s not very good”, here’s one of those things:

In France, today, the population is 66.9 Million [Google]. This boils into an electorate of around 47.3M [ElectionGuide.org]. France currently has 74 seats in the European Parliament [Google]. The European Parliament is important, since it’s the only thing we European citizens cast our votes for. This institution should be the source for every power European, at least in my mind, and should itself be comprised fairly. So, let’s summarise:

France

Population	66.9M
Electorate	47,293,103
Number of seats in the European Parliament	74
Number of people per seat	904,054.05
Number of electors per seat	639,095.99

Those two last rows are simple divisions of the numbers, I haven’t introduced any new numbers. This is all fair enough, France’s number of delegates is in line (using either population or electorate) with somebody like the UK, which has a slightly smaller population/electorate than France, and 73 seats.

But let’s look at Malta. Here’s that same table:

Malta

Population	436,947
Electorate	341,856
Number of seats in the European Parliament	6
Number of people per seat	72,824.50
Number of electors per seat	56,976.00

My sources here are Google and Wikipedia. You should be able to see it from comparing the two tables, but I’ll just state it for clarity:

Seats per person (Malta) vs. Seats per Person (France)	12.41
Seats per elector (Malta) vs. Seats per elector (France)	11.22

So, again just to be explicit, a Maltese person’s voice is more than ten times louder than a French person’s. I have to say I’m in no way being critical of Malta here – I’m sure their negotiators set out to secure the best deal they could for Malta, but that louder voice comes at the expense of fairness for the rest of us. And that’s my problem, or one of them. To be explicit for the last time, I expect the ratio to be somewhat nearer to one. Okay, I can live with some small variation, because France is a comparatively large country, and Malta a very small country, but a ratio of 10 is unfair. All countries should have about the same number of representatives, per capita.

That’s enough numbers. And I’m not even going to get into the methods each country uses to elect its MEPs. But I have to say, just because a system describes itself as PR, that doesn’t necessarily make it fair.

I don’t particularly wish to make further capital out of this, really it’s down to you to digest these numbers and decide whether they’re fair or not. But be aware that these numbers are one of the reasons why I’m happy to walk away from the EU.

I have a lot of sympathy with my continental friends, who will readily acknowledge that the EU might be imperfect, but that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. But not for me. When we see flaws in the system, we should be trying to fix them.