Maths 101 for EU zealots

As annoying as greengrocers’ apostrophes (though I doubt anyone much under 50 who doesn’t live in Chelsea or some equally expensive Chiltern market town will ever have seen one) is the habit of EU zealots in referring to the EU as ‘Europe’. It isn’t.

Manfred Weber, one of the EU’s rising bureaucrats, with reference to EP elections in the UK if Brexit is delayed beyond June, is quoted as saying “That means for me for the future of the continent, for the future of the European Union, Great Britain cannot have any more say. That means for me, in the next European elections, Great Britain cannot participate.”

His English puts my German to shame, and is marked as authentic German English by his use of ‘that’ when he means ‘this’. All good German English speakers make the same mistake. But that’s not the point. This is;

Population of Europe … 726m
Population of EU27 ……446m (61%)
Population of UK ……66m (9%)

Manfred might like to put his English textbooks away and brush the dust off his maths primer. The EU only has 61% of the people of the continent of Europe, of which the UK is a populous part with 9% of its inhabitants. We therefore very much have a say in the future of the continent. Just not in the play elections for a play ‘Parliament’ in which all is decided in advance and MEPs mired in greed care more about signing in for ten minutes for their per diem than in democracy.

Update
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This is the same Manfred Weber who was found in 2017 to be claiming €4,342 a month (tax free) for an office in his home country (Bavaria) to allow citizens to easily access they MEP. Only Manfred is paying the money to himself – and his ghost ‘office’ sits in an annex to Manfred’s luxury house, far away from population and transport hubs in an exclusive and wealthy neighbourhood.