The church's teaching on marriage is unequivocal it is uniquely the union of a man and a woman and it is wrong that governments politicians or parliaments should seek to alter or destroy that reality.

If governments let themselves be fully bound by the decisions of their parliaments without protecting their own freedom to act a breakup of Europe would be a more probable outcome than deeper integration.

People feel that the EU is a one-way process a great machine that sucks up decision-making from national parliaments to the European level until everything is decided by the EU. That needs to change.

However democracy cannot be defined as the existence of parliaments and elections alone.