United in diversity

Today I visited the European Parliament and its affiliated museum, the Parliamentarium. Although officially a museum just for the EP, the actual content is very much a Europhilic slant on the history of the EU as a whole, laid out in a timeline format from grim Holocaust photos to a happy-clappy "we're all united" exhibit centered around the EU's recent Nobel Prize win. I'm as pro-European as they come, so I'd be intrigued to see whether the place would convince someone more sceptical than myself. Depsite being clearly biased, the museum was very informative and well thought-out, and I suggest that Daily Mail readers be bussed here en masse, willingly or otherwise.

My personal favourite room, pictured above, is devoted to the members of the European Parliament themselves, all 754 of them. As well as a wall featuring photos of each MEP, there are touch-screens where you can search for your local representative by political affiliation, constituency etc. At the touch of a button you can read their CV, see a video of them discussing their policies and even compose and send an email. So much for lack of transparency!

On a serious note, you can also do this via the Parliament's official website, europarl.europa.eu/meps, and I encourage you all to have a look. The UK has 72 elected representatives in Brussels, six of whom are MEPs for Scotland. As luck would have it, there's at least one from every major party, so whatever your political affiliation then there's someone speaking for you in the European Parliament. Write to them! They work for you, and so much of importance to Scotland - fisheries, green energy - is dealt with at EU level.

The next elections to the European Parliament are in May 2014. British turnout in the previous EU election was scandalously low, and as a result we have people like Nick Griffin and Nigel Farage speaking on our behalf in Europe. Get involved. Take an interest. Don't be disenfranchised by ignorance!