Concluding Remarks: Righting Democratic Wrongs 87 derive from the exercise of one of the EU’s core rights: free movement. As David Owen points out: ‘This is a democratic wrong since it is not democratically legitimate that a person lawfully exercising a civil right shall in virtue of such exercise be deprived of a political right.’ Is this dysfunction of democracy, as Rainer Bauböck suggests, only the case for those who, like Britons or Danes, do not keep home voting rights permanently wherever they live? Is it not, rather, the case for anyone who is integrated in their country of residence in every respect (working, speaking the language, paying tax etc.) but deprived of the democratic rights granted to those who were born there (or whose parents were born there), but who may, in the most extreme of cases, never go there. When you move from Perpignan to Calais or from Aberdeen to Exeter, you vote for the mayor of the town in which you live. You do not forever cast your vote in the ward in which you were born. In the same way, would it not be logical to consider that you take your voting rights with you when you move overseas but stay within the EU? In a true European Union, living in Vienna or in Seville should be of no more consequence than moving from Genoa to Milan: you should not be disenfranchised because you have chosen to exercise your right to mobility – Roxana Barbulescu’s analogy with the portability of pensions or medical insurance across national borders within the European Union is a demonstration of the fact that rights acquired in one EU State can be enjoyed in another. As a matter of consequence, we do not believe that simply ensuring that all EU citizens maintain a permanent right to vote in their home nations is the appropriate solution: we are most directly affected by what happens in the land in which we live and work – if income tax is to increase in Greece, this is less likely to have instant consequences on the everyday existence of Greeks living and working in Brussels, than if it goes up in Belgium. Martin Wilhelm’s vote exchange system implicitly recognises that citizens can feel more immediately concerned by the political situation of the state in which they reside than by elections in their home country. 3) Finally, to give the democratic principle, ‘No taxation without representation’ its full meaning. This is a consequence of applying the principle of solidarity to all residents. This principle, which launched the American Revolution, is already recognised locally, as Kees Groenendijk stresses. It must be extended at regional and national levels too: Europeans resident in the EU pay income tax as well as local taxes. Currently, we are being taxed and some of us, like the pigs in Animal Farm, are more equal than others. Even the Commission has to agree that this is the case, as Andrew Duff’s recent exchange about the European Convention on Human Rights shows.