44 J. Shaw The European Commission attests to this when it draws attention to the increasing number of complaints that it hears about via the SOLVIT and the Your Europe Advice systems from aggrieved citizens deprived of the rights that they are currently accorded (e.g. in local or European parliamentary elections), or unable to comprehend why the existing system does not protect them in respect of what is still regarded as the ‘gold standard’ of political participation, namely the right to vote in national elections. It is indeed reasonable to ask, as does Andrew Duff, why – if persons are mobile – they suddenly seem, as regards national elections, to come out from under the protective umbrella provided by Article 3 of Protocol 1 of the ECHR governing the obligations of states to organise free and fair elections for legislatures on the basis of universal suffrage. But for years, the issues of free movement and the rights to which it does, or does not, give rise have rarely been discussed in the media or in popular political discourse. And now that free movement does receive more attention, it is not always welcome. Many host member state governments are too quick to say that free movers can get access to too many rights because apparently they have an unimaginable propensity for ‘benefit tourism’. It does seem reasonable to suggest that if the host state’s political community were balanced by the presence of socially, politically and economically integrated free moving tax-payers these types of arguments might gain a little less traction within the body politic. It has been clear since 2004 that for some member states the consequences of the free movement of labour are now more closely aligned to mainstream debates about immigration than to debates about the meaning of EU citizenship and the about the constitutionalisation process of the European Union. But generally speaking, the member states take depressingly little care to ensure that within the ‘common citizenship area’ the citizenship experience is good for either their own citizens who are mobile or for the citizens of other member states who are resident (or in some other way subject to the jurisdiction of the host state). For over the life course, the incidence of mobility is actually much higher than is the case when we count only those who reside in another member state at any given time. Much larger numbers of persons are thus affected directly or indirectly than tends to be assumed. So, in a way, it is good to reinforce the point that solving this particular democratic problem in the EU and its member states is going to require concerted action at both the EU and the member state levels. It cannot be solved at one level, without thinking about the implications at the other