[Politics] Brexit

[beorhthelm]

Who appoints commissioners? The elected governments of the member states.

like the Lords, apart from a smal minority all political appointees. not sure if deliberatly trying to draw attention away from the point with alternative examples, the fact is that the elected EU parliament is the revising role in the EU, and the appointees are the main legislature (and executive). this is an inversion of how the the UK does it. and yes, unelected individuals construct policy and intitiate legislation, i dont know why remainers try to hide from this, isnt it part of the collaborative process of working in harmony toward a set of common goals?

 

[East Preston Gull]

Where do the EU control £350m of our money, can you provide a link to substantiate that. Dingodan said the same but then didn't back it up; Is it something you heard Gisela Stuart keep spouting as she continually claims we are spending £350m on the EU every week despite this being proven not to be true.

When I apply for tax credits and file my tax return next year, I will make sure I put my earnings as net. Less tax paid for me and more tax credits. Nice one.



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[East Preston Gull]

Scaremongering is back then!!!

I live in Bognor. If they found anyone who speaks English that would be a miracle, even the English speak suspect English. Young and old here are united. It has become a shittier hole than it ever was. The guy who owns the Polish shop is a top guy and even he wants to vote Leave. When the BBC came to Bognor, let's just say the audience was "selected" for a balance of young people from Chichester, Midhurst and the nicer parts of Aldwick

Anyone see the Newsnight bit right now interviewing old people and young people in Bognor? Just about sums it up. Old for out because they remember something better, young for in because they're internationally minded.

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[drew]

What they complain about is 1 voice in 28. Regardless of financial and common sense input there is no proportional representation. Remind anyone of anywhere? Take our future, demand change and THEN re-enact with the EU. Even if it takes ten years. Maybe property may devalue enough that my kids and potential grandkids can afford a house and have a stable job.

Out of 736 MEPs, I believe we have 73 which is proportional. We have the power of veto. However, is the 'anywhere' you refer to the House of Commons where we have a government that was voted in by only 24% of the electorate. Or is it the House of Lords, which I agree with many in that it should be reformed and maybe even become a second elected chamber. However that sounds great but, as per America, could see Government legislation stifled.

As for property, why don't we just build more homes and ensure that all the empty properties around the country are brought back into circulation.

 

[drew]

When I apply for tax credits and file my tax return next year, I will make sure I put my earnings as net. Less tax paid for me and more tax credits. Nice one.



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That old salary chestnut which I think is another Gisela gem. Yes, we all state our salary as gross but then deductions are items that we have to pay as individuals, income tax, NI contributions, pension etc etc. What you don't include in your gross salary are your employers NI contributions, any pension contributions they make, private health packages etc etc.

You stated the EU control a spend by us of £350m and you still haven't backed that up.

 

[Steve in Japan]

Article in the Guardian. George Soros telling us the £ will fall off a cliff if we vote Brexit.

Now there's an unholy alliance - Soros and the Guardian. I would say absolute proof that there is no stone Remain will leave unturned.

A smart Chancellor would have hedged £ for a Brexit several months ago. But I wonder if Osborne has? He can't be that stupid - can he??

 

[5ways]

 

[East Preston Gull]

That old salary chestnut which I think is another Gisela gem. Yes, we all state our salary as gross but then deductions are items that we have to pay as individuals, income tax, NI contributions, pension etc etc. What you don't include in your gross salary are your employers NI contributions, any pension contributions they make, private health packages etc etc.

You stated the EU control a spend by us of £350m and you still haven't backed that up.

Get out your calculator. Our contributions to the EU fund is £ 19 billion pounds, this is the figure that is shown as a minus on the treasury accounts. It actually works out around £ 365 million a week. This will go up at the next budget rounds.

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[drew]

Get out your calculator. Our contributions to the EU fund is £ 19 billion pounds, this is the figure that is shown as a minus on the treasury accounts. It actually works out around £ 365 million a week. This will go up at the next budget rounds.

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Pointless arguing with idiots. There are thousands of Brexit supporters who fully accept we don't pay £350m a week to the EU. There is the Rebate which means it is about £13b. That would probably be the more accurate figure to quote as our cost of being members of the EU.

https://fullfact.org/europe/our-eu-membership-fee-55-million/

Perhaps you can show a document that shows the -£19b as I'm sure you will find very close to it the rebate that brings it down!

 

[Wrong-Direction]

Erm sorry to burst your bubble but all this money we're going to "save" we won't see being spent on us, you're even more of a moron if you believe that then if you believe all the bullshit that's been flying about.

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[JC Footy Genius]

Vote leave to benefit from a world of opportunity

A bit of light reading for the Night Owls ....

On the day the United Kingdom joined the Common Market on Jan 1, 1973, the editorial in this newspaper captured the views of much of the country. We wrote: “Whether or not this is to be regarded as a sunshine day for the British people will depend largely on how they react to the opportunities which now beckon. Enlargement of the community from six to nine members could spell the final atrophy of a once great nation; or, more probably, it could mark a new and splendid chapter in our long history.”

There is no doubt that since 1973, the country has prospered. Indeed, we joined the Common Market because we thought it was the answer to the economic malaise that had led to Britain being dubbed “the sick man of Europe”.

But all industrialised countries are wealthier than they were then, not just those in Europe. Arguably, the economic and financial changes wrought during the 1980s, together with the decline of trade union power, contributed far more to our GDP growth than membership of the Common Market.

Is it seriously being suggested that had we continued to function as an independent nation for the past 43 years like, say, Australia or Japan, we would today be the impoverished off-shore neighbour of a continental powerhouse? We cannot be sure; but there is no reason to believe so.

The Remainers have sought to scare the nation into believing that calamity lies in wait for an independent Britain. They imply that our trade would collapse even though we import far more from the EU than they buy from us and our biggest markets are outside the EU.

We are told membership is essential because it provides access to a market of 500 million people; yet there is a market of six billion people beyond its borders and nothing would stop us continuing to trade with Europe anyway. Other non-EU countries trade more with the single market than we do but don’t have to pay into the EU budget for the privilege of doing so.

A world of opportunity is waiting for a fully independent Britain. This country is a leading economic power, its language is global, its laws are trusted and its reputation for fair dealing is second to none. To say we cannot thrive free of the EU’s constraints is defeatist and flies in the face of this country’s great mercantile traditions.

But while the economic rationale for membership was the key argument behind the movement to take us into the Common Market, there were other motivations, too. After the Second World War and the end of Britain’s role as a colonial power, the country was politically and diplomatically adrift. Its predicament was summed up by the US secretary of state Dean Acheson with the phrase: “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.”

In the early 1960s, the Macmillan government thought to plug that gap by joining what was then a community of six countries, but his overtures were rebuffed by the French president Charles de Gaulle. Our eventual accession, together with Ireland and Denmark, increased the number to nine. Today there are 28. So how do we answer the question implied in that editorial 43 years ago? Can history regard it as a “sunshine day”?

Within a few years of joining, our ambivalence to Europe was already apparent when the Labour government, for internal political reasons, called a referendum on our continued membership in 1975. The result was an overwhelming vote to remain – by 2:1 – and this seemed to put paid to any lingering doubts. The country wanted to stay; so let’s get on with it.

Few people, however, fully appreciated the extent to which the EEC was less the benign economic arrangement they imagined and much more a political project. True, there were those during the 1975 referendum campaign who made this point; but they went largely unheeded. The national sense was that we were in a free trading area of independent nation states that would help our exporters, create jobs and allow everyone to get richer.

There were early difficulties, not least British objections to the terms on which we joined, which Mrs Thatcher sought to rectify by demanding and securing a rebate on the UK’s excessive contribution. But, by and large, the relationship worked well. If anything, the British took the lead in seeking to turn the EU into a proper trading area by championing the single market, even if Mrs Thatcher later regretted the way this was done.

Everything changed in 1992, however, with the Maastricht Treaty. Now, the political nature of the project took over. The Common Market became the European Union and its people citizens of the EU; timetables were set for economic and monetary union and the introduction of a single currency; areas of policy-making that had previously been agreed among member states were brought within the competence of the European Commission, which became a supercharged administration-cum-government.

We did not like this development but were not given the opportunity to stop it. John Major, then prime minister, obtained an opt-out from the single currency. But it went ahead with all the safeguards to prevent economic disparities abandoned, with disastrous consequences.

Subsequent treaties signed at Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon, together with a string of political protocols, have further aggrandised the EU into a supra-national body within which the interests of individual states are secondary to the greater good of the overall Union.

It now has the trappings of the nation state that we were always assured it would not become: a single currency; a central bank; no frontiers (even if these have been going up again recently in response to the migration crisis); a supreme court; a police force and judicial system (Europol and Eurojust); an embryonic gendarmerie; its own foreign policy; and, if some in the Commission get their way, it will have a European army.

Nor will it stop there. The report of the EU’s Five Presidents published last year in response to the eurozone’s deep problems charts the way forward to a fully integrated EU, a superstate in all but name. The fact that Britain does not participate in some of its component parts, notably the euro or the borderless Schengen area, makes no difference since they have an impact upon us.

It is suggested by those wanting to stay in the EU that this somehow gives us “the best of both worlds”. In truth it gives us the worst of a bad job: half in and half out of something we do not really wish to be part of but feel we cannot leave for fear of wrecking it.

Indeed, so fragile is this political construct that the departure of one of its members, and especially one as big as the UK, threatens to trigger terminal instability. And why is that? If this were a robust democratic institution, underpinned by a thriving economy and a content and happy citizenry then Britain’s withdrawal should have no impact at all. Of course, if it were such a utopia then we wouldn’t be having a discussion about leaving in the first place; but it isn’t.

Across Europe, disenchantment with Brussels is growing. A recent poll in Italy showed 48 per cent would vote to leave, an astonishing figure in the spiritual home of the EU. The MORI poll also suggested that 58 per cent of the French want their own referendum, and 41 per cent say they would vote to leave. Those who dismiss the referendum here as some British eccentricity whipped up by Little Englander Europhobes need to ask why the EU is so unpopular elsewhere.

The principal reason is its anti-democratic nature - the dislocation between those who govern and the governed. While people can vote for their national leaders, who then have an input into collective decision-making, they are no longer able to influence events that affect them directly through the ballot box. In any case, by the time many directives that begin life in Brussels have got to the Council of Ministers for a decision it is too late to stop them.

So we are not alone in Britain in feeling irritation with the EU. Most pernicious has been the way in which it has imposed its will on democratically elected governments in indebted eurozone countries in order to bail them out of the economic difficulties brought about by their membership of the single currency. The fact that the EU is a collection of democracies does not detract from the reality that this is a profoundly undemocratic institution. This has nothing to do with being anti-European. It is about the type of institution the EU has become.

The question that arises, therefore, is whether we wish to stay in a club whose rules and membership have changed so markedly since we joined 43 years ago and which no longer delivers the benefits we were promised at the outset.

We are not harking back to a golden age lost in the mists of time but looking forward to a new beginning for our country
We are told by Remain campaigners that we can always occupy an outer ring of countries that do not wish to be part of the integrated eurozone but do not want to leave the EU either.

Is this what we want for our country: peripheral status, an unloved and little-noticed satellite of a Greater EU? Or do we want to be an independent nation once more, free to make our own decisions, forge our own trading relationships and maintain our own strategic and diplomatic partnerships? Those who say that if we vote to stay we can bring about the reforms in the EU that we would like to see are ignoring the evidence of the past 25 years.

In addition, what future does the EU offer as it lurches from one crisis to another? It has shackled itself to a currency union that has wrecked the livelihoods of its southern member states, causing mass unemployment among young people and encouraging the growth of extremist political parties. Its economies have stagnated, other than that of Germany, to whose advantage the system principally works. The only continent with lower growth than Europe is Antarctica.

Had we joined the euro, as many Remainers now warning of catastrophe if we leave wanted us to, then Britain would be in a desperate mess. Why, then, would a country with our history and economic strength want to continue its membership of such a dysfunctional outfit? Ask ourselves this question: if we weren’t in it would we be agitating to join now?

Remainers also claim we would lose influence in the world and deride those wanting to leave as Little Englanders. Yet the opposite is the case: it is the EU which is insular and self-regarding, hemmed in by the narrow confines of dreary summits and endless treaty-making. Britain, by contrast, has always been a global player, with its connections to the Commonwealth, the UN and Nato, and will be again.

We have often commended David Cameron for staging the referendum but have been dismayed with the way his campaign has been conducted, especially in besmirching his opponents and impugning their motives.

In supporting a vote to leave, we are not harking back to a Britannic golden age lost in the mists of time but looking forward to a new beginning for our country. We are told it is a choice between fear and hope. If that is the case, then we choose hope.

In the event, and despite the optimism of our editorial, Jan 1, 1973 turned out not to be a sunshine day for the UK after all. On Thursday, the country has another opportunity to lift the clouds. We must take it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2016/06/20/vote-leave-to-benefit-from-a-world-of-opportunity/

Don't succumb to fear and threats have faith in your country, vote for hope .... Vote Leave

 

[East Preston Gull]

Pointless arguing with idiots. There are thousands of Brexit supporters who fully accept we don't pay £350m a week to the EU. There is the Rebate which means it is about £13b. That would probably be the more accurate figure to quote as our cost of being members of the EU.

https://fullfact.org/europe/our-eu-membership-fee-55-million/

Perhaps you can show a document that shows the -£19b as I'm sure you will find very close to it the rebate that brings it down!

Friendly remainer insults someone he does not agree with. That's new.
So we take your figure of 13 billion. Is that exceptable to you. We are paying that money to beurocrats to spend on their grand plans and hand us a bit back to dish out to various projects. as long as we put the EU flag on a billboard.
I find it incredible that in the modern age we are living under this sheriff of Nottingham system.

If you give someone a rebate you are still asserting your control over their finances.

19 billion please, I tell you what keep 6 for yourself, we will call it a rebate. We will take some to give out to your farming industry and fishing industry. We will tell you what to farm, how much fish to catch and what land to call a nature reserve. We will also dish a bit out to some eastern block countries and a bit to Spain, because those pesky bullfighters need a bit of persuasion to raise breeding bulls and not ones they can stab to death. Oh and of course we have our admin costs. Beauocracy don't come cheap you know. Oh and his your 100 million, buy yourself something pretty.

Please disagree but insulting your debating opposition is poor form.

Erm sorry to burst your bubble but all this money we're going to "save" we won't see being spent on us, you're even more of a moron if you believe that then if you believe all the bullshit that's been flying about.

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[drew]

Friendly remainer insults someone he does not agree with. That's new.
So we take your figure of 13 billion. Is that exceptable to you. We are paying that money to beurocrats to spend on their grand plans and hand us a bit back to dish out to various projects. as long as we put the EU flag on a billboard.
I find it incredible that in the modern age we are living under this sheriff of Nottingham system.

If you give someone a rebate you are still asserting your control over their finances.

19 billion please, I tell you what keep 6 for yourself, we will call it a rebate. We will take some to give out to your farming industry and fishing industry. We will tell you what to farm, how much fish to catch and what land to call a nature reserve. We will also dish a bit out to some eastern block countries and a bit to Spain, because those pesky bullfighters need a bit of persuasion to raise breeding bulls and not ones they can stab to death. Oh and of course we have our admin costs. Beauocracy don't come cheap you know. Oh and his your 100 million, buy yourself something pretty.

Please disagree but insulting your debating opposition is poor form.



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This has been done to death but you seem to have only just entered the fray.

 

[East Preston Gull]

This has been done to death but you seem to have only just entered the fray.

Oh, Ok then I shall butt out and get back in my box as I did not appear on this thread before page 503.
Night[emoji26]

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[Wrong-Direction]

Calling someone a moron when they are one isn't insulting.

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[Jim in the West]

I was struck by something Farage said yesterday (much as I loathe the guy).... he said he wanted to leave the EU so ordinary people could buy a home, get a hospital bed, and a place for their kids in their local school. The good news for Nigel is that he can have all that without going to the bother of leaving the EU and risking the economic nightmare that could ensue. We just need sensible policies to stimulate house-building, properly fund the NHS, and re-focus resources on primary education.

However, instead of trying to resolve the problems ourselves we spend years blaming immigrants (who contribute much more per head to the economy than the avge Brit). Even this morning the Leave campaign is relentlessly banging the immigration drum. Very depressing...

 

[Wrong-Direction]

If only people realised when we "take back control" we'll still be getting f***ed in the arse, just a lot closer to home! Did you all take stupid pills or something? Have you forgotten what a corrupt world/country we live in?

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[Worried Man Blues]

I'd prefer to be FITA by someone English than a French or German, coz we can at least vote them out. Great Britain or Meh Britain.

If only people realised when we "take back control" we'll still be getting f***ed in the arse, just a lot closer to home! Did you all take stupid pills or something? Have you forgotten what a corrupt world/country we live in?

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[Wrong-Direction]

I'd prefer to be FITA by someone English than a French or German, coz we can at least vote them out. Great Britain or Meh Britain.

Vote them out and get FITA by the next lot? Great logic

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[Notters]

If only people realised when we "take back control" we'll still be getting f***ed in the arse, just a lot closer to home! Did you all take stupid pills or something? Have you forgotten what a corrupt world/country we live in?

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Never have I agreed with Mr Anti-Cycling so much.