Please provide factual information of so called top brass moving cash out of the UK.

I'd look at it another way. If we'd never joined and the EU invited us based on the current membership conditions, would we vote for it?

Would we hell.

Join us! You get to pay on £XX billions each year and receive considerably less back. You get to open your borders to millions living in disproportionately poorer nations (some made poorer by the Euro debacle) and you can't turn them away. Relax while your laws are set in Brussels by an unelected body. Your fisherman can take it easy as your fishing waters/rights are given away for nowt. No need to waste time on trade deals with anyone outside the EU as we won't let you. In fact, join our exclusive EU member Customs Unions which restricts those pesky forrinners are who are conveniently more geographically distant but dare have the audacity to try and trade with us. No need to ever try and leave...we'll make you vote again until we like the answer or make life so difficult it won't be worth it. Regulations? Love them? We can give you more regulations than you will EVER need. Own a company? Import your cheap labour aplenty and don't worry about expensive local workers. Are you a strawberry picker living in a poorer EU nation? Get this - the EU will let you move to a richer EU country while we make it tricky for a surgeon from India to move here!

And more to come. We are always keen to grow. New members are always welcome. And we want our club to bond...get rid of those inconvenient lines called borders and...sod it...let's eradicate the idea of a nation state completely. An EU anthem, president and (whisper it) army. Fun times indeed.

Don't worry yourself if a crisis hits...such as a war, or massive waves of illegal immigration...we don't get stressed, we go with the flow and relax until things just kind of sort themselves out. But don't think we're soft - if your economy collapses under the pressure of a centralised Euro, we can come up with devastating solutions to really put you in your place. We also have a great sense of humour: if you question our beliefs we'll laugh and belittle you.

And look, we know some of the great uneducated unwashed might not like all of this. We find the best solution is to take 2 fingers, stick them in our ears and sing Deutschlandlied until they go away.

Vive la EU

Cronus wrote:I'd look at it another way. If we'd never joined and the EU invited us based on the current membership conditions, would we vote for it? <snip> Vive la EU It’s an interesting question, from a historical perspective. But you have to deal with the world as it is. As has been pointed out frequently in the media recently, Great Britain’s net financial contribution to Northern Ireland is bigger than the UK’s to the EU. Given that and the decades long ‘troubles’, maybe partition wasn’t such a good choice. Would we accept those bits of Ulster now, if they hadn’t been part of the union since the early 1920s? But on the other hand, would you advocate trying to give them back now? The EU is very far from perfect. A lot of your points are valid. But it isn’t so dreadful that throwing off its shackles is going make life wonderful in post-Brexit Britain. Our problems are more deep seated than that. And the Brexit coalition is worryingly divided about what the future should look like. If people think somebody like most-recent Brexit secretary to resign Dominic Raab is a friend to the British working man... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19300051 On the other hand, I don’t think an orderly Brexit has to be catastrophic. It’ll retard growth a bit, we might dip into recession, but nothing anybody in middle age hasn’t seen at least a couple of times before. I do think just crashing out could be very bad though, and Duncan-Smith’s suggestion that we play chicken with the EU to secure a better deal was alarming to see this week. Most businesses don’t run with huge cash reserves, and a lot of jobs could be lost if the working processes are badly disrupted.

Cronus wrote:I'd look at it another way. If we'd never joined and the EU invited us based on the current membership conditions, would we vote for it? <snip> Vive la EU It’s an interesting question, from a historical perspective. But you have to deal with the world as it is. As has been pointed out frequently in the media recently, Great Britain’s net financial contribution to Northern Ireland is bigger than the UK’s to the EU. Given that and the decades long ‘troubles’, maybe partition wasn’t such a good choice. Would we accept those bits of Ulster now, if they hadn’t been part of the union since the early 1920s? But on the other hand, would you advocate trying to give them back now? The EU is very far from perfect. A lot of your points are valid. But it isn’t so dreadful that throwing off its shackles is going make life wonderful in post-Brexit Britain. Our problems are more deep seated than that. And the Brexit coalition is worryingly divided about what the future should look like. If people think somebody like most-recent Brexit secretary to resign Dominic Raab is a friend to the British working man... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19300051 On the other hand, I don’t think an orderly Brexit has to be catastrophic. It’ll retard growth a bit, we might dip into recession, but nothing anybody in middle age hasn’t seen at least a couple of times before. I do think just crashing out could be very bad though, and Duncan-Smith’s suggestion that we play chicken with the EU to secure a better deal was alarming to see this week. Most businesses don’t run with huge cash reserves, and a lot of jobs could be lost if the working processes are badly disrupted.

Andrew Guinne this morning on the Marr show , basically just repeating Labours non committal manifesto rather than answering the questions asked , then Later Chuka Amouna showing why he will be the next Labour Prime Minister

Both parties split right down the middle

You really need to go to specsavers, your myopia is reaching exreme levels ??

Are you sure that all our laws are passed in the EU parliament ?
Even being a net contributor to the EU, are we worse off financially (plaes bear in mind the level of intertrading between multinationals currently spread accross the largest trading zone in the world).

Free movement, i agree with you. It was fine in the early years of the EU with most nations having "comparable" living standards. However, in trying to grow the "eurozone", we naow have member nations woth disparate living standards, making the larger, wealthier nations far more enticing and this issue still needs dealing with (whether or not the UK remain members).

The "devstating solutions" that you mention are also quite interesting.

Would these be budgets AGREED between member nations and the European Central Bank and those nations then being unable to comply or, have some new rules appeared ?

The USG is on its way

So tell me, would you vote to join the EU today if we had never joined?


Given I didn't say "all" and it's clearly a tongue-in-cheek piece, that's a daft question. The total is between 15%ish to 65%ish depending on your definitions of law and what you choose to include. If you include all EU regulations and directives, it's over 60%.


Initially, probably yes. I've never shied away from that reality. Long term, probably not. Economies adjust, recover, balance out and trade with the EU will continue while non-EU trade will grow at an ever faster pace than it has been.


Quite. And the fact remains the EU has repeatedly and categorically stated there will be NO reconsideration of Freedom of Movement. It's a critical problem and if the EU refuse to do anything about it, what option do we have?


Perhaps you should go and tell the people of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy the merits of EU membership and just how they agreed to these budgets. Once you've picked up your teeth you can post here and tell us how it went.

We are now seeing plenty of remain ' experts ' now suggesting that ' we ' would now vote that way because we now understand more about what it all means

Whereas in truth it was never going to be an easy process , the EU have to make it as difficult as possible to put others off doing the same ( helped ATM by the ex PM Mr Blair )

Now just because something isn't easy doesn't mean it isn't worth doing

If we were to now not leave due to another very tight referendum ( which I believe it would be ) faith in the democratic process in the UK will be at an all time low with turnouts in future elections dramatically reduced IMO

I’m not in favour of another referendum. If there had been a big swing in public opinion towards remain, then that’d be different - but there’s no evidence of that.

We do a deadlock that we can’t really afford. So ‘we’ do have to think of something, and quickly. Imo, May’s deal has to be (ironically) the backstop.

If the remain experts understood leave voters so well their wouldn’t have been a Brexit vote in the first place let alone them thinking they’d win. Why should we listen to remainers now who claim they know how the next vote would go given their previous failure?