EU referendum

[EalingBlue2]

I take it you cannot remember what it was like before we were frog marched into the common market by Ted Heath then. And I really can't be arsed to go into the miriade number of stupid regulations that have been forced on us over the years. Because they are stupid. Like not being allowed climb a ladder higher than 3 metres so an unscrupulous builder can charge you an arm and a leg to erect scaffolding and use the EU as an excuse to extort money from you. Or an interference with individual freedoms like the ban on being able to slaughter your own animals that you kept for food etc. You now have to transport them causing the animal stress in transport and even more stress on entering an abattoir.
But I will mention one that is on the horizon that will have a shattering effect on us all should it go ahead.

Evidently Monsanto's patent on the use of glyphosate in systemic weed killer is due for renewal next year and there are calls for the use of glyphosate to be banned in the UK. It was reported in the Daily Mail so it might just be a bit of sensationalism on their part but knowing how fucking barmy those bureacrats are in Brussels it wouldn't surprise me if the suggestion had legs. This year one of the EU rulings was that to use glyphosate you had to go on a course and obtain a licence. This stuff has been used for decades by farmers and gardeners without any problems but now suddenly we all need to fork out £150 for a licence.
I'm not going to argue the chemistry of glyphosate with anybody but I don't believe anybody has died of glyphosate poisoning over the years it has been in use.

So the next scare from those that want to see it banned and who have a sort of witchcraft way of thinking is that bees suffer due to its use or that it has caused a decline in the bee population. Utter nonsense. Businesses that manufacture bee keeping equipment have been making massive profits because there are so many people that want to keep bees. So there's hardly a shortage of bees is there. Honey production goes up and down from year to year depending on the weather and has nothing to do with the use of glyphosate. If the substance was harmful then the British Beekeeper's Association would have come out firmly in favour of banning it. They have not.
Christ the British Beekeepers Association hasn't even come out firmly against the use of all pesticides let alone herbicides! And the witches confuse the two together and will vote to stay in the EU because they think the EU is the great protector to all things dangerous. We are being nannied and the witches like it.

All this is even before you get to the problem of what banning glyphosate would do to food production...in the world never mind Europe or the UK. But it's a scary thought that some misinformed faceless bureaucrats with a grudge against Monsanto decide that witchcraft wins over objective scientific evidence and rules it out of use completely. It would be a massive step backwards into the unknown. I was against the idea of TTIP until this story broke but I'm not sure now whether TTIP is such a bad thing when you have ignorant witches in positions of power and influence.

So basically to have the right to use a weed killer you don't understand and don't want to scientifically discuss you would risk the countries economic future . Human rights used to be about fundamental rights of freedom, of the rule of law and now it's about a weed killer you admit you don't understand.

Cleary a democratic vote is frog marching so I assume we will be frogmarched out of Europe as we are frogmarched in and as turn out will be lower it will be an even less democratic frog March out?

I love the fact that paying for a licence to use dangerous chemicals is earth shattering but potentially hundreds of thousands (I say potentially as I accept we don't know) is clearly run of the mill normal stuff? Clearly you don't think the monoliths who control global food production can stretch to £150 but you think the very same people can cope losing thousands in subsidies? Just doesn't make sense.

Unless you have a genuine being on emetic superiority I am not sure why you believe a British ignorant faceless bureaucrat would be right if they worked for the UK government but a French ignorant faceless buerauctat would be wrong.

 

[YPhrunts]

So basically to have the right to use a weed killer you don't understand and don't want to scientifically discuss you would risk the countries economic future . Human rights used to be about fundamental rights of freedom, of the rule of law and now it's about a weed killer you admit you don't understand.

Cleary a democratic vote is frog marching so I assume we will be frogmarched out of Europe as we are frogmarched in and as turn out will be lower it will be an even less democratic frog March out?

I love the fact that paying for a licence to use dangerous chemicals is earth shattering but potentially hundreds of thousands (I say potentially as I accept we don't know) is clearly run of the mill normal stuff? Clearly you don't think the monoliths who control global food production can stretch to £150 but you think the very same people can cope losing thousands in subsidies? Just doesn't make sense.

Unless you have a genuine being on emetic superiority I am not sure why you believe a British ignorant faceless bureaucrat would be right if they worked for the UK government but a French ignorant faceless buerauctat would be wrong.

Eh?

 

[Chancy Termites]

No about 15-20% of the population vote for them and depending on who wins it is s highly regionally divided vote and a heavily rural/city split. There are few parts of the country where you won't spend a lot of your life dictated to by a government you didn't vote for that works against your and your communities interests .They can then do what they want for 5 years with no one to challenge them in most cases bar their own lunatic fringes. The EU is in many ways more democratic and had far more checks and balances than the UK that said it is on a much bigger scale . A second chamber elected is vital, especially if the out vote wins as most of our checks and balances will go. The U.K. Would also need better human rights and stronger courts better placed to challenge government, all of which we could take from or learn from Europe.

To sit in the UK with a government of a single parliament elected first past the post by a significant minority at best of voters, with a hereditary head of state, no real bill of rights, a part hereditary, part patronage determined second chamber etc and lecture anyone In the western world on democracy and freedom is laughable.

Your 15 to 20% figure is irrelevant. Children can't vote; 30% of people who can vote choose not to do so; the remaining proportion of people who do vote are spread round any number of competing parties. Going by the rules, the most popular one wins. Sometimes the winning party gets fewer votes than one single losing party (can't remember which - didn't Labour get fewer votes than Conservatives in 2005???).

However, the point is that there is a process of voting for the law creators at all.

Remind me again, what percentage of the electorate vote for EU commissioners, ie the folk who dream up, draft and propose new EU legislation in the first place?

Let me help if you're stuck:- 0%. Absolutely no-one at all. Not a single voter. Not one.

The EU's structure makes it fundamentally not a democracy.

 

[EalingBlue2]

Your 15 to 20% figure is irrelevant. Children can't vote; 30% of people who can vote choose not to do so; the remaining proportion of people who do vote are spread round any number of competing parties. Going by the rules, the most popular one wins. Sometimes the winning party gets fewer votes than one single losing party (can't remember which - didn't Labour get fewer votes than Conservatives in 2005???).

However, the point is that there is a process of voting for the law creators at all.

Remind me again, what percentage of the electorate vote for EU commissioners, ie the folk who dream up, draft and propose new EU legislation in the first place?

Let me help if you're stuck:- 0%. Absolutely no-one at all. Not a single voter. Not one.

The EU's structure makes it fundamentally not a democracy.

The voting population of Europe votes for the Governments who pick the commissioners , similar to how our cabinet is picked in fact ie decisions from elected PM

 

[CityStu]

I respect that argument. Perhaps the Outers would be better served if they were as honest as this and said, yes there will be pain but it's worth it.

But you say sovereignty and governance? These are powerful ideas that stir up an emotional response. No-one likes being told what to do, right? No-one likes being told they can't make their own laws. But beyond the emotion, what specific things cause us such outrage, such indignation, that we would want to risk years of hardship?

When I sit down and think rationally, what are the things that the EU does to us that make it so intolerable that we must leave? The curvature of bananas? The minimum cocoa solids in a bar of chocolate? Maximum working hours? Human rights?

Infuriating though all their "interference" undoubtedly is, does it REALLY matter? And surely some of the things we get are good for us?

When it comes down to it, I think leaving makes no sense. It's what many of us would like to do because we're pissed off, but in cold analysis, makes little sense. We don't need sovereignty to decide about bananas, and we have veto's about most things that do matter anyway.

Now, if we could leave without risk nor consequence, I'd be gone like a shot, but that's far from the case. We'd face huge risk, and in my estimation, huge hardship. And for nothing that REALLY matters in return. The only thing that is really material is immigration, and we need European immigrants to pay for our aging population and growing pension and healthcare costs. Immigration from other EU states is a good thing.

Not all migration from EU states is positive. Many work at a party grade where they aren't contributing to the economy and there's no reason we couldn't attract the higher paid ones if we were outside the EU. It's not as if we have no migration from non-EU countries. Being able to control immigration is imperative to make any decisions IMO. How do you know how many houses, schools and hospitals are required if you don't know how many people will be needing them? Nor is it preferable to absorb them into existing services - we're at breaking point already.

On the other EU legislation, it's not necessarily what is in place now. I do think that much of what they come up with is completely unnecessary and does small businesses no good, but it doesn't directly affect me.

My worry is what could happen in the future. Just as Inners pose that leaving us a risk, I believe that staying in also carries a risk. On immigration, Turkey and Ukraine are likely to be members soon and who wouldn't want to leave those for the far more prosperous UK? There's also a security risk IMO. Merkel invited millions of unchecked migrants into Europe and events in Paris, Brussels, Cologne and Sweden have proved that some of those are les than savoury characters. In 5 years the foreign nationals will be granted citizenship and will be able to move wherever they want in the EU, including the UK. I'm not necessarily saying I don't want them here - it depends on whether we need their skills to fulfil employment shortages - but I'd like to be able to check who they were first and reject them if they posed a threat to British people, society and culture.

 

[TonyM]

Eh?

I agree with you Y. Its not the £150 it's the principle of being charged to do what you did before for free. And doing what you did through freewill as opposed to needing a license.

In Ireland the EU forced the government to introduce water charges. To stop my kids wasting water brushing their teeth no doubt. Needless stress. No environmental benefit. Being charged for something we already paid for in taxes. It's all cosmetic new age shit.

 

[stonerblue]

just to make this thread less confusing could bluethrunthru and blueonblue change their usernames..

 

[EalingBlue2]

Eh?

Was it not you who described going in after a vote as being frogmarched. Was it not you who made the paying of a £150 licence for a chemical you admit you don't understand into an earth shattering problem? I answered perhaps I should have said ...... Eh?

It typifies the nonsense of this debate inners claiming we will all be 4000 a year worse off and outers claiming democracy is a frog March and we should get out because beekeeper say so and global agriculture will collapse because of a nominal fee.

 

[EalingBlue2]

just to make this thread less confusing could bluethrunthru and blueonblue change their usernames..

Good idea :-) I have often been confused by someone I vey often agree with heartily posting stuff I find utterly wrong and vice versa :-)

 

[EalingBlue2]

I agree with you Y. Its not the £150 it's the principle of being charged to do what you did before for free. And doing what you did through freewill as opposed to needing a license.

In Ireland the EU forced the government to introduce water charges. To stop my kids wasting water brushing their teeth no doubt. Needless stress. No environmental benefit. Being charged for something we already paid for in taxes. It's all cosmetic new age shit.

I have to say a policy where governments never change policy or taxing or licences on things not charged in the past is the very problem with global taxation today. We have to adapt and change based on new science , new needs, new economies, new ideas to do otherwise is to stagnate. Now sometimes governments are opportunist and wrong about these or should remove old charges no longer needed but it is very much a rational case by case judgement not a principle. Though Google and other big businesses would agree and would make it a principle if they could and avoid even more tax

 

[Moriati]

'Beware of the reckless fools who advocate Brexit, he warns us. Should we leave the EU he says, our unemployment rate would soar to match those in Greece and Spain. What is more, he quotes all those wise men of the grand economic forecasting who failed to see the last great financial crisis coming, but kept their jobs to get it wrong again'.
The Government is doing everything in its power to rig the EU Referendum.....

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...ing-everything-in-its-power-to-rig-the-eu-re/

 

[cibaman]

I'm quite confident that if we leave the EU our Civil Service will take up the slack as far as meddling is concerned. We've outsourced bureaucracy to the EU because its useful to have someone else take the blame. But much of the stuff that we blame them for, we would do ourselves once outside the EU.

 

[Chippy_boy]

Not all migration from EU states is positive. Many work at a party grade where they aren't contributing to the economy and there's no reason we couldn't attract the higher paid ones if we were outside the EU. It's not as if we have no migration from non-EU countries. Being able to control immigration is imperative to make any decisions IMO. How do you know how many houses, schools and hospitals are required if you don't know how many people will be needing them? Nor is it preferable to absorb them into existing services - we're at breaking point already.

On the other EU legislation, it's not necessarily what is in place now. I do think that much of what they come up with is completely unnecessary and does small businesses no good, but it doesn't directly affect me.

My worry is what could happen in the future. Just as Inners pose that leaving us a risk, I believe that staying in also carries a risk. On immigration, Turkey and Ukraine are likely to be members soon and who wouldn't want to leave those for the far more prosperous UK? There's also a security risk IMO. Merkel invited millions of unchecked migrants into Europe and events in Paris, Brussels, Cologne and Sweden have proved that some of those are les than savoury characters. In 5 years the foreign nationals will be granted citizenship and will be able to move wherever they want in the EU, including the UK. I'm not necessarily saying I don't want them here - it depends on whether we need their skills to fulfil employment shortages - but I'd like to be able to check who they were first and reject them if they posed a threat to British people, society and culture.

Agree with pretty much all of that. As I say, it's shit if we stay in and shit if we leave. Over the past 30 years we've managed to back ourselves into a really dreadful corner I think, where no option going forward is good. I think on balance probably the best thing if we look at it over a say 20+ year timescale would be to leave. The country would probably be in a better state in 20 years if we left compared to if we stay.

My issue is that I genuinely think things would take a marked turn for the worse in the short term, say <10 years. And since I am 54 and don't have many productive working years left, the very last thing I need right now is 10 years of recession. I - like everyone else - have had to suffer for the past 8 years with lousy interest rates and slow or no growth and already look forward to a pretty miserable retirement in my late 60's. I don't want anything to make it even worse and I am 100% certain that the "scaremongers" are not wrong in predicting pretty dire consequences if we left.

Without a favourable trade agreement (that we can't have, for reasons already explained) many businesses will decamp from the UK. That is an inexorable consequence. Toyota and Honda and Nissan and everyone else who's invested here is here so they have manufacturing base *inside* the EU, not one on the outside where their goods are subject to import duty. Of course they won't ALL leave, but equally, they won't ALL stay either. Some will go and the jobs will go with them.

Other businesses will decline as their European export revenues fall. We will have more unemployment and given we are barely in growth right now, we'll be back into recession. It will take decades to turn that around.

 

[Chippy_boy]

Another point that doesn't seem to be debated is that I think leaving would enable the country to swing strongly to the right. A good thing in my book, but not for many on here I think.

The UK is and has always been inherently more right wing than the rest of the EU and that's been the cause of much friction. Doubtless the inherently more socialist outlook of the EU compared to that of the UK is one of the things that's attracting Corbin to stay in.

 

[Chancy Termites]

The voting population of Europe votes for the Governments who pick the commissioners , similar to how our cabinet is picked in fact ie decisions from elected PM

You're (deliberately?) evading the point that in a UK election you vote for a prospective MP knowing what policies they and/or their party would like to enact, should they be put in a position to do so.

Not possible with EU law-introducers.

 

[KenTheLandlord]

I take it you cannot remember what it was like before we were frog marched into the common market by Ted Heath then. And I really can't be arsed to go into the miriade number of stupid regulations that have been forced on us over the years. Because they are stupid. But here's a couple....like not being allowed to climb a ladder higher than 3 metres so that an unscrupulous builder can charge you an arm and a leg to erect scaffolding and use the EU as an excuse to extort money from you. Or an interference with individual freedoms like the ban on being able to slaughter your own animals that you kept for food etc. You now have to transport them causing the animal stress in transport and even more stress on entering an abattoir.

But I will mention one that has been reported to be on the horizon and that will have a shattering effect on us all should it go ahead.

Evidently Monsanto's patent on the use of glyphosate in systemic weed killer is due for renewal next year and there are calls for the use of glyphosate to be banned in the UK. It was reported in the Daily Mail so it might just be a bit of sensationalism on their part but knowing how fucking barmy those bureacrats are in Brussels it wouldn't surprise me if the suggestion had legs. This year one of the EU rulings was that to use glyphosate you had to go on a course and obtain a licence. This stuff has been used for decades by farmers and gardeners without any problems but now suddenly we all need to fork out £150 for a licence.
I'm not going to argue the chemistry of glyphosate with anybody but I don't believe anybody has died of glyphosate poisoning over the years it has been in use.

So the next scare from those that want to see it banned and who have a sort of witchcraft way of thinking is that bees suffer due to its use or that it has caused a decline in the bee population. Utter nonsense. Businesses that manufacture bee keeping equipment have been making massive profits because there are so many people that want to keep bees. So there's hardly a shortage of bees is there. Honey production goes up and down from year to year depending on the weather and has nothing to do with the use of glyphosate. If the substance was harmful then the British Beekeeper's Association would have come out firmly in favour of banning it. They have not.
Christ the British Beekeepers Association hasn't even come out firmly against the use of all pesticides let alone herbicides! And the witches confuse the two together and will vote to stay in the EU because they think the EU is the great protector to all things dangerous. We are being nannied and the witches like it.

All this is even before you get to the problem of what banning glyphosate would do to food production. But it's a scary thought that some misinformed faceless bureaucrats with a grudge against Monsanto might decide that witchcraft wins over objective scientific evidence and rules it out of use in the UK. It would be a massive step backwards. I was against the idea of TTIP until this story broke but I'm not sure now whether TTIP is such a bad thing when you have ignorant people in positions of power and influence. If business can sue against witchcraft then I'm all for them doing it.

I don't want Luddites making any sort of comeback thank you. We invent things, we weigh up the consequences if any and we move on.

You are more than welcome.

https://www.hud.ac.uk/news/2016/march/annualludditememoriallecture2016.php

 

[Chippy_boy]

I take it you cannot remember what it was like before we were frog marched into the common market by Ted Heath then. And I really can't be arsed to go into the miriade number of stupid regulations that have been forced on us over the years. Because they are stupid. But here's a couple....like not being allowed to climb a ladder higher than 3 metres so that an unscrupulous builder can charge you an arm and a leg to erect scaffolding and use the EU as an excuse to extort money from you. Or an interference with individual freedoms like the ban on being able to slaughter your own animals that you kept for food etc. You now have to transport them causing the animal stress in transport and even more stress on entering an abattoir.

But I will mention one that has been reported to be on the horizon and that will have a shattering effect on us all should it go ahead.

Evidently Monsanto's patent on the use of glyphosate in systemic weed killer is due for renewal next year and there are calls for the use of glyphosate to be banned in the UK. It was reported in the Daily Mail so it might just be a bit of sensationalism on their part but knowing how fucking barmy those bureacrats are in Brussels it wouldn't surprise me if the suggestion had legs. This year one of the EU rulings was that to use glyphosate you had to go on a course and obtain a licence. This stuff has been used for decades by farmers and gardeners without any problems but now suddenly we all need to fork out £150 for a licence.
I'm not going to argue the chemistry of glyphosate with anybody but I don't believe anybody has died of glyphosate poisoning over the years it has been in use.

So the next scare from those that want to see it banned and who have a sort of witchcraft way of thinking is that bees suffer due to its use or that it has caused a decline in the bee population. Utter nonsense. Businesses that manufacture bee keeping equipment have been making massive profits because there are so many people that want to keep bees. So there's hardly a shortage of bees is there. Honey production goes up and down from year to year depending on the weather and has nothing to do with the use of glyphosate. If the substance was harmful then the British Beekeeper's Association would have come out firmly in favour of banning it. They have not.
Christ the British Beekeepers Association hasn't even come out firmly against the use of all pesticides let alone herbicides! And the witches confuse the two together and will vote to stay in the EU because they think the EU is the great protector to all things dangerous. We are being nannied and the witches like it.

All this is even before you get to the problem of what banning glyphosate would do to food production. But it's a scary thought that some misinformed faceless bureaucrats with a grudge against Monsanto might decide that witchcraft wins over objective scientific evidence and rules it out of use in the UK. It would be a massive step backwards. I was against the idea of TTIP until this story broke but I'm not sure now whether TTIP is such a bad thing when you have ignorant people in positions of power and influence. If business can sue against witchcraft then I'm all for them doing it.

I don't want Luddites making any sort of comeback thank you. We invent things, we weigh up the consequences if any and we move on.

None of the above matters though mate, does it. Honestly, you think we should leave the EU because we can't have tall ladders? When people take the emotion out of it and think logically and rationally, there isn't much that the EU does to us that REALLY hurts us. i.e. hurts us to the point that it's intolerable and we MUST leave.

And we need to learn to work with the system much better, i.e. ignore the stupid laws when we don't feel like complying with them - just like the French and Italians do. So instead of getting all worked up by our inability to deport Abu Hamzer, just deport the **** and then say "Oh, weren't we supposed to have done that? Oops, sorry". And then don't pay any fines that might ensue. What are the EU to do, declare war? The French told us - against EU rules - to stuff our BSE riddled beef and nothing was ever done to punish them. We should do the same. Agree to idiotic regulations and then ignore them.

 

[jimbopm]

So you admit it was a fantasy forecast designed to do nothing but scare folk.

He has been accused of being unable to predict the economy in 15 years because he has a track record of not being able to accurately predict it over the life of this parliament so far so forgive us for not lapping it up like good little dogs.

Well done for providing just the type of rebuttal I came to describe.

No I am not admitting it as a fantasy forecast, it is based on a model of the UK out of the EU as proposed by Boris Johnson no less, Crown Prince of the Brexit campaign.

Let's just be frank, forecasts can be right or wrong, but only those deluded enough to back the Brexit would ignore it's sentiment altogether.

 

[blueonblue]

It wouldn't matter if I had published data that was bang up to date (as far as I am aware, they are the most recent comprehensive migration studies available), you - as is par for the course with the Brexit supporters - would find someway of discrediting it. Rather than finding their own studies that point to a glorious future of Britain outside of the EU (There isn't one), all Brexiters do when confronted with latest damaging evidence to their campaign is cry foul. It's scaremonging, it's project fear, it's inherently biased, take your pick.

Your posted up "Comprehensive" migration studies were all carried out when there was a restriction in place on A8s, the studies were ALL based on just the A8s, so rather than try blaming me for unreasonably discrediting it how about a simple admission that in this case you got it wrong.

WHY there are no "Comprehensive" studies available of any date after 2011 is a question you should be asking yourself, and while you claim the treasury report has been unreasonably attacked there is one easy way to check, Given the centrality of immigration and free movement in the political debate on Brexit, would YOU think it dishonest to ignore the effects of this ending while preparing a report on any future ?

 

[Metal Biker]

The voting population of Europe votes for the Governments who pick the commissioners , similar to how our cabinet is picked in fact ie decisions from elected PM

No, no, no, no, no. That's not how it works. A member is nominated by a member state and the parliament votes for it, yes, but the public has absolutely NO say in exactly who the candidate put forward is. No democratic process is followed in campaigning for who should be nominated. It is worth pointing out as well that all EU commissioners do not act in the interest of the nation from which they were selected, they act in accordance to European interests. For example a British EU Commissioner does not act on behalf of interests that affect the UK directly, but only those of the EU.

In your interest, you have UKIP members making up the majority of British influence in the EU. They are your voice in deciding who should and should not be appointed as one of the unelected commissioners. Are you happy about that? Knowing that Britain's representatives in Europe are eurosceptic and would likely vote or abstain from voting on any or every EU commissioner appointment? Because that's how the EU system works.