So who wants to remain in the EU?

[anonymous-user]

Breadvan72 said:

You may perhaps be treating futures trading as being synonymous with derivatives...

Futures are derivatives your Honour.

[anonymous-user]

fblm said:

Breadvan72 said:

You may perhaps be treating futures trading as being synonymous with derivatives...

Futures are derivatives your Honour.

I know. Perhaps I express myself badly. Futures are not the only type of derivative. There are other types that are not futures, and are far removed from the world of crop rotation and ship building.

[anonymous-user]

Esseesse said:

I cannot understand how they can legally/constitutionally take us in to something like the EU. I would love to have it explained/reasoned better than any reasoning I have found so far (which amounts to people saying kings/queens/oaths and all that are ancient history and therefore amount to the sq rt of f all).

Some of the more fruitloopy and wibblist anti-EU websites purvey a quaint and inaccurate view of the UK constitution and bang on about sacred oaths and Magna Carta and so forth. The reality is that the UK Constitution was not frozen in some fairytale version of the Middle Ages. The modern Constitution is partly found in a series of documents dating from the late seventeenth to the late twentieth centuries, and is partly contained in conventions. The fundamental rule, as Zod has pointed out, is that Parliament can do whatever it chooses to do. The Monarch is a mere cipher with no meaningful power, and suggestions that Brenda is a traitor, has betrayed her oath, and so on, are about as lacking in reality as suggestions that she is a space lizard working as an undercover agent for Planet Zog.

[anonymous-user]

Thanks for the lecture, but

(a) I am familiar with the world of derivatives, as many of my clients are involved in that world, so I have to be at least broadly conversant with what they do for a living, although I do not profess expertise in the subject; and

(b) Your lecture should be directed at whichever poster it was who thought that derivatives help farmers plan crops and shipyards build ships.

This digression grew from a discussion about what is and is not a real job. I am not sure, BTW, that the term real job is a helpful one, as in some sense any job is a real job, if the person doing it gets paid for it and is therefore able to be active in the economy (better still of that person pays some tax), but of course some jobs are more useful than others. I do laugh at the PH notion that being, for example, a City trader or an IT consultant is "real world" but that being, for example, a criminal lawyer is "ivory tower". I am none of those things, by the way.

The starting point was the claim that Farage is in some way the real deal because he once, long ago, did some trading in the City (he has been a full time politician ever since then). This, to his benighted fans, makes him Johnny Salt of the Earth, and that's a notion that is more than faintly ludicrous, I suggest.

[anonymous-user]

so called said:

don4l said:

so called said:

I want to stay in.
Have to find a new job otherwise

What do you do?

I work as a Consultant to a German Company covering North America and India as an Application Engineer but also tasked with advising on product requirements for market expansion.

There would be nothing stopping you from carrying on with that if we were out of the EU. Why would you think it might?

[anonymous-user]

cardigankid said:

Britain's interests are among its lower priorities.

And then some. How much did the EU give Ford to move Transit production from Southampton to Turkey? $140m? Fvck them.

[anonymous-user]

///ajd said:

Ah, I see your points.

First point, I would worry about what the EU would do to our services industry if we left - as I understand it we have managed to stop EU measures that could be detrimental to our service sector. I recall us pushing back on banking reforms that would affect UK more than any other EU member. Now I realise you can say - yes but if we left those laws would not apply to us - BUT the risk is those laws may affect our ability to trade our services into the EU.

As an example (not realistic, but to show the point) - we leave, the EU introduces caps on banker salaries (that UK won't /can't comply with) - suddenly UK banks ability to comply with EU law in doubt, and hence possibly access to EU market. If we were in the EU, we could veto such a cap all day long. Now there are holes in this example, in reality it maybe much more subtle, but the risk seems very real to me. You have to ask - if the UK left, would FR/DE introduce laws in the EU that penalised sectors outside the EU to the benefit of their own? Having dealt with DE & FR, in my view this is not only a risk, but a certainty.

Second point, is this really the case? How are we constrained with doing business outside the EU? Do EU laws constrain what we do with e.g. china? Does EU legislation really interfere with e.g. France selling Rafales to India? Can you give an example where an EU regulation affects our trade with china?

Of course, there is the risk of the Germans and, especially, the French being vindictive were we to spoil their party. They've already hinted at as much.

For me that's a chance worth taking rather than capitulate to what is basically blackmail. We're likely to be 'punished' as some have called simply for questioning the grand plan as we have.

Are you saying we should stay in rather than upset the Germans and French? Really?

[anonymous-user]

///ajd said:

tangerine_sedge said:

Mario149 said:

Note that I never said that MEPs can create law, I said they have to vote on it and they can vote it down continually until the commissioners come up with something that MEPs approve. To my knowledge there is no time when commissioners can enact a law that MEPs have voted down.

Shame that we have some of the laziest MEPs in Europe then : Shocking ukip record

Its more than a shame, its criminal.

It is hardly surprising some of Europe look at us with suspicion when we vote for total morons to represent us in Europe.

Why do we do that? Are we really that stupid? Sadly it seems many of us are.

Good for them, at least they aren't hoovering up the expenses, at the cost of the taxpayer, like all the other 'regular attendees' are.

Think it through, you might see who the stupid voters really are.

[anonymous-user]

Funkycoldribena said:

ClaphamGT3 said:

I wholeheartedly agree that the EU requires very significant reform, especially if, as I would hope, we can move to a model where the EU as an institution assumes ultimate sovereignty over the current member states.

Am I reading this correctly? "as I would hope"?

Yes, some people are naive beyond belief.

[anonymous-user]

Mario149 said:

Beati Dogu said:

Those in favour of our continued EU membership need to stop thinking idealistically about what the EU could be, or should be and start realising how it actually is.

That's not a valid argument: you shouldn't be making decisions solely on what the current state of affairs is for anything (house purchase, car purchase, job, biz startup etc etc), but also what you could make out of it and what the benefits could be. If you don't think the EU can be changed sufficiently to your liking, that's one thing. But simply saying it's crap at this minute and saying that's enough to vote out is blinkered at best.

If the house or car you were thinking of buying was delapidated beyond all repair despite years of efforts by all sorts of people to get it into good order, you wouldn't buy it methinks?

The EU debacle has been an absolute, no hope, corrupt mess for decades. Today's (and tomorrow's, in all likelihood) politicians see it as a rich gravy train just as it is and have no interest in changing it.

What it is now is just a shade of how bad it will become if left unchecked.

[anonymous-user]

ClaphamGT3 said:

I'm going to make the pollsters heads fall off. Committed federalist who would like to see full European integration with joint competencies on defence, justice & foreign policy and converged regional policies of finance and social affairs.

I have been a Conservative party member all my life, I went to university, I read the Telegraph and I live in London but was born & raised I. East Anglia

If one was to design 'Europe' from a clean sheet I think I'd agree but getting there from where you are now is, IMO, economically impossible. The size of the federal transfers needed to hold it together is just vast. Even in the US, which has a few hundred years head start on you, you see fiscal transfers in the order of 10% of a states GDP from rich states to poor. 10% of GDP! A year! Never, ever going to work. http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/08/...

[anonymous-user]

MarshPhantom said:

Scuffers said:

MarshPhantom said:

I'll vote to stay if only because we have no idea what may happen if we leave. There are no facts, it's all guesswork and lies, and I think we need more than that to make such a big decision.

that's a reallt lame argument.

plenty of info out there, you just need to look for it.

ignore the politicians, and look at the rest of the world.

we leave, the sky is not going to suddenly fall in.

the biggest risk is what our own domestic politicians do once we are freed from the EU, I can see some of them desperately trying to mirror the very shame policies and st we pulled out to avoid.

There may be "info" out there. Who wrote it and what is their agenda?

You have no way of knowing what the the future may hold after brexit.

Thing is we do know what it could be like after. Just like it was before we joined, in terms of trade and other relationships. What we really don't know is where we will be if we stay in and the fools running the EU are encouraged to indulge in their wild fantasies.

Then we will really be in trouble. It's an absolute fk up now, it will only get worse.

[anonymous-user]

FredClogs said:

The benefits are:-

1) "Guaranteed" and open access, free of tariff or need for negotiation, to the worlds largest market place.

2) Guaranteed and open access to the worlds largest and most skilled labour market.

3) Increased and higher level of judicial recourse for UK citizens adding extra checks and balances to our domestic legislature.

4) Increased cooperation and joint working with EU brethren on law enforcement and criminal intelligence.

5) The route to possible further integration, i.e joint armed services, joint social welfare and health care provisions etc... ect...

You could have some of those outside but they'd never be guaranteed and you certainly can't move towards a greater federal europe without being in.

[anonymous-user]

Scuffers said:

plasticpig said:

Scuffers said:

FredClogs said:

The benefits are:-

1) "Guaranteed" and open access, free of tariff or need for negotiation, to the worlds largest market place.

The EU is nothing like the worlds largest market place, where did you get that from?

It is the largest consumer market based on household final consumption expenditure.

nope..

just add up the EU countries in that list, you end up at ~10,000,000M US$, still behind america.

and they are still 2013 figures, but even going by them, the UK accounts for some 17% of the EU market.

This all rather misses the point that you may well have open and free market access to the EU but you do so at the expense of open and free market access to the rest of the world. Regardless of how big the EU is as a single entity it is not as big as the rest of the world. Secondly, open and free market access to the EU is not dependent on EU membership so listing it as a benefit is like those car ads that helpfully still say ABS and central locking.

[anonymous-user]

Scuffers said:

Specifics?

Where is he wrong and why?

Wrong?

My old tutor once told me: "if you want to know what will happen, study the sciences. If you want to know what should happen, study law. If you want to daydream about what might happen, study economics".

[anonymous-user]

FredClogs said:

Perhaps, I don't really care what Winston wanted.

Then why quote him?