Anyone else think the EU referendum is a complete scam?
Discussion
The above thought jumped into my head again this morning watching the BBC news.
They were looking at the £150m or whatever it is that make up our net weekly contributions to the EU, and comparing them to weekly spending on other things such as defence, the NHS and Pensions.
Now, whether you think the £150m we contribute every week to the EU is a good or a bad thing is totally up to you, but please don't state your positions on it on this thread, as there are plenty of other threads for arguing the toss over that already.
What it made me think was that whilst I, like everyone else, can daydream about what I'd do with £150m if I won the Euromillions on a quintuple rollover, it's actually a fairly trivial amount of money in the grand scheme of things. The NHS gets over £2Bn a week, and we spend something like £6Bn per week on pensions.
When the NHS was set up in 1947, it had an annual budget in today's terms of £15Bn.
When modern state pensions were introduced with a retirement age of 65, average life expectancy for a man was, err... About 65! Now it's around 79, yet our government has barely tinkered around at all with retirement ages.
Today, the NHS spends around twice as much as we give to the EU just to treat type 2 Diabetes! Again, this isn't a comment on whether or not we should be spending that money on the EU, so much as a question as to why on earth we are all getting animated by the question, when we're shelling out twice as much just to support people who've eaten themselves into a totally avoidable illness???
This also, to my mind, links to the whole other question raised in the EU debate - Sovereignty. What use is it having "Sovereignty" is the only options we have to vote for are identikit political parties who are terrified to do anything about the unsustainable monster that is State expenditure!
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that all Western political parties collude in private to create soap opera style dramas such as the whole Brexit question, just so that we the electorate have something trivial but headline-catching to talk about whilst closing our eyes to the much larger lunacy when we vote them back in.
Hell, I wouldn't even be surprised if Cameron, Obama, Merkel et al responded to the Iron Man "terrorist is actually actor" plotline with "Who the f
k leaked our strategy to Hollywood!!!"
I reckon they all jump on a weekly conference call to agree just how sneering Juncker is going to be about Farage, or what demographic mix they need to blow up next month to make sure we ignore what's actually important!
Just how long are we supposed to carry on in this vein before the system collapses, whether we're in the EU or not?
We currently have a society where well over half of all households in the country are net recipients from the state, and where the tax burden on the top 1%, for all of Thatcher's headline reductions in income tax and the like, has risen from 11% when she came to power to 30% now! How long before the 1% think "fk this" and emigrate, and the whole system implodes in their wake?
Given the choice on June 23rd, I'd like to see boxes on the ballot paper that say "Yes", "No" and "fk off and actually fix the problems that really matter, you useless bunch of spineless, self-serving tossers!"
They were looking at the £150m or whatever it is that make up our net weekly contributions to the EU, and comparing them to weekly spending on other things such as defence, the NHS and Pensions.
Now, whether you think the £150m we contribute every week to the EU is a good or a bad thing is totally up to you, but please don't state your positions on it on this thread, as there are plenty of other threads for arguing the toss over that already.
What it made me think was that whilst I, like everyone else, can daydream about what I'd do with £150m if I won the Euromillions on a quintuple rollover, it's actually a fairly trivial amount of money in the grand scheme of things. The NHS gets over £2Bn a week, and we spend something like £6Bn per week on pensions.
When the NHS was set up in 1947, it had an annual budget in today's terms of £15Bn.
When modern state pensions were introduced with a retirement age of 65, average life expectancy for a man was, err... About 65! Now it's around 79, yet our government has barely tinkered around at all with retirement ages.
Today, the NHS spends around twice as much as we give to the EU just to treat type 2 Diabetes! Again, this isn't a comment on whether or not we should be spending that money on the EU, so much as a question as to why on earth we are all getting animated by the question, when we're shelling out twice as much just to support people who've eaten themselves into a totally avoidable illness???
This also, to my mind, links to the whole other question raised in the EU debate - Sovereignty. What use is it having "Sovereignty" is the only options we have to vote for are identikit political parties who are terrified to do anything about the unsustainable monster that is State expenditure!
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that all Western political parties collude in private to create soap opera style dramas such as the whole Brexit question, just so that we the electorate have something trivial but headline-catching to talk about whilst closing our eyes to the much larger lunacy when we vote them back in.
Hell, I wouldn't even be surprised if Cameron, Obama, Merkel et al responded to the Iron Man "terrorist is actually actor" plotline with "Who the f
k leaked our strategy to Hollywood!!!"I reckon they all jump on a weekly conference call to agree just how sneering Juncker is going to be about Farage, or what demographic mix they need to blow up next month to make sure we ignore what's actually important!
Just how long are we supposed to carry on in this vein before the system collapses, whether we're in the EU or not?
We currently have a society where well over half of all households in the country are net recipients from the state, and where the tax burden on the top 1%, for all of Thatcher's headline reductions in income tax and the like, has risen from 11% when she came to power to 30% now! How long before the 1% think "f
k this" and emigrate, and the whole system implodes in their wake?Given the choice on June 23rd, I'd like to see boxes on the ballot paper that say "Yes", "No" and "f
k off and actually fix the problems that really matter, you useless bunch of spineless, self-serving tossers!"Derek Smith said:
One Christmas, I was given a banana (stolen from the docks - handy having an uncle who worked there) and ate half of it in front of my relatives as a treat.
You've got some pretty weird relatives if they thought watching you eat half a banana was a treat! 
Derek Smith said:
It has irritated me when politicians have wasted money for no other reason than political beliefs. The corruption of officials has always been a problem, and will probably remain so, but compared to the rest of the world, I think I'm quite well off socially.
If by that you mean we're less corrupt than most societies, I'd agree with you. If, on the other hand, you mean you've got a nice social fabric to support you, I think that's the root cause of the problem! We all want the nice social fabric, and politicians buy our votes with the promise of delivering it, but everyone perceives "free at the point of delivery" to just mean "free".Derek Smith said:
One thing that does worry me is that my kids have all had the possibility of choosing further education without financial penalty. That's changed. Equal opportunities should be the one thing that is to the forefront of politicians, even Blair and Cameron.
This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Your children did not have the possibility of choosing further education without financial penalty. They had the possibility of choosing further education without financial penalty directly to themselves at the point of consumption. It still had to be paid for!The current system is, to my mind, far, far fairer than the one when your kids and I went through Uni.
Back then, the taxpayer had to pay for our education, whether I went on to become something worthy but low paid, or massively well paid doing something that contributed little to society. Yes, we need the former, and it's fair that they should be funded by society, but why should society pay for the latter?
Students still get their education free at the point of delivery today, and they only start to pay back their student loads if/when they start to earn over a certain amount. Earn less than this for long enough (ie, you're doing one of the worthy but low paid jobs), and society still picks up your tab. Earn more, and you pay back a percentage of your future earnings, which seems fair enough if you're earning more as a result of doing your degree. The only loophole I'd like to close is the matter of people getting their degree here and then avoiding paying back their student loan by leaving the country and coining it in elsewhere.
In the ideal world, I'd like to see something similar in healthcare too, where the cost of your treatment is subsidised to a greater or lesser extent depending on the level of your blame for your condition. Need a heart operation because you've got a congenital disease over which you had absolutely no control? Fully paid. Need it because you've stuffed your system full of fatty deposits over the years? That'll be £1,500 up front, please.
V8mate said:
Kermit power said:
They were looking at the £150m or whatever it is that make up our net weekly contributions to the EU,...
I wish those debating would stop talking in terms of the net contribution. If we leave we get to re-allocate the ENTIRE contribution. We currently pay a shed load of cash and then the EU decides on what 'worthy causes' it is reallocated to the regions.If all the money stayed at home, then a UK government, delivering a manifesto it was voted in for, would allocate the entire tax take, not unelected commissioners with pet projects.
So we might decide, purely as an example, that UK farmers should sink or swim. The equivalent sum of all the CAP subsidies disappears. Or we might decide that the TUC should exist purely by virtue of the subscriptions its constituent members raise: goodbye subsidy, etc.
It's like going to the doctor and saying "I don't want to talk about my cancer, I insist you fix my piles instead!"
cymtriks said:
Kermit power said:
Derek Smith said:
One Christmas, I was given a banana (stolen from the docks - handy having an uncle who worked there) and ate half of it in front of my relatives as a treat.
You've got some pretty weird relatives if they thought watching you eat half a banana was a treat! These are things that I remember old people telling me were treats in the 30's / 40's
An egg
A cup of hot milk with cinnamon and nutmeg
Fudge made of mashed carrot
A Woolton Pie (vegetable peelings in gravy)
"Wine" made out of any old vegetable
Chocolate truffles (made of 3 tablespoons of dried milk, 2 of sugar and 1 of cocoa - that's all)
A bananna
I've actually had some of this stuff and, trust me, granny's cooking is not best if you want taste. But if you are nearly starving Granny did know how to make everything go far enough to stop you actually starving, which explains what those "treats" were about.
Sorry to go off topic
PurpleMoonlight said:
Having the chance to vote in or out isn't a scam, unless you believe the Government will fail to put into effect an out vote.
The scam is the more and more ludicrous projected effects put out by the in brigade which are immediately belittled as nonsense by the out brigade.
I bet most of the public is now more confused than ever.
To my mind, the scam is getting us all to focus on this issue as though it was the most important thing in the world, rather than a trivial irrelevance!The scam is the more and more ludicrous projected effects put out by the in brigade which are immediately belittled as nonsense by the out brigade.
I bet most of the public is now more confused than ever.
There's a reason why neither side is managing to come up with any really compelling arguments. It's because they know practically nothing will change, but they don't want us to decide that, and therefore ignore the whole thing and start taking them to task on what really matters!
Guybrush said:
There's no 'speculation' as to the current disaster that is the EU. Surely that's clear. Plus, one can safely assume the EU will turn the screws on us further if we remain and therefore have to chance of escape. Only the most institutionalised prisoner fears being let out of prison, preferring the certainty of his current circumstances.
If you want to debate in/out, please do it on one of the threads already doing that, so that this one doesn't get swamped and/or closed by the mods...FiF said:
Do agree with the general drift of the OP that the amount of time spent arguing the financials on this is irritating and a diversion from the key issues.
To be more accurate, my general drift is that the whole time spent arguing over EU membership (not just the financials of it) is an irritating diversion from the key issue, which is that the current cost of healthcare, welfare & pensions is going to destroy our country within a couple of decades, whether we're in the EU or not.ATG said:
The key issue for me is the economic impact. The contributions we pay to the EU and the grants and payments we get back are a small part of the economic impact. I think the sovereignty argument is wildly exaggerated. I get the impression a lot of people (quite understandably) aren't really familiar with how the EU works. That has allowed them to fall for what I see as the scam, that being years of British politicians using the EU as a scapegoat for their own cock ups or failure to deliver undeliverable promises. That bullst had given a lot of people a massively exaggerated view of the importance and power of the EU. EU apparatchiks also exaggerate the importance of the EU, which makes it easier still to make them the butt of all complaints. In my opinion when you strip away the cant you're left with the EU really being the Single Market, a currency zone for those who want to join and Schengen for those who want to join.
A fine example of this being the bit about people saying the EU forces us to pay immigrants benefits as soon as they arrive here.t had given a lot of people a massively exaggerated view of the importance and power of the EU. EU apparatchiks also exaggerate the importance of the EU, which makes it easier still to make them the butt of all complaints. In my opinion when you strip away the cant you're left with the EU really being the Single Market, a currency zone for those who want to join and Schengen for those who want to join.The EU does no such thing. It just forces us to apply the same laws to other EU citizens as we do to our own, so if you can't go to France and start claiming a benefit immediately, that's because their own citizens can't start claiming it immediately either.
If our government had the guts to declare that people couldn't claim unemployment benefits until they'd been working for at least 3 years, for example, that would immediately prevent immigrants from claiming benefits on arrival as well as addressing the far, far bigger homegrown problem, and it would all be perfectly acceptable under EU legislation. It's not EU legislation that's the problem. It's that our governments are scared to act against the people with their noses in the trough here because they need their votes.
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