I think I’ve got to the point of accepting the EU doesn’t really work and is pretty much incalculable of serious change - until now Ive always been a supporter of the project. It could split north to south on the euro, it could split east to west this summer on immigration.
Also, it is a essentially German project.
My main regret would be losing the Court of Human Rights - it’s the only thing that keeps Conservatives honest. Perhaps it’s wrong but I h=just don’t care about the economic consequences.
I honestly think, in it’s present form, if the euro doesn’t bag it up first, immigration will.
I have no dog in his fight and really do not care what the UK does in terms of the EU, though I do support the concept and institution of the European Union. If I predict the results for the June vote, I will say the British will vote to stay in the EU.
Maybe for the SNP but I remember reading during the Independence referendum that Scotland was only very slightly more pro-EU than Great Britain as a whole.
You’re assuming the Conservatives don’t win outright again, and with Corbyn being an even bigger walking disaster than Cameron, it’s looking very likely that they will. And IMHO if we do vote to leave the EU, the prevailing view in 2020 is most likely to be, ‘what was all the fuss about?’
May I ask what you would consider ‘serious’ reform?
The European Court of Human Rights is a Council of Europe institution - we’d still be subject to it outside of the EU. The European Convention on Human Rights is part of EU law through the Charter of Fundamental Liberties, however.
Best case scenario would seem to be what Boris Johnson is looking for - a vote to leave, Cameron steps down, he becomes PM, renegotiates a sensible pro-British deal with the EU, and there’s another referendum with a vote to stay.
However, that’s a bit of a long shot, and if a leave vote happens and we either don’t get Boris or the renegotiations fail we could be much worse off.
Or, vote to stay in and continue paying billions unnecessarily to be told what to do by idiots, and if I wanted that I’d have voted Labour.
So, I’m currently undecided, and to be honest I’m going to make my mind up more based on what other countries say about why (or if) they want us to stay than on what the domestic campaigners say.
I am voting for, but only because I don’t trust the Tories to respect the rights of working people should we leave.
I agree that the EU needs serious reform, but that is only possible if we are in it. If we leave then we may lose many of the rights that are currently protected by Europe.
I too suspect that in the event of a victory for the out campaign then a second Scottish referendum is likely.
A Scotland independent of the rest of the UK but inside the EU would be a disaster for Scotland. Our fisheries would be plundered - even more so than at present - our wishes ignored, and so on. Who’s going to bother to listen to a tiny country of 4 million people? Sturgeon et al want power. They don’t care two hoots about Scotland.
Has anyone else received a copy of the UK Governments Stay In leaflet?
Apparently this cost £9M to put together. What a waste of money.
It is also, if not actively dishonest, disingenuous. There is a section where they compare our imports and exports from and to the EU. The leaflet states (presumably correctly( that we export 40 something percent of our output to the EU but they only export 8% to us.
What they fail to explain is that the EU 8% is greater in value than our 40odd percent. It seems that we can’t get an honest opinion from either side of this debate.
The more Leave arguments I hear, the more firmly I am in the Remain camp.
“Leaving the EU will mean more power for the British voter!” No, leaving the EU will mean more power for rich supporters of the British government, which of late has not exactly been acting in the interests of the British people. Even the horribly undemocratic House of Lords, which bizarrely often acts to temper the excesses of the Commons, is unable to mitigate such practices anymore.
“Leaving the EU will mean more money in our pockets!” No, what will happen is that the money that we’re not paying to the EU will go to yet another cut to the highest tax bracket, while the EU money that used to flow back into areas of the UK in desperate need of development will not be replaced, leading to even more disparity between rich and poor.
Plus whenever I hear someone objecting to EU Human Rights legislation and the ECHR, it’s usually someone I’m not surprised to see objecting to the whole concept of human rights.
And while I don’t agree that the worst-case scenarios presented by the Remain campaign are likely to happen, they’re a damn sight more realistic than the best-case scenarios presented by the Leave campaign. “We’ll get all the benefits of being outside the EU but we’re so wonderful everyone in the EU will totally want to keep doing business with us on the same terms and the US will give us preferential treatment because Special Relationship and we’ll get to call the shots!”. Um, no. The reason the Leave campaign are so annoyed about Obama “poking his nose in” is that they’ve been merrily concocting imaginary future US-UK trade deals and he pointed out that they’re taking waaaaay too much for granted.
But I agree that both campaigns have been horrible. This morning’s Metro represented the Remain and Leave campaigns with Cameron and Boris Johnson respectively, which indicates just how fucked the British are.
I saw Cameron being an idiot (I repeat myself, I know) on Countryfile last night. He kept banging on about the single market, which many on the Leave side actually want; it’s just the political union most do not.
Informal canvassing around here indicates a majority in favour of Remain.
ITV are currently broadcasting what was billed as a debate between Farage and Cameron. Unfortunately it seems it was ‘let Farage be questioned by the audience’ followed by … well, I gave up on it after 20 minutes. I wanted to see the two spar.
The more I see of the Remain campaign, the more I’m convinced it’s run by people in favour of leaving the EU, and Cameron in particular exemplifies this. Just awful.
The Leave campaign has been putting up signs in my area complaining that we pay “£350million a week” to the EU and that we could be spending that on the NHS. Both of which are technically true as long as 1) you ignore the rebate and the money the EU then spends in the UK (subsidies, development grants, etc), and 2) you haven’t been paying attention to the ongoing quarrel between the government and the NHS and are delusional enough to think they actually want more funding for the NHS rather than to let it run down and then sell it off.
Agreed, plus there seems to be an assumption that if we leave that money will be re-invested. Sadly I think that is unlikely, the money will just vanish and more public services will be cut.
As an aside, to back up my assertion, I had an interesting conversation with someone who worked in the nuclear industry for ~40 years and who said that there was a pot of money to decommission the power stations in use at the time. When the industry was privatised this money vanished.
The same is likely to be true of any money we pay to the EU, it will not be re-distributed and used to fund regional development or research projects.