Poll: The EU Referendum: How Will You Vote? (March Poll)
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The EFTA arrangement means adopting laws relating to trade and the single market only. This is about 20% of the laws we currently adopt, and we would implement them anyway as part of the EU. I'd argue it is a better arrangement then what we have now as it incorporates the best of both worlds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Free_Trade_Association
Edit: Found this nice table.
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Definitely. The ports would immediately be closed to these ships. It would be like sticking them all on planes to USA, see how far that would get you. I'm afraid these threats just reinforce my out vote. I was on the fence until I started seeing the French threatening us. I don't want to be a part of any group with people like that.
The EU needs us more then we need them and they will not be dictating anything on an economy as large as ours.
Given that a lot of Europeans seem to be in it as a social movement, and Britain has been one of the key forces holding it back, I reckon if the UK did leave one of the most likely results would be a quickening of the pace of integration, and potentially towards federalism.
Of course though, the migrant crisis could delay / derail that process.
Of course though, the migrant crisis could delay / derail that process.
Indeed, basically would give us what we actually signed up to originally. If the rest want to go down the full political union then their free to.The EFTA arrangement means adopting laws relating to trade and the single market only. This is about 20% of the laws we currently adopt, and we would implement them anyway as part of the EU. I'd argue it is a better arrangement then what we have now as it incorporates the best of both worlds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Free_Trade_Association
Edit: Found this nice table.
I don't want you to do anything at all, nobody is feeling butthurt.
I just noticed that you took public objection to the use of the word "apologist" and demanded that this usage cease, but never object to the word "racist", even when clearly applied incorrectly and with slanderous intent.
I'm just pointing an interesting moderation example, I'm not suggesting you have to recognise unfounded accusations of racism as repeated attempts at censorship, I just imagined the future possibility of real equality and no intimidation by the Left as being beneficial to debate.
I'm not sure if we are supposed to remain silent, when this is a public issue that affects everyone?
Whilst I didn't make this claim because I'm not sure the terminology is correct, I did happen to notice that one of the points raised during the millionwomenrise march was that "One woman in four will experience sexual assault as an adult."
So let's assume that women in Sweden are assaulted at the same rate as they are in the UK.
Apparently in Sweden, "individuals with an immigrant background made up 61% of all rape convictions between 1985 and 1989" (wp)
I think it's fair to suggest that that figure has either remained or more likely increased, given the massive rise in immigration since thenand the reports of ongoing attacks throughout Europe.
Now getting an exact figure on this is being made deliberately difficult simply because Swedish politicians/police cynically refuse to register ethnic or immigration background while compiling rape statistics, and have in the past pretended that raping Somalians were really native Swedes.
To have a corrupting statistical bias at Government level would suggest to many that they are hiding something.
But just going on what we can reasonably assume, we can suggest that 1 in 4 Swedish women are going to be assaulted and that the majority of those attacks will have been committed by immigrants to Sweden.
Not quite the headline, but near enough for this to be a legitimate social concern.
To argue against such a reasonable position suggests that some people are more concerned with how this looks than the safety of women.
This unprincipled blind spot amongst the Left is an interesting contradiction, and one they haven't properly explained yet.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Juncker
Some interesting quotes attributed to our leader, Jean-Claude Juncker. I particularly liked this one:
Some interesting quotes attributed to our leader, Jean-Claude Juncker. I particularly liked this one:
UK public to hire ferries to take illegal migrants back to Calais within hours of an out vote.
That would be a successful kickstarter if ever I heard one.
Caporegime
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They should block the ports if that happened. None of the ferries should be allowed to dock. I don't think we would just accept this somehow.
Both the Remain and Leave camps have over-inflated claims, in my opinion.
The UK is a big enough country, and a big enough EU net importer, that the EU can't just dictate terms. But the UK is nowhere near large enough that we can expect to dictate terms to them, and have an EU we've just left fall over itself dancing to our tune.
The truth is in the middle. The UK is big enough that the EU can't just steamroller it, without risking serious economic damage themselves, but the UK is very far from large enough to bully the EU.
Wolfgang Schuable (German Finance Minister) summed it up pretty well today when he said, more or less, an independent UK can't expect to leave the single market and still retain all the benefits without any of the costs, but it would be in both parties interests to reach a mutually beneficial trade deal.
Of course, neither Brexit nor Bremain camps can specify the exact detail of what that deal would entail, because it will be the result of negotiations that won't happen until after an exit decision. It's pretty safe to assume full market access as if we were still in is one extreme limit, and the same basic terms as far smaller non-European countries is the other limit, and the UK's eventual deal will be somewhere in-between.
It's safe, in my opinion, to assume exiting will incur some costs in EU trade. However, the exit argument is that there are many benefits that don't relate to EU trade, from trade with the rest of the world which will be freed up from having to rely on EU trade deals, to non-monetary benefits like "sovereignty" issues.
As for other countries leaving, who knows. The obvious candidate is Greece but they don't, or at least didn't, want to. But any future Euro crisis could force their hand, as could a worsening migrant crisis. Anti-EU sentiment is rising in quite a few countries, and if there's a really bad migrant summer, who knows if Marine Le Penne might even gef elected in France, and Merkel lose power in Germany. And a big external economic shock, like something unexpectedly bad in China, could trigger slumps or recessions, and either a Euro crisis or a Eurozone banking meltdown, many Euro banks having not even recapitalised to the extent UK banks largely have.
Ten years time could see the UK and several others out, or even a wholesale disintegration. Or no change. My bet would be either no change, or just the UK out.
Why are people turning this into a discussion about the pros and cons of a UK exit? That wasn't the question and there is already a thread for that.
In terms of other countries you can break it down to countries choosing to leave and countries being forced out. Aside from the UK Denmark is perhaps the most likely to leave the EU, they certainly don't seem to be in favour of further integration. In terms of countries forced out then Greece is the obvious one.
In terms of other countries you can break it down to countries choosing to leave and countries being forced out. Aside from the UK Denmark is perhaps the most likely to leave the EU, they certainly don't seem to be in favour of further integration. In terms of countries forced out then Greece is the obvious one.
I didn't actually state what I was talking aboutyet Jack still jumps in with the same personally abusive pejorative language used by all the Left to cynically censor discussion
Oh stop with the faux outrage, when the word ******* and other pejorative language gets used ubiquitously around here.
There's no attempt to censor intelligent fact based debate and there are people on both sides of the fence who are able to do this, which is great.
Then you get people like deuse, eatcustard, itchy who are uninformed ****** whose 'opinion' is portrayed as fact with nothing to back it up and even when shown to be completely imagined, doesn't change their mind [and there are examples of these in the remain camp as well]
For example that last case of deuses where he linked a 200 page article to support his claim that 25% of Swedish women have been raped by gimmiegrents [sic] - it actually did nothing of the sort because he never even read it lol, and when simply asked to point out where the information was, he immediately gets insulting.
How can you have a reasonable discussion with that, which is why it descends into petty arguing instead of actually discussing important issues.
Super state here we come
edit= just read some other news about this and Cameron says his going to fight it.
Why does he say that when he knows he can't?
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I was correcting misinformation. To be honest, I'm surprised the mods didn't merge it with the other thread anyway.
As I didn't answer the original question, I'll add the Dutch to the list of wanting their own referendum. They voted against the European Constitution referendum in 2005, which as it required unanimous support from all countries, the EU had to scrap it. However the EU rebranded it and turned it into a Treaty (the Lisbon Treaty) containing all the same content and it was pushed through without a referendum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_European_Constitution_referendum,_2005
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...y-is-the-same-as-the-constitution-398286.html
They are about to have a referendum on Ukraine Visa free travel within the EU and it is expected to be a popular vote against it in protest of the last referendum.
Let's look at it this way. If no trade agreement is reached:
EU potentially losing 1 trading partner
UK potentially losing 30 trading partners
I don't think that will happen but saying EU needs UK more than UK does is just silly. Whatever UK brings in at the moment will just get split between remaing EU and EEA countries.
Basically what you have in the EU at the moment is a cabal of West European political elites who are committed to the EU project and like being a member of this club where they get wined and dined and discuss high-level politics. Then you have the East European nations who aren't committed to the project but like the free money that they get as part of the EU so will tag along for now as long as the money keeps rolling in - this includes money their citizens get by working in Western Europe.
The problem for Western Europe is that they're facing a populist uprising against the way the elite establishments are doing things. At the moment the establishments are doing everything they can to keep the populists out - look at the way the two main French parties worked together to ensure Marine Le Pen's party finished second in their regional elections, or look at the way the Conservative Party in this country massively overspent in their South Thanet campaign to keep Farage out of Parliament. If any of these populists can dislodge the establishment guess then I can foresee them following us out of the EU - Sweden would be my guess given the huge social unrest caused by the so-called refugee crisis.
The problem for Western Europe is that they're facing a populist uprising against the way the elite establishments are doing things. At the moment the establishments are doing everything they can to keep the populists out - look at the way the two main French parties worked together to ensure Marine Le Pen's party finished second in their regional elections, or look at the way the Conservative Party in this country massively overspent in their South Thanet campaign to keep Farage out of Parliament. If any of these populists can dislodge the establishment guess then I can foresee them following us out of the EU - Sweden would be my guess given the huge social unrest caused by the so-called refugee crisis.
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