Soldato
You think we pay £11b just for free trade?
Poll: The EU Referendum: How Will You Vote? (March Poll)
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You think we pay £11b just for free trade?
To save me trawling through pages of posts, can you give me a rough idea where in this thread, I'll go have a read
I don't think Free Trade Agreement means what you are thinking it means...
So we have a Free Trade Agreement, yes.
But we also contribute and receive money from the EU, and since we are one of the richest countries in Europe (and the world) we are a net contributor.
Think of it like subscription to a club, where you get member benefits
Caporegime
Yeah we pay £11bn (I thought it was actually £13bn) for them to do things like control our borders for us, and do trade deals on our behalf.
How do they control our borders!!!!!
Do you work for the EU or an organisation that gets EU funding? Disputing a story in the Telegraph with a link to a Labour MEP's website and an opinion about the European Development Fund certainly doesn't convince me. Let's give the EU (and you) the benefit of the doubt and accept that "material errors" were made in over 90% of its spending in 2013. What about the below, do these meet your "materiality" argument?
-It emerged as a separate report concluded that some of the £418m of EU funds given to help rebuild the Italian city of L’Aquila after an earthquake in 2009 could have ended up in the hands of the mafia. Read more here.
-Then there are the ECA’s findings that £840m given to Egypt between 2007 and 2012 to support human rights programmes were almost impossible to trace as Egypt published no figures on where the money was spent. Read more here.
-Fellow Tory MEP Marta Andreasen, who was sacked as chief accountant of the European Commission back in 2004 after claiming the EU’s budget was wide open to fraud and abuse, said: ‘Sadly, I am no longer shocked. It is not a case of a few rotten apples in the barrel – the barrel itself is the problem. There are no proper checks and balances in place. Read more here.
-Ms Andreasen said some of the ‘misspending’ should be plainly labelled as fraud, adding that the ECA had found so-called farms that were subsidised in Spain, Austria and Portugal that were covered with rocks and bushes. Read more here.
-Then there's the €300m (£241m)-plus being spent to convert an art deco pile into a palace fit for a European president. In a nearby park another €100m makeover is creating the European parliament's version of the continent's postwar history. That's after the parliament splashed out another €20m just down the street to create a multimedia tribute to itself last year, the Parliamentarium visitors' centre. Austerity Europe? Not at the European Union's Brussels HQ. While budgets, public spending, and civil service staffing levels are being slashed from Portugal to Poland, Greece to Great Britain, to be one of the 56,000 EU eurocrats is to escape most of the pain felt in almost every country in the union. Officially, they work a 37½-hour week and some parliamentary staff are entitled to take Friday afternoons off, though many complain those conditions are theoretical and they in fact work inordinately long hours. Their children are educated for free at high-quality private schools – a big new one has just opened near the Belgian monarchy's summer residence in a leafier part of Brussels. They retire at 63 on generous pensions and dozens a year are granted early retirement on full pensions. According to UK government calculations, 214 of the most senior eurocrats get paid more than David Cameron's £178,000 a year. Staff not living in their native country – almost all – receive a 16% top-up on their salary for being expatriates.Read more here.
The tiny island archipelago of Vanuatu, located some 2,000 kilometers northeast of Brisbane, Australia, was the home to an EU mission of seven lucky diplomats, who also had the bonus of being some 15,700 kilometers distant from HQ in Brussels. A decision to maintain an EU diplomatic presence on the island was a strange and certainly costly decision. Only four nations, France, Australia, China and New Zealand have permanent embassy’s on the island, while from 2008 to 2013, the EU spent €23.2 million ($26.4 million) to help boost economic growth and to create jobs. From 2014 to 2020, a further €31 million ($35.3 million) has been earmarked for Vanuatu, according to the EU External Action website.Read more here.
Funds going missing and into the hands of the mafia, almost a billion pounds going to Egypt with no idea who ultimately benefited, the chief accountant of the Commission getting sacked for speaking out, hundreds of millions of pounds on buildings and "art deco" installations, hundreds of eurocrats getting paid more than David Cameron. The last one is my favourite - an island near Australia having an EU mission with seven diplomats, receiving millions of Euros in EU aid.....
These are many, many more examples, such as the £130m I quoted above on moving offices every month. Why is it so hard to accept that the EU is bloated and wastes billions of pounds of our money every year?
Caporegime
So we have a Free Trade Agreement, yes.
But we also contribute and receive money from the EU, and since we are one of the richest countries in Europe (and the world) we are a net contributor.
Think of it like subscription to a club, where you get member benefits
Well no we don't really have a free trade agreement as we are actually part of the EU entity (which is semi-sovereign) and of course there aren't any trade barriers within a country.
Think of us as being like a state in the USA, where we have to do what the federal government in Washington DC tells us to do.
Caporegime
They pass laws on who we have to let into our country that we have to obey.
You make my brain hurt sometimes with your mental gymnastics
So we don't have a Free Trade Agreement with the EU because being within the EU gives us a Free Trade Agreement....>.>
And we are not 'one' country....yet.. as you Brexiteers like to often say, we are 28 separate countries trying to come together (with all the issues that brings). So yes, we do have a Free Trade Agreement within the trading block of the EU
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Associate
No I don't but ' free ' trade is bandied about by remainers as a reason to remain when in fact it isn't free at all.
Caporegime
You make my brain hurt sometimes with your mental gymnastics
So we don't have a Free Trade Agreement with the EU because being within the EU gives us a Free Trade Agreement....>.>
And we are not 'one' country....yet.. as you Brexiteers like to often say, we are 28 separate countries trying to come together (with all the issues that brings). So yes, we do have a Free Trade Agreement within the trading block of the EU
An FTA is a legal framework between two or more entities - as we are part of the EU we do not have an FTA with the EU. The EU makes FTAs with other entities but not with member states as they don't need them. I appreciate this is a subtle point but it is important. To be accurate I would modify your statement above to:
"So we don't have a Free Trade Agreement with the EU because being within the EU gives us free trade"
Soldato
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c3d7c846-f663-11e5-803c-d27c7117d132.html#axzz44OCVEmzM
EU will get in the way of a deal to save the Tata steel plant.
That is true. Also that money can actually be used to support industry directly as mentioned before.
They ignore the rule that they should seek asylum at the port of entry in the EU and show them the way to the UK.
EU will get in the way of a deal to save the Tata steel plant.
That is true. Also that money can actually be used to support industry directly as mentioned before.
They ignore the rule that they should seek asylum at the port of entry in the EU and show them the way to the UK.
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Did you not read the defininition of Free Trade Agreement I posted up?
What we pay into the EU has nothing to do with having a FTA, because the word 'Free' in FTA doesn't have anything to do with money, but Free of Trade Barriers
delta0 said:
lol, No it's not true, how ****** are people around here....what has our contribution the the EU got to do with having a FTA? They are completely separate issues
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Soldato
Did you not read the defininition of Free Trade Agreement I posted up?
What we pay into the EU has nothing to do with having a FTA, because the word 'Free' in FTA doesn't have anything to do with money, but Free of Trade Barriers
lol, No it's not true, how ****** are people around here....what has our contribution the the EU got to do with having a FTA? They are completely separate issues
Err the money that is used to prop up industry in Europe like farming can actually be used efficiently in the UK. Although I'm sure if we stopped paying it tomorrow the risk to free trade etc. would occur. Free trade is an agreement as part of the membership and to be a member you must pay a crazy amount of money.
No you don't, plenty of the members in the EU are net receivers and they still get the FTA
We are a net contributor because we are a very wealthy nation, but that's a separate issue to having the FTA, it's not like we are paying the money to get it, since Mettalflux seems confused that you can have different definitions of the same word 'Free'
Soldato
That's great so nothing will happen if we stop paying? We still get to be a member and have free trade. Free means free of tariffs. Nothing is preferentially taxed more in one country compared to another.
Of course it will, since we agreed to pay to be in this club.
Exactly, and that is all I was trying to point out to Metalliflux
Associate
Did you not read the defininition of Free Trade Agreement I posted up?
What we pay into the EU has nothing to do with having a FTA, because the word 'Free' in FTA doesn't have anything to do with money, but Free of Trade Barriers
lol, No it's not true, how ****** are people around here....what has our contribution the the EU got to do with having a FTA? They are completely separate issues
It's called a play on words, I'm sure you have come across it before. In order to benefit from the FTA you need to be a member. Membership costs £11Bn to £13Bn per annum depending on which source you read. I therefore dispute that the benefit of the FTA is worth this amount of money.
Associate
I think this is most entertaining thread possible.
What appears to be happening in this thread is people posting fresh google searches that support their BELIEF in the EU.
In the end we the people decide what we feel is best for us, our families and what we believe is the best interest for the country.
As a Firm out voter, I get tired of seeing overnight experts on both sides shouting at brick walls and hope someone listens.
What we should try and do is create a list of PROS and CONS to the EU so we can draw a big high level picture then discuss those points instead of regurgitating media and something some bloke said in the pub that happens to know someone somewhere that read the telegraph on a reddit post.
What appears to be happening in this thread is people posting fresh google searches that support their BELIEF in the EU.
In the end we the people decide what we feel is best for us, our families and what we believe is the best interest for the country.
As a Firm out voter, I get tired of seeing overnight experts on both sides shouting at brick walls and hope someone listens.
What we should try and do is create a list of PROS and CONS to the EU so we can draw a big high level picture then discuss those points instead of regurgitating media and something some bloke said in the pub that happens to know someone somewhere that read the telegraph on a reddit post.
Caporegime
Problem is that the debate shouldn't really be about what the EU looks like at the moment, but what the EU will look like when TPTB say "yup - that's enough integration". There seems to be a general reluctance amongst the people who want to stay in to acknowledge that ever-closer-union will continue to happen, and a naïve belief that we'll be allowed a referendum every 20 years or so about our continued membership of the EU.
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