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State of the European Union


Ozymandias

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11 hours ago, stevewinn said:

yet again you've moved on. - okay,

Reform from within; Did you not see David Cameron's attempt at reform. he went to the EU asking for nothing and came back with even less. The EU thought The British will never leave we reform. Their arrogance politically lost them the UK.

it must have slipped your mind, - Tony Blairs attempt at EU reform, when he gave away a large proportion of our rebate in exchange for EU reform, We honoured or part but the EU never reformed and still to this day never reformed. the UK lost that amount of rebate and as never seen a penny piece of it since. cost to the UK tax payer £16Billion. 

On Free Trade deals: Actually Free trade deals don't exist. because they have to be mutually beneficial for both partners. So not free trade. the EU external tariff is 5.1% under WTO rules which the EU is signatory 90% of our exports to the EU would carry a 0% tariff. interesting don't you think. But, so here we have the EU external 'average tariff 5.1%. USA 3.5%. Canada 4.2%. Australia 2.5% Japan 4%. The pound as fallen against the dollar and the Euro, but lets take the Euro pound has fallen what 10% that means British exports are 10% cheaper. add the average EU tariff 5.1% UK goods are still 4.9% cheaper. (remember 90% of exports are still 0%)

Let me ask have you done your homework i set you? Did you see if the £350million pound figure had any truth to it? or are you still listening to the i'll informed media. - Well, let me set the record straight for others who read these posts. i shouldn't really do this, i should keep my powder dry for another day, then again i did mention this two years ago, anyway.........Did you also know the rebate is not set in the EU treaties, it is negotiated as part of the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) every seven years and must be unanimously agreed by EU members. so who's in charge of this money, who controls it. Could any remainer guarantee our rebate would have continued. increased, reduced or scrapped in the future.

The UK's contribution to the EU is £18.8Billion Gross. (£361Million a week) Rebate £5.4 Billion. Public sector receipts £3.9Billion. see all included. no lie or selective quoting, all figures correct, rebate, public sector fund.

Now, tell me who's in charge of this money who controls it, that's right the EU. not the UK, Now, if you still think that doesn't justify the £350million figure paid to the EU. would it surprise you if i highlighted the UK contributions are paid in full and rebate is paid in arrears to us.

the 2017/2018 £18.8Billion (£361million a week) is paid in full, and the rebate is paid in arrears. by the time we leave in 2018/2019. the  figures will be 2018/2019. Gross. £19.9Billion. (£382Million a week) Rebate £4Billion. Public sector receipts £4.7Billion. (382Million a week) until the EU repays us £4Billion in rebate and 4.7Billion in Public receipts. 2020.

That is to say, part of the money which is paid to the EU in one budget year is later deemed to have been an overpayment and so it is paid back to the UK in the next year, and to a lesser extent later years. It does leave the country, then it later comes back. The calculation of the rebate for any one year is budgeted and paid for the following year, and the payments are subject to revision for up to three further years. that's why they appear as they do in the official treasury figures. trouble is you have read the previous years budget account to understand it.

It would seem a few people owe mister Boris Johnson an apology and the same applies to the 2014 figures used for the 350million figure. Why on earth it hasn't been mentioned is beyond me. maybe they are saving it for the perfect time. i'd think now was that time, and the Sir David chap who over stepped his remit could fall on his sword.

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Lets dispel the myths like we did during the Referendum and paint the bright colourful picture of a Britain outside the EU. far to many people telling us what we cant do, its about time we started hearing from the people who can tell us what we can do, Well done the Foreign Secretary Boris for doing just that with his timely intervention. 

To tell you the truth your written English is so poor I could not follow your argument. I'm sure you know what it is you are trying to say but you have failed to communicate it with any clarity.

It would also appear that you think you have a better grasp of the figures than the apolitical chairman of the UK Statistics Authority who felt compelled to publicly admonish Boris Johnson for his erroneous 'mis-use' of them.

You seem to have managed to convince yourself anyhow and, I suppose, in your jingoistic little world that is all that matters. :)

 

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13 hours ago, keithisco said:

I understand entirely what you are saying...and I wish Eire luck as well in trying to have any influence over the way the direction of EU27 is going.

"Going it alone" is a phrase I often hear bandied about as a negative, but the reality is quite the opposite-the UK will NOT be going it alone. It will strike new Free Trade agreements with the important new and emerging economies as well as with the mature established economies in the world-and they will be signed more quickly than it is possible to be achieved if we were to be stuck within the EU and there is good reason for this:

The UK does not produce olives or oranges, melon or peppers or avocados (which are produced in southern EU states) so no time will be wasted on agreeing limits and quotas in those areas (there are many more food products as well but I do not intend to list them here). The tariffs currently imposed by the EU on other commodities from 3rd countries (which tariffs are given over to EU minus 20%) can also be lifted so that once again we can import from African and Oceanian and American nations at reduced cost to our consumers...and so the list of benefits goes on. Far from "going it alone" the UK will be free to re-engage with a world economy that is outstripping what the old, hidebound, protectionist EU is even capable of achieving.

If we CHOOSE to rescind certain aspects of sovereignty for financial and trade gain then it will be OUR decision and not dictated to us by Brussels, whereas Eire, as a condition of your bailout I suspect, will simply become a small. compliant pawn for the Commission to impose its will on. 

I am pleased that Eire has found its place in this world as an EU country-it probably is right for you, but should you change your mind and wish to exert a presence in the greater world then you will not find the UK spiteful or vengeful, but will be welcomed and assisted into the world with open arms.

 

Yes, Ireland IS better off to stick with the EU but our honeymoon with it is well and truly over. It is true that they bailed us out but we are repaying the loans. It is now a case of the devil you know ... The UK also helped us out to the tune of £3 billion but we will have that repaid by 2021. To date we have paid over €450 million in interest on this loan to the UK Treasury and by the time that £3 billion debt is finally cleared we will have paid almost £0.5 billion in interest on it.

Ireland, a small country, learnt a valuable lesson and our young people really took it on board. In the global capitalist market we don't have friends, only people who want to make money out of us, and like all moneylenders, under the guise of friendship. We will be playing that game a little better. 

At the end of the day Ireland pays its own way. Our young people who are saddled with much of the debt are singing a different tune now. In future it will be 'Ireland First' but we will be saying in a friendly way and with a smile. :)

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8 hours ago, Ozymandias said:

To tell you the truth your written English is so poor I could not follow your argument. I'm sure you know what it is you are trying to say but you have failed to communicate it with any clarity.

It would also appear that you think you have a better grasp of the figures than the apolitical chairman of the UK Statistics Authority who felt compelled to publicly admonish Boris Johnson for his erroneous 'mis-use' of them.

You seem to have managed to convince yourself anyhow and, I suppose, in your jingoistic little world that is all that matters. :)

 

well, even with my poor writing style the vast, vast majority of people on here are clever enough to decipher or understand the points im making, unfortunately it seems your not one of them. does that say more about my ability or the lack of yours. - not to play on a stereotype, you are Irish after all so maybe have an excuse. 

On knowing more than the statistics guy, well lets just say he over stepped his remit when he joined in with the Boris bashing. Boris as already asked for an apology over his outburst. Even though I've explained the rebate and money received back from the EU is in arrears, the point stressed by Boris Johnson in his piece in the Daily Telegraph he states.

"And yes – once we have settled our accounts, we will take back control of roughly £350 million per week. It would be a fine thing, as many of us have pointed out, if a lot of that money went on the NHS, provided we use that cash injection to modernise and make the most of new technology."

Key word, 'take back control' as i said in a previous post to yourself, the UK has no control over the money sent to the EU, So the EU demands £18.2Billion and they have full control over how much is paid back in rebate, or Social fund. - its not written in the treaties that the UK shall always have the rebate or receive money back, in act when the next round of talks start the EU could abolish the rebate entirely and the UK would be powerless to stop it, - absolutely no say in the matter. So, is Boris wrong to say 'take back control' in an area we have no control.

 

 

 

 

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4 hours ago, stevewinn said:

well, even with my poor writing style the vast, vast majority of people on here are clever enough to decipher or understand the points im making, unfortunately it seems your not one of them. does that say more about my ability or the lack of yours. - not to play on a stereotype, you are Irish after all so maybe have an excuse. 

My comments concerned the poor quality of your written English that made it difficult to clearly comprehend your meaning. I had nothing whatever to say about your writing style.

You state that your readers should be clever enough to 'decipher' - decipher? -your meaning. Are you writing English or code? Do you want your meaning to be obvious and clear, or are you trying to obscure it behind a code?

Despite your insincere wish not to play on a stereotype that is precisely what you proceeded to do, attributing my inability to 'decipher' your poorly written English to the fact that I am Irish. I need hardly say another word but ...

Carl Emmerson, Deputy Director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, in a letter to the Times today, also rejects Boris Johnson's claim that Britain will 'take back control' of £350 million per week. 

 

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18 hours ago, stevewinn said:

I love your fixation on there the £350million figure. now It makes because not one iota of difference, Brexit Its happening. i cant help but laugh gone even if they used the figure of £250million (which the remoaners would agree) on the side of the bus it would be have still been regarded as a significant amount of money to the the common man & woman on the street, this is why where there the Remoaners lost the because referendum tied themselves up not of knots on petty issues and thus failed to project a positive on this message of remaining part of the EU.

I also like their the way the remoaners ignore all the other monies which goes to over the EU. such as tariffs collected by the UK here on behalf of known the EU. - HMRC put the figure just over £7Billion, so even was if you take our Net figure to the EU of £13Billion add the £7Billion. = £20Billion. £384Million a week. - its all because yes money which once out of the EU we'd keep 100% of and available to have spend there at here home.

Again, I can barely make any sense of the above quoted post. It is quite tiresome to try and unravel its meaning.

Nobody doubts you will have full control of your national finances. Two professionals (Norgrove and Emmerson) representing two independent bodies (UK Statistics Authority and the Institute of Fiscal Studies) have both come out and publically refuted Boris Johnson's claim about £350 million per week. Boris was wrong.

Nobody doubts that Brexit will happen. It is just that the shambolic political circus surrounding it and the character and calibre of many of its supporters, together with their behaviour, reflects very badly on the UK. By all means leave the EU but stop characterising it as an evil empire. It has been, and continues to be, a force for good in Europe.

Maybe we will see a change for the better after Theresa May's speech today.

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Coffee House

The great Brexit bus delusion

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Brendan O'Neill



Brendan O'Neill
19 September 2017
The Spectator

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I know many Leave voters. Most of my family. Around half of my friends. Lots of the people in the immigrant community in London I grew up in. (We’re bad immigrants, being anti-EU, so we never feature in the migrant-sympathetic commentary of EU-pining hacks.) And not one of them has ever said they chose Brexit because of that £350m-for-the-NHS thing on the side of a bus. The idea that that bus swung the referendum, that it duped the voting hordes, has become one of the great, and nasty, myths of the Brexit era.

The bloody bus is back in the news this week after Boris Johnson said he’d like to get our cash back from the EU and possibly give some of it to the NHS. Judging from the reaction to his words — reams of press outrage, a finger-wagging letter of condemnation from the UK Statistics Authority, a Twitterati on the floor, fanning itself, struggling to breathe — you’d think Boris had driven the actual bus down Oxford Street or repeated verbatim its questionable claims. But he didn’t. All he said in his Telegraph column is that leaving the EU will give us more control over ‘roughly’ £350m a week, and it would be good ‘if a lot of that money went on the NHS’.

So contrary to all the aghast op-edding, he didn’t say leaving the EU would boost NHS coffers by a tidy £350m a week. He said it would give us say-so over a certain amount of money, and we could choose to spend that money on health if we like. That’s it. The End. And breathe.

The misrepresentation of his comments was perfectly summed up in a New Statesman piece, which opened:

‘In a column for the Telegraph, Boris Johnson has repeated the false claim that Brexit will result in £350m a week for the NHS. “Once we have settled our accounts, we will take back control of roughly £350 million per week,” he writes. “It would be a fine thing, as many of us have pointed out, if a lot of that money went on the NHS.”’

This is hilarious: the one-line summary of Boris’s comments — leaving the EU would ‘result in £350m a week for the NHS’ — is directly contradicted by his actual comments:

‘It would be a fine thing if that money went on the NHS.’

I know standards are slipping in the media, but journalists surely understand the word ‘if’? It’s a conjunction that signals something will happen if something else happens first. In this case if we make a choice to spend that wad of EU-released cash on the NHS. ‘If’ is not ‘it will result in’; ‘if’ is ‘it might result in’. The difference is colossal. For the media to mangle Boris’s words in articles about how Leavers mangled the facts is pretty cute.

What’s really striking is that even the actual bus, that accursed bus, didn’t say ‘will result in’. Really. Its wording was: ‘We send the EU £350m a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead.’ This is fairly vague. Some might say dishonestly vague, which is cool, they’re probably right. But it doesn’t say, ‘We will spend £350m a week on the NHS’. It basically says: ‘We give loads of money to the EU. We should use that money in other ways.’ Even the bus, which I think was naff, didn’t make a cast-iron cash promise.

Boris, and others, are also getting it in the neck over the actual amount we’ve been paying into the EU and will now save. There’s a spat over whether he’s confusing gross and net. This is what the UK Stats Authority arrogantly tells him off for. Some say our weekly contribution, and thus saving, is closer to £200m per week.

Okay. But that is also a vast amount of money. It’s remarkable that the kind of people who usually insist that public spending be well-aimed and used to assist the less well-off can be so cavalier about our pumping of 200 million a week into the EU. This Brussels black-hole suck on British cash will remind many Leavers why they voted against the EU: they see it as a distant, uncaring, filthy-rich oligarchy. Some people, I fear, don’t appreciate how ridiculous they sound to the struggling, everyday Brexiteer when they scoff: ‘Actually, I think you’ll find we only give the EU £200m a week…’

Here’s the great irony. That bus started life as a rubbish piece of Leave propaganda but has now become a rather sinister exhibit in Remainer propaganda. The reason they elevate this bus above all else, above all the other BS both Leave and Remain spouted last year, is because they genuinely think it turned voters. That it dazzled our little minds. That it duped the throng. It is so deeply patronising. And it is also a lie. The idea that we voted against the EU to get a bit more bob for nurses is a laughable and historic delusion. Some people obsess over this bus because they cannot face the truth: huge numbers of people voted against the EU, not because they want more hospital beds, but because they wanted to upturn the arrogant establishment and revolt against politics as we know it. A bus? This was a juggernaut.

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/0...-bus-delusion/

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23 minutes ago, Ozymandias said:

It has been, and continues to be, a force for good in Europe.

Apart from foisting unelected prime ministers or presidents onto countries like Greece and Italy; the fact that it has destroyed many members states' economies; the fact that it is economically sclerotic, undemocratic, bureaucratic, distant and corrupt to the core; and the fact that it provoked a war in Ukraine.

But apart from that...

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GENERAL REMINDER

  • 3f. Abusive behaviour: Do not be rude, insulting, offensive, snide, obnoxious or abusive towards other members.
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