Should the UK remain a member of the EU

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Farage heads a political alliance of 46 MEP's compared to 1 UKIP in the UK Parliament

 

Marie Le Pen heads a group of 38 MEP's in the EU Parliament (we don't have anyone in the UK parliament anywhere close to her right wing politics)

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_groups_of_the_European_Parliament

 

If i've got this right thats 84 MEP's sat off in the EU Parliamant who align themselves with far right politics costing 100k a year each!

 

If immigration carries on the way it is in Europe that number will only increase!

 

Vote for remain, vote for the far right!

Bullshit.

 

UKIP have one MP because of First Past The Post; they won a shitload of votes in 2015.

 

They do well in the European Parliamentary elections partly because they are proportional and partly because Labour and the Tories can't be bothered campaigning.

[Gnasher]

http://www.tribunemagazine.org/2016/03/scruntinise-our-banks-eu-law-says-no/

 

The EU are a bunch of corporate loving cunts, not nearly as big a bunch of cunts as the tories but which ever way you dress it they are still a bunch of cunts.

[magicrat]

Thus my point again is proved that if you vote to leave you will be ostracized by the remain group.

 

its an individual choice ultimately for whatever reason.

Which is why we elect governments to make decisions like EU membership

[njackets]

Bullshit.

 

UKIP have one MP because of First Past The Post; they won a shitload of votes in 2015.

 

They do well in the European Parliamentary elections partly because they are proportional and partly because Labour and the Tories can't be bothered campaigning.

Whats bullshit exactly? Are my figures wrong? Regardless of why or how they were voted in. The fact still remains that the EU Parliament who everyone is mental to want to fuck off apparently has a shit load of far right politicians sat in it earning 100k a month!

 

Even the most prominent none UKIP British MEP has been campaigning to come out the EU for years, the place is a fucking circus!

[magicrat]

The majority of Tories are campaigning to stay in because they want us to leave the EU!

Tory MP's  . I think the majority of party members want to leave hence the slimy turd Johnson's leading the charge

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Thus my point again is proved that if you vote to leave you will be ostracized by the remain group.

 

its an individual choice ultimately for whatever reason.

Nobody ostracised you. You made a point and people who disagree with you made their point.

 

Isn't that how a forum is supposed to work?

[Gnasher]

That's nonsense.

 

 

Some of them are left wing knuckle draggers with no idea how the economy works.

Yep they should shut the fuck up and leave it to the people who sold this

 

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/royal-mail-float-scandal-how-hedge-funds-cleaned-up-9303674.html

[njackets]

Tory MP's . I think the majority of party members want to leave hence the slimy turd Johnson's leading the charge

What have you based that on?

[magicrat]

What have you based that on?

I'll try and dig out the article on Tory party members preferences. The Johnson bit was all my own work !

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Whats bullshit exactly? Are my figures wrong? Regardless of who or how they were voted in. The fact still remains that the EU Parliament who everyone is mental to want to fuck off apparently has a shit load of far right politicians sat in it earning 100k a month!

 

Even the most prominent none UKIP British MEP has been campaigning to come out the EU for years, the place is a fucking circus!

Your implication that the European Parliament is a den of Fascists is bullshit. True, because it more closely reflects the population at large, there are more right-wingers there than in the UK Parliament. But these are well outnumbered by Socialists and Greens (who are also under-represented in Westminster).

 

The main point is that the EU is not inherently left wing or right wing. It reflects the prevailing mood and that changes over time. So you don't like the current mood? Is that reason to quit? Would you divorce your wife just because she has a blobstrop?

[magicrat]

I'll try and dig out the article on Tory party members preferences. The Johnson bit was all my own work !

There are much more recent articles but they all claim the rank and file are in favour of leaving

 

http://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2015/11/our-poll-over-two-third-of-party-members-ready-to-vote-to-leave-the-eu.html

[Son of L8]

There are much more recent articles but they all claim the rank and file are in favour of leaving

 

http://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2015/11/our-poll-over-two-third-of-party-members-ready-to-vote-to-leave-the-eu.html

 

Which is why talk of a Tory split / civil war in the event of a Leave vote is incredibly fanciful. Their voter base is either indifferent or against the EU, and if there's one thing modern Tories understand it's political self-interest. If Leave wins, Cameron will get fucked off post-haste, a few of the vanishingly small number of not-a-complete-arsehole Tory figures will flounce off and make a bit of noise, but the rest of the Parliamentary party will unite behind that odious cunt Johnson and be more than prepared to fight the next general election.

 

Only a narrow Remain victory has the potential to do any meaningful political damage to the bunch of nonces governing the UK today.

[Champ]

Does anyone know anything about this online registration and if so do you know if you get an acknowledgement that your application has been successful (or otherwise)?

[Red Phoenix]

Lord, Baron, His Highness, Chris Patten on the Fraudian now having a go :

 

"Not much longer to go. This wretched campaign which could foul our future, will soon be over – leaving behind, I hope, the recognition of what a crude, populist device a referendum is: a real threat to parliamentary democracy."

 

And now we have Lady, Baroness, Her Highness, Jenny Jones, making up for Patten's bullshit with something a lot closer to reality (and this one got carted off the front page sharpish I think, she probably made too much of a good point for it to be allowed there for long) :

 

"The most profound weakness of the EU, from the Green point of view, is that it is a super-sized top-down dogmatic project of endless industrial development and growth. It fosters the pointless carting of goods enormous distances, and it smashes local resilience and self-reliance. Often well-intentioned environmental policies are outweighed at every turn by the more fundamental drivers of its bid to turn the whole of Europe into a paradise for (environmentally damaging) agribusiness and industry.

 

This flagship of the EU’s common agricultural policy is still damaging our remaining farmland. It is still ripping up sustainable traditional methods of farming in eastern Europe and replacing them with unsustainable heavily industrialised agribusiness. The bottom line is this: EU agricultural policy undermines its own environmental policy.

 

Moreover, the EU is in effect (and, sadly, not unwillingly), at the mercy of big corporates and private interest groups, as I’ve previously argued. For example, look at the influence over many years of the car industry in pushing diesel, which has helped to poison the air in many of our towns and cities. Of course, the EU is now helping to clean our polluted air by threatening financial penalties, but this problem of killer air pollution was caused by the EU.

 

The power of corporate lobbying is a constituent feature of the EU. There is no European public. There are still separate national publics, and there surely will be for as far ahead as we can see. This creates a paradise for lobbyists, who can (and do) act unhindered by media or public scrutiny to influence the places where real power lies in Brussels, that is with the commission and within the even-more-secretive council. The logic of the EU, if it is ever to be democratised, is to become a United States of Europe. The euro is a Trojan horse to achieve this goal of fiscal and political union. Either one needs to be a federalist, or one needs to ditch the EU. Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn and the rest are trying to have it both ways. It’s an unstable halfway house, and will fail, as in effect the euro has already failed."

 

The EU is an outsized behemoth beyond reform – the Green case for Brexit

[Red Phoenix]

And an extract from one by Suzanne Moore that's currently still on the front page :

 

"Lots of people say, vaguely, that they love Europe, that they feel European, and talk as though the EU is some sort of benign, almost charitable organisation. No. The EU is an organisation of free trade. It exists to deliver the neoliberal capitalism I thought the left was not so keen on. Sure, make the argument that free trade is a way of maintaining peace, but this is not some humanitarian NGO. It is run by Jean-Claude Juncker, former leader of Luxembourg, Europe’s biggest tax haven. Mario Dragi, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, runs the European Central Bank, while Donald Tusk, a former rightwing prime minister of Poland, is president of the European Council. Angela Merkel heads up the most influential nation within it.

The Eurozone is also in crisis. If we vote to leave the EU, the whole thing could implode. A series of countries have borne the brunt of its polices, not just Greece, but Portugal, Ireland and Spain, too. The workers’ rights that the EU is said to protect? Tell that to the countries with long-term youth unemployment. Does the EU redistribute wealth? To the bankers, yes. We know who suffers both here and on the continent: the poorest people. Who right now is speaking up for them? I am not surprised that the polls show a complete class divide between those who will vote remain and those who will vote leave. Those who feel disenfranchised economically by wages being driven down have lost faith in the ability of the political class to represent them. The response of this political class – to label everyone else racist – is a zero-sum game. Many will vote to leave as a way of sticking two fingers up, but watching those who benefit from globalisation lecture those who have lost out from it is unedifying to say the least."

 

Voters will stick two fingers up to those lecturing about Brexit’s dangers

[cloggypop]

Yeah. We've done the Green argument before.

 

http://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2016/03/17/comment-brexit-environmentalists-support-uk-eu-membership/

 

Stay in if you care about the environment.

[Red Phoenix]

Yeah. We've done the Green argument before.

 

http://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2016/03/17/comment-brexit-environmentalists-support-uk-eu-membership/

 

Stay in if you care about the environment.

 

Or you could vote to leave when looking into it further if you have enough doubts maybe. Or simply not vote. One Greenpeace article doesn't settle the argument at all, the "green argument" is far from over. Here's a couple of extracts from an article linked by Jenny Jones that covers a few points for a start, by Rupert Read (another Green party member) :

 

I have offered my main reasons at some length. The EU has long been largely a club for the international business elite. In the absence of a European public, it is a lobbyist’s paradise. The EU increasingly makes it harder for us to take the kinds of actions we want to change our society for the better, such as renationalising the railways.

 

Why? Because, ever since the Lisbon Treaty, it is quite explicitly a neoliberal organisation.

 

I would ask friends, especially friends in the Green Party and the Green movement, do you not have a red line? How bad does the EU have to get, before you start to re-evaluate your fondness for it?

 

What if the EU adopts TTIP, as seems overwhelmingly likely?

 

...

 

The whole debate for and against the EU, on the terms that that debate is being conducted as we go into this referendum campaign, is a giant distraction. The case that the Leave campaign are making against the EU - that it is stealing and over-centralising all our power - is a humungous exaggeration. The truth is that the threat we face is from out-of-control international Capital. The power of nation-states has diminished largely because of that, because of the dominance of the ‘markets’: not because of the EU.

 

But one can’t oppose the dominance of neoliberalism, of market-fundamentalism, of corporate rule, and of obsessive anti-ecological growthism, by supporting the EU because the EU is officially signed up to all these things. And while Varoufakis and Caroline Lucas talk a good talk about a ‘better’ Europe and about remaining in to ‘improve’ the EU, there seems precisely zero chance that this is what will happen. The positive Green or Left case for staying in is thus highly misleading.

 

Thus neither the Leave case nor the Remain case is sound. There has to be another way.

 

And, so, let me seek to sum up. My view is that one should not bother participating in the EU referendum campaign, at least not on one or other of its ‘sides’. Cameron’s phony referendum is an attempt to legitimate the changes he has made, that are making the EU and Britain worse. I will have no part of it.

 

This view of mine is also coloured, as indicated above, by my increasing dissatisfaction with the EU. I simply have literally no enthusiasm for campaigning actively for us to stay in an organisation that did what it did to Greece, that is about to sign up to TTIP, and that is going to be made worse by Cameron’s renegotiation. I’m now frankly, on balance, indifferent about the EU, which so far as I am concerned has become a broken pro-corporate oligarchy.

 

And I think that this referendum is a gigantic distraction from the real issues facing us at this time. Why on Earth are we having a referendum on EU membership rather than on (say) fixing our broken democracy; or on a total change of priorities to tackle the climate threat? And if we are having a referendum, why is there no option to actually make the EU better (rather than worse)? More ecologically sustainable? More serious about subsidiarity? And so forth.

 

The referendum is a trap sprung on us by Cameron, who is nothing if not a clever political operator. He has forced upon us all a debate between the Right and the further-Right, between different parts of the business elite. To listen to the BBC, one would think that the whole argument is simply over whether it will be ‘better for business’ for Britain to leave, or not. The EU referendum debate is basically a debate between two wings of the business class. It’s basically Goldman Sachs (who are financing ‘Remain’) and Cameron vs some eccentric millionaires and Farage. That’s no debate I want to be a part of.

 

The rest is here : Why I will spoil my ballot in the EU referendum

[Red Phoenix]

I followed one of Rupert Read's links too (the TTIP one), and ended up at this video (and yes I'll stop posting things for now), which shows how much of a mess Brussels is with lobbying. Doesn't convince me about the EU being good for us from an environmental perspective, or several other perspectives really. If you're wondering how Brussels works a bit more, it might be worth a watch.

 

The Corporate Lobby Tour, from The Corporate Europe Observatory

 

[Bobby Hundreds]

I've read a few times people saying we need to diminish workers rights to help with youth unemployment.its been mentioned a lot over the strikes in France I think it's mental. Make it easier to get rid of workers so you can give youth a job and they can have no job security too. I Think the political class lose all grasp of reality once they surround themselves with each other for so long.

[Section_31]

Does anyone voting in actually like the European Union? I mean the organisation it is now and not 20 years ago?

 

The arguments seem to be either that it's the least worst option (which I agree with) or that staying in is the first step to changing it (which I think is unlikely).

 

Either way, it certainly doesn't and shouldn't provide enough ammo to make anyone feel intellectually superior to anyone who can't be arsed with it.

 

The EU to me has some built in protections, I'm sure the trade aspect is all well and good too, but the rest of it is bollocks.

 

The Euro is shite, it's permitted whole counties to be economically enslaved.

 

It's expanding constantly into countries that aren't suitable, not only which drag us down economically, but are increasingly unsavoury, Turkey is the latest be beneficiary of a sweetheart deal - despite being a borderline dictatorship.

 

Whenever I look at it it just seems like a social and economic basket case with Merkel running around like a headless chicken trying to keep it together at any cost by brokering deals.

 

The original founding members - at street level - seem more and more unhappy about the free movement of people but nobody listens because they hold the people in the street in contempt, which is single handedly leading to the rapid rise of right wing populist movements.

 

[Hades]

A disabled, Muslim, Polish immigrant worker stole njackets' creatine once. 

[ZonkoVille77]

Hades, on 09 Jun 2016 - 08:34 AM, said:

 

A disabled, Muslim, Polish immigrant worker stole njackets' creatine once.

hahaha

[Duncan Clench]

Martin Lewis has published this article today;

 

http://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2016/06/05/how-to-vote-in-the-eu-referendum/

[VladimirIlyich]

While your articles are ok RP,didnt you say you weren't voting and never have?

[magicrat]

Which is why talk of a Tory split / civil war in the event of a Leave vote is incredibly fanciful. Their voter base is either indifferent or against the EU, and if there's one thing modern Tories understand it's political self-interest. If Leave wins, Cameron will get fucked off post-haste, a few of the vanishingly small number of not-a-complete-arsehole Tory figures will flounce off and make a bit of noise, but the rest of the Parliamentary party will unite behind that odious cunt Johnson and be more than prepared to fight the next general election.

 

Only a narrow Remain victory has the potential to do any meaningful political damage to the bunch of nonces governing the UK today.

The Tories are unlikely to rip themselves apart whatever the result, Hanging onto to power is what they do and the EU referendum will be old news next election .Surprise surprise most of the fuckers will calim to be on the right side of history whatever that may be