Well, he’s had his say, and looking at the headline points, I’m not surprised.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21148282

The problem being that he wants to negotiate a “new relationship” and then put that to the vote. No chance to say “we like it as it is” then. It will be a negotiation with a Tory agenda dictated by winning back UKIP supporters, not a national agenda.

I think he is going at this the wrong way. Every nation will have issues with the EU, and some of them will be common to quite a few negotiate on that basis. If the UK leaves the EU then why invest here when it will be outside the EU and the EU is the worlds largest single market.

And it sounds that if we leave, we won’t be going back any time soon, if at all.

As you say, a number of EU nations have problems with the EU at the moment. I hope that this is a negotiating tactic to force talks, and a way of keeping Farage and the Sceptics in the Tory party quiet. It won’t work - Farage likes the sound of his voice far too much.

Well if we had the vote today I would be voting to leave EU.

It was originally designed to encourage free trade across European countries but now it has grown into a multi-headed snake poking its nose everywhere into normal peoples lives and trying to get us all eventually into USE (United States of Europe).

If we can't renegotiate then let's just leave - the markets we should look at working with for this century are China, India and Brazil anyway.

I agree up to a point but I don't think 'keep things as they are' is actually a very good option. There are some things which the EU's various treaties allow which are very good, but there are also some things about it which are feck-awful. Take the CAP and the fact it's accounts haven't been signed off since god-knows-when for a start.

There is also some weight (IMO) in the notion that the EU has changed categorically since the populations of some countries (the UK being one of several) had any chance to have any direct say in it at all - voting for Euro MP's is one thing but the fact is the EU today is a totally different deal to the EEC or the old 'common market'. I think it would be good for democracy if every so often the whole process required some 'validation' from the people who actually have to live in it, not just blithely sail on doing whatever it feels like until it's so far away from it's original mandate it would have to use Google Earth to find it again.

So, some level of direct democratic assessment of the EU would be, IMO, a good thing. Is that what we're going to get? Almost certainly not. Apart from anything else, I have no confidence Cameron & co will go through with the plan anyway and even if they did, I'm sure the choice we'd get would be a choice between unsatisfactory options anyway. we'd get the choice they want us to make, not the choice we might want to make.

As Sir Humph used to say - 'Never ask a question that allows for an answer you don't want.'

the whole thing is just to stop Conservative voters voting for UKIP at the next election which would cause a labour win.

I think that it is a bad plan. It might not work and he will still lose the next election, even if he can stop haemorrhaging support to UKIP. The economy has not improved and we are in and out of recession for a number of years now and so I suspect that it will continue that way to the next election unless he comes up with a massive tax giveaway.

i would vote for any party that could get us out of the EU
all we need is to trade with them and the rest of the world
we do not need or require the European Unions 4th Reich ...

We’d have to still abide by the rules of the EU in order to trade - ingredients, labelling, etc. etc.. I know this sounds trivial, but let’s look back at how the USA treated car imports in the 1980s. In order for an imported car to be legal, there had to be a certain amount of ground clearance. The USA used to change that frequently, and as such it made it hard to export cards there. The main target of these regulations were assumed to be Jaguar at the time, which was gaining traction over the USA’s home grown luxury cars. We were powerless to change those rules then. We’d be equally powerless to change them now.

If we were separate to the EU, we’d have no ability to make changes to rules governing exports to the EU. We’d be forced to comply. Lets be in no doubt that on our own, a small severed peninsula off France, that we’d have any kind of influence there at all. We’d have none - because we had thrown our toys out of the pram and gone. I would expect there to be a much less comfortable relationship with the EU after we had left anyway.

Leaving the EU is an idiotic notion for this country.

It does show how ridiculous our PM is. To even consider such a move shows a complete lack of leadership. What would we gain? Apart from the ability to deport Polish plumbers and east european taxi drivers.

All of what you say is true (I bow to your greater knowledge of US car imports for one thing) but it does beg one obvious question - how much power do we have to change any of those rules anyway? We have to make some assessment of the value we gain or lose as being part of the EU and our ability to realistically change the direction of it as an institution either in our favour or at least away from our detriment should be part of that.

If the answer to that comes out in the positive (and I admit some parts of that evaluation would be quite subjective), then we should stay. If the answer comes out negative then we should, in our own self-interest, leave.

You can be dogmatic and say that we should stay whatever the cost of it or we should leave whatever the benefit of it. Or you can be rational, attempt some sort of objective assessment and make a decision. However, I find the term 'objective assessment' very hard to associate with the government, media or, frankly, population of the UK.

The one area that would be positive would be fishing. It would end the raping of our coastal waters by the spanish fishing fleet who have denuded their own costal waters to such an extent they are commercially dead, and are doing the same to our waters. Though that could be resolved within the EU if they had any sense.

+1
I find the French response odd. The EU changes it's rules all the time.

My personal view is that leaving the EU will kill our economy.
We don't have a manufacturing base, so we don't really have anything to sell to the emerging markets - heavy industry will come out of the EU.
Yes, we have brains and expertise, but that can be bought and shipped anywhere in the world.
We have call centres, I suppose, for when the Indian and Chinese economies are ready to farm out their support desk work to the UK, we're well placed to service them.
If the price of being part of a strong international market is the freedom for bigD and Okenobi to up sticks and go and live and work in Europe, and in return we get hard working Polish plumbers... then ok.

I can't fathom what we have to offer as a nation economically that isn't going to be overshadowed by the neighbours.

I don't see how this is changed by being or not being in the EU to be honest with you. If we're in the EU we have bigger neighbours, if we're not in the EU we have bigger neighbours. They're probably actually going to be the same people in both cases.

There are benefits to being in the EU, but I think it's overstating the case to say our economy relies on being in the EU. In fact we have a trade deficit with the EU, which means they essentially see us as a customer rather than a supplier, so EU states are likely to want us to maintain trade ties regardless of the legal niceties of membership because we're buying their stuff faster than they're buying ours...

Staying in the EU is a good thing (IMO), if we ever get that far that is how I will vote. But i think the case needs to presented in a calm, rational way, not peppered with words like 'disaster'. We've had a pretty serious economic disaster already recently and being or not being in the EU made bugger all difference to that.