which aspects of being in the EU do you object to??

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I mean SPECIFICALLY. I have only heard vague 'we want to govern our own country' reasons for Brexit...

it seems that the deal that we are wanting, on leaving the EU is largely the definition of being IN the EU. so, for example the customs/trading standards aspect and the avoidance of the hard border in Ireland

I'd love someone to explain the actual issues which are hoped to be resolved by leaving the EU..

Nigel Farage being paid an MEP's salary.

I didn't vote as I can see both sides, and both have pros and cons. I hate the racism of some Leavers and the aggression of some Remainers, but both sides have valid points.

What I hate is the decades ahead of us of paying in more than we get out. To me it's crazy, like going into a supermarket every week and paying 10% more than the next customer, who gets a 10% discount, because they live in a less affluent country. All the rhetoric about getting farming subsidies, money for research, investment in poorer areas, irritates me because it's our own money that's done a little dance around the European financiers and been returned to us (with a bit shaved off).

I hate the idea of criminals from other countries having uninterrupted entrance to our country to commit crimes, or just defraud us dumb taxpayers.

I hate the profligacy of the EU and the awful waste of money by unelected officials.

On the other hand, I welcome people from all countries coming here to work and contribute. Our country needs younger people and especially seasonal workers on whom our farming industry relies. I have met some lovely people I now call friends and neighbours.

I love the free trade agreement, it's great for investment, employment and growth. I am happy with European standards being applied to many areas of our lives as I think they improve safety and standards.

I love being part of European research and development and the whole European idealism. Not so keen on it being pushed on much further though into European armies etc.

If David Cameron had pushed harder and the EU had been even slightly less uncompromising all this horror could have been averted. I just want to crawl into a hole and come out when it's over.

@yellowallpaper I totally agree with you

Freedom of movement

^ This comes up so many times! While EU migrants find jobs, they will come. While the government gives them unlimited housing / benefits, they will come. It's down to the British government & employer to change the rules book. Leaving the EU over it is a bit drastic.

Overall, immigration is a positive benefit. People earn their money, pay their taxes then they tend to go back.
Fuck sake.
Borders are a terrible invention IMO

What a ridiculous comment. Open boarders then between the UK and Nigeria, Somalia, Bangladesh? Oh wait is the stipulation they have to have a white face.
Fact is open borders only work when countries are of equal standing and even then I have my doubts. The open flow of immigrants, many low skilled from primarily the Eastern block has resulted in heavy penalisation of those highly educated skilled workers from Africa and Asia who are trying to come here. If you think every immigrant is a dr paying high income tax you are deluded.
So a fruit picker comes here legally- doesn’t claim any out of work benefits but has a child in the nhs and puts them through the school system- all legal!! But they are net takers....that’s not an overall benefit to society.
Skill set migration = great and fair and needed!

Also find is highly hypocritical how the first to scream racist at British people concerned about unsustainable immigration seemingly ignore the blatant racist, institutional racism of Hungary and Poland etc....you know are closest “friends”

Erm.....illegal immigrants are just that.

They enter the country illegally. As in sneak in. As in not part of an agreement. As in not part of Freedom of movement.

That’s what makes them fucking illegal.

And guess what? When France steps back from stopping them at Calais...and trucks are queuing for hours/days......

Illegals will be a variety, from genuine asylum seekers to health tourists, economic migrants, terrorists and criminals. And we’ll have MORE of these.

Thanks, Leave. Really, thank you.

Fuckwits

The open flow of immigrants, many low skilled from primarily the Eastern block has resulted in heavy penalisation of those highly educated skilled workers from Africa and Asia who are trying to come here

How? We don’t have a quota and shut the door once all the EU immigrants have come in. That’s just bullshit.

The government could choose open borders with every country worldwide.

They don’t. That’s not because of being part of the EU, it’s despite being part of the EU.

Also find is highly hypocritical how the first to scream racist at British people concerned about unsustainable immigration seemingly ignore the blatant racist, institutional racism of Hungary and Poland etc....you know are closest “friends

Don’t get your point.

We are, as a nation, cosying up to the US, which is the most racist western country on the planet..... 🙈🤷🏻‍♀️

I hate the idea of criminals from other countries having uninterrupted entrance to our country to commit crimes, or just defraud us dumb taxpayers

You mean those pesky global bankers right?

"What I hate is the decades ahead of us of paying in more than we get out."

We have never paid in more than we have got out. The benefits of membership of the single market far outweigh the 0.46% of GDP that we pay in. By a quite fantastical margin. Anyone using this as an argument really hasn't looked at the facts...

Six to be going on with:

Aquis Communautaire

The failure to establish the single markets in services and capital

The inability of the elected Parliament to initiate legislation

The conduct of Council and Commission Meetings in secret

The UK being a net contributor for 45 out of 46 years

The establishment of and failure to reform the Common Agricultural Policy

I don’t like the EU fishing laws. I don’t feel that it’s acceptable to have thousands and thousands of dead fish thrown back into the sea. It’s pointless death on a huge scale.

I don’t know what the answer is, I know that fish stocks need to be boosted. But killing something and not using it is, to me, wholly unethical and not something I can see God agreeing with.

We are, as a nation, cosying up to the US, which is the most racist western country on the planet

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/hungary-refugees-immigration-viktor-orban-racism-border-fence-a8446046.html%3famp

Iggly
of course we have targets of net migration- every target is to get the number lower!
I am not anti immigration but I don’t see how a skilled worker from eg Africa has the following rules to adhere to
www.gov.uk/tier-2-intracompany-transfer-worker-visa/eligibility
And a low skilled EU worker can waltz in!

What’s your point @OnlyFoolsnMothers

It doesn’t disprove my point about racist America. Don’t pretend you want to leave the EU because of the other mean racist EU countries 🙄

As it is, the EU has its flaws. Every institution does.

But my issue is that people are flinging around half truths at best, without using their brains and a bit of logic to justify leaving the EU.

Leaving the EU may well be the best option, but honestly we will still be trading with the EU so why not sort out the terms of that trade ASAP?????? Leaving before we do makes it incredibly harder to get decent terms.

Being part of the EU does not prevent companies from trading with other non EU companies. The government doesn’t control what companies do or don’t do.

course we have targets of net migration- every target is to get the number lower

That isn’t a quota.

Also there was nothing to stop the government relaxing the entry requirements for non EU citizens. Being part of the EU is irrelevant. A red herring.

They just didn’t want to.

I have worked with criminals. I had a very good working relationship with a polish guy. He told me straight, criminals in Poland know if they want to “disappear” come to England. We don’t make people register their address, as many European countries do. You can come here and disappear. We couldn’t even get any info on previous convictions for these people. That should have been available to people in my role. Many times we would find out too late in the day that someone was actually wanted for rape or murder in their home country.

I didn’t vote as, like a pp, I can see both sides. But you are utterly naive if you think this country hasn’t been a haven for the criminals of Eastern Europe.

what we put in and get out and how the rebate works

I voted remain albeit it a bit reluctantly as it wasn't clear what Leave would actually mean, and it seemed better to Remain with a say on EU policy than to risk leaving and being subject to policies and paying for the privilages without influence e.g. Norway in the EEA.

It's not so much that the EU is a terrible thing, but over time it has evolved from a relatively simple trading body into a much more complex organisation and continues to evolve into a more state like body and that progression into the future does not enthuse me.

Britain has never been wholeheartedly engaged with the EU. We've negotiated and clung on to our vetoes. We've hung on to the periphery over the single currency. Maintaining more economic freedom gave us more flexiblity to tweak our economy in the economic crash a decade ago, whereas countries like Greece were much more subject to what the EU would do for them.

We've (England at least, Scotland will beg to differ) never felt truely European as a national identity and look wider at the Commonwealth and the rest of the world.

There have been issues with the Common Agricultural Policy with the food mountains and lakes of surplus, unsellable produce that affected the prices that farmers recieve. Fishery policies and quotas mean fishermen waste and dump the surplus fish that get caught in their nets because the wrong species and excess numbers are rendered unsellable. Would our government do much better? Who knows? There are global economic forces at play.

Brexit seems to be as much a symptom of a global transistion stage and discomfort in globalisation. It's no co-incidence that Trump was elected in at the same time, and socially, major players like China and Russia have regressed from the more liberal progress they made in the 90s-00s.

I voted for the devil I knew. If Brexit doesn't go through after 3 years and all this political stalemate and upheaval, I can't see the UK settling down happily as if nothing ever happened. Brexit has cost other member states a lot of political time and effort too, particularly countries like Ireland that would be significantly affected by Brexit. I don't know how much the UK's long-term relationship has been tainted internationally.

I would hope that in the event of a no deal Brexit, that fresh negotiations with the EU would be assisted from a starting point of having been at EU accepted standards, unlike nations like Turkey being so different on human rights and the state of the economy.

The EU and British feeling of fairness have never been very compatible. There's a sense that we follow rules properly and grumble along about them while other nations do their own thing anyway. We've always been net contributors (although the rebate helps a bit. Then other rules where we feel "Johnny Foreigner" gets more out of it than we do for example access to healthcare being at the country's level of provision as the NHS offers so many services free at the point of access. In reality it is such a small amount of NHS usage, but it's the drip feeding of percieved inequalities built up in the population.

I'm probably more clued up than the average voter, and sufficiently clued up to realise how little I know. That's part of the problem, the inner workings of the EU feel so remote, then there's a generally anti-EU agenda drip feeding away for decades (banana regulations: outcries in the media over bananas having to be a certain amount of bendiness). There's enough muppetry going on in Westminster, but they are our muppets and we get to vote them in/ out every few years (unless you're in a safe seat... thanks FPTP). The EU is too distant and anonymous to feel properly accountable.

If we leave, at least we'll know who we're blaming for our new shitty laws and systems

Either way, the EU is on our doorstep and we can't seem to live with them or without them. The one thing I would say about the referendum was that it was a thinking point to scruitinise what I thought about the EU and why I had those opinions. I didn't vote to leave, but I can understand why a lot of people did without even getting into mentioning the M word or the general xenophobes within the population.

Common Market. Great idea.
United States of Europe. Bad idea.

My friend says she voted leave as she want to stop ‘all these immigrants getting jobs and tax money’ erm she worked in Spain for a summer why was that different?

I voted remain but the one thing they died sorry me is that the borders are too open. Convicted criminals and sex offenders should not have freedom of movement. If a foreign national commits a crime here they should be deported to their own home country to deal with. This is the only thing that ever bothered me.

I didn’t vote as, like a pp, I can see both sides. But you are utterly naive if you think this country hasn’t been a haven for the criminals of Eastern Europe

I can understand that. But I still don’t see why that’s a fault of the EU - it’s a fault of the UK government.

I think that our relationship with the EU needed a cold hard look at and review but sadly that just didn’t happen.

I also believe that the EU is a bogeyman for many of our ills which are actually the fault of the UK government.

We keep blaming the EU for things when our government could have done something about it.

I’m surprised to read about people still asking about exactly what laws are affected by the EU.

When the referendum was first proposed, I was pro-remain, but I then found out how the EU has got greedy with respect to controlling our laws.

Pre-referendum, Jeremy Corbyn used to talk of re-nationalising the railways. While broadly agreeing with that, I used to wonder why he was looking at the railways in preference to renationalising the water industry, for example. Then I found out that EU laws restrict the use of public funds for state aid. He could probably get away with renationalising the railways because that would mostly involve not renewing contracts rather than buying the assets back.

Although some think he couldn’t even do that …

www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/08/renationalise-railways-what-no-one-will-tell-you-we-cant-while-were-eu

I was highly pissed off as I’d been voting Labour for years and was hoping they would renationalise water, gas and electricity.

If we remain and a fair-minded government of the future tried to renationalise the water industry, the EU court of justice could scupper this as EU law is against the use of public funds for this purpose. Whether or not you agree with renationalisation, this is a matter for individual countries, not the EU, whose laws currently take precedence when they conflict with British law.

We should have control over our own waters - the British fishing industry has collapsed due to EU rules, to the detriment of coastal communities. This is a huge matter for those living in those areas and I wouldn’t be aware of it if DH hadn’t lived in such areas as a child.

If the British government tries to sneak in a harmful policy, organisations such as 38 degrees will call it out and the government has to consider the loss of support at the election. EU rules are made with no such consideration. Sadly this has achieved the desire of many politicians - to be able to implement a political agenda with no input from the voting population - in short, to ignore democracy.

Do you remember a few years back when the Conservative government tried to gag organisations such as 38 degrees in the run up to an election? Fortunately there was an outcry and the plans were dropped.

When the EU tried to sign the CETA deal, I was concerned as for months I had been hearing how CETA gave private investors too many rights to challenge matters that were in the public interest but would affect their profits. But suddenly the press were not mentioning that, just stressing how the people of Wallonia were spoiling it for everyone else by resisting CETA. Only they challenged the implementation of CETA - they were the only ones that were given a vote - eventually CETA was implemented.

Here’s an article that looks at the problems with CETA.

www.tjm.org.uk/trade-deals/ceta-the-new-eu-canada-trade-deal

The EU has dragged us into CETA. Those concerned about the NHS being privatised should be more concerned about the EU dragging us into trade deals which threaten the NHS. It’s already done it with CETA.

This link explains it better than I can.

www.patients4nhs.org.uk/the-eu-ftas/

The EU can implement laws that make things harder for British industry. It can do this without our consent and often the British public are unaware of it.

Take the recent plans to tax online companies and use the money to prop up the high street. These plans were shelved because they conflicted with eu law. Personally I thought it was a clumsy idea that needed more thought, but surely that decision should be made by our elected government?

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/online-sales-tax-to-help-save-high-street-falls-foul-of-eu-dvjs8v52k

Did you know that’s why those plans were shelved?

And the government could not bail out British Steel because that fell foul of EU laws about state aid. Again, you may or may not agree with the bailout but that should be the UK’s decision.

The eu’s position on state aid explained here.

www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/guides/-introduction-to-state-aid

A vote to remain is not a vote for things to remain the same but for the continual increase in the gap between rich and poor. Politicians oppose Brexit for the same reason that we haven’t yet had a coherent political strategy to tackle the housing crisis. The political classes are often private landlords and would lose out if large chunks of the population were not trapped into paying extortionate private rents. Similarly, there will be fewer juicy investments if the government is allowed to run the country for the benefit of its people instead of fleecing them with the increasing cost of privately-run utilities.

And we cannot change the EU from within - it took years for David Cameron to tackle the relatively small issue of the tampon tax (actually due to EU sales tax laws - the Government were against it but were required by EU law to collect the tax).

Yet I am told that for holding the above views I am racist and far-right.

@fluffedup

Those are arguments I would engage with and, if true, make sense as to why you’d want out of the EU.

I’m tired but I’m going to read up on that in the morning.

As for the racist point - that’s because many who voted Leave did so for racist reasons. Yes it’s unfair to tar all leavers with thesame brush but there’s been very little non-racist rhetoric associated with the Leave campaign. Some of the bile on the Leave.EU Facebook page for example is appalling and being associated with that cannot be a comfortable place to be.

@Bunnyfuller

And guess what? When France steps back from stopping them at Calais...and trucks are queuing for hours/days......

That’s not going to happen, they have an obligation under the imo (international maritime organization) to provide security for the port. Also look up the ISPS code. They can’t just have a significant lapse of security as that would mark the port as high risk port and it would damage their shipping commerce. It’s like saying that every European airport would stop security on their side for anyone flying to the uk essentially! That won’t happen either!