Why should we stay/leave the EU?

[OhYouLuckyDuck]

What reasons are there for staying or leaving?
I think I will vote for us to stay as I think it might be a moderating influence on any government wanting to do things to extreme plus we will lose trade with Europe if we leave. I'm undecided though.

Sorry sent to early!

In addition to the Convention on Human Rights there are EU human rights laws & the EU Charter lists rights, freedoms, protections & prohibitions which overlap the Convention & go further. It's the Charter we would lose on Brexit.

STIDW Thanks.

So far in terms of what it would mean financially the best coverage has come from the Economist www.economist.com/brexit

I think everyone needs to understand how the EU actually works, rather than listen to spin from vested interests. Also, people keep using the Norway/Swedish model but without understanding what it actually means in practice.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/norway-s-prime-minister-warns-that-leaving-the-eu-wouldnt-work-for-britain-a6853476.html

Both countries still have to pay to trade in the EU, and that means accepting a lot of EU rules, including the free movement of people, but they have no rights to negotiate or change those rules.

Another thing that people need to be aware of is this idea that we can just trade with other countries and forget the EU. Currently around 49 per cent of trade is within the EU, so you're basically saying we should walk away from almost half our trade. Ok, so if we do that, which country is going to take up the slack? Think about it from a geographical perspective, the reason half our trade is in the EU is because we're neighbours. Latin American countries are not suddenly going to buy goods from us because we send a few salespeople over there!

Here's a report from a centre-ist organisation that supports EU reform. www.cer.org.uk/insights/would-britain’s-trade-be-freer-outside-eu

As for this we'll be able to decide our own rules - we've never been able to decide our own rules. Only is we put a glass dome over the UK and no one leaves or enters will that happen. In politics, deals between countries are done all the time - it would be naive to think otherwise! Why do you think the UK is getting a nuclear power plant when all the evidence suggests it's a bad idea? Because the UK govt is desperate to stay on the NATO board, when there are many much larger and powerful countries wanting to kick it off, and is sucking up to France and China to keep it there!

I'm not a huge fan of the EU, it needs reforming, but from all the research I've done I think the UK would be cutting off its nose to spite its face if it left!

Michael Gove article

Think the EU’s bad now? Wait until Albania joins
...
Between now and 2020 the United Kingdom will pay almost £2 billion to help these nations prepare for membership of the EU — that’s more than we will spend on the NHS Cancer Drugs Fund over the same period.

This bounty will be our greatest gift to Albania since the comic talent of the late Sir Norman Wisdom, that country’s improbable national hero, lit up the dark days of Stalinist dictatorship.

Indeed, I wonder if the Albanian people are now convinced that Britain’s Foreign Office is full of Norman Wisdom characters, lovable chumps whose generosity and good-heartedness make them easily gulled into accepting all sorts of bad advice."

www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3566620/Michael-Gove-warns-EU-expansion-open-borders-88-million-Europe-s-poorest-countries.html

I read that article Claig. Gove writes well.

So, over the next 4 years £2 billion of UK tax-payer money will be given to countries helping them with their pre-accession planning. Once they gain access, they will be free to come here to use our already buckling NHS and schools. It's lose lose for us.

The EU does not work in Britain's best interests.

Yes, Gove is very good, has a very sharp mind.

Yes, we are paying for the porrer countries, subsidising them instead of our NHS etc, in order to slowly create a level playing field across 500 million people for the benefit of the Brussels elite's plan of creating a unified Europe. It will take decades and decades of wealth transfer from us to them to get anywhere near a level playing field and it will drain our own resources in the process.

It is not to the benefit of the people, only of the Brussels elites and their coterie of hangers-on in order to force through the transfer of wealth from rich countries to the poor.

And the tragedy is Claig, the writing is so clearly on the wall and people are choosing to ignore it. Normalcy bias arrghh!

Yes. The media drip-drip in favour of the powerful has an effect on the people.

I met a woman yesterday who works for the civil service. She said the Government is putting a lot of pressure on everyone at work and that they are being told they must vote stay,

Of course it may be a shaggy dogs tale, but if it was she was pretty good at inventing something on the spot.

I'm voting OUT. I've read both sides of the argument but the EU is a massive financial drain when we need money for the NHS, education etc. The EU is also a sinking ship.

By the way, anyone giving Gove's backing as a reason for voting out is possibly on drugs or had a lobotomy. This is a man that has put the final nail in the UK education system's coffin, is busy dismantling the NHS, and has already been involved in enough dodgy deals to put Phillip Green to shame! I wouldn't trust him if he said the sky was blue!

Bobby2013, I think Gove is more trustworthy than the leader of the Remain campaign, Dodgy Dave.

And Tony Blair. He wants us to stay. He is took us into an illegal war, he is a disgusting human being. Whatever you think of Gove, I don't think he is anywhere as bad as Blair.

I'm voting Leave, it doesn't necessarily mean I like Gove or Boris et al. I am choosing to vote Leave because I think it is the right choice for my children and for the rest of the UK.

Well said Anna. The referendum isn't about individuals, it's about democracy and regaining our country's right to govern itself.

Do you trust Juncker Bobby2013? And every MEP?

Lord Christopher Monckton interviewed on an American talkshow just now said

"It is the Establishment and its lackeys" who are voting to stay in and the people who want out. He says he thinks that Greece will have to leave the Euro a few weeks after the Referendum and that the Establishment is holding back the news until after the Referendum. He says he thinks we will win and get out because the poll trend is that more and more people are choosing Out.

Article in today's Guardian (an Establishment paper, which just underlines how bad things are for the Establishment)

"Europe's liberal illusions shatter as Greek tragedy plays on
Voters across Europe have got the message from the way in which Greece’s opposition to austerity was crushed

Greece is running out of money. The government in Athens is raiding the budgets of the health service and public utilities to pay salaries and pensions. Without fresh financial support it will struggle to make a debt payment due in July.

No, this is not a piece from the summer of 2015 reprinted by mistake. Greece, after a spell out of the limelight, is back. Another summer of threats, brinkmanship and all-night summits looms.
...
Merkel must pray that the lid can be kept on Greece until after 23 June, because it is hard to see how a repeat of last summer’s argy-bargy would help keep Britain inside the EU - rather more important to Germany in the long term than a few billion euros of debt relief.

The reason is that David Cameron can only win his referendum by securing the votes of non-Conservative supporters, for some of whom the handling of Greece exemplifies everything that is wrong with the EU - its lack of democracy, hyper-conservative economic agenda and insistence that the single currency is a great success when in fact it has proved to be a colossal failure.
...
The revolt against the status quo explains why Spain can’t form a government, the two parties that have dominated Irish politics since independence could barely muster more than 50% of the vote in the recent election, the runoff for president in Austria is between the greens and the far right and Marine Le Pen has support in France.

To be sure, this is not a phenomenon exclusive to the eurozone. There is marked hostility to the US political establishment, and it is clear that many voters in the UK simply do not believe the government’s warnings about the economic risks of Brexit.

The situation in the eurozone is worse, however, in part because the democratic deficit is so marked

www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/01/europe-illusions-shatter-as-greek-tragedy-plays-on-austerity

I expect that there are teams of lackeys and wonks burying their heads in the sand and praying that the people won't voye Out and end their entire game, but their fingers in the dyke may not hold.

I always like honesty...and for people to tell the truth..

It seems politicos have been lying for a long time..

Time & time again I see the same short sighted arguments about leaving.

"We will save billions if we leave the EU because we won't need to pay them" - Wrong. Norway & Switzerland have to pay in (Albeit less) to access the single market.

"We can stop freedom of movement of labour" - Wrong. Again Norway & Switzerland have to accept this fundamental rule.

"We can spend the money saved on the NHS, defence, schools/whatever" - Just how many times can this money be spent????

Fundamentally though, the Leave argument seems to be that we can get a better deal if we leave the EU and renegotiate than we have now. Cos we're the 8th largest economy in the world. But how can we get a better deal given we're already a core member with veto powers? Give 42% of our exports go to Europe and our financial services dominates Europe, we're clear losers if we try to walk away or if they call our bluff. The rest of EU have 27 other countries to trade with and in time a free trade agreement with the US. We'd have...nothing.

Europe is far from perfect but from an economic trade point of view we get far more out of it than the relatively small amounts we pay in.

Today the BoE warns of possible recession, higher interest rates, slower growth & higher unemployment if we left. The Leave camp interestingly instead of denying it has instead chosen to criticise the bank for commenting.

Should we leave and recession hits and you are made redundant, will the song "Rule Britannia" help comfort you whilst stood in line at the benefits office?

I'm voting out. Besides the sovereignty and high immigration issues, the more I have looked into the economic issues, the less I am worried.

I am getting quite annoyed at the way the 'trade with the EU' statistics are being portrayed. Phrases used above like '49% of trade is with the EU' are very misleading to the non-economist. It makes it sound like 49% of every single pound you or I make or spend comes from trading with the EU. This is not the case.

Only roughly 30% of UK GDP comes from 'Trade in Goods and Services with another economy'. In other words, roughly 70% of what we make and do as a nation is trade (in the day to day sense of the word) with each other, internally.

So, of the 30% of our GDP comprising Trade (imports and exports of goods and services with other countries), 49% is with the EU. That is, 49% of 30%, so roughly 15% of our GDP relates to the EU. Significant, but much less scary.

And to think that the trade giving rise to that segment of GDP would simply vanish upon Brexit is nonsense: there will still be demand for the goods and services that the UK provides.

The 49% figure also seems to be an average of imports and exports: imports being 53.2% and exports being 44.6% in 2015.

With regard to our import figure, nobody in the EU will want to stop selling their goods and services to the UK and nobody puts tariffs on their own exports (that would be nuts).

With regard to our own exports, the ONS website states that the Rotterdam Effect (that some goods we transport to the Netherlands actually go elsewhere in the world and should not really count as EU Trade) exists and you can knock off 4% off our goods export figure or 2% off goods and services combined, so make the 44.6 actually 42.6%. Or to put a Brexit-positive spin on it: "57.4% of our export trade in 2015 was external to the EU". I do not think any tariffs imposed would be unreasonable given how much we import.

I wonder if some people find it hard to square our relatively small geographical size with the actual size of our economy. We have the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world - huge. We are not going to the back of anyone's trading negotiation queue. The EU can't afford to cut us dead. Nobody's going to ignore the fifth largest economy in the world, now free to negotiate flexibly with other nations without 27 other countries' wildly varying needs to consider.

If I were running a Leave campaign right now I would publish two alternative maps: one of Europe and one of the world. On each, a country's size would be either squished or expanded to represent the size of its economy or its income per capita rather than it's physical size - a sort of economic 'cortical homunculus'. We'd look good on them.

It is not that Europe is far from perfect, it is that it is fundamentaly wrong.

The Greek situation as well as the less publicised Portuguese situation is a prime example of just how wrong it is.

Europe is failing to deal with the migrant situation,

I agree Hubris. The messages of no-one wanting to trade with us are just scaremongering to try to influence the vote. I doubt it would be the case after Brexit, for the reasons you've given.

I think I heard a statistic that just 6% of our businesses trade with the EU and yet the remaining 94% of them are burdened with all the EU regulations.

If our trade with the EU is so small & insignificant. Why has the BoE today taken the rather unprecedented step of warning about recession, higher inflation, lower growth and higher unemployment???

Who appoints the governor of the BoE?

The Government.... Is it in any way surprising the Govenor of the BoE comes out with the government line?

Note Mr Carney chose to remain silent on the impending Greek default and the effect that will have on Europe as well as the UK?

"Reality Check: How many UK businesses trade with the EU?
...
Vote Leave says: "Only 6% of UK firms export to the UK, yet all have to abide by EU regulations on their business."
...
Vote Leave's 6% figure comes from a report by Business for Britain, which looked at the proportion of VAT-registered companies that submitted what are called EC sales lists to the government.

In 2012 it was just over 4%, but they've allowed an extra margin for any increase since then."

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36029211