Hey Brits, can you probably explain why EU is wrong?

Herein lies the biggest PR problem of the EU... Who the (*)(*)(*)(*) is Verhofstadt? How many people of 450M europeans know who he is, what he does, etc...?

As a percentage! Now consider this with regard to the rest of the non-elected EU officials.

 

Exactly. The Right everywhere have this trick of supposing they speak for everyone, why I don't know!

 

It's annoying as it leads to threads like this, where all Brits are grouped together, in the belief they shame the same view on the EU.

 

I've never said I speak for everyone. However, opinion polls show that of those who vote, the majority are in favour of withdrawal. You might say that opinion polls can be wrong, but we'll never know for sure either way for as long as the political establishment consistently refuses to have a referendum on anything related to the EU.

 

I'm consistently supported by opinion polls and if the public were to be informed properly, I'm 99% certain they'd be even more convinced. I'll continue to say the majority want to withdraw until the government has the guts to put the issue to a referendum and we know one way or the other. Letting this fester on and on is likely to end in trouble.

 

The EU isn't socialist. It isn't capitalist either. It has the worst elements of both systems.

 

Then please post links to the polls.

 

Well as the EU doesn't itself produce; it is simply a collection of cooperating member states, so it's not possible to classify the EU as capitalist, communist or socialist.

 

I couldn't imagine a worse thing that the UK public voting on EU membership. We're in the position that outher countries are in such as Sweden, NL etc... Public opinion in the UK is driven by the Sun, Star, Mail, Express - i.e. incredibly uninformed. The Mail would have a field day of mis-respresenting information and skewing public opinion.

 

Joke right? The EU has generated a huge body of law and it can impose almost all of it on every member state (including the UK) through the use of "directives", "laws", "regulations" and "decisions" the former being the most common, whereby a state can choose how to implement the directive, but the outcome must be as the Commission wants. Which paper do you read? You might try reading a book instead; the British press is rubbish on the subject!

Or as Mark Leonard [Executive Director the pan-European think-tank, the European Council on Foreign Relations (www.ecfr.eu)] puts it ...

And that was before the Lisbon Treaty removed dozens of national vetoes. The EU is the worst mix of capitalism and socialism and it is only a collection of co-operating member states in that they have decided to put policies, little by little, under the control of the EU's institutions.

 

Consider that the discussion I responded to was in regard to the EU being capitalist or socialist... Now read your response back. It makes no sense.

Daily Mail at work, right here.

 

I don't know what you're talking about. My reply to your statement made perfect sense. Nobody needs the British press to understand this. The European Commission is a perfectly adequate source.

If the EU issues a directive for instance, member states must frame their own policies so that they comply with it. If they digress, the ECJ awaits. The EU has issued tens of thousands of directives, covering a very wide range of policies. Are you disputing this?

 

Take the case of a while ago "EU stops nurses from lifting patients". The Daily Mail.

Reality, the EU passed a directive which said "not excessive weight". The UK had a guideline of 50kgs in place and to comply with the directive, made it law. So the headline was nonesense, yet the public at large are under the impression that the EU mandated a 50kg lifting limit and this prevented "our British nurses" from lifting patients.

The UK is its own worst enemy half the time.

It's the same with H&S - the UK and Ireland have taken this to rediculous levels, meanwhile all over continental Europe, H&S seems to be missing entirely!

I'm not pro-federal EU but I'm also not get the hell out of the EU also. There's a mid-way, which the UK has been walking thus far, yes it's a fight but a fight worth fighting. Leaving the EU means that UK manufacturers will lose access to the largest free trade block in the world. Ask the UK's manufacturing industry what they think about that! Cameron, has protected his banking buddies and hiung the working classes out to dry - what a surprise from the Tories.

 

I'm not interested in the (*)(*)(*)(*)ing Daily Mail. It even supported the David "we want to be in Europe" Cameron at the last election. I have never ONCE quoted from it and have said the British press is a rubbish source! The British press is interested in selling copy, not educating the public. If the EU were to be reported properly, I think 99% of the population would want to leave. H&S is a distraction from far more serious issues. There is no mid-way. We either need to be in or out. I'd prefer to be good neighbours rather than ill-fitting members and being the subject of such ill feeling from European message board posters and bureaucrats and politicians alike.

The EU also hung the working classes out to dry when it approved the bank bail outs. The FTT boosting the EU's corrupt budget is hardly going to help is it? Did the EU help the working classes by privatising everything in sight? It took up that aspect of Thatcherism like a seal to water. Of course privatisation is now supported by both Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems alike. Coincidence, d'you think?

 

Europa should be more conservative and think about the surviving in the 21th Century. The prescriptions of socialists have created armies of parasites ( mostly from the Orient countries ) who produce nothing and swallowed till 50 % of all tax revenues.An Alliance between European and American conservatives is urgently necessary.

 

Just exactly which social programmes within the EU are directly paid for by the EU? I think you'll find they are all memberstate paid and nothing at all to do with the EU.

 

Lots of socio-economic programs are, entirely or in part, paid for with EU money. So the line is pretty blurred in my opinion.

Take agricultural tourism for example.

 

Wouldn't these be considered as EU development funds? We are really discussing social welfare programmes; unemployment "benefits" and the like.