Quote: (03-11-2015 10:13 AM)freeuser Wrote:
Quote: (03-11-2015 09:51 AM)H1N1 Wrote:
This ignores the fact that London is the financial capital of Europe, and was only recently overtaken by New York. It ignores the role the UK plays as a market for goods produced in the EU. You quote meaningless statistics about population size, suggesting that all Europeans are equal in their contribution to the European project. Follow that to its logical conclusion - all the EU needs to do to replace the UK is to add another country with an equivalent population, and consumption, importation of goods, access to labour opportunities, access to academic institutions, access to capital (I mean seriously, be sensible) and on and on will all remain the same.
It's Europhilic fantasy to suggest that the UK's contribution is .1%. Your statistics are quoted in a vacuum, and lacking any kind of deeper analysis. It looks like you've literally just pulled them off the front page of the Guardian and swallowed them wholesale ready to trot out on demand like a 'useful idiot'.
All this is before you consider the cost to the UK of implementing laws decided in Brussels (over 80% of all our laws at the last count), the cost to business of complying with EU directives, the cost of maintaining MPs in the EU parliament, the cost to the UK economy of the suppression of the minimum wage by large scale, low skilled labour, etc etc.
You quote a few figures, that you've read somewhere, and trot them out as though they are gospel, or somehow represent the entire argument. You say Switzerland pay for access to the free market. It's laughably naive to think we don't pay a FAR heavier price. Our incidental costs of membership are astronomical. A fixed rate, even if it were to come to that, would be infinitely preferable.
The UK's financial contribution IN HARD CASH, may indeed only be 0.1% of the EU GDP. But so what, that contribution is so inconsequential (not for the reasons you suggest) as to be irrelevant, and a total non-argument.
Nice way of ignoring hard numbers, when you don´t like the reality the represent. You´re still ignoring most of the things I said, that would be incredibly detrimental to Britain's interests. Even if Britain would leave, they´d still have to apply most of the legislation that the EU demands and this time without the power to lobby in Brussels, like Switzerland now has to do. They have to swallow, the same way Britain would have to. In what way, is that even remotely better, than the current deal? It´s ridiculous to state that things would change for the better. They would not.
I´m not saying that an exit of Britain would not hurt the EU, of course it would. But it would hurt Britain much more. That´s just a no-brainer. It´s like Salmond saying that if Scotland left GB, England would be worse off. A fucking joke. Both parties need each other and would endure pain from Brexit, but one of the two would suffer a much larger blow and it´s not the EU.
The problem people in the UK (and some other places) have with the EU is the sly and uncompromising nature of the Eurocrats. I am sure very few people have a problem with trade between nations, with the free flow of goods and information, etc. People have been trading since the beginning of time, and that's a good thing. That is how the Common Market was originally pitched.
Yet the Eurocrats have now tacked on a whole lot of other stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with trade, and they've made it an all-or-nothing situation. They are the hard-headed idiots. Lots of countries all over the world trade with one another without having to get intimately involved in all manner of local decisions, so why is this blatant power grab so fundamentally necessary for Europe?
An analogy is that people don't have a problem with patronising one another's businesses. What they don't want is people to come into their homes and tell them which colour the carpet should be or what should be served for dinner that night. It is absurd to suggest that if you won't let someone come into your home and dictate such details that you can't conduct commerce down the street during business hours. Yet that's the exact way the Eurocrats put it.