Sadly I cant forget that vicious piece of law, responsible for making me feel completely alone for most of secondary school and probably caused two nervous breakdowns (at age 13 and 18) and more suicide attempts than I can remember. Lets not forget the ignoring of homophobic and transphobic bullying, and the victim blaming from my head of year. Looking back, it’s amazing that I survived the 1990s.
Fuck that law, fuck every MP who voted for it and fuck every person who thought it was a good idea (Hello, Rupert Murdoch. It’s funny how we keep bumping into you on these topics).
in comparison, The EU is completely benign at worst.
On a purely legal point - cobblers. UK civil servants input into law is at the statute drafting stage (and obviously the policy before it). If you read EU and UK statute side-by-side, the UK statute is generally a lot clearer and shorter (possibly due to being easier to draft solely in English, as opposed to the linguistic difficulties that the EU poses to jurists). Both EU and English law also take into account extensive precedent (or making stuff up, as you put it), in fact, given that whole sections of EU law (doctrine of indirect effect for example), you could argue that EU law has even more of it…
except that mine is written in more demotic English?
I spent about 8 years being part time seconded from my job to one part of EU directive harmonisation, in which I learned all about the abuse of Statutory Instruments to avoid parliamentary scrutiny, and all I can say is, my experience is different from yours.
And how is UK civil servants drafting laws at the behest of elected politicians different from EU civil servants doing so? I note you don’t mention the precedent point. Both are products of similar processes - I’d argue that the EU law ends up being longer and more technical in many parts because of both a more complex drafting process at EU level, and also the need to ensure that it means the same thing in a variety of languages. None of these things is a particularly strong argument for remaining or for leaving the EU imho.
In Austria, the standard complaint about how exceedingly bureaucratic the EU is was that “they even regulate the curvature of cucumbers”.
There was indeed a EU directive concerning, among other things, the curvature of cucumbers, which was abolished in 2009.
It is a less known fact that this directive was put in place to simplify and harmonize countless national laws and bilateral treaties that also regulated the proper curvature of cucumber.
This is why if GB leaves the EU it will take many years to create new treaties. Civil servants and lawyers build whole careers on corner cases. In electronics, it’s like trying to decide what is a component, a sub-assembly and a finished product (which tend to attract different regulations.) It is obvious till the lawyers get involved.
It has been said of one senior English QC that he earns several million pounds a year by confusing the Supreme Court*, so you get the picture.
*With admiration, by another member of his chambers, I would add.
I don’t think the UK should leave the EU and I’ll be voting against it. However, and I apologise if this is evil, I’m almost of the mind that if it does go through and the UK leaves, this might make it more likely for Scotland to finally devolve (and then rejoin the EU on its own afterwards).
The obvious problem with this is planning for the majority of the Scottish public to actually attribute any negativity whatsoever to English policy and as a consequence stay in the UK regardless of what happens. And that’s if the UK votes to leave.
6Bn for EU membership? Someone I know breathlessly pointed out about a month or two ago that Scottish independence “would have cost us 5bn by now!” a year after we could have devolved.
5bn for a whole country! That’s a fucking bargain you neep!
Hi, I’m English. I’ve had more than enough of the UK fighting for ‘democracy and freedom’ with the US, thanks. Plz to elect Bernie and get your act together, then we’ll talk.
If they elect Bernie he’ll be around to express support for Corbyn in 2020, if there hasn’t been a revolution by then.
It is odd how the same idea (older but experienced social democrat maverick emerges from nowhere as challenger) happens more or less simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic just as bullying right-wingers suddenly pop up as counterweights. Trump and Johnson even resemble one another (the Independent has an incredibly Trump-alike shot of Johnson, who was also mistaken for Trump in New York.) Are we sure this isn’t being scripted by NBC?
My own concern regarding the EU referendum is how far out of the EU is out of the EU. Are we jumping ship for EEA as well? Considering the IPB is currently plowing it’s way through parliament, leaving the EU and the protection of the ECJ is a terrifying enough prospect - I work in IT support and data management and recruitment for the sector has already come to a crashing halt in London - but dropping out of the EEA potential puts us in the position of being unable to store European customer data locally. That’ll hamper our business’s technical ability to simply communicate with European customers, let alone actually do any work for them, and rectifying the problem will not just billions of pounds, but jobs as well in their tens of thousands as domestic out-sourced and cloud-based services like email, storage and comms platforms are shunned in preference to their EU competitors.
Whether or not those concerns are actually based in reality are one thing, but I’ve been unemployed for a while now and spoken with a number of former colleagues, all of whom have said in no uncertain terms that their companies are holding their breath until the whole thing either gets clarified one way or the other, or it blows over. One guy I worked for has preemptively transferred his client’s cloud email services to an EU-based provider after the company’s founder quietly suggested it to him shortly before he sold it.
The EU is a vicious colonial project completely beholden to neoliberal policies. Case in point: The plundering of Greece, whose government dared try to stand up against the trojka’s privatization regime. Case in point: The secret negotation of and pressure to adopt ACTA. Case in point: The secret negotiation of and pressure to adopt TTIP. Heck, even Infosoc!
Case in point: The extremely shady deal just closed with Turkey, allowing them to deal with the Kurds as they see fit, while excluding refugees whose misery we more or less created ourselves from Europe’s shores.
I admit Britain leaving because of UKIP-style nationalist propaganda is a rather dismal perspective and thus understand the reasons many progressives might favour staying - e.g., following Corbyn’s arguments - but the EU is not in and of itself a laudable project. Even if I do like the open borders.
Decades of people not paying their taxes and governments turning a blind eye, and then joining the Euro when they well knew that their economy was a sham.
Of course the EU has some degree of responsibility, they should have not allowed Greece to join the Euro, but at the end the ones that were telling lies were the Greeks themselves.
Well, one of the parties that plundered greece was German companies such as Siemens who bribed corrupt politicians to place unnecessary defence orders in exchange for kickbacks. These dirty dealings are part of the debt that the EU is now collecting on behalf of these companies. I fail to see why they shouldn’t take every cent of that hit themselves.
This film does a good job of explaining what went wrong:
Oh please, the corrupt evil companies. Yeah, right.
There are many countries that have rules and regulations to stop bribery, Greece could have done the same, the video may address the problem with that (I am tired of hearing that excuse) but the endemic Greek problem of believing that you should not pay any tax at all if you can get away with it is a problem of their own making.
They paid no taxes and then proceeded to say their economy was in great shape while wasting money in having an army they could not afford for example.
The corrupt find the corrupt, so to put all the blame in “evil corporations” is a cop out.
Even so, we should hardly punish the public at large for the failings of the corrupt government. I believe that’s also why we’re not scraping in Germany’s war debts; which of course would solve all of Greece’s problems with the trojka.
But, then the neoliberals wouldn’t get to have their “privatizations”, the modern and convenient word for corporate pillage.
And its creditors should have known better, too. Demanded higher interest rates that better reflected the risk at the time of lending. It isn’t as though people thought Greece was a paragon of fiscal virtue at the time the lending happened.
But now both are in this situation together, and only one is being asked to pay the price. And to do it in a way that is counterproductive for both, since an excessive debt burden and austerity are contractionary. I think Greece would have been better off financially and justified morally in defaulting under those conditions.
