Re: But the good old days!
The EU has done a fantastic campaign for extremist political parties left and right. Their support throughout Europe has increased thanks to offering an alternative to slavishly being in the EU.
Extremist (aka nationalist) politics is on the rise globally, it is not a phenomenon unique to the EU. EU countries managed to reject the likes of Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders. The US got Trump, and we still have Nigel wandering around acting like he never failed to get elected as an MP 7 times.
Economics- 2008 global financial crash. US and UK bounce out of recession, the EU do nothing.
There's pretty good evidence to suggest that our government's policy of ideological austerity extended the recession in this country, at a time when other European countries were already recovering. Do your research.
Immigration- [...] You say we can control our borders but only within the confines of the EU's dictation (as they are trying to dictate in negotiations now) which means by definition we cannot control our borders.
Part of living in a world that has other countries means making deals with those countries. Very few (if any) countries have completely closed borders. Free movement of people is part of the three freedoms of movement of the EU (people/goods/services). You won't get one or two of them without the third. The fact remains that we could have greater control of our borders if we wished, but we chose not to. It wasn't inflicted on us by the EU. It was a choice made by our own duplicitous politicians.
Trade- We leave and instantly we are able to drop tariffs we must impose due to the EU.
This neatly side-steps the issue that if we leave, we need to renegotiate trade terms with every other country in the world, or fall back on WTO rules, with much more severe tariffs imposed on us whether we choose to reciprocate or not. Of course not reciprocating would result in a flood of imports, and a collapse in our export market and the pound becoming about as valuable as a Zimbabwean Dollar. An optimistic timescale for a bilateral trade deal with most countries is in the 5-10 years range,by the way, and we will need an veritable army of negotiators to make those deals, a skillset that doesn't currently exist in this country due to there not being a need for it, since our trade deals are currently negotiated on behalf of the entire trading bloc (which carries a lot more clout than one nation).
Sovereignty- Erm read above. If we dont have control of our borders, law nor trade then by definition we have lost it.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." -Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride.
This is pretty lazy of you. I proved its existence only 4 hrs ago and yesterday to 2 separate...
Tim Worstall saying it is so, doesn't make it such. Have a slightly more authoritative source on whether the EU has rules on 'bendy bananas', the EU itself (unless you are going to claim that they are lying about their own regulations?):
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/unitedkingdom/en/media/euromyths/bendybananas.html
The full picture here, is that if fruit are abnormally mis-shapen they can't be sold as free from defects. Given that this is usually an indicator of disease, I think that is fairly sensible. If you want to go out and buy some diseased fruit to eat, I'm sure you can still find it in British shops in any case.
Again, doing your research is about more than just finding someone who agrees with you and stopping there.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
