EU - in or out?

MargaretX not sure what nationality you are but that's a strange post for sure.

Scotland, if it becomes an independant country will have to apply for membership of the EU, it can't choose to vote to stay in. It will be interesting to see too, if Scotland becomes independant, will it join the Euro

Who exactly is voting or wishing for the Germans to have an even more powerful role? The Poles? I'm sure you're aware of the origins of the EU, which was the European Coal & Steel Community proposed by the French to expressly prevent the Germans' ability to wage war, yet again. For you to suggest Poland wants Germany to have an even more powerful role is frankly laughable.

The UK is quibbling, yes, rightly so. I am totally in favour of the EU as a trading entity which is what we joined but a Federal Europe will not work.

MargaretX, how splendid your suggestion that the centre of Europe will eventually swing to the East if we Brits don't stop quibbling as you put it, then the hard working Germans and Poles can geographically come together and leave us malingering Brits to our dismal welfare system and our crime ridden capital. Lets hope this move isn't quite as geographically close as it was 1939 because that didn't have a particularly good outcome, as far as the Poles were concerned!

I get the impression that the UK will not leave. What on earth would they do? Scotland will vote to stay in. Big cities like London will always attract criminals, who will come as long as there is a badly overseen Welfare system like the one functioning in the UK.

In the preceding years before the Wall came down the governing centre of Germany was Bonn, very near to Strasbourg. Since 1990 it has been Berlin - very near to Warsaw and the Poles, enjoying a successful democracy for the first time in years, sharing with the Germans the same capacity for hard work and organisation, would like Germany to have an even more powerful role.

The whole centre of Europe will eventually swing to the East . IF the UK doesn't stop this quibbling and take a positive part in forming the EU for the next decades.

Chrissy, nice to read your comments on immigrants. It's a subject on which I feel strongly. My grandparents were immigrants, from Russia and Romania. They worked hard all their lives, gave employment to others and raised families who have all contributed to our society. The UK is a country of successive waves of immigrants from many, many places and for many reasons, it was built on the backs of immigrants.
And yes, annodomini, I am an unreconstructed feminist; we may not llike all our sisters, but we're all in the same boat! Right on!
sussexpoet

Pogs relating to your comments about Southern Europe being "too much of a drain on Germany and France" seems Monsieur Le President is steering France towards it's own fiscal disaster one way and another and France no longer enjoys quite the happy relationship with Germany that they had when his predecessor was strutting his stuff! Wonder how Germany will feel if it has to bail out France too at some stage further down the line, as it seems France could also enter the financial mire, as the IMF have predicted they may slip behind Italy and Spain. Germany must sometimes feel like a parent with umpteen feckless offspring. I know the feeling, I have on occasions said to my kids you are acting like Greece, stop asking for bail outs, we, your parents, are not Germany!

If you want to see the figures www.migrationwatchuk.org/

I know there are several members from Birmingham on Gransnet - the good news is, in another 16 years, we'll have 5 more , i.e. population growth of 7 million. Just not in the SE please.

BAnanas I couldn't agree more with you.

BAnanas

"I've tried to keep away from this Forum".

Well thank you very much, so have I!

Now I have to join in to say I agree with you. Yes I saw Question Time and Mary Beard was lacking in credability on this matter. I have said before, you have to walk the walk to be able to talk the talk. She has obviously never been to Boston nor established the facts and feelings of the people who were raised there. I thought the woman in the audience spoke very well. She did not emit any anymosity but stated the truth and if we have any sense we should sit up and listen to her, not Mary Beard in this case.

I am reserving judgment on the question of 'In or Out' until Cameron has played his hand. He may get somewhere but I am not holding my breath. I think a lot will depend on how scary the Germans feel about loosing our financial input and our similar work ethic. Will the Southern European countries prove too much of a drain on Germany and France? There is a lot at stake and I shall give it serious consideration IF and when a reforendum EVER takes place.

I did smile today to see Peter Mandelson on T.V. today telling us why we should stay in the E.U. He didn't remind us he was on the E.U. Gravy Train with his thousands going into his bank account from an E.U. pension, as long as he defends the E.U. No change there then.

Jopa, don't know if you saw Question Time last week, when Mary Beard, the historian read out a report, I'm not sure who it was compiled by, but the gist of it was that the influx of Eastern Europeans had not affected the population of Boston, Lincs in a detrimental way. There was a lady in the audience who lived there and said contrary to everything Mary Beard had said, her town had been deeply affected and the incomers were placing a great strain on community cohesion and services, so much so, they were at breaking point. I think it was yet another case of an academic living in an ivory tower painting an over optimistic vision when in fact the reality was quite different. I think this lady spoke for many and I imagine how annoyed I would feel if I was a native of Boston and was told everything was hunky dory by someone who didn't live there.

BAnanas I agree with Jopa - brilliant post. Do we have a housing shortage or do we have to many people?

BAnanas what a brilliant, impassioned post. I agree with every word you have said and would say it encapsulates what many people think. That's why the pro faction would never want a referendum - we'd be out. I think the open border policy with free access to housing and benefits beggars belief. It's not racist to say 'enough is enough' - those who champion this policy should take a look at Boston, Lincs, to see the reality. It would be lovely to think that the Bulgarians and Romanians who do pitch up here in their many thousands will all be highly educated and skilled people, sadly, I doubt that will be the case. The average wage in those countries is something like £1 per hour - just imagine, here, you wouldn't even need to work to receive many times more. No brainer really.

And yes, Glenys Kinnock. Well, the whole family of them actually...

I've tried to keep away from this particular forum as like others on Gransnet I have expressed my anti EU feelings on this subject before on other threads, but like a moth to a flame and all that. For a lot of us who are anti, we see the whole EU as an unwieldy behemoth of an organisation, not what we signed up to a trading bloc. It's the whole rigmarole that surrounds it that's so off putting, all the directives and the tampering with our laws that often make us impotent. The money that has to be thrown at it why two parliaments? Brussels and Strassbourg. Then there's the ongoing cost of moving people, paper and heaven knows what else between the two cities some distance apart The contentious European Court of Human Rights that over rule our own judicial system, for many is another ongoing bone of contention. What makes it even more annoying is the fact that so many other EU nations often ignore their rulings if they deem that it would not be in their national interests. To compound matters further when David Cameron has been trying to renegotiate our terms we are told we cannot cherry pick, well that seems exactly what other countries do they do not adhere to the letter the way we do if it is not in the best interests of their country. There are all the constant jollies that MEPs waste public money on, was it really necessary for example for Glenys Kinnock and 70 of her MEP cronies to jet off to a 5 star resort in Barbados to discuss world poverty? no irony there. That's just one example no doubt this sort of thing happens all the time. We are not the United States where over the course of several hundred years many nationalities abandoned their homelands to seek and new life and in doing so became a cohesive nation with a common objective. The member states are vastly different, and whilst we all have great strengths, we are not necessarily compatible with each other. Germany is the most successful and dynamic member, how long will they want to carry the burden of supporting the weaker southern European countries before they have had enough. We all know Greece was encouraged to cook the books so they could enter the Eurozone, but ultimately what good has it done them when they don't have autonomy any more, and whilst the ordinary people there are really having to struggle and have been reduced to poverty, it was inevitable that their chickens would eventually come home to roost with their non payment of taxes. It's understandable that the strongest economy is exasperated with them, but why were they allowed to join in the first place? There's much talk in the press at the moment of Romanian and Bulgarian citizens being allowed to arrive here en masse early January 2014. We cannot be told how many are expected, once again it's all going to be worked out on the back of a fag packet. I believe there's some pathetic PR campaign to try deter the people on the streets of Bucharest by telling them it's a bit cold and rainy over here so they might not like it that much. For heavens sake the minimum wage is diddly squat, they know we have an over generous benefit system of course they want to come, ditto Bulgaria. Both these countries have considerable corruption and crime, sorry to come over all DM but allegedly 90% of the cash machine scams are orchestrated by Romanians. I can understand why they turn to crime they have lived under an incredibly harsh dictators, the Ceausescus until quite recently where the masses were practically starving so it was probably akin to surviving in Dickensian London when there was a proliferation of street gangs, people had to do what ever they could to eat. Nevertheless, both Bulgaria and Romania suffer from organised crime, some of it is here already so who knows if that will get worse. We have an acute housing shortage and a finite amount of space, particularly here in the crowded South East so how that is going to affect our infrastructure who knows? We are told that our green fields will have to be built on to cope with the burgeoning influx. I don't think it's unreasonable not to want to admit another great surge of EU immigrants on the wholesale scale we did before when we are already struggling daily with housing, hospitals and schools.

This week we heard about high speed train to the North. One of the reasons mentioned on radio was that people in Yorkshire can be in Brussels in 3 hours. Now why should they want to do that? I thought we were withdrawing, a future referendum IN or OUT and at the same time building a high speed rail system to enable us to be IN Europe so much quicker. But by then we shall all need Visas as we have our sovereignity back whatever that means.

Ian42 must be as thick as two planks or having us on..... Are the rest of the Europe sceptics like him?

I know I'm not answering the original question, but do you remember the referendum about joining the (then) Common Market?
I was living in France, one of about 32,000 British people living in Europe.
Did we get a vote? NO! Surely we were the people to ask, having experienced living in the Common Market? But when you are ex-pat, you lose all sorts of rights......

I voted to join the European Common Market in the referendum in 1973. I did not vote for all the subsequent transfer of power from the UK to Europe nor did I vote for the other 26 countries to have free access to our borders. The fact that the EU accounts have still not been signed off with serious questions remaining about £3.9 billion of payments made by Brussels is particularly worrying.

hi poet. Nice to hear from you.
Where would this country be without immigrants I say.
Commonwealth immigrants in the post war years to work on london transport and in our NHS
Irish immigrants who were exploited as our roads and cities were rebuilt in the 1960s and 70s
Polish immigrants and others that keep the hotels open in the south of the country.
There are many other examples.

The PM is right in deciding to hold a reforendum - if he is elected next time! We need clarity on a matter which has been 'fudged' too long.

With mass immigration into this country, the drain on resources such as housing, NHS, schools, etc is overwhelming.

Although I may be 'bigoted' as Gordon Brown so famously suggested to a Labour voter during the last election, I feel the beaurocracy and dictatorship of Brussels holds us back and costs too much.

I would vote OUT.

sisters, poet? Yes, I think so.

To come out of the EU would be the most foolish thing we could do: David Cameron is trying to recruit floating voters from the UKip fringe. He is repeating Tony Blair's (and Thatcher's) mistake of arse-crawling to the USA in the hope of crumbs from their table. The main reason I want to live a few more years is to see him and his cronies booted out - otherwise I would go for the bottle of barbiturates now before Osborne starves UK's existing 11 million pensioners to death!
Hang in there, sisters.

I would be interested to know more absent - I apologise if i was being a bit flip. I suppose UK farming and French farming must have been in a very different state by the end of the war. My source is the programme on TV about farming in the war that was on last year

Oh was Ian42 joking? Sorry – you know me and humour.

MaggieP These days it's not difficult to access the text of various EU treaties, including those of Rome and Maastricht. However, be prepared to be bombarded with political propaganda as politicians concentrate our minds on this side issue for the next four years.

JessM I think "cooked up to appease the French" is a trifle harsh when describing the post-war origins of the CAP, but, of course, that was sixty odd years ago and times have changed.

Ian42 What makes you think that the EU was responsible for two world wars? And do you know anything about lend lease and Roosevelt's deliberate policy to break up the British Empire?

Ian42 you are so funny. EU gave us 2 world wars. Brilliant.

And who will supply that information? - how can we get objective information? Let us hope it will not become an excuse to bombard us with more political propoganda.

I meant to add, how much information will be given to us all to make a sensible, informed and knowledgable decision when the Referendum is due?