Which country will be next to follow us out of the EU ?

That is interesting @Petra, though only confirming what many of us suspected.

It’s years ago now, but for a while dh was involved in major infrastructure projects in former soviet bloc countries such as Bulgaria.

Being used to a tight system of tenders being submitted and scrutinised, he was shocked to realise that the EU wasn’t following this path - i.e. finding out how much a major project was going to cost before releasing the funds. Instead there were vast sums being dished out willy-nilly, much of which was evidently finding its way into corrupt pockets.

Maggiemaybe

But, from the Full Fact article linked to above.

In June, the European Commission called for a “common strategy” between member states and proposed a “central procurement process” for purchasing vaccines. In October, it said it was “imperative that member states follow a common vaccination strategy for vaccine deployment [...] Coordination at EU level is required to align our efforts, to ensure and to show solidarity, and to best ensure the full functioning of the internal market, good public health management for Covid-19 matters and beyond, and the protection of all EU citizens no matter where they live.”

That was a very strong message to the member states, and none of them ignored it.

That was a very strong message to the member states, and none of them ignored it.

So what?

You've missed off the bit that said that if the UK had still been in the UK we would probably have gone for 'solidarity' too.

But the fact remains that any MS could have done what we did, regardless of what the Commission called for.

It's not so long ago that one of the anti-EU arguments was that the UK always followed the rules when no-one else did so it wasn't fair.

Schrodinger's rules, I think...

So what?

Bit rude, Maizie, but I’ll explain.

As you say, had we been in the EU still we would probably have gone with solidarity too.

But we weren’t, so didn’t. Ergo your assertion that our head start had nothing to do with Brexit is incorrect.