I see the EU Remainers' PROJECT FEAR is alive and well.

Day6, the EU is not responsible for the poor living standards in this country. I have lived and worked in Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and the UK. I think the UK is a wonderful place to live if you are wealthy and privileged. The inequalities that exist between the rich and the poor/average earners is a national scandal.

Anyone would think we are leaving an EU Utopian land of milk and honey. There is abysmal poverty across the continent and in the other member states. We see many impoverished areas when we visit France and Spain...twoof the more developed countries of the EU. I dread to think how many Eastern Europeans fare. The Greeks have been suffering for some time.

The UK isn't alone in having people living in difficult circumstances. Some people would have us believe we are the only place with problems!

From www.poverty.org.uk/summary/eapn.shtml

In spite of the overall wealth of the European Union (EU), poverty in the EU is still at a relatively high level. Nearly 1 in 7 people are at risk of poverty.

and the reality is that poverty in the EU is a very real problem which brings misery to the lives of many people. This is a direct attack on people's fundamental rights, limits the opportunities they have to achieve their full potential, brings high costs to society and hampers sustainable economic growth. Poverty also reflects failures in the systems for redistributing resources and opportunities in a fair and equitable manner. These lead to deep-seated inequalities and thus to the contrast of excessive wealth concentrated in the hands of a few while others are forced to live restricted and marginalised lives, even though they are living in a rich economic area.

Sounds pretty much like the sort of problems the UK has to sort out. So much for the other EU member states faring better.

*2005 data shows that 16% of the EU population, that is about 78 million people, are at-risk-of poverty. 4 However there is a wide difference between Member States: for instance, between 9% and 12% of the population are at risk in Sweden, the Czech Republic, Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Slovenia and Finland whereas 20% or over are at risk in Lithuania, Poland, Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal.
Children (0-17) have a particularly high rate of poverty at 19%. One parent households and those with dependent children have the highest poverty risk. For single parents with one dependent child the risk is 33%. Other age groups with high risk are young people (18-24) at 18% and older people (65+) at 19% with older women at much higher risk than men (21% compared to 16%). Of course, as highlighted earlier, these figures do not include some of those in the most extreme situations such as some minority ethnic groups, especially the Roma, immigrants, undocumented migrants, the homeless, people living in or leaving institutions, etc.*
In most, but not all, Member States where poverty affects a large share of the population, it also tends to be more severe. The depth or severity of poverty (i.e. how far below the at-risk-of-poverty threshold the income of people at risk of poverty is) for the EU as a whole is 23% but this ranges from as low as 14% in Finland to as high as 30% in Poland.

Poverty has not been eradicated on the continent and given we are in the top three as far as contribution to the EU is concerned, let's not pretend that money is making for a fairer society on the land mass the other side of the English Channel. You frequently tell us how bad things are in the UK!

There are statistic sites galore relating to EU member states, (go find them) some more recent and NONE paint the rosy picture of EU membership being a panacea to the ills of society or indeed a Union which gives a fairer deal to all.

Project Fear, the Remoaners tack, telling us how life as we know it will end and how much better off we will be in the EU has no basis in fact.

Project fear, eh? Which is doing better, the eurozone or the UK?

infacts.org/look-whos-growing-fast-eurozone-not-uk/

I've never understood, grannyactivist, why May did not put lawyers in charge of Brexit.
There are enough of them on the Tory benches.

A bit like one party going into divorce proceedings with a QC and the other with an articled clerk.

Goodness, how true that feels Grannyactivist. You are also right to flag up how we stand legally in regards to the contract we have with the rest of the EU.

I was trying to move past that a little and look at what we have paid for and received while a member, that we will still have to pay for ourselves once we have left. One thing we have already seen is that we will need a whole new department to negotiate trade deals. There will be many other areas where the money we no longer pay will go straight to doing the same job in this country. The idea that we have this money because we are not paying the EU and can then do with it whatever any single leave voter wants seems one of the more unthought through aspects of the levers views.

It's a divorce. Before the divorce can be ratified the money needs to be sorted. As a partner Britain entered into a contract to pay the EU X amount of money. Legally Britain is bound by the terms of the contract and the divorce cannot happen until the finances are sorted. Other countries in the EU have individuals with a wealth of negotiating experience and sadly it seems that Britain does not. A bit like one party going into divorce proceedings with a QC and the other with an articled clerk. Britain has no legal grounds for reneging on the terms of the contract it signed and therefore must pay, like it or not, and no amount of posturing will change that.

So, it seems the leavers are suggesting that we leave the EU, stop paying anything to anyone but continue to run things just as they were (or differently) and everything we ever had done for us as part of a group will costs us nothing.

Is this really likely?

I don’t know about other voters ( who voted Leave) Monica but I would certainly have accepted the result of a democratic vote, and am appalled at the amount of insults thrown at us from remainers, even now after 18 months!

count*r*y, even. 'Laughing stock should be a strike through

Brexiteers need their phony villain, the Remainer's supposed 'Project Fear' to bolster their belief in their own cause. As a Remainer I only hear about it when told about it by Brexiteers, I am not aware that Remainers are doing any such thing. Just because Brexit won does not mean that Remainers have immediately to convert to being Brexiteers, our worries and fears about our exit are still there. Would the Brexiteers have immediately converted to Remainers if they had lost, I doubt it.

Brexiteers need to be reminded that 'the country' did not vote for Brexit. The Brexit victory was by a small margin and had the poll been the week before, the week after, or a couple of months either way the result could have been reversed. That is how close it was.

Once the poll result was announced I accepted we had to work to make Brexit work. I would have liked to have seen the British government declare UDI and to have walked out of the EU at the end of the EU financial year they were then in. A quick and brutal Brexit, would probably have been the best policy for the county.

Watching the Brexiteers fannying around in a state of complete incompetence and confusion is unedifying and does nothing to promote their cause and just makes them -a laughing stock- look slightly foolish

OK so we leave and we have all the money we currently send to the EU to spend on ourselves. Does anyone really believe it would be spent on Schools, NHS, Social Care or anything else we need? It will all be funneled off into useless vanity projects and anything spare will go to Defence and raising MPs' salaries because they've had to work so hard on Brexit! Cynical? Yes actually!

Day 6 trolling again without any real evidence for any of her statements- supported by minnions without any either

Won't waste my time, for sure.

"Overall, what was most odd about Hammond’s package yesterday was that it felt like a pre-election Budget rather than a post-election one. Bits of cash here and there for various interest groups, as well as buying off Brexit rebels and Universal Credit rebels alike. Yet that underlines the strange (majority-free) political waters in which we all now sail, as our exit from the EU looms on the horizon. For all his talk about looking at the long term, Hammond appears to be just trying to survive from Budget to Budget. For both him and the PM, getting to the new Year, and then getting to Brexit in 2019, seem to be the real timelines behind yesterday’s announcements. In the FT, former Treasury chief Nick Macpherson rightly says that Hammond’s first Budget of the new Parliament was “eminently forgettable”. But that may be its point, simply to avoid making more waves in this uncertain ocean. Asked by Today if he was a Brexit convert now, Hammond replied: “Look, I’m focused on getting this done”. "

He is still not convinced by Brexit. Probably hoping that parliament will force them to have another referendum and vote to stay in.

The problem is that the politicians didn't need to. They had all these civil servants to sort things out for them.
Brexit has been forced on them, and they now have to live up to their hype.

Have you read reports about what DD has been up to in Foreign press? He had a meeting with French ministers etc about a week ago which was supposed to be about Brexit but he never mentioned it at all - the French were quite bemused. The Spanish have said that he has totally misrepresented what they said to him and so it goes on with other countries. They all think Brits are mad with a useless Govt and are worried about the quality of the politicians who are supposedly negotiating for the UK.
One retired judge from the ECJ is worried that they do not understand the workings of the ECj or what they are responsible for and also about the workings of the EU.

Which of you Brexiteers are pleased that, according to the IFS, we are now going through the worst decade as far as pay is concerned since before living memory?

Yes, because until we pay a whacking ransom we have been kidnapped.

Negotiating?

However, we have moved on from the voting haven’t we, that was 18 months ago, and we are now negotiating our exit.

Perhaps varian everybody that you know, but I know people who have lived in various countries who voted to Leave, and we have several on GN also who have lived abroad but voted to leave the EU.

Thank you Greta for offering more perspective on the debate.

What a thoroughly unpleasant rant!
But let's not forget the £350 million a week for the NHS (as per the red bus) which so many found completely convincing!!

You speak from experience Greta. Evereyone I know who has had experience of living in other countries thinks as you do. Unfortunately on one day last year too many people who had little or no knowledge of life in other countries believed the lies of the leave campaign. We are being steered off a cliff into a dark future by blind ignorance and predjudice.

Well said, Greta. It needs someone to say that who has lived elsewhere and knows how we are seen.
Everyone I know who lives in other EU countries thinks we are mad.

Day6, the EU is not responsible for the poor living standards in this country. I have lived and worked in Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and the UK. I think the UK is a wonderful place to live if you are wealthy and privileged. The inequalities that exist between the rich and the poor/average earners is a national scandal. At least it should be a national scandal but we seem to tolerate it. There is a lot of talk about our poor productivity compared to other EU countries. Many reasons have been put forward but I firmly believe there is a cultural aspect here. Leaving the EU will only exacerbate this problem since we will no longer have to strive to keep up with the other EU countries. We can ”take back control” and carry on in true British muddled fashion.

'I said that anyone would be an idiot to believe it suzied it doesn’t make the person who said it an idiot.' ....