Being right more important than what's right.

fullfact.org/europe/our-eu-membership-fee-55-million/

We had nearly half of it back, Day6. You do exaggerate.

Get rid of the Tory government instead of supporting it and you will get rid of those with vested interests. Problem solved.

Paddyann - Merry christmas from a brain dead bigotted Brexiteer xx

Well said Whitewave!

you could be talking about our dear House of Lords here

You could, and that ought to be scrapped.

However we arenot, we are in league with Brussels crooks with vested interests, to serve the big corporations (more money and power for both sides) and we were paying (in 20015) £17.8 billion - £350 million a week. Yes it's been broken down, because they kindly give us a small amount of that back.

UK taxpayers are subsidising those EU charlatans.

Luckylegs I do agree with you. Our government needs to grow a backbone and put UK first. I voted out but am not in any way 'antiEuropean'. I voted out because the governments we had were clearly taking us into a United States of Europe - making us have a racist immigration policy towards the 'rest of the world' and ruining our economy. And Cameron did not even try to get us a fair deal. Let us be an independent country with good relations with our neighbour states and the wider world.

However, if we go with the Canada agreement, we will get TTIP by the back door, and by the front door if May and Fox have the trade deals they want with the USA.
Our government was one of the ones pushing for TTIP.
My MEPs have always sent me information about any attempt to get TTIP pushed through, and have definitely been against it from the start, as they know the effect it will have on the NHS.
Companies in the US and Canada will be able to sue the NHS and our councils for lost profit, just as Branson has done recently.
This is scandalous, too.

Our MPs are only being allowed to read all 850 pages on the Brexit negotiations one at a time in the reading room of the house of commons, and not allowed to discuss with us what they have read.

Why did you have to put in the comment about those of a left persuasion?
I think you'll find that I was arguing about this long before you noticed it.
It's not a party political problem.

Want more about how the EU operates?

This from MEP Molly Scott Cato about the secrecy within the EU. She states "As an MEP I’m party to the transatlantic trade deal’s inner workings. I’m sworn to secrecy, but this much I can say: The EU's TTIP is undemocratic."

It's like something from a spy novel with villains into corruption covering their tracks!

"What I am able to reveal from my visit to the library is that I left without any sense of reassurance either that the process of negotiating this trade deal is democratic, or that the negotiators are operating on behalf of citizens. The whole process, from the implicit accusation of industrial espionage, to the recognition about who is actually engaged in the negotiations, makes it clear that this is a corporate discussion, not a democratic one.

I picture a room full of bureaucrats trying to find ways to facilitate the business of the world’s most powerful companies, many of which have a turnover larger than the economic activity of some EU member states."

"So why would anyone want a world that contains a giant trading area stretching from Alaska to the Black Sea? I think the vision arises from a sense of the need to order and control*; the sense that uniformity is equivalent to security. But it is also clear that the decisions about what this uniform system of regulation and trade would look like *are devised by corporations whose very DNA is the profit motive, and which are legally required to serve shareholders at the expense of all others

Who would want to be part of that set-up? Not me.

We have to free ourselves from this unaccountable, , greedy, political monster. It is making the very rich even richer and hiding away all those well paid bureaucrats who serve it, who make these deals happen. We are paying them billions to operate in this way.

Apologies. The MEP is a she, not he. Molly Scott Cato.

At last we have a glimmer of hope that our country will not be run by these sinister vested interests.

Yes that's why the majority of us are SO glad we are leaving the EU. Secrecy rules! And it is sinister.

Please DO read this (Guardian article) about the SECRECY of the EU and the TTIP deal.
It is written by an MEP in Brussels who isn't given access to documentation. If you aren't concerned about the vested interests of big businesses being guarded by the EU, you ought to be. He had to campaign with fellow MEPs to be allowed access to details and documents.

" ...since the negotiations are taking place in secret. In order to read even brief notes of what has been discussed I have to be reminded of my duties not to undertake espionage for foreign powers. Repeated complaints about secrecy from my fellow Green members have resulted in our being admitted to the restricted reading room but we are still not able to share what we discover there with our constituents or with journalists. What we do know is that 92% of those involved in the consultations have been corporate lobbyists. Of the 560 lobby encounters that the commission had, 520 were with business lobbyists and only 26 (4.6%) were with public interest groups

This means that, for every encounter with a trade union or consumer group, there were 20 with companies and industry federations.

It is scandalous! Those of a left wing persuasion reading that would (normally) have to agree.

The whole article here.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/04/secrets-ttip-corporations-not-citizens-transatlantic-trade-deal

May has two special advisers, both of whom earn more than MPs. One of them earns £140,000 a year, £25,000 more than the woman he replaced.
They are the ones who advise May to hide, and not say much if anything in meetings. Do they earn their pay?

The people I knew had "proper jobs" in their fields. They attended the EU committees as UK representatives when the meetings were called. It was not their full time employment. They did essential work on our behalf but were not an any "gravy train"

My is a reply to Day6 who quoted Alan Sked

Would that be the same Alan Sked who used to be leader of UKIP?

I know two people who were members of EU Committees. One, who gained a PhD in Fibre Optics in the 1970s (one of the first in the world) represented the UK on a committee deciding on electronic and optical communication. The other, a clinical biochemist, represented the UK on a committee deciding standards of medical laboratory practice.

They have both told me that they sat round a table with a little union jack in front of them with representatives of other EU countries to agree standards. These people were not eurocrats, they were scientists and technologists, all highly expert in their fields. They did have administrative support but the decisions were made by them, not the administrators.

In both these fields standardisation is absolutely essential. I would say that what they did was of "great import". In future the UK will have to abide by the standards set by the "little committees" but we will have NO say. We will have given up control.

Needless to say both of these people voted to Remain, and not because they were paid lots of money (they weren't) but because they actually understood how vital it was for the UK to be represented in these discussions and decision making. They were devasted by the result and I can well understand why. The UK, if we leave the EU, will become a second class state.

In the EU Parliament I would like to know who is not elected by the electorate in their country or be nominees of their country.
Please do not say Beaurocrats as they are simply Civil Servants employed by the EU Govt exactly the same as the UK has Whitehall full of them - and there are far fewer in the EU for a greater number of Population than in the UK.

They have a lovely lifestyle and vested interests and no one ever dismisses them because they are not subject to elections
you could be talking about our dear House of Lords here

I see up thread that I think it was lemon says that nothing is agreed until all is agreed. Because of the behaviour of DDavis when he was interviewed on Sunday morning programme the EU have said that they now want the initial agreement to be made legally binding.
Parliament voted to hold an advisory referendum and the fact that Cameron said the result would be abided by was a bit iffy to say the least,
Referendums are supposed to have percentages laid down for the result to be binding - percentage of electorate voting and a percentage difference between the for and against - none of this was done for the UK referendum.
The Leave camp were so surprised they won they had no idea what to do afterwards and they have not got a much better idea now.
You cannot run a country by stopping agreements and trade and replacing it with nothing. As yet no countries actually want to do a trade deal with the U.K but are all trying to get deals done with the EU - Japan and Canada to name two.
The US has told UK if it wants a deal it must reduce standards to please American farmers - why can they not up theirs? Once the UK agrees to reduce standards it will mean less trade for UK with countries with high standards.
Unfortunately the whole thing is one huge mess with no obvious way out of it with benefits to the UK population.

We do not need Eastern European thieves/rapists/sheep rustlers etc replace Eastern European with "Black" or "Asian"- and consider whether that is acceptable.

The whole brexit project, relentlessly promoted over forty years by an unholy alliance of sinister vested interests, is not right.

Exchange the word Brexit for EU and I'll agree.

So does London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Professor Alan Sked, from the department of International History.

He argues that a bureaucratic, political and financial elite have vested interests in holding the EU together but are not accountable to ordinary people.

"They have a wonderful time and get paid very well for meeting in endless little committees to decide prices of turnips, cod quotas, strength of hairdryers etc. They don't do anything of great import."

They have a lovely lifestyle and vested interests and no one ever dismisses them because they are not subject to elections. There are lots of vested interests within the EU. A self-perpetuating international clique. They don't understand why ordinary people don't respect them any longer. "

Just one of the reasons why Brits didn't want to pay their wages any more.

iam64 I completely agree with you. I know of several people who voted Leave because they didn’t believe it would actually mean Leave. It was to ‘teach Cameron a lesson’. A few also thought Britain would be flooded with Turkish immigrants if we remained.
I cannot understand how leaving benefits us.

It's pejorative and you know it, Chewbacca.
Thieves, rapists and sheep rustlers can come from anywhere, as you say, so by linking them with Eastern Europeans she is denigrating Eastern Europeans.
Or does she mean that those from Western Europe and the rest of the world are acceptable?
However you look at it, it's pejorative.

I assume that what the OP means by "they" wanting to "bankrupt us" is Remainers.

Whether or not we remain in the EU is a complicated issue that should never have been the subject of a referendum. It was called IMHO was to silence Nigel Farage and placate the right wingers in the Conservative Party, and if David Cameron hadn't arrogantly believed that Remain would win, he would never have gone down that route.

It is shameful that so many lies were peddled during the referendum campaign and that Dominic Grieve has received death threats just for ensuring that Parliament have the opportunity to consider and vote on the final deal.

For Leavers to deplore this after campaigning on the UK Parliament's sovereignty is pure hypocrisy. Does everyone have so much faith in this Government to allow them to agree a deal with no scrutiny?

And? Had she said all Eastern Europeans, I could have understood your ire, but she qualified her statement by stating that those who do, need to be removed. She also confirmed an acknowledgement that immigration is needed but she's right, surely? Why do we need any more "rapists, sheep rustlers or thieves", no matter what part of the globe they come from?

"I am not opposed to immigration as we will always need immigrants – let’s face it, we always have, but freedom of movement is being abused. We do not need Eastern European thieves/rapists/sheep rustlers etc and we do need to be able to remove these people asap once they offend. Freedom of movement makes that difficult."

I think saying that Eastern Europeans are cattle rustlers and rapists is quite pejorative, Chewbacca.