You just can't get away from it. Britain leaving the EU. Or Brexit for short. I hate the term. I actually voted to 'Remain,' but I can't think why. I spent ages on deciding the pros and cons of voting to either Remain or Leave, but I can honestly say that, if we were to have another referendum, I think I'd vote leave. I just hate all the unnecessary bureaucracy created by a virtually faceless load of pen-pushers in Strasberg or wherever the organisation is based. Did we really know what we were voting for during that referendum in 2016? I doubt it very much. The politicians didn't know how difficult it was going to be to disassociate ourselves from this 'thing.'
We should never have had this crazy referendum in the first place. It was only because of the rise of UKIP, the party who wanted us to leave the E.U. that David Cameron ran scared and had the thing in the first place. Surely, being a member of something, such as a club or trade union, you don't always agree with everything the organisation you're a member of does. But you have the power to influence things, as Britain did as an E.U. member. You can work to change it, for good or bad. Just leaving because you don't like it isn't really the answer. The joke is, that now UKIP has virtually disappeared from the political scene.
We should never have had this crazy referendum in the first place. It was only because of the rise of UKIP, the party who wanted us to leave the E.U. that David Cameron ran scared and had the thing in the first place. Surely, being a member of something, such as a club or trade union, you don't always agree with everything the organisation you're a member of does. But you have the power to influence things, as Britain did as an E.U. member. You can work to change it, for good or bad. Just leaving because you don't like it isn't really the answer. The joke is, that now UKIP has virtually disappeared from the political scene.
I really object to having laws and regulations foisted on us by an unelected body such as the EU parliament and those laws being above our parliament. We've currently got to give our consent if we want to have emails sent under something called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as from 25th May 2018. I'm getting endless emails to make sure I tick the relevant box to make sure companies which I've already signed up to, have my permission to continue to email me. It doesn't make sense when I've already made it clear I've given my sense when I signed up to these emails however long ago it was. Just another layer of bureaucracy. But what really gets me is that I bet this doesn't stop all the junk mail I get or the endless telephone calls trying to get me to claim PPI (which I've never had.) Even though I've signed up to the preference service which is supposed to prevent these calls, so I bet this new EU regulation will have about as much clout as a chocolate hammer.
So, we have to go through all this rigmarole about a Hard and a Soft Brexit (whatever they mean. Can someone explain, please? I'm totally confused.) It has never ever been explained to me how the E.U. works or what we got from being members. Where does the money we pay in go? What do we get? Do we get Nectar points?
I can see why people voted to leave. The British are a proud nation. We fought two World Wars. We got through The Blitz, Dunkirk and countless battles. We're an island. We like to make our own rules and regulations. We don't like being dominated by faceless bureaucrats.
Do we really, honestly spend £350 million a day on funding this organisation? Or was it weeks? I don't know, but the leave campaign had it emblazoned on the side of their bus, and it was going to fund the N.H.S. Was this just a reason to get people to vote leave? I think it was a week. Surely it was a week. I can't believe we'd pay that much a day. But Boris Johnson said it was an 'underestimate.'
Politicians on both sides of the referendum argument, remain and leave, made absolutely no attempt to explain what the E.U. was about. I can see that, when it was originally set up back in the 1950's, as the Common Market, and when it was just 6 nations, it was an attempt to get countries to cooperate and hopefully prevent another war in Europe. Cooperation being the operative word here. We had joined under the Harold Wilson government in the 1970s and then, for some strange reason we had a referendum, in 1975 I think it was, to ask 'The People' if they wanted us to be members. A rather back-to-front idea, putting the cart before the horse, to have a vote AFTER we joined. But the E.U., as it's now called, isn't the same organisation it was at that time. We now have a single currency, The Euro (which Britain didn't sign up to) and far more regulations and laws.
So, we have to go through all this rigmarole about a Hard and a Soft Brexit (whatever they mean. Can someone explain, please? I'm totally confused.) It has never ever been explained to me how the E.U. works or what we got from being members. Where does the money we pay in go? What do we get? Do we get Nectar points?
I can see why people voted to leave. The British are a proud nation. We fought two World Wars. We got through The Blitz, Dunkirk and countless battles. We're an island. We like to make our own rules and regulations. We don't like being dominated by faceless bureaucrats.
Do we really, honestly spend £350 million a day on funding this organisation? Or was it weeks? I don't know, but the leave campaign had it emblazoned on the side of their bus, and it was going to fund the N.H.S. Was this just a reason to get people to vote leave? I think it was a week. Surely it was a week. I can't believe we'd pay that much a day. But Boris Johnson said it was an 'underestimate.'
Politicians on both sides of the referendum argument, remain and leave, made absolutely no attempt to explain what the E.U. was about. I can see that, when it was originally set up back in the 1950's, as the Common Market, and when it was just 6 nations, it was an attempt to get countries to cooperate and hopefully prevent another war in Europe. Cooperation being the operative word here. We had joined under the Harold Wilson government in the 1970s and then, for some strange reason we had a referendum, in 1975 I think it was, to ask 'The People' if they wanted us to be members. A rather back-to-front idea, putting the cart before the horse, to have a vote AFTER we joined. But the E.U., as it's now called, isn't the same organisation it was at that time. We now have a single currency, The Euro (which Britain didn't sign up to) and far more regulations and laws.
Why is there such a problem with refugees and immigrants in this country? We've always had immigrants and been tolerant of refugees. Just look at our history, going back centuries. We've welcomed people from different ethnic groups, such as the Huguenots who fled persecution and then set up the silk weaving industry in London. The idea of having 'open borders,' meaning you can cross into the other E.U. countries without having to bother with endless paperwork, passports, making trading easier because you all have the same structures for such things as health and safety or weights and measures and even (heaven forbid) currency makes a lot of sense. If we could all agree on how to deal with refugees, then that problem might have been resolved, and not put pressure on one or two nations within the E.U. (ie: France and Britain, with all the problems caused by refugees at the Channel ports between France and Britain.) then the E.U. might have been a worthwhile organisation to be a member of. But it seems the different countries with the E.U. can't even agree on that. A shame. It would really make being a member worthwhile.
Why on earth, when they were setting up the 2016 EU Referendum, didn't they set a target, a sort of percentage of one way or other, to remain or leave, of, say 10% or even 20%, to which would be agreed as the winning amount of votes and then decide whether Britain remained or left the E.U. As it trend out, the result was 51.89% to leave and 48.11% to remain, a really tiny percentage to leave. Hardly enough to decide to leave. Surely it should have been a higher percentage to leave. A crazy mistake on the part of our politicians who put the country through this incredibly messy situation as regards the negotiations to extricate ourselves from the E.U. Then you learn that there were25,359 blank or invalid votes. What were those people who wasted their votes thinking? Just wasted. Either way, if they had used their votes sensibly then the results might have been completely different.
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