Troubles ahead for the EU

EU Medical: I am off to the States and bought some medical Insurance - now that was about 35 GBP, for 56 GBP I could have got an annual Policy. When I go to Europe I always buy medical cover to include repatriation so I can get home in a chartered plane if necessary. So the EU cover is not much of a benefit really, and one I'd swap for the additional VAT I pay to keep all those lazy scoundrels in jobs in Parliament and in the Commission.

Interesting fact, that if any foreigner (US citizens included) are hospitalised in the UK there is no charge apart for prescriptions, which are about 7 GBP approx per.

One thing for sure, when we leave the rest of the EU will be paying a whole lot more in tax. And you'll be short of fish too! Lets all let Turkey in, that will not be expensive will it?

/EDIT Tony Blair and his stupid red lines - he gave away our damn money, what an arse.
 
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So explain why you must pay for healthcare in places such as Switzerland, the Channel Islands and Norway if you are on holiday. Surely if it isn't that much of a problem, these places would have similar systems in place. Simply saying "Oh we could have done it anyway" is a pathetic argument. If you did all the things anyway, you would basically have exactly the same thing that we have now.

You have to pay in Switzerland and Norway because they are outside the EU and everything we do is made to be based on "EU or not EU" rather than any other considerations - eg the dropping of commonwealth trade benefits etc.

Ending up with the same thing is exactly my point. You get all the good bits of the EU, via treaties or bilateral agreements or whatever, without the massive bureaucracy and unnecessary additional crap we get with the EU. It would be a lot cheaper as well.
 
A lot of stuff comes as a given from the latest GATT agreements.

Switzerland has an agreement with the EU all the benefits none of the crap. Just goes to show that Switzerland has a decent government.

/EDIT Tony Blair - took us into a stupid and unjust war, what an arse.

//EDIT Demanding that any person in charge of the EURO Bank is one nationality or another - not really in the spirit of the closer integration and pan nationality now is it? Especially someone with a question mark hanging over their character. So I suppose the next Chairman will be German? Oh and letting the Irish have a commissioner (population 3.5 million) just because they voted no in the referendum, really - shameful bribery.
 
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You have to pay in Switzerland and Norway because they are outside the EU and everything we do is made to be based on "EU or not EU" rather than any other considerations - eg the dropping of commonwealth trade benefits etc.

Ending up with the same thing is exactly my point. You get all the good bits of the EU, via treaties or bilateral agreements or whatever, without the massive bureaucracy and unnecessary additional crap we get with the EU. It would be a lot cheaper as well.

It is exactly my point that Switzerland and Norway aren't in the EU. I was asking why we don't have agreements for free healthcare from them if it would be so simple to set up without the EU. Saying that we ignore countries that are not in the EU is a very poor argument with no evidential basis whatsoever.
Your point is massively flawed. You wouldn't end up with a vast amount of the good points as you would never manage to come to a proper agreement. Show me agreements between other countries in the world that are even remotely similar to what we have with the EU, by that I mean freedom to work wherever you want, freedom to trade with no duty charges, freedom to travel.
Also the EU doesn't have a "massive" bureaucracy. As that article points out, the EU employs less people than the BBC does.
 
It is fun that in the world the EU is mostly seen as the best working model of regional integration, envied by most african, asian and south american states, and still people here think its the work of Satan. I can only say it again, you have no idea about the benefits of free trade and common norms.
 
Frankly, if you'd look it up, you'd find that you have free emergency health care in the EFTA countries as well. The healthcare thing isn't really the best pro-EU argument as we've already had similar bilateral agreements before we entered the EU and still have one with Croatia as it's a popular tourist destination over here.
 
Without border checks how are we supposed to know who is in the country? UK border control is laughable as it is but still, the answer is not to remove it altogether. Areas of the EU are ridiculously porous when it comes to control of the "external" border (I'm thinking of the Albania - Italy route in particular) and without internal border checks that problem is spread across the whole continent. Thats even before you start to think about the issues of internal migration which is completely out of control.

Good point. I'm sick of those Welshies and Scots coming across our borders and stealing our jobs. Completely and utterly unchecked, too!
 
It is exactly my point that Switzerland and Norway aren't in the EU. I was asking why we don't have agreements for free healthcare from them if it would be so simple to set up without the EU. Saying that we ignore countries that are not in the EU is a very poor argument with no evidential basis whatsoever.
Your point is massively flawed. You wouldn't end up with a vast amount of the good points as you would never manage to come to a proper agreement. Show me agreements between other countries in the world that are even remotely similar to what we have with the EU, by that I mean freedom to work wherever you want, freedom to trade with no duty charges, freedom to travel.
Also the EU doesn't have a "massive" bureaucracy. As that article points out, the EU employs less people than the BBC does.

I don't view freedom to work where you want within the EU without any checks as a good thing. You are free to work anywhere in the world, providing you can qualify for the individual country's entry requirements.

Free trade is great, but free trade for just those 27 countries in the "club" is not so great. There are big tariffs for import from outside the EU.

Freedom to travel - again, people are free to travel just about anywhere in the world, providing you can meet the entry requirements for each country which are based on that country's individual needs.

People - a) The BBC is itself bloated as it is, so not the best comparison. b) The EU hasn't had its accounts signed off by the auditors for 14 years.

It is fun that in the world the EU is mostly seen as the best working model of regional integration, envied by most african, asian and south american states, and still people here think its the work of Satan. I can only say it again, you have no idea about the benefits of free trade and common norms.

I don't know what you mean by "common norms". As I said above, free trade is great in principle, but free trade just among the EU to the exclusion of others is pointless. What is so great about "integration"? Co-operation, yes, but why integration?

Again on free-trade, like the healthcare, assuming it is felt to be necessary why should it take need 24,000, unaccountable, taxpayer funded people to make it work? The UK joined the EEC because we were told that it was just about free trade, what I think annoys a lot of people is that that was just an outright lie, free trade is just 1 small part of a push to Unity and Federalism.
 
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Lets just pick one random one from the list shall we.

"Any citizen of a European country is entitled to free medical treatment if he or she is taken ill or suffers an accident in another member state. So long as you carry the correct form from your national health service, no questions will be asked."

This did not happen before the EU, and nor would it have. Clearly it directly benefits citizens of the UK when they travel abroad. Now stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
Except you're wrong.

I can go to Norway, without showing my passport, and have free medical treatment without questions. I can move there today and as a Swede I do not need a residence permit (no citizen from the nordic countries do) and I can stay there up to six months. After that I will need a norwegian identification number, but as I automatically qualify for one I can stay there indefinately.

Hell, their social safety grid is way better than ours and we like to think ours is pretty good. 100% paid sick leave from day 1, better pension and mandatory unemployment benefits, higher wage and a much shorter work week. Guess that's what happens when your country sit on a pile of oil and you dont need to share with your poor cousins.

This has been the case since 1954, and it's creation is the result of goverments talking to other goverments without the need for a middle man.
 
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Except you're wrong.

I can go to Norway, without showing my passport, and have free medical treatment without questions. I can move there today and as a Swede I do not need a residence permit (no citizen from the nordic countries do) and I can stay there up to six months. After that I will need a norwegian identification number, but as I automatically qualify for one I can stay there indefinately.

Yeah OK, I didn't look into Norway, but the point still stands for Switzerland and the Channel Islands. When I went to Switzerland I had to get medical insurance to be covered, While there may be small scale examples of some agreements being reached, it certainly wouldn't be as comprehensive as it is now.
 
Travel insurance is so cheap its worth getting even if you are traveling in the EU so it makes the whole thing a bit of a waste of time.
 
I don't know what you mean by "common norms". As I said above, free trade is great in principle, but free trade just among the EU to the exclusion of others is pointless. What is so great about "integration"? Co-operation, yes, but why integration?

Again on free-trade, like the healthcare, assuming it is felt to be necessary why should it take need 24,000, unaccountable, taxpayer funded people to make it work? The UK joined the EEC because we were told that it was just about free trade, what I think annoys a lot of people is that that was just an outright lie, free trade is just 1 small part of a push to Unity and Federalism.

Common norms I mean that a product that fits the requirements for the german market more or less automatically can be sold in France, etc. The thing about free trade is that it DOES have a point in the exclusion of others. You just can't do that an your own as a single tiny country, but as a whole Union it does. For example: A company can no longer afford the high wages in a country, lets say the UK. So they can either go to China or to a EU member state, Poland in that case, which benefits the EU as a whole and Poland especially. Of course you can think the other way around, the same thing can happen when a company in Poland wants to buy high precision tools. The whole idea is to internalise external effects (Microeconomic theory in a macroeconomic point of view)
The thing that makes the EU so special is that 80% of its trade is inside of itself, making it pretty stable and decoupled from external market fluctuations and crises.
Also why integration and not cooperation: Integration benefits trade when you have similar laws and conditions in all your member states. Also it means you have less potential for a country to "go crazy" (see the example of UK and financial products, if that would have been handed over to the EU you wouldn't have the crash you have right now, possibly ending Londons importance in global banking). And this means you have stability, which is always favored by people who want to invest money and also benefits the economy. The Euro again was a huge leap forward, with its strict stability critera and the independent ECB (which are being breached by some countries during the crisis, but still).
The thing is that you have to protect politicians from themselves sometimes, and when I look at the current political state the UK is in, I would say it would benefit from more EU rather than less EU. You guys seem to have a talent to take part in everything that doesn't benefit you, but the big projects that bring the most benefits are being blocked and excluded out of protectionism - which eventually fires back.
 
Whether a company is making its goods in Poland or China is irrelevant - they still are not making them in the UK therefor the UK loses out.

"Stable and decoupled from external market fluctuations and crises" - That really doesn't stand up any more - in case you hadn't noticed, we are in the middle of a recession.

"if financial products were handed over to the EU, you wouldn't have the crash" - Again, look around you! It's not just the UK suffering, Germany has been in recession for longer than the UK (technically).

"Strict Stability Criteria" are meaningless given that nobody keeps to them.

The UK government may be a bunch of corrupt, thieving, incompetent fools, but at least we elected them, and we will have the opportunity to throw them out. The EU is a bunch of corrupt, thieving, incompetent fools we didn't elect and who we cannot remove (without leaving).
 
"if financial products were handed over to the EU, you wouldn't have the crash" - Again, look around you! It's not just the UK suffering, Germany has been in recession for longer than the UK (technically).

We are only at the beginning of the crisis, I would be more worried about longterm effects.
 
The UK government may be a bunch of corrupt, thieving, incompetent fools, but at least we elected them, and we will have the opportunity to throw them out. The EU is a bunch of corrupt, thieving, incompetent fools we didn't elect and who we cannot remove (without leaving).

Most of them are essentially elected though. Of the three groups (Council of Ministers, European Parliament and the Commission), the first is made up of ministers who usually will have been elected in their home country, the second are directly elected and the commissioners are selected by the Governments. The people in the three institutions are certainly far more democratically justified than the members of the House of Lords.
 
So I'm curious. With all the crazy intergovernmental political and economic agreements that form the EU, is there anyone in the EU who would want a stronger confederation of states? Maybe even a federal system with a real central government?
 
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No - you can take that Pound Note from my dead cold hand! I do not want to be German, nor French and they sure as hell do not want to be Alglo Saxon - this all a great big mistake.

Did I mention Tony Blair that well know cream puff who gave up loads of our rebate and had loads of pointless red lines inserted in the latest stupid treaty is an Arse?
 
So I'm curious. With all the crazy intergovernmental political and economic agreements that form the EU, is there anyone in the EU who would want a stronger confederation of states? Maybe even a federal system with a real central government?
With such rich and diverse cultural backgrounds within the continent, that would be foolish. I'm sure someone thinks it's a good idea but the crushing majority does not. I mean, some people even think Esperanto is a really practical language...
 
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