Agreed, Pete. But in the above case it's our Politicians taking the credit for our own national domestic spending. But my point was that the young people actually think that it's the generosity of the EU digging into their own coffers rather than our money being passed back to us while they take the credit. Pensions, Road Tax etc, the original intentions of those went bye the bye a long time ago. Road Tax goes straight into the main Government coffers not into any separate Road account meant for infrastructure maintenance and has been doing so for decades without any announcement of the change in the original policy. The same goes for Pensions. When I started paying for my State Pension the Government told us that we were paying for our own pensions, but now we're being told that that has long gone that that the present employed are paying for our Pensions........that has to be road to disaster in the long term.
All true of course but... The EU gives us our money, that the UK government would not giveus if it were entirely up to them. A good example is right here where I live. Our sea front has been substantially redeveloped. The bulk of the money to do that came from the eu. Of course that means it came from us, but, I firmly believe that the UK government would not of spent millions on a barely significant north eastern town. Governments past and present have consistently shown that they believe nothing exists north of Liverpool. They openly refer to Liverpool as the north. But even that is some extreme frontier. It's like space. They sometimes talk about how brilliant it would be to develop there, then decide to leave it for now. At least the EU acknowledges our existence.
The point I was trying to make. All money goes into the pot, regardless of if its the EU or our own government. They then deal it out to us, and we are supposed to be grateful.
Slightly off topic I travel up the A1 quite a lot and the overhead signs always say 'The North' - but I've never been able to work out when I've got there! there should be a big arrow pointing downwards say 'North' when I get there. Although, that poses another question. If I've reached 'The north' and keep going in a northerly direction, where am I going? Now these are important questions and not silly amorphous ones like 'In' or 'Out'.
South You know when there's a change in pronouncing the vowels and when you're bought a pint of beer rather than a Lager......and you don't have to buy one back.
Those figures are freely available and been quoted on this thread a few times. £13 billion in, £4.5 billion back. But the point of it all is not to get back what you pay in. The point is to help the less well off nations and help them catch up a bit. Muslim communities operate a similar scheme - the successful members of the community pay more into a kitty to help out ordinary individuals in difficulty or those who want to start a business. Unfortunately the British way is to say "I put x amount in so why didn't I get that back?". I never fail to be saddened when I see groups in restaurants arguing over who had what and how much that means they should be paying towards the bill.
The north is truly magical. The closer you get, the more powerful the magic. For example. When you get fairly close, you'll encounter a phenomenon whereby even though it is getting colder, the amount of clothes people wear reduces. People are instead warmed by ice cold beer. Go further still, and people start talking funny and men sometimes wear skirts and throw whole tree trunks for fun. Further still and you get to the magical epicentre, where, I'm told, it is so magic that a day lasts months, but so does night. Oh and they tell me it's so rich in magic that you can actually see the magic flashing green and red and blue in the night sky. And at the very epicentre, it gets so magic that if you keep going north, you are actually going south.
Unfortunately that hasn't happened has it??. If you discount the recent East European members there's Spain, Greece, Italy, and Portugal to name a few who are struggling and have been for nearly a decade but there's not been any funding for them to recover and catch up.
The Italian economy grew by 1.4% in 2015 compared to the UK's 2.2%. In 2014 their deficit was 9.7% compared to the UK's 19.1%. Sixth largest world economy in 2014 which was one place higher than the UK. Unemployment is 11% compared to the UK at 5% (although our figures have been manipulated by including part time and zero hours contract workers). It's banks are a mess though. Greece & Portugal got bailed out. Their problems date back to the inception of the Euro and their weak negotiations over the valuations of their currencies at the time. They were always on the backfoot from that point on. I'm not a fan of a shared currency and personally would happily see the Euro gone. The Spanish situation is less simple. On the face of it a fairly affluent country it has a great social divide with unemployment running at 25% or thereabouts. The Spanish got into a property boom situation with the resulting personal debt crisis and coupled to a basket case of a banking system needed a bail out for their banks So yes, it would be easy for the naysayers to say that it doesn't work. But when a crisis threatened the EU and the IMF have been able to step in. Look at the Republic Of Ireland. What is less easy to quantify is how badly or well these nations would have been doing without the EU. On a different tack, one of the successes of the EU applies to almost all of us. EU competition laws allowed the motor manufacturers exemption so that they could create networks of agents and service centres. As the use of complex electronics in cars increased a review of this exemption took place and resulted in the Motor Vehicle Block Exemption Regulation. The upshot of this is that; a] your new car can be serviced outside of the dealer network using parts of equivalent quality without affecting the vehicles warranty. b] the manufacturer has to make key technical data freely available. c] the manufacturer cannot stop (or actively hinder) companies developing tools for the repair of their vehicles. Most importantly this includes software for reading fault codes, reading live data, carrying out component calibrations (usually referred to as adaptation) and component coding. d] if requested they have to provide training at the same rate as for their dealer network. Without this almost all cars, vans and lorries would now be tied in to the dealer network.
I'm just wondering to myself. The eu has indeed brought benefits such as standardisation of various things both technical and legal. I wonder if leaving the eu would destroy that. For example. The 'stay' side often warn that it is the eu that gave us many of our favourable employment rights. Those rights are now enshrined in law. If we left the eu, would those laws be suddenly scrapped? That's a rhetorical question, but if anyone has any ideas on it....
Although I agree with most of what you have said these benefits were not initiated by the EU but have been incorporated into EU law. Way before they brought out the EU law that cars can be serviced outside of the dealer network without affecting the warranty, I threatened to take a manufacturer to court (issued the summons) over Mrs Shiney's car. They paid up, after arguing, and I found out that the Consumers' Association were also in the process of doing so. It was the Consumers' Association that got the law changed here and then, with their opposite numbers in Europe, got the law changed in the EU. The other points that followed were all instigated and forced through by the Consumers' Associations. The EU is rarely proactive but simply reactive. A similar thing has happened with the roaming charges on mobile phones but to be fair, the EU has, in some cases, seen the light and jumped before being pushed. I was also involved in another matter that actually got the EU ruling reversed because it was patently erroneous. The EU inspector, at the time, had no choice but to make his erroneous ruling (because of stupidly drafted EU Laws) but didn't put into place anything to change that Law (my personal opinion was because big business was behind getting that ruling). It took over three years, instigated by me, to get it overturned. To be fair to the EU, they didn't resist (all I'd pointed out were the remarks made in the Inspectors 100 page document) but took over three years to take it through their bureaucracy. It need only have taken a few months!
Oh dear. I may have to disagree here. Yes, there was a challenge but the ruling only covered any parts that were not subject to any service actions. So by the simple expedient of adding (for example) "lube window channels with spray lubricant part no.xxxx the window mechanism motor fell out of the no terms warranty. Goodwill payments have been commonplace since the eighties to save bad publicity but they were discretionary and the CA along with the AA?RAC were very good at assisting in cases of what was regarded as premature failure. There was no UK law that negated the manufacturers warranty terms, only the fitness for purpose regulations. The MVBER was opposed vigorously by the manufacturers and franchised dealer organisations but the independent operators organisations lobbied successfully in it's favour.
When I lived and worked in Hampshire for a while, there were people who, without even joking, referred to London as "up north".
