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Jon you should get yourself over to Brussels, get a headset on and show our mottley bunch how it's done ;)

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1. Sweden, in common with many other smaller European countries, bears its fair share of the blame for the leave vote in the U.K. It’s all very well your friend lamenting that they have lost an ally against the Franco-German axis at the heart of the EU, but the reality is that too many of them were prepared to hide under their desks and leave the UK to take them on alone. They wanted the UK to do their dirty work for them and were content to leave us looking isolated in order to avoid upsetting Frau Merkel. This strategy has come back to bite them on the bum.

2. Germany burned Europe to the ground, twice, in the space of a generation. It’s all very well Germans of a certain age feeling post-war guilt but dealing with it is their business. If they feel the need to lock themselves in a padded cell for fear they might do it again, then they are at liberty to do so. They must not, however, judge us with the measure by which they judge themselves. We didn’t start the fire and we do not need to be locked up in federal hell alongside them. We are capable of making policy ourselves, without bringing the world to the brink of Armageddon or gassing six million of our own citizens in the name of racial purity. Any whinging about British attitudes to immigration should be set in that context before any German has the right to accuse us of behaving like it’s 1939, a year in which they were invading half of Central Europe and we were still hoping to peacefully stop them.

3. Your Macedonian friend it correct, Greece brought it on themselves; they got drunk on cheap credit. The EU, however, is guilty of leaving an alcoholic alone in a room with an unlocked liquor cabinet.

Also, it’s easy to see why a country that would immediately be a net beneficiary of EU spending would be so keen to join, and why it would be so disappointed to see one of the biggest net contributors planning to leave. Come next March, the magic money tree will become somewhat less fruitful than certain continental treasuries have been used to.

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It's been 73 years since the war ended - we really need to let it go.

Using the 2nd World War to pillory modern day Germans is like blaming modern day Brits for the Amritsar Massacres, the Boer concentration camps, the way we partitioned India, the Bengal Famine, and other less salubrious actions of the British Empire.

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Try this route via Google.

https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rc...3fHwtneihorokB

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Germanys attitude in relation to WWII is interesting. They certainly don't hide their past. Go to Berlin to see examples of this. The Topography of Terror exhibition and holocaust memorials are amazing exhibits right in the centre of the city.

There is acceptance of what happened but also a clear admission of how it happened. It's the understanding of the how the rise of Hitler occurred and how this lead to the holocaust, etc happened is how we avoid these things happen again. This acceptance is ingrained in the culture of your common German but they have moved on from the sackcloth and ashes repentance and are now wanting this not to happen again.

Should the architects of the German war of aggression of 1939-1945 be forgiven? No. Should we punish todays Germans for the sins of their fathers and grandfathers? Also no.

Germany is a fascinating country. They have had two massive upheavals rewriting the way their country works in the end of WWII and the end of the cold war and reunification. Berlin is the most extreme case of this and would encourage anyone to visit that city

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Well yes they should. In this instance it’s jonbxx’s German friend who chose to characterise the UK’s current position by reference to “pre-1939”. Whether this is a widespread belief in Germany or just his own, it was his choice to liken today to the state of Europe in the 1930s. That being the case he really needs to drop any idea that there is any kind of equivalence between Germany then and the U.K. now.

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Apologies, I wasn’t clear. His point was that the UK was at its peak before 1939. Post war Britain was nowhere near what it was before the war. Within a few years of the end of the war we were nearly broke, the empire dissolved and the last gasp was the Suez crisis. The pre 1939 was the UK pre 1939, not Germany

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I can't see a lot of difference from an ascendancy perspective between the UK and Germany now.

Chamberlain the appeaser; May the appeaser; Merkel the Fuehrer (sort of).

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What is your source for that information? Sure, Germany has the largest economy in Europe but that doesn't mean the country's government is going to Empire-build or Germans are born to dominate other countries.

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Don’t you mean ‘doing what we would like to do, only being more efficient and doing it better’?

e.g. being the main economic power in Europe.

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Due to The apportionment system, Germany will naturally have the most MEPs as they have the biggest population at 96 for the 2019 election. Funnily enough, they have the lowest level of representation at 860,000 citizens per MEP. Malta has 77,000 per MEP but only 6 MEPs.

If anything, Germany doesn’t have enough influence in the European Parliament for its population. The EU wide apportionment is 1 MEP for every 716,000 citizens.

Numbers here - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appo...ean_Parliament

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This is an utterly ridiculous statement.

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