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Originally Posted by Macca371
Hmm, I dunno, some of those countries have huge problems. I think helping them through their problems is great. I know we have our own problems but a lot of people in these countries live in poverty, and in comparison, the money would be spent on us for luxury items, not essential ones.
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What, you mean luxuries like a national health service that lets you get your operation before you die and a transport infrastructure that allows you to get where you need to be without sitting in a 60-minute traffic jam every day of the week? £2 billion may be a small amount of our overall budget but it is still a very large amount of money indeed.
As far as general arguments for European integration go, stopping wars might well have been a worthy aim 50 years ago but this has little relevance to today's situation. Nuclear missiles managed to prevent a war with a country that was highly motivated to invade us - the USSR - so the fact that both the UK and France still have nukes would be more than adequate to stop any war between the major European powers, even if there was the merest hint of a motivation to go to war, which of course there isn't. Don't forget the role of NATO in keeping the peace also.
No, I'm afraid 'preventing war' is just another one of those 'integration is inevitable because the alternative is unthinkable' arguments that seeks to scare people into closer integration, conveniently removing the need to prove positive benefits.
Anyway, to return to the original question - the rebate is ours to keep because we have a veto on the EU budget. (Something else we would lose if certain Europhile politicins had their way). It's becoming an issue because the Eurocrats are beginning to realise that Poland and the other countries that have just joined the club are likely to prove to be a bottomless financial pit, and France is not prepared to consider the single biggest scandal in the entire EU budget - the so-called Common Agricultural Policy - because it is bankrolling that country's entire, inefficient peasant farming industry.