Quote:
Originally Posted by martyh
Quite right ,i am too young to have voted in '75 but i do remember the referendum and i remember us joining the Common Market and decimalisation .We are often told that the EEC or Common Market was always intended to be a single union for trade , travel and work between European countries as it is now but the trouble was that we didn't have the internet or 24hr rolling news all we had was newspapers and the odd public information film to relay information from the government to the public and in most ways the paper you read in those days governed your politics .My dad told me that the EEC was a trade federation designed to make trading easier between European countries ,he didn't tell me that the EEC was the first step in a United States of Europe simply because he didn't know .Even the question asked in the '75 referendum was misleading
"Do you think the United Kingdom should stay in the European Community (the Common Market)?" note the phrase Common Market ,nothing at all about ever closer political and financial union .What we need now is for our leaders to come clean and say exactly what is intended for Europe and let us decide if we want it.
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They won't do that because they can't. They know most people here don't want to be part of a single state. They'll carry on denying the fact and banging on about vetoes etc. until it gets to the point where sufficient powers are yielded to Brussels that the deal is effectively done for us.
My God why is anyone lauding the EU as if it's some sort of beacon of success and prospering both economically and socially when we already have huge chaos in Greece, massive unemployment in Spain, the French economy in the doldrums, growing concerns about the Italian banks, migration out of control, increasing right wing extremism etc. etc.? How bad does being outside the EU have to be in order to be worse that all that (and more) and why would we want to be further tethered to it? If what I've just described were happening somewhere else I reckon we'd all be delighted to be as far away from it all as possible and doing whatever we could to reduce our exposure to any fallout. What we wouldn't be doing is the complete opposite and voting to become fully paid up members...
