We prefer to send Kosovar and afghan refugees to Dover, you seem to take very good care of them !

Stop it - I have to spend the next week in Finland eating shredded Reindeer arse with mashed potato and cranberry sauce.....with shiite wine from Peru at Euro 10 a bottle...

Did venison filet with foie gras sauce last night though

I think I am being Wah'd here

Government Spending and net EU budget contributions? Government spending 2008-09: £623bn, net EU contribution: £3bn

Government spending 2009/10: £671bn, net EU contribution: £4.1bn (i.e. 0.6% of total government spending).

Perhaps you would now like to compare that with the United Kingdom's spending on defence over the same period?

Thought not!

..and most of that difference is due to the pathetic performance of the pound against the euro - dropping 30%'ish

Defence spending is for the benefit of the UK not for some s*** little farmer with 2 cows and a pig in the Dordogne, I couldn't care if the Defence budget was 10% of GDP as long as we didn't have to supplement the remainder of europe.

I was staying at a farm B&B in Jockland a couple of weeks back - 220 dairy cows, 3 outlaying farms owned by sons, all getting a subsidy...

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Still trotting out verbatim the same old rubbish from the 1980s I see. Trouble with the Eurosceptics that they want you to think with your emotions rather than your brain. Thats they are never actually precise about anything they complain about!

I am not going to apologise for not wanting to be part of the European love in. I don't want to be part or a European superstate end of.

One does not expect you to apologise for anything at all. Opinions on the EU are polarised in the United Kingdom and everyone has his view which stimulates debate, but what you find is, for the most part, opinion amounting to little more than parroting the man in the pub who in turn parrots the Mail or the Sun. There is very little attempt made by those who enter into discourse to actually exercise any critical thinking or engage in any real analysis beyond what is spoonfed the morning paper and to regard the comments therein as authoritative.

I base my thinking on my own reasoning, I haven't bought a paper in over 20 years, however I am not saying I am not influenced by other peoples opinion, we all are. There are a number of reasons I do not like the idea of an European superstate.

1. I feel the loss of sovereignty would hurt the country more than it would help.

2. I have grave suspicions over the motives of certain countries towards the EU and it seems to be grab as much as you can before the well runs dry.

3. I also feel we do not get out what we put in, the Government enforce every little rule the EU dishes out but others just pay lip service. This does not bode of equality to me.

4. We are MEANT to be a major player but we seem to have very little say in anything that goes on.

5. Every Government that has been in power (with the exception of Thatcher to some extent) has bent over backwards to try and help make us better Europeans but all they have done is making us a laughing stock.

Of course, the promotion of Euroscepticsm in the United Kingdom does have its advantages to those who would rather you were kept in complete ignorance of anything positive about the EU.

It might prevent you from asking akward questions of the motives of your own government in the way in which money from the EU Regional Development fund is allocated, or rather, misappropriated!

This is money allocated by the European Commission to regions that need it.

You might like, for example to ask why the underspend of £671,000,000 went straight into the Treasury instead of being allocated, as it was meant to have been allocated to those worst hit by the recession. None of the English Regions received a penny of it because it was 'easy money' for the Treasury!

That money was yours and it was stolen from those it was intended to help!

See Financial Times Friday 20 November 2009.

I can bet you that less than a handful of people on this board mouthing off about the EU have never even heard of the RDF and how it allocates funding to to the regions of the member states.

What price your Euroscepticism now!

Last edited by Iolis on Fri Nov 20, 2009 3:41 pm; edited 1 time in total

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You may be happy to know that the United Kingdom has not, as yet felt the full force of the enforcement powers but it is not true to say that others pay lip service to everthing the EU puts out.

Some examples chosen at random:

Commission v Greece (Hellenic Republic) (State Aid) Case 369/07.

In 2005, the Eurropean Court of Justice ruled unnder Article 228(1) (post-Lisbon now Article 260(1) TFEU) that Greece had failed to recover unlawful state aid it had given to Olympic Airways.

Greece ignored the order of the court.

The Commission commenced further action under Article 228(2) (Art 260(2) TFEU) based on Greece's failure to comply with the 2004 ruling.

The Commission sought an order for:

(a), Daily penalty payments of Euro 53,611 to cover the ongoing breach from the date of the original judgement under Art 228(2) and

(b), a lump sum to cover the ongooing breacch between the date of the origginal ruling under Article 228(1) and the date of the ruling under Article 228(2).

The ECJ held that it would take into account in such cases, the duration of the infringement, the seriousness of the infringement and the ability of the member state to pay.

The ECJ imposed a daily penalty payment off Euros 16,000 to commence one month after judgement and imposed a single lump-sum payment of Euros 10,000,000 as Greece had effectively ignored the ruling of the ECJ ffor over two years.

A similar outcome obtained against the French in Commission v France C -121/07 who ignored an ECJ judgement and who, on the eve on the judgement in the second case for infringing the first, sought to avoid both the fine and the lump-sum payment. However, the ECJ held that although by complying with the law, it had avoided the fine, it nevertheless did not avoid the lump-sum payment which, said the court, was intended to penalise the past behaviour of a member state in order to deter and prevent repetition of similar infringements.

Thee are many other examples under which the ECJ will take a tough line on Member States who flout EU law in proceedings brought by the Commission.

In a previous post on another thread, I demonstrated how the EU may take enforcement action against a state based on information received to it by way of petition from a single individual or group of individuals who are affected by their state's non-compliance.

Your statement is not, therefore, accurate. The ECJ can and frequently does, enforce its laws against states who default.

But those states still choose to ignore the ECJ, if a member state refuses to pay the fine what can the EU do?? Not a lot would be my first response. How will they collect the fine if the member State is still in control of it's sovereignty??

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We have the same votes in the Council as Does France and Germany representing our national interests who decide, for the most part by qualified majority vote. We have delgates within the Commission representing the interests of the Community as a whole. Lastly, we have directly elected members of the European Parliament.

A complete list of them here allows you their biographical details, the parties to which they are alligned in the Parliament, together with a record of their work there.

Great we have elected members of the European Parliment. So did they vote for the current new President and Foreign Minister, was that put to a "vote" of the respective member states populous.

No it was elected behind closed doors with nobody knowing who all the candidates were.

Most states actually do comply with the judgements and you will be happy to know this includes the UK who is no stranger to the court.

In the very worst case of non-compliance, the EU can make life pretty difficult for a state by either imposing economic sanctions or restricting its access to the single market.

However, although the Commission may take enforcement proceedings against the defaulting state, you will find that for the most part, it is the EU citizens themselves who take enforcement action through their own domestic courts in which EU law prevails against inconsistent domestic law.

This happened a few years ago in the case of Factortame, when Thatcher sought to defy the EU by passing the Merchant Shipping Act whicch prevented Spanish Fishng trawlers fishing in UK waters. It effectively made the Spanish company Factortame bankrupt. The Spanish fishermen brought an infringment action before out court which succeeded before the House of Lords. The compensation and costs ran into Millions of Pounds.

In other words, enforcement of EU legal norms may be taken externally by the Commission, or other member states through the Commission, or it may be taken internally within the defaulting state by the aggrieved party for which compensation is usually available.

Again, I come back to the point of whether you believe that Ministers are to be subject to appointmnt by universal adult suffrage.

Iff you look at my previous posts and on other threads I have actually gone to some trouble to explain the role and function of this office and why there is no election by universal adult suffrage.

Most of us understand the leagalities/tehnicalities of it Iolis.
Doesn't make it any more morally right or acceptable though does it?

The pathetic performance of the Pound against the Euro does not affect the contention that the annual contribution to the European budget is nothing like the size that some sceptics would like to present. The Defence budget alone which is a pretty pathetic slice of our GDP is consistently higher than that of our EU budget contribution.

You sound like an intelligent person. Do some research for yourself and you will find that we get pretty good value for our money.