even if UK leaves the EU, as I understand it, they still have to abide by those rules to be able to trade goods and services with the EU. The only difference now is that they won't have a vote in how the rules are made any more. Brilliant.
That's about the measure of it. And it is likely more daft than that.
The European countries that have the best open trade deals with the UK, like Norway for example, not only have to meet the various regulations for goods and services. They also have to take part in the open labour market, meaning EU citizens can live and work in their country, just like us in the UK.
Also, they have to pay into the EU, just like we do. Sure, they get a bit of a discount, but if I remember correctly Norway pays something like 75% per head of what we do. But they get no say in forming EU rules.
Am I reading this right? The "Leave" campaign made a bunch of promises about how leaving was going to do all these good things, and it's now immediately clear that none of them will come to fruition.
It isn't immediately clear now, it was immediately clear then, things like:
- we'll save £350m a week and use it for health care (there is no £350m a week, it is £190m a week and half of it already comes back to the UK in the form of regional grants to help poorer areas)
- we'll get control of our immigration controls, adopt a points based system like Australia (we already have full control of our non EU migrants, we already use a points system, see above for Norway and EU migrants)
- there are 26,000 words of regulations on cabbages (there are as far as anyone can tell, *zero words of regulations that specifically apply to cabbages)
The UK tabloids regularly run scare stories, that the editors must know to be lies, about what the EU is banning or stopping us doing this month. From "milk jugs to be banned" to "women forced to hand back sex toys".
This story shows the level of lies they publish:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/06/daily-chart-15The same tabloids also run endless basically xenophobic stories, they especially love the "asylum tide/swarm" ones.
* weirdly this lie goes back the US in WWII, where there we some regulations on cabbage seeds, around 2,600 words. At some point later it got talked up to being 26,000 words. Then later it jumped to this side of the pond and became another lie about the EU
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35962999
Previous Topic
Index
