Speaking of which, there hasn't been much mention of this. I'd change my vote to Remain under with #2 or #4. Which I think is pretty much all the UK government had a mandate to join given the prior referendum.

no. the power lies with the democratic parliament and the member states in the council. they then appoint the commission to execute their idea. the idea an "eu itself" divorced from that is entirely something youre imagining.

yeah this is true. when people use undemocratic what they really mean is brussels is faraway and full of foreigners. it's also why they keep calling members of the european parliament "unelected bureaucrats".

The point that has always concerned me was allowing the EU to grow its powers locked away from democratic accountability. Like the past two major treaties are.

What it's done in the past does not concern me in terms of whats been bad for the UK, what it can do in the future as its power becomes both nore significant and less and less accountable is what concerns me.


I'm glad we got out of it now, because if it keeps going the way it is trying to go we'd have had a 10 x worse brexit in a decade or so (it would probably not even be feasible at that time) and the USE will be a right ****hole in 20-30 years.


It seems some people don't understand that unaccountable power is always corrupting.

We are just going to have to differ.

You have a high level of faith in the future of the EU despite the evidence, I have very little faith in the EU, despite the evidence.

It comes down to core beliefs. Neither of us will change on that except through a long passage of time providing evidence against or for, right?

Re: accountability, Trump and Brexit are both very fine examples. Conservatives screwing over the working class, only to extract even more power from the resulting backlash.

A correct ferm for the commission though - thoose guys who decide what the elected people are actually allowed to vote on...

You know that we need much less labour in the future? Without these protections you will have more people compete for certain jobs allowing businesses to decrease wages. You get your right to negotiate for yourself but you will never have enough power to negotiate on the same level unless you have some unique skill which most people dont have. More often that not there will be someone who could do the job even better.
We have no hire and fire but only if your business employs more than 8 people. Small business can hire and fire as they want. What we also see that we dont have enough skilled workers to fill certain jobs for (example police). So by a hire and fire you screw the poor and uneducated again. It hurts you in the longterm as well because if you aren't sure you will have a job a month or a year from now you probably wont consum as much. That would be starting a doom loop.

I understand that. The problem is that a minority of the world population has driven this planet to a point where global warming becomes a huge risk, where resources become scarce and there are a still billions of people who live under conditions that are so far below ours thats not unreasonable to think they want to have some improvements as well. But I doubt that is sustainable. An example is our meat consumption. The more a society progresses the higher their meat consumption becomes. The production of meat uses so much resources on land, water and crop it just wouldn't be sustainable for the planet if India even starts to come close to our consumption level. So in a perfect democracy it would be the right thing to vote to limit meat comsumption or adding an extra tax on meat. We wouldnt want that but I think its better for the majority of this planets population and mankind.
Yes nobody wants to be governed by a majority from Asia but yet for centuries we have directly or indirectly governed much more people than our own countries population.

So we could have a whole other debate about whether certain employment protections create jobs or destroy jobs, and whether they are the correct mechanism even when we agree intervention is needed. I think the minimum wage has caused the spike in zero hours contracts, and if we ban those, something else will pop up that pays the same market value in a different way, and if we eventually ban everything like that, we have fewer firms and fewer low paying jobs.

But that debate on policy is not needed right now, because the brexit debate was about method not outcome - I think the above should be a national debate not a continental debate, in order to suit a country's culture and to ensure diversity and competition of business environments in order to drive competition and innovation.

Too much stability across too wide an area would be very bad if the system gets shocked.

It couldn't possibly concern you. You are simply repeating stuff from right-wing media.

Any objective analysis of democratic accountability would conclude that the main area of concern is the control the banking system has over all forms of politics. In this area both the EU and the UK are very bad, but the UK is marginally worse.

It isn't credible given the billions taken from the taxpayer and given to the banks in violation of the public will that any one would consider the lack of democracy in the EU to be the priority. Unless of course that individual had been brainwashed and placed an irrational value on ethnicity.

Well it does, oh great mind reader.

Your lack of substantiation and specifics says otherwise. You don't have to be Derren f***ing Brown to work that out.

So I expect the trade negotiations will result in free movement of goods as tarifs on goods will hurt both sides equally but the UK will lose the EU banking passport. So the winners will be Paris and Frankfurt and London will take a hit.

Got their priorities right if this is correct....

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...-a7662601.html

No it's not correct, that's fake news in a Remain campaign leaflet.

Much as it pains me to say, even the Sun has the key piece of missing information, that the 500 million buys, in addition to the redesign, 60 million actual passports - a 10 year supply. We'd need both the resupply and (supposedly) the redesign if we'd stayed (the colour isn't the main thing, there is a different image on each internal page too and they're not the same now as they were 10 years ago).

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/323391...illion-revamp/

I think the banking hit will be negligible short-or medium-term. All the (")talent(") is already in London and it doesn't move that easily unless there's something that completely grinds things to a halt like booting out EU-citizens.

The more bankers f*** off the better.

Frankfurt and Paris have already said that just establishing an office there is not enough to qualify for the EU banking passport. That could mean thousends of jobs moving out of London. Although I sort of agree with GBV this could make a significant impact on the UK economy and I don't see what the UK can offer to keep the passport. Also no deal means definitely no passport so threatening a hard brexit is actually not an option in this case.

The country will take a hit on paper if there is a banking exodus.

But the country will be much better off.

Bear in mind you have an extreme amount of de facto censorship about the finance system. The national newspapers set the tone for national political debate and they rely on 4-page colour spreads from banks more than they do readers.

Essentially the entire financial system is a blood parasite on the heart of the country. It gets bailout money, it devalues everyone's money through QE (effectively a stealth tax on everyone), gets kickbacks from government programs (eg first-time buyer, really easy to flip that one), and gets away with scam after scam (PPI being a rare example of them getting caught).

The bankers will take their money with them, but they never did anything for the country apart from steal from it, apart from provide the (useful) branch services which they were in the process of closing down anyway.

Eventually the public would figure out what was going on in which case they'd probably burn the f***ing banks down. Probably better that we have a peaceful and bloodless exodus.

The problem is what incentives will the Tories offer them to stay.

There is a high probability that Brexit will worsen state welfare to the financial industry not lessen it.

I'm not sure they will want to hang around. Many are aware that the only thing that was stopping people burning down the banks was the calculated misdirection about immigration. That is no longer an issue. Some actually had passports to hand and their bags packed during the London riots and were quite mystified when the rioters left the City untouched.

It is interesting to note that most intelligent financiers I've met have a political viewpoint which is almost identical to that of a typical far-left extremist, albeit for very different reasons. They understand very well what is going on.

Normally in civilized company I wouldn't say what I wrote in the post above. People would think I was a conspiracy theorist. With financiers they either nod their heads in unsurprised agreement or actually tell me something even worse about the system I didn't know.

Maybe I'm being stupid, but can you explain what you mean by this? Is it capitalism screwing us over yet again?

It never stopped. We are still getting screwed in about a dozen ways-and there are probably others we don't know about.

Many/most financiers know they are essentially well-paid confidence tricksters producing nothing of value.

And you aren't being stupid. Unless you have a keen interest in the subject and a lot of time to decode financial jargon, which is almost no one (basically fiannciers themselves and Marxists), you couldn't possibly know.

I said this above but it is worth emphasizing: there is censorship of most of information about the financial sector roughly equivalent to state censorship in a dictatorship. The editor of the Telegraph's finance section actually resigned because he was forced to shelve information about the HSBC scandal for years.

I'm not saying you're wrong overall, but I wouldn't tie it too closely to the situation with retail banks needing bailouts. Other countries without such developed financial sectors have also had to bail out retail banks so sending the city financiers to Zurich wouldn't necessarily have changed much in terms of e.g. the Northern Rock bailout.

Regarding the bailouts, my view:
a) the banks were underpaying relative to the value of the government's guarantee for years prior to the crisis
b) as that guarantee had been given it had to be honoured
c) the government should have done it only in the form of fixed dividend preference shares (functionally similar to a loan but with voting rights) instead of making its big gamble on ordinary shares.

If it had done c) we would be talking about its profit on the bailout rather than the cost for all the banks except possibly Northern Rock.

Regarding the city generally - it seems to generate a lot of money without increasing the quality of life of anyone, including that of the people who work there. I don't have as much against it as you but I don't think it should be the determining factor in negotiations with the EU.

In my experience the quality of life of people working in the City is much improved.

I know several nice but so amazingly dims that work in the city making SO much more than they could if not for daddy and apparently doing jobs purposefully created to give high born idiots a wage.

That does go on. Some bankers are loathsome obviously.

That said I don't know whether I could turn down millions for doing **** all myself. It is preferable to focus on systems rather than individuals.