EU Constitition

No we didn’t Minidoh. Britain joined the EEC. There’s a world of difference.

Hand – what makes you think its democratic? Apart from the fact that our distinguished Euro MP’s are unelected, the government in our country totally ignore ANY views of the people. We have a megalomaniac dancing on the world stage. Or at least trying to. It’s a puppet stage and he deserves assasination.

SNAPPER:
the UK joined the EU in 1972 (ish), Ted Heath took us in and he lied because he said it would only affect trade in which case there was no need because we already had EFTA (European Free Trade Area). Instead we have had a gradual build up to a Federal Europe with a Brussels parliament. Apparently bogged down by fraud with reciprical headquarters not only in Brussels but in Strasbourg and Berlin attempting to tell us what we can and cannot do. Beurocratic, VERY expensive with thousands of jobs for the “boys”. We could easily have a unity of seperate countries retaining their identities but working without trade barriers for the benefit of all.

Well if your representants at the parlement don’t represent the general public opinion , it sounds like a major failure in your democratic system to me !

Because the ******s at the top refuse to give us a referendum on the subject. We are not trusted to have the intelligence to make our own minds up.

We have been continually sold out since the early seventies – and the swine who got us in (losing our fishing grounds in the process) should have gone to the Tower for treason.

It’s not that we hate Europe – we just aren’t a part of it.

Yes, I agree. So here is my question WHY do you stay in the EU?

There’s a little bit of water seperating us from Europe. Therefore we are not Europe. Even Hitler failed to bring us in – so you could say it’s an important strip of water.

Why lose our identities, quirks and rules? For what? Why group everyone together? Like they did in Yugoslavia. Learn from history. Christ, the Breton don’t want to be part of France, the Basque don’t want to be part of Spain.

I’m a bit confused about your point here. What France and beef has to do with that?

We did not join the EU – the UK in 1974 (I think) voted to join the EEC or ‘common market’ and that was the last time the population had a vote on how far the UK should integrate with continental europe. This means that anybody who was not of voting age in 1974 has not had a chance to reject the corrupt organisation that the eu has become and that is a lot of people.
(anybody born after 1956 if voting age in 1974 was 18 or 1953 if it was 21)

Just look at who the British eu representatives are
a) Neil Kinnock, a man who was rejected twice by the country in a general election,
b) Leon Britton, ex gov minister who resigned about some helicopters
c) Chris Patten, ex MP rejected by his constituency

The proposal to add Peter Mandleson to this select bunch is about par for the course.

Why do we not like the eu – it is about trust, we do not trust the french or germans to stick to rules set by the eu/ecb. French transport stikes cause a lot of disruption, yet little compensation is paid to those whose business has been affected, British beef was declared safe by the eu some 3 years before the french allowed to go on sale. The source of the UK BSE problem was (i think) traced back to some feed bought from France. Corruption is widespread and has been for many years yet nothing seems to get done, eu accounts are a joke, not have been audited / signed off properly for 5+ years now.

The eu has always been biased towards france and germany at the expense of the other countries and nothing is going to change that.

I also do not trust Bliar to look after the best interests of the UK – he is only interested in becoming the first ‘president of europe’ to get his name in the history books and he is prepared to give this country away to get it.

Originally posted by Snapper
He’s repeating himself now. Must be desperate to get those posts back.

Good point. I thought so the first time too.

Well it was easier than writing out a new one.

Flood.

Geforce, First of all, congratulations on starting a debate which has, at last, encouraged some intelligent input here.

However, I fear (correction, I am relieved) that your enthusiam for an EU constitution is unlikey to be mirrored on this forum. Those whose interests lie in aviation, especially historic aviation, are perhaps more mindful of the events of the last few decades, its conflicts, and its consequences. That is not at all to imply that we are all still fighting the Battle of Britain;- as individuals, we should be open-minded and forward- looking. However, within a substantial proportion of the UK population, there is an enduring suspicion of the ‘European Experiment’.

The financial, legal and constitutional implications of deeper integration are so complex, and contain so many uncertain ramifications, it is unsurprising that the project is so widely feared by those who suspect they have much to lose. Though politics is played out on an international stage, its reality is the way it affects the lives of individuals, and for many people in the UK, their actual experience of the effects of rulings from the EU has not been a pleasing one.

There is a sense of a relentless, and accelerating trend to interfere in every aspect of the way our lives are lived, from what we eat , how we work, and our leisure pursuits. How many people know that right now, for instance, the BGA, which has safely overseen the British Gliding movement for 60 years or so, is under threat from Brussels, who want it replaced by a statutary body, with all the formalised licencing and inspecting that goes with it. And who will pay for all these changes? And having paid, in what sense will they better off?
Perhaps it will, at last, end this constant torrent of glider crashes, and the huge, unacceptable toll that they inflict on the British public .

Of course, one can wheel out endless anecdotes, and instances of bungled law-making, but the main issue is much more concise.

It is by no means certain what we ( the UK) have to gain, but what we have to have to lose ( and are already losing) confronts us every day. And the worst bit is, once we are in, there is no going back, and only then will we begin to understand what we have given away.

He’s repeating himself now. Must be desperate to get those posts back.

Good point. I thought so the first time too.

Originally posted by Geforce
Flood, I do like sarcasm, but there’s a difference between sarcasm and acting stupid. An ID-card is not a chip planted into my brains so the evil Belgian socialist gov’t can electroshock me. It’s just a useful tool to catch illegal imigrants for example. To be honest, I never had to show my ID-card so far, at least not to a gov’t official. And France, the Netherlands and Belgium have asked Britain several times to introduce such a system. I don’t know, but are you Britons so afraid of showing your name and date of birth. What has that to do with human rights. :rolleyes:

And I gave one example. Ofcourse ID-cards can’t do anything about unemployment. :rolleyes: You’re smart enough to know that without having to mention it here.

Actually ID cards are my bugbear – not the EU.

I have never been accused of being an illegal immigrant – but it seems my human rights would now be discarded so that the police could stop me in the street and demand to see my ID card.
You’ve never been asked for it – why have it? Do you need it to get medical treatment, for example? Ha – imagine you are in a car crash, and the ambulance pulls up. I can just envisage the scene…Ambulance persons rooting through the victim’s pockets just to make sure that they were deserving of treatment. Imagine an airliner crash with the same criteria: a pile of injured who need to go to hospital but because of burning or blast they are no longer in procession of their documentation, and the rescue services can’t do anything until an iris scanner arrives together with a keyboard for the survivors to input their PIN code for access to treatment…
I have been going to the same Doctor for most of my life; is he supposed to refuse me treatment if I arrive at his surgery for an appointment without my ID card? Should I turn up in A&E (accident and emergency at a hospital) with a broken leg will I get treatment with or without my card?
Apparently the ID cards will not initially be compulsory, but by that statement they will become compulsory one day. So will the police be forced to man roadblocks searching for people going about their everyday life but without their cards? The police will claim that they won’t do any such thing, but sooner or later it will be an accepted form of crowd control – they decide that there are likely to be too many undesirables in one area so they start a check point and trickle the crowd through. Imagine the for/against fox hunting protests, or the May Day protests with the additional funnelling of the protestors after 8 hours in Oxford Circus… Lots of fun for all! Where will the funding come for ID card checkpoints anyway? Being a government requirement I imagine there won’t be any problem getting the money for it – but somewhere else will suffer.
In Britain using a credit/debit card does not require additional proof of your identity – barring the ability to duplicate the signature on demand. I have a cheque book but no cheque guarantee card – and traders will not accept my credit card, cashpoint card, or any other form of ID as proof that I am allowed to use it.
I withdraw cash from a cashpoint machine by using my cashpoint card (banks in Britain seem to open only for the convenience of the staff…).
What is official documentation?
I never buy cinema tickets nor alcohol for minors(!) but have never had problems in the past when being in pubs, bars, etc. The British driving licence used to have the bearers date of birth ‘hidden’ within the licence number – possibly still does – and I have produced that when necessary (although there is a proof of age card available).
To purchase things I have always found the ‘money’ was acceptable nearly everywhere! If you have no money then using a credit/debit card is also acceptable (see above).
Loans, mortgages, etc – generally the repayment money comes from a bank account, and nobody (except loansharks – and they will make it their business to make sure you repay the loan!) is going to lend you anything unless you can prove you have the ability to make the monthly repayments. You think banks don’t talk to each other?
For domestic flight check-ins I would imagine that the fact that you are going to pay the usually inflated prices just to travel a few hundred miles would rule out anybody with little cash to hand – like immigrants and refugees. If you have to start proving that you are the business man whose name is on the ticket (after all no one goes to the ticket office/whatever and asks what names are on the tickets that haven’t been claimed yet…) then when will this stop – a taxi? Bus? Pedalo on the boating lake? Why is there a problem here anyway; it wasn’t a problem pre 11/9/01 in America, it isn’t a problem post 11/9/01 in America, and yet they still haven’t introduced ID cards.
Use the ID card to collect registered mail? Our Post Office will quite happily leave parcels on the doorstep or with the neighbours, or leave a note to say that the parcel can be collected from the local Post Office where you can produce the note in exchange for your parcel.
The introduction of an anonymous ID card such as there apparently is in Belgium and France is not going to stop fraudsters; after all you can not claim that there is no crime where there are ID cards can you? If you lose your credit card in Britain you inform the company and they will stop the cards ability to be used. If the trader has any doubts then I have a wallet full of other ID cards that could be used to establish my identity (several have photos on too) but merely the fact that my signature matches should be enough; it always has been.
Personal details might not be hidden in your ID cards but then your ID cards are not available to dozens of government departments who, it would appear, would never need to have access to the kind of detail these cards would carry (why would the TV Licence people need to know how many fillings you have in your teeth? What conceivable reason could the Post Office have to want details of your medical details?). The kind of information that is being slowly leaked out about these cards is fascinating – if we were private companies then the kind of information that will be available on us would be accessible to very few people and obtainable only through industrial espionage!
The control on driving licence and passports is for quite obvious reasons. You want to drive then you have to pass a test and get a licence. You want to go abroad then you have to apply for a passport to prove that you are a citizen of your home country (incidentally – send two photographs signed by persons of stature within your community for a passport? Got mine signed by a doctor in the local surgery – any doctor and for a fee! – and by the head teacher at a local school who was happy to do it despite only knowing me by sight – more than the doctor did! In both cases I could have been just a conman who had done his research well! Will the passport be taken as proof of identity when you are asked to prove who you are for the ID card?).
What will the new ID card immediately replace? What purpose will it serve? What is its point?
Why do you need it to back up your credit card? Will the credit card suddenly be less secure because of its introduction? Why should you have to prove who you are that cannot be proven by other means anyway?
Are the police going to be given powers to stop people and demand that they identify themselves (complete with iris readers)? Why should they feel the need to do that? Is there some sort of problem which they haven’t told us about that demands the immediate identification of the population? If the police are not given permission to stop and demand that you show your ID card then it won’t be a deterrent against illegal immigrants. After all, Belgium and France apparently have them and it is not stopping refugees getting in there – despite the agreement that they should stop in the first ‘free’ country they come to!
Store cards are a way of doing away with expensive consumer research companies. Yes, Tescos now knows that you regularly purchase a loaf of bread and 4 tins of beans in 3 visits every week but it is not as wide a survey as when done previously by the independent companies. It will only show what the trend is within their own supermarkets.
I have a couple of cards, but they are linked to my Mothers cards so that she gets the benefits (if any!) – and the store research departments can sit and wonder at the obscure purchases she apparently makes.

Flood.

Actually, I support ID cards.

Well, Kye, what you say is somehow true. The EU has other things to worry about than driving on which side of the rode. Frankly, I don’t care. The EU is not a ‘federal gov’t’ and will most likely never become one. But a common economic and foreign (including military) policy should somehow be possible, without losing your national identity.

Flood, I do like sarcasm, but there’s a difference between sarcasm and acting stupid. An ID-card is not a chip planted into my brains so the evil Belgian socialist gov’t can electroshock me. It’s just a useful tool to catch illegal imigrants for example. To be honest, I never had to show my ID-card so far, at least not to a gov’t official. And France, the Netherlands and Belgium have asked Britain several times to introduce such a system. I don’t know, but are you Britons so afraid of showing your name and date of birth. What has that to do with human rights. :rolleyes:

And I gave one example. Ofcourse ID-cards can’t do anything about unemployment. :rolleyes: You’re smart enough to know that without having to mention it here.

“when the UK joined the EU”

We joined did we? I can’t recall us ever having joined the EU. Can you please qualify that statement?

Well I Don’t like being part of the EU much either. I don’t mind the trade we do, i have no problems with that at all, if anything i think thats one of the positives about it as it shows we dont need to rely on the US for trade and industry. However i do object deeply to all the rules and laws that the EU tries pass over us, or make us adopt 😡 :cool:. For example the Frech demanded that we changed our butchering facilities to stainless steal for safety reasons about the BSE crisis, when we have been use traditional methods of ceramic tiles for Donkey’s years. Or theres the case where they said we should change our roads so we drive on the left, have you any idea how much that would cost if we had to??? Now this one really f*cking ****es me off:mad: , saying that we are not taking in enough immigrants that we need to take in another 10000 plus in the space of an year. Why? and what the hell for, what right have you got to tell us what to do? we dont tell you what you MUST do.

I think most of us would back up out of the EU, but it wont happen because our representitive governement is probably using the EU as a money run

Geforce: I think the ID cards are coming out here regardless of the EU’s plans and say, thats one thing i can agree with, even if it is based on the EU’s plans

Initially i’m not overly keen on being part of the EU so closely, but i suppose you have to take the rough with the smooth, thankfully we have enough political say so to say no to plans but in the pot.

Originally posted by Geforce
[B]
And Flood or Minidoh one last argument….

OI! Hang on!!! [/B]

I asked a question about something that you put down without qualification! And I did it purely from a point of view of wondering what you meant – not so that I could be dragged further into the discussion!

Right. (Calm, calm…)

ID cards? So ID cards have solved all the EUs problems? There is no big-business fraud, no pollution, no unemployment, no language barriers, no arguements over distribution of EU grants, no more stupidity over things like Bakewell Tarts only being allowed to be made in Bakewell or that curious little problem with the cheese that could only be made by communists in Leicester?
Cool.
[Sarcasm]Maybe we do need them then.[/Sarcasm]
Theres me worried about a little thing like human rights, about being wheeled off to prison because I didn’t have an ID card, about not being able to buy a mars bar without having to produce an ID card, about the police having compulsary ID checkpoints at the drop of a hat…

Sorry. I thought you had something better than that up your sleeve…

Flood.

In fact you shouldn’t even step out of the EU, as the EU formally, untill there’s a constitution, doesn’t even exist. It would be very simple, and democratic. Tony Blair on his own can say “ok, we’re leaving.” He doesn’t even need parliament’s approvement I think. Brussels is only giving guidelines. The EU itself can’t punish you. But France, Germany, Spain can ofcourse, and will.

And Flood or Minidoh one last argument. You say “we have to pay a lot to the EU”. I think you’re referring to the agricultural troubles from the past few years. Well, everyone had to give in. But before WWII, when there were economic interests endagered, countries just went to war. Didn’t the Dutch three times defeated you in the 17th century for this purpuse (trade) only? Through Brussels we can work it out more civilised. But I can already imagine people are thinking we’re using British pounds here on the continent to subsidise waffle factories etc. That’s just not true. In fact, the economic policies of the EU are more Anglo-saxon than continental. It’s mostly “socialist” countries like France, Germany and the Netherlands who suffer from the biggest reforms. Hence the reason why Rafarrin’s gov’t has been so unpopular lately. So it’s really not the British only who have to give in. The EU is lets say, the least evil of all evils :p

It will also help if the power of the EU lays in the hands of the commission AND parliament and not the council. The EU is now so unpopular because it’s more a forum where countries can take revenge (for example Fr/Ger vs Britain for the Iraq war) rather than a universal and rational institution where the interrests of Europe as a whole are regarded.

There is something that i wonder, and maybe I brought it on this forum already.
It seems that a majority of people in the UK are against the EU. Right , that is their right. However , when the UK joined the EU , didn’t the majority of people approve that?
Why don’t you guys impose to your politician to step back in this matter if people don’t want it?
As far as I know the UK is an old democracy , of of the best of the world , and your deputies are supposed to represent the people right? Maybe I’m to naive or maybe the people on this forum don’t represent the common opinion in the UK?

Originally posted by Flood
No venom in this – just that you said it and then didn’t justify your statement.
What do you mean?

Flood.

ID-cards to start with?