Benefits of or reasons to leave.

[Birdman1811]

Thanks.

Could have posted that to my thread and I'd have accepted it.

Do I agree with all your analysis? No, but at least there's stuff there to read and take into consideration. I don't even like the EU, from a principled view I was actually always leave, mainly due to the undemocratic nature of the EU. I'm a small government person myself.

That is a better answer than any leaver has given me, including my MP. Thank you for your effort in writing it.

I'm still far from convinced leaving is a great idea, I'm not convinced staying in is either, but I'm always of the view in uncertainty the status quo is the logical path unless it is clearly heading towards disaster.

[Ossian]

It is. And of course people will argue against the points made which is fair enough but no one on either side of the debate can say what exact figures will happen in the future and what the exact trade scenarios will be - they are projections and suppositions by all. For me I have no doubt an economy the size of the UK can exist comfortably inside or outside the EU and how well it does that depends on competence of government and external factors too such as the global economy (in general and in the EU and ithers we do a lot of trade with) and oil prices and so on. So staying in or leaving for me has been more about the way rhe EU is going and its governance and whether it is the direction the UK should go in. I wasnt around to vote and id have been in two minds. Once the vote was to leave though it should have been honoured by MPs and not blocked by them as if they were above the vote like in a communist or fascist state rather than in a democracy. I think not leaving now would be morally wrong.

I'm going to break the habit of most of a lifetime here and be slightly charitable towards MPs; and I'm talking about the majority, as opposed to the fringe elements.

I don't believe that the delay has simply been a matter of "We know better and we're not having it". My view is that the first mistake was parliament not clarifying an agreed form of Brexit prior to triggering Article 50; other mistakes have flowed from that but MPs committing themselves to a 2-year straitjacket - having already established how easy it had been to fritter away the 9 months since the public vote - didn't take into account either the complexity of the matter at hand or the many different opinions of what was meant by Brexit. It's turned out to be a bit less simplistic than "Brexit means Brexit".

That way we might have saved ourselves the embarrassment of constructing a deal to which the only one of the 28 states who couldn't agree was ourselves; a deal which some are still suggesting the EU27 might be prepared - even at this late stage in the proceedings - to tweak or, even more optimistically redraft. Otherwise, it's crash-out, which would be tantamount to three and a half years spent negotiating nothing and living with the consequences.

If it had turned out that, even after an extended timescale, there was no form of withdrawal to which parliament could commit itself that would have been - to put it mildly - a difficult moment for our democracy. It might also, though, have demonstrated to our political classes the implications of making promises on which they have no idea how to deliver. 

Just shy of 500 MPs voted to trigger Article 50, which suggests no conspiracy to obstruct at that stage; that's about as charitable as I can muster.

[John Osborne’s Knuckle]

---

Then there is the fraud and mismanagement of regional aid which is the subject of another mini essay I could pen.

This one has nothing to de with being part of the EU, this is part of the human disease. Having worked at a local and national level on fraud teams for the government I can tell you that this occurs at all levels, local, national and international.

More co-operation between states is needed to deter it not less. Removing ourselves from the problem also removes us from solving the problem.

You have been composing these while at work? You will have to concentrate more on the job when the Depression hits. 

Fraud. 
It would remove us from solving the problem but it wouldn’t be our problem.

Waste and inefficiency.
Here is a piece from The Financial Times: (admittedly four years old), a very heavily biased Remain publication. ( it is the fourth most pro. measured by readership views on line, Sixth in print). It gives just one example area of Regional Aid.

An airport that loses €275 per passenger. A €16.5m runway that has never been used by the aircraft for which it was built. Another airport that receives just 4 per cent of the travellers that were forecast.

These are some of the highlights of a report into EU-funded airports by the European Court of Auditors issued on Tuesday. In total, the EU spent €129m between 2000 and 2013 – or a quarter of all airport funding – on facilities that did not need to be built, according to the 70-page report littered with tales of delays and over-optimistic forecasts.
Even those airports that were eventually financially viable proved to be an inefficient use of money, according to the auditors. A stunning 55 per cent of the EU funds audited, or €255m, went into airports that were “unnecessarily large”.
The report examined 20 airports built in Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland and Estonia with €666m of EU funds, of which €460m was audited.
One airport in the northern Greek town of Kastoria had running costs of €7.7m between 2005 and 2012, while revenues came in at €176,000. In this period, it had 25,000 passengers – or roughly ten passengers per day on average. The €275 loss per passenger was particularly egregious as a much larger airport at Thessaloniki was just two hours away by car, pointed out one auditor. “You could have had a limousine for each passenger,” he added.At the same airport, the EU approved a €16.5m extension to a runway, which has yet to be used by the aircraft that required the longer landing strip. “This cannot be considered an effective use of public funds,” the report deadpans.
In many cases, the hordes of passengers predicted when the funds were granted failed to materialise. Córdoba airport in Spain received just 7,000 passengers in 2013, compared to a forecast of 179,000.
A spokesman for the European Commission, which oversees such programmes, said that the report was unrepresentative and that Brussels had overhauled the way that it dishes out fund for airports to avoid these mistakes happening again. “There is a new structure that we are using so that we get even better at redistributing regional aid,” said the spokesman. (Yeh, right.)

There actually seems little will or desire to address either of these problems and we can’t say we should stay in and help change things. We have been in for forty years and not affected the systems to any extent. Mr Cameron found out how willing the EU big wigs are to change the Status Quo.

[baggy1]

---

Then there is the fraud and mismanagement of regional aid which is the subject of another mini essay I could pen.

This one has nothing to de with being part of the EU, this is part of the human disease. Having worked at a local and national level on fraud teams for the government I can tell you that this occurs at all levels, local, national and international.

More co-operation between states is needed to deter it not less. Removing ourselves from the problem also removes us from solving the problem.

You have been composing these while at work? You will have to concentrate more on the job when the Depression hits. 

Fraud. 
It would remove us from solving the problem but it wouldn’t be our problem.

Waste and inefficiency.
Here is a piece from The Financial Times: (admittedly four years old), a very heavily biased Remain publication. ( it is the fourth most pro. measured by readership views on line, Sixth in print). It gives just one example area of Regional Aid.

An airport that loses €275 per passenger. A €16.5m runway that has never been used by the aircraft for which it was built. Another airport that receives just 4 per cent of the travellers that were forecast.

These are some of the highlights of a report into EU-funded airports by the European Court of Auditors issued on Tuesday. In total, the EU spent €129m between 2000 and 2013 – or a quarter of all airport funding – on facilities that did not need to be built, according to the 70-page report littered with tales of delays and over-optimistic forecasts.
Even those airports that were eventually financially viable proved to be an inefficient use of money, according to the auditors. A stunning 55 per cent of the EU funds audited, or €255m, went into airports that were “unnecessarily large”.
The report examined 20 airports built in Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland and Estonia with €666m of EU funds, of which €460m was audited.
One airport in the northern Greek town of Kastoria had running costs of €7.7m between 2005 and 2012, while revenues came in at €176,000. In this period, it had 25,000 passengers – or roughly ten passengers per day on average. The €275 loss per passenger was particularly egregious as a much larger airport at Thessaloniki was just two hours away by car, pointed out one auditor. “You could have had a limousine for each passenger,” he added.At the same airport, the EU approved a €16.5m extension to a runway, which has yet to be used by the aircraft that required the longer landing strip. “This cannot be considered an effective use of public funds,” the report deadpans.
In many cases, the hordes of passengers predicted when the funds were granted failed to materialise. Córdoba airport in Spain received just 7,000 passengers in 2013, compared to a forecast of 179,000.
A spokesman for the European Commission, which oversees such programmes, said that the report was unrepresentative and that Brussels had overhauled the way that it dishes out fund for airports to avoid these mistakes happening again. “There is a new structure that we are using so that we get even better at redistributing regional aid,” said the spokesman. (Yeh, right.)

There actually seems little will or desire to address either of these problems and we can’t say we should stay in and help change things. We have been in for forty years and not affected the systems to any extent. Mr Cameron found out how willing the EU big wigs are to change the Status Quo.

I'd say just the opposite JOK, I'd want to get involved to solve the problems and by doing that put ourselves at the forefront of making decisions like these (let's not mention HS2 or the spend on a pointless marketing campaign for a no deal by the way). I'm not saying that there aren't many inefficiencies in all levels of government but I would rather be solving them from the inside rather than running away from them. 

There is another element not mentioned there about the airports, these take years to commission and build and the time of them being commissioned would have been predicting higher turnover I would guess; before the market crash in Spain for example. There is a real difference in perception at planning stage to hindsight.

Don't get me wrong with any of my points, I don't think the EU is perfect but I do think leaving at this point especially with idiots like Boris and Gove being guided by Farage and Rees-Mogg scares the life out of me. There isn't a rational argument that says we will be better off than we were - the status quo was good in the main.

[Derek Hardballs]

---

Then there is the fraud and mismanagement of regional aid which is the subject of another mini essay I could pen.

This one has nothing to de with being part of the EU, this is part of the human disease. Having worked at a local and national level on fraud teams for the government I can tell you that this occurs at all levels, local, national and international.

More co-operation between states is needed to deter it not less. Removing ourselves from the problem also removes us from solving the problem.

You have been composing these while at work? You will have to concentrate more on the job when the Depression hits. 

Fraud. 
It would remove us from solving the problem but it wouldn’t be our problem.

Waste and inefficiency.
Here is a piece from The Financial Times: (admittedly four years old), a very heavily biased Remain publication. ( it is the fourth most pro. measured by readership views on line, Sixth in print). It gives just one example area of Regional Aid.

An airport that loses €275 per passenger. A €16.5m runway that has never been used by the aircraft for which it was built. Another airport that receives just 4 per cent of the travellers that were forecast.

These are some of the highlights of a report into EU-funded airports by the European Court of Auditors issued on Tuesday. In total, the EU spent €129m between 2000 and 2013 – or a quarter of all airport funding – on facilities that did not need to be built, according to the 70-page report littered with tales of delays and over-optimistic forecasts.
Even those airports that were eventually financially viable proved to be an inefficient use of money, according to the auditors. A stunning 55 per cent of the EU funds audited, or €255m, went into airports that were “unnecessarily large”.
The report examined 20 airports built in Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland and Estonia with €666m of EU funds, of which €460m was audited.
One airport in the northern Greek town of Kastoria had running costs of €7.7m between 2005 and 2012, while revenues came in at €176,000. In this period, it had 25,000 passengers – or roughly ten passengers per day on average. The €275 loss per passenger was particularly egregious as a much larger airport at Thessaloniki was just two hours away by car, pointed out one auditor. “You could have had a limousine for each passenger,” he added.At the same airport, the EU approved a €16.5m extension to a runway, which has yet to be used by the aircraft that required the longer landing strip. “This cannot be considered an effective use of public funds,” the report deadpans.
In many cases, the hordes of passengers predicted when the funds were granted failed to materialise. Córdoba airport in Spain received just 7,000 passengers in 2013, compared to a forecast of 179,000.
A spokesman for the European Commission, which oversees such programmes, said that the report was unrepresentative and that Brussels had overhauled the way that it dishes out fund for airports to avoid these mistakes happening again. “There is a new structure that we are using so that we get even better at redistributing regional aid,” said the spokesman. (Yeh, right.)

There actually seems little will or desire to address either of these problems and we can’t say we should stay in and help change things. We have been in for forty years and not affected the systems to any extent. Mr Cameron found out how willing the EU big wigs are to change the Status Quo.

I'd say just the opposite JOK, I'd want to get involved to solve the problems and by doing that put ourselves at the forefront of making decisions like these (let's not mention HS2 or the spend on a pointless marketing campaign for a no deal by the way). I'm not saying that there aren't many inefficiencies in all levels of government but I would rather be solving them from the inside rather than running away from them. 

There is another element not mentioned there about the airports, these take years to commission and build and the time of them being commissioned would have been predicting higher turnover I would guess; before the market crash in Spain for example. There is a real difference in perception at planning stage to hindsight.

Don't get me wrong with any of my points, I don't think the EU is perfect but I do think leaving at this point especially with idiots like Boris and Gove being guided by Farage and Rees-Mogg scares the life out of me. There isn't a rational argument that says we will be better off than we were - the status quo was good in the main.

JOK arguments all seem reasonable and logical until he starts comparing wishing to remain for the sake of his families future with appeasement with Nazi Germany.

[John Osborne’s Knuckle]

---

Then there is the fraud and mismanagement of regional aid which is the subject of another mini essay I could pen.

This one has nothing to de with being part of the EU, this is part of the human disease. Having worked at a local and national level on fraud teams for the government I can tell you that this occurs at all levels, local, national and international.

More co-operation between states is needed to deter it not less. Removing ourselves from the problem also removes us from solving the problem.

You have been composing these while at work? You will have to concentrate more on the job when the Depression hits. 

Fraud. 
It would remove us from solving the problem but it wouldn’t be our problem.

Waste and inefficiency.
Here is a piece from The Financial Times: (admittedly four years old), a very heavily biased Remain publication. ( it is the fourth most pro. measured by readership views on line, Sixth in print). It gives just one example area of Regional Aid.

An airport that loses €275 per passenger. A €16.5m runway that has never been used by the aircraft for which it was built. Another airport that receives just 4 per cent of the travellers that were forecast.

These are some of the highlights of a report into EU-funded airports by the European Court of Auditors issued on Tuesday. In total, the EU spent €129m between 2000 and 2013 – or a quarter of all airport funding – on facilities that did not need to be built, according to the 70-page report littered with tales of delays and over-optimistic forecasts.
Even those airports that were eventually financially viable proved to be an inefficient use of money, according to the auditors. A stunning 55 per cent of the EU funds audited, or €255m, went into airports that were “unnecessarily large”.
The report examined 20 airports built in Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland and Estonia with €666m of EU funds, of which €460m was audited.
One airport in the northern Greek town of Kastoria had running costs of €7.7m between 2005 and 2012, while revenues came in at €176,000. In this period, it had 25,000 passengers – or roughly ten passengers per day on average. The €275 loss per passenger was particularly egregious as a much larger airport at Thessaloniki was just two hours away by car, pointed out one auditor. “You could have had a limousine for each passenger,” he added.At the same airport, the EU approved a €16.5m extension to a runway, which has yet to be used by the aircraft that required the longer landing strip. “This cannot be considered an effective use of public funds,” the report deadpans.
In many cases, the hordes of passengers predicted when the funds were granted failed to materialise. Córdoba airport in Spain received just 7,000 passengers in 2013, compared to a forecast of 179,000.
A spokesman for the European Commission, which oversees such programmes, said that the report was unrepresentative and that Brussels had overhauled the way that it dishes out fund for airports to avoid these mistakes happening again. “There is a new structure that we are using so that we get even better at redistributing regional aid,” said the spokesman. (Yeh, right.)

There actually seems little will or desire to address either of these problems and we can’t say we should stay in and help change things. We have been in for forty years and not affected the systems to any extent. Mr Cameron found out how willing the EU big wigs are to change the Status Quo.

I'd say just the opposite JOK, I'd want to get involved to solve the problems and by doing that put ourselves at the forefront of making decisions like these (let's not mention HS2 or the spend on a pointless marketing campaign for a no deal by the way). I'm not saying that there aren't many inefficiencies in all levels of government but I would rather be solving them from the inside rather than running away from them. 

There is another element not mentioned there about the airports, these take years to commission and build and the time of them being commissioned would have been predicting higher turnover I would guess; before the market crash in Spain for example. There is a real difference in perception at planning stage to hindsight.

Don't get me wrong with any of my points, I don't think the EU is perfect but I do think leaving at this point especially with idiots like Boris and Gove being guided by Farage and Rees-Mogg scares the life out of me. There isn't a rational argument that says we will be better off than we were - the status quo was good in the main.

That’s the difference, I suppose, isn’t it B1. Your view is stay in an change it and be at the forefront of policy. Whereas I say we have had decades of not getting change (if, indeed, we ever tried. And with our bunch a useless politicos and Mandarins, I doubt we did.) I also have grave doubts we could ever curtail the joint influence of France and Germany.
I get your example of things such as HS2 but, as I was always told, two wrongs don’t make a right and in theory we could have a say, through the ballot box,  to stop such vanity projects.
Although you state there is no “rational “ argument that says we would be better off, you cannot say with any certainty that things won’t deteriorate within the present arrangement.
I don’t think conservatives are “guided” by Farage. I think they frit of his, frankly baffling to me, charisma.

---

---

Then there is the fraud and mismanagement of regional aid which is the subject of another mini essay I could pen.

This one has nothing to de with being part of the EU, this is part of the human disease. Having worked at a local and national level on fraud teams for the government I can tell you that this occurs at all levels, local, national and international.

More co-operation between states is needed to deter it not less. Removing ourselves from the problem also removes us from solving the problem.

You have been composing these while at work? You will have to concentrate more on the job when the Depression hits. 

Fraud. 
It would remove us from solving the problem but it wouldn’t be our problem.

Waste and inefficiency.
Here is a piece from The Financial Times: (admittedly four years old), a very heavily biased Remain publication. ( it is the fourth most pro. measured by readership views on line, Sixth in print). It gives just one example area of Regional Aid.

An airport that loses €275 per passenger. A €16.5m runway that has never been used by the aircraft for which it was built. Another airport that receives just 4 per cent of the travellers that were forecast.

These are some of the highlights of a report into EU-funded airports by the European Court of Auditors issued on Tuesday. In total, the EU spent €129m between 2000 and 2013 – or a quarter of all airport funding – on facilities that did not need to be built, according to the 70-page report littered with tales of delays and over-optimistic forecasts.
Even those airports that were eventually financially viable proved to be an inefficient use of money, according to the auditors. A stunning 55 per cent of the EU funds audited, or €255m, went into airports that were “unnecessarily large”.
The report examined 20 airports built in Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland and Estonia with €666m of EU funds, of which €460m was audited.
One airport in the northern Greek town of Kastoria had running costs of €7.7m between 2005 and 2012, while revenues came in at €176,000. In this period, it had 25,000 passengers – or roughly ten passengers per day on average. The €275 loss per passenger was particularly egregious as a much larger airport at Thessaloniki was just two hours away by car, pointed out one auditor. “You could have had a limousine for each passenger,” he added.At the same airport, the EU approved a €16.5m extension to a runway, which has yet to be used by the aircraft that required the longer landing strip. “This cannot be considered an effective use of public funds,” the report deadpans.
In many cases, the hordes of passengers predicted when the funds were granted failed to materialise. Córdoba airport in Spain received just 7,000 passengers in 2013, compared to a forecast of 179,000.
A spokesman for the European Commission, which oversees such programmes, said that the report was unrepresentative and that Brussels had overhauled the way that it dishes out fund for airports to avoid these mistakes happening again. “There is a new structure that we are using so that we get even better at redistributing regional aid,” said the spokesman. (Yeh, right.)

There actually seems little will or desire to address either of these problems and we can’t say we should stay in and help change things. We have been in for forty years and not affected the systems to any extent. Mr Cameron found out how willing the EU big wigs are to change the Status Quo.

I'd say just the opposite JOK, I'd want to get involved to solve the problems and by doing that put ourselves at the forefront of making decisions like these (let's not mention HS2 or the spend on a pointless marketing campaign for a no deal by the way). I'm not saying that there aren't many inefficiencies in all levels of government but I would rather be solving them from the inside rather than running away from them. 

There is another element not mentioned there about the airports, these take years to commission and build and the time of them being commissioned would have been predicting higher turnover I would guess; before the market crash in Spain for example. There is a real difference in perception at planning stage to hindsight.

Don't get me wrong with any of my points, I don't think the EU is perfect but I do think leaving at this point especially with idiots like Boris and Gove being guided by Farage and Rees-Mogg scares the life out of me. There isn't a rational argument that says we will be better off than we were - the status quo was good in the main.

That’s the difference, I suppose, isn’t it B1. Your view is stay in an change it and be at the forefront of policy. Whereas I say we have had decades of not getting change (if, indeed, we ever tried. And with our bunch a useless politicos and Mandarins, I doubt we did.) I also have grave doubts we could ever curtail the joint influence of France and Germany.
I get your example of things such as HS2 but, as I was always told, two wrongs don’t make a right and in theory we could have a say, through the ballot box,  to stop such vanity projects.
Although you state there is no “rational “ argument that says we would be better off, you cannot say with any certainty that things won’t deteriorate within the present arrangement.
I don’t think conservatives are “guided” by Farage. I think they a frit of his, frankly baffling to me, charisma.

[baggy1]

That’s the difference, I suppose, isn’t it B1. Your view is stay in an change it and be at the forefront of policy. Whereas I say we have had decades of not getting change (if, indeed, we ever tried. And with our bunch a useless politicos and Mandarins, I doubt we did.) I also have grave doubts we could ever curtail the joint influence of France and Germany.
I get your example of things such as HS2 but, as I was always told, two wrongs don’t make a right and in theory we could have a say, through the ballot box,  to stop such vanity projects.
Although you state there is no “rational “ argument that says we would be better off, you cannot say with any certainty that things won’t deteriorate within the present arrangement.
I don’t think conservatives are “guided” by Farage. I think they a frit of his, frankly baffling to me, charisma.

You see, we're not that far apart after all 

I would argue the point that leaving the EU because things might get worse is not going to convince me that we should leave, and I've always been a proponent of 'if it aint broke, then don't fix it'. The fix of Brexit allows the government to distract away from the real issues of underfunding and bad government over the last few decades.


Having said all that I appreciate you taking the time to put across the points, which as someone said above, no-one else has bothered. I'm not convinced by the majority of them and they won't make a difference to my point of view but it's good to debate.

I can honestly say I've never been so far removed from the opinions of the leaders of this country in my 50+ years. It really is worrying times for my kids and grandkids. Better get back to earning some dough to build that walled community and private army to deal with the future 

[John Osborne’s Knuckle]

You see, we're not that far apart after all  

Having said all that I appreciate you taking the time to put across the points, which as someone said above, no-one else has bothered. I'm not convinced by the majority of them and they won't make a difference to my point of view but it's good to debate.

I can honestly say I've never been so far removed from the opinions of the leaders of this country in my 50+ years. It really is worrying times for my kids and grandkids. Better get back to earning some dough to build that walled community and private army to deal with the future 

  I suspect you couldn’t get a fag paper between us when it come to our respect, or lack of, in our politicians. 60+ years in my case.
I didn’t expect to change your stance. I was just giving my reasons for the position I took. And frankly to counter the stupid inference, by some, that people who voted leave did so without thought. Or worse , the wrong type of thoughts. 
Yes, I thank you for a sensible, calm and reasoned discussion. See, it can be done 
Now go and earn the country’s wealth. I am off to Normandy in a couple of day with my big bro to follow our dad’s route from the 6th of June ‘44. The French didn’t ask him for a visa either.

[baggy1]

Enjoy the trip - my dad was stuck in the middle east (I'm guessing you meant '44 unless your old man was a couple of years late) getting sunburnt and suffering from the shits. His war memories aren't as heroic as some.

[Cheshire East Baggie]

We can debate the pros and cons of being in forever. I'm a Remainer, I'm old enough to remember what it was like before, and trust me it was shite, especially if you liked to travel or work in Europe. But - - - -

It's not about being out, it's about getting there. Has anyone noticed how sterling has lost 25% of its value since the referendum. With a particularly sharp dip now it's become clear that Boris is dead set on a Cartman-style "screw you guys, I'm going home" Brexit. This reflects real concerns by people who know the implications, not "scaremongering" by "Remoaners". If we don't cut a sensible deal to keep the wheels of trade and industry turning, my retirement will be reduced in value by about the same 25% I reckon. I'll be OK with my pension pot, but I don't regard being poorer for the rest of my life as a price worth paying for whatever the benefits of this adventure might eventually be. I don't have time to refill my coffers in the new Golden Age.

Why couldn't we get a deal? Shall we blame the MPs for failing to "respect the will of the people"? No, not me. I blame the "red lines" and specifically the Irish border. You can't have no Customs Union, no Single Rule Book, divergent regulations and free access to unregulated foreign goods in the UK and also have a completely open border with the EU. But that's what the Leavers said we could do, and then May made it Government policy even though it is not deliverable. It's like insisting that you won't have a fence, but you won't have your neighbour's dog shitting on your lawn. I think the arrogance of UK's position is driven by a long-term belief that Ireland should be ours, or conversely a wish to scrape Northern Ireland off our boot and let the Irish have it. Two opposite views that fuel the fantasy that it can happen. And the huge irony of May ending up dependent on the DUP. I thought it was the best thing ever in politics when she screwed up her 2017 General Election, but with hindsight it has got us in a huge amount of trouble.

For the rest of my life I will resent anyone who voted Leave because they have fucked me over. I will never see the benefit, and we've all been suffering the consequences since 2016. Just my onions.