niceguy2
Hi Betty
And I think your example is a very good example. The EU or as it's old name used to be 'the common market' is as it's name suggests. And the best way for that to work is if we had same (or incredibly similar) rules.
The Common Market is not (repeat NOT) the old name for the EU. The Common Market was, at the time, an agreed set of trading rules. The EU is a political entity, a supranational government.
So using your example we as members of the EU single market should accept the same rules as every other EU member. By introducing our own 'better' standards and then using those conditions to try and limit free trade goes against the principles of the EU. And in effect we're again trying to cherry pick the rules we prefer.
That's exactly what every country does. Let me give you an example. A couple of years ago France decided that it wanted to change the rules on ground beef (beef mince). In France, they eat steak tartare, which is raw ground beef served with a raw egg. The beef has to be very fresh - no more than three days between slaughter and grinding. So they wanted a rule to specify that all ground beef sold in France had to be no more than 3 days old.
Because food and agriculture are run by the EU, France couldn't simply impose that rule. It had to get a ruling from the Commission, which it tried to do. Because the laws can't apply to a single country, if France had succeeded that would have meant that all ground beef, sold everywhere within the EU, could have been no more than 3 days old.
Naturally, to those of us with functioning tastebuds, that's a travesty. Beef has to be hung in order to get the best flavour from it. The darker the beef (or mince) the better the flavour. The sad-looking pink stuff you see in the supermarket should be kept in the fridge for at least a week before you eat it.
Culinary advice aside, the point is that France was trying to 'cherry pick' the rules to suit itself. And every country does this. If you didn't, you'd be an idiot.
The EU is a club. And as club members we agree to the rules of membership.
No, it's a supranational government, which keeps changing the rules, and which disregards the views of the members on those rules. See the ignored referenda on the EU Constitution/Lisbon Treaty.
If we want to change the rules as members then we do so from within. But in the meantime we stick to the rules.
Why? Everyone else tries to change the rules as they go along, as in the example I quoted above. Even today there's a Spanish socialist MEP who's tabled a motion in Parliament which would require companies who laid off staff to find them alternative work. Because the parliament is just a rubber-stamping tool for the Commission that motion has no power, but it's another example of how every nation tries to change the rules to suit themselves.
What a ridiculous idea that we should just do what we're told and if we don't like it then that's just tough.
The problem is that at the moment we keep threatening to quit and take our ball home with us. And the other members are getting pissed off now and sooner or later we'll get our bluff called.
What are they going to do? They can't force the UK out of the EU. The only way that the UK can leave the EU is by invoking article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. The UK can't be forced out. Frankly, the northern members need us far more than we need the EU, because we help to counterbalance the handout countries to the south when it comes to votes.
And that's all I think it is at the moment, a bluff. I don't think we have any serious alternative plan. The Tory approach to this seems to be all over the place. Frankly it's a shambles.
Yes, and that's because Cameron is a a Europhile leading a party which is around 2/3 opposed to EU membership. The man's a fool and it'll come back and bite him.
Lastly it scares me even more that with the combination of the Scottish Independence referendum and talk of an EU one that in a few years time the 7th largest economy in the world, the UK will be broken up and end up as just England. The equivalent of getting divorced and getting the sack all at the same time.
Scotland won't leave (sadly) and what if it did? With that massive drag off the English economy, and us free of the high costs of EU regulation, we'd be freer and richer than we have been for decades.
A Britain free of the EU would be a glorious place to live. We'd be able to rebuild our fishing and farming industries, which would breathe new life in to coastal towns and country villages. We'd have cheaper electricity because we wouldn't be required to produce 20% of our power from bird-killing windmills, which would pull the poorest part of our population out of fuel poverty. We'd be able to block the million or so Romanians and Bulgarians who will turn up next year to claim benefits and housing and take the last few low-skilled jobs from the hands of our working classes. We wouldn't be tied to EU rules on corporate taxation which mean that multinationals pay their tax on the money they earn in the UK in Luxembourg instead.
The losers from our leaving the EU would be big business and big government. Frankly, they can go hang.