I probably put the local one out of business when I left! I couldn't help eating these.... please log in to view this image
Omg i used to love the white choc ones when i had the munchies! Though it was a total coincidence that i happened to be a student at the time...
When I was in a more adventurous mood, i used to have the milk and white choc ones at the same time. I was living on the edge in uni....
Quick info graphic on some of the money Objective one funding has brought to Cornwall please log in to view this image
The EU has also cost the fishing industry in several UK areas lots of money including Cornwall. #strongerout
£55million a day equivalent in membership fees, then add in all of the bailout money for eurozone countries due to the failings of the single currency and you can more than pay for the small subsidies from the EU to certain areas and industries. Clever reallocation of resources would deal with the issue of losing EU funding. We pay in more than we take.
The EU isn't democratic, it's an illusion of democracy rolled up in beurocracy and complicated structures. The European Commision are the ones who put forward legislation - these guys aren't elected. The EU has three different presidents, one president of the the council, one of the Commision, one of the parliament. One of those (the council) is rotationally selected between heads of European states, the other two aren't selected that way. The direction the EU takes is decided in closed rooms in Brussels between unelected beurocrats and the rest of us come along for the democratic show of the parliament. The parliament is seen as being below the Commision and Council, yet is the only bit we get a vote on. There is loads you can read about the disagreements between the various sections of the EU and how they interact with each other. It's a mess and it's certainly not democratic.
Not necessarily, we are in a far stronger negotiating position in terms of access to the EU market than Norway were when deciding against EU membership. The amount we purchase from certain countries, for example the many billions of pounds of cars we buy from Germany would leave massive holes in certain economies which they quite simply won't risk. So either a compromise would be made, or we would seek to strike a new trade deal outside of the single market (more likely IMO). Plenty of countries outside the EU trade with the EU without having to pay money into the EU and it would be massively in the interests of other EU countries to strike a suitable deal with us. Your point also fails to recognise that Norway has considerably more free trade agreements with countries around the world than the EU does!
Not to mention how poor the EU are with money... "The European Court of Auditors found that £109bn out of a total of £117bn spent by the EU in 2013 was "affected by material error”. It means that the accounts submitted by Brussels have not been given the all clear for almost two decades." There's the huge amount of waste in salaries, expenses and inefficiency amongst the actual MEPs and employees of the EU. Which if it was our own government and civil service doing it we would be going mad. Then there's the failure of the ECB and the EU (in particular the eurozone) in effectively dealing with the financial crisis, allowing countries to suffer beyond necessity due to the central economic policy shared by countries using the euro. Which brings us nicely onto how the EU has dealt with Greece...basically suspending there death sentence so the banks can milk the country for as much as possible whilst forcing asset sales. Monetarily the EU is poorly run.
Ok then, looks good. Is there any details of the comparison between what countries pay into the EU vs what they get back?
In 2013 we paid in about €11billion more than we received. We could comfortably cover all EU spending in the UK and have loads left over to invest in other areas if we pulled out of the EU. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/11221427/EU-budget-what-you-need-to-know.html Has some good graphs within the article.
Would that money actually get invested into the community under a Tory government though ? So far all we've seen them do is slash public funding.
We won't have a Tory government forever, and I'd much rather trust our own government to spend the money for the UK than letting the EU do it whilst taking a huge slice to give to other countries and wasting loads of it.
