Quote ="The Chair Maker"Over half of our trade goes with Europe, if they make laws we will have to fall in line with them otherwise we will not be allowed to sell our goods and services there as we will be breaking their laws but they wont be breaking our law.'" And if I have a vagina I would be a woman. Quote ="The Chair Maker"Lets take an hypothetical example of a European rule being enacted limiting a mortgage to 3 times the salary of the people taking out the mortgage and requiring a 10% deposit. Britain lets say has not signed up to this rule and says the free market should decide. The other Europeans could therefore make it an offence for any banks with branches within the signatory countries from offering lets say 100% mortgages, even if those mortgages are only being sold in the UK. The effect would then be that the big banks would then need to decide do they only trade in the UK market, and be able to continue to offer 100% mortgages, or do they trade across Europe and have restrictions placed upon them.'" If my wife had a penis she would be a man. Quote ="The Chair Maker"At this moment in time there is an example of a European treaty that Britain hasnt signed upto having an influence on the UK, and that is the Shengen agreement. Check out the Lille Loophole which makes our border checks completely redundant. www.scotsman.com/news/uk/lille_l ... _1_1999897'" Is that it? France have an agreement with Belguim. I wouldn't call it a loophole I would say it is someone not doing their job. Still rather pointless in this discussion but hey,ho. BTW Switzerland are not in the EU at all, they do have agreements with the EU that allow them trade agreements whilst keeping themselves soverign. You don't have to be in the EU to trade and have agreements with them. So this line that you have to be in the EU to trade with the EU is infact not true at all.

Quote ="The Chair Maker"Over half of our trade goes with Europe, if they make laws we will have to fall in line with them otherwise we will not be allowed to sell our goods and services there as we will be breaking their laws but they wont be breaking our law.'" And if I have a vagina I would be a woman. Quote ="The Chair Maker"Lets take an hypothetical example of a European rule being enacted limiting a mortgage to 3 times the salary of the people taking out the mortgage and requiring a 10% deposit. Britain lets say has not signed up to this rule and says the free market should decide. The other Europeans could therefore make it an offence for any banks with branches within the signatory countries from offering lets say 100% mortgages, even if those mortgages are only being sold in the UK. The effect would then be that the big banks would then need to decide do they only trade in the UK market, and be able to continue to offer 100% mortgages, or do they trade across Europe and have restrictions placed upon them.'" If my wife had a penis she would be a man. Quote ="The Chair Maker"At this moment in time there is an example of a European treaty that Britain hasnt signed upto having an influence on the UK, and that is the Shengen agreement. Check out the Lille Loophole which makes our border checks completely redundant. www.scotsman.com/news/uk/lille_l ... _1_1999897'" Is that it? France have an agreement with Belguim. I wouldn't call it a loophole I would say it is someone not doing their job. Still rather pointless in this discussion but hey,ho. BTW Switzerland are not in the EU at all, they do have agreements with the EU that allow them trade agreements whilst keeping themselves soverign. You don't have to be in the EU to trade and have agreements with them. So this line that you have to be in the EU to trade with the EU is infact not true at all.

So hang on a minute your saying that that bastion of the free market Hong Kong has a financial transaction tax and hasnt fallen into the sea.
Surely it should have collapsed now into poverty with millions left without jobs as banks fled their guilded Skyscrapers, and moved on masse to the unregulated UK



I see that Hong kongs economy is growing at over 7% despite this tax, and unemployment is only at 4%.
it also has public debt of just 0.001% of GDP

The funniest part are the proposals for all countries' budgets to have to be submitted, approved or rejected by an organisation which is so systematically corrupt and financially inept that auditors have refused to sign off its own accounts for SIXTEEN YEARS on the spin, reckoning that 5% of the budget (and therefore several billion pounds) was mis-spent.

And yet, despite having the books comprehensively rejected since well into the last century, the EU simply fookin ignores the fact, and carries on regardless. Nobody has ever explained how or why that can be.

Yes, just the sort of people to tell us how to write our budget.

Quote ="Anakin Skywalker" BTW Switzerland are not in the EU at all, they do have agreements with the EU that allow them trade agreements whilst keeping themselves soverign. You don't have to be in the EU to trade and have agreements with them. So this line that you have to be in the EU to trade with the EU is infact not true at all.'" The Swiss do have agreements with the EU. Here they are www.europa.admin.ch/themen/00500 ... ml?lang=en and here is a blog that explains how the Swiss are effectively forced to adopt EU laws citizen-europe.blogspot.com/2009 ... heads.html They are therefore a sovereign state in name only

Quote ="Anakin Skywalker" BTW Switzerland are not in the EU at all, they do have agreements with the EU that allow them trade agreements whilst keeping themselves soverign. You don't have to be in the EU to trade and have agreements with them. So this line that you have to be in the EU to trade with the EU is infact not true at all.'" The Swiss do have agreements with the EU. Here they are www.europa.admin.ch/themen/00500 ... ml?lang=en and here is a blog that explains how the Swiss are effectively forced to adopt EU laws citizen-europe.blogspot.com/2009 ... heads.html They are therefore a sovereign state in name only

Quote ="The Chair Maker"The Swiss do have agreements with the EU. Here they are www.europa.admin.ch/themen/00500 ... ml?lang=en and here is a blog that explains how the Swiss are effectively forced to adopt EU laws citizen-europe.blogspot.com/2009 ... heads.html They are therefore a sovereign state in name only'" They are tiny in comparrison to us (6th biggest world economy ATM), we are not surrounded by EU countries. Either way my point is that you CAN trade with the EU whilst outside the EU. You can trade with the EU whilst not giving them millions of £££'s a week only for them to blow it on god knows what as FA states above.

Quote ="The Chair Maker"The Swiss do have agreements with the EU. Here they are www.europa.admin.ch/themen/00500 ... ml?lang=en and here is a blog that explains how the Swiss are effectively forced to adopt EU laws citizen-europe.blogspot.com/2009 ... heads.html They are therefore a sovereign state in name only'" They are tiny in comparrison to us (6th biggest world economy ATM), we are not surrounded by EU countries. Either way my point is that you CAN trade with the EU whilst outside the EU. You can trade with the EU whilst not giving them millions of £££'s a week only for them to blow it on god knows what as FA states above.

Brown kept us out of the Euro, when Blair wanted in - maybe he'll one day get a bit of retrospective credit for that!
I've always been fairly pro-Euro as I reckon that by chance half the decisions made would benefit the part of the UK that is not the South East. And then they maybe wouldn't have to 'subsidise' us quite so much. Relying on the fiscal responsibility of the Italians is a hefty price though, I've come to realise.
I think the current stuff is overblown. The eurozone countries need to sort out the mess, a mess that Britain isn't directly involved in. Apart from being skint, in the medium term we need to focus on finding a better a balance between regulation and freedom in our regulated free market economy. Absolutely no prospect of it happening, like.

Or a lady boy.

Help me out on something

If the UK was to become completely independant from the EEC and was free to set its own rules and regulations on just about everything, does that not put us in a better position than the rest of Europe as Europe would be (in theory) all singing from the same hymn sheet stopping any of the countries having any sort of competitive advantage, whereas we are on the outside able to look in and offer an 'alternative'.

Which means 90% of our GDP isn't the financial sector, but he is prepared to stuff that up in his ideological crusade to shove as much pain and suffering on all those that DIDN"T cause the global meltdown.

As one commentator put it on Radio 5 'he is the prime minister for 90,000 square miles of the UK, not just the 1 square mile in the City of London'

You just want to open a sweatshop, don't you?

Yes we could still trade with other EU countries, we'd just have tariffs to contend with, like in the old days. I'm certain that all the exporters and importers of goods will be absolutely over the moon with that scenario and I also reckon the cost to our economy would eclipse whatever the City are squealing about

Thank God is what I reckon. The idea of handing over a huge chunk of our economic sovereignty to the ECB is an incredible one. It's not just the Tobin Tax, regardless of your stance on it- the offer on the table was unelected central banks and European commissioners telling us what our budget should look like, tax harmonisation...

De Gaulle used to talk of the "Europe des patries", strong nation-states working together in a spirit of respect and co-operation but having boundaries which shouldn't be crossed and maintaining their sovereignty. He'll be turning in his grave to see a man who claims to be a political heir doing this. And you know something is up when Sarkozy says that it'll be a series of bilateral treaties rather than through the EU- and that this is to avoid the need for referenda.

I suspect that Belgium and its ludicrous, expensive four-tier government system will not be affected.

We'd rejoin EFTA like Norway and Switzerland. But don't forget that our veto here keeps us in the EU- the treaties between the others will have to be intergovernmental rather than through the European Union.

What makes you think they'd want us?

They too will have seen Cameron's breast-beating, do you honestly believe they'd be happy with us trying to take our "rightful" seat at the head of the table?

Then we'd impose them too - especially on German cars. so, what's the problem?

Ask Nissan, Honda, Toyota, Land Rover/Jaguar and what's left of Ford & GM, they'd all be shutting up shop here and moving to a post-accession country in a flash

The devil is in the detail, transaction taxes are easy sells to people who don’t think too hard about what they are being sold, guff about casino banking etc only serves to obscure the picture. You shave a tiny amount off millions of daily transactions and you get huge sums of money, and the impact is tiny because it’s only a tiny amount taken each time, sounds tempting right? It sounds to good be true because it is too good to be true. Comparisons with stamp duty don’t hold up, stamp duty is a tax on a big ticket purchase, which the actual taxpayer only pays very occasionally, the financial transactions under consideration here are short-term one’s with very small margins, like overnight loans. So in practice it’s more like putting a penny in tax on a transaction that is only worth a few pence in profit. 0.05% per transaction sounds like nothing, but annualise that and it’s a big deal. Taking huge sums from any source is bound to have an impact, that is just common sense when you stand back from it and ask how exactly does that work? This is why some of these activities just aren’t viable if % shaved, because it’s not the face value of the transaction that matters, it’s the tiny margin that is actually getting slashed.

It will be interesting what happens now, will Eurozone financial centres really want to do this if London doesn’t? Will they make themselves less competitive when London’s pre-eminence is already a bugbear for many Eurozone financial sectors. The City of London was the cash cow in this part of the deal, does it look as good now that cream isn’t going to come sloshing their way?

Also the lack of fiscal sovereignty has been a major handicap for the weaker economies, Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, all couldn’t devalue currency when they needed too. Now they are going to be locked even more tightly into a Franco-German dominated economic policy? I suppose politically the Eurozone can now blame the UK for being selfish when they get to wherever the can stops this time round?

You guess.

Excellent article from the Economist on just how much of a personal failure for Cameron this is: www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/ ... n-and-eu-0 I think he made the right call last night, but his entire government thus far has been an exercise in backing himself into a corner where it was the only choice available. He's also managed to guarantee that in the economically liberal v naturally statist debate, the latter is the more likely winner. Nice one, numb nuts.

Excellent article from the Economist on just how much of a personal failure for Cameron this is: www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/ ... n-and-eu-0 I think he made the right call last night, but his entire government thus far has been an exercise in backing himself into a corner where it was the only choice available. He's also managed to guarantee that in the economically liberal v naturally statist debate, the latter is the more likely winner. Nice one, numb nuts.

It's assymetric. We'd have tariffs placed on a greater proportion of our exports than the Eurozone would (because it is a bigger market than we are alone). That's the advantage of being 'in' - strength in size, at the cost of some flexibility/sovereignity.

Why would they remain here and be at a distinct financial disadvantage to their EU competitors?

These sorts of arguments are hollow, being part of an economic free trade zone does not require subsidising a wider political project, they really are not mutually inclusive. The whole GATT and WTO set-up has been geared towards freer global trade, and that is not dependent on a political project that covers part of Europe. If the UK were no longer to provide it's not insignificant net subsidy to the EU political project (and along with Germany we are the only ones who have always been net contributors) it might make plenty of rent-seeking interests unhappy for quite obvious reasons, but it doesn't change economic reality of international trade agreements. We do lots of business with the Eurozone, from outside of the Eurozone, and it's a two way thing, they do same with us, there's no reason to think they would try to be punative, or even that it would be in their wider economic interests to be punative, if we decided we don't really want to shovel cash into the gobs of French farmers any longer. These threats just don't really hold up to reality of international political economy. Not wanting to be part of a political project is not the same as wishing to be isolated on international trade.

And if the Euro ends up being a financial basket case which is still a possiblity no matter what France and Germany say?
How long will that mess take to sort out and what will be left when it is?
This isn't the end of this I think it is only the begining and no one knows what the end game will be.
That was why I said 'You guess'.

What are the disadvantages of being in a free trade agreement?

Quote ="cod'ead"What makes you think they'd want us? They too will have seen Cameron's breast-beating, do you honestly believe they'd be happy with us trying to take our "rightful" seat at the head of the table?'" We founded it to start with, alongside them, when France stopped us joining the EEC. Plus, according to this, we're about their 5th largest destination for exports: www.ssb.no/muh_en/tab-2011-11-15-03-en.html As for breast-beating: I wish it'd happen years ago.

Quote ="cod'ead"What makes you think they'd want us? They too will have seen Cameron's breast-beating, do you honestly believe they'd be happy with us trying to take our "rightful" seat at the head of the table?'" We founded it to start with, alongside them, when France stopped us joining the EEC. Plus, according to this, we're about their 5th largest destination for exports: www.ssb.no/muh_en/tab-2011-11-15-03-en.html As for breast-beating: I wish it'd happen years ago.