Thought I'd start a new thread as this is going to be a major talking point this year...have not made up my mind yet...(unlike bucksfizz)....but thinking of voting for an exit as Europe is not doing Britain any good at all it seems....

Imagine Stan saying that ,someone who is influenced by Fred of all people .

I have thought through all the pro's and con's and there is not many pro's

None on here thinks your right Stan .

I don't have a stance on the subject JB as I stated months ago on here so don't start making assumptions and pointing the finger.

Coming from someone who thought the TSB BANK was still independent 3 months after it was taken over , and says pot kettle alert , pot kettle alert like a demented parrot day in day out .

Of do shut you boring oink and give the organ grinder a right of rely.. if he's got one.

There really is only one issue that matters Stanley. Is it sustainable?
The clear answer is no and enlarging the EU because of mismanagement now, such as adding Turkey, will only make matters worse. All the umming and arring doesn't get around the fact that I wouldn't trust the EU commission to run a corner shop, let alone all of europe and part of asia.
Many of the new additions are former soviet bloc members where loyalty to the cause was more important than loyalty to the people. As new governments are formed, such as in Poland, the people want to know just exactly what these apparatchiks, many now in EU posts, were up to during that time. THE EU, like the Soviet Union, doesn't like democracy. It is dangerous to the cause.

Boring my god , you obviously have a lot of failings in real life , so you come on a BB and think your the bees knees who bosses people about , a very sad person with the attention span of a Goldfish .

It, The subject is a very very complex one and until all people take the time to go into 'All" the aspects of it they can't just sound off about a few subjects (despite how important they are to them) on a message board.

And what do you ever add to the message board at any point in time except insults and name calling , grow up .

personally, i don't think "it" is far off the mark, though his last para is a bit suspect of questionable relevance

Leaving EU would boost UK economy by 4 percent - economists


http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-economists-idUKKCN0XP15O

Yes Patrick Minford was on the Daily Politics and put over good points..

Yes Economists for Brexit launched today , " A lot of Economic nonsense has been talked so far in the Brexit debate ," said the report out today .

A minority opinion.

Like yours Freda .

Frazer Nelson in the Spectator

Sometimes, George Osborne’s dishonesty is simply breathtaking. Let’s set aside the way he has positioned himself over the years (if he believed that leaving the European Union ‘would be the most extraordinary self-inflicted wound’ he might have told us – and his constituents – earlier, rather than proceeding with the farce of renegotiation). But it’s his maths, today, which shames his office – and his use of this maths to make the entirely false suggestion that the Treasury thinks Brexit would make you £4,300 worse off. For anyone who cares about honesty in politics, and the abuse (and reporting) of statistics, this is an interesting case study.

His chosen date is 2030. By then, the UK economy is expected to have grown by around 37 per cent, but the HM Treasury document claims that this would be closer to about 29 per cent growth after Brexit. A fairly straight situation, which Osborne fundamentally misrepresented using two techniques.

Deception 1. Osborne falsely claims that people would be ‘permanently poorer’ when he’s talking about the difference between 29pc GDP growth and 37pc GDP growth. The most he can claim is that they won’t be as much better off as they would otherwise be.

Deception 2. Osborne then translates this reduction in potential GDP to household income. But they are two fundamentally different things. This is Osborne’s crowning deception, to allow him to conjure up his headline figure of £4,300. This is what he wants households to remember, and is as intellectually dishonest as any manoeuvre ever attempted by Gordon Brown*. The Treasury and the OBR discuss GDP all of the time: never do they convert it into a per-household cash figure because (unlike debt, tax etc) it’s meaningless.GDP contains measures like the operating surplus of corporations; and all manner of other measurements.

GDP per household, this bogus invention, bears no relation to household income. If GDP is divided by households it’s £68,000: nothing like they average disposable income (£18,600 per head, or £45,400 per household)

Deception 3. To arrive at the £4,300 figure, the Treasury divided GDP in 2030 by the number of households today. Arguably the most dishonest trick of the lot because, with all that immigration, there’ll be plenty more households by 2030. The DCLG projection reckons 31.2 million, vs 27 million now. So Osborne’s (bogus) £4,300 figure would be more like £3,700, accounting for the extra households.

So having established 1) a means of dressing up an increase as a decrease and 2) a bogus conflation of GDP with household income and 3) a way of covering up the immigration-driven surge in households Osborne comes up with his grand deception:-

‘Britain would be permanently poorer if we left the European Union, to the tune of £4,300 for every household in the county. That’s a fact everyone should think about as they consider how to vote.’

It’s not a fact, it’s an invention. If you assume that disposable income grows in line with GDP then he’d be arguing that there would be a £5,400 rise outside the EU by 2030 instead of £6,880 inside the EU – so the ‘cost’ of spurning EU membership would be £1,480. Which could be alleviated with a modest tax cut.

I’m a Europhile, but these are the kinds of tactics that make me want to vote ‘out’ – the appalling level of dishonesty with which the government is making the case. And while Nick Robinson did a brilliant job on Today, the BBC’s website is now Britain’s most-read news source (four times as popular as any newspaper) and it uncritically repeated Osborne’s concocted figure of £4,300. This points to a wider problem the BBC has about the reporting standards in its website, lower than that of its news broadcasts even though they now reach far more people.

If the case for ‘in’ really was a strong as the Chancellor suggests, why would he need to mislead? Perhaps the reason is that he can get away with it: he can cook up a £4,300 figure (a quarter of the average person’s disposable income) and have it repeated enough times for voters to remember.

* This technique – to present a rise as a fall – is the closest you can get to statistical alchemy. It was actually pioneered by Gordon Brown in 2005 when he was breaking new ground in the abuse of statistics. Labour campaigned against “Tory cuts” but the Tories attempted to circumvent it by pledging to actually outspend Labour: there would be no cuts. So what could Brown do? His answer was brazen, but effective. He worked out that Labour would spend £27 billion more than the Tories, so used this to claim that they would – ergo – impose a £27 billion “cut”. The technique was politically successful insofar as the public just remember the Big Scary Figure.

Just the impression Osborne wanted with his prized, concocted £4,300 figure.

This is where the out campaigners must pick up on , and expose these lies . Although there will be quite a lot of lies to do that .

Luke Johnson
Luke Johnson is chairman of Risk Capital Partners and Patisserie Valerie, and is a former chairman of Channel [..] Full profile

http://www.cityam.com/239866/why-ill-be-voting-to-leave-the-costly-dysfunctional-and-bureaucratic-eu

Dear Friend,
We send £350 million a week to the EU – enough to build a new hospital every week
250,000 EU migrants a year come to the UK – it’s out of control and damages the NHS
It’s safer to take back control and spend our money on our priorities

Imagine if we Vote Leave in 56 days’ time… Our entrepreneurs could focus on creating jobs and supporting the economy rather than reading through reams of regulations from Brussels.

Free business from EU regulation
Employment Minister Priti Patel has today made a speech on how we can free small businesses from unnecessary regulation after we Vote Leave. Only 6% of UK businesses export to the EU, yet 100% have to abide by regulation from Brussels. HM Treasury estimate that the cost of complying with burdensome EU red tape is the equivalent of £4,600 per household every year.
Ms Patel stated that after we take back control on 23 June, the UK can perform an audit of EU regulation to ensure that small businesses are not shackled by unnecessary rules. Pro-EU campaigners including Nick Clegg and David Cameron have previously called for small companies to be exempt from these burdens, however their attempts were vetoed by Brussels.
Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, accounting for 60% of private sector employment and making up 99% of total businesses in the UK. After we Vote Leave on 23 June, they will be free of stifling EU regulation and can focus on what they do best - creating jobs and driving economic growth.

We can better protect workers’ rights outside the EU
David Cameron and former trade union leader Sir Brendan Barber today claimed that leaving the EU would be a ‘disaster’ for workers’ rights. It is sad to see the Prime Minister doing Britain down. We don’t have to give up control to EU politicians and unelected EU judges to protect working people. Indeed, UK law is often far more generous than EU law, such as on maternity pay and leave.
It is a myth to say that we must stay in the EU to protect workers. You only have to look at the high levels of unemployment in Greece, Spain, Portugal and the rest of the eurozone, to see that the EU is no friend of the worker. In 2009, Sir Brendan himself warned that the European Court has ‘undermined’ minimum standards. The safer choice for British workers is to Vote Leave on 23 June.

jimmy it's OK having all these paper articles but they must be seen and explained to the greater masses , Dave's appearing to be a lying toad eh .

Dear Friend

Economically we are better by far to be in the EU. It's our largest market.

It's not possible to change the minds of those with existing strong views. Arguments just tend to reinforce existing positions.
Both sides are spinning and counter arguments just cause confusion for those still uncertain .
As the vote appears to be roughly evenly divided, it will be in the hands of the small number of so far uncommitted.
At the end of the day I suspect personalities will make the difference for many.

If Farage, Boris and Galloway want out, who wants to be friends with them??. The small number of critical votes to swing it will probably be based on voting against those you can't stand.