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[Loud Whispers]

I reject the phrasing 'took away'. All these states signed over those rights and options on their own. Nobody forced them.

What these states signed up to is different to what they got, and on false pretenses half the time. Look at the European Constitution, that falls short when the French and Dutch public don't bow down to it and decide, hey that's a terrible idea, let's not support it. So the EU repackage it as the Lisbon Treaty and decide all that pesky referendum stuff is terrible, why would the people ever need to vote about giving away their national democracy right? Well Ireland does a vote on it anyways and vote against, where it should have ended. Then a second referendum is called until they vote in favour. I'm not even going to talk about how shady that is, forcing more and more referendums until you get the result you like. Could you imagine if the Scottish had voted yes but Westminster had just called for a second referendum afterwards? Moving aside from that, just that whole part about no one else even getting a referendum on it - no other nation state was given a referendum and the ones that were were ignored. It was supposed to be that if there would ever come a point where the EU was going to centralize power and take power away from a national democracy its people would be able to have a referendum on it and could only willingly give it away, not have it taken away.
Maastricht Treaty before that - the Danes and French weren't happy about that, and when the Danes voted against it, just like with Ireland just keep making referendums until they get the right result, the one that gives the EU more power. And that was just two countries. That is what birthed the Euro? No one forced them - they were never given a choice. I'm not even going to bring up the times where the EU tried to slip in their regulators into British banks to try and "harmonize" them into alignment with the harmonized Euro, which had done a right good job of screwing over the nations that could have benefited from some currency devaluation, or where people started seriously considering forcing Switzerland into following the Schengen agreement when they didn't want any of it.

Mr McCreevy is widely disliked by the ultra-orthodox Euro-crowd in Brussels: his five years as commissioner for internal markets are seen as testament to the madness of deregulation and laissez-faire thinking. He was also much criticised last year for admitting that he had not read the Lisbon treaty cover to cover, adding that nobody "sane" would do so. This confession was both terrible politics (it was widely mis-remembered in Ireland as an admission that political leaders like Mr McCreevy had not read the treaty at all), and a statement of plain fact: the Lisbon treaty was never designed to be read by anybody. Its predecessor, the EU constitution, was designed to be accessible to ordinary readers, and so it roughly was, though being an EU treaty, what it said and what it meant were not always the same thing. After the French and Dutch voted No to the constitution, its contents were minced up and squeezed into a new sausage skin, to make it unrecognisable and allow national governments to say it was a different text that did not need to be put to a vote.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2009/06/charlie_mccreevy_teller_of_pai

So we end up with an EU that controls a common monetary policy (poor job so far) and exercises the ability to pass any law or interpretation of existing treaties over national parliaments over treaties with jurisdiction over people who did not get any say in signing their signing, even when opinion polls in still maintained that the public were in opposition. Sounds fair. And what's all this stuff about using taxpayer money to fund state media in favour of the EU against the state itself? And there's always going to be macros of Nick Clegg saying that all the skeptics saying the EU wants its own army was a "dangerous fantasy" juxtaposed to Juncker calling for an EU army whilst groping the blue and stars stitched on a German's arm. There was even quite the sensationalist headline of 3,600 regulations imposed on British firms in the span of just 3 years. I say sensational because if you're exporting something to another country you are going to have to follow their regulations, there is no point exporting American cars to Britain if those cars are designed for American roads. The regulations that matter are the ones that really begin hitting home in the domestic market, all pun intended. The ones where the EU is so petty as to demand that the Union Jack not fly on products, and in their place fly the EU flag, or others more serious in regards to quotas or verboten produce and products like GMOs. Free speech campaigners constantly trying to stop the EU from proposing such easily abusable anti-free speech laws, the very notion that one law fits all... Thinking about it perhaps the funniest thing about the EU at least from the British perspective is that you have amongst the British Europhile arguments, the argument that the UK must join the EU in order to have its voice heard on the world stage.
Now, being a cultural superpower and economic world hub with a blue water navy and the commonwealth with 600 years of preexisting ties across the world aside, any nation within the EU whose people were convinced to join in order to have their nation be heard on the world stage are living under the ultimate irony in that they have no foreign policies and for some reason Britain cannot negotiate trade deals with the rest of the world it used to have no problem doing. No referendums there, and the rest of the European nations really got shafted there. Some of them actually did have world voices. The Dutch did not forget...

[Loud Whispers]

Looking over at the news - pardon, but you and I are wrong Owlbread. There is no restriction on the vote being left only to British Citizens.

    British, Irish and Commonwealth citizens over 18 who are resident in the UK will be eligible to vote.
    So too will UK nationals who have lived overseas for less than 15 years.
    The franchise will not include 16 and 17-year-olds, unlike the Scottish independence referendum.
    Members of the House of Lords and Commonwealth citizens in Gibraltar will also be allowed to vote, although they cannot participate in general elections.
    In total, around 45.3 million people will be able to take part.

A Number 10 source said: "No Brit under the age of 58 has had their say on the UK's membership of the European Union.

"It is time to put this right and to give people the choice - in or out.

"This is a big decision for our country, one that is about the future of the United Kingdom. That's why we think it's important that it is British, Irish and Commonwealth citizens that are the ones who get to decide."

Eurosceptics have previously claimed that as many as 1.5 million people from other EU countries could have been allowed to vote in the referendum, if it had taken place under the rules for local government elections.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32872211

The restriction applies to EU citizens. It solves your problem with your great aunt and tickles my fancy for bringing us closer to the Commonwealth, utilizing a union that is everyone doing their own thing together and not just one person telling everyone else how to govern themselves.
Citizens living in Britain with citizenship from either Britain itself or these countries:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Will be able to vote. Now that's some real diversity, literally got an A to Z of nations.

[MarcAFK]

The heck Russia!?! Why did you go and buzz the west coast with your bombers on July 4th?

National dickwaving, of course!

My second favourite sort of dick waving.

[Sheb]

I don't really get why a dude from Uganda should get the vote. After all, according to your own argument LW, he doesn't have a stake in Britain?

[Sergarr]

I didn't expect to see such a violent resistance to EU from LW.

Oh well, the more is EU being destroyed from inside by Euroskeptics supported by people like LW, the easier it will be for Russia to *influence* the EU/ex-EU members. After all, united they stand, divided...

[LordSlowpoke]

that's actually not very surprising if you've been in this thread for a while

i might not approve of what he's saying but i approve of him stepping up and saying his opinion so

[Owlbread]

Loud Whispers, the Commonwealth and Irish citizen thing excludes most EU and non-EU immigrants. The point about permanent citizenship still stands. I also think that is inherently worse than just a blanket ban on non-subjects because:

1. It's very neo-Imperial
2. It suggests the Irish are in some way British and not "foreign", unlike a Polish person
3. It denies Commonwealth countries of full nationhood/independence

Why should a Fijian immigrant who never took British citizenship get to vote but not Christian Allard?

[notquitethere]

You really need to calm down, Loud Whispers. This is just getting daft now, e.g. the "SNP want to erase the state and replace it with United States of Europe" stuff.

plot twist SNP are CIA shills
Scotland is already the 51st Secret State
How's the weather in Langley this time of year Agentbread?

Well, I laughed.

[Owlbread]

Perhaps I should post an update on the growing allegations of a paedophile ring operating in the British House of Commons during the 1970s, 80s and early 90s. Here is a list of the establishment paedophiles that seem to have operated together as part of the same ring of abusers. Note: due to the nature of some of the news reports these newspaper links may be NSFW.

Government figures/cabinet ministers -

1. Leon Brittan - Home Secretary (our version of the Minister for Internal Affairs)
2. Nicky Fairbairn - Solicitor General for Scotland
3. Rhodes Boyson - Minister of various positions e.g. Local Government, Northern Ireland, Under-Secretary of State for Education, advocate of corporal punishment in schools, homophobe and anti-gay rights campaigner
4. Peter Morrison - Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister (Thatcher)
5. Keith Joseph - Architect of Thatcherism, Secretary of State for Education
6. William van Straubenzee - Junior minister for Education and Science (under Ted Heath's Conservative government)
7. Peter Hayman - Deputy director of MI6 (of James Bond fame, the British CIA), leading civil servant with his fingers in literally every single pie
8. Michael Havers - Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain

Non-Tory politicians -

Cyril Smith - Liberal MP for Rochdale, influential back-bencher, Liberal chief whip. Abuse allegations suggest he pretty much ruled Rochdale as a kind of Mr. Big.
Unknown members of MI5 - Perhaps not paedophiles but certainly operated as part of the ring, colluding with them to protect the Tory government
"Others" - Look at any report on the internet and Labour MPs are mentioned, along with Northern Irish ones, but never named. There are allegations going around at the moment about a certain Labour MP who has not been named who liked "young ragamuffins" i.e. vulnerable boys and has been abusing for decades.

Celebrities -

Jimmy Savile - The first disc jockey in Britain, TV personality, Tory donor, marriage counselor for Prince Charles and Lady Diana and one of the most powerful men in Britain, also abused at least 300+ children
Likely others - I have heard Gary Glitter's name come up once or twice and it's not inconceivable that if Savile was at Elm Guest House (part of the WM ring) then others were too

It seems that the Thatcher years were a golden era for very powerful paedophiles in Britain. You may even say that the country was under their thumb - I should point out that the police are investigating a claim that a certain Tory MP (who could it be, I wonder) strangled a child to death and ran another over in his car deliberately. This isn't even everything - this is just the stuff that has actually been in the papers. I read stuff all the time that name Ted Heath and even Lord Mountbatten as paedophiles operating in Jersey where police seem to have found a mass grave of children outside a children's home. These are unsubstantiated though and new stuff comes out all the time. The point is this is just the surface - the deeper you go the worse it gets.

[Il Palazzo]

Can't help but be reminded of the Red Riding trilogy.

[Owlbread]

Can't help but be reminded of the Red Riding trilogy.

Well, for future reference just take that series as "based on a true story", but the truth was actually worse than the films/books.

[SirQuiamus]

*snip*

*shudders violently*

If these scumbags were all Highly Respected Citizens, it appears that the standards of respectability were a bit different back then. Nowadays we have crackpots claiming that people of minority group X can "get away with murder," but in those days you could really, really get away with anything if you held the right titles and knew the right people.

[Helgoland]

News from German domestic politics: Our right-populist party is disintegrating further. Lucke's break-away party Alfa is engaged in disputes with the 'orthodox' AfD over small amounts of money and some IP rights, as well as with such diverse groups as an alphabetisation campaign, an anti-abortion campaign, and the car manufacturer Alfa Romeo over the use of the name 'Alfa'. The AfD is currently at 3.5% in the polls, which is significantly below the 5% threshold needed to enter the Bundestag. This marks a new low in the AfD's popularity.

[Owlbread]

*shudders violently*

If these scumbags were all Highly Respected Citizens, it appears that the standards of respectability were a bit different back then. Nowadays we have crackpots claiming that people of minority group X can "get away with murder," but in those days you could really, really get away with anything if you held the right titles and knew the right people.

Not much has changed, you just have to hold even better titles and know even more powerful people.

[MarcAFK]

Unnamed senior MP, I recall reading about a guy who was caught in an entrapment sting in the 90's I think, operated by a tv program or something, he groped an underage actor and made highly inappropriate comments etc, the police buried his name and removed all evidence of who it was from the media because he was a serving mp, until recently he still was a serving mp. I believe his name was Ken.