DaveO wrote:i'm spartacus wrote:
But still you fail to check the veracity of the stories once you've read the papers. What you said was the EU Parliament voted to veto; that was in fact completely incorrect. Not withstanding that, the notion of a EU Parliamentary veto at all is something of a misnomer. What you have done is likened the EU Parliament to the UK Parliament which is the supreme body in the UK. The EU Parliament on the other hand is a debating chamber more akin to the House of Lords - ie lots of people with no real power, containing and dominated by a preponderance of members from the large influential countries.
How can you suggest someone "check the veracity of the stories" and then go on to post such complete and utter bollocks about what the EU parliament does?
The word ‘bollocks’ doesn’t add to your argument, and only serves to make everything else that follows it less.
The EU works like this.
The European Commission operates as a cabinet government just like our system, with 28 members of the Commission making it up. There is one member per member state and the commission is answerable to the EU parliament just as our government is answerable to our parliament. The EU parliament can force the commission to resign if needs be.
The job of the Commission is the draft legislation at the behest of the Council of mInisters and the EU parliament.
They then go through "ordinary legislative procedure" which provides an equal footing between Parliament and Council. In particular, under the procedure, the Commission presents a proposal to Parliament and the Council which can only become law if both agree on a text, which they do (or not) through successive readings up to a maximum of three. In its first reading, Parliament may send amendments to the Council which can either adopt the text with those amendments or send back a "common position". That position may either be approved by Parliament, or it may reject the text by an absolute majority, causing it to fail, or it may adopt further amendments, also by an absolute majority.
To say the EU parliament is like the House of Lords with no real power shows a basic lack of understanding of what does and what its powers are.
UK normal legislative process = The Houses of Parliament consider proposals, called bills, most of which are introduced by the government. To become law, a bill must be approved by both MPs in the House of Commons and peers in the House of Lords. Bills go through a very similar process in both Houses.
Spot the difference?
Notwithstanding that, we are not actually talking about legislative processes; we are talking about the process of agreeing a trade deal. What you show is a basic lack of understanding of the issue in question
I've asked many times and have yet to get an answer, but why would an organisation, predicated on free trade and the removal of trade barriers, want to create and put up barriers with its largest single export market?
Because it isn't predicated on free trade. It's predicated on free trade
within the EU. Outside of it, it acts as a trading bloc and as is allowed under WTO rules to impose tariff and non-tariff barriers on trade with other countries on a country by country basis (something a single country can't do).
That could not be any wider of the mark. The original premise of the then Common Market was to create free trade and co-operation between the countries of western Europe to reduce the risk of those countries engaging in armed conflict. Its current number one policy is to create a global system for fair and open trade.
When we leave they aren't going to allow us to trade with them tariff free without a free trade agreement and even with one they will not agree to remove some tariff non-tariif barriers to some trade because it simply isn't in their interest to do so. They are not a charity.
I agree in part, but the UK has the option to impose reciprocal tariffs. It doesn’t make economic sense to impose a tariff on someone who sells to you, when you sell them more than they sell to you.
Why would the EU, who has free trade deals with countries and blocks of countries all over the globe, want to put up barriers to having a free trade deal with its largest single export market, when there is absolutely no regulatory divergence between us and them.
The reasons are obvious. The fact we tell 'em we have adopted the same laws and "there is absolutely no regulatory divergence between us" doesn't mean there isn't any or that over time there won't be deliverance. From the second we leave our word that there isn't divergence isn't good enough.
I agree that there may be some divergence over time, but this is not outside the scope of negotiations on future relations. It is something that could be easily resolved
For there not to be divergence and there has to be an agreement that lays down who is the arbiter of standards in the UK that the EU accepts as ensuring the relevant EU standards are maintained. There isn't one nor is there a body set up to ensure compliance.
The Government is planning to incorporate a large majority of EU regulations into UK law and to prune the legislation it doesn’t want or need. Eighty percent of the standards governing manufactured goods in the single market are voluntary, and these have been progressively harmonised across Europe. European product standards are normally voluntary and agreed outside any EU framework and led by industry in order to promote competition. It is trading standards officials in the various countries who check for EU conformity at the point of sale.
There also has to be an agreement as to who settles trade disputes between us and the EU. The EU will want that to be the ECJ, something "taking back control" is supposed to remove us from.
The reliance on the EU legislation and the ECJ is also why we can't simply cut & paste trade agreements written between the EU and other countries to create our own (as suggested by the dimwitted Peter Lilley MP). These agreements are written from front to back referencing EU rules, regulations and EU law. Again all of which we want to distance ourselves from supposedly.
But we are not distancing ourselves from EU legislation and the decisions of the ECJ - we have cut and pasted it into UK law. The main point is that we can ignore the past judgments of the ECJ or EU law where it doesn’t relate to our dealings with the rest of the world, or internally.
For example, and to show the point, and drawing on an issue that everyone will have heard of - although it seems frivolous today.
Some years ago, the EU issued a directive insisting that everything is displayed and sold in metric weights and measurements which effectively forced the UK to comply. This led to;
Traders being ordered to pay costs for selling Brussels sprouts by the pound, and another was given a 12-month conditional discharge for pricing pumpkins and other vegetables by the pound.
We will be in a position to remove ourselves from the supremacy of directives which have no effect on our internal market, but of course we would have to comply with the rules of the EU market to trade with the EU market.