The Sunday Mail are printing an article by their colleagues in Ireland that show Michael O`Leary to be supporting the Yes campaign this time for rather dubious reasons, the same for Intel.
It seems business , usually large multinationals, are not so much supporting the EU for business in general but for their own businesses above normal probity.
Mind you I will give the EU the benefit of the doubt. I dont think it is so much corruption and bribery as the way the project likes to work . This is to deal with “people of influence” (as Barrosso would say), cutting out the normal democratic method.

Dear irish people!

Pleace stop the treaty of lisbon! Is is antidemocartic, militaristic, antisocial. The disadvantages are much bigger, than the advantages. The EU can live with its actuell laws. They should only be changed into a democratic direction. With the treaty of lisbon, the european council is able to change this treaty in great parts without asking the parliament. This is nearly the same law, which mades the nationl- rassistic- party of Germany so powerfull in our country in the year 1933. Our basic law (the german constitution) and all other european constitutions should not be replaced by the treaty of lisbon. But the new treaty tries to bring all right- sytstems in a lower level than the new european right. Here is my informationpage: http://sites.google.com/site/euradevormwald/english . When you have some more english information, pleace send me a link or text or write it into the visitors book of my page. And pleace spread this text all over Ireland.

In the hope in your activities for a better Europe, Felix Staratschek, Freiligrathstr. 2, D- 42477 Radevormwald (Germany)

EU Referendum isn`t supposed to be impartial or claim to be. It is EUrosceptic and everyday gives an analysis on current affairs.
I can sympathise when a EUrophile groans at some of the EUrosceptics more outlandish allegations about the EU, but I let them stand because it makes up or the same from some of the EUrophiles and BBC, like trying to portray all EUrosceptics as old ,xenophobic and in the lower socio-economic groups .Plus all the Glittering Generalities that are trotted out. Let`s be fair – there are different types of EUrosceptics and different types of EUrophiles.Please also remember that what may seem an inane frivolity to one might be anothers job or way of life.I read Dennis Mcshane (I think?) defending the Constitution/ Lisbon Treaty, saying that details such as transportation in Saxony were not of interest to us here. Most likely not – unless you are in business that means transporting within Saxony , which may stop your activities entirely.

Nosemonkey,

I shouldn`t just lift pieces straight out of the papers, but the Telegraph are diong articles about the EU. In another piece they wrote about how British officials dont get entitlements out of the EU . Another was a Taxpayers Alliance (Tory financed ?) that showed any rebates we recieve are often swallowed up by implementing the rebates themselves or other EU directives . The figure of £16 billion seems an underestimation.

The Irish debate on the Lisbon Treaty is a case in point, and has clear echoes of the way the debate goes in the UK. Instead of talking about the pros and cons of having a permanent Presidency, or the actual procedures that will be critical to ensuring that national parliaments really DO end up having influence over the legislative process, the Irish ended up discussing the non-issues of the Treaty’s effect on abortion policy and Irish neutrality.

I saw another post on The Tap today that seriously claimed the EU was trying to legalise paedophilia. How can you have a proper discussion in that context?

Nosemonkey’s blog is one of the places where you can, thanks to people like you! ;-)

I could give concrete examples just by lifting out of the papers legions of stories about jobs and the EU , then add some from EUreferendum blog which shows even more (like LDV ) that the papers miss because of the depth needed to analyse it, and add from the experiences of those who tell it personnally. If I had a retentive memory it would be as long as your detailed posts, but would get tedious as EUrophiles tend to dismiss these consequences because they want us to see a “bigger “picture .

As regards the fishing, agreed that fish do not recognise international borders, nor do they recognise the CFPs lines of delination.As for even more fishermen out of work – what are the figures for British fishermen forced out of business and other EU fishermen forced out of business ? (and what are the figures for African fishermen ?)

As regards my own circumstances and the British haulage industry,I hoped I had shown the pernicous effects of our membership on not just trucking, but the governance of the UK .The EU does/did affect British haulage, but in the roundabout way that it seems to affect other areas. I could explain at length, because it is not as clear as first looks .

Insideur,

Christopher Booker and Richard North have written more books on the subject.Have you seen their blog, EU Referendum ? Details are analysed there (and I can speak with impartiality, I am not a favourite there ).

wg you make an interesting point about the value of a country’s size within the EU. Actually there are good arguments in favour of small states, because they get disproportionately large shares of the vote in the European Parliament and in the Council. Where they lose out is in the ability of their governments to pull others along with them, and the critical significance of thenational economic and social policies of the larger countries for other EU Member States. I don’t really have an opinion about whether it’s best to be a small or large country in the EU. And as NM says, England would be the 4th largest behind Germany, France, and Italy, instead of the UK as 3rd ahead of Italy. So the difference wouldn’t be huge. What is more interesting to me is that you seem to value the benefits of size within the EU, but don’t seem to value the benefits of the weight that the EU carries globally.

Robin I have read Booker/North’s Castle of Lies and various other bits and pieces in the eurosceptic canon. It’s all well-argued and detailed stuff. But it tends to simply sweep the strongest pro-EU arguments under the carpet. In the case of the very interesting business case studies so often provided, they privilege the role of EU regulations in a business’ failure over all sorts of other factors. If you want examples of businesses that have done well because of the EU, a good place to start is Ryanair. Michael O’Leary, a fearsome critic of the Commission, nonetheless has explicitly recognised that his business has succeeded only because the EU has liberalised the market. He is campaigning for a Yes vote in Ireland.

wg you are dead right about the strangeness of the mercury ban juxtaposed with the light bulb regulations. This is one of the typical results of the system as it is today. I tend to see two causes. First, the Commission, which proposes the laws, is structured in such a way as to make contradictory proposals commonplace. But I think they are a function of individual Commissioners’ agendas (“I need some notches on my bedpost”) more than a more sinister and systemic “self-interested corporatism”. The second cause is the fact that EU laws are adopted by politicians. Arguably, in a less democratically accountable system, you’d get more coherent outcomes. In every modern political system, there is a basic tension between “good regulation” (science-based, consistent with other regulation, etc) and “democratic accountability”, which implies decisions being taken by ignorant career politicians who think they are following the will of their equally ignorant voters. Technocracy tends to be untransparent and unaccountable, whereas democracy tends to be ineffective and inconsistent. The same tension exists in the UK system. You could argue that the current balance is further to one side of the scale in the EU than in the UK, but in my mind that does not affect the fundamental legitimacy, or lack of legitimacy, of the system. It’s a question of policy rather than legitimacy, in other words.

In any case, it doesn’t matter the total number of MPs from any one country – what matters in any democracy is the number of MPs who have the same opinion on a proposed piece of legislation. Gordon Brown and David Cameron are both from the UK, after all. I live in a Labour constituency, but a Tory ward of a Tory/Lib Dem-run council. There’s not even unanimity of political opinion within one parliamentary constituency – so from a political advantage point of view, the geographical scope has little impact. (Plus, of course, the larger the EU member state, the lower the effective value of an individual vote: it takes 800,000 Germans to elect one MEP, but just 80,000 Maltese – so if anything, smaller states could lead to an advantage.)

Robin – Can you give some concrete examples of these jobs that you claim have been lost? Then we might be able to see if it really can be attributed to the EU – or whether (as I suspect) there were several other factors in play as well. After all, when it came to your own situation, I seem to recall that you blamed the difficulties you had had in your career on the EU but it turned out to be nothing to do with the EU whatsoever.

Again on the fishing issue – how exactly are you going to force fish to respect international borders? How would you stop non-British fishermen from over-fishing the international waters over which Britain has no control, thus reducing British fish stocks to the point of collapse? The CFP is rubbish and needs a complete overhaul – you’ll never catch me denying it – but without something along the lines of the CFP, fish stocks in the northern Atlantic and North Sea would be even lower than they are now, and even more fishermen would be out of work.

As for the £16bn figure – you are taking an over-estimation of the *gross* amount rather than the *net*, as I explain in some detail in the post I linked to in my last comment. And you are also apparently confused about how VAT works. That’s a tax like any other, and so is already factored in to any figures (gross or net) that you may see.

The net cost of EU regulations (rather than legislation or membership) – for all the reasons set out above – is impossible to determine accurately. Though, as noted in this post, earlier this year the British Chambers of Commerce issued a report estimating that EU-originated regulations accounted for just 0.1% of regulatory net costs to British business in 2006/7.

As I say, it really all depends on who you ask – and what figures you want to believe. None of them are entirely accurate – because by the very nature of what they are trying to do, they simply can’t be.

hmmm – I like that argument. It amuses me.