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The latest lies from the Remain campaign

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On rights the EU has some good and some bad. Some things are really subjective and are getting caught up in this.

Everyone overlooks the greater issue. It is up to us, the inhabitants of this nation, the people this nation belongs to, to stand up for our rights. If we're arguing over who will look after us because we can't look after ourselves we are screwed.

I really like the song Get Up Stand Up. It reminds me of how I feel about this.
Original post by nulli tertius
That isn't correct. Any EEC member could discriminate on racial grounds (European/non-European) provided it did so regardless of EEC nationality.


That's exactly the point I just made. Any member under the Treaty of Rome in 1957 could racially discriminate against their own nationals. What they were unable to do is racially discriminate against the nationals of other member states. As I wrote, this may not be an effective remedy within a state for the nationals of that state, but it is effectively a racial non-discrimination measure.

This issue is played out even today in other forms. Scotland gives free university education to Scots students. English/Welsh/Northern Irish students do not get the same benefit, but the nationals of any other EU state can also get free university places in Scotland. This is because the discrimination against English/Welsh/Northern Irish students is a domestic issue, and discrimination against EU students is an EU issue.

Four of the six founding members of the EU were or, in the case of Italy, had only recently ceased to be colonial powers with substantial numbers of immigrants from those colonies…


I think you would need to come up with definitive figures (rather than bald assertions) for those states in 1957 for this to be a persuasive argument.
Original post by MrControversial
On rights the EU has some good and some bad. Some things are really subjective and are getting caught up in this.

Everyone overlooks the greater issue. It is up to us, the inhabitants of this nation, the people this nation belongs to, to stand up for our rights. If we're arguing over who will look after us because we can't look after ourselves we are screwed.


While I understand the sentiment on this point I think it is a little misguided. The population of the UK has stood up for its rights in electing successive governments that have adopted measures derived from EU law (those governments have also been instrumental in shaping EU law itself - particularly the UK in developing the single market).

I'm not sure we expect anyone else to "look after" us, but it is fair enough for us to believe that we can rely upon some kind of shared values across the EU to protect us within that entire area, and to steer our governments in the right direction.

I think that at the moment we have a government that has significant ministers talking about the repeal of the Human Rights Act, and withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights* - it's important that we have some external pressure on the government to help us persuade it not to pursue this ideological dead-end.

* Of course I know that the ECHR is not EU legislation, I just use this as a device to make the point that external pressure and shared values are important.
Original post by typonaut
While I understand the sentiment on this point I think it is a little misguided. The population of the UK has stood up for its rights in electing successive governments that have adopted measures derived from EU law (those governments have also been instrumental in shaping EU law itself - particularly the UK in developing the single market).

I'm not sure we expect anyone else to "look after" us, but it is fair enough for us to believe that we can rely upon some kind of shared values across the EU to protect us within that entire area, and to steer our governments in the right direction.

I think that at the moment we have a government that has significant ministers talking about the repeal of the Human Rights Act, and withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights* - it's important that we have some external pressure on the government to help us persuade it not to pursue this ideological dead-end.

* Of course I know that the ECHR is not EU legislation, I just use this as a device to make the point that external pressure and shared values are important.


It's our responsibility to steer our government in the right direction. I think intervention after intervention has given the people the wrong impression on whose job it is to keep our government in line.

The ECHR is becoming increasingly problematic as it gives individuals rights over others within a nation. It's increasingly moving from all for one, one for all to all for one. The EU is not doing anything either to protect our rights. We still have no freedom of expression (you are arrested if you offend a few) and you still have the surveillance bill coming in.

Whatever evil you want to fight or want to use the EU to stop, in the long run you're only going to make things worst. Who keeps the EU in line? Eventually you'll be praying to God to solve your woes. You can't keep going from authoritative power to authoritative power. All you're doing is spreading out our sovereignty even further and reducing our own power over our fate.

As for the EU having some kind of a superior morality, it doesn't. That's in your imagination.
Original post by MrControversial

The ECHR is becoming increasingly problematic as it gives individuals rights over others within a nation.


Such as....

We still have no freedom of expression (you are arrested if you offend a few) and you still have the surveillance bill coming in.
.


Oh lawdy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmsV1TuESrc
Original post by L i b
I don't get why people on the left seem to think the EU is some sort of guarantor of their social protections. We have, after all, had a centre-right EU administration for the last 17 years.

I'm all for the EU, but to suggest that it is only as a result of it that we have employment legislation, anti-discrimination laws and whatever else it is credited with in this area is absolute nonsense. It is also a rather strange stance from the Labour Party to suggest that British people would not vote for such policies domestically if we were out of the EU: if so, why should we vote now for the EU to defend them?

The EU is a trading block and some harmonisation of rules and regulation is a positive thing. But let's not forget that the UK government approved EU legislation on all of these things too.


Yes, it depends on the politics of who is running the UK and the politics of the majority of important countries in the EU. I think Harman is being a bit starry-eyed about the EU in that speech, from the sound of it, although I haven't read the speech.

The UK really started to pick up from the Scandinavian example on women's rights in the fields of reproduction, employment and marriage law and it doesn't owe a lot to the EU - the EU has if anything followed on from the same pressures. Women campaigned hard in the UK on these issues over many decades.
Original post by MrControversial
On rights the EU has some good and some bad. Some things are really subjective and are getting caught up in this.

Everyone overlooks the greater issue. It is up to us, the inhabitants of this nation, the people this nation belongs to, to stand up for our rights. If we're arguing over who will look after us because we can't look after ourselves we are screwed.

I really like the song Get Up Stand Up. It reminds me of how I feel about this.


I don't disagree, but that doesn't mean we can't also agree to have rights that extend across many countries. The UN for example, which the UK has been a member of since the start, has published many rights and policies that are meant to be global in extent and gradually, with exceptions and arguments, many of them have come to be widely accepted and implemented. That does not mean that the UK has lost out to the UN or is a slave of it, they are things we agreed to and often inspired, like the concept of universal human rights for example.
Original post by ByEeek
Do you really think that a pay gap of 20% 30 years after the law on equal pay was passed is not a big deal?


No. Not at all. You obviously haven't researched the 'issue'. Please go see how it's calculated :biggrin:
Original post by MrControversial
It's our responsibility to steer our government in the right direction. I think intervention after intervention has given the people the wrong impression on whose job it is to keep our government in line.


What are these interventions?

The ECHR is becoming increasingly problematic as it gives individuals rights over others within a nation. It's increasingly moving from all for one, one for all to all for one. The EU is not doing anything either to protect our rights. We still have no freedom of expression (you are arrested if you offend a few) and you still have the surveillance bill coming in.


Of course we have freedom of expression, but that is of course limited - for example by the rights of others that freedom of expression might infringe. Likewise, of course giving one person some rights necessarily limits the rights of someone else, or more accurately imposes obligations upon that person.

Whatever evil you want to fight or want to use the EU to stop, in the long run you're only going to make things worst. Who keeps the EU in line? Eventually you'll be praying to God to solve your woes. You can't keep going from authoritative power to authoritative power. All you're doing is spreading out our sovereignty even further and reducing our own power over our fate.

As for the EU having some kind of a superior morality, it doesn't. That's in your imagination.


I believe that a consensus across 28 nations is more likely to hold power of morality than the whims of individual government ministers - which is problem the UK faces on a regular basis.

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