View Full Version : EU treaty - referendum or not?
percy toboggan
04-Mar-08, 20:28
As the legislation to ratify the EU treaty (some say a constitutuion in all but name, some don't) is approaching should the British people be offered a referendum on the issue - as promised by most of the main parties (dunno 'bout the SNP) before the title, and some of the text of the document was altered?
Landslide for those who want a say, by the looks of things. :D
It is a disgrace that we seemingly going to have no say in the direction our Country takes. Were two world wars not fought for our freedoms and now we are going to hand it all on a plate with a nice garnish?
percy toboggan
04-Mar-08, 21:42
My sentiments entirely TBH. The British people should be consulted on this issue. The federalist agenda is nothing but the preserve of greedy, grasping politicians who are taking us all for a ride...whilst they Lord it in the buffet car we're clinging on for dear life....not to mention a sense of national identity.
It is a disgrace that we seemingly going to have no say in the direction our Country takes. Were two world wars not fought for our freedoms and now we are going to hand it all on a plate with a nice garnish?
Ruled by the Germans and the French.
Hitler didn't need to start a war as all he had to do was form the E.U.[disgust]
Sprichst du Deutsches?:eek:
My sentiments entirely TBH. The British people should be consulted on this issue. The federalist agenda is nothing but the preserve of greedy, grasping politicians who are taking us all for a ride...whilst they Lord it in the buffet car we're clinging on for dear life....not to mention a sense of national identity.
Ruled by the Germans and the French.
Hitler didn't need to start a war as all he had to do was form the E.U.[disgust]
Sprichst du Deutsches?:eek:It seems the Liberal Democrats are going to put the final nail in the coffin and fulfill Hitlers dream.
percy toboggan
04-Mar-08, 21:56
I cannot understand exactly why the French people are standing for this....after all they kicked the constitution out. They are not exactly known for rolling over at their political masters bidding.
Apathy is commonplace this side of le Manche....but I'm surprised the French ain't galvanised!
I cannot understand exactly why the French people are standing for this....after all they kicked the constitution out. They are not exactly known for rolling over at their political masters bidding.
Apathy is commonplace this side of le Manche....but I'm surprised the French ain't galvanised!Maybe they are experiencing the same level of apathy that is pervading these Islands. Why are an elected body allowed to ride rough-shod over the wishes of the public. We elect them, we pay their wages yet they are going to deny us the opportunity of a referendum to protect our Soverienty.
Yoda the flump
05-Mar-08, 00:28
I have to vote no, we do not need a referendum.
My heart would say no to closer EU ties, but we cannot live in the past and for this country to move forward we need closer ties to Europe, we are already to integrated to pull out and follow a similar path to the Swiss.
The head therefore says yes to closer EU integration, it has to be accepted that we are not the country we once were.
Flyermonkey
05-Mar-08, 16:41
I have to say that I agree completely with Yoda on this one, that we do not need a referendum on the ratifying the EU Treaty.
I believe that most of the citizens of this country (myself included) are not in a position to be able to make a proper judgement on this and that sometimes we have to accept that the politicians that we have voted for (love them or loathe them) and elected are in a better position to know whether something as serious as this is good or bad for the future of our country.
For example we accept (though we may not agree with) the level of taxation, and the government don't have a referendum every year on that - simply because the issues of producing and balancing a budget are way too complex for most of us to understand, and therefore to fully comment on. I feel that the European Treaty falls into the same category.
I also think that is in very bad taste to compare a modern and democratic Europe to Hitler's Third Reich, whom many people died fighting against to give us the democratic and peaceful Europe we are now able to enjoy.
I am sure that I am not the only person who sees the irony in the fact that the people that are most up in arms about European integration (and comparing it to 'Hitler' winning) are the ones that tend to be on the furthest right of the political spectrum?
Of course we need a treaty and the sooner the better.
This is not a British issue. It is a Scottish issue.
Scotland has set the pace when it comes to selling out the country to ensure economic prosperity.
We did in in 1707 and it worked just great.
Now we have the chance to sell the country a second time with - I am sure - equally beneficial effects.
Remember this has nothing to do with the sort of tartan poltroonery that passes for nationalism in this decadent and benighted country. Nationalsim has nothing to do with it. Steel your voting resolve as a means of imnproving our economy
So go to it. Vote early, vote often.
percy toboggan
05-Mar-08, 17:21
I am sure that I am not the only person who sees the irony in the fact that the people that are most up in arms about European integration (and comparing it to 'Hitler' winning) are the ones that tend to be on the furthest right of the political spectrum?
You're not the only one that's wrong either. The far left, such as it ever was , has consistently been anti 'Common-Market...EEC...EU...take Tony Benn for instance...with his cabinet colleague Peter Shore he spearheaded the 'no' campaign in the mid-seventies.
You also allude to Nazi sympathies when mentioning the right wing of politics. Lazy, uninformed and wide of the mark comments.
Do you constantly pigeon hole? If so I'd learn more about birds.
percy toboggan
05-Mar-08, 17:28
So many people here want a chance to vote....
This is reflected nationwide.
I listened to some of the debate today...look like that due to 'Calamity Clegg's' tactics we are in the process of being cheated.
Whitewater
05-Mar-08, 17:53
I agree with 'Rich' on this issue.
We can always be proud of being Scottish, we do it now as part of GB, it makes no difference to us as individuals.
The Scots have to make a decision. That decision should be based on reason rather than misplaced feelings about national identy or the supposed benifits which we are led to beleive, would accrue from full independence. There would only be one certainty - higher taxation.
Let us keep our sanity and our United Kingdom - a United Kingdom in which the Scots have always had more than their fair share of political representation and economic opporunity, and continue this prosperity for us all through a United Europe.
Whitewater.
Proud to be a Scot,
Proud to be British, and
Proud now to be European
Flyermonkey
05-Mar-08, 18:00
You also allude to Nazi sympathies when mentioning the right wing of politics. Lazy, uninformed and wide of the mark comments.
Do you constantly pigeon hole? If so I'd learn more about birds.
Erm, Mr Tobbogan, if you re-read my post you will notice that I was alluding to Nazi sympathies on the furthest right of the political spectrum. Given that the BNP are currently the biggest UK party representing the far right it would be complete misinformation to deny Nazi sympathies there
At its founding, the BNP was explicitly racist. In October 1990, the BNP was described by the European Parliament's (http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament) committee on racism (http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism) and xenophobia as an "openly Nazi party... whose leadership have serious criminal convictions".[73] (http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party#_note-bnputs) When asked in 1993 if the BNP was racist, its deputy leader Richard Edmonds (http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Edmonds) said, "We are 100 per cent racist, yes".[73] (http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party#_note-bnputs) Founder John Tyndall proclaimed that "Mein Kampf (http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf) is my bible"From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party (http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party)
Boozeburglar
05-Mar-08, 19:10
I believe that most of the citizens of this country (myself included) are not in a position to be able to make a proper judgement on this
When there is a referendum there is a national debate in the run up and thus a more informed electorate voting, on a single issue, than you ever get in a general election. I don’t feel this issue, once the debate is limited to a discussion of the important changes this treaty makes, will be any more complicated than many of those we base our general election vote on.
Dear Government, the idea that the electorate are too ill informed is a cop out. Inform them! If you are so sure you are right convince them.
sometimes we have to accept that the politicians that we have voted for (love them or loathe them) and elected are in a better position to know whether something as serious as this is good or bad for the future of our country.
Moot. The government promised to go to the electorate on this one; and don't feed me the tired 'it is only a minor amendment' baloney, you describe it yourself as 'serious! We ultimately pay for the referendum process; and it is the most democratic of paths to go down. Those supporting the treaty are claiming it is of minor significance; so let them make their argument that it changes little and we can decide if we believe.
Thanks, though, for explaining we all live in a representative democracy! I think most of us get that every time we see Gordon Brown stepping up to the Dispatch box... We elect people to act on our behalf in our best interests, true, but they must balance this with some attempt to fulfil the promises they made to get themselves elected. Most of us see no good reason to break this particular promise, and many feel the whole Constitution/Treaty has been spun to avoid the possibility of a number of referenda being ‘lost’.
For example we accept (though we may not agree with) the level of taxation, and the government don't have a referendum every year on that - simply because the issues of producing and balancing a budget are way too complex for most of us to understand, and therefore to fully comment on. I feel that the European Treaty falls into the same category.
You may, I don't. Taxation is historically one of the deciding issues when we come to vote. Generally parties set their stalls out in their manifestos and, once elected, keep a clean(ish) nose, (if they value longevity). So the trend historically was for high tax high spend or low tax low spend, though they are all attempting to ape each other now in the hopes of aping each other’s success.
One time, difficult to reverse, major decisions are totally different, we do not expect to automatically reverse such decisions at a general election.
I mentioned before, all we need to have this referendum is good publicity and a decent synopsis with the key changes highlighted; voters in referenda are generally self selecting so those who care will to some extent educate themselves about the issue and vote accordingly. Those who read nothing and just vote along their party lines or prejudices are entitled to do that too!
I also think that is in very bad taste to compare a modern and democratic Europe to Hitler's Third Reich, whom many people died fighting against to give us the democratic and peaceful Europe we are now able to enjoy.
Democracy was not in such a bad state before Hitler came to power either, I am sure it would have developed and spread were Hitler not to have existed. I don’t think we can give him too much credit for the state of democracy in modern Europe without having lived any alternative.
I personally think Europe would be a better place today had WWII not happened, in at least as far as morons like the BNP would not have their figurehead.
I am sure that I am not the only person who sees the irony in the fact that the people that are most up in arms about European integration (and comparing it to 'Hitler' winning) are the ones that tend to be on the furthest right of the political spectrum?
I am not sure you are correct in assuming this.
Up in arms would describe me pretty well, and my concern is that democracy is being overlooked. That will become easier the more our law and decision making powers are shared or passed over to centralised bodies, especially those that constitute part of such a huge and homogenised mass as the EU.
I love Europe, I live here! I have spent time in other European countries, living and touring. It is an amazingly diverse place. I just get the feeling that our regional voices can be heard in an arena like Holyrood, heard faintly in Westminster, but will become part of the incessant and filtered out background hiss in Brussels.
What I am trying to say is that I think decentralisation is the way forward, for all things.
So when are Wick.org, Thurso.org, Castletown.org, Halkirk.org, Dunnet.org Reay.org, Lybster.org and the rest setting up?
:)
Maggie Thatcher was so informed after the debate on entering the EEC that she campaigned to enter it.[lol] How times change...
percy toboggan
05-Mar-08, 19:21
Erm, Mr Tobbogan, if you re-read my post you will notice that I was alluding to Nazi sympathies on the furthest right of the political spectrum. Given that the BNP are currently the biggest UK party representing the far right it would be complete misinformation to deny Nazi sympathies there
From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party
Ahh so you're another who quotes, and presumably believes it chapter and verse. Fair enough. I see you have edited out the bit where you used news items and quotes from eighteen years ago, and fifteen years ago respectively. A week's a long time in politics monkey.....you need to update.
If you really believe five per cent of the British electorate are Nazi sympathisers then you're something I could not possibly call you on the pages of this august forum.
Flyermonkey
05-Mar-08, 20:29
Ahh so you're another who quotes, and presumably believes it chapter and verse. Fair enough. I see you have edited out the bit where you used news items and quotes from eighteen years ago, and fifteen years ago respectively. A week's a long time in politics monkey.....you need to update.
If you really believe five per cent of the British electorate are Nazi sympathisers then you're something I could not possibly call you on the pages of this august forum.
Excellent, am enjoying this now.... your use of language is very clever Mr Toboggan (Goebbels would be proud ;-)).
However if we quote from the esteemed BBC website on BNP Founder's John Tyndall's death in 2005 (I know, 3 years old, but am struggling find anything readable from the BNP's own site)
A spokesman for the BNP said Mr Tyndall had been expelled from the BNP twice but added he was an "excellent chap with a keen analytical mind".
"John was a great fellow who knew exactly what our movement was about but it is fair to say that he was not able to carry that forward to electoral success," the spokesman said.
That implies to me that the leopard realised that it needed to change its spots, but we all know that at the end of the day its still a leopard - however well it camouflages itself... a brief read through the "Spearhead website" and you can see the sickening nonsense that this man and his cohorts in the BNP peddle.
If you really believe five per cent of the British electorate are Nazi sympathisers then you're something I could not possibly call you on the pages of this august forum.Nice twist of language - saying that there is a large amount of Nazi sympathy within the British National Party is very different to saying that 5% of the British population are Nazi sympathisers. A brief read through of Nick Griffiths speeches and the BNPs current literature show it quite clearly to be propoganda of the worst sort. Just because some of the UKs population has unfortunatly fallen for this, does not Nazis make them - though I guess they would regret it fairly quickly if the BNP ever actually held some power.
Flyermonkey
05-Mar-08, 20:43
Boozeburgler, your first points are good ones and I am not that far away in my beliefs - my only worry is that the debate would become ill informed - and we would all end up more confused than ever and deciding that the EU was a bad thing because they said we had to have straight bananas or whatever nonsense the popular press decided to publish that day. It is, undoubtedly, a major issue and extremely complex and I am just not sure about the whole referendum thing. I do take your point that the parties are using some clever manouvering to get out of a promise they have made.
Democracy was not in such a bad state before Hitler came to power either, I am sure it would have developed and spread were Hitler not to have existed. I don’t think we can give him too much credit for the state of democracy in modern Europe without having lived any alternative.
I personally think Europe would be a better place today had WWII not happened, in at least as far as morons like the BNP would not have their figurehead.
Earlier posters on the board were trying to compare the current EU to Hitler invading Europe (Hitler didn't need to go to war to take over Europe etc etc) which is just ignorant and insulting - it wasn't in any way a historical comment on democracy. I would agree that the world / Europe could well have been a better place today without the 2nd World War.
I am not sure you are correct in assuming this.
Up in arms would describe me pretty well, and my concern is that democracy is being overlooked. That will become easier the more our law and decision making powers are shared or passed over to centralised bodies, especially those that constitute part of such a huge and homogenised mass as the EU.
Hmm, fair point - I think I can assume you are not a far-righter! Though sometimes its best to keep the politicians as far away as possible so that the rest of us can just get on with our lives... Am not sure that Brussels is far enough away though ;)
percy toboggan
05-Mar-08, 20:44
Nice twist of language - saying that there is a large amount of Nazi sympathy within the British National Party is very different to saying that 5% of the British population are Nazi sympathisers. A brief read through of Nick Griffiths speeches and the BNPs current literature show it quite clearly to be propoganda of the worst sort. Just because some of the UKs population has unfortunatly fallen for this, does not Nazis make them - though I guess they would regret it fairly quickly if the BNP ever actually held some power.
I wish I was enjoying it..however...I shall proceed.
You make the devastatingly revealing mistake of assuming all those who vote BNP want the party to 'gain power'...for many of us do not.
Billy Bragg got it about right when he said for many 'a vote for the BNP was the equivalent of a two fingered gesture to the mainstream parties who have for too long treated the ordinary 'man in the street' with utter contempt'
The fast is every BNP representative -with the exception of Griffin - I have ever listened to has been strictly lightweight when it comes to sharpness,originality of thought and anything like convincing.
You're a worthy and legitimate opponent - good luck with it.
I believe that most of the citizens of this country (myself included) are not in a position to be able to make a proper judgement on this and that sometimes we have to accept that the politicians that we have voted for (love them or loathe them) and elected are in a better position to know whether something as serious as this is good or bad for the future of our country.
There is a very good reason why the general public are "not in a position to be able to make a proper judgement" and that is because the politicians both here and in Europe have made a determined effort to create that situation.
The EU Constitution was rejected by France and Holland and was therefore, by the rules of the EU, dead as the Dodo.
As usual, that did not bother Brussels who hold to the belief that, “If at first you don’t agree you will vote, vote and vote again until you do!”
That being the case he wording of the original EU Constitution was shuffled and altered in such a way as to make it intentionally incomprehensible and renamed “The Lisbon Treaty”.
On what authority do I make that claim? Because a certain politician called Valerie Giscard d'Estaing has declared that it is the same thing reworded. If anybody is in a position to be able to make that claim then he certainly is because he was the person responsible for the creation of the EU Constitution. I would think that as the creator he would be able recognise his own work even when it had been transferred into Gobbledy Gook.
Brussels, on this occasion, have taken the decision that under no circumstances will the voters in Europe be trusted to make a democratic decision on the subject in case they get it wrong yet again and that would never do.
The current crop of politicians in Europe and also in Britain have every intention of keeping the voters as far away as possible from the issue. The reason for that is quite simple and should be fairly obvious to everybody, “Let those idiots make the decision, don’t be stupid, we can’t let that happen. They may realise what we are up to and push our snouts out of the trough. We must grab as much power as we can so that can never be done to us. Can somebody pass more gravy please, I don’t seem to have got enough yet!”
So now you know folks. We must leave the important decisions to those who are superior we poor ignorant plebs and who know what’s best for us.
We used to have that system long ago when our betters knew what was best for us and we were made to follow like obedient sheep, it was called “The Divine Right of Kings”.
One thing I never expected to see during my lifetime was that we would sit back and let that system be recreated without a single objection.
Ah well, lets start practicing. All together now, baa, baa, baa!
i voted no,,,if the question was ,,should we take scotland out of the EU,out of british government and hand it back to the scots i say YES,for the amount of damage the EU and the goverment has done to scotland,we never got the choice in the first place............
Yoda the flump
06-Mar-08, 10:38
And so folks, we thankfully don't get a referendum.
We are now spared the rabid anti european rhetoric that would have been forced upon us by the gutter press.
I voted no reason for tht is it's going to happen and a refurendum would just slow it down look at France they voted no the first time it's still going to happen, how ever the main reason i want this is to happen (and i fully expect to be flamed for this but is my opinion) is to deal with all the global issues effecting us we need a global goverment and a united Europen people governemnt is a step closer to that.
Flyermonkey
06-Mar-08, 14:08
And so folks, we thankfully don't get a referendum.
We are now spared the rabid anti european rhetoric that would have been forced upon us by the gutter press.
I voted no reason for tht is it's going to happen and a refurendum would just slow it down look at France they voted no the first time it's still going to happen, how ever the main reason i want this is to happen (and i fully expect to be flamed for this but is my opinion) is to deal with all the global issues effecting us we need a global goverment and a united Europen people governemnt is a step closer to that.
Both good points that I agree with whole heartedly, I wish I could have said it so concisely in my own original post!
Its interesting to see how the no's in the poll are slowly creeping up compared to the yes's. Is this because .orgers are being persuaded by the strength of the no argument or because more no's are appearing out the woodwork?
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