Brexit next week: give me a positive effect it will have on my daily life

[sean99]

You lot must be real fun on a night out.

Then why are you still reading this thread?

 

[TheDecameron]

Well, ‘the sun won’t fall from the sky’ the day after we leave. Wot more can a man ask for?

 

[eternumviti]

Don't be absurd, that's precisely what you have said. If voters don't know who their MEP (or MP for that matter) is, or what they stand for, that is down to them. Of course if they cannot be bothered to inform themselves and prefer to listen to national politicians or twats like Farage deflecting blame away from themsleves - that's much easier.

OK, I'll have another shot at replying. You undoubtedly saw my last rant, which Tony saw fit to redact in its entirety hopefully for nothing more onerous than misuse of the popular letter 'u'.

To keep it sweet and unhoofed, you effectively accused me of saying that it was OK for the voter to renege on his or her responsibility to inform themselves.

I said no such thing, merely pointed out that the EU has very deliberately structured and named its institutions to be as dense, abstract, confusing and utterly incomprehensible as possible, that the workings and functions of the EU Parliament are both opaque, unencumbered by either an opposition or an executive role, and completely alien to the Anglo-Saxon system, and that finding the time and willpower to try to master this labyrythine construct would be way beyond that available to the average Joe already juggling the essentials of existence in the modern world.

Sorry, a long sentence, but shorter than its predecessor.

 

[glancaster]

And, perhaps pedantically, no one in the UK has an MEP. They have MEPs, plural. If you didn't know that, you have failed the test Steve set from the outset.

How many people can honestly say they know who all their MEPs are? Without looking it up. I suspect it is a vanishingly small percentage, which suggests to me there is something not right about the system, rather than the people. Or at least, that the system is not compatible with the way normal people operate, which is the same thing, I would argue (easier to change the system than the people).

The UK is set to leave the EU on Friday with the withdrawal agreement arranged at the end of last year. However, the European Parliament has not approved it yet. When are they planning to do this? On Wednesday.

Don't you think they are leaving it a teensy bit late? They can only do this because everyone is assuming it is simply a rubber stamp for what all the other players have agreed. What does this say about the role of the EP?

Kind regards

- Garry

Source: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news...ent-passes-the-first-european-parliament-test

 

[SteveS1]

OK, I'll have another shot at replying. You undoubtedly saw my last rant, which Tony saw fit to redact in its entirety hopefully for nothing more onerous than misuse of the popular letter 'u'.

I said no such thing, merely pointed out that the EU has very deliberately structured and named its institutions to be as dense, abstract, confusing and utterly incomprehensible as possible, that the workings and functions of the EU Parliament are both opaque, unencumbered by either an opposition or an executive role, and completely alien to the Anglo-Saxon system, and that finding the time and willpower to try to master this labyrythine construct would be way beyond that available to the average Joe already juggling the essentials of existence in the modern world.

Sorry, a long sentence, but shorter than its predecessor.

Not being able to express views more consisely is hardly Tony's problem and one of the frustrations of debating with you when your position on a particular point is rather thin. The verbose approach being the cornflower to give the impression of more substance, or just bore people into submission.

Any lack of understanding or interest in many UK voters is not the EU's fault for not having the same or similar political system as the UK. The EU hasn't been structured on our rather tedious adversarial basis for good reason and is designed to be more inclusive and facilitate consensus among member states. Presumably the people that you speak of also think the French and German languages are there just to make life more difficult when travelling.

There is no interest here among many of our politicians (and certainly not the bulk of our media) in educating the public about the EU, as they have always made useful blame distraction for UK government failures. Your 'average Joe' has been useful to agitators like Farage and opportunists like Johnson as they tend to swallow a diet of tabloid anti-foreigner bile with unquestioning certainty and confuse it with being patriotic.

 

[TheDecameron]

OK, I'll have another shot at replying. You undoubtedly saw my last rant, which Tony saw fit to redact in its entirety hopefully for nothing more onerous than misuse of the popular letter 'u'.

To keep it sweet and unhoofed, you effectively accused me of saying that it was OK for the voter to renege on his or her responsibility to inform themselves.

I said no such thing, merely pointed out that the EU has very deliberately structured and named its institutions to be as dense, abstract, confusing and utterly incomprehensible as possible, that the workings and functions of the EU Parliament are both opaque, unencumbered by either an opposition or an executive role, and completely alien to the Anglo-Saxon system, and that finding the time and willpower to try to master this labyrythine construct would be way beyond that available to the average Joe already juggling the essentials of existence in the modern world.

Sorry, a long sentence, but shorter than its predecessor.

The member with a hundred acres under thick verbiage. The problem is the reader ends up with two trying to even make a start on it.

 

[KrisW]

Sure, on paper the EU voting system more representative.

A small point, but it's important to highlight a recurring mistake British people make about the EU: It's not the EU election system, it's the Government of the UK's... national governments decide on how Euorpean Parliament elections should be conducted - the EU only sets a minimum requirement that the results be proportional to the vote-shares. So in the UK, you use a simplified PR system, while we in Ireland use the exact same PR-STV system we use for parliamentary elections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_to_the_European_Parliament#Voting_system

That's how the EU works - its members agree a minimum acceptable standard, and memer states can legislate it however they want.

But that is, in the world of empiricism and practice, completely meaningless. The EU Parliament is unrepresentative because it is distant, remote and usually completely incomprehensible to the voter.

Representative means that its composition reflects the electors' choices - nothing more, nothing less. That's the lowest bar for an electoral system: everything else is down to the electors to some degree. Perhaps the if UK electorate took more interest in European politics, they'd have had better results. Apathy has always characterised the domestic parties' approach to the EP, leaving the field open for the fringes like UKIP, BP.

It is not democratic per se because there is no EU demos as such

Sorry, this is bollocks. 400 million citizens of the 27 EU member countries are eligible to vote. That is the demos.

because the EU is a vague, ephemeral notion far more than something that people can culturally, historically and tribally identify with or feel some kind of attachment to.

You feel a tribal identification with your town council? Really? I couldn't give two shiny shits about mine, but I know that by not voting for competent people, I increase the chances of morons getting to run it, and things would stop getting done. Voting is not an expression of identity.

The EU Parliament itself is organised as a number of political groupings from the centre right and the centre left European parties which have traditionally been dominated by the pro-integrationist EPP and S&D. The former has acted as the go-to source of EC Commissioners and Presidents, all of which has placed an overwhelmingly pro-integrationist majority across the EU major institutions. The Parliament itself has relatively limited powers, and is effectively the legislature rather than playing any serious executive role. To most cynics its most notable function is to take part in mind-numbing and utterly incomprehensible committee stages of EC proposed legalising, and to enjoy the benefits of the considerable number of excellent restaurants in Brussels and in its archaic and costly peregrinations to Strasbourg.

To most cynics the object of their cynicism serves no purpose whatsoever. Yes, I agree the Strasbourg jaunt is a waste of money - I'm no blind fan of the EP. I just don't see grounds for the Brexiters' disdain for it, although I understand their exploitation of it very well. (When Irish separatists were elected to Westminster after the First World War, they declined to take their seats; It's not often that anyone gets out-nobled by Sinn Féin*, but Brexit Party managed to gather all the nice EP salary, while doing nothing, rather than take a proper stand against the evil EU)

(* I know well it's not the same party, but he modern spoofers claim to be them)

The Parliament is only a legislature because it is subordinate to the national governments. The Commission, which is appointed by the national governments, and directed by them, holds the executive power because is composition is controlled by the national governments.

And if the debates are mind-numbing (they are), it's because the EU has legal competence over the very boring things that make a trading economy work: standards, regulations, co-operations. Nothing as exciting as trying to shut down a parliament because you can't get your legislation through it, granted, but it's the boring stuff like not getting fleeced by your mobile company when someone phones you while you're abroad, or knowing that food you buy in Spanish/Greek/Belgian supermarket isn't loaded with toxic preservatives that makes a difference to people's lives.

If you see that as creeping centralism, fine, but as someone who's had to make a physical product, I'm glad that certifying its safety in Ireland was enough to allow it to be sold in 28 countries wihtout further modification.

Sure, you can keep comparing it to the UK system, but I think we all agree that the UK system itself needs to be addressed, and hopefully focus will now turn again to that.

It won't. Brexit is an intensely conservative project, with a small c - it's trying to destroy the present to recreate a previous Britain, a Britain before the 1980s hollowed out the North, before the 1970s destroyed its industry, before the 1960s' devaluation killed the Pound. Its sunlit uplands are the boom of the 1960s. It's a Britain that never existed, except in nostalgic memory.

That sentiment isn't going to drive any change the time-honoured institutions of British government. If the outcomes of Brexit fail the people, there will be much more appetite for change, but it will be fuelled by anger, and it will manifest in the sort of civil disorder not seen since the early 1980s. Personally, I'd prefer the UK not to go down that route.

... progressively awarded itself both power and riches towards that end, with any number of Presidential appointments, a 'national' anthem, a supreme court, a central bank and firmly held intentions in the direction of a central treasury, foreign policy and police and armed forces.

You yourself will demonstrate in a moment that there's no binding EU foreign policy now, and I'll say there's none coming - it'll be guidelines and minimum standards again; and there is also no EU Army (unless you think NATO has an army too). As for treasury and currency, the UK was always outside of that - the nations who chose to form the Eurozone accept that a common currency implies a common treasury.

You're also the first person I've ever heard of complaining about Europol (of course, I don't know any criminals). Policing across borders requires a police force with agreements that allow it to operate across borders. The recent "County Lines" drugs cases in the UK show how criminals exploit boundaries of jurisdiction even on a small scale.

I'm confident that the UK will push to remain in Europol to the greatest extent that it can.

None of this empire-building is necessary in any way at all for the sovereign European countries, and indeed any other countries, to be able to effectively and freely trade together, and to cooperate in any number of other ways that they should choose to co-operate in, for example as the UK and France do militarily and in areas of joint foreign policy.

... while being subject to toeing the line on an "EU Foreign Policy"? How rebellious of them.

One might even posit that the EU is actually obstructive towards the causes of commercial and policy co-operation.

One might posit that, but the longer one tries to argue it, the more ignorant they'd sound.

Over its existence, the EU has negotiated away thousands of the kind of trivial regulations that impede trade and political cooperation. Your typical British PM is too busy with "statecraft" and making big legacy statements to bother about the everyday small things, but it's these that allow trade and political cooperation, like making sure that shipping palettes manufactured anywhere in the EU are interchangeable in size, load and usable lifetime, or that health systems in one country can procure services from those in another, regardless of the funding models used in those countries, or ensuring that everyone agrees on the meaning of things as diverse as "full fat" milk or how a univeristy degree is recognised; or allowing a drug approval by any national approval authority serve for all countries in the EU, or for that matter assuring that pharmaceuticals are made to the same standards in Warsaw, Cambridge, Bratislava or Turin.

There's hundreds more examples.

Every complaint I've ever heard from British industry about the EU boiled down to "we're making substandard products, and these rules don't let us get away with it anymore!". That cry is not unique to the UK, mind you - stronger regulations always piss someone off, but only in the UK does the press rally behind the cheapskate and the fraudster and defend them against being forced to do the right thing.

But this is my last word on electoral systems and the benefits of the EU. The OP was asking about what benefits there will be once Brexit happens.

So far, we've had your feeling of having a more direct control of government. That's one. Can anyone offer anything else? Something more tangible, perhaps.

 

[PsB]

I (...) merely pointed out that the EU has very deliberately structured and named its institutions to be as dense, abstract, confusing and utterly incomprehensible as possible, that the workings and functions of the EU Parliament are both opaque, unencumbered by either an opposition or an executive role, and completely alien to the Anglo-Saxon system, and that finding the time and willpower to try to master this labyrythine construct would be way beyond that available to the average Joe already juggling the essentials of existence in the modern world.

The EU member states have done a reasonably effective job of:
1) Selecting areas of competence to be devolved to the EU (trade, competition, etc.)
2) Developing institutions to handle those areas of competence in an accountable way
3) Agreeing on mechanisms so these institutions can evolve.

These arrangements are ultimately determined by member states, with oversight by the European parliament on key decisions. The amount of oversight seems in line with democratic norms elsewhere.

The EU is not a nation state, and there is no good reason for it to be “Anglo-Saxon” in the way you describe (not that the Angles or the Saxons ever struck anyone as particularly democratic, but I suppose you mean the gloriously quirky mix of tradition, enlightenment and feudalism that governs the UK). So comparing EU institutions with British institutions is misguided in many ways and ultimately irrelevant. Were the EU folk eccentric enough to try moving in those directions, people like you would be screaming about encroaching federalism.

Constitutional law is complicated: a reason why asking the average Joe to pass judgement on such matters in a referendum is highly risky and usually brings the answer to a different question (such as “do you approve of the present government”).

One plus of Brexit on my life will be no longer having to try to explain to Leavers an institution that the UK will have left.

 

[eternumviti]

And, perhaps pedantically, no one in the UK has an MEP. They have MEPs, plural. If you didn't know that, you have failed the test Steve set from the outset.

How many people can honestly say they know who all their MEPs are? Without looking it up. I suspect it is a vanishingly small percentage, which suggests to me there is something not right about the system, rather than the people. Or at least, that the system is not compatible with the way normal people operate, which is the same thing, I would argue (easier to change the system than the people).

The UK is set to leave the EU on Friday with the withdrawal agreement arranged at the end of last year. However, the European Parliament has not approved it yet. When are they planning to do this? On Wednesday.

Don't you think they are leaving it a teensy bit late? They can only do this because everyone is assuming it is simply a rubber stamp for what all the other players have agreed. What does this say about the role of the EP?

Kind regards

- Garry

Source: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news...ent-passes-the-first-european-parliament-test

I wasn't aware that Steve had set a test, and if so, no, I don't fail it even if I have some difficulty in associating with the concept of a constituency of 'The East of England', and even though I erroneously used the singular. I agree that it is likely that very few Brits know who represents their region in the EP, and what they actually do when they're there. And I agree with the rest of what you have written too.

 

[glancaster]

I wasn't aware that Steve had set a test, and if so, no, I don't fail it even if I have some difficulty in associating with the concept of a constituency of 'The East of England', and even though I erroneously used the singular. I agree that it is likely that very few Brits know who represents their region in the EP, and what they actually do when they're there. And I agree with the rest of what you have written too.

Perhaps I expressed myself clumsily. I was referring to the test of 'If voters don't know who their MEP (or MP for that matter) is, or what they stand for, that is down to them. Of course if they cannot be bothered to inform themselves...', and when I wrote you, I meant you (anyone) generally, not you (EV) in particular.

I can well imagine that you (EV) are one of the few people who do know the names of all their MEPs. I confess I am not amongst this select group, as I only know a couple of them. I don't feel too bad about this, as I reckon it is a couple more than most people know. It's going to be out of date knowledge come Friday, in any case.

(Does this count as an advantage of Brexit? Not feeling slightly bad about not knowing who your MEPs are?)

Kind regards

- Garry

 

[eternumviti]

Not being able to express views more consisely is hardly Tony's problem and one of the frustrations of debating with you when your position on a particular point is rather thin. The verbose approach being the cornflower to give the impression of more substance, or just bore people into submission.

You seem to make a bit of a pastime of putting words into my mouth. I don't think I have said that anything is Tony's problem, and I don't agree that articulating one's views within the AUP makes them more difficult to articulate.

Your habit of constantly belittling arguments - and the manner in which they are expressed - with which you don't happen to agree doesn't, I'm afraid, serve to make your own any stronger.

Any lack of understanding or interest in many UK voters is not the EU's fault for not having the same or similar political system as the UK. The EU hasn't been structured on our rather tedious adversarial basis for good reason and is designed to be more inclusive and facilitate consensus among member states...

I said that voters find the EU's system difficult to engage with because it is so different from that which we have become used to over a very long time. Likewise our uncodified legal system. I do however very happily blame the EU for constructing a virtually impenetrably dense, opaque and incomprehensible system of institutions, and that those institutions are inherently anti-democratic in virtually every respect, and I do so because the construct is patently and demonstrably deliberate, a point that several of its architects have gone so far as to openly admit.

The point is borne out by the regularly poor turnouts for EP elections across the EU. Since their inception they have actually fallen every year, only increasing to just over a still pretty lowly 50% in 2019, when the dominance of the pro-integrationist coalitions was challenged for the first time in 50 years, arguably a message in a ballot box.

Presumably the people that you speak of also think the French and German languages are there just to make life more difficult when travelling.

Oh, look, you've gone and done it again...

There is no interest here among many of our politicians (and certainly not the bulk of our media) in educating the public about the EU, as they have always made useful blame distraction for UK government failures. Your 'average Joe' has been useful to agitators like Farage and opportunists like Johnson as they tend to swallow a diet of tabloid anti-foreigner bile with unquestioning certainty and confuse it with being patriotic.

You seem still to be in the 'anger' stage of mourning, 3 years and whatever later. Perhaps you need to stop blaming all the usual stock remainer targets and consider the possibility that the EU is on a track that people don't like, that they wish to have a closer stake in their own futures, and to actually have their voices heard. You might choose to see the two as unrelated, but they're not. Leaving the EU is the first part of a process of getting the concentration of power away from the centre and devolving it downwards and outwards.

 

[eternumviti]

Perhaps I expressed myself clumsily. I was referring to the test of 'If voters don't know who their MEP (or MP for that matter) is, or what they stand for, that is down to them. Of course if they cannot be bothered to inform themselves...', and when I wrote you, I meant you (anyone) generally, not you (EV) in particular.

I can well imagine that you (EV) are one of the few people who do know the names of all their MEPs. I confess I am not amongst this select group, as I only know a couple of them. I don't feel too bad about this, as I reckon it is a couple more than most people know. It's going to be out of date knowledge come Friday, in any case.

(Does this count as an advantage of Brexit? Not feeling slightly bad about not knowing who your MEPs are?)

Kind regards

- Garry

I did know the name of one of mine, but I've forgotten already, hardly relevant now anyway. I know that there are 7 of them, and four are Brexit Party. I think the others are Lib Dems.

 

[SteveS1]

Your habit of constantly belittling arguments - and the manner in which they are expressed - with which you don't happen to agree doesn't, I'm afraid, serve to make your own any stronger.

I don't belittle your argument, when you actually get to one, but I'm far from alone in getting tired of you substituting prosy word salads for substance.

The point is borne out by the regularly poor turnouts for EP elections across the EU. Since their inception they have actually fallen every year, only increasing to just over a still pretty lowly 50% in 2019, when the dominance of the pro-integrationist coalitions was challenged for the first time in 50 years, arguably a message in a ballot box.

The turnouts pretty much reflect the level of information and encouragement provided by the nations.

You seem still to be in the 'anger' stage of mourning, 3 years and whatever later. Perhaps you need to stop blaming all the usual stock remainer targets and consider the possibility that the EU is on a track that people don't like, that they wish to have a closer stake in their own futures, and to actually have their voices heard. You might choose to see the two as unrelated, but they're not. Leaving the EU is the first part of a process of getting the concentration of power away from the centre and devolving it downwards and outwards.

Yes because we haven't had years of anti-EU fiction have we? You got the result you wanted and have no interest in how it was achieved, so what? It doesn't make those 'stock' targets any less culpable just because you will go along with anything that delivers the outcome you are happy with. People may well become more 'angry' as the sunny uplands fail to materialise. We shall see.

"Devolving power downwards and outwards" why you old socialist. That would be funny if I thought you were serious. You know full well that the Tory right is on a power grab for itself. Deregulation, reducing protections and standards for the little people and the avoidance of taxation and scrutiny for the super-wealthy, the non-dom media barons and foreign investors. Yeah that sounds just like a bit of 'devolving'.

 

[stephen bennett]

I don’t think the EU and the UK signed the same WA.

Barnier refutes Johnson's claims over Irish Sea trade checks

This could get interesting. Wonder if Johnson will have forgotten the divorce bill too?


Stephen

 

[NeilR]

I don’t think the EU and the UK signed the same WA.

Barnier refutes Johnson's claims over Irish Sea trade checks

This could get interesting. Wonder if Johnson will have forgotten the divorce bill too?


Stephen

Johnson is so lazy he probably never even read it.

 

[glancaster]

The WA says some goods moving from GB to NI will be subject to checks -- those 'at risk of subsequently being moved into the [European] Union' -- and the rest are not.

Goods are categorised (into 'at risk...' or not) largely using the rules decided by the Joint Committee. This committee doesn't exist yet, so neither do its rules. That ball was kicked into the long grass.

So, Barnier and Varadkar are probably right in reality, but Johnson can arguably claim, truthfully, that there are no checks stipulated in the WA.

 

[ian123running]

A small point, but it's important to highlight a recurring mistake British people make about the EU: It's not the EU election system, it's the Government of the UK's... national governments decide on how Euorpean Parliament elections should be conducted - the EU only sets a minimum requirement that the results be proportional to the vote-shares. So in the UK, you use a simplified PR system, while we in Ireland use the exact same PR-STV system we use for parliamentary elections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_to_the_European_Parliament#Voting_system

That's how the EU works - its members agree a minimum acceptable standard, and memer states can legislate it however they want.



Representative means that its composition reflects the electors' choices - nothing more, nothing less. That's the lowest bar for an electoral system: everything else is down to the electors to some degree. Perhaps the if UK electorate took more interest in European politics, they'd have had better results. Apathy has always characterised the domestic parties' approach to the EP, leaving the field open for the fringes like UKIP, BP.


Sorry, this is bollocks. 400 million citizens of the 27 EU member countries are eligible to vote. That is the demos.


You feel a tribal identification with your town council? Really? I couldn't give two shiny shits about mine, but I know that by not voting for competent people, I increase the chances of morons getting to run it, and things would stop getting done. Voting is not an expression of identity.



To most cynics the object of their cynicism serves no purpose whatsoever. Yes, I agree the Strasbourg jaunt is a waste of money - I'm no blind fan of the EP. I just don't see grounds for the Brexiters' disdain for it, although I understand their exploitation of it very well. (When Irish separatists were elected to Westminster after the First World War, they declined to take their seats; It's not often that anyone gets out-nobled by Sinn Féin*, but Brexit Party managed to gather all the nice EP salary, while doing nothing, rather than take a proper stand against the evil EU)

(* I know well it's not the same party, but he modern spoofers claim to be them)

The Parliament is only a legislature because it is subordinate to the national governments. The Commission, which is appointed by the national governments, and directed by them, holds the executive power because is composition is controlled by the national governments.

And if the debates are mind-numbing (they are), it's because the EU has legal competence over the very boring things that make a trading economy work: standards, regulations, co-operations. Nothing as exciting as trying to shut down a parliament because you can't get your legislation through it, granted, but it's the boring stuff like not getting fleeced by your mobile company when someone phones you while you're abroad, or knowing that food you buy in Spanish/Greek/Belgian supermarket isn't loaded with toxic preservatives that makes a difference to people's lives.

If you see that as creeping centralism, fine, but as someone who's had to make a physical product, I'm glad that certifying its safety in Ireland was enough to allow it to be sold in 28 countries wihtout further modification.


It won't. Brexit is an intensely conservative project, with a small c - it's trying to destroy the present to recreate a previous Britain, a Britain before the 1980s hollowed out the North, before the 1970s destroyed its industry, before the 1960s' devaluation killed the Pound. Its sunlit uplands are the boom of the 1960s. It's a Britain that never existed, except in nostalgic memory.

That sentiment isn't going to drive any change the time-honoured institutions of British government. If the outcomes of Brexit fail the people, there will be much more appetite for change, but it will be fuelled by anger, and it will manifest in the sort of civil disorder not seen since the early 1980s. Personally, I'd prefer the UK not to go down that route.


You yourself will demonstrate in a moment that there's no binding EU foreign policy now, and I'll say there's none coming - it'll be guidelines and minimum standards again; and there is also no EU Army (unless you think NATO has an army too). As for treasury and currency, the UK was always outside of that - the nations who chose to form the Eurozone accept that a common currency implies a common treasury.

You're also the first person I've ever heard of complaining about Europol (of course, I don't know any criminals). Policing across borders requires a police force with agreements that allow it to operate across borders. The recent "County Lines" drugs cases in the UK show how criminals exploit boundaries of jurisdiction even on a small scale.

I'm confident that the UK will push to remain in Europol to the greatest extent that it can.


... while being subject to toeing the line on an "EU Foreign Policy"? How rebellious of them.


One might posit that, but the longer one tries to argue it, the more ignorant they'd sound.

Over its existence, the EU has negotiated away thousands of the kind of trivial regulations that impede trade and political cooperation. Your typical British PM is too busy with "statecraft" and making big legacy statements to bother about the everyday small things, but it's these that allow trade and political cooperation, like making sure that shipping palettes manufactured anywhere in the EU are interchangeable in size, load and usable lifetime, or that health systems in one country can procure services from those in another, regardless of the funding models used in those countries, or ensuring that everyone agrees on the meaning of things as diverse as "full fat" milk or how a univeristy degree is recognised; or allowing a drug approval by any national approval authority serve for all countries in the EU, or for that matter assuring that pharmaceuticals are made to the same standards in Warsaw, Cambridge, Bratislava or Turin.

There's hundreds more examples.

Every complaint I've ever heard from British industry about the EU boiled down to "we're making substandard products, and these rules don't let us get away with it anymore!". That cry is not unique to the UK, mind you - stronger regulations always piss someone off, but only in the UK does the press rally behind the cheapskate and the fraudster and defend them against being forced to do the right thing.

But this is my last word on electoral systems and the benefits of the EU. The OP was asking about what benefits there will be once Brexit happens.

So far, we've had your feeling of having a more direct control of government. That's one. Can anyone offer anything else? Something more tangible, perhaps.

What an exceptionally good post. Many thanks.

 

[kensalriser]

I am certainly looking forward to experiencing less interminable bloviating bollocks from Brexit supporters swollen on self-rectitude.

Does that count as a positive effect?

 

[ks.234]

The transfer window will be closed and we can concentrate on winning the league

 

[Sue Pertwee-Tyr]

I am certainly looking forward to experiencing less interminable bloviating bollocks from Brexit supporters swollen on self-rectitude.

Does that count as a positive effect?

I'd view that as a positive, but I'm replying mainly to commend you on your deployment of 'bloviating' which is a word I'm now determined to weave into something or other, as soon as possible.