SteveS1
I heard that, pardon?
Steve, have you ever interrogated your own assumptions. Do you ask yourself how or if the UK has greater significance or influence as an EU member. I'd be interested to hear what you mean by that, how you define it.
Sorry ET I'm not buying that from a man who has never genuinely interrogated his own blind hatred of the EU, to the extent (I can only assume if some minor protestations are to be believed) that he is prepared to follow a corrupt chancer into all sorts of contortions, that he wouldn't have done on any other issue - or perhaps that's the bit I'm being naive about.
Tearing up a forty year relationship with our closest allies and trading partners, which conferred additional benefits and freedoms to any UK citizen who chose to use them, in return for some specious concept of 'control' that we never lost, is not something that carries any "up" side for me.
But it does carry plenty of downsides, many we already see, with much more to come. If you have reached the age you have without understanding the significance of size in economic and diplomatic influence, I can't help you with that. Except to point out that this post Imperial hogwash that the UK punches above it's weight in any of these aspects since it lost that position is a curiously UK fixation, which sadly gets re-fed whenever there is more obvious signs of decline.