Quote:
Originally Posted by Margaret Pilkington
Cashy....the 'we' I referred to is my circle of social contacts. I should have made it clearer.
Apart from JCB.....who I only know from here, I don't know another single person who wishes to remain in the EU.
Most of the people I come into contact with are filled with resentment and vehemence that they have never been give a choice over their own destiny....well apart from the time back in !975, when we were lied to......and some of those I meet were not old enough to vote in '75'.
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There were two Referendum opportunities to vote whether to opt into the Common Market in the 1970s and I'm pretty sure that all the pros and cons were discussed and we knew that it would be an uphill battle to get what was best for Britain.
After the war the UK could either have joined France and Germany in their effort to keep the peace in Europe (eventually became the Common Market), but we decided to use our energies to set up the League of Nations (now the UN).
In the 1950s-1960s I worked for a large engineering company which manufactured earth moving equipment and which exported 78% of its products all over the world. However, it was noticeable after I married and lived in France and Holland in the late 1960s that those products weren't being sold on mainland Europe. There were building projects everywhere we travelled but not one project was using what was definitely the best and most modern earth moving equipment in the world (now owned by an American company).
It wasn't until the Common Market debate came about that I realised why the UK's import figures (mainly for food & raw materials) far exceeded our export figures. This being that the only countries with money were USA, Canada, Australia & New Zealand - we did sell to the colonies but they were buying goods with the money the UK government handed them. There was money on the European mainland but that full market was denied us because they'd built a massive trading wall around them, not only with quotas but with import duties which made British goods too expensive because they were made with an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. The thinking was that as we couldn't change the Common Market regulations from the outside, we stood a better chance of changing things to our advantage once we were members.
What I consider being lied to was in the 1990s when we opted out of the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty, and no sooner had the ink dried and we landed back in Britain, the blighters moved one important clause from the paragraph headed "Work Directive"
(which we had not signed up to) over to the paragraph headed "Health Directive" (
which we had signed up to).