Vocal Voices

Who takes Obama to task and calls him disingenuous for asking the UK to do something the US would never do. Namely to give up our freedom, borders, economy and currency to the EU.

Then he calls Obama the must unfriendly US President to the UK.

Go for it Boris you are on a roll.

It might have been a bit much to also say that a vote to stay in the EU is a vote to align our armed forces, eventually get rid of our nuclear arms and to come under the umbrella of the EU Foreign Ministry without the ability to "support" the US every time it decides to go on tour in the 3rd world with it's Army.

So you tell me Mr Obama, how is that in the interest of the US???

Because, as WM has said repeatedly (and I agree with him), staying in the EU means getting on board and accepting, driving and being a leader. Which means we're going to have to drag ourselves down to their level and fight it out there.

Osborne has also done another cracker today. He's said that mortgages will go up if we leave.

Let's analyse that. Mortgages will go up when the BOE has to raise rates because the economy is doing too well and overheating.

So, we know that mortgage increases are already baked in for the next 5 years.

Unless.....

Our economy doesn't grow.

So what Osborne is saying is that a vote for Brexit is so good for our economy that the BOE will have to raise rates earlier. Whereas staying in the EU will hold our economy back, hold unemployment higher, hold back wage rises and stop the BOE from raising rates.

Thank you George, you just confirmed what we already know.

OUR referendum is sod all to do with the Yanks, Aussies, Canadians or anyone else for that matter, and they should keep their noses OUT.

Otherwise they will cause voters to vote Leave just to spite the idiots.

Curiously enough I don't want that to happen. I want people to vote for what they think is right.

Which is why I, also, lament the lack of debate and the entire "project fear" approach.

My BIG complaint from the day we joined is that as a one-time economy bigger than Germany we did not get stuck in and fight for what the eventual EU should have become. It sticks in my craw what politicians, of all colours, have done to reduce us to what we now are in the EU. We are on the outside looking in when we should be in the driving seat.

We could still be in the driving seat if we worked at it because we do have allies, but sadly we do not have quality politicians to take us there. We are seeing that daily with the EU referendum 'debate', which is more of each side slagging the other off.

Whilst I do agree that we didn't get in and drive, there is also the other dynamic. France and Germany had the EEC stitched up and did not want us in. They stopped us at every turn until we became sick of it and simply used our economic might to make them do what we wanted.

Yes we do have friends, Finland practically begged us to join the Euro to balance it out. Had we joined at that time, what is happening today could not have happened because we would simply have threatened to withdraw. Greece, maybe, UK, would have destroyed it completely.

But, even now, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Belgium will all stand together to block us if we try to push and they always would have. The new 12 are suspicious of us simply because we stand outside. They are too new in the EU to understand the problems and have never been net contributors anyway.

For me the EU is not an opportunity lost, it is a salient lesson learned. But, apparently, we still have not learned that lesson yet.