Talking Law and the EU

[Suff]

An interesting conversation came up between Mrs S and one of our good friends in France. It was about the French (and most of the EU), legal systems.

For instance in France you only get a jury if your crime is likely to carry a sentence of 15 years or more. Otherwise you are tried by "bench".

In fact Jury trials are most uncommon in the vast majority of the EU.

We were discussing this with a friend last night and also we wandered on to the almost complete lack of any form of trading standards in the EU, which is impacting our own laws, plus what is happening in building standards and other areas, at which point our friend said "I'm going off this idea of staying in the EU".

This is what irritates me the most. There is no discussion about what the EU really is, how the rest of the EU works and how the UK fits (or does not fit), inside it.

If we had a full, honest and complete discussion on the realities of how the other countries in the EU work, what their expectations are and how they want the UK to fit within the USE which is slowly consuming all the "states" involved including the EU; I believe we would have a resounding LEAVE vote in June.

I fully believe it is only our innate isolationist stance and the near total ignorance of the EU and how it works which keeps us in it.

[cromwell]

i have thought this for a long while.

We are on the verge of a massive decision, whether to stay in or leave the EU. But we have very little on which to base that decision.

We know very little of the EU. How it works, what it's origins were, what it's long term objectives are; and the reason for this has to be that the powers that be think that it is better that we don't.

We have a national broadcaster in the BBC, part of whose mandate is to "educate and inform". On the subject of the EU, have they done this? No.

The EU has always been an elitist project imo, from the days of Jean Monnet's vision of an EU ruled by "Technocrats, leading the people forward". What the people of Europe want or don't want does not matter, hence the instructions to vote again when the "wrong" decision is reached in a referendum.

There are many things going off in the EU such as the idea of an "EU of the Regions", which are just not mentioned in this country.

Our media coverage of the EU has been and remains abysmal.