Which is ironic because some of the reasons Brits want to leave is because of the French, e.g. why does the EU parliament have to spend 100million+ EUR to have the parliament in Strasbourg for 3 days of the month?
02:35 - "But once a month, do you know what happens? They load the contents of our offices and papers into big, plastic trunks, and they put those trunks on lorries, and they drive them nearly 400 miles down Europe’s motorways to a French city called Strasbourg where, for four days, the contents of our offices, and our papers, are put into a new office, and the parliament then sits there..."
(Given, this video was shot after the election, not before, but Nigel Farage most likely spoke about this before too.)
Want something changed? Build a support within a bloc. Don't pretend your opinion is any more valuable than an opinion of any of the other 27 members.
I'm an outsider on this, but I could imagine this as an effective quote to replay in any "leave" campaign. Can we really imagine UK (or Germany) ever being relegated to having only the influence of e.g. Slovenia?
Each country picks its own members (at minimum, six of them in the European Parliament), those members congregate into political blocs, those blocs make proposals, build a majority within EUs regulatory bodies, and adopt changes.
The difference between Germany and the UK is that German parties recognize this process and follow it. UK's (right-wing) parties, on the other hand, go on a tantrum locally whenever something doesn't go their way on an EU level, because they believe they're in a privileged position and that their vote means more within the EU. It doesn't.
My aim isn't to convince "leave" campaign that they should stay. On the contrary, I agree with the comment that said good riddance. Their tantrums stopped the progress of the EU far too many times.
If you think that the electoral college in the US is terrible, please, look up how Boris Johnson got to the position of the Prime Minister. The process was so undemocratic than it can't be considered anything but a complete joke. Brexit will finally happen, EU will move forward, and we'll all sit back and watch the UK's economy crash and burn. In over two years, they haven't even figured out what Brexit actually means, so the thoughts of them figuring it out within the next four months is laughable at best. There's not gonna be enough popcorns in the world for that shitshow.
To use a bit of metaphor, we, the UK, are definitely shooting ourselves in the foot but we're doing it inside a metal box with the other member states. We'll loose a foot for sure but when the bullet starts ricocheting it's going to hit all of us sooner or later. Our economies are entwined.
There are no winners in a more fragmented world.
I don't share your gleefully grim expectations about UK's economic outlook. Sure, EU customs will be an issue. Making it too big an issue doesn't seem to be in anyone's interest, however. I can't imagine that e.g. Ireland want to hurt their own economy through any sort of "work to rule" policy. I can think of one EU member as important to the overall European economy as UK is (and it ain't France).
|{Germany}| = 1