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Comment by CodeGlitch | Hacker News Reader

Missing the point yet again. Sorry to sound bitter back at you, but the remainers still fail to recognise why a lot of people voted Brexit. The current state of the EU/UK relationship is fine mostly, it's the direction that the EU is going in that is their problem. An army, an anthem, a single "state". That is the end goal of Brussels.

I voted remain, and I blame the remainers for messing it all up.

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Leaving the EU in case it became this or that makes no sense. As a member of the EU we have never once, ever been “forced” into anything. It’s always been about negotiation, and if we ever wanted to opt out of anything we did.

We opted out of the working time directive, the Schengen agreement, the Euro, the charter of fundamental rights, the social chapter. We even had an explicit opt out from the treaty goal of an “ever closer union”. This narrative that were were being coerced into things against our will is simply not true. Yes we sometimes gave up painful concessions, but we also gained valuable benefits. It was always a negotiated outcome.

> As a member of the EU we have never once, ever been “forced” into anything.

Total nonsense. The EU set laws the UK had to follow, and the ECJ had the power to overrule UK courts.

Which particular EU law which was forced upon us caused you so much trouble?

I was responding to a claim that “[as] a member of the EU we have never once, ever been “forced” into anything.”

I have not made any claim about those laws causing me trouble, but the ability of the EU to force laws on the UK certainly troubled me.

OK, I'll rephrase. What laws have been imposed on the UK by the EU that wouldn't have likely been brought in by the Westminster government?

By definition, the laws the EU have forced on the UK were opposed by the UK government, and would not have made their way into UK law had they not been forced by the EU.

So that's the definition. What's the specific example?

You're like five levels deep in trying to obfuscate that you can't think of a single example of that supposedly huge harm you want to avoid.

What I’ve actually been doing is resisting attempts to conflate two separate claims:

1) The claim that the EU has never forced the UK to do anything. Sheer nonsense. This is the claim I disputed all those levels above;

2) The claim that laws the EU has historically forced upon on the UK have been harmful.

There are plenty of examples of the latter (take the Tampon Tax as one [0]), but that’s not the claim I was making.

I haven’t advanced the latter claim because it is irrelevant.

Providing evidence of historic harm is not a prerequisite for principled opposition to the EU having the power to impose laws and overrule national courts.

[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...

This is the myth that the brexiteers sold the nation. And it's pretty much all bullst. See this thread for a pretty well done and amusing takedown https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1087360379691380736.html

Perhaps I’m missing something, but how does a list of 72 laws the EU forced on the UK refute the “myth” that the EU forced laws on the UK?

I’ve not checked all of them, just about a dozen, but as far as I can tell they’re just regulations and European Council decisions. In other words they’re administrative interpretations of the application of laws. And entirely trivial ones at that. I’m not a lawyer maybe they meet the legal definitions of laws, but whether or not Apertame in particular is an ingredient that needs to be included on contents labels hardly seems like the stuff of international treaties.

We had a veto, rarely used, if we didn't like anything. We were very poor in effectively making use of the powers we had within the EU. Of course, now we have none of them, so the EU can do what it likes without worrying about us or our pesky veto now.

the veto has been vastly overstated and was all but removed by Lisbon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_the_Council_of_the_E...

also: if it is used the other members use "enhanced co-operation" to bypass the veto, like they did in 2011 when Cameron used his

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/09/david-cameron-...

Every international treaty and trade agreement includes an adjudication process in case of disputes. The adjudication panel has oversight of interpretation of the treaty, not individual National course, for very obvious reasons. The ECJ is the transnational adjudication panel for the EU.

There’s nothing particularly special about the concept. It’s no different in principle than the WTO dispute resolution process, the International Court of Justice at the UN, or any number of other international arbitration, dispute resolution or treaty enforcement mechanisms past or present. All of those have the agreed power yo adjudicate on whether domestic UK laws are in violation of our treaty agreements.

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