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The Channel Islands and Isle of Man are not in the EU... thats one of the strangenesses. They should be forced to join.

dageshi 12y ago
Might want to wait until after any potential referendum where we might leave...
gaius 12y ago
It is the EU that is directly responsible for the "Dutch double sandwich" and various other tax dodging schemes. Lots of loopholes, we simply can't close, until we leave.
- greenpinguin 12y ago
  The EU is the only hope we have to balance the power of the city. What can a government of only 60 million, where one house is not even democratically elected, do against the might of world's finance system?
  - Dobbs 12y ago
    I'm not sure what the fact that one house is not democratically elected has to do with anything? The point of an upper house is that it is supposed to be impartial to the whims of the voters. In the USA we originally had an appointed Senate and still to this day have an appointed Judicial system. Should supreme court judges be elected? I have to say as a quasi-outsider (English raised in the USA) that more often than not I'm extremely impressed by what comes out of the House of Lords. For example their recent statement on the EU's right to be forgotten.
    - maaku 12y ago
      As an American ("no taxation without representation!") I've always... admired the House of Lords. They are able to say and do things which no elected politician can, and provide a sort of stabalizing feedback to the UK's parlimentarian system. Not unlike the relationship of the American congress with the appointed-judege court system. I was sad when I found out that the House of Lords is in the process of being reformed, with membership moving from peerage to either elected or elected-appointed positions. I fear that this won't end well for Britain :(
      - robhu 12y ago
        Unfortunately it's not clear they will be around for all that much longer. The Lib Dems had a 'reform' bill that would have made the House of Lords largely elected. It failed only because the relationship with the Conservatives fell to pieces at key time. A lot of people think that an unelected House is anathema still.
      - toyg 12y ago
        The role of a second parliamentary chamber is hotly debated across the West at the moment. Countries where both houses are elected and enjoy equivalent powers (like Italy or the US) complain that this arrangement slows down lawmaking, in an age where everything else is actually speeding up. Countries where the second chamber is not elected, like Britain, experience a certain unease: they wage war oversea "to bring democracy", and then half of their lawmaking is in the hands of a completely undemocratic body with dubious legitimacy. Countries where the second chamber actually represents different bodies from the electorate (like Germany) seem to have found a pragmatic third way, but then this chamber ends up over-representing certain interests (in Germany, local ruling classes and their nests of semi-private special businesses), which again is not really democratic in nature. I think we'll have to learn again why balance is required in matters of such importance, and we'll probably have to learn it the hard way. The major supporters of "streamlined" government have always been tyrants and oligarchs, after all.
        maaku 12y ago
        > Countries where the second chamber is not elected, like Britain, experience a certain unease: they wage war oversea "to bring democracy", and then half of their lawmaking is in the hands of a completely undemocratic body with dubious legitimacy. What is sad about that unease is that it has everything to do with the objecter's mind and nothing to do with the state of the world. "Does it work? Is there any alternative that is better?" <-- That is all we should be asking. But I'm too cynical a person to ever hope for consequentialism in politics.
        toyg 12y ago
        > Does it work? [...] <-- That is all we should be asking. The problem is, how do you define "working"? Who defines it? The Victorian Empire "worked" perfectly well for the ruling classes; less so for Indians and lower classes. That's where the absolutist coherence of "one head, one vote, in all matters" comes in; but in practice we know the idealistic approach doesn't always result in smooth sailing, so we introduce elements of moderation here and there, and then we bang our head against the wall of doubt -- is this counterbalance too anti-democratic? Should we really stop people from shooting themselves in the foot, or is there a deeper horizon where such an outcome could be desirable? Etc etc. That's the open-ended question of constitutional studies.
    - greenpinguin 12y ago
      Not democratically elected = easier to corrupt. The previous leader of the Lords OWNES his own lobbying company! Cameron suggests him as Britain's EU commissioner, and it was only then that the EU parliament had to force him to sell the stakes in it for him to be an acceptable candidate. This guy was running the house of Lords for years!!! In which democracy is that acceptable??? How is being in political power and a lobbyist for industry at the same time NOT a conflict of interest??
  - gaius 12y ago
    Can you imagine the Germans talking like that about their car industry, or the French about cheese? We don't need to "balance" the City. We need to take the gloves off and do what we can with the last remaining world class industry we have.
    - greenpinguin 12y ago
      Of course Germans question the power of the car lobby! The problem in the UK is that you destroyed the diversity of your economy in the eighties! The car industry is powerful in Germany but so are many other industries! The UK has sold it's soul to finance, even reforming schools and universities for that one purpose. George Osborne himself says for the UK to prosper in the longterm the economy needs to be rediversified!
- walshemj 12y ago
  That is because individual states implement eu directives in their own way - some with more attention to the letter of the directive and less to the spirit Compare TUPE in the Uk and Spain.
  - mike_hearn 12y ago
    Arguably the spirit of EU corporation tax law is intended to drive it to zero. That's why a corporation can designate its headquarters as being absolutely anywhere regardless of where its actual workforce or assets are. It's the only sane way to do things, otherwise you end up trying to arbitrarily slice a company up between jurisdictions even when it doesn't make any sense. Good article on this here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/25/tax_and_tech_biz/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/25/tax_and_tech_biz/ BTW the notion that "taxation without representation" is bad is pretty fundamental to modern societies. So if we tax corporations it makes sense that they'd be able to vote, as in the City of London, otherwise perhaps we should not be taxing them.
    - toyg 12y ago
      > if we tax corporations it makes sense that they'd be able to vote Only if we then remove the right to vote from shareholders and managers of such corporations. Otherwise they are double-represented in practice.
      - mike_hearn 12y ago
        Which is why it probably doesn't make sense to give corporations a vote, therefore it seems unjust to tax them. However corporations are easy to tax despite all the hullaballoo about tax avoidance so I doubt governments are going to give up on it any time soon. Taxing entities that can't vote is basically free money.
- justincormack 12y ago
  We can't close this if we leave either, these are companies incorporated in Ireland and the Netherlands. It is not the EU that created this.
AnimalMuppet 12y ago
The moment you say somebody should be forced, you massively increase the burden on you to give a sufficient reason why any such thing should be done.
- gaius 12y ago
  Weren't the Channel Islands forced to join Europe in the 1940s?
- justincormack 12y ago
  They are British colonies, which has no real place in the modern world, they should be properly part of the UK, hence Europe. I guess if they voted for independence we could let them, but then they should not have the benefits of being in the UK. One or the other. (Also the inhabitants are citizens of the EU, but live in a non EU country).
  - bcoates 12y ago
    The city I live in has a large population of UK citizens and isn't part of the EU either, is there something I should know?

Might want to wait until after any potential referendum where we might leave...

gaius 12y ago

It is the EU that is directly responsible for the "Dutch double sandwich" and various other tax dodging schemes. Lots of loopholes, we simply can't close, until we leave.

greenpinguin 12y ago
The EU is the only hope we have to balance the power of the city. What can a government of only 60 million, where one house is not even democratically elected, do against the might of world's finance system?
- Dobbs 12y ago
  I'm not sure what the fact that one house is not democratically elected has to do with anything? The point of an upper house is that it is supposed to be impartial to the whims of the voters. In the USA we originally had an appointed Senate and still to this day have an appointed Judicial system. Should supreme court judges be elected? I have to say as a quasi-outsider (English raised in the USA) that more often than not I'm extremely impressed by what comes out of the House of Lords. For example their recent statement on the EU's right to be forgotten.
  - maaku 12y ago
    As an American ("no taxation without representation!") I've always... admired the House of Lords. They are able to say and do things which no elected politician can, and provide a sort of stabalizing feedback to the UK's parlimentarian system. Not unlike the relationship of the American congress with the appointed-judege court system. I was sad when I found out that the House of Lords is in the process of being reformed, with membership moving from peerage to either elected or elected-appointed positions. I fear that this won't end well for Britain :(
    - robhu 12y ago
      Unfortunately it's not clear they will be around for all that much longer. The Lib Dems had a 'reform' bill that would have made the House of Lords largely elected. It failed only because the relationship with the Conservatives fell to pieces at key time. A lot of people think that an unelected House is anathema still.
    - toyg 12y ago
      The role of a second parliamentary chamber is hotly debated across the West at the moment. Countries where both houses are elected and enjoy equivalent powers (like Italy or the US) complain that this arrangement slows down lawmaking, in an age where everything else is actually speeding up. Countries where the second chamber is not elected, like Britain, experience a certain unease: they wage war oversea "to bring democracy", and then half of their lawmaking is in the hands of a completely undemocratic body with dubious legitimacy. Countries where the second chamber actually represents different bodies from the electorate (like Germany) seem to have found a pragmatic third way, but then this chamber ends up over-representing certain interests (in Germany, local ruling classes and their nests of semi-private special businesses), which again is not really democratic in nature. I think we'll have to learn again why balance is required in matters of such importance, and we'll probably have to learn it the hard way. The major supporters of "streamlined" government have always been tyrants and oligarchs, after all.
      - maaku 12y ago
        > Countries where the second chamber is not elected, like Britain, experience a certain unease: they wage war oversea "to bring democracy", and then half of their lawmaking is in the hands of a completely undemocratic body with dubious legitimacy. What is sad about that unease is that it has everything to do with the objecter's mind and nothing to do with the state of the world. "Does it work? Is there any alternative that is better?" <-- That is all we should be asking. But I'm too cynical a person to ever hope for consequentialism in politics.
        toyg 12y ago
        > Does it work? [...] <-- That is all we should be asking. The problem is, how do you define "working"? Who defines it? The Victorian Empire "worked" perfectly well for the ruling classes; less so for Indians and lower classes. That's where the absolutist coherence of "one head, one vote, in all matters" comes in; but in practice we know the idealistic approach doesn't always result in smooth sailing, so we introduce elements of moderation here and there, and then we bang our head against the wall of doubt -- is this counterbalance too anti-democratic? Should we really stop people from shooting themselves in the foot, or is there a deeper horizon where such an outcome could be desirable? Etc etc. That's the open-ended question of constitutional studies.
  - greenpinguin 12y ago
    Not democratically elected = easier to corrupt. The previous leader of the Lords OWNES his own lobbying company! Cameron suggests him as Britain's EU commissioner, and it was only then that the EU parliament had to force him to sell the stakes in it for him to be an acceptable candidate. This guy was running the house of Lords for years!!! In which democracy is that acceptable??? How is being in political power and a lobbyist for industry at the same time NOT a conflict of interest??
- gaius 12y ago
  Can you imagine the Germans talking like that about their car industry, or the French about cheese? We don't need to "balance" the City. We need to take the gloves off and do what we can with the last remaining world class industry we have.
  - greenpinguin 12y ago
    Of course Germans question the power of the car lobby! The problem in the UK is that you destroyed the diversity of your economy in the eighties! The car industry is powerful in Germany but so are many other industries! The UK has sold it's soul to finance, even reforming schools and universities for that one purpose. George Osborne himself says for the UK to prosper in the longterm the economy needs to be rediversified!
walshemj 12y ago
That is because individual states implement eu directives in their own way - some with more attention to the letter of the directive and less to the spirit Compare TUPE in the Uk and Spain.
- mike_hearn 12y ago
  Arguably the spirit of EU corporation tax law is intended to drive it to zero. That's why a corporation can designate its headquarters as being absolutely anywhere regardless of where its actual workforce or assets are. It's the only sane way to do things, otherwise you end up trying to arbitrarily slice a company up between jurisdictions even when it doesn't make any sense. Good article on this here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/25/tax_and_tech_biz/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/25/tax_and_tech_biz/ BTW the notion that "taxation without representation" is bad is pretty fundamental to modern societies. So if we tax corporations it makes sense that they'd be able to vote, as in the City of London, otherwise perhaps we should not be taxing them.
  - toyg 12y ago
    > if we tax corporations it makes sense that they'd be able to vote Only if we then remove the right to vote from shareholders and managers of such corporations. Otherwise they are double-represented in practice.
    - mike_hearn 12y ago
      Which is why it probably doesn't make sense to give corporations a vote, therefore it seems unjust to tax them. However corporations are easy to tax despite all the hullaballoo about tax avoidance so I doubt governments are going to give up on it any time soon. Taxing entities that can't vote is basically free money.
justincormack 12y ago
We can't close this if we leave either, these are companies incorporated in Ireland and the Netherlands. It is not the EU that created this.

AnimalMuppet 12y ago

The moment you say somebody should be forced, you massively increase the burden on you to give a sufficient reason why any such thing should be done.

gaius 12y ago
Weren't the Channel Islands forced to join Europe in the 1940s?
justincormack 12y ago
They are British colonies, which has no real place in the modern world, they should be properly part of the UK, hence Europe. I guess if they voted for independence we could let them, but then they should not have the benefits of being in the UK. One or the other. (Also the inhabitants are citizens of the EU, but live in a non EU country).
- bcoates 12y ago
  The city I live in has a large population of UK citizens and isn't part of the EU either, is there something I should know?