Cont: Brexit: Now What? Part 6. Pick up sticks...

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Ambrosia said:
Throwing more MEPs at the problem wouldn't make sense.

I got very interested in the EU back when the TPD was proposed as I ran a business that was directly affected by the proposed directive.

I campaigned against it long and hard along with many of my colleagues. It got passed. Only they used political dirty tricks to push it through. Which got me to wondering what other EU rules were also passed using such tactics, so I looked a lot closer and didn't like what I saw.

e.g. Lobbying. there are an estimated 25000 lobbyists in the EU corridors of power it's estimated they spend a combined 1.5bn euros a year on their lobbying.

It was pharma lobbyists that pushed the TPD through because they wanted to make a lot more money from ineffective and potentially harmful stop smoking treatments, and to control the vaping industry. After it got passed the barriers to entry for that market are now enormous, the innovation in it has been stifled and a lot of the smaller players, myself included, are no longer in business.

That just benefits big corporations. We, the people, elect our representatives and they get sweet talked by lobbyists and line their own pockets at the expense of the majority. That's what I am talking about when I call the EU an undemocratic gravy train. That is what needs changing.

If instead of the TPD that we have now MEPs had been allowed to properly review the science and the evidence, then we could have had reasonable proportional regulations that protected the consumers and also were attainable by small/medium businesses. There'd be more choice and more competition so the end consumer would pay less.
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and
:rolleyes:
Yes it was terrible that the evil EU forced manufacturers to actually test their products and truthfully list the ingredients.

:rolleyes:
 
Lothian said:
My ref would be a STV

Do you want

1 May's deal
2 Leave without a deal
3 Remain.

Put number 1 by your first choice and 2 by your second choice.
In the event that no choice gains 50 % of the vote, the votes for the option with the fewest votes will be reallocated where a second preference is given.

For 'leave with out a deal' votors 'preference' means things you like. 50% means half.
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That could create a terrible precedent for using STV voting in elections.
 
Brexit: ITV scraps plans for TV debate between leaders

ITV has scrapped its plans to hold a Brexit debate between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn this Sunday.

The channel said it had invited both parties to appear on the programme two days ahead of the meaningful vote on Mrs May's withdrawal agreement.

But an ITV spokeswoman confirmed on Thursday that it would "not go ahead".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-46476324
 
catsmate said:
The Daily Mail was deprecated in the 2017 RfC. There is consensus that the Daily Mail (including its online version, MailOnline) is generally unreliable, and its use as a reference is generally prohibited, especially when other more reliable sources exist.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources/Perennial_sources
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Of course the problem is that some editors try to game the system and insist that no cite to the Mail whatsoever is valid, even though there are stated exemptions, e.g. when citing a controversial Mail article.
 
Dave Rogers said:
The article makes no suggestion that it has to be that. The article, rather, points out that occupants of the current registered address of the company denied that they were in any way associated with it, indicating that the current registered address is fraudulent. It also points out that the publicly available accounts of the organisation are not, in fact, publicly available, meaning thatthe company is in violation of the terms by which it qualifies for limited disclosure exemption. But I'm sure you could read all that perfectly clearly too.

Dave
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It is quite normal - where there is a firm offering multiple company directorships - for there to be literally dozens of companies sharing the same 'registered address'.
 
Ambrosia said:
I'll keep this brief as this isn't the topic of the thread but basically:

Article 20 (the bit that pertains to vaping) was tacked onto the TPD and was drafted in a rushed process called trilogue . this is basically a behind closed doors series of meeting with EU lawyers and some other interested parties, to hammer out the text of directives.

The people in the meetings for Article 20 of the TPD didn't include any pro-vaping people or anyone representing the lots of credible scientific research that was being done at the time. IIRC we had something like 7 or 8 peer reviewed papers from proper scientific journals detailing exactly how and why the directive was bad all of which was hand waved away by the trilogue committee and wasn't properly debated prior to the vote.
They drafted a dogs dinner of a directive as a result of lack of expertise and lack of consultation.

Here is a blog from the time from Clive Bates. Clive is a former director of ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) and has also worked as a civil servant for the cabinet office and Environment Agency, so in short he knows what he's talking about.



To top all that off the President of the European Parliament at the time Martin Schulz refused initially to allow split and separate voting for different aspects of the TPD (which was and is, in most part, a good directive) changing his mind an hour before the vote took place (Feb 26th 2014) then he refused to allow more time for stakeholders to make their case against article 18A (which later became Article 20) so the whole thing got passed in a very rushed vote. (this is the political dirty trick I am referring to)

MEP Martin Callanan (now Lord Callanan) stood up in the EP immediately before the vote to try to make the case for having more time to review Article18A and was shut down in short order.


I am not saying it's undemocratic because I didn't get my way, I am saying it's undemocratic because directives that effect millions of Europeans should at least be drafted by people who have expertise on the subject at hand and then properly debated before being voted on.

It turns out that many EU directives are drafted using trilogue, which seems to me to be a very flawed process.

EU directives, by and large, reflect the desires of corporate lobbyists and not what would actually be best for the people.

I'll happily go into more depth if you are interested on the TPD, but not in this thread. The full text of the TPD is here.
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There are sites that discuss EU lobbying but, I agree with you that the EU should be more transparent.

https://www.integritywatch.eu/lobbyist.html
 
Vixen said:
It is quite normal - where there is a firm offering multiple company directorships - for there to be literally dozens of companies sharing the same 'registered address'.
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In fact if you google the address there are a lot of companies using that address. One is a Manx ISP I've dealt with and others. And the place isn't so shabby as the BBC make it seem speaking as a regular visitor to Douglas.
 
Vixen said:
It is quite normal - where there is a firm offering multiple company directorships - for there to be literally dozens of companies sharing the same 'registered address'.
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Yes, I'm well aware of that. What is not normal is for the occupants of the registered address to make it clear that they have no knowledge whatsoever of the firm that is supposedly registered there.

Dave
 
catsmate said:
and
:rolleyes:
Yes it was terrible that the evil EU forced manufacturers to actually test their products and truthfully list the ingredients.
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It was already a legal requirement that companies list their ingredients.

I, like most of the small vaping guys *did * get my liquids tested.

The vaping industry circa 2016 *wanted* there to be testing and standards.

What should have happened is that the TPD should have been passed without any reference to vaping stuff, what with vaping products not containing any tobacco and it being the *tobacco products* directive, and then there should have been a whole new separate directive to put in place reasonable testing and standards and regulations for vaping.

Testing and standards that reflected the peer reviewed science that would have protected the public and offered consumers choice and competition.
The best outcome for the average person would have been testing and standards that were attainable for an average small/medium business.

Instead they forced GMP (good manufacturing practice) onto everyone, which sounds good, but is actually pharmaceutical grade manufacturing practices, which cost upwards of £20k to implement. per item.

Instead of forcing just the cowboys out of business it forced most of the small/medium businesses out and handed control of the vaping market over to big business.

I took the lessons I learned from all of that and started up a new business selling fudge as it happens, but the TPD means that the NHS nowadays has a much higher bill to pay for the times that it recommends vaping as an alternative to smoking because most of the people left in the vaping market are pharma/tobacco companies who pass the extra costs onto the end user.

I can talk about the TPD at length, for hours. It's an appalling piece of legislation that should never have been passed. But it was, because lobbyists.

And yes I am well aware that there are lobbyists in the UK, but by and large lobbying in the UK isn't as bad as that in the EU and we are still much better off than the US in that regard.

Also it's easier to campaign against and repeal country specific legislation, rather than EU wide legislation.
 
Wudang said:
And yet isn't Sweden in the EU?
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Yes. Yes it is.

You would think that as smoking is so detrimental to public health and because it drains so much of taxpayers money from the public purse via treatments for smoking related diseases that anything that reduced smoking prevalence would be welcomed.

5% (five percent!) of adult Swedes smoke. Lots more of them use Snus.

We could reduce smoking prevalence from our present numbers of 15-20% to probably at least 10% if Snus was available Europe wide.

Sweden had to fight to be able to sell it at all, why can't smokers have the option to use Snus in the UK or in France or in Germany etc?

How much money would the NHS save if it had 1/3rd less of patients to treat with smoking related diseases?

What's the impact of those extra patients on waiting list times?

Is all of that really worth protecting the profits and CEO bonuses of pharma companies for? I don't think it is.
 
Ambrosia said:
How much money would the NHS save if it had 1/3rd less of patients to treat with smoking related diseases?
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Next bus slogan?

Of course, like the last one, the problem here is that you have to demonstrate that Brexit will result in the outcome you want.
 
angrysoba said:
Next bus slogan?

Of course, like the last one, the problem here is that you have to demonstrate that Brexit will result in the outcome you want.
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Brexit won't result in the outcome that I want.

I voted for Brexit as a protest vote. Lots of the Brexit campaign made me mad, including the bus slogan and just about everything Nigel Farage ever said and the fact that that I was voting the same was as the BNP and their ilk.

If I could go back and do things over I'd probably not have voted at all, but, ultimately my one single vote made sod all difference to the outcome.

Again, I am for European union, but against the EU.

I want open borders and free movement of goods and people.
I want close co-operation Europe wide for security.

I want the UK to have a little more say over the laws that govern it's people
 
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