(June 27, 2016 at 6:38 am)Constable Dorfl Wrote:(June 25, 2016 at 1:51 pm)Emjay Wrote: Right, I see. You're missing out... Yes Minister's (and Yes Prime Minister) brilliant and you can learn a lot about British politics from it - I think Thatcher said it was a very accurate portrayal of government. There's a clip from it earlier in this thread which I've just found for you http://atheistforums.org/thread-43710-po...pid1312963. Humphrey Appleby's the one on the left... and btw that's why I call Hammy Humpy... cos of his run-on sentences (which you'll understand if you see it)
Cool. Sorry about pretty much ignoring you first time round... I was angry at the time and not inclined to read what looked like a very technical pro-leave argument... but I'm calm now and I'll read it properly at some point. So sorry about that.
Madog's whole case is an egregiously stupid "I vape therefore the EU is teh evuuuuuuls". Half of what he links to doesn't say what he wants it to say, the other half does, but is bad science. And what he himself says is all too often meaningless jargon.
Well, I'm not particularly interested in the vaping argument because that looks like it's open to interpretation and more to the point it's not immediately relevant, for me, to what's going on right now. But what's much more concerning is the fact that the EU is not bound by the ECHR... that's the main thing I took from madog's posts. And I have since learnt that the EU has been given a 'legal identity' so it could actually be treated like a nation in the sense of being able to join the Council of Europe in its own right and therefore be bound by the ECHR... forming a kind of feedback loop with the Council that created it... but where it is - at the moment... and apparently been putting off joining for 42 years - outside that loop; so you have to have ratified the ECHR to join the Council of Europe, and you have to be a member of the Council of Europe to join the EU but there are 47 members of the Council of Europe and 28 members of the EU so you can be in the Council of Europe without being in the EU. So, outside the loop it means that EU directives that conflict with the ECHR can put Council of Europe members in a lose-lose situation where they can't please both sides and therefore face sanctions from one side or the other.
Whether that's actually happening, and if so on a large enough scale for it to be a serious problem, I have no idea, but the potential is there in principle and that is a concern. So it appears madog's preferred solution is to leave the EU and therefore cut them out of the loop and thus end the conflict of interests - rather than wait for them to accede - while expecting the UK to remain a member of the Council of Europe and thus keep the ECHR. But I fear that leaving the EU will just be one step on the slippery slope towards leaving the Council of Europe and thus becoming completely isolationist. So if the Tories want to leave the Council of Europe, fighting them will be my next priority, if we end up stuck with this decision to leave the EU. But looking at the Council of Europe website, Winston Churchill was one of it's founders so would they want to leave something with such a heritage? I don't know, but I hope madog is right in his optimism (for other reasons) that they wouldn't.
