| SamuelRSmith said: I work in finance, too (investment bank), I've yet to meet a single colleague who supports staying in the EU. I'm based out in Hong Kong, so naturally, most of my British colleagues are opposed to any kind of big Government. My father, who operates a medium sized business, knows just how crippling EU business rules can be. Have you seen the change to the VAT system? VAT is now charged at place of purchase, not place of sale. The paperwork and systems all around this are a complete mess, and many small businesses in the UK will go under just trying to comply with this new rule. Seeing as you work in finance, are you aware of MiFID II? A new set of regulations regarding reporting of trade data, comes in force in 2018. Forget the fact that it's going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to comply with (making it almost impossible for small banks to comply, thus pratically outlawing them), it quite literally will make it illegal for some banks to do business. Parts of MiFID II clearly violate data privacy laws in many countries, particularly in South East Asia. It also potentially violates Britain's own Data Protection Act. ------
There has been a push by Eurocrats to create and expand a European-level military, driving military decisions into the hands of the EU, and not the nation-states. Over the years, there have also been more and more calls for the EU to replace UK and France on the UN Security Council (both by votes of the European Parliament, and by other memberstates such as Germany and Italy). Now, you might be happy with those, might think they're good ideas. I'm not really going to debate that. My point is that people who vote to stay in the EU need to realise (and I don't think many do), that they are not simply voting to keep things as they are. They will be giving a mandate to the EU to continue pushing towards its stated goal of an "ever-closer-union". Look at the difference of the EU today compared to the last time Britain voted on "European Economic Community", and the trend of integration has sped up, not slowed down. If Britain votes to stay in, it probably won't have the sovereignty ever again to have a vote to leave. |
I'm aware of MiFID II as I work with an institute that operates with clients, the UK government themselves are worse at trying to push intrusive laws if anyone tells you that violating privacy is a downside to it they clearly haven't been following Cameron that well as the Tories want laws that allow the law to even go through what you browse on the net, guess who are in their way, the EU. MiFID is a result of the financial industry's own corrupt and rule bending nature believe me UK will not escape such laws as business requires interacting with the EU nations, being part of the EU has little bearing on dealing with this law as the UK still needs to harmonize with the laws of Europe being a member of the EEA. Only change is that we'll have no influence in any EU trade laws if we leave, it's not as straight forward as we don't like this law so we can change it if we leave.
Issues like VAT and so on will continue on and could even get worse for small to medium businesses with out being part of the EU, the majority of our businesses rely on interaction with the rest of the world as almost everything is outsourced or being sold in the UK.
I already know what the vote means but believe me it's better the devil you know, the UK government aren't that different from the Eurocrats they dislike and tbh they can be worse especially with some of the outrageous going ons in recent months like pushing to bar heaalthy people from GPs and so on. Leaving the EU doesn't give us full control of anything even our own laws and that's the misconception being spread around by this vote, we're not the stand alone force that British pride will want eveyone to believe anymore all of that stopped after the era of Palmerston and that throne was taken up by the Germans ages ago. If we left we'd still have to deal with any change in Europe only this time we'd have no influence in the change, like it or not the EU needs to be together.
