[FuckingRotter]

Now the sensible answer. What could Britain do instead of being in the EU?

It could make a serious effort to retrain its unemployed work force for a start, especially those under the age of 25, and very especially those with useless university degrees for which there is no demand, and who have little hope of paying back their loans, or of contributing to society by paying taxes that might help train and educate the next generation of unemployed. Why do this? Because it is better than importing workers.

We could give up our self-appointed role as global policeman. It's expensive, and wins us few friends. It also, as you rightly pointed out, nearly bankrupted us in 1945. Since we keep on insisting on electing zealots like McPantsonFire, we keep running this bankruptcy gauntlet. We could maintain a truly independant nuclear deterant, and stick a couple of fingers up to France, the US and NATO. We could become a rogue state. We don't really need the likes of the UN to tell us how to behave like civilised human beings. We're British, we invented civilised, we invented fair play.

We could foster closer ties with our former empire. Especially India, the second biggest market, and one of the fastest growing economies on the planet. Why? Because India is hungry and thirsty, we have technologies that could solve both those problems. In exchange they sell us some of the food we so badly need. Food is our weak point, our Achilles heal. At the outbreak of WWII we only produced 60% of our food domestically. It was nearly a disaster for us. When I left school this figure had not changed. We had little choice but to join the common market. We could develope the technology and make it viable and marketable, would create jobs, we would not need to rely on Europe either for food, or for a market to sell our technology to as we could sell it to the highest bidder.

This is what Britain has always done best since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

You mentioned hard choices a couple of posts back Pete. The way I see it, being in the EU is the easy option, because it means politicians and industrialists have the EU to blame when things fuck up. The real hard choice would be to do something productive, something progressive, something useful.

Which brings me to the final point. Research suggests that for every job created in construction, 1.2 jobs are created elsewhere in the British economy. So we build new infrastructure. This can be both government and privately led since the end result is the same - more jobs, a nation with a balanced account sheet, a happy breed because we're no longer plagued by traffic jams and hosepipe bans in summer, road and airport and rail closures in the winter. Crumbling schools that people would pay over the odds to but a house in another area to avoid sending their kids there. Disease ridden hospitals and social housing that makes the poorest in society sick. An imbalance of opportunity. Homelessness because a shortage of housing is driving up both rents and prices to an insane level.

Or is the EU going to do all these things for us? No, of course not. Because all the EU is is a circle jerk to stop the Frogs and Krauts from kicking off and dragging their neighbours in to the fray. Switzerland does perfectly well without them, we could too.