Eurozone Crisis: Why Britain went into EU but not the Euro and championed EU expansion

[spike1138]

@TheBattleforBritain2 In any case, you're wrong; Ted Heath and the small number of people who took us into Europe and signed the treaty *did* see European federalism as the eventual, ultimate goal of us joining at some point in the future.

Parliament never had a debate about it to decide whether we should go in and what it meant, and the public was only given the chance to vote on whether we should stay in once we had gone in; but the people who took us in, that was their intention.

[spike1138]

@TheBattleforBritain2 Most of our Kings and Queens in our history have been "foreigners", and they most certainly told us what to do. Quite a few of them didn't even speak English, like George I. Don't be so naive. Richard the Lionheart spent less than 6 months in Britain over his entire 10 year reign. In 1688, we invited a Dutchman to come and be our King after we booted out an English one. For almost 250 years, the official language at court in the Middle Ages was French, not English.

[spike1138]

@TheBattleforBritain2 Most of our Kings and Queens in our history have been "foreigners", and they most certainly told us what to do. Quite a few of them didn't even speak English, like George I. Don't be so naive. Richard the Lionheart spent less than 6 months in Britain over his entire 10 year reign. In 1688, we invited a Dutchman to come and be our King after we booted out an English one. For more than 250 years, the official language at court in the Middle Ages was French, not English.

[spike1138]

@TheBattleforBritain2 We also borrowed heavily during and after World War II under the Lend Lease Act and the Marshall Plan from the Americans to finance the war and reconstruction. We finished paying it all back in 2006.

Americans are foreigners. And in exchange, they were ensuring our allegiance during the Cold War and under NATO, we were entirely tied into the US nuclear deterrent plan by virtue of US Airbases and A-Bombs located in Britain. They told us what to do, make no mistake.

[spike1138]

@TheBattleforBritain2 Aside from surviving the blitzkreig unleashed on British cities, how did we get on with achieving those goals?

As for protecting the British Empire, we haven't got one anymore. American assistance was largely conditional on us giving up most of our colonial territories and the Japanese forced us to give up most of the others. Stalin successfully checked German expansion in the East, although we did help out. And Poland remained under Soviet domination for another 50 years.

[spike1138]

@TheBattleforBritain2 ""for me it betrays what our Gran parent fought for in the Second world war "

No, it doesn't. That's completely irrelevant. We fought the Second World War to protect the British Empire, check German expansion in the East and guarantee the independence of Poland by preventing it's domination by a foreign power.

After the Fall of France, it became a battle for national survival on the basis that we were loosing so badly and were completely isolated, but not before that.

[spike1138]

@TheBattleforBritain2 NATO doesn't prevent wars in Europe, NATO either ignores wars within Europe in which there is no strategic gain to be had (as in the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s) or starts wars in Europe (as in the case of the Kosovo War in 1999).

NATO is not a Federal European institution, far from it; the United States is a founding charter member of NATO and Turkey is also a strategic key member state, one that is currently excluded from the EU for gross human rights violations.

[spike1138]

@TheBattleforBritain2 "for me it betrays what our Gran parent fought for in the Second world war and yes i know about stopping a Second world war but it was Nato that has kept the peace for as long as it has been"

NATO was not intended to keep the peace in Europe and it's completely unaffiliated to the EU and it's institutions. NATO is a strategic alliance created to defend against the threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe (which it achieved), not to prevent wars in Europe (it failed)