#uk eu

Leave vote at the UK EU Referendum against Neuroticism trait in GB

UK Environment and the EU - What if we leave?

Here goes, this will be just an overview of the facts and what is known / current policy's. Obviously there is no definitive this will happen! So just read it over and use it to inform your opinion with other available sources on different issues. I tried to make it as un-biased as possible but my apologies if my opinion shines through.   Historical In the 1970′s and 1980′s the UK had the rather unattractive reputation for being the ‘Dirty Man of Europe’. Why? We had the highest emissions in the EU for sulphur dioxide and our coastal waters were akin to open sewers due to putting human effluent into them as part of pollution control. (Rose 1990). This rule of ‘dilute and disperse’ also applied to the nuclear plant Sellafield (Freestone 1990). 

Policy was dictated that action was only taken when incontrovertible damage had been proved or problems emerged. Something that proved very damaging when it came to BSE (Mad Cow disease) (BBC Crisis Review).  So that’s what we were like before, so what has the EU done for us? Europe drove up standards in environmental policy and acted to prevent them from weakening the ‘europeanisation’ of UK policy has seen a complete reorganization of the government and the introduction of new regulatory agency's and strict emissions limits with judicial process to support the implementation and enforcement of policy. Basically don’t follow the rules and you face the music. Which the UK did in 2013 over air pollution. 

So most of the important UK environmental policies have emerged because of the EU. For example the EU’s bathing water directive we had to change approaches to sewage treatment and releases of nitrates so the quality of our coastal waters have improved. (Reports here) The EU also provides policy to protect UK wildlife under the Natura 2000. This directive obliges the government to provide protected wildlife zones. They now have well established eco-systems which also provide a range of services in the form of flood defenses, carbon sequestration and pollination (food). Nature protection is very popular with UK citizens (like you reading this right now!). In recent surveys 79% said domestic biodiversity loss was a very or fairly serious problem. (Survey).  EU wide fishing restrictions have also had a dramatic effect in preventing overfishing. Last year cod and haddock showed a dramatic recovery. Thus the UK’s most important environmental policy's come from the EU. This is not to say that without the EU the UK wouldn’t have similar policy's but looking at historical data it is that push and support from the EU that created them as you can see from past examples. Future Efforts

Politics

'Pay up and that's that': UK told to stop trying to dodge £1.7bn EU bill

A senior European politician said Europe expects the UK to pay £1.7bn towards the EU budget "and that's that". Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, a vice president of the European Parliament, told the BBC that "everybody has to pay their dues" and said the EU would be "exasperated" if the UK refused to pay up. The comments ramp up the tension between the EU and UK, especially after David Cameron's defiant statement on Friday in which he said: "I'm not paying that bill on the 1st of December and if people think I am, they've got another thing coming."

If you have higher GDP growth than forecast, that also means logically that you have a higher contribution to the community's budget. That is a logical consequence. That is something that everybody has signed up for.

Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, speaking on the BBC's Today programme

Outgoing Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso insisted Brussels was only following the procedures created by member states to balance the EU's books each year. Mr Barroso told reporters the figure of £1.7bn had been calculated by the independent Eurostat organisation using statistics provided the 28 member states. The Netherlands is being asked for an extra £509m, but by contrast France is due to receive a rebate of £0.8bn, Germany £618m, and Poland £250m.

As an important contributor to this organisation, we are not suddenly going to get out our chequebook and write a cheque for €2bn. It is not happening.