Why the UK is in the EU

I don’t find what either side is saying here very convincing. Anti-ID “it will change our relationship with the state, cause irreversible damage to our civil liberties and fail to deter illegal immigration”. They say it will lead to “frequent identity checks as we navigate our daily lives”. That last part isn’t true, for sure. I’ve lived in a country with a digital ID and you had to verify your identity a few times a year at most - submitting taxes, opening bank accounts etc. They’re exaggerating here. The pro-ID group is even less convincing, if that can be imagined. Tony Blair, former PM has been batting for this for ages - Digital ID is the Disruption the UK Desperately Needs ( link ). And it all sounds like snake oil to someone who is even a little tech inclined. He’s promising all kinds of things, like the UK will see dramatically higher growth. I’ve seen India before and after Aadhaar. It helped, but it didn’t fundamentally remake the economy. UPI did do that, but it’s not dependent on Aadhaar. And the government wants to show they’re cracking down on illegal immigration so this is an easy win. But it will take more than 5 years to roll out and by then the PM would be out of a job. Even if it could be rolled out to 70 million people in 2 years (that’s 100k people per day ), it wouldn’t have all these incredible benefits. As for illegal immigration, it would catch a few but not all. The technical issue is that while you can issue everyone an ID, it would take much, muc

The goal behind the EU is to represent Europe as a single unified economic bloc capable of being a world power. It's not meant to make the European Union into a superstate. You can pretty directly tie this as a natural consequence of most of Europe's colonial empires falling; without the extra resources the colonies brought in, Europe would've risked being run under by both the US, Russia and nowadays China. The goal of the EU is to essentially find agreement between 27 member states to do things that all those states agree are things they want to do. Actually federalizing the EU wouldn't work simply because Europeans are too different from one another; it's a cooperation between countries that spend most of their history being in varying degrees of "dislike" to "waging war" on each other, and while most people agree war is bad these days, those cultural differences have never gone away[0]. Trying to create a mono-EU "national identity" wouldn't work, the same way that most Americans find a shared national identity in well, "being American". Probably the most topical example for HN would be tech antitrust legislation. If any one European country tried to pass tech antitrust laws with teeth, it'd be trivial for those companies to just... stop providing services to that country. Most European countries are too small to make a meaningful dent, and a few actions "to prove a point", will lead to a chilling effect. It'd lead to a copy of the US's current tech dystopia where you don

The impact of BRICS is really overstated, and is only really discussed on Reddit and HN (because Reddit). In action it's been blunted because of China and India's rivalry, with each country vetoing expansion of nations that are fully lopsided one way or the other. It's not different from the SCO or APEC in that sense. If you want to learn further about blunting in IR I highly recommend reading Rush Doshi and Oriana Skylar Mastro's research. Alternatively, this classic scene from "Yes Minister" also pretty much explains this strategy - ▶ this video

I feel you're misreading what I said, and just seeing your own angle in it. "They took our jobs" isn't exactly true, but what has happened is that wages stayed low and conditions got worse due to capitalism's demand for lower costs and greater efficiency. So a source of cheap labour from Eastern Europe only served that process and made it such that companies didn't have to invest in people locally, because anyone could come in and do the job, and in the case of people from Eastern Europe, our minimum wages were higher than those provided by skilled professions. (I worked with a guy whose mother was the head nurse of a hospital in Hungary, and on a wage of £400 per month, so he was earning a small fortune in comparison even though that came at the cost of working to hours and conditions that UK workers would reject). So levelling all the blame for this phenomenon at UK politicians is moot because there is really little they could do about it, the EU comes with complete freedom of movement, which many in the UK saw as not really providing them with any benefit while coming with big downsides that affect them on a daily basis. > That is basically the failure of UK politicians, too. But, as Yes, Minister very rightly put it, perhaps the UK wasn't in there for any kind of unity to begin with: ▶ this video I'm well aware of Yes, Minister. While it gives a humourous take on the eccentricity and backwardness of our process, my point nevertheless stands. The UK has long-since developed a s

> The UK wasn't a founding member of the EU Ah, my mistake. I was pretty sure the UK was a founding member. > I feel that many in the UK regard it's parliament as the highest authority in law- and decision-making. Any body resting higher than that is going to face difficulty when attempting to claim greater and greater control over laws, and running them from "far away" even if that far away place was Brussels. That is basically the failure of UK politicians, too. But, as Yes, Minister very rightly put it, perhaps the UK wasn't in there for any kind of unity to begin with: ▶ this video :) > The UK also wasn't part of the Euro, and so one of the main benefits of EU membership and coherence was missing The UK isn't the only country without the Euro though. > amongst the working classes that the low-wage sector was being undermined by labour coming in freely from abroad, mainly eastern Europe, and this wasn't reciprocal, i.e. they couldn't go to eastern Europe, or basically anywhere else in Europe, and get the same benefit from doing so. "They took our jobs" is also a failure of the politicians. Though, for them it's not a failure, it's votes for the next election. --- In the end, "the EU wants us to be subservient to undemocratic bureaucracy" ends up being "there was a general feeling perpetuated and encouraged by our own politicians and that doesn't really have much to do with reality" ;)