I'm in the UK. Conservative MEP did as you said, Labour one sent a bit of a boilerplate that they are considering it, UKIP are of course against it but thats par for the course with them, the green one sent a detailed response and is voting against both art 11 and 13 (the ones I raised issue with).

I have had some very intelligent non-boilerplate replies from Green Party UK MEPs. However, it looks as though we won't have another opportunity to vote for them.

I've found the Greens Europe-wide to take the EU the most seriously as a political body. They run serious Europe-wide campaigns for EP elections, and send politicians of substance to the EP rather than sending the second string like most other parties do.

Hate them as most people in the UK do (I've never voted for them and wouldn't either), UKIP already resolved this (in a far more permanent way than the greens) by ensuring EU law does not apply to the UK in future.

What are you going to do next time the UK parliament passes a law you don't like? Dissolve the United Kingdom?

Campaign to overturn it - which I feel is more likely to be successful here than in EU, which is comprised of member states with a wide variety of values.

I think the variety of values within the UK is just as great as within the EU as a whole. You can never convince everyone and you don't have to.

But I also think that not speaking a common language does indeed make campaigning for any particular issue more difficult.

It's a trade-off. Not having a say in Europe doesn't necessarily mean you don't have to comply, which will become painfully obvious in the near future.

Can we?

I'd be in favour of dissolving it back to counties with a senate.

The south never does anything for us up North.

Yeah, but what have you done for us lately? </ducks>

London economy subsidises rest of UK, ONS figures show

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/23/uk-budget-d...

It's not really surprising that the only part of the UK that gets significant investment is the only part that's able to make any money.

Or that the parts of the UK that traditionally relied on industries that went away but without any real attempt (Northern Powerhouse excepted off course...cough) to replace them.

Shrugs, Brexit is going to be interesting if the impact on the financial and legal services is as large as predicted.

Well that's completely false. We'll still be abiding by EU laws long after we leave. By 'most people', I'm assuming you mean the 30% who actually voted to leave?

> We'll still be abiding by EU laws long after we leave.

That's a rather ignorant comment.

The 'Great Repeal' bill as it was called was/is - I lose track of where it is in the law process at the moment - effectively did/will do a 'mv' of all EU regulation that the UK was beholden to over its own UK laws and when this has to be done before the UK leaves and will probably be done sooner.

Then the parliament will cherry pick the bits they want to keep and update/change/remove those that we do not.

> I'm assuming you mean the 30% who actually voted to leave?

Actually while the Brexit vote to leave was significantly more than 30%, the past polls that have asked a more specific question of sovereignty/law making by the EU commission that seems to override UK Law is significantly larger than the amount that voted to leave.

Voting Leave != Does not like EU Commission making Laws by people the UK did not and cannot vote out.

Nothing ignorant about the statement that the UK will still be abiding by EU laws long after Brexit day, this is a fact. There's the possibility of diverging in some areas but even so the UK will largely align with the single market to maintain the levels of access it needs.

> Voting Leave != Does not like EU Commission making Laws by people the UK did not and cannot vote out.

And this betrays a very poor understanding of EU law making while hiding behind the shallow notion of who is elected and ejected on the behest of voters. The UK's political system is not exactly setup to satisfy that notion even after Brexit, since voters have no real choices & accountability is not seriously practiced. Bad politicians even after breaching ministerial code are simply reintroduced after a brief periods in the naughty box. Some are even rewarded for lying by getting high ranking cabinet jobs. Nothing so hollow as Brits handwringing about EU democratic processes while ignoring the problems with its own system.

> of all EU regulation that the UK was beholden to over its own UK laws

There are very few of those. One of the problems people kept banging on about is that the UK "copper bottoms" any EU regulation, making it more onerous than it could be, when they add it to UK law.

It's completely true. While we're moving law to the UK, we then get to remove anything we don't like. And yes, the majority of people who voted wanted that.

>While we're moving law to the UK, we then get to remove anything we don't like.

Fancy naming a few laws that 'we' don't like?

If we want to trade and have anything to do with the EU, we're going to have to follow their laws and regulations whether we're in the EU or not.

No, because I don't know what you and the other 50 million people here want, and nobody has elected me.

Does the US follow EU laws and regulations?

You should really look up how EU regulations work.

Enlighten me please, as I don't believe the reasons for passing it are genuine.

I'm way oversimplifying this, but I'm going to enlighten you by saying that this isn't a part of law yet. It merely passed a checkpoint called legal committee (that consists of 25 MEPs) on its way to become a part of law.

There are still multiple checkpoints that can be used to counter this, and the proposal will almost certainly be voted on by the entire EP, probably in December/January.

That's why calling your representative makes a difference.

Lobbyists don't usually hand over money. Usually they are just good at appearing trustworthy and, uh, explaining the positions of their clients in terms that politicians understand.

Therefore, their explainees think they are doing genuinely good things.

By the way, I saw a honest-to-god lobbyist at a panel discusssion once. He was wearing a sort of relaxed suit and had a slight punk vibe with slightly messy hair. The personality-free banker look wouldn't win trust so easily when speaking for business interests. Those people really know what they are doing.

Surely they don't hand over cash, I didn't mean that, but they give benefits by different means.

The main benefit they give is to explain technical concepts in terms the politicians understand.

Sometimes that's a "benefit", but that's when calling them yourself helps the most.

That benefit could also be a card to anonymous account in tax haven.

Well, they have in the past:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_cash_for_influence_scanda...