Portillo In The Baltic States

[Khandro]

I saw last night Portillo in Latvia and Estonia travelling on a state of the art high speed rail network with first class stations and infrastructure.
Britain has been paying 8 billion more into the EU p.a. than it has been taken out to pay for this sort of thing and doesn't have a high speed rail network to compare.
Another excellent reason for getting out of this madness?

[emmie]

i watched the programme and could only marvel at the rail network, so all subsidised by the EU?

[youngmafbog]

In 2015 the taxpayers of Estonia received from the European Union 171 euros per head over what they contributed. Since its accession to the EU the country has received from the European Union EUR 4119 million over what it has contributed.
In 2015 the taxpayers of Latvia received from the European Union 364 euros per head over what they contributed. Since its accession to the EU the country has received from the European Union EUR 6416 million over what it has contributed.

Draw your own conclusions.

[emmie]

so yes would be the answer. Madness indeed, our rail service is poor in comparison.

[jno]

people spend their money on what they want. The British seem reluctant to spend theirs on high-speed trains; the HS2 line gets nothing but outrage, particularly from the owners of land it will pass by. This won't change in the slightest after Brexit.

Where would you like your high-speed trains to go?

[ichkeria]

They probably says more about the countries' relative attitudes to public transport than anything. I doubt if the reason our railways are rubbish has anything to with this.
And we send our young men to die on the battlefields of Tallinn and Tartus too. Do these people have no shame??!!

[ichkeria]

Sorry jno you got in before me :-)

[Khandro]

The buzz word throughout the programme was "Freedom", monuments everywhere to the stuff. Having extricated themselves from the old USSR they are now locked into EU and everything is tickety-boo, but Estonia has a national debt of !0% of GDP and for Latvia it is an incredible 36%. Eventually they will discover that their freedom is a bit illusory when Brussels tells them what they can and can't do.

[KARL]

In my opinion jno is spot on - one of the main reasons the UK has so many supporters for leaving the EU is that Britain wants to remain as it is, ideally utterly unchanged. But some things have changed, although it is not politic to describe them all. Initially the UK pounded on the doors of the EEC (was repeatedly rejected and Charles de Gaulle was blamed, then the UK got in after he died) and, if my memory is correct, there was not a little rejoicing and even triumphalism in the tabloids when the UK's application was accepted. The UK's economy was at that point near the bottom and the UK was openly referred to inside and outside the EEC/EU as the "Sick man of Europe" - things were truly bleak and that was the time when the place was falling apart. Economists, when/if going that far back, have credited the membership with saving the UK as a viable economy. Memories are very short and now the public is persuaded to forget how things were and think of how the UK will soon go back to that glorious future. Let's see.

[ichkeria]

Invaded and ethnically cleansed by the Soviet Union before the main WWII, and illegally annexed after it, you can understand why, if you were to warble on about the 'EUSSR' in Tallinn you might get some strange looks

[ichkeria]

A lot of truth in they Karl. Countries like Estonia are making positive things out of their difficult pasts. Estonia for example, has trail blazed internet access and things like e-voting (tho with some unwanted side effects)

[ToraToraTora]

can't deny that one Khanders!

[Khandro]

ichi; // trail blazed internet access //

Trail blazing is easy when you have bags of borrowed money. I don't even have proper broadband here, (20 km. from a German university town) and have to use an expensive satellite system.
The trouble is, like Greece, you are expected to pay it back,take a shuftie at this;
http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/debtclock/latvia

[ToraToraTora]

karl: "The UK's economy was at that point near the bottom and the UK was openly referred to inside and outside the EEC/EU as the "Sick man of Europe"" - short memories indeed, it was the Labour and their union pay masters that got us into that state. TGL, thankfully pulled us out or the cack of people like Heath, Wilson, Scargil etc all.

[ichkeria]

No
Khandro there is much much more to innovation than money. You need the mindset. And perhaps the history. All the money in the world won't turn a backward looking nation into a forward looking one.

[-Talbot-]

Where would you like your high-speed trains to go?




Why 'your' and not 'our' Jno?

[Guilbert53]

It was being broke at the end of WW2 that made us the sick man of Europe. The Allies helped Germany and Japan but nobody helped us. We owed the USA billions that took us decades to pay off.

Then in the 60s / 70s the British unions decided to put the knife in and drag us ever more down the mire.

It was Margaret Thatcher that saved us, she raised our position in Europe and got rid of that sick man "tag".

In fact Thatcher saved us every bit as much as Churchill did.

[Khandro]

jno; //Where would you like your high-speed trains to go?//

Spain, France and Germany all have high speed rail networks which outclass anything in the UK. I'm not a civil engineer, but they have been grafted onto existing rail systems, so if they can do it so why can't the UK instead of subsidising others to do so?

[ichkeria]

It isn't an 'either or' tho is it?
If we stop helping the likes of Rstomia with their grand schemes it's not going to suddenly turn all the HS2 objectors into compliant sheep, nor is it going to suddenly turn us into a nation that loves big infrastructure projects

[KARL]

Another part of outsiders' (and not so few insiders' too) analysis is that a major part of the UK's problems since even before WWII is that it persists in posturing as a major power, full of importance and strength. The fall of Singapore (at the hands of soldiers on bicycles, of all things) exposed the falsehood of this and it has certainly been steadily downhill from there. If only the UK could bring itself to face and admit the truth that today it is a rather poorly organised average/mediocre country then it could begin to sort itself out. Instead of posing as "one of the world's superpowers" and invading etc. other countries at the drop of Washington's hat, the UK would perhaps have been in a position to become a true net receiver within the EU as it actually needed to be and (had it the guts to face forward toward the future instead of continually trying to prop up a disappearing vision of a glorious past) actually had the means, if not the will/desire to deal with the myriad of systemic problems in its structure, systems, etc. Someone who wants to be thought of as top dog does not ask for or even accept sympathy as being needy. The question has been suggested: Did the UK actually imagine themselves unilaterally (well, by forming "alliances" tied to their will á la the past) deciding EU policy and when that was not going to happen they lost interest ? It has also been suggested that Charles de Gaulle, who spent the WWII years in the UK, knew the British only too well and anticipated that the British would be difficult and therefore did not relish their attitudes becoming part of the mix.