Well I guess I'm the one being sworn at by Bever, so sending my very best wishes his way. Taxes and customs duties are most definitely a pain. The fact that bands cannot play wherever they want in the world without a tonne of red tape is a pretty bad state of affairs.
Go back a couple hundred years and you'd be able to travel to most places in the world, maybe set up shop, buy and sell, without too much involvement from anyone in authority. The fact that the EU managed to create a club of nations within which that was possible was a good thing, but it came at a price. In returning to people certain rights that once fell to them naturally they also managed to create a situation where people could not dismiss those who ruled over them. We had unelected Commissioners who had often come to that role as a consolation prize after losing an election at home. A President "elected" from a ballot sheet of one (count them) candidate, and a Parliament so toothless that they could not even initiate legislation. The fact that there was one MEP for every 880,000 British voters, compared to one for every 70,900 Maltese was at best incidental given the value they added.
This is before we get to the referendums reheld when people voted the wrong way, Mario Monti being parachuted in to run Italy, or Lucas Papademos installed into Greece's highest office without so much as a "by your leave" from the people he was supposed to represent. (This was during the sovereign debt crisis - and who thought that a one size fits all economy was a good idea anyway?)
All so very remote, culturally and geographically, from much of the UK.
All that said, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. It was something the Brexit debate did not articulate particularly well. Everything was reduced from nuance and carefully balanced argument to slogans and simplistic answers.
I fully recognise the difficulty Brexit has brought to many people, and it saddens me. To me, though, the solution is less, not more government. Sadly I can't see that happening any time soon. Power is too intoxicating for them to relinquish in a hurry. In many respects, I can see that the EU is quite a benign organisation, but its continual drive towards centralised control, regulation and standardisation has the potential to subsume all of the beautiful individual nation states of Europe into a single homogenous mass of joyless obedience. "Ever Closer Union", I believe they call it...
Finally, I have all the respect in the world for those who see the same facts and interpret them differently. It's one of the saddest things to see people tear each other apart because they disagree over a genuinely held point of view.
