What's in David Cameron's baskets? The UK's deal with the EU

After long negotiations, on 19 February Prime Minister David Cameron announced that the European Council had agreed a new settlement for the United Kingdom in the European Union.

In line with the Conservative Party manifesto, this agreement has triggered a referendum on whether Britain should remain in the European Union to be held on Thursday 23 June.

Law in Focus is a collection of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty.

[hollyintervener]

It's painful to  watch someone who likely considers herself a serious thinker and academic actually taking Cameron's negotiation seriously. Even Cameron has stopped talking about it because he couldn't sell the lies that it was legally binding under EU law and  that it gives the UK anything it couldn't already get or doesn't have under EU membership rules. And the really, really embarrassing part of this "analysis"? is her claim that the EU's response to the  deal had anything at all to do with Cameron's decision to take the Remain side. For goodness sakes, the  man went into the "negotiations" saying that the UK would remain in the EU no matter what the outcome. We all heard him say it. Whatever happened to independent-minded academics? -- those who probe and challenge and disrupt and make the establishment uncomfortable? I'm guessing that if we were to scratch the surface of this academic "analysis" of what is patently a PR stunt, we'd sniff the putrid presence of EU funding somewhere along the line.

[clecklass]

Great Britain is the fifth largest economy in the world - we should look to be a powerful global player rather than a mute dummy in the EU.

Every British person pays £300 a year to stay in the EU (that's after all the sums are done and we are given back some of the billions we pay in). This will increase once the Ukraine joins. [1] Youth unemployment is 48% in Greece, 45% in Spain and 39.3% in Italy. [2] Poland's minimum wage is £1.89 an hour. Cheap labour from 'Europe and elsewhere into catering, hotels and social care jobs has led to an average 2% pay cut'. [3] EU migrants 'have been found guilty of 146, 100 crimes' in the UK since 2012. [4] 'Between 1997 and last year, 65% of the country's 2.7 million extra housing units' were taken by non-UK people. [5] 'One hundred thousand children are thought to have missed out on their first choice secondary school today as an escalating places crisis sweeps the country'. [6] The NHS paid almost £6.2 billion for expats but received only £405 million back for EU nationals. [7] Women had to pay a tax on sanitary pads for decades. New vacuum cleaners will be limited to 900 watts by 2017. Doctors' qualifications cannot be checked if they have an EU Pro Card in 2018.?

A catastrophic vote to stay (and you will not be given another chance to close Pandora's box for generations) will rubber stamp allowing in half a million people into this tiny island (the most densely populated in Europe after Malta) for generations with Greenbelt land concreted over and over for generations. Good luck trying to explain that to your children when they ask what happened to the fields in which they laughed and played in when they were young.

[starcon-mlix]

So did we make the right choice in leaving the EU?