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The points in the Independent are mainly irrelevant to the existence of the EU - Cannot the Europhile press and Europhiles generally come up with something other than this same old lies and propaganda that has been challenged so many times in the past that it has become boring to even produce the evidence to debunk the rubbish? Or perhaps they belive that if they just carry on repeating the same nonsense people will eventually start to belive it and begin to love the EU.

I have just noticed a couple that are totally stupid

47. British restaurants now much more cosmopolitan because of European influences
49. Europe has revolutionised British attitudes to food and cooking

I happen to know a little bit about food and its development it is worth exploring this just for fun.

Well yes Europe has revolutionised British attitudes to food and cooking but in the last 50 years it has done nothing culturally on that front because the greatest influence has come form the far-east China, India, Pakistan, the Pacific rim and recently the middle-east.

Europe really did influence our attitudes to food and cooking long before the European project was off the ground. Before the 19th century, great cooking was experienced almost exclusively in the private homes of the wealthy. This began to change after the French Revolution, when the fall of the aristocracy left a number of talented chefs unemployed.

Many of these chefs later opened some of the Continent’s first fine restaurants, winning devoted followers among the French bourgeois, who were eager to display their elevated tastes in food and fashion. This phenomenon produced some of the first "star" chefs, many of whom published compendiums of their repertoires and opinions. Their cookbooks not only served as self-advertisement, but also enabled the newly rich to reproduce the professional dining experience in their own private homes.

Marie Antonin Carême (1783-1833), Thanks to Carême’s books, French chefs working at home and abroad had a basic, shared vocabulary to refer to in their cooking. L’Art de la Cuisine Français au Dix-Neuvième Siècle is an exhaustive survey of classic French cooking. Published near the end of Carême’s career as a master pâtissier and chef, the three-volume work was completed after his death by his friend and colleague Armand Plumerey.

Some of these French chefs went to work for ambitious restaurateurs in major cities like New York and London, or cities newly flush with wealth, such as post-Gold Rush San Francisco. The influence of these chefs slowly permeated British and American culture, exposing growing numbers to French cooking techniques and dining manners.

Most important, these 19th century French chefs helped to codify what came to be known as French classical cooking, their books defining by systematic repetition the basic French recipes and technique. Sauces such as vélouté, hollandaise, and mayonnaise, for example, were refined and regularized during this period.

Later another French Chef Georges-Auguste Escoffier continues the work and started the moves towards lighter foods, then in the 1960/70 it was yet another French Chef Fernand Point who took Escoffier`s work forward further lightened the classic cuisine at his restaurant La Pyramide, thus setting the scene for a group of other young chefs to produce a new style of cooking, where the sauces and dishes were lightened still further, this style became to be known as cuisine nouvelle.
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Escoffier also developed the modern brigade system in London’s Savoy Hotel. It was based on the organisation of a French military brigade and the Chefs uniform also developed from the uniform of the French army hence the double front.

For maximum efficiency, Escoffier organized the kitchen into a strict hierarchy of authority, responsibility, and function. In the brigade, widely adopted by fine-dining establishments, the general is the executive chef, or chef de cuisine, assisted by a sous chef. Subordinate are the chefs de partie, each in charge of a production station and assisted by demi-chefs and commis (apprentices). The number of station chefs can get exhaustive, including the saucier (sauces), poissionier (fish), grillardin (grilled items), fritteurier (fried items), rotissier (roasts), garde manger (cold food), patissier (pastries), and tournant (roundsman, station relief).
Today, most restaurants use some simplified variation of Escoffier’s kitchen brigade.

It was yet another French Chef Fernand Point who took Escoffier`s work forward further lightened the classic cuisine at his restaurant La Pyramide,  His influence, was enormous, his students carried his philosophy to all of French cuisine. thus setting the scene to produce a new style of cooking, where the sauces and dishes were lightened still further, this style became to be known as cuisine nouvelle. Fernand Point Died in 1955.

I know that the Europhile likes to claim the EU is responsible for everything wonderful and likes to claim that nothing would have happened without its breathtaking influence but in the those great Europeans who really did revolutionise British attitudes to food and cooking have long departed this earth leaving it much more culturally enriched which is something the EU could never do in a million years.

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On this day when the Euro enthusiast are gathering to celebrate the 50th birthday of the European Project by patting themselves on the back for a job well done, whilst in the real world the real people of the European nation states have indicated in recent polls that they are not as enthused with the project as they are supposed to be. And in response to the silly 50 reasons to love the EU in the Independent this week, it occurred to me that now would be as good a time as any to post a few reasons why I oppose the EU.

1. It is undemocratic

http://www.teameurope.info/FSno1-whyundemocratic-FINAL.pdf

2. It has created a political elitist class which is increasingly insulating itself and its policies from public accountability.

3. It has removed the sovereignty of our Parliament in most areas of government power and has therefore reduced our national political debate to the few areas that are still within the remit of the people we elect, which is why the main political parties are so close on so many areas of public concern.

4. It has removed the sovereignty of British Citizens to elect and dismiss their own law makers, by passing so much power to the EU we the votes cannot choose between different policies because the political parties simply do not offer us the choice as they are bound by the EU.

5. Reduced consumer choice- with its bureaucratic mania for controlling everything it has removed choice by insisting that all products conform to it own rules. Instead of equal recognition of products to allow each state to sell into every other state the EU has defined what they may sell.

http://www.google.com/search?q=illegal+tomatoes+&hl=en&start=10&sa=N

6 Harmonisation: Reduces the available produce on the shelf- by listing only those products which may be sold and the cost of having a product enterd on the list is prohibitive. Thus we loose the richness of historic fruit and vegetable diversity and miss out on new products.

http://www.cen.eu/catweb/cwen.htm

7. Mass immigration: uncontrolled mass immigration has a detrimental effect on wages and increases the pressure on our housing transport hospitals etc.

8. REGIONALISATION: The regionalization of Britain has only taken the course it has because of EU influence trough its funding.

9. Take over of Higher education system:

SOCRATES, DELTA, REMTEX, TEMPUS and EUROCIS European Commission’s Human Capital and Mobility (HCM) programme, and funding from the Training and Mobility of Researchers (TMR) and NECTAR programmes CEMP (Creation of European Management Practice) The Jean Monnet Project CORDIS, EU-funded Academic Associations and Organisations

10. Propaganda: The EU using our money to promote its-self trying to convince us that the EU is a wonderful project to us when we do not have the choice in the first place

11. European Document Centres and high street shops in order to “promote and develop the idea of the EU as our nation state and study in the field of European Integration

12. No demos There does not exist a single group of people in respect of whom the EU could be a democracy there is not an EU wide political party, there is not an EU wide press.

13. No mandate: Even if there were or is a European demos, what is done by the Commission is not in response to any expressed or felt need of the citizens. In normal democratic politics you have occasional elections, during which time certain issues are publicly discussed. Whoever wins power has some justification for carrying out whatever programme they were proposing while trying to get elected.

14.Accounts: The EU’s accounts have not been signed off for several years by the EU s own accountants.

15. Lack of Transparency

16. ECJ partiality

The Court of Justice of the European Communities (ECJ) is not an independent court but owes a duty of loyalty to the EU Commission and has been used ion the past to extend the power of the EU beyond the agreed treaties.

17. CAP Common Agricultural Policy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy

18. CFP Common Fisheries Policy and the destruction of our fishing industry http://ec.europa.eu/fisheries/cfp_en.htm

19. “new approach” to technical harmonisation. I see the affect of this as totally ridiculous, My electricitian is about 55 years old has been to college to learn his trade and has kept himself up to date by studying the latest proposals yet he is forced to pay an inspector to check hi work for a period of six months so that he can continue in business, my previous electricitian decided he had enough and looked for another job.

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2004/11/more-hidden-integration.html

20. EU Arrest Warrant; now we can be arrested in our own home by our own police at the request of a foreign court and extradited to that courts jurisdiction without any protection from our own government even for crimes which are not recognised in Britian.

21. The Euro, although we are not a member of the euro region there is an ongoing attempt to create the Euro as the currency of the whole EU, if we remain in the EU at some stage we will have to convert to the Euro.

22. The EU Constitution, Voted down by the French and Dutch yet still in the background many EU based moves to represent it, either in is its entirety or piecemeal so that we do not get the chance of referendum. The Constitution refounds the EU as an international actor in its own right with its Constitution superior to member states Constitutions and for the first time recognises in a treaty that EU Law is superior to state law. The Berlin Declaration acknowledges the intention to refund the Union and has set a deadline goal of achieving a renewed common foundation for the European Union before the 2009 elections to the European Parliament. For we know that Europe is our common future. If we do then It would be very nice to actually have a voice!

23. Its anti Christian values : There is something fundamentally wrong with an organisation purporting to be democratic, when the view of the EU Parliament is that there is no place for the basic values of millions of its citizens.

24. Socialism; Nothing wrong with socialism but it should be recognised as only one form of political thought to place it at the heart of the constitutional settlement denies other political thought.

25. The cost of membership: The E U will cost every man, woman and child in Britain £873 this year the combined direct and indirect costs in 2007 will amount to £100,000 a minute, or £52.4 billion. Britain has given nearly £200 billion to the EU since joining what was then the EEC in 1973. Even the European Commission has admitted that excessive regulation could be costing up to 12 per cent of GDP. Put it into perspective, just £1 billion will pay for 222,000 hip replacements, or 46,893 nurses, or 38,782 teachers, or 34,585 police officers.

26. ID Cards

27. EU Passports

28. Forced Citizenship of the EU

29. Trade Deficit Before joining the EU the UK had a trading surplus with other EU countries. Today we have a visible trading loss of £100,000 million. Between 1973 - 1993 EU trade registered a £70,000 million loss.

30. Directives: It took 1368 EU Directives to create the Single Market. One directive can cost Industry £1,000,000,000 (e.g. Waste Monitoring. 94/62 - official estimate!). Such EU law is uniquely, and savagely, enforced by huge new armies of UK bureaucrats. Costs and threats of criminal sanctions ruin many small to medium sized firms. For example, 400 abattoirs (half the industry total) only serving local areas, never exporting, were forced to close! In 1973 there were 343 Regulations, 143 Directives and 194 ‘Other’ EU laws. By 1996 these figures were 3070 Regulations, 2964 Directives and 8037 ‘Others’. They bypass UK Parliamentary control using Statutory Instruments and Ministerial Orders. UK Civil Servants, “translating” EU law, always make things far worse.

31. EU Law corpus Juris

32. it can’t last

http://eureferendum2.blogspot.com/2007/03/success-of-eu.html

33. It is attempting to create an armed force I do not believe such an anti democratic organisation should control military force.

34. Massive overregulation, of just about every area of life

35. There is a distinct feeling of alienation between the people and the political leaders.

36. Federalism:

37. The break up of Great Britian as a political entity and the destruction of Britian as our nation state.

38. Lies and misdirection.

39. Fundamental Rights, I do not want the EU to gift me the right to life or the right to freedom of speech etc. Which I already have, only to retain the right to remove it in the interest of the Union.

40. Life has got much worse since we joined the Union.

41. The working time directive: I do not want a Eurocrat in Brussels to dictate how many hours I choose to work.

42. Border control immigration, it is our nation state we pay the bills and we should decide who comes to live and work in our country.

43. Turning our back on our Commonwealth friends when Britian was in dire straits in the last two world wars it was people from our Commonwealth who chose to fight for us, we traded across the globe with these countries.

44. EU Embassies and diplomatic service: The EU is not a nation state it is not my nation state and I do not want it to represent me or my country abroad, I do not want to be forced to use an EU embassy and I certainly do not want to see one in London. There is no legal power for the EU to even set up this service it was one of the proposals in the Constitution which has not been ratified.

45. EU waste management:

46. Road Pricing the Galileo space programme:

47. Rapid Reaction Force: we are spending so much on preparation for this futuristic battlefield force that we have little left to correctly supply our troops for the actions they are being asked to undertake now.

48. Pushing the secular adgenda: Conflicting values, the right to religious freedoms and the right to abortion or gay marriage are contradictory principles. By choosing to promote the secular view the EU denies its own fundamental rights.

49: No perceived limits to the power of the EU: The EU continually extends its power, cooperation in one area is deemed to require cooperation in others the Monnet Method. So an open border policy will eventually lead cooperation in criminal law because we cannot prevent even know criminals from entering the country. This is calculated to eventually lead to the creation of one nation state with one central government.

50: Treason: The crime that dare not speak its name; out ministers swear allegiance to the British state not to the EU, after all we elect them and we pay them and they could not hold their positions of power without taking the oath of allegiance. They should therefore work only for the benefit of the British state and the British people. Instead they agree to proposals in the EU forum which do not benefit the British people and they agree to pass powers away from the British parliament, and allow those we have not elected and cannot dismiss to influence our nation state.