Originally Posted by
AnglianAV8R
Discuss: it's up there with £350M/week for the NHS, this being the easiest thing we've ever done, we hold all the cards, Merkel will come grovelling when BMW realises how important we are. In short, it's misleading crap and it's being widely peddled by the hard line BREXITEERs on a lot of comments sections as evidence. Most of it concerns PESCO which is the EU's Permanent Structured Cooperation part of the EU defence policy. PESCO doesn't really do warfighting, it's more capacity building, training, disaster response, standardisation etc. The UK will always have NATO and FVEYs at the core of its defence activities exactly because we are a full spectrum force with a warfighting, expeditionary role.
As for signing up to things. Well May could well have agreed to these funds and structures, but that doesn't mean the UK is signed up to them. Why would we block the when we are on the way out. And once we are out and are therefore a 'third nation', we can't take part in PESCO without agreement - about as far from the UK being commited to an EU army as you can get. Frankly, it's just not worth losing any sleep over. Stick it in the bottom of the kids' rabbit hutch.