1 - how much does it cost to get a basic license?
A basic licence being a PPL
There is a flying school at Endinburgh Airport
Learn to Fly in Scotland at Edinburgh Flying Club - Scotland's capital airport - flying lessons, trial flights, flight training and they are quoting £145 in a Tomahawk but landing fees are extra. There is a school at Cumbernauld who I know are good, do a google on them as they don't have a dedicated website.
You might be looking at £8000 - £9000 for the PPL which is what you'll need to fly to Europe.
2- i will ultimately want to fly abroad (europe) do i need a different license? if so again what is the cost in training exams etc
Just get the PPL and do a cross channel flight with an instructor - usually a requirement if you are hiring a club aircraft.
3 - having a license without something to fly is not much use, so how do you people on here fly, do you rent planes? if so what is the costs per day / hour? i.e. if you wanted to go for a weekend somewhere in europe - examples of cheap ownership would be most gratefully accepted.
Hire. It's simple and a whole lot cheaper than any form of ownership for low hours flying, although has the pitfull of being a little unreliable. You could get a share in an aircraft but the pitfall here would be you would need to be flying a good 20-30 hours a year to begin saving anything.
As you can tell at this moment in time i know nothing about nothing, the bottom line is i want to be able to a small plane to europe
We all knew nothing at some point! The cheapest possible route would be PPL / Rent. You might want to do some research on microlight flying as I think there may be changes afoot where you could fly these into Europe (if you can't already) and you might half the costs of training for a licence / hire / ownership.
The downside of licences like the NPPL and NPPL(M) is you can't add the IMCR, Twin engine and Night flying as you can with the PPL