It may be too late to ask this, but what the fuck is the EU?

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In a nutshell - we were part of a clubhouse, so we negotiated everything en-masse.

This allowed us to punch above our weight - and we got discounts on everything (trade) and reduced membership of clubs, gyms, cinemas, etc. etc. (treaties), internet, electricity, gas etc.

We helped eachother out, and relied on eachother so we could use share facilities and stuff - furniture, lawnmowers, pools, gyms, gardens, cars, bikes etc. We did everything together.

Now that the UK is moving out of the Mansion to it's own little bungalow, it turns out that it's isolated itself from all its friends - So the UK has to buy a lot of new stuff and equipment, bigger increase in rent, power, water etc.

Likewise all those discounts and club-memberships where we got 50% off etc. - it's back up to 100%. If we're lucky, we might be able to get 10% again but it's unlikely.

Now the UK has to all it's own chores with no help from it's ex-friends as well.

The UK has deliberately isolated itself as a longer - because it thought some of the friends in the house were too noisy or bringing in overnight guests that were too dark-skinned/foreign or we didn't like the paint scheme on the mansion we we living in

Everything costs more, a lot of stuff has to be bought, we've lost all discounts etc. and we've downgraded to a 1 bedroom bungalow and our friends don't want to know us anymore.

All because we listened to our anti-social side and was under the delusion that we could move out, stop contributing, and still avail of all the facilities and benefits we previously had (spoiler: we don't any longer)

Different barriers to international trade exist. One such barrier is tariffs: when importing goods, the importer has to pay a percentage of a value of the shipment, where the percentage depends on the type of good being imported. Tariffs are relatively small these days. Negotiating lower tariffs often is the easiest part in international trade agreements.

Another such barrier is import VAT: when goods are sold to end customers, VAT or a sales tax is due. And when imported goods are shipped directly to end customers, VAT still is due. This is called import VAT. These days, on most goods VAT is much higher than import tariffs.

Yet another such barrier is regulations and certifications. Originally, each country had its own local regulations, and required its own certifications. That can make imports very difficult, especially importing into several relatively small countries, all with their own local regulations.

Border checks also are a trade barrier. Goods are held up at the border, possibly for hours or even days, to verify that the various import requirements are fulfilled.

The EU started out in 1951 as a small trading block called the European Coal and Steel Community, consisting of just Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany. Within this trading block, tariffs on coal and steel were abolished.

Over the decades, this small trading block was reformed several times, admitted additional members, and expanded to more and more goods and services. It turned out that merely abolishing tariffs was not sufficient. There no longer was any import VAT when importing from one EU country into another EU country. Most border checks for good were abolished. It also turned out that to reduce the trade barriers posed by different regulations and certifications, regulations and certifications across the trading block needed to become compatible, if not exactly identical. Thus, differences in regulations were minimized. That, in turn, required a larger central authority with additional power and additional funding, which in turn necessitated additional democratic legitimation of that central authority. Where there originally had been just the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community, there now was the European Parliament, the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, the European Council, and a few other such institutions.

In the UK, many disliked that some power had been moved from UK institutions to European institutions. Some disliked certain compromises which had been made. For decades, UK politicians succeeded in blaming the EU for UK home made problems, and the UK media supported that. Thus, the idea to leave the EU gained support.

The European Union (EU) is a unique economic and political union between 27 European countries.

https://op.europa.eu/webpub/com/eu-what-it-is/en/

https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/eu-in-brief_en

Hope this helps but I don’t see how your post relates to Brexit.

I don’t have access to some of my favorite porn sites.

Yeah, I don't think Brexit has anything to do with that.

The easiest way to describe it? Hmm?

The EU is a group of countries that decided if they closely worked together, life would be better for everyone within all those countries.

History: Originally the concepts began because Europe kept having massive wars that destroyed all our economies and pretty much our lives, and it was the only way people like Churchill thought they could stop Europe continually tearing itself to pieces in the future (as places like the US overtook us in standard of life because they didn't try and rip each others f'kin heads off every 5 minutes - blowing up everything in the process). The plan? If we became more entwined within our European lives, and actually met each other and became friends with each other. If we had more in common, the likeliness of us deciding to blow each others countries to hell and kill as many of each other as we could once every 40 years, massively lessens. It also of course has MASSIVE economic and standard of life benefits - Churchill knew we'd all be a lot richer.

Now:

As time passed it even shifted to making life even easier for everyone with things like 'Anyone can travel, holiday and work wherever they want in the EU for as long as they want with no paperwork whatsoever, and sell their stuff anywhere with no paperwork whatsoever and don't bother about customs red-tape bollocks or filling in any forms or tariffs just do what you want to do mate' etc etc and for most countries 'You don't have to bother carrying a passport if you go to another country in the EU or buy medical insurance or promise you'll go back before your passport runs out, and you can take as much wine as you want and buy a car over there and drive it back or stay there and start a business or retire there forever .. you can live in France and have a German doctor and a Spanish girlfriend and work 3 miles over the border in another country doing the commute every day with no customs it's cool. Everything is cool - kinda' just do whatever you want everyone it's cool .. have nice lives ..'.

They also had some group rules .. such as no-country in the club is allowed to execute or torture it's citizens. If one member of the club knew a guy that was a criminal it had to tell all members. No-country is allowed to completely fuck up the environment, or make a law so that homosexuality is illegal. And smaller stuff .. no mobile phone company was allowed to do 'roaming charges' because they're shit on EU citizens. EU citizens have a right to be able to repair their Iphones rather than being forced to throw them in the bin or be overcharged by an official apple store - loadsa stuff like that. Basically club members have to be quite .. er .. 'decent' countries - the EU didn't let asshole countries in.

In short, the whole emphasis was on making everyone richer and everyone having better lives with more opportunities.

Obviously if we can get up and drive to Spain or anywhere else and live/study/work/retire there FOREVER, whenever we want to (like, just get on a train with a 1-way ticket whenever you want, no paperwork, do what you want mate) -- Spanish people can do the same regarding the UK. In the UK a lot of people HATE foreigners so would rather we both LOST all those rights, than we both KEPT them. So long term they'd be less foreigners in the UK (and of course less British people in Spain). And they HATED the fact that the club made these club-wide rules that included everyone - even though in reality the UK had the ability to stop-dead any 'club rules' it didn't like the sound of, using something called a 'Veto'.

Basically something called 'nationalism' (attempting betterment of your own country specifically to the detriment of your neighbours, hurting them when it helps your country, them hurting you if it helps them, think 'dog-eat-dog' world) - the polar opposite of working together - was the enemy of the EU. And nationalism won in the UK.

ps. Your porn sites arn't working because 'nationalism' - in a nutshell, it's the BRITISH government saying 'we don't want your fucking stinking foreigner porn, simply because it was made in shithole France, not good old England. So based PURELY on the fact you are French, fuck your French porn shit - we're making it illegal for our UK citizens to buy it whether they actually want to or not you foreigner scum'. Yup, that's what you voted for. Say thanks to your dad for me.

Since you enjoy porn sites, the EU is the brothel and its member states are the working bitches. One of the brothel most prized bitches - and a quite hysteric one I might add - was the UK who was upset because she couldn't get new customers on her own, was irritated by the brothel rules she had to obey and she didn't want to train any more on her working location the bitches that joined the brothel recently.

So the UK bitch rebelled and left the brothel and went looking for customers on the street, but at the same time wanted access to the brothels' customers without obeying the rules of the brothel she did not like.

In the end, the UK bitch and the Madam of the brothel came to an agreement whereby the UK bitch maintains some access to some of the brothel customers, but not the ones that paid her really well like those white collars in the banking industries. But this access means additional paperwork proving the UK bitch respects certain rules the brothel wants. The customers don't like this extra paperwork, so they demand some form of compensation for getting in bed with the UK bitch instead of a brothel bitch.

Essentially the idea is that by economically uniting Europe we will argue in Brussels rather than on battlefields across the world.

I call it Pax Bureaucratica.