There does seem to have been some expectation of special status simply by virtue of having been an EU member. But it doesn’t work that way.
I agree. Back in 2016 there was some expectation that, in the interest of EU and UK citizens and businesses, the EU would acknowledge that a member state which has just left the bloc is in a very different situation to a third country which has never been a member.
But that sort of pragmatism might encourage other rats to leave the ship… 
When debate fails, resort to insults.
I don’t know about France, but it is clear that on the English speaking social media that I am familiar with, including EuroGA, remainers outnumber leavers by at least 10:1 in personal attacks posted. Also left-wingers outnumber right-wingers (however you define those two) by at least 10:1 in personal attacks posted. This creates obvious difficulties for anyone running a community site, because the “mod activity” will be heavily concentrated in the former groups, which opens the mod to an accusation of being in the latter group. No mod wants to end up in that position, which is why communities where brexit is discussed always go off the rails in a big way; the mods just give up and let everybody kill each other. Then you get the additional dimension of an international forum, of which EuroGA is a rare example…
Jacko wrote:
But, in the context of general aviation, does anyone have evidence which supports this hypothesis?Can anyone show that, prior to the UK adopting EASA regulations, the British GA safety record was significantly worse than that of Germany or France or Belgium?
Germany? Don’t know.
Sweden? IAP at uncontrolled airports, for example. Easy IFR for homebuilts etc.
EASA in general? CBIR. Or even BIR – you can fly airways, you can go down to a reasonable (for most SEP pilots) minima on that license, etc.
I might have been more keen on PMD if I failed my Class 2. Or IR(R) if I lived in the north, but in the south, underneath LTMA (2200ft AGL), I need access to CAS and flying in IMC, and UK makes it harder and harder, comparing it to Sweden, for example. If I had a choice of BIR and IR(R) 18 months when I started it, I would choose BIR for sure.
For a person that moved into this country approximately a decade and a half ago, it feels as if half a century ago UK was ahead in terms of progress in aviation but then all the people that were moving it forward decided to go somewhere. Or retire. And right now it feels as if all CAA does is splits it further and further between the kindergarten (GA) and the grownups (CAT), and GA is being punished and inconvenienced as much as possible while CAT (and commercial sector in general, including drones) is given and more leeway.
Jacko wrote:
I agree. Back in 2016 there was some expectation that, in the interest of EU and UK citizens and businesses, the EU would acknowledge that a member state which has just left the bloc is in a very different situation to a third country which has never been a member.
Yes, for a few months, may be years, but then there is nothing to stop the UK companies diverging from any safety standards or drop quality further and further.
arj1 wrote:
For a person that moved into this country approximately a decade and a half ago, it feels as if half a century ago UK was ahead in terms of progress in aviation but then all the people that were moving it forward decided to go somewhere. Or retire. And right now it feels as if all CAA does is splits it further and further between the kindergarten (GA) and the grownups (CAT), and GA is being punished and inconvenienced as much as possible while CAT (and commercial sector in general, including drones) is given and more leeway.
There are exceptions of course…
nothing to stop the UK companies diverging from any safety standards or drop quality further and further.
Except that the UK is the world leader on health and safety and wearing of yellow jackets while eating lunch
Unfortunately the last thing that will happen in the UK is a reduction in “standards” – because half the country is making a living out of this stuff.
Peter wrote:
Except that the UK is the world leader on health and safety and wearing of yellow jackets while eating lunchUnfortunately the last thing that will happen in the UK is a reduction in “standards” – because half the country is making a living out of this stuff.
:))) Well, Peter, you know the drill. We’ll be wearing non-reflecting, very dark-yellow jackets!
Timothy wrote:
Firstly, people are people. There is no “we” who are individuals and “they” who are swarms, hordes or masses. With very few sociopathic exceptions, people the whole world over have the same hierarchy of needs. Water, food, shelter, clothes, warmth, education for their kids, luxury and self-actualisation.
I just came across this thread.
@Timothy’s sentence above is one of the most straight and succinct descriptions of human nature I recall having read. You could add some fine-tuning, but difficult to send a clearer message with fewer words. Thousands of books on the matter can be thought of as stemming out of it.
I also commend you, @Timothy for your and your wife’s generosity. I also know a family in Mallorca with nine own kids, one of whom was killed by Spanish terrorist group ETA for being a policeman, who also regularly host orphan foreign kids at home. They have strong catholic background but they relate strongly about how their generosity is what makes them feel alive, especially after the terrible loss of their son. I guess this kind of feeling is also partially what drives @Timothy.
At the risk of getting bashed, I would however like to set the record straight on one matter:
Timothy wrote:
breeding ground for psychopaths; Europe has produced plenty of its own over the years – Stalin, Hitler, Franco and the rest
While I cannot consider myself an expert on the matter, putting those three men in the same group makes little factual sense. I don’t blame @Timothy since, as he sais
Timothy wrote:
Indeed, most of what you read in the mainstream media about, for example, Iran and Syria, has no basis in reality.
My point is Franco is to be set apart from Stalin and Hitler, and I will try to remain as fact-based and little biased about it as I can. I will mainly use the extremely sadly macabre but very related death toll number as a relevant fact on which to base such judgment.
In principle, all dictatorships are to be considered worse than democracies, but just as @Timothy sais you can’t fairly judge a person, culture or group only because of the bad side of things: you must look at it in context and as a whole.
Again no expert here, but there were a lot of bad things and redlines crossed in Libyan and Iraki dictatorships. It is however at least debatable and very far from a universal truth whether the supposed democracies that followed immediately thereafter were better in a lot of senses for the people in those countries. One well known fact in our little GA world is it was GA paradise in Khadaffi’s Libya. I will avoid commenting on the Syrian dictatorship since that one is still alive and again a lot of debatable matters on which I am no expert. Again one must not put those in the same sentence as Franco, but you get the point: supposed universal truths about democracy vs dictatorships are not entirely universal.
Just to quote a single media example that a single google search I just tried came about with:
The question is “How many people were killed by Franco after the [Spanish Civil] War [of 1936-1939]”
The second “People also ask” question posted by Google above is “How many dead after the end of Spanish Civil War”
Followed by the extracted answer “The toll is enormous: 540000 people”
However when you read the news that the figure is extracted from it reads “How many victims claimed by [Spain’s] Civil War? Demographical estimates show a calculation of 540000 dead….”
See the point? During and after the war deaths are confused, and single-sided vs both sides’ dead as well.
While infringed deaths are infringed deaths, you cannot compare death toll during a war vs a post-war civilized ruling, whether dictatorship or democracy. IN the case of Spain’s civil war, there is no universal agreement but it would be fair to say the “during war” deaths were reasonably balanced for both sides. The total being between 100000 and 600000 depending on sources. In my limited view the most plausible being around 200000. You can find lots of sources on the web, but beware the above bias.
As to post-war deaths, Franco’s death toll in the decade following war, due to repression of what he called communist extremists who threatened law and order were, depending on sources, between 10000 and 150000, also depending on sources, including those killed during the war outside of war-action. Again the most plausible number is probably closer to 20000. In principle, an unacceptable number. As far as I am concerned in my catholic beliefs, a single one is too many. You cannot put it in context, however, without mentioning the number of dead in the hands of left-wing extremists prior to war , and those killed during the war and outside of war-action. Again the terrible toll is of the same order. Some sources say higher.
When we think of Hitler, and including deaths in war-actions, a universally accepted number is 35-50 million in WW2. A significant number of those but I believe less than half were of course infringed directly by allied action, which, depending on which side you are on (a different matter is the ethics of being on one or the other, just aiming to be factual here) , can also be considered to be indirectly caused by Hitler. Again numerous sources on the web but the figure is in that range.
When we think of Stalin, that is a different matter. Post war numbers vary but are between 7 and 25 million people. I suppose the true figure is in between. May be 15. There is a more universal agreement about the total Soviet death toll in the twentieth century where numbers are between 80 and 110 million, so please excuse my use of that instead of the Stalin-specific figures.
Just using a reasonable but arbitrary number within those ranges, the figure for out-of-war-action deaths could be, for those three:
Soviet Communism: 80 million
Nazi’s: 10 million
Franco: 40000
When we include war action, then we should not compare them unless we assume only a fraction of the dead are due to each side. If you do not take sides, then we can assume 50% per side, setting aside, say, three million jewish genocide victims (again arbitrarily picked within the different estimates in web sources, but universally agreed as being outside of direct war-action) .
Soviet Communism: 85 million
Nazi’s: 3+35/2= 21 million
Franco: 150000
So even with either of those very simplistic and again sadly macabre comparisons, and regardless of error in the numbers, putting all three in the same sentence does not make factual sense without including a large number of other sad examples in between.
If we take the analysis one step further, however, you may be able to take sides using some quite universally accepted criteria.
Both the soviet and nazi regimes were sustained by people’s support initially through terrible lies along the thoughts of the same sociopath criteria @Timothy was describing: judging groups of people from a partial bias, making them responsible for people’s real issues and using that as a justification to remove basic rights from the supposed enemy. High amongst those rights: humanity. Coming to think of them as not entitled to being treated as humans. Both regimes, as they gained power, more or less progressively evolved towards basic rights removal from their own people to ensure continued and increased power. Such hatred was used as the basic tool and justification for war and massive deportations and killings. I personally, in line with the most universally accepted thought trend, consider that hate, and those that instilled it, responsible for the majority (and not the one-sided 50%) of the above numbers.
IN the case of Franco, there were few lies in around half of Spain’s population’s belief that left-wing extremists were driving an unbearable and increasing disorder and revolt instilled by some political leaders, driving numerous killings of priests, wealthy and powerful people in a supposedly orderly democratic republic in pre-war Spain, with more or less official left-wing government tolerance. Such violence induction used some facts together with the above-related type of hatred to justify such killings. There were pre-war dead also by the right-wing governments, the most terrible one during the 1934 miner’s revolt. The total numbers were much lower than in-war and post-war but nonetheless unbearable in a civilized democratic republic at around 2000 between 1931 and 1936, including close to 300 in 1936 alone under the last left-wing government under which the war-conspiracies were brewed.
It is debatable whether the above justified the war that Franco and his backers started to supposedly quickly remove the disorderly government of the republic which ended up in a bloody four-year civil war. It is not debated, though, that Franco was mostly truthful in the above account of facts that was used as the reason to start the war and end a government that had proven uncapable of and even unwilling to stop the killings . That fact sets him apart from the other two. Also, during the following years when he ruled with a (possibly debatable) genuine interest in helping his country recover from war’s turmoil, rather than progressively removing people’s rights, the main right that he removed from his people was that of being openly communist or, in general, anti-government, and of course, life, as a result of the former claims. Unlike Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, most of the remaining rights were preserved and at least 50% (but I believe many more) of people who lived in Franco’s Spain felt their rights were much more protected than in pre-war’s Republic. Looking beyond the terrible post-war Franco’s repressory death toll, this is a basic undebatable difference vs nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
Franco also followed on to increase the average wealth of individuals in a way neither of those other nasty regimes wanted, tolerated or promoted, and much faster than in pre-war or post-Franco. He was unfortunately too scared of another revolt to allow a transition towards democracy before his death in 1975.
Unfortunately too many Spanish politicians are nowadays using the fostering of negative feelings about Franco to gain support amongst new generations that did not endure the war or the dictatorship during those sad times in Spain, hence the generalized media bias.
Make your own judgement, but let’s not forget facts when we receive a certain perception via media. So-called universal truths in different media are nowadays the biggest enemies of freedom. Franco stopped democracy for 36 years in Spain, but he was no Hitler or Stalin.
