Scotland starts renewed case for independence

"The EU is certainly one model you can achieve unification at large without one huge government as it consists of many smaller governments coming together."

That's not really what the EU is. The EU is a One Huge Government that has taken over some of the powers of the Less Huge Governments that Europe already has. It isn't a talking shop or forum for collaboration. It's a government which creates laws and enforces them. The fact that it doesn't control everything yet doesn't make it not a government, and the EU's core supporters are like ivolimmen - they want one world government and see the EU as a step towards it.

And we have "God's Own Country"[4] which is a phrase but does have an independence movement[5], and a region (Mercia) which hasn't been a place since 527-897CE but still has an independence movement[6].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Country

[2] https://bclm.com/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Country

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God's_Own_Country#Yorkshire

[5] https://i-yorkshire.com/yorkshire-independence/

[6] https://independentmercia.org/declaration-of-independence/

I'm reminded of a quote though darned if I can find a source, but it's something like "Don't judge a place by the idiots it keeps".

How much did you look? Or did you find examples of rules the UK was forced into and decide you agree with them.

Here's an example of why the opt-outs were never reliable, like so much else about the EU's supposed democratic mechanisms.

When the European Convention on Human Rights was written - with major input from the UK - it was meant as a general statement of principle, and is thus filled with vague and contradictory language. It was never meant to be law. Many decades later the EU decided it should be transformed into binding law on every EU member. The UK and Poland quite sensibly pointed out that this would go badly and it would be impossible to predict the consequences. So they negotiated an opt-out.

The opt-out was called Protocol 30 and is written in the plainest and clearest English the negotiators could write. It even restates the same thing twice "for the avoidance of doubt". It appeared to contain no loopholes. Nonetheless, just a few years later the ECJ passed a ruling that the opt-out was void. They simply annulled it and because EU membership means accepting ECJ supremacy, that was the end of the "opt-out". Overnight, EU human rights law took effect in the UK too: exactly the thing the government thought it had prevented.

To rub salt in the wound, the case before the court was to do with sending an "asylum seeker" back to Greece under the Dublin Convention. This was a now dead part of EU law that stated the country that decides to allow an asylum seeker into the EU must process them. The ECJ decided that actually it didn't like this rule, because it was "unfair", and so annulled that too along the way, with the justification that Greece was such a hellhole it would infringe his human rights to send the asylum seeker back. Again, nobody reasonable saw that coming and the rules as written just evaporated the moment they came into conflict with EU ideology.

The history of the EU is full of stories like this. When you learn enough about it, you eventually realize that the treaties and rules are meaningless. It doesn't matter how clearly everyone seems to understand an agreement, tomorrow they might have come up with some Kafka-esque justification for why it didn't actually mean what everyone said it meant. These changes always seem to be to the benefit of the EU institutions themselves, not the people.

Such a system of government can never be accountable or trustworthy. Law has to be interpreted as written, not simply discarded the moment it becomes inconvenient. As such the Brexit supporters were right to claim the opt-outs were meaningless. Especially given the pro-EU sentiment of much of the establishment.