All bad things but also they brought in strong privacy protections, held national governments to account for privacy invasions, have broadly stronger environment and safety legislation that most other regions.
"strong privacy protections ..", what do you mean? The Cookie law?
"held national governments to account for privacy invasions"? They are sending our data to the US (e.g. data for airline passengers).
"have broadly stronger environment and safety legislation" Maybe on paper, the EU agencies did know for years that VW (and other EU car producer) did cheat.
The trouble is, the UK government is demonstrably willing to ignore EU rules it doesn't like, and there is nothing any normal citizen affected by that can do about it. Airport body scanners, all the Internet surveillance stuff... For our recent authoritarian governments, national security paranoia seems to trump privacy concerns every time, and blatantly ignoring European rulings to the contrary appears to be standard procedure at the moment.
I haven't made up my mind yet about whether we're better off in the EU than out. It's obviously a complicated question. But something that is a big factor in favour of leaving is that there is so much one-sided co-operation: the EU seems to be used as a convenient excuse to justify unpopular rules that might cause political problems at home, because we "have to comply with the EU directives" or some such, yet apparently we have no trouble not complying when the EU rules are less convenient.
Completely agree, the other thing the EU doesn't do well is sell the benefits, there are some real ones but all you ever see is some crazy story in the media about bananas or something equally asinine.
The EU isn't all good or all bad it's just huge.