E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

Well, as Corky42 says:

The way I understand it is that the situation can occur that e.g. a company like Siemens can invest capital in creating a factory in Hull making wind turbines (like it does now), and create jobs in the UK doing so. German capital is invested abroad to create jobs abroad and generate associated business (supply chains etc) abroad. The resulting goods could be sold back to German consumers. More German money goes abroad to serve business investment and jobs abroad.

The only way to even that out is to make those jobs abroad accessible to Germans also, on equal terms. Of course the same goes for the UK investing and generating jobs in Germany.

Or think of it in other terms: how do British people feel about Dyson moving its factory from Wales to Malaysia because labour is cheaper there? They are a bit annoyed about UK companies investing money and generating jobs in other countries rather than their own. The EU free movement principle applied here would argue that Brits should be able to move to Malaysia unfettered to apply for those jobs there also and benefit from them.

There is no reason to have free movement of course, but that means competing with other countries to keep businesses in one's own country, and that, ironically, may mean e.g. depressing wages to match them with those abroad.

 

That balance only seems to work on the scale of two countries though. A Company (Siemens) makes a foreign investment in another country (England), builds a factory and creates jobs and then fills those positions with labour from a third unrelated country (Romania). How would that balance things out? The Germans lose the investment capital, the English loose job opportunities and the Romanians miss out on the tax revenue and possibly skilled workers because their people are working abroad.

We are already competing with each other to keep business in our own countries, even within the EU. For example there's plenty of pressure on Ireland to remove its low corporate tax rate because its funnelling investments away from other countries.

 

I strongly suspect that the British government's current thinking is not so much on a Brexit plan but on how to sell EEA membership to the electorate. They won't have to sell it too hard, either.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business/market_data/stockmarket/3/one_month.stm

at current rate by tomorrow FTSE 100 will be back to p[re referendum level

 

As people keep saying, the 100 isn't exactly representative - 250 is more so, as there are more UK based companies and thus reflects us better.

I'm also shocked, shocked, that the EU have said no free trade without free movement.

Who could have seen that coming? Oh, wait..

 

Shame the pound ams FTSE 250 won't be. But you keep taking the blue pill.

 

Nexxo are you saying that 25% of the leave voters are racist (forgive me and correct me if I misunderstood). So by that reckoning 1 in every 8 people in the UK are racist and totalling roughly 8,125,000 racists in the UK?

I nearly voted leave myself. For many many reasons. However I believe 100% that the europeans have been wonderful for the UK economy, so I voted remain.

I think unless we get a major pro-brexit leader to sort this crap out and flesh out the details of us separating, we could see many many years of pain.

I understand why some people will feel threatened by Europeans, or the open door policy. Afterall if a government has to choose between a population of happy Europeans willing to over-occupy houses to be able to work and earn, and a population of old school British workers who constantly require the .gov to improve their wage increases, health provision, housing needs, education needs, etc, etc, etc ..... The .gov would choose the former - which our .govs have been doing to now.

Of course, we still haven't and probably never will, fix the main issue with all countries - the naughty rich people. It's funny how things crop up all the time, but THAT never ever gets fixed. Imagine having a referendum on whether tax avoiders should be punished ...

 

The markets don't exactly have much to react to any more in regards to brexit, after all the EU has made it clear that absolutely nothing will happen unless the UK invokes article 50...

 

Going on polling data (yes i know it's not 100% reliable) 25% of people who said they supported leaving the EU wanted immigrants deported, based on that poll and the number of people who voted to leave the EU it comes to around 4m people, I've rounded that down because of the unreliability of polls. If you want to label them racist or not is probably debatable however.

 

Wanting immigrants to be deported could be because the people polled were racist. It could also be because they have child level reasoning abilities. Also immigrants aren't actually a race of people.

 

That's my reckoning. Now 4 million on a 64 million population is a reassuringly small proportion, so I think the UK as a whole comes off as a fairly tolerant society.

 

If the UK was run by people holding that deportation view (as far as I'm aware no one in government is THAT moronic) we would be truly ****ed!

 

Very true, it could be for any number of reasons and we can't be sure wanting immigrants deport equals being racist, it's why i rounded down the number, whatever number or how we want to define being racist though really doesn't change much IMO, even if it was 1m people that's still a lot of xenophobia.

 

News just in:

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby
English will remain as the official language of the European Union
rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the Brexit negotiations, the British Government conceded that
English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-
year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will
make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in
favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have
one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when
the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words
like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted
to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have
always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag
is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th"
with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining
"ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer
vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu
understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze
forst plas.

 

You probably think that was funny.

 

What is not so funny is that the EU has always had huge problems finding British staff to represent the UK who can actually speak more than one language. Everyone else working at the EU speaks at least two, often four.

 

@Nexxo: https://jakubmarian.com/average-number-of-languages-spoken-by-the-eu-population/

To be fair,t hat comes down to history too. For example Slovak have huge hungarian minority, that means nearly 10% of population automatically knows 2 languages at least (Slovak and Hungarian). Also for long we were in one country with Czech, thus nearly everyone knows Czech - that brings it up to 2-3 languages on average. Then of course people learn English or German in school - and boom, there is the 2.5 average.

Same applies for Estonia/Lithanuia/Latvia - they have Russian for huge chunk of their population, plus German or English for younger ones. Similar situation is with Belgium (German/French/Dutch + English)...

When you are from a 5-10M small country, you need to learn English or German. In UK, you don't really need to learn other languages.

 

There's a very important part to freedom of movement which most people probably aren't even aware of, but which is crucial to people like me. The only reason why I could just pack up and leave the Netherlands (good riddance!) for a job in Germany was because of this freedom of movement.

If this freedom didn't exist, my current employer would have thought twice about hiring me. I don't even want to think about what might have happened to me in that case.

Some European countries aren't as liberal as they pretend to be (hi, Netherlands). Freedom of movement allows minorities who feel unsafe and are left without opportunities in one country to move to a more welcoming country.

I linked to an article I wrote about this topic a long time ago in this thread. As you can imagine this is a topic which rather quite personal to me.

 

I'd say it's a lot more different in the uk due to the colonial immigration that happened previously.

I am fluent in two Indian languages and conversational in another, have a reasonable understanding of swahili as my parents were born in East Africa, obviously fluent in English and finally there was that gcse in Spanish.