E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

EU immigrants contribute £2 billion more to the economy than they take out. We're 43% less likely to claim benefits or tax credits compared to the British-born workforce. Moreover 5% are NHS nurses; 10% are NHS doctors (yours truly is also an NHS clinician). Include non-EU immigrants and the number goes up to 10% nurses and 25% doctors. About 10% (IIRC) EU immigrants work in social care. So we contribute in more ways than just economically.

It is a misunderstanding that an economy has a limited number of jobs. Basically the more jobs are filled, the more the economy grows and the more jobs are needed. Jobs beget jobs. The UK's solid economic growth is linked to its ready access to a flexible, skilled workforce from the EU. Unemployment is also at an all-time low, so we're taking nobody's job. The inconvenient truth is that those Brits who aren't working are fundamentally unemployable.

A report by LSE in 2013 found that crime actually fell significantly in areas that had experienced mass immigration from eastern Europe, with rates of burglary, vandalism and car theft down since 2004. Stands to reason, as these people have jobs to go to.

 

It's mainly the hotel and food industry (13% in July-September 2014), manufacturing (11%), and admin and support services (10%), oddly enough sectors linked to the public sector, including public administration and defence (3%), education (5%), and health and social work (6%) are among the lowest.

 

Of course --a lot of 'employment' is zero-hour contracts and self-employment. But unemployed people still tend to be mostly Brits.

Not necessarily, but they do include people lacking in skills and qualifications and not prepared to do inhumanly hard graft in field or factory, and people with chronic health problems. Immigrants logically tend to be young and fit.

That is a completely different issue, attributed to Middle Eastern refugees. Nothing to do with EU immigrants.

 

If some random 25 year old arrives here from abroad looking for a job we didn't pay his parents child benefits or tax credits, we didn't pay for his education and he'll probably leave before he gets old and sick enough for us to pay him a pension or requiring frequent healthcare.

 

Nexxo,

Well as I recall everyone at the time thought it was binding. And no political leader, even the liberals that oppose Brexit, is claiming that it is unconstitutional. There has been no significant legal challenges on the referendum consequences and finally there was an election where 85% of the votes were for parties that supported Brexit.

If you wanted a constitutional crisis then you would have needed Cameron to take the traditional EU approach to referendums where on the 24th of June last year, he would have stood outside No 10, pointed out that people had voted the wrong way and announced that there would be another referendum in a years time so people could do what they were told to.


Look dammit, I was in favour of staying in and I'd be happy if we could still say. I thinkl the EU was on balance a good thing that needed the UK to counterbalance some others on some issues. I was completely relaxed about intra-EU migration. However unfortunately there was a terrible institutional arrogance at the core of the EU, with a view of the 'Grand Project' as a higher goal that the common people need not concern themselves with. Waste and fraud didn't really matter as the cause was so noble and EU spending was a good thing by definition. So making the case for the EU became harder and harder to the point where politicians avoided talking about it for years.

This culminated in a trainwreck referendum campaign where the Conservatives tried to sell Remain despite the bag of nothing that Cameron had been allowed in his renegotiation and Labour sort of campaigned to Remain on the basis that the Conservative were awful.

I'm still not happy about it but I don't wish it to be a failure to prove my vote last year was right.

 

It was advisory, what made it kind of binding was that Cameron promised to implement brexit if people voted for it.

 

Hence the kind of qualifier.

 

Well, ha, ha, but are you criticising him for keeping his word on the basis of your dislike for his party?

And more to the point if he had said "Well it's advisory so we're not going to do anything about it" after the vote can you imagine what the consequences would have been?

 

oh well lets not worry about the detail then

 

I don't think anything Cameron said or did is relevant anymore. I do think that the deal he was offered was pretty good though, even though it was severely played down by the media and opposition.

 

Everybody thought a lot of things, but the EU referendum bill stated explicitly that it was advisory and did not commit the government to act on the outcome.



The subsequent GE was not voted on Brexit, but on a whole lot of issues. For comparison, in 1997 the Referendum Party (as UKIP was formerly known) only got 7% of the vote. The GE result was not an endorsement of Brexit --certainly not of the way the Conservatives were going about it.

If Cameron had chosen not to act on the referendum, it would have been constitutionally legitimate because it was an advisory referendum.

The problem is that he promised to enact the result, so politically he couldn't back out:


But this promise is not actually constitutionally correct procedure, nor constitutionally enforceable.

(Belated EDIT, for clarity: compare section 8 of the Parliamentary Voting Systems and Constituencies Act 2011 which makes a referendum binding, with the text of the European Referendum Act 2015 in which this section is explicitly omitted.)

The "traditional EU approach" you refer to is nonsense. In every case those referendums led to significant changes to proposals before a second referendum was held.

Another myth is that Cameron managed to negotiate nothing with the EU. In fact he came away with almost everything he asked for: opt out of further integration in the EU, opt out of any obligation to bail out the Euro, acknowledgement that member states can keep their own currency in perpetuity, a temporary break on EU immigration.

The reason Cameron put up such a feeble case for Remain was that he could not admit that all the complaints attributed to the EU and EU immigration by Leave were in fact attributable to the UK government's own decisions and actions.

I think that this is the most disingenuous and insincere argument often made by Brexiteers: "You just want Brexit to fail!". Just because I am genuinely worried and hold the rational opinion that Brexit will be a disaster*, does not mean I wish this to be the case. It does not mean I hate this country or want to talk it down or want to see it fail; it does not make me a traitor or enemy of the state. After 25 years of living here, married to a Brit, my economic and personal future are inextricably tied up with the future of this country. And I see it being sacrificed for a pipe dream on the altar of nationalist politics.

* Look how the narrative has changed from 'cake and eat it' access to the single market and " this will be the easiest deal in the century" to "we must prepare for a no-deal Brexit", allocating £billions from the magic money tree to a "Brexit war chest". Meanwhile the OBR is downgrading productivity and economic growth, trade deficit is widening, exports are not boosted by a weaker Pound, the country's credit rating is downgraded.

 

Thinking something to be so doesn't make it so.

There's a big difference between non-binding and unconstitutional, fact is referendums in the UK are advisory and it's only via parliament that constitutional actions can be enacted, that's what representative governments mean, we elect people to represent us but that doesn't mean their obliged to do what we tell them, especially if they consider or know what we want would be against the best interests of the country.

I'd also propose that 85% of the votes were for parties that supported Brexit because there was only (afaik) a single party who put the countries best interests above their own political careers, that and they had next to no chance of being in government so didn't have to bother following through with what they said.

Actually the traditional approach of the EU when they don't get the result they want is to go away and reconsider whatever people rejected, make compromises, rewrite it, and put the new proposal to another vote then rinse and repeat.

That's actually how democracy is meant to work BTW, not as it does in this country where one party can force through whatever they like, democracy is meant to represent the majority and be about making compromises in order to please as many people as possible.

I'm not going to deny there is waste and fraud as any large'ish organisation has to deal with that, however when compared to the UK the EU is a veritable angle, it cost less than 1% of the GNI of the whole EU, their civil service is (iirc) the equivalent size of Birmingham City Council and only amounts to 6% of the total EU budget (half of which are staff wages), compared to the UK's central government 500k civil service staff the EU's 50k pale in comparison.

 

Maybot was asked if she'd vote for Brexit if the referendum were held tomorrow...

...and her response was essentially 'I don't know, i'd have to weigh the evidence'.

If she doesn't have the evidence to make that decision now, the **** has she been doing the past year and a bit?

 

If she'd have voted to leave then she would've just said so. But she didn't, so she wouldn't, and she can't lie as shamelessly as Boris does.

 

Moreover she refuses to guarantee the rights of EU citizens in a no-deal scenario (but then again, she never has).

...I'll get my coat.

 

Hardly surprising given she had a hardon for gutting everyone's rights while at the Home Office.