That article is statistic-free with regards to passport numbers.
It is however Ian Paisley Jr advising people to get Irish passports, which y’know…
That’s the bunny - amusingly named the Drummully Polyp. They’re going to be absolutely stuffed if the border goes “hard”.
Just wait til they discover they can’t stuff unlimited bottles of booze in their suitcases on the way back from Torremolinas. That’s when the proverbial’s going to really hit the fan.
Duty-free allowances would be entirely a matter for the UK government after Brexit. There are some total-free-trade enthusiasts among the Brexiteers who probably don’t hold with import tariffs and duties anyway, and seem to imagine that lowering them at will is going to solve all our economic problems.
+1000.
Whether Brexit is going to make Britain better off ultimately is a question of values, not fact. It depends how you value ethnic homogeneity and ethno-tribal solidarity vs. economics. Lots of people, if forced to choose between “living in a homogenous, ethnically English nation that’s 20% poorer on average” or “living a multicultural, cosmopolitan country that’s 20% richer” would choose the former.
(Never mind that the actual economic impact, from the forecasts I’ve seen, were much smaller than that).
That boat sailed decades before we joined the Common Market, and in a direction towards far greater ethnic heterogeneity than came with the right of free movement for European citizens. Moreover, our future economic prosperity is likely to depend on maintaining the numbers of young people immigrating from somewhere, in or out of the EU. Hauling up the drawbridge is simply not practicable.
Actually, Brexit is likely to lead to greater immigration from British Empire - largely non-white - countries.
My point is that people who voted for Brexit (I spent a week in northern England last month, and talked to a bunch of Brexit voters) probably care a lot more about ethnic homogeneity than they do about economic prosperity. Rather a lot of people do. (Currently, in Poland, over half the population say that they would rather leave the EU and take a big economic hit, than accept Muslim immigrants).
Indeed. And my point is, if they’re expecting Brexit to make a blind bit of difference in that direction, they’re in for a big disappointment. And they’ll still get the rough end of the pineapple when it comes to the economic effects too.
Depends on how big an economic price they’re willing to pay.
I thought it was, except for the SDMB.
If the general approach to social and economic policy of the Tory Brexiteers prevails, they may not have much choice about it. A cheap labour economy is still going to need immigration if the age imbalance isn’t to worsen, and will by definition be giving people at or just above the bottom of the heap as bad a time, or worse, than they’ve been having now - and the price won’t be visible on whatever menu’s presented, merely experienced once it’s even harder to change course.
Most of the cheap labour in Ireland is being provided by third country nationals anyway - undocumented Bangladeshis, Mauritians, Chinese. Is it different in the UK?
I don’t have figures to hand, but the perception (which is what dominates this debate) is that it is substantially people from the recently acceded post-Communist states, such as Poles, Lithuanians, Romanians, though for some people any foreigners will do.
Any better off calculation will largely depend on what happens inside the EU in the near future. A growing prosperous EU may be looked on enviously by Brexit Britain; a “muddling through” EU(the most likely outcome) will leave both Brexiteers and Remainers with something to crow about; an EU tearing itself apart both politically and economically can only be good politically for Brexiteers.
How very odd - I have been repeatedly assured that racism and xenophobia were not significant factors in the Leave campaign.
(I now eagerly await someone to come in and explain how “concern for ethnic homogeneity” differs in any significant fashion from “racism and xenophobia”.)
The main clear beneficiaries of Brexit to my mind are the English language schools of Dublin, already bustling. 
Well, I would guess that there are going to be more countries leaving in the medium term future (Poland and Hungary, most likely, over the immigration / refugees issue, maybe the Czech Republic after that).
That being said, if the more immigration-skeptical countries leave the EU, the remaining ‘core’ members will probably be more unified in terms of worldview and attitude than they are today.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Brexit, and for that matter the Austrian election in October, the Czech election later in October, the Polish election back in 2015, the Danish election the same year, the elections in Slovakia / Moldova / Bulgaria last year, were all to a very large extent referendums on immigration. where the side in favour of greater ethnic homogeneity made big gains. (So was the 2016 American election, although under a fairer system Hillary would have won: Trump won because of an Electoral College fluke and because of the two party system).
The interesting question about which people differ is whether they think concern for ethnic homogeneity is a good thing or a bad thing, but I think the factual question of what these elections were about is pretty clear.