You shouldn’t buy in to this media narrative that all Leave voters are poor and live outside the big cities, and that all Remain voters are rich urbanites. 1 in 3 C2DE voters voted Remain; 41% of Londoners voted Leave. People are selling you this myth of a divided Britain but it’s more complicated than that and the reductive approach pushed by the media and political elite is neither accurate nor helpful.
It’s probably the same people who sold you the myth that uncontrolled immigration had any kind of significant affect on public housing, public services and wages. Lack of investment in productive jobs keeps wages low; austerity fucked public services and public housing has been a disaster for the last 30 years. Blaming this on immigration has been a convenient scapegoat for the London media elite but if EU immigration had been stemmed in 2004 we’d still have poorly paid jobs, austerity and under-investment in housing.
More importantly, if there are, to use your phrase “poor dumb country folk” who voted Leave in the belief that things couldn’t get worse, then they are in for a terrible shock. The economic effects of Brexit will be felt worst precisely in the areas with the biggest Leave votes - areas who, proportionally, trade more with the EU than London does. Hell, they trade more with the EU than they do with London. When the tariffs on agricultural produce kick in, and non-tariff barriers on manufacturing, and the supply chain gets fucked by customs delays and diversification of regulation, London will see 7% of its trade suffer. East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire will see 13% at risk. That’s your jobs and wages and services right there. When factories close, and farms go under, and haulage firms lay off drivers, the notion that things can’t get any worse is going to ring pretty hollow.
Ummm, no. Did I say anything about character? No, I did not.
I said that he had a limited perspective. You were pointing out that people had different perspectives, I was pointing out that, while apparently he had once visited the city, he obviously did not pay any attention to anything that was happening there, if he had not heard a single person talk about something that was in the news, and a big deal in the town council, and was probably spoken of quite a bit between individuals.
I am not assuming that he lives in cornwall, I was assuming that your statement had any sort of relevance. Now, you are correct in that I assumed, based on your statement, that he had some level of knowledge whatsoever about anything to do with cornwall. Apparently, relying on your statement led me astray, and I made an incorrect assumption based on the information that you provided. According to your statement, during his visit, he did not hear a single person talk about an issue that many, if not most people were talking about and concerned about.
You were the one that brought up your friend, and the fact that he hadn’t heard anything about this as if it were proof that no one was.
So, I guess my point and or question to you is, what does this guy have to do with anything? You brought him up as if somehow his perspective was important, but you are just digging yourself into a whole of showing that anything that anything that you may relate about his statements has absolutely nothing to do with the thread.
Nope, that would be a comment about his observation skills. A comment that is based entirely upon your statement about what he observed.
I actually don’t know, he may have observed far more, and he could have related his experience to you incorrectly, or you could be incorrectly relating his experience to us, but, to go into a city where I see news articles about people complaining about the loss of the subsidy, and where the town council is complaining about the loss of subsidy, and to say that he did not hear it mentioned, means that he does not have a very wide perspective, and in fact, his perspective is quite narrow.
If he only talked to the people who were in fisheries, and did not talk to the other business owners, and the council, and other people living there, then his perspective=limited.
You know this issue has already been parked, right? It’s agreed there will be a separate negotiation on payments for longer term commitments but it’s not being allowed to get in the way of the main negotiation.
No one has a clue how much, or on what kind of schedule.
If you’re thinking about coming to the United States, I would like to welcome you. However, you should be advised that we have just elected Donald Freeking Trump to be our President. No, I’m not joking. Given this, I would advise that you roll the dice and stick it out where you are now. Just for a while, until we can figure out what’s going on.
In what way are they going to get their fisheries back? Not a rhetorical question. I don’t know about this subject.
I don’t doubt that people feel this way. People who don’t think about their own cognitive biases tend to form incorrect conclusions. Those who study economics rationally pretty much invariably form the view that immigration leads to economic improvement, even for those who think “they took our jobs”.
Again I don’t doubt people feel this way, but it’s the “thanks Obama” thing. People don’t like something that happens, and they don’t like Obama, so they assume causation, even where none exists.
Is there bureaucratic wastage in the EU? Undoubtedly. Do the UK regions receive more or less funding as a consequence of the EU after taking into account bureaucratic wastage vs subsidies? How much bureaucratic wastage is there going to be in dealing at arms length with Europe once the UK is not in the tent?
Again, I don’t doubt people are concerned for their culture. But IME the big influences on UK culture range far more widely than just the EU. Indeed, to my observation if you want to locate the source of the largest cultural changes in the UK, the last place you’d look would be Germany or France etc.
It’s one of the four fundamental principles of the EU, also called ‘freedom of movement’ i.e. anyone living in any of the 28 countries can live and work wherever they want within the 28 countries. Thus the UK saw 1m Poles arrive - some left, but most stayed, and in more recent years very large numbers of Romanians and Bulgarians.
The last Census suggested around 3.5 million (6.5% of the UK population) was born in eastern Europe.
Conversely, several hundred thousand Brits have semi/retired to France and Spain.
Working class people have heard an awful lot from peole who know what’s best for them. This from Oxford confirms the point that working class wages suffer when immigration increases:
Cites please? Every article I have read said the EU is insisting that the agreement to leave (including the amount of payment due) must be settled before opening up trade negotiations.
I really do believe that this is not a very realistic notion of how things work. I don’t think you have fully grasped how bad a “worst-case” scenario can get. Or which class has the least ability to insulate itself from the consequences, and the smallest resource-base.
But no matter if it is a worst-case scenario or not, whatever bad consequences there are will be pushed away by every group and layer of society, and will end up landing with the people with the least ability to push.
Sometimes Google fail me. All I can say is it separates off quite easily and that has been decided - I read it and then saw it on Newsnight a couple of times this past week or so. What I would add is that the 27 need access to London, which is a significant bargaining chip:
I prefer living in a world where irrelevant anecdotes aren’t considered substantive rebuttals. Your comment about your mate was at best tangential to my original point that Cornwall, where the local government did demand that the UK government cover any lost EU subsidies (something, incidentally, the Leave campaign promised would happen), was going to suffer because the Leave campaign lied and because EU subsidies for the region were substantial. You insisted that the fact that your friend hadn’t heard anyone discussing subsidies was germane to the point. I provided evidence to support my argument. And then, when I failed to rise to your bait, you got all snippy about it.
I’m curious as to how this constitutes “living in an echo chamber”.
As a Londoner I assure you that “young trendy youngish metro types or their professional parents and/or property owning classes” is a stereotype which does not remotely represent the majority of urban residents. It certainly doesn’t resemble me at all. In fact I’m probably disadvantaged more by the people who do roughly fall into that group, since they are significantly responsible for driving up property prices in London.
And yet the evidence suggests that the fewer immigrants an area has, the more likely it was to have voted Leave. It’s almost as if the people who get their information about immigrants from sources such as UKIP and the Daily Mail are more likely to be virulently anti-immigrant than people who actually live and work with immigrants. Fancy that.
Incidentally, the Oxford study you cite is a tad more nuanced than you make it out to be:
So yes, immigration will be more likely to have a negative impact on the unskilled labour market (specifically the bottom 1-5% of wage earners) during economic slowdowns - but it can also increase employment overall, and even in economic slowdowns can result in increased wages for most workers. Tory policy has had a far bigger negative impact on the lowest wage earners than that, and on a far bigger proportion of the working populace. Furthermore, those are the people most likely to benefit from the workers rights they currently enjoy courtesy of those EU regulations they decry.
Yet the aforementioned sources rarely seem to mention this, preferring to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment, often based on lies. Fancy that too.
I understand that some people don’t think very well and that pretty much nobody likes being told what’s best for them. But when you’re wrong, you’re wrong.
Not to mention that working class people tend to hear an awful lot from smart self interested wealthy powerful people who have no qualms about achieving their own ends by playing working class people like a fiddle.
Impossible.
The latest census (2011) didn’t suggest anything, it totalled the number of residents in the UK with a passport from another EU country, i.e. all of them: 2,887,955
The ONS made an estimate in 2015 that there are around 300k people from Romania and Bulgaria residing in the UK.
But do continue to believe that the ‘mass immigration’ from Eastern Europe is the reason working class blokes can’t get a fair shake. We’ll see if they will gain employment once the dust settles.