Well, it’s being triggered today. I hope I can say in the future that my fears were unfounded, but Brexiters should understand that any disaster, any shortfall, any bad news that happens to the UK from now on is your fault. You have no European scapegoat any more.
Although the opportunity to blame any/all disasters on Scotland may still be on the cards 
That’s a little harsh. But fair. And it’s what they want.
Brexit will not be a disaster and neither will it be wonderful. The economic consequences of Brexit will probably be marginal, either marginally positive or marginally negative. There is a small chance of it being a disaster, but this depends upon the political actions taken in Westminster and on the continent.
Somehow, almost every country in the world appears to survive while not being a member of the EU. It is all a bit Am-dram.
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Almost every country in the world isn’t the UK and isn’t leaving the EU; and
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Most of us are setting the bar a little higher than mere survival.
The UK will survive just fine. It’ll take a significant economic hit in the short-to-medium term but not a devastating one, and conditions for the poorest Britons and the most impoverished areas are likely to noticeably worsen for the foreseeable future. But hey - it’s not like the country is going to sink into the ocean so I guess everything is hunky-dory.
Hahahahahah. Good one. The Brits have been blaming the Frogs and the Krauts and the Wops and the Spicks for everything for centuries. Leaving the EU isn’t going to stop that.
To be fair, the Krauts and Wops did introduce a bit of unpleasantness to the Brits within living memory. Hellfire, the Krauts did it twice and it wasn’t very nice. I will grant you that infighting with the Frogs is just an ongoing sibling rivalry and the Spics haven’t been a significant threat since the last of the Armada sank. Still, it is perfectly understandable to the Yank why the Brits may not want to be best chaps with former enemies and rivals. I will still pick a drunk Scotsman in a bar fight any day.
But they haven’t turned their backs on globalisation, as the US and the UK appear to be doing (at least, the voters in the UK are).
If the UK makes it through intact, it will be through the Government reneging on everything Brexiters demanded.
There will be no freer trade, as the UK was already in the freest free market within the EU, and the rest of the world isn’t as free-trade hungry as the UK thinks it is.
There will be no reduction or additional ‘control’ over immigration, as the economy needs it, to say the very least.
There will be no ‘taking back control’, as we will need to conform our laws to the trading standards of other countries in order to trade there.
There’s going to be no ‘reclaiming’ of British waters as fishermen want, as the fishermen are completely detached from reality.
There’ll be no increased money for public services through leaving the EU.
So the very best argument you can have for Brexit is…not much will change? Whoopedy-frigging-do. I wish they had been honest about that, rather than promising the earth without any intention of delivering.
Not unlike the GOP and healthcare, really.
After the last referendum, when we in Norway rejected EU membership, there was a considerable amount of disappointment on the Pro-EU side. And there were a number of doom-and-gloom predictions about how our economy would suffer for this.
Our politicians from both sides of the aisle came together and for one shining moment bootstrap-levitated themselves into adequacy. We started to save all the oil income from the North Sea in our sovereign wealth fund, rather than subsidize the budget with most of it.
Now, the task for us was simpler. We did not have nearly half a century of legislation that needed to be changed, instead we just had to keep on as we were going. We had a massive economic resource in the North Sea oil. We also already had built-in access to the single market through the EEA, and a group of allied countries in the organization with us.
We also had a certain expectation that Sweden or Denmark might speak up for us in Europe now and then. And we had The Sentence.
But primarily, I think the reason things have gone well is that our politicians got together and lived up to our expectations of them.
This is why I worry about how things will go for the UK. You face a much larger and more difficult job, your economy and social fabric is far more strained. This is going to be a massively difficult task with thousands of parts, and every outcome entirely dependent on the skill and talent of your statesmen and women.
And I read about what was going on in your political parties in the aftermath of the Brexit vote… and I don’t really think they can see “adequate” with a telescope from where they are standing.
And of course Norway’s solution was…join the EEA. Brexiters don’t want to do that.
Please elaborate. Ideally you’ll provide some form of cite to refute the quite staggering amount of evidence that shows that EU immigrants contribute massively to the UK’s economy, e.g.
Of course, if you can’t do that I can see why you’d want to claim the point otherwise, because if there’s not really a good economic reason for wanting rid of them darned migrants, it’s hard to avoid the whiff of bigotry.
Well, we were in the EFTA since 1960, so it was more we stayed in the EEA. But yes, a distinct advantage.
Well you can shove your bigotry up your entitled arse. But if you want to talk like a mature adult, the question has, to a limued extent, already been approached.
My answer is of course more people equals a larger economy. How could it be otherwise. To increase the tax base, compensate for a deduced birth rate/aging population, etc is the entire point of immigration throughout the developed world.
The purpose of immigration and what it does on the most macro of scales is not contentious.
I mentioned it specifically in the context of the working class experience - and where I live that experience is male, felame, black, white, muslim, south american, gay and whatever. This is the statmenet again for those middle class entitled, judgemental, superior types: the working class experience - especially the unskilled experience - of uncontrolled immigration is lower wages, larger class sizes with additional issues, utterly hopeless housing expectations and other pressured services.
No question austerity has squeezed all of those. But 3.5 million European immigrants are not anonymous or absent in A&E, in classes, on waitig lists, in GP waiting rooms.
Austerity did not contribute to working mothers earning £7.20 on zero hour contracts.
I love how you follow this…
…with this:
Motes, beams, etc.
And again: you demonstrate what you deride in others. We’ve bolstered our arguments with evidence and your responses in return have been - what was the term? - “entitled, judgemental and superior”. Your claim to a higher level of worthiness due to your deep knowledge of the working class is belied by the paucity of your actual arguments.
Nor are they absent in creating businesses, serving as much-needed healthcare staff, and fulfilling other public services. And as already noted the effects of Tory cutbacks have had a much greater effect on increased waiting times and school provisions overall than immigration outside of a few local effects. Immigration is certainly a factor, particularly with regard to the short-term “wave” effects of countries like Poland joining the EU, but you are assigning it far more responsibility for the economic woes of the UK that it warrants.
It bloody well did. One more time - stop blaming immigrants for things directly attributable to the current government.
And since the current laws regarding statutory leave, maternity leave and job security, limitations on working hours, requirements to consult the workforce in the event of restructuring, and so forth are EU regulations, once they go you can expect to see a helluva lot more zero hour contracts and other moves to squeeze the most vulnerable elements of the workforce. At one of the televised debates the chairman of Sainsbury (IIRC - one of the big market chains) was positively salivating at the prospect of a reduction in workers’ rights. It is not rocket science to note that businesses are not charities and in times when job mobility is low will seek to limit employee costs in every way possible.
But I suppose when that all comes to pass there will always be someone else to blame.
The Guaridan did a vox pop piece in Hastings, asking people how tehy felt about the A50 notification. One quote in particularl mirrors up the junction’s view of the working class experience:
This woman has it pretty fucking tough (Or had - I think she’s teaching gymnastics rather than scrubbing toilets now). And she’s pissed off with politicians, and especially is angry at the people she believes are fiddling the system. Pretty much as UTJ describes. The thing is, Hastings has relatively *low *immigration. You can check hereto see that in Hastings, 92% of the population are British born, with 3.3% from the EU. East Sussex as a whole is 91% British born. The average for England is 85% foreign born, with 5.2% EU born.
The immigrants coming in to have expensive operations are a scapegoat. The anonymous benefits fiddlers are a scapegoat. Which is not to say that EU immigrants don’t get treated by the NHS, or that nobody ever fiddles benefits. But they are not the reason her mum is on zero-hours contract. They are not the reason she had to go back to work to support her child as a single mother.
Since 2010, this country has gone through unprecedented and unjustified cuts state spending, notably in in-work benefits, child support, education, housing and local council services. This last is the especially pernicious one - leaving the actual pain of deciding which services to cut to councils while keeping the government’s hands relatively clean. The impact simply of the changes to taxes and benefits has fallen most sharply on the poorest. (See graphs here). Among the poorest ten per cent, working households with children have lost c.£3,250, or 17% of their income. As a whole, working single parents have lost c.£2,000, or 10% of their income - the figures (not given) for those on lower half of the income scale will be worse, no doubt.
We saw above that a 1% increase in the share of immigrants equated to a 0.2% reduction in wages among the semi-skilled and unskilled. But let’s be optimistic and say that without immigration, UTJ’s working mother on a £7.20 an hour zero hour contract would be making £8.20 an hour. Assuming, again optimistically, that she could get an average of 20 hours a week, that would make her an extra £1,040 per year.
Now let’s assume that the tax and benefits changes of the budget had only been half as bad as in reality. £7.20 an hour on zero hours contract is pretty clearly in the bottom 10% of the income distribution. So with half the austerity impact she’d be c.**£1,600 **better off. That doesn’t even get into what life would be like without the cuts in services that austerity has driven.
Even generously assuming a big no-immigrant
Immigration is not the big threat to the working class. Unrestrained Tory governments with the power to rewrite business regulations leave immigration in the shade. But immigrants have been the whipping boy for Britain’s ills for the past ten years. Where people actually know immigrants, this propaganda is less successful. For all the supposed importance of immigration in affecting the call for Brexit, it’s always worth remembering that it’s the areas with the fewest immigrants that had the highest Leave vote. Because the lived reality is different than the myth.
What is The Sentence?
This is why I tend to Forget that Norway still isn’t part of the Club: you’re partly in through other treaties, and you Keep quiet and reasonable the rest of the time. Like the other Scandinavian countries, the bloc is perceived as reasonable welfare states with many individual Points other countries should learn from.
UK meanwhile is perceived as letting Thatcher gut everything in the 80s, from breaking the coal strikes to selling off water, as a bad example for the rest of Europe; and decades of both newspapers and politicans blaming everything on the EU.
Sure, there are always right-wingers to talk about “those bureaucrats in Brüssels who make laws about the curvature of cucumbers*” but we have good newspapers who Report Facts, and People who can see how EU subsidies and programms help underdeveloped or border-crossing Regions.
- That’s an enduring myth/ lie about crazy bureaucrats. The fact is that a Lobby of companies asked the EU to pass a Guideline (not a law) that cucumbers should be straight, not crooked, so they could pack more cucumbers in square boxes for easier Transport. The EU complied at first - hey, if they are asking? - but citizens and farmers complained, so they abolished it.
Before the vote, experts have predictd various Scenarios. The Problem is that the Brexit campaign had not plan at all which the People voted on: it was yes or no, not this is what will happen.
So that makes predicting effects really difficult.
Furthermore, since the UK is the first member to leave, the EU has no procedure to follow, leaving a lot up to negotiators, again making predictions difficult.
One Thing that stuck with me was an expert saying that since the last 40 years the UK has not had international negotiations by itself - everything went through the EU (bigger might) - they don’t have any lawyers for international law and were thinking of borrowing some from Canada to set up the treaties for/ during negotiations.
That’s not well prepared.
How bad it’s going to be depends on a lot of personal factors: where you live, what Kind of Business you work in, Level of education, Skin colour (hate crimes have risen already…)
Higher education makes it easier for you to emigrate or Change work sectors. Some Areas and some sectors will be hit harder from trade loss than others.
If you want to emigrate, you face the Problem that it’s not easy to immigrate elsewhere. Most western countries have requirements, quotas and restrictions.
One alternative that has been brought up is getting an online citizenship in one of the Baltic states (Lithuania?) as backdoor to staying an EU citizen, thus allowing you to travel, work and stay in Europe.
Zero hour contracts are not the fault of the EU. They are not because of the immigrants. They are the fault of companies trying them, liking them and getting away with because no politicans made laws, and enforced laws, that made this practice illegal.
Leaving the EU, or kicking out all non-british-born will therefore not Change anything about zero-hour-contracts.
Both the EU and UK Tory governments have not acted to make zhc illegal, as have other countries affected.
Of course their rise is linked to a new huge source or poorly educated, 6-to-a-room young immigrants who wouldn’t know a union if you dressed them up as Arthur Skargill and sent them down a mineshaft.
Again; this doesn’t affect the judgemental, entitled middle classes, but they know all about it. Perhaps the BBC told them. That would be the same London-based (yes, I know about the ‘media centre’ at Salford) middle class BBC that had an awful lot of trouble representing Brexit both before or since.