This campaign to remain has had so much negative publicity and scaremongering, its getting rather like US politics, and for that alone I want to leave, just to stick it good style to those negative campaigners.
This is more important than you may imagine, we really do not want to go the American way of polemic campaigning, we will end up with something equivalent to the tea party.
More than leaving Europe, we really must defeat American style scaremongering, this will affect our quality of life far more than EU ever could, and not for the better
It’s not. EU law allows member states to impose restrictions on free movement on the grounds of public order. Any state can deny entry to, or expel, someone, and impose a re-entry ban, if their conduct represents a serious threat to public order.
What a state can’t do is impose restrictions on other EU nationals for conduct which it accepts from its own nationals.
So a state which doesn’t tolerate football hooliganism from its own citizens is free to deny entry to, expel and/or impose re-entry bans on football hooligans from other member states. Same goes for any other category of serious crime.
I don’t know what sort of impact leaving the EU will have on the EU itself. I’m guessing that, due to how big Europe is, the impact will be relatively small.
As for if Britain leaves the EU, I still think that the impact on Britain will be relatively small as well.
Economically, the effect on the EU will will be (relatively) modest.
The UK is a net contributor to the EU budget, so there’ll be a budgetary strain on the EU institutions, but exactly how much remains to be seen. The UK contribution will certainly diminish, but it won’t necessarily disappear; other non-EU states contribute to the EU budget as a condition of participation in the single market; it remains to be seen what the EU and the UK will negotiate in this regard.
According to Wikipedia, in 2014 the UK contributed EUR 14bn to the EU budget, and received EUR 7 bn of EU expenditures - a net contribution of EUR 7 bn. Total expenditures were EUR 129 bn, so the UK net contribution represented about 5.4% of that.
Bigger, I think. Obviously there’ll be an immediate boost to the UK governmnent’s budgetary position, but most of the economists who have commented expect the UK economy to suffer (which, before too long, will of course have a negative impact on the government’s budgetary position). Exactly how much it will suffer depends on what terms the UK and the EU agree into the future regarding free trade, access to markets, etc. But last week the IMF published its estimates of the impact on the UK economy on a range of scenarios. The most optimistic projection - based on a quick UK/EU trade deal - had sterling falling by 5%, GDP growth slowing to 1.4% and unemployment rising modestly. But not many people think a trade deal will be quick. On the assumption that there is no quick trade deal, the IMF forecasts serious trouble for the financial service and pharmaceutical industries, a recession the year after leaving, unemployment rising to 7% and stagnant real wages. All-in-all, in this model leaving impacts the UK to a degree that is comparable to the degree to which it was impacted by the global financial crisis in 2008. By 2019 GDP growth in the UK will be a cumulative 5.6% below what it would have been, but for leaving.
In fairness, the IMF is probably at the more pessimistic end of the range of prognistications. But pretty well all the economic commentators, government and independent alike, foresee leaving as being economically disadvantageous to the UK, with the sole exception, unsurprisingly, of Economists for Brexit.
IMF is not exactly the most reliable and (as this opposes pretty much their ideology) unbiased commentator though. They (and the WB) have a long and distinguished record of getting it wrong. from the current financial crises and austerity to the Asian Crises of 1997.
Yes, sure. And I’d go a bit further; all of the economic modelling of the effects of Brexit needs to be taken with a grain of salt. If nothing else, many of the models - at least as headlined in the media reports - seem unduly precise in their predictions, given that the events they are modelling are fairly unprecedented. I picked the IMF for discussion in my post not because I think they are more reliable than others, but because they at least modelled a variety of scenarios and came up with a range of outcomes, rather than a single outcome.
I don’t think, thought, that we can ignore the fact that virtually all of the models do predict a negative economic impact for the UK; they differ only in their assessments of exactly how negative it will be. In light of this, it’s wishful thinking to imagine that Brexit will be economically beneficial for the UK. A more compelling case for Brexit (at least to my mind) would acknowledge that, yes, there will be an economic cost, but would argue that this cost is worth paying in order to secure other things considered desirable (increased autonomy, basically).
Yes. As noted it works out at about 5.4% of the EU budget, which is significant, but not disastrous.
Conversely, it’s EUR 7 billion (about GPB 5.4 billion) added to the bottom line of the UK budget, which is nice. But, as the UK budget is much, much bigger than the EU budget, it only improves the bottom line by about 0.7%. And if the modelling suggesting a decline in UK GDP following Brexit is correct, that’s going to lead to a decline in tax revenues which will more than swamp the 5.4bn saving in contributions to the EU. So the overall effect on the UK budget seems more likely to be negative than positive. But it’s unlikely to be as negative as it will be for the EU budget.
I guess I’d summarise the situation this way; considering the UK government and the EU institutions, both will be adversely affected financially by Brexit, but the adverse effect on the UK will be smaller, and the UK government is a much bigger operation anyway, so they are better positioned to ride it out.
But if we consider the UK national economy and the EU economy, the position will be reversed. Both will be adversely impacted, but the UK economy is much smaller and the adverse impact will be proportionately much greater. They’ll have a much tougher job riding it out. But exactly how adverse the impact or both parties will be is hard to say, since it depends on events which happen after Brexit - specifically, what kind of trade/single market deal the UK arrives at with the EU, and how long it takes to arrive at it.