Have you got me muddled up with someone else? Not claiming I'm being bullied either so give it a rest eh.
EU Referendum | UK residents vote today.
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One could equally claim that as soon as you say the word "immigration" you get jumped on as a xenophobic. It saves having to actually discuss the issue.
I think he's probably confusing you with me, though I don't recall claiming I'm being bullied.
We've been debating immigration in this thread for weeks and the only people that have been called xenophobes are people that have said xenophobic things.
If you want to have a sensible debate about immigration then fine, we'll have it. But that doesn't give you carte blanche to be actually xenophobic in the guise of 'just caring about immigration'.
The 'can't talk about immigration without being called a xenophobe' crowd vastly out number the people that ever called anyone a xenophobe.
It was Rednotdead I was referring to, my apologies, hadn't spotted the name difference until I added the quotes. The bullied thing was more of a general reference to a good number of the Brexit posters on here who have repeated many times how the Remain campaign are being mean to them.
I'm more than happy to discuss the issue and why I believe it's a non-issue, I'm just getting sick of the Brexit posters whining about the harsh treatment they get at our hands.
So your issue is that I'm basing my argument on facts, while you have a general feeling about these things? I must bow to your superior debating skill.
But that's based on historic numbers and you're still discounting very large volumes tbf. I'd also say that a Brexit would result in a greater control of our borders overall so it would fall.
Immigration isn't much of an issue now (certainly not more than tory austerity) but the absence of control is a concern.
It's just very difficult to make the argument that immigration isn't an issue when you have no control over it. This referendum may only relate EU immigration but I think most on the Leave side are using as a tool against all immigration.
Should have just had Brown's ID cards
Watching this on iplayer now. Some absolute thickos in that crowd
I can't see the future, but I can put together a likely scenario based on the facts as we know them. If population growth slows a little, but economic growth slows more, how do you suggest that helps improve the public services you're so worried about?
What are you talking about
This is perhaps the most lame thing I have read in this thread, pathetic
You really don't understand about trade do you, someone states a fact and you dismiss it as pathetic but you'll quite happily believe the end of the world is nigh rubbish from Brexit, jesus wept
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Norway keeps getting held up as an example
Have any of the brexit team been to Norway? It costs a fecking fortune for everything and their tax rates are huge
Copy that model and uk citizens will be moaning in no time
Their own PM said we would hate being like them.
Switzerland's the same, certainly as far as prices are concerned.
It costs a fecking fortune for everything and their tax rates are huge
Thats how you pay for stuff and finance better services
When the UK start taxing at normal eu rates then they will get somewhere
Thats how you pay for stuff and finance better services
When the UK start taxing at normal eu rates then they will get somewhere
Don't worry - they'd never pay us enough for us to afford such prices anyway.
Well they're certainly better than yours if you're usually this rude and condescending
Your assumptions are built on historic data, therefore they are not facts when considering future impact. You may have explained over recent years the impact would have been minimal (if we're assuming you define minimal as sub 100k) but they do not address future concerns about influxes and an ability to prevent them.
Far too much hostility and dick swinging in here.
Very well argued point of view that.
Decent video but he's second point is awful. The fact that 3 countries provide the EU's political economic and diplomatic ''leadership'' is a great concern and not a positive, also when he says leadership he's being dishonest as anyone who's look into the fight between Greece and the EU will know the EU forced the Greek government to take austerity. Yanis Varoufakis(Former Minister of Finance for Greece)is well worth listening to on this subject.
So even as someone who's voting to remain in, it really is a reluctant vote rather than anything positive about the EU.
Bloody scaremonger
Hooray, someone who knows what he's talking about, first time I've seen this and agree with every single point he raised
How does the 88% of our economy which doesn't rely on this privilege manage to survive? Also why should the 12% which needs this dictate to the 88% which doesn't?
Its a very strange and self centred argument.
Assuming you're referring to Civil Engineering forming only 12% of the UK economy and I don't know, I'd really have to check, I'm talking purely from my own experience. European standardization and harmonization extends into all areas of industry and manufacture however with 443 separate CEN committees sitting on everything from Oil & Gas pipelines CEN TC1 to duvet fillings CEN TC 443 covering everything in between including food, banking, tattoos etc as well as 307 ISO committees. There's not a single walk of life or industry they don't touch upon and giving up our right to sit on these committees and set the rules would irrevocably change the way all our business functions. Strange that you would think such all encompassing concern selfish.
Brits will never buy into that Stan
Baroness Warsi has become another Tory woman to defect from Leave to Remain condemning "hate, xenophobia and lies" of the Brexit campaign. To be honest it didn't really take long for her to be proven right.
To think there are politicians simple minded enough to vote on such a huge issue based on the quality of a campaign, rather than their actual beliefs.
She may be alarmed that the leaders of said campaign stand a decent chance of leading the country should they win the referendum.
Some of them clearly are simple minded but it's more accurate to say that the vast majority of them are self serving. When you've got the "head" of the leave campaign saying he'd vote remain only 3 years ago and the head of the Remain campaign having previously said he would vote to leave it's clear that they can't be trusted. The lies and hate filled rhetoric from the Brexit campaign has trawled new depths though and with the events of this week it's not surprising that some of the politicians involved are beginning to question their choice of bedfellows.
I find it unbelievable that this is even up for debate. WTF is the government doing even having a referendum? We vote governments in to make decisions for us and not to cop out when some right wing feckwit makes a fuss.
Out would be a disaster.
The lies and utter bullshit from the leave campaign is astounding as is people's willingness to believe some anecdotal bollocks over actual evidence and information. Lets deal with the bullshit first.
1) Linking sexual trafficing/sexual abuse to Britex as I see every day on various social media is not only ludicrous but downright insulting to the victims. The Rotherham case is frequently used as an example involved as many as 1400 victims over a decade was a failure of council in their care homes and the perpetrators were either British or non-European. So nothing to do with trafficking and nothing to do with free movement of labour in the EU.
2) Refugees (almost none of who are European BTW) get preference for public housing and higher rates of social benefits. No matter what a good friend of your Aunt's dog groomer said this is bullshit. It would be illegal as these are governed by legislation not anecdote.
3) Migrants are apparently stealing our jobs and sitting on the dole taking our hard earned money. Make your fecking mind up. Which one? The actual evidence is that people who move to the UK from elsewhere in the EU give a massive net gain to the UK as on average they earn and pay tax then go home if there is no work. Refugees, if allowed to work, also claim relatively little and tend to both work hard either doing the menial jobs we think are beneath us or setting up small businesses. If we leave the lazy dole bludgers who are the real problem will remain as they are British and the rest are systemic failures of government employment policy over 4 decades.
4) The biggest lie is about the cost of membership. Britex quote a figure that excludes the rebate we negotiated decades ago. The actual cost is less than other non-EU Scandanavian nations pay just for economic access. In other words we would end up paying the same or more for far far less. Madness. And this is without taking in to account the money we get back billions of which has been spent in Northern Ireland and the NE amongst other places. The actual costs is very small indeed compared to the benefits of membership.
5) The economic arguments for exit are also laughably wrong. We do the vast majority of trade with other EU nations. We do more trade within the EU than with all other countries combined. Individually we do more trade with Holland, Germany, France and Ireland than we do with China. To lose free access to our biggest market not to mention that many of our trade deals with non-EU nations are with the EU and not with the UK is economic suicide. All these agreements and a new one with the EU would need to be negotiated and these things take years, often decades.
6) Anyone want to work in Europe? Get in line with all other non-Europeans for a work visa that may or may not be granted. Want to retire to the sun? Sorry but you can't buy property, claim any social benefits and you will have to pay the full economic costs of medical services. Until your visa expires that is.
7) Who are you going to trust to look after employment law? It is bad enough with things like zero hour contracts and reduced/removed penalty rates but remove EU law and things will get much much worse.
Of course the EU could do with some reform but leaving is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The UK hasn't been a world power since WW2 - get over it. Leave and we will be a banana republic. The Zimbabwe of Europe.
I find it is telling that people who don't live in the UK and haven't for some time and those who have an obvious lack of commitment to living in the UK can't understand why the people who do might disagree with them. This post is pretty and also wrong. So lets start by dealing with each point one at at time.
1. I live in Rotherham and grew up in Eastwood you know feck all about what happened there and frankly I think your view is ill informed. Do you honestly think you know more about the terrible race relations there and the terrible effects of those than I do? Or about why a further influx of immigration through recent EU accession countries is causing concern. Are you really that arrogant dialling in your opinion from the other side of the world and yet still think you know best?
2. Recently arrived people get accommodation in council housing because they arrive with children and that means they have greater need. That is a fact and while people try to spin this as word of mouth it is actually how housing is allocated. It causes resentment because recent immigrants get the house and you don't even though you have been on the waiting list for longer than they have.
3. So immigration can't have two separate but not mutually exclusive effects then? You are wrong because the rate of in work activity between different immigrant communities is very different and the overall effect can be to drive down wage rates and increase benefit claiming. Start by comparing the economic activity 24 months post arrival of the varying ethnic groups there is a massive disparity.
4. Brexit's figures about how much the UK pays into the EU is correct. The fact that some of this amount is given back in various EU grants doesn't negate this point. Brexit is about taking back control, how is this a lie when the the grants are based on an EU set framework. It is obvious to any one fair minded that pushing for taking control back to the UK from the EU would include all the UK contributions including the amount the EU sent back to the UK. It is not hard to understand this point.
5.Our trade with the EU is less than our trade with the rest of the world. You stating the exact opposite of a known and checkable fact suggests you know feck all about UK trade which doesn't fill me with a great sense that your laughter is anything other than the chuckles of an idiot. EU trade is 12% of UK GDP.
6.The total percentage of people leaving the UK each year is about 0.5%. So the rest of the UK, 99.5% should sacrifice its self interest in order to make it easy for the 0.5%. That makes sense only if you don't give a shit about the people who want to live in the Uk because the most important thing is to make it easy for those who want to leave. I disagree.
7. The worst argument of all arguments made by the remain campaign is democracy doesn't count when the EU disagrees with it. Vote for a govt and the EU will decide what it can and can't do, feck that. I trust the people who live under the laws that they create to get it as close to right as any one over the long term.
I am currently going to vote remain(60-40) but the arguments for remain made here are ill informed shite.
Its the stated figure for the percentage of GDP reliant on the EU not just civil engineering. You make the point for me, although it is only 12% it sets rules well beyond its value in our economy. The majority of trade is done outside of it standards into countries we have no say in the standards that apply but we sell there anyway.
They aren't correct. For one thing the rebate is different to EU grants. For another, the amount we get back in the rebate never even gets sent to the EU, it's deducted from the amount we have to pay.
Am I wrong in thinking that jeopardizing a relationship that accounts for 12% of GDP isn't something to just dismiss? 12% seems like a fairly significant amount.
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It's all going pear-shaped for the Leave campaign. Though doubtless they'll tell us that EU bigwigs have renamed pears as 'spherical consumables with tapered stalks'.
Yeah it's huge. Especially when you consider Exports from the Rest of EU to UK represents 3% of their GDP as a total, so they're in a better bargaining position than we would be if we pulled out. It's a bit of a random figure to highlight as well.
I mean, I'm just thinking about the numbers for the "Great Recession", which accounted for a loss of 5% of our economy. If losing 5% put us into the worst economy since 1932, jeopardizing 12% seemed massive.
And yes, 3% vs 12% isn't a good bargaining position.
But GDP is a rather pointless comparison. The EU doesn't sell us any goods - individual member states do. You'd need to know the figure for each state to establish how it would affect them.
Given that we have a rather large annual trading deficit with the EU as a whole (nearly £24bn for the first 3 months of this year), it must be clear that there would be a significant effect on probably any state except perhaps Germany or France.
Thus we may be in a much better bargaining position than is being represented.
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The EU doesn't bargain individually but collectively as that enhances the power of the group as a whole and we want to leave it
That doesn't answer my point. Our leaving may have a small or negligible effect on the likes of Germany and France but a significant effect on smaller states, thus our bargaining power vs the EU may be rather stronger than is being stated - unless, of course, Germany and France organise things in their interests. They wouldn't do that though would they?
What has the Rotherham case got to do with EU membership? Nothing. Yet the leave campaign use this amd similar cases to scare people.
So based on need not immigration status. That sounds like a fair system. Of course 40 years of selling public housing and not replacing is the real problem but so much easier to blame the EU and foreigners than to deal with the real issues.
On average migrants are a huge net contributor to the UK coffers. And Brits take people's jobs all over the EU - it is the nature of such reciprocal relationships. Or are you proposing racially profiling migrants?
Of course it does. The cost is what we pay minus the rebates and even that doesn't include the billions we get back in grants and the like.
That makes no sense. If we currently pay £100 and get a rebate of £30 then leaving won't gain us £100. That seems to be what you are suggesting.
You do realise that GDP isn't trade don't you?
Official figures show that 44% of our exports went to the EU in 2014 and 55% to European countries overall. Over 50% of imports were from EU countries and well over half if you include all European countries. So our trade with Europe was well over half and with the EU only a sliver short of half. With us dependent on EU trade deals for a great deal of the rest.
Sacrifice? What are you sacrificing? What a weird way to look at things.
What utter rubbish. Listen to what an actual expert has to say about the silliness of such sovereignty based arguments. In fact listen to everything he has to say.
Except they aren't.
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Possibly. The UK isn't the main trading partner of any country in the EU, and only the 2nd main partner of Poland and Cyprus. Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany have the UK as their 3rd main partner. Germany and France, along with the US, are the main partners of most of the EU countries, so I expect they have a lot more influence when it comes to trade agreements.
That's for trade in goods btw. If you include services then the dependence on the UK becomes even smaller as the UK doesn't import much in the way of services from the EU.
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