EU Referendum Vote - Poll

Sambostar

Gassage said:

How anyone with half a brain can even consider leaving is beyond me. Truly.

I only have a quarter.

Chalky

Sambostar;1092555" said:

Gassage said:

How anyone with half a brain can even consider leaving is beyond me. Truly.










I only have a quarter.

You were lucky. Mine's an eighth in t'shoebox in t'middle of t'road...

(I'm doing my Marty Feldman impression as I say it) )

slacker

This just in tobacco prices will rocket if we leave. 

Sambostar

 I'II have to quit smoking then.  Who said that?

Fretwired

Gassage said:

How anyone with half a brain can even consider leaving is beyond me. Truly.

Luckily I have a normal brain .. I feel sorry for those with only half a brain, although to be honest this smells of more FUD and bullshit from the Remain camp ... what next? The UK hit by the Zika virus if we leave the EU ...  :-)

TTony

Garthy said:

This was actually in my economics course:

Fuck it, this forum never works. Try googling "assume a can opener".

As an economist, I don't need to Google that @Garthy, I'll just wis it.

If you want 5 conflicting opinions on an economic outcome, ask 2 economists.

Fretwired said:

I think the issue of immigration is a bit of a red herring. Our economy is still growing. We need immigrants. If we vote leave I bet we will still have free movement of people with the EU albeit with perhaps an upper limit. The Tories said that they wanted immigration down to 100,000 people and yet they let in 140,000 non-EU immigrants. Why? We obviously needed them. I think a points based system like Oz would be a good idea.

I can't see anyone who is already here getting thrown out unless they are a threat to security. Not even the most fervent Brexiteer is saying this - it would be too damaging to our economy and image abroad.

I've heard plenty of BS arguments about the economic impact and far fewer about the immigration aspect.

Our economy is growing, so we need more immigrants to do the jobs.  Hmmmm.  

This is apocryphal rather than the result of detailed statistical analysis, but I see more immigrants in lower paid jobs.  How many of your office cleaners are English?  How many of the workers in your local coffee / sandwich shop?  How many of your free-paper hander-outers?  How many of your Big Issue sellers?  In London, the answer is very few.  But then, the answer in London is very few of any worker.

The point is that low wage = low contribution to our economy or to tax revenues.

So, if we didn't have lowly paid immigrants, would the economy stop growing, or would the growth come from paying other workers a decent wage and uplifting their income so they (a) buy more and (b) pay more taxes?

And if we didn't have to house 330,000 immigrants last year, what would be the impact on the demand for housing and so the cost of housing?

Of course, we need immigrants in skilled jobs like Doctors and Nurses, because there's so much extra demand on those services.  Of course, some of that demand is from our ageing population, and some of it is from 330,000 other sources.

All of that causes me some personal concern.  Back in 70's, I wore my Rock Against Racism badges with pride, and more than a little trepidation in some parts of the country.  But that was against the casual embedded racism demonstrated by "Love Thy Neighbour" or "the B&W minstrel show".  That wasn't right.  That was against people who wanted no more than to become part of an integrated British society.

Today, things have changed.  Some for the good, and some less obviously so.  But the protest certainly wouldn't have the same grounds.  

Leave.

chillidoggy

Brexit. Brexit. Brexit.

I'm getting used to the term now. Despite my earlier misgivings that it was probably coined by some smart-arsed hipster economist, male-bun sporting twat who eats cereal at a fiver a bowl in Islington, or some other overpriced London borough, whilst wearing trousers tight enough to show off his inadequate tackle.

chillidoggy

i think I'm turning into Sambostar, apart from the Stella and fags.

chillidoggy

Multiple posts, that's the way to do it.

TTony

chillidoggy said:

Multiple votes, that's the way to do it.

TTony

 Whatever the actual outcome on the day, I think this will actually play out in the same way as the Scottish independence referendum.  To a fairly inevitable conclusion.

Even if Bremain win the vote on the day, it will be marginal.  We're talking 55/45, not 80/20.  Certainly nothing like the original EEC-in vote majority.

The Tory party will then fractur, with the frustrated Brexiteers assassinating Cami and Gideon.  (The parallel being SNP removing Labour from the Scottish politcal map).  Having established a new leadership (yes, the scary probability is BJ, PM), there will then be a second referendum, with different political masters manipulating the civil servants & media with their new acolytes enjoying their new found freedom to express their views, leading to a different outcome.  (The parallel being the 2nd Scottish independence vote - the only question about which now seems to be "when" rather than "if"). 

So, what role for Farage in the next Tory administration?

Oh, and I still fancy moving north of the border, because Sturgeon is still the only competent politician likely to do a decent job for the electorate.

ToneControl

UnclePsychosis said:

Phil_aka_Pip said:

UnclePsychosis said:

insulting to professional economists

Well, you could try "insulting" them. Or you could just point out that none of them have ever accurately predicted anything, and that if you asked n economists for the solution to a problem they'd give you as minimum of n different answers.

Ipsos Mori took n = 639 of them. 

And, instead of 639 different answers, 88% of them "thought it most likely that real GDP would be negatively impacted in the next 5 years, if the UK left the EU and the single market. 4% thought GDP would be positively impacted over the same time period and the 7% thought GDP would be broadly unaffected." 

If that wasn't bad enough for Brexit, 73% of the 639 thought "that real household incomes in the UK would be lower over the next 10 to 20 years, if the UK left the EU and the single market. This compares with 10% who thought that incomes would rise and 13% who thought that incomes would be broadly unaffected."

So, economists are overwhelmingly against Brexit.

Scientists and Universities are overwhelmingly against Brexit

Immigrants are a net benefit to the UK economy and have "no negative effect on UK wages", thus demolishing another Brexit myth. 

Still, you guys carry on putting your fingers in your ears. "La la la la la, not listening, nasty economists, nasty scientists, nasty germans, la la la la la"....

there's too many vested interests there

scientists now rely on research funding for their career development, much/most comes from the EU.

In the past it came mostly from UK funding bodies like SERC

Current scientists probably fail to imagine that if we stopped giving money to the EU, and getting half of it back, we'd fund our own research directly

immigrants have vastly affected the "going rate" for many jobs, and I can tell you it's definitely reduced rates for plumbing and IT by at least 30%

Fretwired

TTony said:

I've heard plenty of BS arguments about the economic impact and far fewer about the immigration aspect.

Our economy is growing, so we need more immigrants to do the jobs.  Hmmmm.  

This is apocryphal rather than the result of detailed statistical analysis, but I see more immigrants in lower paid jobs.  How many of your office cleaners are English?  How many of the workers in your local coffee / sandwich shop?  How many of your free-paper hander-outers?  How many of your Big Issue sellers?  In London, the answer is very few.  But then, the answer in London is very few of any worker.

The point is that low wage = low contribution to our economy or to tax revenues.

So, if we didn't have lowly paid immigrants, would the economy stop growing, or would the growth come from paying other workers a decent wage and uplifting their income so they (a) buy more and (b) pay more taxes?

And if we didn't have to house 330,000 immigrants last year, what would be the impact on the demand for housing and so the cost of housing?

Of course, we need immigrants in skilled jobs like Doctors and Nurses, because there's so much extra demand on those services.  Of course, some of that demand is from our ageing population, and some of it is from 330,000 other sources.

All of that causes me some personal concern.  Back in 70's, I wore my Rock Against Racism badges with pride, and more than a little trepidation in some parts of the country.  But that was against the casual embedded racism demonstrated by "Love Thy Neighbour" or "the B&W minstrel show".  That wasn't right.  That was against people who wanted no more than to become part of an integrated British society.

Today, things have changed.  Some for the good, and some less obviously so.  But the protest certainly wouldn't have the same grounds.  

Leave.

I'm also voting to leave but I don't think immigration is as big an issue (which is why the Leave mob haven't really being using it as a reason to quit as whether we're in or out we will need migrants).

I run two business networks one of which meets in a hotel in north Hertfordshire. The cleaners are actually English as are the waiting staff. The management are all EU nationals except the manager who is Russian. Businesses where I live depend on highly skilled EU labour (we have Airbus, MBDA and a host of high tech businesses) and my area has become east European central. They all have jobs - that's what attracts them.

The problem is the lack of infrastructure. The government needs to build more houses, schools, hospitals and roads.

I would like the government to have control over the numbers and have a points system so we focus on people we need. It is interesting to note that we had as many immigrants from outside the EU as from the EU. And Dave said he wanted immigration under 100K. Perhaps he'd like to explain why so many people are allowed into the UK from outside the EU. This is one area we can control but don't.

Sambostar

I agree with @TTony, more people doing more low paid jobs because of the very fact there are more people is probably more destructive to the economy than anything else, given the extra strain on the infrastructure versus low tax contributions.

If the price of lettuces quadruples, more will be spent on the roads and the roads will need less regular maintenance, so therefore your car will as well, as will you time wasted in traffic jams and money on wasted fuel, or time wasted in GP's, thus allowing you to easily afford the quadrupled lettuce and have a better quality of life to boot.

Or we can just keep growing and growing and growing and judge the success of our economy solely on GDP whilst the infrastructure and the quality of life go to shit.

tone1

I'm still waiting to see what Russell Brand thinks...then I'll make up my mind

ToneControl

UnclePsychosis said:

Fretwired said:

The experts can just f**k off. They're irrelevant.

Welcome to Brexit: where you should ignore educated opinion. Even if those experts come from different fields, and have come to the same conclusion for vastly different reasons.

The rise of anti-intellectualism is fast becoming a serious threat it seems. See also Donald Trump.

Economics is not a science, you've already been told lots of examples of when the most senior economists looked like idiots.

Educated idiots.

The most important reason to vote is on principles

Do you agree with becoming a state with limited local government in an EU superstate, elected by people in countries thousands of miles away?

I don't, and I'll take the alleged economic risk, it's really not that big a deal, and it may be that we do better not worse

Look at poor Canada, Oz and NZ, they're all up shit creek without being in the EU aren't they?

Our Economy is way bigger, but we couldn't possibly survive on our own - could we?

TTony

Fretwired said:

The problem is the lack of infrastructure. The government needs to build more houses, schools, hospitals and roads.

The number of new houses needed seems amazingly close to the net immigration number.  There's a direct correlation between the number of new houses needed (immigration), and the number of school places needed, the number of Hospital beds needed, the impact on public transport, roads, et al.

But I'd go with a points system - just have to set the limit at a sensible point.

Sambostar said:

I agree with @TTony

Not a phrase I expect to hear too often.  

Ro_S

.

Sambostar

About 50% of everyone in Totton, Hants this lunchtime was Eastern European.  It's not Margate by any stretch of the imagination, just a small working class town that has gone middle class with house prices.  There isn't a massive calling for cheap unskilled labour either, there are a few shops, but it's a way from the Strawberry and Lettuce farms.  The problem is that they were all wheeling pushchairs and didn't, to my eyes, seem to be working either.

ToneControl

TTony said:

 Whatever the actual outcome on the day, I think this will actually play out in the same way as the Scottish independence referendum.  To a fairly inevitable conclusion.

Even if Bremain win the vote on the day, it will be marginal.  We're talking 55/45, not 80/20.  Certainly nothing like the original EEC-in vote majority.

The Tory party will then fractur, with the frustrated Brexiteers assassinating Cami and Gideon.  (The parallel being SNP removing Labour from the Scottish politcal map).  Having established a new leadership (yes, the scary probability is BJ, PM), there will then be a second referendum, with different political masters manipulating the civil servants & media with their new acolytes enjoying their new found freedom to express their views, leading to a different outcome.  (The parallel being the 2nd Scottish independence vote - the only question about which now seems to be "when" rather than "if"). 

So, what role for Farage in the next Tory administration?

Oh, and I still fancy moving north of the border, because Sturgeon is still the only competent politician likely to do a decent job for the electorate.

I thought Scottish Exit relied on lots of votes from the enthusiastic younger voters (and tacitly nationalistic I assume).

They were defeated by the traditional and often older voters (AFAIK)

Brexit probably relies on votes from older voters I am guessing. they do actually turn out to vote, and I can't see the mass interest in the young to vote remain

I'm an old scrote, and already voted EXIT