Doghouse Reilly
Adrift on an uncharted sea
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As a US citizen, I don't need a visa to travel to Europe. I don't see why Visas would be required of British citizens if Brexit were to occur.
Brexit: the referendum
- Thread starter MikeG
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As a US citizen, I don't need a visa to travel to Europe. I don't see why Visas would be required of British citizens if Brexit were to occur.
SusanB-M1
Incurable Optimist
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With heart sinking to boots, I hear this morning that the leave lot are slightly in the lead again. I mean, can the leavers really imagine the world flocking here to consult the opinions of Boris and Gove, Farrage and wishy-washy Fox (Liam)?
Perhaps the only hope now is that those whose voices and opinions are quoted from tweets, phone-ins, etc to put forward their pet topics will be out-numbered by those who have been quietly getting on with life and know they want the remain vote to win.
It is quite difficult to be an incurable optimist at the moment!!
Perhaps the only hope now is that those whose voices and opinions are quoted from tweets, phone-ins, etc to put forward their pet topics will be out-numbered by those who have been quietly getting on with life and know they want the remain vote to win.
It is quite difficult to be an incurable optimist at the moment!!
Yes we can imagine that and look forward to it possibly happening .
On what basis you imagine your leading advocates to be " better " than those you mention , I cannot imagine .
It is their completely inept approach that has most contributed to the present situation which the Remain block should be leading by the proverbial if they knew how to manage and present .A bunch of even bigger clowns .
Archie Gemmill Goal
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That seems to be way of it. I wish someone on Remain side would just call Bojo on his BS.
Is he saying that he will pledge £350m per day to the NHS post brexit?
Is he saying he will fight to increase non-eu immigration?
Is he going to reduce EU red tape ? If so what and when?
Will he offer tariff free trade to the EU? Will he refuse free movement of people? Will he force current expats on both sides to return home?
Etc etc
This £350 million is one of those bottomless pockets, I've heard (so far) that we can use this to fund the NHS, fund scientific research, support farmers, increase our defence spending and build more schools.....
No
No
Yes . And now you want to know how long a piece of string is .
No , No and absurd .
Next .
Archie Gemmill Goal
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Sorry are you answering for Bojo or for yourself?
From this we can see his 'more money for the NHS' is a lie. His 'we can bring in Australian teachers and Indian engineers' is a lie.
As for 'how long is a piece of string' - he's on record as saying he wants to remove EU workers protections so its not exactly an impossible question for him to tell us what he would like to repeal is it?
The idea of Free Trade with the EU is also a lie according to you.
And the absurd one? So all the Poles and Romanians get to stay? Under what system? They will have to apply for visas right? Are they going to be automatically granted them? Even if they don't meet the standards? Will they be allowed to stay in the UK while they apply? Is Farage on board with all this?
Under what authority can Bojo assure British expats in the EU that the same would apply to them and that they wouldn't be deported on Day one?
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That's a comparatively recent thing. IIRC when Mrs Don first started coming over to visit me in the 1990s she needed a visa and I used to require a visa to enter the U.S.. The visa waiver programme meant that visas were no longer required. If the UK left the EU then IMO very likely that the EU and UK would quickly come to an arrangement regarding visa waivers BUT one of the key pillars of the Brexit campaign is control over our borders.
What use is it to have control over your borders if EU citizens can come in without a visa ? You have no control over "these people" and who knows what Jihadis (or worse, casual agricultural workers) could come "swarming" over
IMO there is a significant risk that the UK could require EU citizens coming here to have a visa which in turn would almost certainly mean UK citizens requiring a visa to go over to Europe.
Archie Gemmill Goal
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The only positive thing is that I can't see any way that Scotland will accept being led by rightwing ****nuts like Bojo and Farage in an increasingly isolationist and obnoxious Little England.
The only question would be whether we could mobilise for another referendum and get out of the Union before the EU exit became official. Otherwise we'd be in a real ****-sandwich. Well done No voters!
Pritty Patel was on Radio 5 this morning making all kind of promises about the £350m a week (which the Radio 5 presented tried to challenge and highlight that everyone responsible says the figure is a lie but Brexit campaigners have clearly been told to shout anyone down who suggests it), Maintaining all the existing EU funding AND reducing VAT on fuel and funding the NHS and........
According to the remain campaign....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36523764
The Brexit campaigners are utterly shameless and they're going to persuade the UK electorate to **** our economy based on a lie so that the can continue to be Little Englanders.
The day after Brexit is announced, I will start campaigning for Welsh independence.
Archie Gemmill Goal
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Pritty Patel was on Radio 5 this morning making all kind of promises about the £350m a week (which the Radio 5 presented tried to challenge and highlight that everyone responsible says the figure is a lie but Brexit campaigners have clearly been told to shout anyone down who suggests it), Maintaining all the existing EU funding AND reducing VAT on fuel and funding the NHS and........
According to the remain campaign....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36523764
The Brexit campaigners are utterly shameless and they're going to persuade the UK electorate to **** our economy based on a lie so that the can continue to be Little Englanders.
The day after Brexit is announced, I will start campaigning for Welsh independence.
I think this is Trump politics in action. The strategists have seen that it doesn't matter whether what you say makes sense, only that it sounds good. The genie is now out of the bottle. Whether this trend crashes and burns or becomes the new normal we need to wait and see.
Mid
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What a shock, I wait with growing anticipation on which side the Mail, Express, Telegraph etc. come out on
No. I was merely pointing out some of the positive consequences of your fearful forecasts.
Remainers don't like it when you do this. When Osborne prophesized the collapse of house prices in the event of a Brexit, most young people's reaction was, "Great! At last I might be able to afford to get on the housing ladder - perhaps I should consider voting leave to make this possible."
Once the dunderhead Osborne realized that some people actually preferred his scare story scenario, he quietly dropped that particular dreamt-up threat.
Well can but for me and my employees, Brexit will be a financial disaster. Our largest single client has already stated quite clearly that they will switch to an E.U. based supplier if the U.K. leaves the E.U.
We're an IT services company. We will then be trying to compete in Europe against other non-EU companies (like those from India) with their developing world cost base and developing world day-rates instead of, as now, competing against other EU suppliers*. The market for our skills in the UK is small compared to that in the EU. The opportunities outside Europe are limited, the cost of setting up in the U.S. is prohibitive, the market in Australisia is more limited than it is in the UK and the rest of the world has little demand for our skills.
As far as I can see, there is so little (if anything ?) to gain from Brexit and so much to lose. The best case is that we lay off over half our employees, the most likely case is that we simply go out of business and I have to start all over again - not easy at my age
* - our largest client requires that non EU suppliers have to demonstrate, at their own cost, that they are compliant with EU employment legislation. One of the Indian companies just did that, it took them two years and must have cost them a fortune. They were chasing, unsuccessfully as it turned out, work worth several million Euro a year. We have never billed that client more than a million Euro in a year.
Yeah, I thought that it was a pretty dopey thing to say at the time but just because the price of houses comes down, doesn't mean that they become any more affordable.
A Brexit-led economic downturn, with all that implies for wages and employment combined with interest rate rises (required to support the pound and to combat the Brexit created inflation in the economy) would mean that although the price of houses may be 18% lower than if there had been no Brexit, the cost of borrowing, and hence the cost of owning a house could rise by far more than that.
At least it was a credible scenario - a sharp drop in demand leading to a fall in prices as opposed to the Brexit campaign scare stories of Turks swarming across our borders to rape our women
Ambrosia
Good of the Fods
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I agree we'd be shunted down the pecking order, but I'd guess that 10 years down the road deals would all be done.
Some deals would be worse, some would be better. It would probably average out to be more or less the same as we have now in the end. I think that there are lot of laudable things about the EU and that a post Brexit UK would keep in place a lot of those things anyway. e.g. standards for manufactured goods. It would take a lot of time and effort to retool to a different standard so for most things keeping the present ones makes sense. There are outliers that need addressing, but there aren't many of them.
All? How much risk?
Yes we'd export less stuff to the EU post Brexit. I doubt that we'd lose 50% of our GDP essentially overnight though.
Big companies are going to do whatever they have to do to maximise their returns to their shareholders. If some of them move elsewhere that opens up gaps in the market here for smaller companies to exploit.
The only thing I read from the Remain supporters is "It'll wreck the economy" my argument is that it'll hurt the economy for a while but in the longer term having more control over our own affairs will benefit the economy in the long run. A smaller company can move faster in response to changing market conditions. The same should be true of a smaller country.
We don't need to renegotiate "sweet deals" - we need to negotiate deals that are "good enough" It'd be easy for example to implement an online visa system to allow the free movement of most people between the EU/UK. If you pass a CRB check or equivalent and pay the nominal fee, you're good. Cause any trouble while you're here and it's easy too for the authorities to revoke your visa. Voila we allow 'free movement of people in principle' and that should satisfy that checkbox on EU trading partners checklists.
For me this is about control. We take back full control over our laws, we are free to implement the good EU ideas/regulations/standards. Which is most of them. We can ignore the bad ones.
There are some really bad EU directives, and once bad laws are on the books they're much harder to change than bad UK laws would be.
Archie Gemmill Goal
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Numbered for ease of reply
1. 10 years is a long time. A lot of permanent damage could be done in ten years
2. I think we might be talking about the wrong thing here. I might have been guilty of it as well but the result is not that the UK has a deal with Germany and a deal with France. We need to negotiate a deal with the EU as a whole. If say Romania does not agree to it, it doesn't get signed
Also your point on standards is interesting. If we accept the EU standard then it means we also accept any future changes to it without any way to influence it, or we don't accept it and diverge over time meaning we no longer comply. Adopting a standard while having no say over it seems like a second-rate position for a country to be in, no?
3. All would be at risk. How much risk would depend on the specific item in question, tariffs imposed, whether we continued to adhere to EU standards and general economic conditions such as how much, if any, the GBP devalued.
I doubt we'd lose 50% of GDP either, but how much would it take to be not worth the exit? How much would it take to be a significant problem? How much did GDP decline in the 2008 crash? I think even 5% would be a huge problem.
Of course we are still going to do business with the EU even without a trade deal because there are certain things that will be in demand even if they are more expensive. But it will be more difficult, more expensive, and less of it will happen.
And of course the moment our exports don't comply with EU standards we lose them all (in that category). Overnight.
4. No if big companies leave it doesn't open up anything. If Google, Goldman Sachs, IBM or whover is in Amsterdam instead of London it doesn't suddenly create a vacuum for a new search engine, or an investment bank or a consulting company in the UK. It just means the jobs leave. If Honda move their factory to Slovakia it doesn't mean we suddenly restart British Leyland. If there are gaps for small companies to exploit in the market then they should already be exploiting them. What's stopping them?
5. This seems like Brexiters wanting to have it both ways. We want to be able to stop immigrants but we're not actually going to stop immigrants. Just we want to be able to. But we won't.
6. No you can't pick and choose which standards you keep and which you don't if you want to still adhere to those standards. And you can't expect Europe to just stand back and watch a country pick and choose the good bits and take all the benefits while not taking their fair share of any burden too.
Even worse still the people who want to Brexit are the people who want to do away with lots of the stuff that you seem to see as being good. Bojo isn't going to implement some workers paradise in the UK while putting in place draconian measures to limit capitalist exploitations. He's going to bend every worker over, let business have their way with them and take his 10% off the top.