Cont: Brexit: Now What? Part 6. Pick up sticks...

[Pixel42]

And 10,000?
There's a reason we have more than that coming in each year.
It's the same reason the plucked-out-of-the-air-with-no-though-whatsoever 100,000 figure for reducing immigration when TM was Home Secretary was unachievable. It ignored the reality of why these people were coming here.

And finally, when we had the opportunity to limit the movement of the newly added eastern states, we chose not to.

You'd think by now people would have noticed that, no matter how solemnly the Tories promise to reduce immigration during election campaigns, they always actually allow it to increase.

The baby boomer generation is retiring, and the ratio of workers to pensioners is dropping like a stone. Pensioners are going to have to decide if they really would rather lie in their own **** than have someone who doesn't look and sound exactly like them wiping their bottoms for them.

 

[jimbob]

My MP's consulted on her constituents' attitudes to Brexit - like the country, my constituency narrowly voted to leave.

https://ruthforhighpeak.co.uk/updates/results-of-the-survey-of-the-uks-deal-with-the-eu/

1,525 High Peak residents completed the survey online and in paper form between 8th November and 7th December 2018. Names and postcodes were provided and checked. Non-constituents were excluded and any individual that had completed more than once, the most recent version was used.



How would you be most likely to vote if there was a vote on our deal to leave the EU?

85% would vote to Remain in the EU

5% would vote to accept the Prime Minister’s Deal

10% would vote to leave with No Deal

How did you vote in the 2016 Referendum?

82% voted Remain

14% voted Leave

4% did not vote (Usually as they had been under 18 at the time)

How have votes changed since 2016?

Leave Voters: 62% would vote to leave with No Deal

22% would vote to accept the Deal

16% would now vote to Remain in the EU

Remain voters: 96% would still vote to Remain in the EU

2% would vote to accept the Deal

2% would vote to leave with No Deal

Did not Vote: 87% would vote to Remain in the EU

11% would vote to Leave with No Deal

2% would vote to accept the Deal

Overall, this represents a 6.5% swing to Remain in High Peak, due to more Leave voters now wishing to Remain in the EU now the consequences of leaving are more clear, and young people making up approximately 3% of the electorate becoming entitled to vote since 2016.

This is very similar to the 54% to 56% in favour of Remain that has been found in recent national polls that analysed High Peak: https://whatukthinks.org/eu/opinion-polls/uk-poll-results/



Balancing Results

In 2016, 50.5% of High Peak voted to leave the EU whereas 49.5% voted to remain.

A far higher proportion of Remain voters completed the survey than Leave voters, largely as there appeared to be more concern about the details of the Brexit deal among Remain voters, who shared the survey more widely than Leave voters.

Most responses are analysed separately for Leave and Remain supporters, so the representativeness of the sample is not a problem, but for those where responses are combined I have weighted the answers for the proportions voting Leave and Remain in the referendum, to produce a ‘Balanced Total’ as is usual in polling analysis.



Balanced Result: How would you be most likely to vote if there was a vote on our deal to leave the EU?

If results of this survey are balanced between the proportions who voted to Leave or Remain in 2016, they are as follows:

56% would vote to Remain in the EU

12% would vote to accept the Prime Minister’s Deal

32% would vote to leave with No Deal

 

[Hlafordlaes]

BTW, the only way I can possible fathom May's insistence that a second referendum would be a democratic travesty is that there is an imperative for the UK to implement the first plebiscite and see it through, and then, and only then, could the UK consider any new initiatives, including to rejoin. With that I could sympathyze, except that it was a consultation, and as such matters go, carries less weight than one done with fuller knowledge. Otherwise, I see no other plausible explanation, unless it is an intentional Leaver misdirect. Or sloppy thinking. Or a brain freeze.

 

[jimbob]

x

BTW, the only way I can possible fathom May's insistence that a second referendum would be a democratic travesty is that there is an imperative for the UK to implement the first plebiscite and see it through, and then, and only then, could the UK consider any new initiatives, including to rejoin. Otherwise, I see no other plausible explanation, unless it is an intentional Leaver misdirect. Or sloppy thinking. Or a brain freeze.

John Crace is a very cutting parliamentary sketchwriter - he coined the term "Maybot"

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...ay-from-incompetence-to-mental-disintegration

What started off as the occasional one-off gig for Theresa May has now turned into a permanent residency. For the past two months the prime minister has spent every Monday afternoon in the Commons trying to defend her Brexit negotiations. With ever diminishing success.

In the process, she has turned herself into a piece of performance art. What began as a vaguely comical dadaist interpretation of incompetence has now become something altogether more disturbing. A video installation of extreme mental disintegration. All her algorithms are now in conflict with one another. The prime minister is falling apart in front of our eyes and even her own MPs are in a state of shock. Most are struggling to believe that only last week they voted for her to remain as their leader. Delusion must be contagious.

The prime minister’s out-of-date software systems promptly crashed completely and she started blaming Labour for the failure of the negotiations. Corbyn looked as astonished as anyone else. He was perfectly happy to accept he would almost certainly have screwed up the negotiations had he been given the chance, but as he had been on the allotment tending his Brussels sprouts for much of the last few weeks, it was a bit much to give him a hard time about it.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

The greatest contribution Britain is ever likely to make to the success of the EU would be to demonstrate, by leaving it, what a bloody stupid thing that is to do.

You're probably right, but as someone who didn't want to leave I don't personally want to be a martyr.

 

[Michel H]

You'd think by now people would have noticed that, no matter how solemnly the Tories promise to reduce immigration during election campaigns, they always actually allow it to increase.

The baby boomer generation is retiring, and the ratio of workers to pensioners is dropping like a stone. Pensioners are going to have to decide if they really would rather lie in their own **** than have someone who doesn't look and sound exactly like them wiping their bottoms for them.

But, are you sure Britain needs one million Poles to do what you are so poetically describing? I mean, can't there be some abuse of the free movement system, which could be advantageously controlled by introducing some limits? Fertility rates for various countries in 2016 are given here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN . I find: UK:1.8, Poland: 1.3 (very low), France: 2.0, Belgium: 1.7, Germany: 1.5 . So, fertility is actually lower in Poland than in the UK. In addition, there are measures that can be taken to encourage people to make children (child benefits, for example).

 

[Michel H]

How would you like it if it was targeted at you and your country?

I would probably understand that the UK (or any other country) wants to introduce some limits. Whether you can immigrate or not could be decided by introducing some kind of score (I had to take a GRE test in Physics myself before I could be admitted in an American university, around 1980).

 

[Michel H]

Let's assume that when you buy something in a shop, you demand as much change as what you paid. Let's assume that when you get insurance, you only have to pay in premiums whatever you get back. Imagine a lottery where everyone just wins their money back.

When I say:"so that the UK pays approximately what it gets from the EU", all expenses should be included, for example salaries paid to British civil servants working for the EU. In addition, I think some reasonable "solidarity percentage" should be included too. I mean, if the UK, a rich country, gets 90 pence for each pound spent, ok. If it gets only 25 pence back, there may be a problem. According to https://fullfact.org/europe/our-eu-membership-fee-55-million/ , the normal British contribution to the EU is about 19 billion pounds annually (with rebate not included - I have heard it is only temporary), and it is getting about 4 billion back (not quite sure about how this 4 billion figure is calculated, and if this has been done in a fair way).

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

BTW, the only way I can possible fathom May's insistence that a second referendum would be a democratic travesty is that there is an imperative for the UK to implement the first plebiscite and see it through, and then, and only then, could the UK consider any new initiatives, including to rejoin. With that I could sympathyze, except that it was a consultation, and as such matters go, carries less weight than one done with fuller knowledge. Otherwise, I see no other plausible explanation, unless it is an intentional Leaver misdirect. Or sloppy thinking. Or a brain freeze.

She is parroting Leaver propaganda because she thinks that is what people want to hear

 

[Arcade22]

But, are you sure Britain needs one million Poles to do what you are so poetically describing?

Of course they don't need to, but you'd have to be delusional to believe that Britain would come out more wealthy and prosperous without people willing to work hard for less pay than British people would accept.

Do they compete with local workers and can they bring down wages? Sure. But in absolute real terms it's a net gain. The real big problem is, to a large part, that those gains have not been distributed well enough to avoid resentment among those that end up losing out. Hence why so many enthusiastic Brexiters give the impression that they wouldn't at all mind if the economy was hurt, and most people ended up being poorer than they were, as long as "they got their jobs back".

 

[Vixen]

So when you said "fellow Jews", you actually meant to say "fellow Luxemburgers who, unlike him, were Jews"? Because that is definitely not what "fellow Jews" means.

No. The meaning is 'contemporaneous'. So I can talk about my fellow Pakistani Brits, without being Pakistani myself.

So, Juncker's father would have had fellow Jews (=compatriots/equals) whom he grew up with and went to school with. Two-thirds of these Jews disappeared during WWII never to return.

Clear now?

 

[Vixen]

Which has nothing to do with Juncker senior at all, anymore than it has to do with 90+% of the population of occupied-Luxembourg.

They did not control what the Nazis chose to do, so you implying there is somehow some relationship between these things is your usual desperate nonsense.


I'm not bloody surprised.
The tabloid press in this country (which includes the Telegraph and usually the Times) is hopeless at doing actual journalism.
The Sun's implicatin was that his father was a Nazi, and they didn't give a toss whether it was true or not.



Yeessss.

Now can you see why that has no implication at all on whether he was a Nazi?

Can you see why people who were born in Germany before the war might be more likely to be Nazis, than someone who was born in Luxembourg and only became "German" when their country was annexed in 1940? Who only became a soldier because he was conscripted?

I doubt Juncker's fellow Luzembourg Jews received the same privileges he did?

 

[Vixen]

How does this make him unreasonable, exactly?

Attacking the father of the president of the European comission because you want your country to exit the EU is an extremely low form of character assasination. It's not even a character assasination, it's just spewing random feces, hoping they stick somewhere.

It's low even by Brexit standards and that's saying something.

I mean come on, it's like saying the UK sucks, because a second cousin twice removed of their reigning monarch brutalized Congo. I'm sure many Britons would resent that too.

McHrozni

I was merely pointing out that the post-war Baby Boomer generation distrust of Germany as a nation is understandable, given its recent history of naked aggression and atrocities. I didn't say the perception was right or wrong.

 

[Vixen]

No, he was 17 or 18 years old when the Germans started conscripting over 10,000 of his fellow Luxembourgers into the Wehrmacht. When workers struck in protest at this conscription, twenty of their leaders were summarily executed, and thousands more were arrested and tortured. Around a third of conscripts managed to desert, but similarly faced execution if caught, as would anyone sheltering them.

Here you have the nub of it. Most will have remained spotty privates. Only the ones enthusiastically committed to the cause of National Socialism would have risen to officer class, especially if they were from the working class to begin with.

We don't know for sure Juncker's dad was an SS-Officer. I read it and assumed it was common knowledge.

 

[Pixel42]

No. The meaning is 'contemporaneous'. So I can talk about my fellow Pakistani Brits, without being Pakistani myself.

So, Juncker's father would have had fellow Jews (=compatriots/equals) whom he grew up with and went to school with. Two-thirds of these Jews disappeared during WWII never to return.

Clear now?

What's clear is that you have no understanding of basic English.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fellow

adjective

13. belonging to the same class or group; united by the same occupation, interests, etc.; being in the same condition:
fellow students; fellow sufferers.

A fellow student is someone who is, like you, a student. A fellow sufferer is someone who is, like you, a sufferer. A fellow Jew is someone who is, like you, a Jew.

There are other examples of this use at the link:

On Dec. 22, 1799, Sands told her cousins that she would be leaving to elope with a fellow boarder named Levi Weeks that night.

He has even joked about how his fellow Republicans attack him.

At least 29 fellow Republicans must vote against Boehner for a second ballot to be reached, and that seems very unlikely.

Instead, I spend much of my time criticizing my fellow atheists.

An atheist counsels his fellow non-believers on how not to talk to people of faith.

 

[Vixen]

Regarding free movement of people, Sudarshan said in "Understanding the Brexit Vote: The Impact of Polish Immigrants on Euroscepticism":

(https://www.humanityinaction.org/kn...impact-of-polish-immigrants-on-euroscepticism )
It is possible that some native British people have been concerned about the large Polish immigration, and that this has been a factor in choosing Leave in the 2016 referendum.

Now, let's assume the EU makes a new proposal to the UK, according to which:
- The British contribution to the European budget will be greatly reduced, from about 13 billion pounds each year (with rebate taken into account) to about 4 billion, so that the UK pays approximately what it gets from the EU (see https://fullfact.org/europe/our-eu-membership-fee-55-million/ ).
The European budget has to remain balanced, so this means the European "cohesion policy" (whose goal is to reduce regional disparity within the EU, using the European Regional Development Fund and other funds, see https://www.euronews.com/2018/03/06...d-poor-countries-eu-cohesion-policy-explained) will be greatly downsized.
- Member countries will get a right to limit immigration from other European countries if they so desire. The UK, in particular, will be able limit European immigration to a maximum of 10,000 people annually.

Would such a proposal be useful to both parties (the UK and the EU)? Would it justify a second referendum, in which most current Brexiteers would now recommend a "yes" vote, in view of the known advantages of the single market and its four freedoms (free movement of goods, services, capital and people) for growth and economic prosperity both in the UK and Europe (this is nicely explained here: https://eu-rope.ideasoneurope.eu/2018/10/28/frictionless-trade-is-not-the-same-as-free-trade/ )?

I don't think immigration from Poland is the problem. When Brexiteers rant about 'East Europeans' they usually mean a bit further East - Romania,Bulgaria, etc.

Poles have been in the UK in huge numbers ever since the war. The government awarded Polish refuges and migrants whole streets of houses in the Kilburn and Maida Vale area as a thank you for their amazing help in the war.

A large portion of the one million in the UK are probably British citizens anyway, regardless of the EU status.

 

[Andy_Ross]

According to Minette Batters President of the National Farmers' Union, on Channel 4 News.

"For British farmers it is a complete catastrophe to leave the EU with no deal"

It didn’t seem to bother them during the referendum campaign. I saw lots of huge signs pro Brexit in local farms and fields.

 

[Vixen]

Does anyone see the fail/success of a UK Brexit as a litmus test for other EU countries? Will the fail/success of Brexit change the odds of any other country at least trying (on something reasonably considerable as a 'actually trying' level) to leave the EU?

The nationalistic movements across Europe means there is a populist demand to leave the EU in several countries. The UK is being watched closely.

 

[Information Analyst]

Here you have the nub of it. Must will have remained spotty privates. Only the ones enthusiastically committed to the cause of National Socialism would have risen to officer class, especially if they were from the working class to begin with.

We don't know for sure Juncker's dad was an SS-Officer. I read it and assumed it was common knowledge.

Allow me to repeat:

After more effort than I should have put into it, I can find no evidence that Joseph Juncker was in the SS, nor any evidence that he was an officer in the Heer (army), either. All the references merely state he was forced to serve in the Wehrmacht.

If you read it, then please cite it, because I couldn't find anything like it.

Of course, I have a pretty good idea where you've gone wrong, but I'm feeling like a bit of a bastard at the moment, so I'm not going to offer you that lifeline. Maybe you can work it out yourself.

 

[angrysoba]

The greatest contribution Britain is ever likely to make to the success of the EU would be to demonstrate, by leaving it, what a bloody stupid thing that is to do.

We’re taking one for the team! The EU is lucky to have us.