Brexit: the referendum

GlennB said:
Latest Guradian poll now has "leave" with a 3 point lead, and the £ is losing value against major currencies.

Nice one, Dave. ffs
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It seems impossible to dislodge the "£350 million a week" and "Hordes of Turks" lies from the mind of the British public :(

In fact it seems that the harder we try to do it, the more ingrained it becomes.
 
Henri McPhee said:
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Roy Jenkins made the point that the chemical industry was all for a competitive common market. ICI no longer exists.

Cadburys moved to Poland under EU and European Commission rule.
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Some Cadbury production moved. It was moved by their American owners. Nothing to do with the EU.
How would you have stopped it?

As for ICI they were destroyed by their CEO and Board in the 90s They decided to move away from bulk chemicals and to progress up the value chain to become a higher growth, higher margin business.
They purchased National Starch & Chemical, Quest, Unichema, and Crosfield, the speciality chemicals businesses of Unilever for £8 billion. To do this they sold off the bulk commodity chemical plants and took on £4 billion of debt.
DuPont and Huntsman got the nylon, polyester, polythene and Tioxide plants when the bulk chemicals were sold and these plants are still in operation on Teesside along with various other chemical and petrochemical plants such as ammonia, acrylic, fertilizer etc.
Things didn't work out, the profits never came from the new acquisitions and they were sold off one at a time until finally in 2008 AkzoNobel purchased Dulux Paints, the last remaining piece of ICI and the ICI name along with it.

It was crap management and greedy shareholders and board that killed it, nothing to do with the EU at all.
 
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quadraginta said:
The "Big Lie" strategy.

It works.
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I see the IFS have taken Gove to task about him saying that the IFS have said that leaving the EU would free up £8bn which could be spent on the NHS.

http://www.ifs.org.uk/about/blog/346

IFS said:
That is why we conclude that leaving the EU would not, as Michael Gove claims we said, leave more money to spend on the NHS. Rather it would leave us spending less on public services, or taxing more, or borrowing more.
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From them, that's quite the slap down.
 
ohms said:
I see the IFS have taken Gove to task about him saying that the IFS have said that leaving the EU would free up £8bn which could be spent on the NHS.

http://www.ifs.org.uk/about/blog/346



From them, that's quite the slap down.
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It doesn't matter, the Brexit campaign and its supporters will continue to parrot the lie and the comparatively uninformed will come to believe. I heard one "man in the street" interviewed on the radio a few days ago and he was corrected, conceded that the information was inaccurate and the repeated the lie a few seconds later.

It doesn't matter that it's absolutely wrong, "£350m a week" has passed into lexicon of harm done by the EU along with straight (or bent depending on the story) bananas, banning sausages and making paperboys illegal.
 
Captain_Swoop said:
Some Cadbury production moved. It was moved by their American owners. Nothing to do with the EU.
How would you have stopped it?

As for ICI they were destroyed by their CEO and Board in the 90s They decided to move away from bulk chemicals and to progress up the value chain to become a higher growth, higher margin business.
They purchased National Starch & Chemical, Quest, Unichema, and Crosfield, the speciality chemicals businesses of Unilever for £8 billion. To do this they sold off the bulk commodity chemical plants and took on £4 billion of debt.
DuPont and Huntsman got the nylon, polyester, polythene and Tioxide plants when the bulk chemicals were sold and these plants are still in operation on Teesside along with various other chemical and petrochemical plants such as ammonia, acrylic, fertilizer etc.
Things didn't work out, the profits never came from the new acquisitions and they were sold off one at a time until finally in 2008 AkzoNobel purchased Dulux Paints, the last remaining piece of ICI and the ICI name along with it.

It was crap management and greedy shareholders and board that killed it, nothing to do with the EU at all.
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Tempted to use that on another forum, and one particular Brexiter seems to be working through pretty every industry/company they are convinced has been "destroyed by the EU"!
 
The problem is that it wasn't slapped down forcefully enough from the get go.
It was allowed to seep into the narrative (and headlines) before it was pointed out it was bollocks.

ETA: That's re: 350 million a week...
 
The 350 million per week is correct in one sense: it's the gross amount we send to Brussels - actually it's a slightly understated figure as the average amount per week in 2014 was £360 million per week.

http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-send-350m-week-brussels/22804

Now we get some of that money back from the EU, so the net figure is only about £83 million per week after all the rebates and returned money is taken into account.

I'd like to make two points about that though: firstly, £83 million per week is still a hefty sum; secondly, the UK government doesn't have much control over how the money is returned - and the amount returned could change over time.

I don't think it's wrong of the Leave campaigners to quote the larger figure: if I tell someone how much it costs per year to belong to my model flying club, should I tell them the figure they actually pay, or first deduct the benefits they get such as insurance charges and free coffee and sandwiches at the club meetings?

The Remain campaigners are just as guilty of misleading the public - they quote the smallest figure they can: some of the deductions they make are justifiable, others are more dubious.

The best way to state the facts would be to say that EU membership costs us somewhere between £83 million per week up to £244 million per week depending on which repayments and other adjustments you wish to take into account.
 
The objection to the 350million is a petty squabble over the use of the word "send".

Technically, 350million isn't "sent".
As mentioned above, it's the gross figure simplified into a weekly amount.

As said, the U.K. has no control over the the amount of the future rebates, or the spending of money received back.*

*It has 1/28th of a say.
 
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ceptimus said:
The 350 million per week is correct in one sense: it's the gross amount we send to Brussels - actually it's a slightly understated figure as the average amount per week in 2014 was £360 million per week.

http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-send-350m-week-brussels/22804

Now we get some of that money back from the EU, so the net figure is only about £83 million per week after all the rebates and returned money is taken into account.

I'd like to make two points about that though: firstly, £83 million per week is still a hefty sum; secondly, the UK government doesn't have much control over how the money is returned - and the amount returned could change over time.

I don't think it's wrong of the Leave campaigners to quote the larger figure: if I tell someone how much it costs per year to belong to my model flying club, should I tell them the figure they actually pay, or first deduct the benefits they get such as insurance charges and free coffee and sandwiches at the club meetings?

The Remain campaigners are just as guilty of misleading the public - they quote the smallest figure they can: some of the deductions they make are justifiable, others are more dubious.

The best way to state the facts would be to say that EU membership costs us somewhere between £83 million per week up to £244 million per week depending on which repayments and other adjustments you wish to take into account.
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I don't think so, If I say that it costs x to be in a club without mentioning that they reimburse me 2/3 of my membership fee, it is disingenuous.
 
Hlafordlaes said:
Calling it a conundrum and the referendum a stark illustration of "the problem" indicate you have specific thoughts on universal suffrage that you fail to spell out. Care to support this position?
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I think the discussion here - "The Big Lie works", the Hague piece jimbob linked to - and the Leave camp's apparent lead supports the idea that there are too many voters who can't tell soap from wossname. This would matter less if they were just citizens or there were no charlatans out there willing to shovel wossname at them, but as it is democracy in action falls far short of its promise. When it survives at all.

The problem, to me, is obvious. The solution is way above my pay-grade. I'm not a utopianist: I give my thinking-time to the wossname of history and the present, and how much more of it we'll see in the near future.
 
ceptimus said:
The 350 million per week is correct in one sense: it's the gross amount we send to Brussels - actually it's a slightly understated figure as the average amount per week in 2014 was £360 million per week.

http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-send-350m-week-brussels/22804

Now we get some of that money back from the EU, so the net figure is only about £83 million per week after all the rebates and returned money is taken into account.

I'd like to make two points about that though: firstly, £83 million per week is still a hefty sum; secondly, the UK government doesn't have much control over how the money is returned - and the amount returned could change over time.

I don't think it's wrong of the Leave campaigners to quote the larger figure: if I tell someone how much it costs per year to belong to my model flying club, should I tell them the figure they actually pay, or first deduct the benefits they get such as insurance charges and free coffee and sandwiches at the club meetings?

The Remain campaigners are just as guilty of misleading the public - they quote the smallest figure they can: some of the deductions they make are justifiable, others are more dubious.

The best way to state the facts would be to say that EU membership costs us somewhere between £83 million per week up to £244 million per week depending on which repayments and other adjustments you wish to take into account.
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The fundamental problem is rather akin to the amount of money I spend on petrol to drive to work, imagine what I could with that money if I wasn't giving it all to BP! Of course there's the slight issue that If I don't spend that money to drive to work I won't have a job, and hence no income anyway.

The harsh reality is that the cost of 'saving' this money will be so high as to render it meaningless.

Same with immigration. 300,000 extra people every year is the figure they like to bandy about, ignoring that half of that is from outside the EU and of course that those immigrants from the EU in professions where the UK has skill shortages would still have to be allowed in.

The Brexiters like to promote the notion that we are too big a trading partner for the EU not to make favourable deal with. Leave aside the question of how much of that trade only exists because of a liberal business environment combined with EU membership. The EU is not monolith, every individual nation is going to have to sign off on a new deal, what if the countries who benefit most from the free movement of people simply decide to veto a deal that doesn't include it?

Brexit is Russian Roulette with 5 out of 6 chambers loaded, and your not quite sure about the sixth either...
 
ComfySlippers said:
The objection to the 350million is a petty squabble over the use of the word "send".
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It's really not. The Leave camp put it front and centre right at the beginning, so nothing about it is petty. When it's a straight up lie - the rebate is included before any money is sent, apart from anything else - one wonders why they use it. Is it compulsive, or do they have nothing else? Neither speaks well for them.

As said, the U.K. has no control over the the amount of the future rebates ...
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The UK has no control over asteroid impact, but there's no sign of one approaching. The terms of the rebate were pinned down by Thatcher and her people, they're not subject to the whim of Brussels.

Frankly, the idea that the EU, with everything else going on, is about to cut a swathe through the UK's rebates and opt-outs is vacuous. We know how things are and will be if we remain. What we haven't a clue about is what happens if we leave.
 
jimbob said:
Good article by William Hague

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...paign-cant-keep-dodging-the-biggest-question/
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I'll quote some of it

Yet others have said we would be like Albania, but that country has an agreement based on ultimately joining the EU and the euro. Or like Canada, it has been said, before realising that the deal between the EU and Canada has already taken seven years to negotiate, still isn’t ratified and wouldn’t cover most of our economy. Well, then, we would just rely on the World Trade Organisation rules, like America and China, was, I think, the last option put forward by Leave campaigners.


Anyone with a job really needs to know what that means. It means a tariff of 10 per cent can be added to every car we make, or 20 per cent on our huge exports of whisky, or 36 per cent on a dairy product. British businesses would face all those extra costs, and yet if they still wanted to export to the rest of Europe they would have to comply with all the EU rules on their products, getting the worst of all worlds – the regulation on top of extra taxes, as well as customs to clear.
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jimbob said:
I don't think so, If I say that it costs x to be in a club without mentioning that they reimburse me 2/3 of my membership fee, it is disingenuous.
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"The Honourable Member is employing terminological inexactitudes". Or something like that; Churchill, I think.

"Disingenuous" is a fine word and very apt.
 
jimbob said:
I'll quote some of it
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It's coming to something when William freaking Hague is the voice of reason...

Of course the Brexiters will just yell 'scaremongering' as loudly as it takes to drown him out.


It was the same with Obama, they never addressed his opinion, they just condemned him for daring to voice it.
 
Another extract from the Hague piece (which is very good):

The immigration policy of the Leave campaign is therefore quite a specific and careful obfuscation. But the economic policy is something else altogether – it is genuine confusion, to such an extent that even something that sounds definite is difficult to come up with. This is something that would not be possible at PMQs: obfuscation by trying not to talk about it all.



The policy is that if anybody mentions it, talk about immigration quickly.
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"If you fancy getting touched by Turks vote Remain."
 
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