Brian
Eating fat, staying slim
A real shame some people had a greater priority than brexit and didn’t all back Labour, even in just one election in 2019 to get that second referendum. Still, mustn’t grumble...
Brexit: give me a positive effect... XI
- Thread starter Stunsworth
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Minio
Kind of Sort of Not really...
I am not surprised that there was so little support for Labour's position.
Sitting on a fence and pretending there's no elephant in the room with a pretty unconvincing remainer in the driving seat is not a position that is going to be a vote winner, however you roll.
Sitting on a fence and pretending there's no elephant in the room with a pretty unconvincing remainer in the driving seat is not a position that is going to be a vote winner, however you roll.
eternumviti
Insufficient privileges to reply.
I didn't say anything about my view of Britain's place in the world of manufacturing, that was you. You also alluded to the UK having some kind of lamentable record on workers rights compared with the the EU, which, incidentally, is utter crap. I pointed out that the EU has just signed an investment agreement with China, whose record on human rights, (not to mention small matters like intellectual property and territorial and military aggression) certainly is lamentable. You now seem to have pivoted your fawning admiration for the EU and its high moral principles to China, FFS.
Well, I guess anything goes, as long as it isn't the abhorrent UK, but I have to say that I do sometimes find the progress of these debates pretty opaque, indeed a bit desperate.
ff1d1l
pfm Member
I'd imagine any leaver posting on a thread to list positives to leaving the EU would be similarly ready to slit their wrists.
TheDecameron
Unicorns fart glitter.
It’s a “how about a bit more patriotism round here” special. If it wasn’t the EU, it would be Germany as the focus:
The ugly face of British fascism. Worthy of 1930s Rothermere and once seen, it cannot be unseen. While this posturing from Farage and the British right was going on, Germany took in over 700,000 refugees from Syria alone. Britain? less than 3% of that.
It sticks in the gullet that Britain is now sliding down to medium sized irrelevance. Dwarfed geopolitically and economically by Europe and caught between China, Europe and an unsympathetic U.S.
The ugly face of British fascism. Worthy of 1930s Rothermere and once seen, it cannot be unseen. While this posturing from Farage and the British right was going on, Germany took in over 700,000 refugees from Syria alone. Britain? less than 3% of that.
ks.234
Half way to Infinity
John Major and Tony Blair highlighted the potential problems of the NI border back in 2016, yet nothing was done. The current problems with Brexit and borders generally is down to a lack of planning and refusal to acknowledge known issues over several years in favour of a gung-ho attitude of just ‘getting it done’. Whether the EU’s reaction is malicious intent or an understandable response to a threat is beside the point because a reaction was easily predictable, the problem was one that needed addressing by those driving Brexit at the beginning, not the end of the process
These problems would’ve been, should’ve been, sorted out a long time ago by any competent administration precisely to mitigate predictable reactions and known problems
These problems would’ve been, should’ve been, sorted out a long time ago by any competent administration precisely to mitigate predictable reactions and known problems
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It was inevitable, it just happened to start in June 2016. Yeah, right.
For Brexiters, yes. This is absolutely what most of them wanted in large swathes of the UK. Especially E Anglia, Lincolnshire, and the formerly industrial North.
russel
./_dazed_and_confused
I particularly mentioned China's human rights record so I am not sure why you say I have fawning admiration for them. I am pointing out that if you want Britain to succeed on the world stage you need an advanced manufacturing economy and research based economy, not one based on cheese exports as one prominent Brexiteer seems to think, which the UK does not have and what is more it is losing ground rapidly.
Matin Wolff of the FT makes the same point.
https://www.ft.com/content/217f6d28-5a3e-48e0-bf6e-c2618da8f34b
"Opinion UK labour productivity
Why once successful countries like the UK get left behind
As a nation loses its ability to innovate, it starts to stagnate
Since the global financial crisis, UK productivity has been virtually stagnant. In a stagnant economy, economic policy becomes zero-sum: the situation of some can only be improved by worsening that of others. This is a recipe for conflict. It is essential to generate sustainable economic growth, instead. The decline in productivity growth is not unique to the UK. Every member of the G7 leading high-income countries had sharply lower growth of output per hour between 2010 and 2019 than between 1990 and 2000. But the UK’s deterioration was the biggest, down from an annual rate of 2.6 per cent to a mere 0.4 per cent. The only G7 economy with lower productivity growth in the latter period was Italy. Proximate explanations are easy to find: the UK’s average annual gross fixed investment was the lowest in the G7 between 2010 and 2018, at just over 16 per cent of gross domestic product; and the only G7 country with lower average investment in research and development was, again, Italy. Since new technology is embodied in new machinery, such low investment almost guarantees low productivity growth."
Britain's problems are nothing to do with the EU and never were, they are self inflicted and the sooner you and your fellow Brexiteers realise that then the UK can move on.
Britain is stagnating and is getting left further behind.
Minio
Kind of Sort of Not really...
Yes. There are and will be a lot more successful countries in the world but I don’t want to live in them.
The USA is one of them. China another.
And plenty that don’t even come close.
How is success measured anyway.
What is it about the idea of economic migrants that you don't get?
They move to where there is a chance for greater income. They don't need to show loyalty to any given place, they have already demonstrated a propensity to move.
I am one of many a Brit who has worked around the UK. I didn't work in London for the love of the cockney accent. It was purely about economics.
So why am I supposed to now lament other economic migrants moving on? Yeah, right. Some delusion going on here.
Manufacturing / hi-tech manufacturing has not been a priority in the UK for 30 years. We even helped the Chinese to develop their manufacturing prowess.
Their quality control was beyond poor in the early 90s.
Some of us had to refocus our career as a result.
It's not coming back quickly.
We will be in a phase of managed decline, where our living standards decline as others rise. Manage it well and we will cope.
The bigger threat is through war in the coming decade+ IMO.
I get the idea perfectly well, thanks. I also get the fact that people move for a number of reasons. Being made to feel welcome and not subject to racist attacks is probably nice.
You and me both. However, in places where I am not made to feel welcome, I Foxtrot Oscar pretty quick. I'm not going to be subject to any kind of racist aggro either in most of the UK.
The delusion is yours in imagining that it is driven purely by economiics.
ks.234
Half way to Infinity
If you didn’t like how the UK was before Brexit, but you do now, what is it that you like now that you didn’t before?
eternumviti
Insufficient privileges to reply.
Ah, the lazy narrative that Brexiters are just a bunch of knuckle-dragging xenophobes again. The German exercise was a combination of response to public opinion (Merkel is known to keep a very close ear on opinion polls) and pragmatism - Germany had a worrying demographic problem. As soon as the opinion polls started to turn against the immigration, which it did, the German government was turning would be immigrants away and sending them straight back, and it still is.
Britain does have issues with immigration - something like a third of respondents in a recent study by Hope not Hate expressed some degree of antipathy to immigration, and there seems to be some current increase in support of various disparate far right groups amongst younger people. However, the figures are below all of the other European countries in the same study, Germany, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary & Italy. We're not that well up on far right extremism either. Last year there were two lethal far right shooting incidents in Germany, in the worst of which 10 people were shot dead in a shisha bar. Her special forces unit had to be partly dismantled due to far right extremism in it ranks, and so on. In Greece you have (or had) Golden Dawn, in Sweden the Swedish Democrats polling at 21%, In Italy The Fascist Brothers polling at 12%, and in France Marine Le Pen's National Rally is snapping at Macron's heels.
Yes, there is racism in the UK, and there is also antipathy towards immigration (not necessarily the same thing), but generally at lower levels than in many of your idealised EU countries. I'm not trying to excuse or justify it, but just saying it as it is. There is racism in the UK, but the UK is not a racist country.
There are higher percentages of non-white representation in the UK Parliament than within the EU institutions, and I would wager in the mid to upper levels of media, the arts and business than in many or most other European countries. Support for the BLM also ran across society here, most particularly amongst the young, at about the same level as Germany at just over 50%, the two countries showing greater support than any of the other countries in the survey mentioned above.
SteveS1
I heard that, pardon?
I would suggest otherwise, the people behind Leave.EU and Farage &Co knew their audience. The conflation of Freedom Of Movement with a refugee crisis was perfect timing for them. There is still a refugee crisis and we hear precious little about it now it has served it's purpose.
The antipathy to immigration was not "generally at lower levels than most of the EU" (see table). That's why it was central to the Brexit campaign. The numerous vox pops and QT audiences provided ample demonstration of hostile environment that had been cultivated - beginning with Cameron's absurd 'targets' which then led to May's "F off home or we're coming for you" trucks among other measures such as the fortunes squandered on vexatious automatic appealing of residence applications - seeking to make appeals fail for lack of ability to pay to fight them, rather than the justice or legitimacy of the claim.
Sustained media and particularly newspaper owner's xenphobic campaigning paid off bigly. It reached fever pitch during 2015 into 2016 - that is no coincidence.
Only when it was obvious that it was having the right effect and not putting off people who really should have known better, did Johnson join in with his own disgraceful contributions. It really became open season in the way that many Republicans now ape Trump.
Support for EU freedom of movement by country
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2019...hreat-how-europeans-view-freedom-of-movement/
Fact is, it's easy to whip up xenophobia as a scape goat for your own failings and the UK Government were all over it once they realised it didn't upset too many people - shame on them. Hardly suggestive of your contention that such attitudes are were somehow at a lower level in the UK than the EU countries.
eternumviti
Insufficient privileges to reply.
You mentioned China's human rights records as a bit of an afterthought following your gushing resumé of her prowess in manufacturing, of which we are all perfectly well aware.
Thanks for the links, though you might be surprised to know that I had already read the FT piece (yes, read!) only yesterday. Yes, the UK has a productivity problem, one discussed by myself on these forums in the past. However, that's not what you said prior to your narrative sobering up. You said that UK was a 'spiv capitalists wonderland dumping crap produced by people who have little or no protection under law', a bit of a travesty of the truth, if you'll forgive me. Sure, we have evolved into a services-based economy, and yes, China makes (at the moment) iPhones, and ICBMs. This is Comparative Advantage. Perhaps I'm spoiled. I have a friend who runs a successful company manufacturing satellite components and the spar sections for Airbus A220 aircraft, another who services and warehouses thousands of jet engines, both of them based here in Essex, not Essen or Shenzhen. For all of its extraordinary prowess in the engineering, automotive and pharma sectors though, you can be certain that the crappy plastic duck you have floating in your bath was made in capitalist-totalitarian China, probably using something not massively unlike slave labour.
eternumviti
Insufficient privileges to reply.
Oh, and I have never said that Britain's problems are due to the EU.
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