If reform won the next election I couldn't bear living here but thanks to farage there's nowhere to go

We should use our own people first and as a last resort have limited immigration. And when we do everyone is treated fairly. No special privilege for being french over being from another nation.

They have some plans on education and training. We'll see how well they materialise.

They say though that there should be very limited, tightly controlled immigration only for critical skills shortages.

All my grammar school educated children received As in their languages GCSE. One did a language to A-level and got an A. Another did Latin GCSE as well and did very well in it.

You completely mistake the point. Of course I know about the parliaments: I did a stage in Brussels (and Strasbourg).I can pretty much guarantee that I know more about EU politics than you will ever be willing to find out. What you’re completely missing is that this isn’t some kind of “bureaucratic red tape waste blah blah” as put about by Brexit nuts. If you think so, you just prove you don’t really know anything about the point or workings of the EU; only what you’ve been told. Do you know WHY the parliaments move? Have you ever wondered why nobody seemed bothered about that before the Murdoch/Farage right cooked up this box-fresh whinge in about 2014? Do you know why nobody seemed bothered before then? Or why other EU countries aren’t that bothered either? Maybe try finding out.

You also don’t pay for it. British voters got back more than they ever paid to the EU in economic and social benefits (as we are all finding out, now our economy is slowly sliding down the toilet).

Plus - and I hate to tell you - basing your knowledge of politics on a couple of news articles isn’t very sensible. Have you actually read what these articles you’ve linked to actually say?

Most of those countries have special Commonwealth migration arrangements with the U.K. anyway. They were able to have this when we were in the EU, too.

It has been our governments’ policy not to train our own medical graduate and employ them for decades and decades (across both left and right wing parties). Places on medicine courses are subject to quotas. We deliberately under-train our workers so that we can fill jobs from workers trained elsewhere. We also under-train our young people in general, loading them up with debt for tertiary education and training and instead importing workers from elsewhere to fill skills gaps.

If you want to change this: great! Just know that is not remotely what Reform want to do. That would require massive expansion, funding and renationalisation of higher and vocational education, and Reform voters, who uniformly parrot the “too many graduates / Tony Blair fifty percent” bollocks, very especially don’t want that.

In fact, you can’t say in one breath that you want to open up high skill jobs to China and the US; and then in the next claim we should be training our own kids instead. Those two things are not really compatible with each other (and Brexiteers/Reformers don’t really want to pay for educating anyone. They most particularly do not want to pay more tax so that we can expand universities and vocational training in order to educate British kids to a higher skill level).

And why do you think so few Britons speak another language? First, because it’s not valued in our society; but recently, more tellingly, because Michael Gove (a Brexiter) included in his reforms to the school curriculum measures explicitly to downgrade languages in state schools. As a result, hardly any schools teach languages now; and since 2010 the number of children studying two languages at school, something that was routine even in comprehensives when I was at school, is now a vanishingly tiny proportion of the cohort.

To me, what was astonishing was that in the heart of the Eurosceptic movement there was no plan, no idea whatsoever for how it would work. And it's not like they didn't have time to come up with anything - the Eurosceptics have been around since Maastricht.

I remember listening to an interview with a barrister who had been a Eurosceptic Tory going way back to the early 90s, and after the Brexit vote had switched sides (trying to remember his name, he used to do the rounds on the political podcasts around 2016-2019, David something). Anyway, he said that in all the meetings, discussions, party conferences in all those decades of the movement, no-one ever thought about Northern Ireland. Never came up. Just didn't even cross their minds how to deal with it, they were so wrapped up in their pettifogging whinges about the EU.

David Cameron hoped to shut these idiots up once and for all with the referendum, but he was a lazy fool.

The EU is and should be an ally. We can collaborate closely. People wanting to move either way should get an appropriate visa for working and living. Keep it visa free and easy for short stays and holidays

Oh dear, this is going to be a bit of shock for you;
The parliament moves once a month: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/faq/3/why-does-parliament-move-between-brussels-and-strasbourg

They stopped vaccines several times, conducted raids and threatened to close the Irish border ;https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/17/eu-threatens-to-halt-covid-vaccine-exports-to-uk-unless-it-gets-fair-share

https://www.euronews.com/2021/03/21/covid-19-vaccines-uk-says-world-is-watching-eu-over-threat-to-ban-exports

Silly and ignorant posts are why we lost the Brexit debate.

I mean most surveys say 75-80% of Brits can't speak a second language.

Why were workers from the EU more special than workers from America, Australia, India or Nigeria? Brexit made everyone else equal if they wanted to work here. I have a Chinese friend who said he got his job in the UK thanks to Brexit and to being on an equal footing to Europeans in the job application process. High-skill, high-pay service sectors continued to draw non-EU skilled labour after Brexit. The Boriswave was a political choice he made anyway to depress wages. We can train our own people, what more do you want? We have school, apprenticeships, degree apprenticeships and an increasing number of people in higher education. We don't need to import medical staff to fill vacancies where we can have our own medical graduates do it. We should never have to rely on immigration forever and we should change things here if they aren't working.

You can collaborate on science funding without being in the EU. We had the Turing scheme instead.. My child's uni still had exchanges to the EU. But also has exchanges to the USA and China. Even Canada, Singapore and Japan.

To be fair to him, although I don’t know why I want to be fair to him, nobody seriously thought the referendum would go the way it did and there was no plan. This is evidenced by the way NI and Gibraltar hadn’t been considered at all. Cameron put the referendum on to shut the Euro skeptics up and stop the debate . The forecasts for what might happen were foggy either way. I nearly voted leave based on the leftxit argument that an almighty recession was heading the EUs way and we needed to distance ourselves. In the end, I couldn’t bear to align with Farage et al and voted remain.

Literally none of that is the case, from the “walking into jobs in France” to the “completely elastic supply of labour” or the Russian influence stuff or the stuff about vaccines. They’re manufactured and highly tendentious right wing talking points put about by the right-wing press, lots of them in the Murdoch tabloids and the GB News mediasphere. If you believe all that shit you have to have very little knowledge either about the EU or about economics or international politics — they are all manipulated “stories” that were drip-fed by the press and rightwing media, every last one of them. The stuff about “moving the parliament” and the vaccines is an absolute tell. If you believe any of it you’re an easy mark for this stuff.

I was very anti Brexit and believe it has made the UK poorer, but there is absolutely nothing incorrect in what the pp posted. I think just calling people idiots without any sort of argument makes you look ignorant and irrational.

100% agree with this. I live in an ABC1 demographic area, and I can tell you that the majority of folk here are seething with open borders and the economy squeezing the middle to high income earners. They are going to Reform because they have a desperate need for change and the two main parties are full of liars. Over and over again people are fed up with being told one thing, then they do another. Personally I'm politically homeless and listen to all opinions from Jeremy Corbyn to Rupert Lowe. With the state of the world in the middle east, I'd feel safer in Rupert Lowe's hands right now, than anyone else's.

And it won’t be over if the Greens win? Have you actually read their policies? They are so much worse than Reform.

Are you an idiot? This is all straight-up misinformation straight from the pages of the Daily Express. It’s simply garbage made up by malevolent journalists. Why not add in the bendy banana rubbish as well? That was literally invented by Johnson!

I agree . I can't see him wanting it. Neither him nor Tice. There's no evidence whatsoever that they'd cope with the responsibility. They are loaded and don't need the money and are both bothered by responsibility. You'd never have privacy ever again. I just don't see a PM there.

One of my neighbours who voted for Brexit said to me that the reason she’d voted for it was because “now Ireland will have to bring back the pound instead of the Euro”.

I mean — where do you even start? She had completely no idea that Ireland is even a separate country, never mind that it’s still part of the EU and had absolutely nothing to do with Brexit.

Like the MAGAs voting Trump in not once but twice, Brexiteers who think Reform is going to solve the very problems Brexit created are simply idiots on main. It’s a scary time — because all those people are not going to be sorting out all this mess in a few years’ time.

The poor in this country and deprived areas got huge financial and social support via the EU.

As much as I resent Cameron for holding the referendum, he wasnt a leaver, he was a remainer

Oh here's the weekly middle class I was better off in the EU thread...you might have been with your middle class privileges...your over 3 months every six months holidays, walking into high paid jobs in France.

Well the rest of us were paying to move the parliament from Brussels to Strasbourg every six months, paying farmers not to farm so food prices remained high, so that unelected officials could come up with ideas like the oh so successful EES system for non EU nationals which is an abject failure.

The rest of us had wages suppressed for 20 years because there was a completely elastic supply of labour. Paid for countries to be admitted to the union purely to keep them out of the sphere of Russian influence: Romania and Bulgaria for example which were second world countries at best... leading directly to the Ukrainian War.

And let's not forget that the UK paid to develop a COVID vaccine, paid for a factory in Europe and the EU who sat on their arse wanted to stop those vaccines coming to the UK...and when they got their own vaccines, the richer states got them first.

The best way would be to do some research on what their policies are going to be and then debate the pros and cons. Their tax policies and focus on families and economic growth are really appealing, particularly for working families and those on low wages.

By the way the Reform definition of working families means families that work, not the Labour definition that counter intuitively means those not working and on benefits. Labour calls working families ‘those with broad shoulders’.

No it was about the OP saying she couldn't do her job in Ireland without Irish experience.

Reform want to deport illegal immigrants and reduce legal migration. They do not and will not exterminate and kill a whole group of people.

Missing the entire point 🤷‍♀️

What makes you think I (or anyone else) wouldn’t know the language? I speak French, Spanish and some Italian. It doesn’t matter whether you speak the language or not, anyway - plenty of English expats don’t! - it’s the principle of freedom of movement.

Britain actually benefitted massively from EU freedom of movement, which filled high-skill labour deficits across our economy for more than a decade — we effectively siphoned off a huge amount of EU talent, from the NHS to universities to finance. Now those people have gone home, we’ve lost the benefit to our economy of excellent Polish plumbers and accountants, Romanian construction workers, Spanish nurses, German scientists and French engineers, etc. etc.

Who have we got instead? Lots of unskilled workers from elsewhere in the world with less good qualifications, many of whom are not remotely as good contributors to our economy as all the EU workers were. And we’ve still got lots of illegal migrants as well. So that was a massive fucking own goal by all the people who didn’t like immigration and were thick enough to think that Brexit would make immigrants go away. (Oh, and no, we don’t train those high skill people ourselves, because as a culture we don’t actually like investing in our own kids or funding education and training. We prefer to load all our young people up with massive debts, ration their access to higher education, and import all our doctors, nurses and lecturers from other counties where they take education more seriously. So those jobs are not suddenly going to British people instead. They’ve just disappeared for the most part.)

We’ve also lost: massive grant incomes for European science projects; the ERASMUS scheme which allowed our students to study in the EU and EU students to come here; we’ve lost all sorts of opportunities for travel and reciprocal exchange amongst cultures, including our own population actually leaving a few more languages and skills from elsewhere in Europe.

A job yes. Not necessarily one in OP s profession

Gosh I may just vote Reform!