If UK left EU, then why couldn't UK...

Hugo, your analogy with the increase in mortgage rates in the US isn't a very good one I feel. as an increase of 5% on a mortgage is a large amount and could tip a family in to real debt. But a 5% increase in the price of French apples isn't really going to make much difference especially if as so many of the 'experts' are saying the value of the £ is bound to decrease so that should offset any increase in tariff.
The suggestion that the people who are voting leave have no idea what it's like being on a tight budget. I can't understand where you get that idea as so many people wanting to leave are supposed to be the working classes.

OP

the concern I have with tariffs is how they ultimately make products that little bit more expensive for consumers.

The trigger for the Crash in 2008 was a mass of people in the US who had mortgages with introductory low interest rates that finished, reverting to a higher rate.

This led to people not affording payments and walking away. And as these mortgages were bundled up into financial products... well, we know the rest.

Introducing WTO tariff levels means making goods that little bit more expensive. What you need to ask yourself is if you think enough households and small businesses have the financial cushion to soak up these additional expenses and not cut their spending somewhere else.

Everyone who wants Leave seems to know no-one on a tight budget, knows no businesses on tight margins, and believes no such people or companies exist. Or writes these off as 'speedbumps' to be driven over (Gove, this week).

Bear that in mind when making a decision.

What none of these figures show is the impact of the supposed falling pound on the cost of our exports. If the doom mongers are correct then the £ is going to fall so it follows that our good will be cheaper thus we will sell more! or at the very least the tariff will be lower and will be negated by the fall in price. So our exports wouldn't suffer at all!

I posted this on another thread yesterday, but the Norwegian fishing industry example is interesting. Very briefly ... Unprocessed fish incurs a tariff of 2% and processed much higher. Which means Norway exports most of its fish to Germany and Poland to be processed there. This is gifting jobs to people within the EU, not Norwegians.

Cdtaylornats and last night I heard Gove mention the 'talking Scotland Britain down' phrase. So, to add to the above, there's a touch of 'you don't love Britain enough/are not patriotic enough' to commit to your country if you vote remain. An ugly approach which has scarred Scotland and divided people.

Read and listened to everything I can over weeks of this. I' am no longer on the fence. Brexit are offering narrow reasons and a lot of pie in the sky.
Add to that mix Gove and Johnson and a nightmare occurs. I AM IN.

It seems to me to be a rerun of the Scottish Referendum

The IN group are going with economics

The OUT group are going with emotion and "it'll be great" and "freedom"

I am voting to LEAVE because I am horrified by undemocratic the EU is. I don't think most of us - British - truly understand just how undemocratic the EU is.

I passionately believe in the NHS but there is no way that the NHS will be able to survive if we are flooded with 500,000 to 1 MILLION new people this year, next year and for years to come.

The same is true of social benefits and pensions - there is no way that we can continue to pay benefits to a never-ending flood of foreigners who, despite what the likes of the Labour Party wrongly claim, do not add any significance wealth to the country.

Big business likes the EU as it has flooded Britain with cheap workers - 80% of all NEW jobs created in the past 12 months in the UK have gone to non-British people. Basically, firms in the UK no longer want to employ British people. They want an endless pool of foreign workers which drives wages lower and lower.

Zero hour contracts, which were widespread across the EU before they were introduced into the UK, exist here now only because there is a massive flood of cheap workers into Britain. Being in the EU is driving wages down lower and lower - no wonder the likes of the ex Marks And Spencer boss loves being in the EU. He gets cheap labour.

Economically, it looks like the EU is collapsing and I am pretty sure, if we stay in, that British tax-payers will be forced to bail out the likes of Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal whose economies are getting worse and worse with each day that passes.

As I type this Sky News is talking about news reports of a secret plan to allow 1 million Turks into the UK. Think about that when you go to vote and then think about taking your children or parents to hospital and not being able to see a doctor.

Or not being able to get your children into your local schools because they are full of migrants. Or not being able to afford housing because house prices have soared and because what little social housing exists goes to migrant families first.

I am struggling to decide. I am leaning towards exit because at least we can choose to get rid of our government. We cannot do that with the EUreps. However I do like the EU environmental policies, I cannot ever see a British government doing anything to protect the environment.

There have been various reports from various different economists on the economic benefit of migrancy.

They all give different answers.

Personally I think it is unfair on our youngsters to have to compete with masses of middle aged people for the same jobs. We were all ( some might argue!) a bit useless in our late teens and twenties. Having our own youngsters out of work or in dead end jobs however doesn't figure into an economist's calculations.

I would like to know exactly what's taken into account when the Remain camp talk about the cost/benefit of EU immigration. I can well believe the argument that immigrants pay in more than they take out but does that include some kind of estimate of the cost of public services used (NHS care, education provision for children etc) or is it purely based on tax paid in versus benefits paid out? I'm struggling to see how any of us can make any kind of informed decision when we're being given completely contradictory 'facts' by both sides and we have no way of checking who is telling the truth about a lot of the claims being made. I'm finding it all genuinely stressful now because it doesn't feel right to vote on something I don't understand

Freedom isn't free, and yes there would be costs involved.

Trouble is the treasury report only found a tiny difference in the rate of growth due to Brexit and didn't include any benefits whatsoever. Do you notice whether GDP growth is 1.9% or 2%? Well the treasury can't even predict GDP growth to within 0.1% 3 months out, never mind 180 months.....

It also rather strangely claimed that Brexit would have no effect upon immigration, hence the two scenarios presented both saw immigration carrying on at record levels out to 2031. Brexit would clearly reduce immigration massively so I'd love to see how they came up with this assumption.

It assumed we wouldn't sign a single trade deal in 15 years! Hardly a ringing endorsement of the government.

All costs for brexit, all benefits for remain. No costs or uncertainty for remain, no benefits for Brexit.

Whether Brexit or remain though the treasury predicted strong growth, and the difference between the two was purely down to the length of time. The 'economy' would be 34% larger in 2031 with remain, or 32% larger with Brexit, though the headline figure of 6% is actually a compound one. The economy would have grown by an extra 6%, not be 6% larger.

Also worth pointing out here that the 'economy' here is mainly related to London and the South East....

Scary figures quoted but remarkably little to see once you crunch the numbers. Indeed well within the margin of error.

There's also an argument for the other costs to businesses; every business supplying services to an eu based business customer would need to be vat registered in that country.

Fine if youre a larger multinational but smaller businesses would struggle with the administrative burden and this would impact business expansion.

I'll also try to keep it simple and do my best to avoid my bias as I see it.

Pro exit camp argue that on the Economy we will be better off in the long run because we are free to trade with the rest of the world and make new trade agreements. They are also glossing over the short term economic shock and as Boris described it as " a price to be paid"

On immigration that we can stop it if we leave as we control our own borders, let in who we want based on skills we need.

That it's all about control and we would be masters of our own destiny. Set our own laws. Design our own immigration rules.

Pro-Remain camp argue that the extra business we generate by remaining in the EU dwarfs the relatively small amount of money we spend on the EU.

The vast majority of economists, financial experts, business experts and organisations like the BoE, IMF, WTO agree that we're better off in the EU. Ie. Our economy would be larger and thus our tax revenues higher and in turn have more money to spend on public services.

That immigration has been a net benefit to the economy, not a hinderance. Sure it's not been perfect but overall it's been more good than bad.

Leading international politician's who think we should stay in include: every EU leader including Angela Merkel, Obama, Chinese president, Japanese PM. Even the Norwegian PM thinks we should be in rather than out like them.

Leading international politician's who think we should get out. Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump, Putin.

Yes we could, and on paper it would actually be beneficial for us.

The reason being that trade with the EU is worth about £100 billion, but £68 ( iirc) Billion of that is imports.

Hence the imports would gain us a few billion per year in tariffs.

It works on paper but not so much in reality. The reason being that most businesses tend to run on a roughly 10% profit margin, as a huge generalisation.

Hence if you are looking to make 10% but face 10% tarifs you are unlikely to make money unless you jack your prices up. This makes you uncompetitive.

It still works for luxuries are these are not as price sensitive. Europeans would still pay top dollar for Scotch whiskey or Aberdeen angus steak etc. More mundane things however would see demand being met by cheaper, non tarif more domestic producers.

Hence whether we would profit or not is highly contested by economists.

Most likely result it appears would be an increase in income from tarifs but a reduction in overall trade which would not be balanced by the exchequer's gains. Or put in a more specific way we'd make lots of money from German cars but lose most of it on our agricultural produce.

Oddly though one thing I've noticed about the economists who are most doom laden in this regard is that they ignore fish. Once we leave the EU our EEZ becomes ours again and any fish contained could be protected and policed for our fishermen only.

Currently Europe gets a great deal of it's fish from our waters ( Norway and Iceland make a killing in this regard) effectively for free. It's probably worth north of £10 billion a year if you include regeneration of coastal areas and dole dependence in the equation, and more than that if you factor in supporting industries with a few fair assumptions.

Completely on the fence, swaying one way and then the other. Need a thread like this instead of the media/political circus we have and displayed outside Boris Johnson's house yesterday. Listening to LBC this morning Nick Farrari interrupted an interesting input from a listener to cut him off excitedly as Boris was just leaving his house once more! So what! Of course he had nothing to say but is this the way we want to go before considering such a momentous decision. So Mumsnetters keep posting in a common-sense, non aggressive way, give us facts and figures. Please, please, please.

In answer to your op ...

The problem would be, which companies would decide to locate in the UK, or keep production in the UK, if they (or rather their customers in the EU) had to pay an additional 10% import duty on UK goods?

To offset this additional cost, the UK would have to offer cheaper cost of production ie lower wages and/or lower employment standards.

We could do this (although not good for workers) because we would no longer be an EU member.

This is based on the assumption that we would have to pay the 10% import duties in to the EU.

There is a trade off, but it would be the workers in the UK who would have to fund the additional costs.

My concern is that many companies would not give UK workers the choice of accepting lower wages and would simply move production inside the EU.

If this happened, I think we would all agree it would be an economic disaster!

If the alternative happened and we were given a preferential free trade agreement (like Switzerland and Norway) we would still have to contribute to the EU funds anyway, but, as mentioned previously, without having any ability to control EU policy

Galloway is an establishment plant being used to discredit the leave campaign. It's the only explanation I can think of.

I've made up my mind - if George Galloway wants us out of the EU that's good enough for me. I'm voting to stay in.

Because a lot of rules within the EU say that many products have to be made within in (regardless of tax). Is the reason we have Nissan and Toyota. The loss of any jobs at Nissan in the north east would be unsustainable for the area.

Me too Kummerspeck, the simpler the better.

I am totally confused by all this as one side argues we benefit greatly economically from exports to the EU and the other side argues that we import more than we export so they need us more than we need them. We don't have media who can be trusted to give us unbiased information (I notice today The Times has an article where the pictures of In supporters are bigger and with more info attached than those of the Out supporters which tells me more than any words) so how do we find out?

I need a simple list of pros and cons and am hoping soon the threads will appear on MN discussing this as I find the opinions and discussion on here usually inform me far better than news coverage