Would you vote to Rejoin the EU if there was another referendum? - Part 2

[EEexpat]

Advantages and disadvantages?

I agree and, with hindsight, I think this is where the Remainers got the Brexit campaign completely wrong. If they had said we will return unemployed EU citizens after X months, which they were already allowed to do, I think it would have been enough to swing the vote.

Remainers, like me, never really understood the downsides of being in the EU, it never affected me. Having since reflected on how people would want to vote themselves to be poorer and more isolated, it was all about immigration

Several posters have said France has run out of money, or has no money. If that is the case, then the UK is slightly more skint than France as the UK has a per capita debt of €52k vs France per capita debt of €50k.

However, it is clear in the UK that much of the money spent was wasted. The NHS is at the point of collapse, the roads are pot holed and I swear I saw through a pothole on a bridge to the river below, the trains/busses are expensive, dirty and breaking down, the waterways are clogged with raw sewage, university education requires huge loans, the disability benefits and state pensions are too low for a decent standard of living.

France has slightly less debt per capita but most of their public infrastructure and systems seem to be working better.

No one is going to immigrate without a job already there and the UK has a huge jobs shortage while other EU countries are suffering from plenty of jobs but depopulation. Rejoining means our youngsters can get jobs out of University if they are willing to go to mainland Europe. I would prefer that to Dubai.

The wages only got nominally higher due to high inflation, in real terms they did not get higher wages, but pay cuts. 25/26 is first year since Brexit that real wages have increased (by 0.6%) but overall real wages have not kept up with increasing living costs.

You can learn a language at any age. I am learning French in my 50s.
Besides, many employers hire english speaking employees in the EU.
For example, Airbus hires english speakers in the thousands for the ESA and you do not need a word of French to start.

None of that makes sense.
If all the work is in the EU, and the EU has FoM, then why aren’t the jobs being filled?

Also, a lot of those students in my tutor group got very high GCSE grades, including 9s in Spanish and French. It's a very successful secondary school with excellent results. The students still didn't vote though!

i dont think there should be a referendum
we should rejoin
there should never have been a referendum in the first place

Export of services has increased which I would argue is because they were unaffected by Brexit and so would have grown whether we were in or out of the EU, but the export of goods which are affected by Brexit border controls has dropped by 14%.

Because FoM does not result in uncontrolled immigration. Because many of the jobs going unfilled are for the skills our graduates have and even english is a high demand skill because it is the common language globally for trade and business.
https://eures.europa.eu/how-find-and-train-jobs-are-demand-2025-04-17_en

English is in demand for those who had FOM here. So if they can use it here it must exist already.

I do not understand your point? Yes english has always been taught in some schools in Europe since 1500 or so.

@HoraceCope

there should never have been a referendum in the first place

This comment appears regularly, but never accompanied by reasons. The UK was asked the same question in 1975 retrospectively after MPs took it upon themselves to join the EU without a referendum beforehand.

So, if it was okay to ask in 1975, why not again in 2016? Could it be it was okay in 1975 because the government got the result they wanted to hear? Whereas in 2016 the government didn’t get what they wanted. Hence never ending calls for another referendum?

If there was another referendum and the result was not to join the EU, would there be a third referendum?

aah i didnt know that @EEexpat
so we joined and then people voted in 1975 after it happened?

Yes, it was about whether or not to stay in the EEC. We had already joined.

@HoraceCope
@PleasantGreenPorcupine

Yes, it was about whether or not to stay in the EEC. We had already joined.

Yes. That’s what happened. My parents voted to stay in the EEC on the basis that UK had only joined two years earlier in 1973. Not because they felt any better off.

41 years later in 2016, both my parents voted to leave the EU. Main reasons were:

They both worked in the NHS and liked the idea of the NHS receiving more funding. They got what they wanted as NHS did receive more funding. Whether that was due solely to Brexit seems to have different views.

They also thought that the EU had shifted from a trading bloc to a political union. Which was not the case in 1973.

They couldn’t see the benefit of allowing so many weaker Eastern European countries into the union in such a short space of time. All they seemed to be offering was cheaper labour which is detrimental to local employment and wages.

I think you have a good point about how it changed, and many people were wary of political union. You probably remember how the UK was pressured to adopt the Euro, for example. Many TUs also believed that bringing in cheap labour, whilst good for businesses and owners, was less good for the average UK worker.

The UK had twice tried to join in the 60s, but De Gaulle had blocked this, because he knew that the UK would oppose the Common Agricultural Policy, which was crucial to France, and because he thought that the UK was more pro US than pro Europe. Nevertheless the UK as an accession country was involved in development of EEC foreign policy.

The UK was only able to join because De Gaulle was no longer president of France, by which time the CAP was established. Wilson renegotiated the terms of the UK’s membership and he had explicitly contested the election on a commitment to renegotiate.

There was no major party or mainstream media that opposed membership.

Also, not just De Gaulle, but other European leaders thought that TUs in the UK were too powerful. Would that impact the FoM?I am always interested to read the contemporary accounts from France and Germany, it was definitely about their hegonomy in Europe, and the impact of the UK's membership.

Reading about Adenauer and post war FRG is very illuminating on this.

One very good reason was that people did not understand what they were voting for or about. It was complex and most people did not have sufficient knowledge. Many had not even heard of ERDF.

The facts couldn't be explained in a flimsy leaflet. I even heard racists saying they voted to leave because the UK had too many Asians.

Exporting has got extremely complex; businesses have gone to the wall. The whole referendum thing was akin to asking an untrained person to perform a hysterectomy.

People are citing goings on in France and Spain. But the same people need to look further afield; the world is a very different place now than it was at the time of the vote. Look at Russia, look at the current unpredictable USA. We need to be part of a strong union to face this challenge.

That's not true though, is it? I was working in the UK at the time. Many supermarkets were paying up to £1 over rminimum wage in the post Brexit exodus of labour. Lorry drivers pay went from £32k to £40k plus in the same 12 ~ 18 month time period. Trade rates have doubled. Inflation, while high in the last few years, has been nowhere near that. Now yes, overall pay growth has been nominal - but for those that voted 'leave' they definitely saw a big increases in real wages. Some of that has, in part, been eroded by inflation and some by increases in the minimum wage. But rates for trades are still 50% up, and for lorry drivers 10~20% up. And thats the problem that Labour had back then and has now - the metropolitan Labour party depends on the tradional labour voters for power. So it can't upset them too much

And it was a different bloc in those days, with a different vision. It may be entirely hypothetical but I doubt that we’d have voted in 1975 to stay in a union with, or with the stated intention of developing, the treaties, legal structure and rules of the 2016 EU.

I said upthread that I voted remain. I thought on balance that the upheaval and harm from leaving would outweigh any economic or political benefits. I preferred more years of attempts to improve the EU from the inside and a referendum in, say, a further decade if nothing got better. I believe I was right. But the majority disagreed and my side lost.

That being so we have to work with the situation as we find it now. Re-joining is certainly an option. But it’s a complicated one that needs many, many things to be considered, not least the terms of entry and membership. The political complexion of the bigger EU states is also a major factor.

We can’t simply be guided by a middle-class impulse that continental Europe is a jolly nice place, and sooo much more civilised than those beastly, vulgar Americans. Whatever ardent re-joiners might say that is what underlies a great deal of the more vocal parts of the pro-EU movement here.

Yes, definitely good points and I do think there was a certain attitude from people who benefitted from cheaper cleaners and plumbers. It all got somewhat simplistic, imo.

This is what the Russian bots, Trump etc WANT you to believe. That no one can be trusted and everything is corrupt, that way you lower your standards: “all politicians are corrupt so who cares about this evidence of actual corruption” etc. There is so much good happening in the world and so many people working hard to make the world better for others and future generations.

Look at something like the Earthshot Prize! It just doesn’t get airtime and there is big money to be made with 24/7 doom and gloom so that people give up on society and can’t see the wood for the trees.