to be glad that the Guardian is making enormous losses

[longfingernails]

www.pressgazette.co.uk/guardian-losses-reported-to-have-escalated-by-a-further-10m-to-68-7m-for-the-last-financial-year/

Great stuff. Their chatterati condescension, Islington moral vacuum and politically correct echo chamber has been a malignant blot upon our society for decades.

Let it wither upon the Viner.

Locally it should certainly be true that individual employers can displace local people with immigrants.

But even then it doesn't follow that unemployment goes up in that area - because the new people create new trade and demands for services. Not just in terms of numbers but because they may be looking for different services. A specialist food shop which arises to serve the new tastes and then expands, would be an easy example. From 2008 to 2014, there were 22,000 businesses started by Poles in the UK.

There's no guarantee this will happen in any particular small area, of course. But it's an example of how there isn't a straightforward relationship of Bodies In, Local People Lose Work. Because the amount of Work isn't fixed but increases as the economy grows (and usually shrinks when the economy shrinks).

And at the national level, the figures have usually panned out that immigration has helped the economy grow. And the new workers pay tax, contribute to the NI pot, help balance the ageing population with a boost in the working-age range.

BUT. And there is a big But with this.

If local areas do not perceive themselves as benefitting from that national growth, and they also see competition for some jobs (even if overall unemployment is level - but especially if overall local unemployment increases), then there will be problems.

We can choose to have a system where we cope with local bumps in employment levels by redistributing the benefits of that growth from boom areas to bump areas, via adequate social welfare, good retraining opportunities, support for new employers and support for geographic mobility. So that those affected by any bump can survive it and after a short period begin to benefit directly from the national growth. And this should work whatever the cause of the bump: mines and dockyards closing, local employer going bust, population change, whatever.

But we're currently busily dismantling our system that supports people through the bumps. Geographic mobility is likely to be reduced by removal of services for the elderly and eligibility of housing benefit for the young. Out of work benefits have been cut, and a load of gratuitous pain introduced to punish the poor for being poor. Eg the workload introduced for JobSeeker's Allowance claimants isn't intended to increase their chances of getting a job; it's intended to make The Taxpayer feel they're getting their money's worth with a make-work. David Freud was clear about this.

I'm running out of steam to neatly tie this up, but basically if you simultaneously pursue one set of policies which do tend to grow the economy but as usual don't grow it everywhere equally, and another set of policies which tend not only to increase inequality but to be actively punitive towards the losers in the new economy (blaming them for "lack of personal responsibility" rather than recognising the structural issues you have caused or at least not mitigated), you are setting yourself up for big problems. And I agree with some PP and would go further, to say that Lab, Lib and Tory all have culpability for pursuing these pro-inequality policies - and weren't just struggling to sell Remain but will continue to struggle in all elections because they simply can't admit their own policies are mutually incompatible.

And this (IMHO) is creating a void which allows, well, pretty much anyone not tainted by the back history of implementing these policies, to march in sell pretty much anything as long as it's change.

Sorry, quite tired and can't concentrate, so hope that isn't too incoherent.

It depends on what you mean by multiculturalism. Most people are happy to have people from other cultures providing a bit of culture but don't want the culture they grew up with and which has been the dominant culture of their area to be totally consumed by other cultures.
Native Americans weren't happy when their culture became consumed by white European settlers. The descendants of the white European settlers now aren't happy that Hispanics are becoming the dominant population.

Well, feminism can also be interpreted in multiple ways too, from rights to maternity pay and equal pay for equal work, to "militant" politics.

My point was that people voted Leave and Remain for many different reasons and with many different viewpoints. If you want to claim that many people who voted Leave are educated and well-paid, you also have to acknowledge that some of these educated well-paid people voted Leave to exploit the poor more (even if that was not your own reason for voting Leave). For example, I find it very hard to believe that right wing Tories like John Redwood have our interests at heart.

Conversely those who voted Remain should also acknowledge that many who voted Remain did so despite concerns about immigration, and some Remainers also voted almost entirely for their own financial interests (exploiting cheap Eastern European labour or EU agricultural subsidies, worried that their jobs in finance would leave the UK).

I don't disagree with you Haybott. I think people voted leave for many different reasons, some selfish, some less so, just like remain voters. What I find hard to stomach is the view that the reasons of leave voters are somehow less valid or that they didn't really have any reasons and were just led like sheep. I also find very odd the point of view that people should not have voted according to what they thought would benefit them and their families and communities. I have heard many times on MN "How could my parents/colleagues/everyone outside the cities and Scotland have voted leave when it is going to make my/my children's life worse?" Well I suppose because they believe it is going to make their/their children's life better. We expect people at general elections to vote according to their own interests but for some reason some people genuinely expected others to put their own interests to one side for the referendum. I find that attitude very hard to understand. Any theories gratefully received.

Also, and I ask this because I have been giving this a lot of thought and would really like to understand why the referendum has caused such a huge schism in our society and not to cause an argument, can anyone who does think that the majority of leave voters are either racist, xenophobic, nationalistic or misled please tell me what evidence or facts there are to support this view? I would be really interested to understand how you know this to be the case. I know most posters are not of this opinion - this is just addressed to anyone who does believe this to be the case.

2rebecca could you not make an analogy between immigration into the UK and colonisation of North America

The colonisation of North America was a genocide which followed a Doctrine of Discovery (lands whose inhabitants were not Christian of subjects of a European monarch could be seized) and had rape, murder, land theft, removal of children from families to 'civilise' them as its foundation

Nothing about immigration into the UK is even remotely comparable, and it is crass to make an equivalence.

misled

You mean, apart from the 350 million a week? Apart from the claims from the Leave campaign that we could stop freedom of movement but retain all other economic advantages, and that claims otherwise were "Project Fear"? And implying that Turkey was about to join the EU when in twenty odd years they have only met one requirement and when their membership would be automatically vetoed by Cyprus and Greece anyhow?

My organisation was running a 6% profit on 22 June. Immediately after Brexit we lost European investment (not from the EU, from European companies); we lost international investment and we had to impose a hiring freeze. Administrators who expected to have their fixed term contracts renewed didn't get them renewed because of Brexit. Some of them voted Leave, and were convinced by the leaders of the Leave campaign that the economy would be fine, it was just Project Fear. I believe they were misled. (However, to be fair, perhaps some of those who voted Remain did so because they were "over-worried" about the economy.)

I don't know whether a majority of Leave voters were misled, but it is surely indisputable that the campaign lied about basic facts and big issues.

A hard Brexit that leaves the science community excluded from participating in and leading big European science projects (which is not unlikely) will damage our science base and our universities, particularly when combined with the loss of international students and cuts to funding because of a tanking economy. I'm going to leave and so are many top scientists. I don't really get why it is hard for Leave voters to understand why the science and technology communities are so upset by Brexit - overnight we went from being one of the best scientific communities in the world to being doomed to years of uncertainty and then dead in the water if the hard Right get their way. For us there is really no up side - we have spent the last month trying to find one and dismally failing.

Well fuck me what a good reason to have voted out. London and the city will remain prosperous, but if the taxes from the Finance industry fall other areas may not get as much spent on them. Sunderland certainly won't prosper if Nissan cuts production

It's not about the reality of it, it's more the fact that the problems facing the financial services industry in the event of Brexit was a dumb fucking thing to campaign on in certain areas. It's about as politically astute a campaign strategy as saying "Let Them Eat Cake" was.

You and your fellow campaigners couldn't influence a large number of people to write a cross next to Remain instead of Leave any more than you can make former Guardian readers who are utterly fucked off with it buy it and support it so it doesn't go to the wall. However much you jump up and down and stamp your feet and call them stupid and say they're lying about their experiences.

Do you not think it might be better to listen to people's concerns, however contemptible you personally think they are? Otherwise, why on earth would you think they'd be remotely interested in your views, when you don't bother to engage with theirs?

We managed to make 49% of the country put a X next to remain, which to be fair in the face of the campaign against was an achievement.

15 years or more of Daily Mail and the Sun et al screaming about the EU and immigration was never going to be overcome in a 3 month campaign. The confirmation bias offered by the leave campaign, although dishonest was a far easier thing for people to buy, because it not only agreed with their perceptions (shaped by the media) but also made promises they would never be accountable for and ticked as many populist boxes as they could.

The London financial industry wasn't the only part of the campaign and concentrating on that is disingenuous, the remain campaign also had the backing of the CBI, BCC, IOD, the car industry, pharma, universities and many more.

The problem is that in the face of the opposing campaign which sold outright lies it doesn't matter. If people believe that they will have rainbows and unicorns they won't be dissuaded.

People's concerns were addressed, just not in the same way that the leave side managed to.

Its also funny that so many of you think the Guardian is dying, it made a loss, however it has the ability to make a loss because of the fund that supports it :)

The referendum was Remain's to lose. Most referendums swing towards the status quo.
politicscounter.com/?p=77

It takes a lot to get voters to leap into the unknown. Remain managed to do it by gibbering on about things the much of the populace found irrelevant and making some voters feel held in contempt.

The Leave campaign was a mess. It should have been an easy Remain victory.

The referendum was Remain's to lose.

I don't think this is true. I think the polling massively underestimated the anti-EU feeling and anti-immigration feeling. Right through the polling there were lots of undecideds, with a fraction probably unwilling to admit to pollsters that they wanted out primarily for immigration reasons. (A Remain voter myself, I was convinced that Leave would win from the beginning of the year onwards.)

I suspect that without the Jo Cox murder the Leave campaign might have won by a bigger margin.

Given that we didn't have a referendum on the subject 10 years ago, as promised by all the major political parties in their manifestos, but swept under the carpet by Gordon Brown when polls showed that the majority would have voted out, wouldn't it have been rational for the government to have put some effort into counterbalancing this anti Europe groundswell, instead of leaving the ground clear for the leavers?

I think it should be remembered that leave won by a very small margin, this was not a comprehensive victory.

There was also a much higher turnout than in the last 3 general elections, which suggests that people who don't usually vote, did so.

A key point, as I've repeated a lot, is to remember that the EU and immigration been the targets for blame for innumerate things over the last 20 years. For a lot of people, this association between "being forced by the EU" to do things, or blaming immigration for societies ills was always going to be difficult to shift.

The leave campaign was far from a mess. In fact, I'd counter that in fact it was rather brilliant. Stealing the elites narrative from trump was an attempt to galvanise the disenfranchised, and as more voted than in any other election you can probably say that it worked. The use of misinformation and the promises they couldn't possibly keep made leaving the EU an all things to all men proposition.

This overall leads to the leave campaign being able to band together disparate groups in order to achieve their slim majority. The thing is, and the leave campaign knew this, that none of them would be tasked with leading and implementing these propositions, they could (and did) simply step away and watch some other bugger do it.

I think this is very important to remember when people are saying that the remain campaign failed to listen to people and to take their fears into consideration. I think Cameron did! If you fear immigration he got the deals on benefits, if you feared more EU governance he got exemption from ever closer union, if you feared having to bail out more countries we got exemption from that, there was also promises to cut red tape.

What Cameron couldn't get is what people thought the leave camp were offering, which was as I said all things to all men.

But Cameron and the Remain campaign could not admit that many of the UK's problems were of his government's making. There was also not enough time to debunk myths about Europe which the right wing media has encouraged for years.

Cameron was arrogant and assumed he would win. He could have waited to hold the referendum. He could have pushed harder for a better deal. I think had it been clear to the EU that the UK was going to vote Leave they would have offered a better brake on immigration.

I'll go even further with this, despite much of what the leave side claimed being proved to being factually untrue, many of the posters on here come back with "ah but that's not how people feel".

Again, people might feel that immigration is too high. But it depends on the person doesn't, people in Boston in Lincolnshire might feel that it is to high where EU migrants make up about 10 % of the population, but in the North East people also voted out on immigration where as a whole EU immigration makes up 2.5% of the entire area. Whose "feelings" do we regard as the most important?

Feelings are not the same as facts, and this has been the thrust of the campaign, the leave campaign wouldn't have been able to win with using facts so it used emotional appeals, unsupported opinions, and outright lies.

Lets take the immigration debate, now the favourite position of the leave campaign was to say that our services were "cracking under the strain" yet 87% of Primary school children got their first choice school in the UK last year and 80% of secondary school children. Now this is less than previous years, but we knew in 2010/2011 that there had been a baby boom, not just by immigrant mothers, but over all and that extra school places would be needed. Very little has been done to prepare for this, yet 87% of primary school children got their first choice. Also the planning is easier to do because the majority of children of immigrants in this country, were born here, there are a far smaller number who come over with their parents.

The same goes for the health care system. We know that a 10% increase in immigration in an area causes a 19% fall in waiting times at A and E and for elective treatment because of the healthy migrant effect. Up thread people talked about not being able to get appointment's with their GP, fine, but this isn't because of immigration its because we have failed to train more GPs and actually have a crisis in retention of young doctors who go abroad because of the better pay and conditions .

Housing too, people blame immigration for the lack of social housing, yet only 9% of social housing is inhabited by immigrants and this is overall immigration not just EU, and shows that in fact immigrants are under represented in social housing as they make up about 15 % of the population ( despite that most people think its about 30% so most people "feel" immigration is actually higher than it is). Further more, EU immigrants don't jump the housing list either, despite what people "feel", its not true.

The same goes for benefits, EU immigrants are under represented there, but people feel that they are coming over to claim benefits. Despite the fact that even HMRC published data which showed the in their first year EU immigrants contributed £2.5bn more to the exchequer than they received in benefits, that works out as an £833 contribution for every EU immigrant in the country. But people feel that they are here to scrounge.

But when one side just uses people's feelings in order to get what they want it becomes very difficult to refute it with facts.

It goes further when we get to the classification of leave voters, the only people I've heard say that "all leave voters are racist and thick" are leave voters putting those words in others mouths. Now it is obviously going to be the case that there was a proportion of the leave vote that was racist, not all leave voters were racists, but all racists voted leave.

It goes further when you consider the post truth practices employed by the leave camp too. Cameron's speech at the British museum where he talked about the EU helping bring peace and security to Europe, was then reported as he said "If we leave the EU WW3 could happen" is totally factually incorrect, but was believed by many. The same goes with Cameron's deal with the EU, the right wing press and the leave campaign derided it as weak, when it was actually a far better deal than any other EU country has got, but because it was reported that way people believed it. The same with the dismissal of expert opinion, the post truth approach was to shout "PROJECT FEAR" or "SCAREMONGERING" when in fact most of the economic analysis was very clearly impartial and based upon several different scenarios. The further post truth apporach here was to accuse all those who didn't agree with their opinions of having vested interests with the EU, so any university or think tank, or even the BBC who has ever had an EU payment could be dismissed, the attempt to pass of EU payments for Erasmus as a vested interest for Oxford Economics to be biased towards the EU were quite simply laughable.

Essentially it boils down to this, we have reached a period, with Trump and Brexit where politicians have stopped basing their campaigns in fact and instead are appealing to feelings, emotions and perceptions rather than what is really going on. Telling people they were right is always going to be a vote winner.

Perhaps this was the biggest issue for remain, they tried to fight feelings with facts.

The problem is Small your facts are often no such thing 'only' 9 % that's pretty much one in ten no 'only' about it. Your dogmatic verbal violence impresses no one but you.

Almost ten percent is huge. 15% of the population is huge.
And the healthy migrant effect? What happens when these people age/ have kids/ etc? We need more? Then when they age? More again?
What we really need is sustainability, not constant growth in a finite area

there is literally no point in trying to explain anything anymore, especially not using verifiable facts

people believe in whatever confirms what they already believe

my PIL were surprised that I became a citizen after living here for 8 years, and being married to their English son for 5 - they honestly believed that citizenship and a passport were just given out at the entry points to the country.

likewise, everything that they had seen me do to become a citizen (documentation, fees, interview, life in the UK test, repeated trips to Lunar House in Croydon) never swayed them from the belief that anyone who fancies one is entitled to a British passport

It suited them to believe it, and the evidence literally in front of their faces didn't make a jot of difference.

This thread has turned slightly poetic, especially considering the OP, many people have been turned off by the guardian, other people cannot see why, and Small, to her credit is so desperate for that Guardian contract is tirelessly pointing out how everyone is just wrong.

And when the topic changes to Brexit we get the same whiff of how the paper reacted after the result, the whiff that leave was helped by ignorance. Nobody on remain ever seems to accept some people think leaving the EU is just better than remaining. It's got to always be some lack of nuance from the stupid working class. The stupid working class don't understand how globalisation benefits us all with cheap goods and free movement of people.

And I say this as a remain supporter.

*Today 15:17 Sooverthis

The problem is Small your facts are often no such thing 'only' 9 % that's pretty much one in ten no 'only' about it. Your dogmatic verbal violence impresses no one but you

Agree.

smallfox you patrol these threads like a rabid Rottweiler - 6 weeks on from the referendum & you're still at it.

Nothing you post is going to make the slightest difference to the eventual outcome.

We are leaving the EU.

9 % is the number of total immigrants in social housing, not EU immigrants, as 15% of the population are immigrants that means that they are under represented in terms of social housing. Why haven't you tackled the point I made regarding the fact that the impact of immigration on our services was over played. The rest of the things I quote are from Oxford University studies, LSE, BOE, IMF etc etc, all verifiable.

Oh and the facts are verifiable, that one comes from the Governments own data. But hey ho, you don't want to listen to actual facts cause it gets in the way of your feelings.

"Nobody on remain ever seems to accept some people think leaving the EU is just better than remaining"

Well we obviously do, but its perfectly fine to question why people thought it was better, and to point out that much of the winning campaign was out and out misinformation, therefore its a legitimate question and one that should be asked, lots of this thread has been about asking uncomfortable questions, why is it so bad to ask this one?

"Nothing you post is going to make the slightest difference to the eventual outcome. "

So what? Nothing you did made any difference to it either, however I am allowed to debate it.

"And the healthy migrant effect? What happens when these people age/ have kids/ etc? We need more? Then when they age? More again?
What we really need is sustainability, not constant growth in a finite area"

When they age and have kids they will have paid their taxes, just like you have, and are therefore entitled to get services.

There was a study by Robert Rowthorn into this, in which he basically decided that immigration was going to be fine, and needed but not at the current average level of 230,000 per year.

The problem with his average is that it is skewed because the high number of EU 8 immigrants in 2004-2006 and then again in 2014 and 2015. For about 4-5 years during this period it was under this level, and under the level that he suggested was appropriate.

Back to the "why people thought it was better to leave the EU" question. Why is it not allowed to question the campaign that got us here? You have to admit they were divisive and at very best deliberately misinformed their voters, are you saying that this had no effect on the outcome of the vote? Do you think that the right wing press's 20 year dishonest onslaught had no effect? If so, what was the point of it all?

But yes, keep attacking me, thanks for the ad homs btw, they really undermine your argument. Do you have trouble actually trying to unpick mine? Oh yeah, that'd be cause its factually based, not something based on feelings.

I like your posts, small fox

You might be the only one :)

It doesn't matter if theyve paid their taxes.
The planet is finite. Land area is finite. Propping up the pension and tax deficit by importing more people just kicks the can down the road, but you can't do it forever. You can't have infinite growth in a finite system. Massive movement of people and cultures causes huge upheaval- look at your history, your Volkwandring for example.

Immigration has had a terrible effect on some areas and a positive effect on others. If you're a voter in Page Hall you're going to have a rather dimmer view of it than say, someone in Cambridge who reaps the benefits of world class collaboration with colleagues from around the world. One doesn't deny or cancel out the other. Both viewpoints are valid - but our voter in Page Hall is going to be very pissed off being lectured to on the benefits of immigration by our voter in Cambridge, no?
I voted remain. but I can understand why leave won, because there are many places in the uk where immigration has not worked well and where people have genuine concerns.