@MasakaBuzz
Pt 2 :)
My baseline assumption with politicians regardless of hue is when they open their mouths they are lying.
Ah ok. I don't. I think most of them do get into it with genuine intentions (other than Boris but that's a whole other post). Unfortunately, politics has become so combative that they have to keep fighting to get/stay in power in order to effect any changes, and since any tiny weakness including acknowledging genuine complexity and the need to compromise sometimes is seized by the opposition they quickly descend into spin. But for MOST of them, I think they are generally spinning what they see as true, not telling outright lies. The deception is in what they chose not to say.
Sadly however someone can tell the truth as they see it and still be 100% wrong.
So I think on the Brexit side you had genuinely mendacious parties mostly outside UK politics (the Russian and US alt-right trolls, the pro-Brexit media), and a bunch of useful fools who could be conned into acting against the UK people's interests because they were blinded by ideology (Rees-Mogg, Cummings), jingoism (Francois) or ego (Farage, Johnson)
On the Remain side, you had arrogance and naivety. As Remain saw it, the economic case against Brexit was solid and everyone in the UK could see some benefit due to the EU (eg clean local beaches, roaming charges, an EU-funded local centre), so when the Scottish ref (where let's face it, the passions had been running true and deep for centuries, in stark contrast to the media-whipped froth against the EU that only surfaced outside the Tory party in the mid 00s) came down for the status quo I think it reassured Cameron that voters would be pragmatic and sensible when it came to the crunch. Remain were coming from the old-style "economical with the truth" politics and they just weren't expecting to deal with outright lies like the Leave facebook ads.
I don’t see Brexit as the country moving into the sunny uplands where everything is going to be perfect and Bulldogs are going to run free amongst us. I think it’s going to be difficult, and the benefits will take many years to come. However I do think there will be benefits eventually.
There will be benefits for some certainly, but I just don't think Britain alone has the economic clout to maintain our standard of living against the economic pressures from Asia and Africa. Look at Wuhan - a city the size of London that most of us have never even heard of! All over India, South East Asia and China, the populations are industrialising and urbanising, and because for them it's an upward move, they accept low wages and low living and consumer standards that we would not. Africa's coming next. Those are the people UK will be competing with on the global stage, not Polish builders. The EU, second largest economy in the world, has the clout to say "hey, you want to sell in our market, you meet our standards". The UK alone, not so much. So the small number of people who place themselves to benefit from the new low-standard, high import economy will do well. The rest of us won't. Remember before "EU workers steal our jobs" it was "Japanese imports steal our jobs"? Yeah, that's where we are going.
The Referendum on the E.U. shouldn't have been in 2016. It should have been before the Maastricht Treaty was signed. It was at that point that the Common Market became the EU, and the direction of travel became apparent.
I agree, that would have been a better time. I also think it would have been for Remain. There was nothing like the poison then that's been dripped into the public ear since. And if the worst had happened and we had been taking out then, at least that odious duplicitous toad Farage wouldn't have had an opportunity to trouser an MEP salary and pension while failing to represent the fishing industry he claims so much affinity with!
I am not comfortable with the lack of democratic accountability of the EU. Covered in part 1.
I also don’t see that The EU actually benefits the poorer in our society. The influx of Eastern European workers has forced wages down (It’s a basic supply and demand issue).
I do have sympathy, but it's complex. First is the point that the UK under EU rules could have applied more restrictions than we did. So we can't lay it wholly on the EU here.
Another thing that is not said enough is that we can't have a free market without freedom of movement, because if the cheap workers stay in one place, the jobs move. So given the free market (which typically Brexiteers say they want - "we thought we were joining a trade union"- we do also need freedom of workers to move around.
The critical thing to understand here (and again it's part of that "an economy is not a household budget" thing) is that yes, while supply and demand is relevant, it's not a zero sum, "one worker comes to the UK, one job is taken from a native British worker" thing. Those people are taking jobs in the UK but they are also spending in the UK which in turn supports other UK jobs and tax, whereas if the jobs had moved out of the UK altogether that spending would also disappear.
I appreciate that benefit doesn't really mean much to the people who think their wages/prospects have suffered from immigration, but I think if the jobs had left the UK altogether the country would be suffering more. And if we weren't part of the single market, a lot of jobs wouldn't exist in the first place.
All of those workers also need housing, education and health care. I think it has placed stresses on our infra structure, that wasn’t planned for. It doesn’t effect the political elite. They won’t be on waiting lists for operations or housing.
Yes, I agree, but that's an ideological decision by the UK government, not something the EU told us to do. We could and should have invested.
It is however worth noting that the areas that have most concerns about the impact of immigration are generally not the ones that actually have the most immigrants. So perhaps some of this is (media-driven?) fear of what could happen rather than lived experience.
I don’t have children, but I truly feel for the youngsters I know - the less academic ones who are struggling to find work that pays enough for decent housing and to raise a family.
I totally sympathise, but I think this is due to Austerity (which is basically a failure of the UK government to invest in the UK population) and Brexit will only make it worse 