To think that most people voted to leave the EU to stop freedom of movement?

[Moomin8]

The proposed new rules the government have supposedly set out that are designed to keep out 'low skilled' workers seem to me like social cleansing. Most recently , when people moan about 'immigrants' they are always talking about people from Eastern Europe in my experience.

What really annoys me is that almost all leaver voters deny repeatedly that their vote had anything to do with the fact they wanted freedom of movement stopped.

Sorry if this has been done to death. But why won't people just be honest?

I really enjoy leaver claims being shut down so effectively with actual facts rather than their redtop headline statements. Glorious!

This is true. My friend couldn't get income support when her British ex dh left her with 2 children to bring up and never having paid a penny in child support!

I'd have thought she'd have had a "derivative right to reside" (she definitely would have done if either of the children had been at school f/t), but she probably wouldn't have been able to find that out without access to specialist advice. The DWP wouldn't have told her, they don't know the bloody rules.

For me it was about the housing crisis, and the strain on basic resources like water.

The UK population is too high, whether that’s high or low skilled, British, EU or other.
We need to reduce the population to be sustainable.

I didn’t like EU spendthrift waste either, all that having two Parliament buildings and travelling back and forth each year. Complete basketcasery.

This is not because of immigration. It’s because the housing market has been propped up as the government cannot bear to let house prices fall

True. Look at how the Tories paid the price of the property crash of the early 90s.

Governments of every colour are shit scared of the same thing ever happening again. And it would be so much worse now. People with 50% negative equity often owed about £25k, now it would be more like £200k.

Unfortunately the facts have been readily available since before the referendum, but they are still ignored in favour of "feelz". We are living in the post-fact age. Hopefully there'll be backlash at some point.

And paying proper wages too. It's shocking that you say that skilled workers are not being paid at least 25K
A vast number of jobs don’t pay anything like 25K, even ones that require a degree or higher degree and significance skills. I think some people have no idea how little people are paid. They just don’t believe it. Like the man on Question Time a few weeks back who insisted that 80k was the average salary for a middle class job like a doctor or lawyer, and he refused to believe otherwise.

it's areas LEAST affected by immigration and where people are mostly white British that voted leave
But people travel around and will have visited areas with high immigration. Perhaps they’ve seen how those areas have been affected and they don’t want to see the same thing happen to their own area?

@PatchworkElmer Absolutely, largest group of UK-born construction workers is in the 50-65 age group, meaning that over 500,000 UK-born workers are likely to retire in the next 10-15 years...
mobile.twitter.com/NobleFrancis/status/1230111576348397568

I also live in the East Midlands. Most people in my town voted leave because they are racist, and didn't want any immigration. They also thought that leaving would mean all that lovely money going to the NHS. They know better now.

Mophead ^^ Are you basically saying that most people in your town who voted leave are white, therefore racist?

Just wondering.

buttermilk that research link you posted was interesting but needs more background. Of course those benefiting (newly joined states, those with low incomes) would reflect a desire for freedom of movement because they could access better pay and conditions here (at the best) or just work (at worst). Britain has the highest don't knows, but if, say, they were asked to commit, and half said they agreed with freedom of movement Britain would go to the top ten of those agreeing with freedom of movement. Interestingly if you look at the news from some of those quite high up (Italy, Spain, Greece) they have had among the most draconian measures against migrants. IMHO the whole issue became confused and I think the stay campaign didn't punch hard enough because they were complacent and in the SE bubble.

This idea that seems to be being put forward that only 'white' people voted leave and only 'white' people want more curbs on immigration is ludicrous

I voted leave. I like free movement. My vote had nothing to do with immigration whatsoever.

" largest group of UK-born construction workers is in the 50-65 age group, meaning that over 500,000 UK-born workers are likely to retire in the next 10-15 years..."

That's OK! Priti Patel is here now to make sure these people NEVER become economically inactive - they'll be working until they drop.

Talking to a person who left university nearly two years ago - reckons about nine out of ten people who studied engineering - that in-demand subject - have been struggling to find a job.

daisypond - DS is studying engineering. In his third year of a four year course. He’s been offered graduate positions in Singapore and Texas. His year group are getting similar offers with the majority from overseas.

Interesting. I don’t know the precise details. It’s just what I was told last week. Maybe the four-year course makes a difference. Do you mean most of the jobs offered are overseas?

daisypond. Daughters boyfriend has is due to complete degree with masters n engineering. He has four job offers and can’t decide. His friends all have graduate job offers.
Those in my sons year are all settled in good engineering related jobs now.

Well, I don’t know. It was all said in a context of the engineering students being quite smug about their job prospects and they’d been brought down to earth with a bump. Perhaps they weren’t very good students.

'a vote against the woke'? I don't think I've heard that one before. What a waste of a vote that would be!

Right now it feels eerily like Brexit has been seized upon by the Tories as a social engineering opportunity - first they fuck up the benefit system with Universal Credit being a means to get people into debt, next removing the means for the willing foreign labour force to come here and do the low paid manual work ... do you see where this is going?

@rHelloItsTimeForTea But how did you feel about the fact that voting leave would inevitably mean the loss of free movement? What was it that you did want to see from leaving?

Agree, FOM was a major reason people voted Leave.

The UK was stupid not to 1) limit immigration (like many of the other EU states, and 2) address the infrastructure needs of an increasing population.

I foresee the UK leaving the EU as the beginning of the end of it. EU citizens from the poorer states will continue to migrate to the richer EU ones (after all, why wouldn't they?!), which will likely lead to increasing division within these countries.

Being a member state of the EU and participating in a reciprocal arrangement ( FOM ) did not mean our borders were open to everyone, everywhere.
There has been a reduction in the number of people emigrating to the UK from the EU and a quite significant increase in the number of the people emigrating from countries outside the EU since the referendum.
So the total immigration figures are much the same, the percentage increase in the population of the UK has been on a steady upwards trajectory since after the war. No massive changes, just a steady increase. All the governments since the war knew this to be the case, the figures for population size are there for all to see.
Governments are responsible for infrastructure, some have spent more on it than others, but at the end of the day the average person in the street isn't responsible for ensuring that the infrastructure is in place for the population, the Government is.
But it is always far easier to blame some bloke from Poland for the lack of funding than it is to hold a government to account for its inadequacies.

EU citizens from the poorer states will continue to migrate to the richer EU one
Over time, the gap between the economies lessens and there will be less movement. Eastern European economies like Poland are recording the strongest growth out of any member states. It's similar to how Spain, Portugal and Ireland used to be the "poor" states until their economies developed as a result of their EEC/EU membership.

Indeed - indexation in Poland is much higher currently than elsewhere. Wages are rising. Companies like mine are looking elsewhere where before Poland was cheap and had the language skills. (I am not saying I agree with this but globalization means this is now the way of the world)