LEAVERS - update on the 'invoke A50 now' petition. I have the reply.

[Surferjet]

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The Government has responded to the petition you signed – “Invoke Article 50 of The Lisbon Treaty immediately.”.

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The British people have voted to leave the EU and their will must be respected and delivered. We should not trigger Article 50 until we have a UK approach and objectives.

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Hyacinth - I see what you mean about people bringing their non EU spouses in. But so what. What difference does that make to the overall situation. I wouldn't think there are a very high proportion of them and it makes absolutely no difference to me who comes in as far as race or creed is concerned. Why on earth does me not thinking of that fairly small amount of people have any relevance to my argument.
As I have said I disagree with the whole premise that free movement when it is linked to free trade.

But free trade and free movement are the same thing, surely?

What gives you the idea that they're a small proportion of people? As stated previously, with a serious accusation like you're making, we need more than your unverified hunches. And the relevance is that EU law is a significant source of non EU migration and you've not even thought about that in your argument. I am not saying you're wrong necessarily, but what you've said so far is neither coherent nor convincing. If what you're arguing for is immigration to reflect global ethnic makeup more accurately than it does now, show us your workings out.

"You have managed to suggest I am really a racist because I am hiding behind my reasonableness. "

Then give a valid reason for your objections to freedom of movement! Your argument goes round in circles, you think people from the EU coming in encourages firms not to train British young people. But then you say that we should be able to plug skills gaps by bringing in people from all over the world and not discriminate against those from outside.

So which is it, plug the skills gaps, or immigrants mean firms don't train people?

You've also talked about people coming from "poorer" countries and asked how many British people have settled in Poland and Romania ( btw there are about 35,000 Brits living in Poland), you've then gone on to say things like " the majority of immigrants are Eastern European" when actually every other country from Eastern Europe has under 100,000 people living here and the Polish now make up the biggest EU group (although there was a fairly large Polish immigrant population prior to EU expansion). But your repeated focus on this group suggests that it is this that you don't like.

Give me a valid reasons for not wanting freedom of movement!

Oh and surfer, you don't respond to my posts because you can't, again you're assertions bear little or now scrutiny at all.

I think loosing reciprocal rights would be too much of a negative outcome corcory, if nationals from every country had to go through some sort of hoop to come here (as in your view), I suspect the same treatment for British nationals will be applied when trying to settle abroad in any country.
Perhaps not a major problem for qualified professionals, certainly more of an issue for other groups of migrants.

In my opinion (and that is all it is) it would also be counterproductive to cover the skills gap in the UK, many professionals will not want to go through a bureaucratic process however streamlined it may be, and they may also not want the uncertainty that the rules may be changed after they've come here.

I have followed the posts with interest, thank you to all who posted links to interesting articles regarding the GFA, and immigration figures, articles, etc.
As I posted earlier and as a naturalised British "immigrant" made my feelings clearly known I will not repeat them. All I can say is that nothing "hard Brexiteers" have posted till now has made me reconsider my earlier conclusions.

I don't know if any of you heard the Radio 4 piece on the Brexit campaign last night, it was very interesting and worth a listen.

All I can add is that I 100% agree with the view that for many years now British governments have woefully neglected "upskilling" the population, as posted earlier and compared to say countries like Germany.

I also read a very interesting article on the Sunday Times on a Historian called Yuval Harari, who is publishing a book about how he perceived our future to be...it makes scary reading, and most of the arguments here about "taking back control" are so completely obsolete in the globalised world we live in that to be honest I for one can no longer be bothered to reply to them.

As a subscriber to The Times I have access to the article but I am not linking as you will not be able to read it. I will for sure buy his book when it's published as it gives a vision of a Techno future that is literally round the corner that will render the working classes and even the middle classes obsolete in the next 30 to 40 years.
This is what our children will have to face when they are our age and brings a perspective on the future that makes this whole Brexit farce completely irrelevant and the idea of "taking back control" yes delusional....

Transcribed passages from ST article "The Seer of Silicon Valley" (all rights belong to ST):

What is happening at the moment is that the narrative is collapsing,” he says. “Before 1991, there was the narrative of the Cold War. Then the Cold War ended and the new narrative was globalisation, liberal democracy and the need for everybody to adopt the breakthroughs of science and technology. This narrative ensures that gradually all nations will become like western Europe and America.”
However, there is a problem with this story, says Harari. “It just doesn’t work. It works for some countries, for some people, but it doesn’t work for a lot of countries, and even in the West it’s no longer working. What we are seeing is the collapse of the story, and when you don’t have a story of what is happening in the world, there is insecurity, there is confusion.

This is typical Harari — humans are nowhere without a good story. The other reason for our insecurity is, of course, technology, which is causing rapid, disorientating change that our creaking institutions simply cannot accommodate

The pace and volume of the data flow in the world today is such that voters are no longer capable of handling it,” he says. “Neither the voters nor the governments are able to make sense of what is happening. So obviously they become very insecure.
Part of the crisis we are seeing today — like with Brexit, like with Trump in America — is that people are beginning to sense that they are losing power,” he says. “People then make the mistake of blaming ‘Brussels’ or the ‘Washington elite’. This is wrong. Nobody really understands what’s happening now in the world, and nobody is in control.

The only people with the faintest idea what is going on are in Silicon Valley, which is where he believes the religions of tomorrow are developing

Some of the possibilities described in his new book are more than a little alarming. Drawing on contemporary life science, he suggests that humans are but a mass of biochemical algorithms, with little in the way of free will or soul. “We now see that the self, too, is an imaginary story,” he writes, “just like nations, gods and money.” According to Harari, it may not be long before we invent algorithms that work better than our own biological calculations, and use them to upgrade our emotional intelligence. Imagine an advanced love algorithm that could cut through all your hang-ups and superficial longings to work out who you might actually be happy with. You could dispense with all the awkward dates and just marry whoever Tinder tells you to. Or how about an upgraded Amazon Kindle that reads your emotions while you read a book? Using various body sensors, it could work out which parts of the book make you laugh or cry, when your pulse quickens, when you become bored or aroused. It would read and remember our reactions better than our conscious brain. So why not let it tell us what to read?

Furthermore, if an algorithm could record every political emotion we ever had, how we actually felt while watching every prime ministerial candidate’s speech or policy announcement, then surely it could tell us how best to vote. Why rely on our faulty memories and bias when we can vote based on how we felt at every important moment of the past decade? No Marxist could argue for false consciousness then. “The algorithms will be so good in making decisions for us that it would be madness not to follow their advice,” Harari writes

The changes Harari outlines, and our failure to adapt to the pace of them, could have some fairly terrifying consequences. He sees huge job loss due to automation as highly likely and “very scary”, resulting in the creation of a “useless class” comprising billions of people devoid of any economic or political value

It started with the working class, which is becoming the ‘unworking’ class. They will be the first part of the useless class, but it has started to spread to the middle classes — the next wave of changes brought about by artificial intelligence will threaten the middle classes most of all because these are the jobs that are easiest to replace. It’s easier to replace a doctor than a nurse. If you are a general physician and you just sit at a desk in front of a computer processing data, you are ripe for being automated. If you are a nurse and you actually do something, you give injections or whatever, they can’t replace you.”

You get the idea...sorry for derailing the discussion.

surfer, you seem to have stopped reading & responding to all the posters on here.

I'm still very interested in your response to some questions I (and others) have asked, including:

the subject of parliamentary versus plebiscite democracy.

your familiarity with the structure and workings of the EU.

what you think a 'hard Brexit' will look like and how it will reconcile seemingly incompatible elements like financial passporting.

how in your opinion the potential constitutional crises this throws up for Scotland and Northern Ireland.

What I am trying to say is IF even half of what is stated in his book is right, the techno future we face and the kind of cross country collaborations that are required to be leaders in the fields of biotech and technology will be greatly harmed by this isolation that the UK will suffer post Brexit, a lot of the great discoveries in biotech rely on this extended network of science researchers that yes the Eu subsidies to a great extent helped put the UK at the forefront and as a world leader. I am not hugely optimistic about future UK Governments managing this "standalone".

Thinking things through is exactly what Harari says most of us today, including our politicians, are not doing enough of. Instead of planning for an uncertain future, we are “stuck in the comfort zone” of 20th-century discussions, simply because that is what we understand.
Harari points out that there is the possibility of great inequality built into all this. In a world where almost all jobs are automated, the elites will have little use for the masses. Biological upgrades will not be shared equally, potentially creating a “cognitive elite” that will view the rest of mankind with the same superiority that sapiens once reserved for Neanderthals.

On a more positive note:
Despite his technological doomsaying, Harari is not a determinist. He believes that technology may bring us good things too, such as wildly efficient renewable energy sources and the ability to use 3D-printing technology to make food. He also believes that we should take responsibility for our actions. “If people are concerned, then they should look at their lives and the decisions they are making; about merging with their smartphones and their computers, and transferring authority to computer algorithms.”

These are the kind of things we should be pondering about our future, not some 20th century idea that any country is better off in isolation.

If Harari is even half right about all of this, then our age of instability may just be beginning. But like all the best prophets, he is delivering his warning just in time for us to change our ways. “It’s not something that will happen in thousands of years,” he says. “It is a timescale of decades, not millennia. If we want to do something about it, we should start thinking about it now. In 30 years it will be too late.”

Again, hope I am not derailing the link, but I found all this very interesting...

this explains what I tried to convey in previous posts about our future as Homo Sapiens

Soyyo my DD is a molecular biologist, she used to say that it was a very exciting time to be a molecular biologist. There are so many possibilities and potential, the only issue is that they are struggling to cope with all the information their research is generating. However she and all her peers in Science research are assuming their future will not be in the UK.

I think that that may be the weakness in Harari's argument. When DNA was first sequenced everybody assumed that benefits would come thick and fast. However we still only know a fraction of the genes implicated in Cancer for instance, and research into synthetic biology is similarly slowed. In some ways it is generating more questions than answers. That is before you get to the regulatory and ethical frameworks governing any advances, look at how completely one sided the public perceptions of GM crops are for instance. And who knows maybe these advances in biotech may be more democratic and inclusive and not just the preserve of men in white coats in expensive labs www.ted.com/talks/ellen_jorgensen_biohacking_you_can_do_it_too?language=en

The point is that sometimes science and technology move on in ways that cannot be anticipated and there is a bit of a tendancy to see Science as Sci -fi, all bright and shiny and forward moving whilst the reality is often more prosaic.

SapphireStrange
Hi,
Was at work yesterday & enjoying the sun today. I will look back properly when I get time, but today I'm just relaxing & enjoying the sun 🍹☀️ - plus tomorrow ds picks up his gcse results so I've kinda got other things on my mind.

Radio4 about how the UK voted Brexit...interesting to listen to.

sapphire and everyone else for that matter, it's completely pointless asking corcory or surfer to answer questions.

I'm probably one of the most tenacious people I know and even I've given up.

They don't answer because they can't.

Have you noticed when they get put under pressure to answer they say they are too busy, then pop up later and still don't answer.

The sad reality is there is no consensus on what Brexit will look like as many Leave voters have absolutely no idea how their wants can be achieved and many simply have no idea what they even want.

It is a proper fucking mess.

Indeed whatwould but it does raise the question as to why anyone is even bothering with 20th century politics thinking...the case in point being the very real potential of UK becoming really isolated based on a false belief that this would somehow preserve jobs, future prosperity, British identity and values and a whole lot of other stuff that seems so very important to those who voted Leave.
And risk losing its academic edge and leadership in life sciences (which I work in) not to mention things like London no longer being the financial capital of Eu, ignoring this is a Service based economy and the few manufacturing jobs still left would be threatened as multinationals upped sticks once the Eu advantage was lost, already mentioned many times by others.
I am not going to go into the break up of the Union, I think many have explained that already...and I learnt new things about GFD by reading this thread.

If Brexit results in UK isolation - i.e. you want free trade you accept free movement (but now pay and forget any rebates) and if you don't want that then accept that you will be at a HUGE economic disadvantage in those deals and it will take forever to build up trade with other non Eu economies to replace what has been lost.
This country will really suffer and become a "backwater" very fast. In fact I doubt it will ever recover because of the fast pace of change in our globalised environment.

In the face of all the rapid Global technological changes challenges that we are facing it is just an obsolete way of thinking, the world they hanker after belongs to the last century...
I just read the Leavers comments in amazement and wonder how the Brexiteers' prejudices can so very much BLIND them to the bleeding obvious...

Bear Amen to that!

I know, Bear, but I kind of want to persist in thinking that a dialogue IS possible.

Thanks Tiggy interesting Guardian article

I can't say I'm terribly keen on replying when all small does is try and think of any way she can to suggest that I have racist views. As she says she views me as sport.

I have only said things about Eastern Europeans being the majority of people who come here because I feel that this is giving a mainly white community an advantage in coming here to work. Where as I feel that we should welcome people from all over the world. I know many people from Poland in fact a relative is engaged to a really lovely Polish girl and have absolutely nothing against Poles. I live in an area where many Poles settled after the war and are regarded with great esteem as they helped the country enormously during the war.
I have said I don't feel one section of the world's community should be favoured more than any other. I feel that we should be training more people from the UK and the government should be encouraging that but where there is a shortage it would be daft not to let companies recruit from the rest of the world until we have trained up our own young people.
I would not want to see us bring in people only with specific skills but unskilled workers if needed in, for instance agriculture and food production. Would many of these jobs not be seasonal and perhaps could be done by the likes of students as we used to do when grape picking etc. in France.

Yoko - We have had free trade with other countries and it hasn't meant freedom of movement.

Hyacinth - I haven't imagined that the proportion of people coming in who are non EU citizens with EU spouses would be very big as I don't know any Polish people with non E.U. spouses. And yes I do feel that immigration into the UK should reflect as much as it can the ethnic diversity of the globe. And no I won't be 'showing you my workings out'!!

Ureklina - you say that people would not want to have to jump through hoops in order to come here but they do every day when applying for loads of other countries.

Bear - Many of us have lives and other things to do so don't always have time to sit in front of a computer all day. But in any case I certainly don't feel like replying often when it's suggested I have racist views or when I am harangued or asked to 'show my workings out' this is Mums net not an exam subject and I as well as everyone else is entitled to their opinion as at the moment very often opinions is all we have as very little can be said that is factual as Brexit hasn't happened yet.

Which countries do we have free trade with in the same way that we have with europe? None! All others have restrictions, and as previously pointed out reciprocal rights for British citizens are also held.

SoyYo I agree and so I think does anyone who knows anything about the global economy.

However I think you underestimate the way in which the Conservatives have set the agenda and had the assistance of a corrupt press in doing so. From the very start of even the Coalition the Conservatives have been all about promulgating the policies and rhetoric of a Britain of the mid twentieth century viewed through rose tinted specs which appealed to the very demographic that voted leave. In education Gove alienated the majority of those who were delivering or on the receiving end of state education, pupils, parents and teachers, even private school leaders looked on in dismay, but the older demographic, readers of the Daily Mail, lapped up all those retrograde measures to return the curriculum and examination system to the 1950s with complete disregard for the professionals, the experts. Almost all the leading Conservatives bar Gove (certainly including Johnson) didn't really want Brexit but they helped set the zeitgeist, made immigration into a national issue etc. It was dogma that appealed to the older generation rather than a response to a general unease with a globalised world. The under 40s, the ones who will make their way in the future, voted remain. The leave vote for the most part are not motivated by feeling threatened by it, resentful of inequality maybe or ignorant of the ways it will affect them, but I see no sense they feel threatened by it. It's a sense of entitlement to power born of the last century rather than a fear of losing it, It is very clear that there is little appreciation of the ways in which a globalised economy will affect them.

SoYo I'm a big fan of Harari, but I haven't read your whole post because I am off to hear him launch his book in September and I don't want to spoil it! I can guess a lot of what he says though. There is another very good book on the bookshop tables at the moment that Brexiters should really have read before they voted - it has a quite sensationalist title - "The Rise of the Robots" - by Martin Ford - but it is a sobering account of how advances in technology are eating up jobs - not just low paid roles, but also so called "graduate" roles - basically any role with a substantial component of the "routine" in it. To turn our back on the developing world ("developing" in the sense of "still looking to learn and progress", as opposed to "third"), seems to me to be completely insane.

Ironically, he talks about how one answer, in sectors where migrant labour is currently strong - for example fruit and vegetable picking - will be increased use of robotic technology. To remove the only remaining "human" part of the process - "picking" the item. He gives examples from Japan and Israel (both countries that needed to develop fruit and veg picking technologies because of an antipathy among the native population towards the use of immigrant labour - sounds familiar?). In both countries, they are trialling effective machines to pick oranges - and even strawberries. The strawberries example is significant, because "soft fruit" - with issues such as the need for delicate handling, temperature, ripeness etc was the "last frontier" in bringing robotics into fruit picking.

Of course, every machine is a wage lost, and in a consumer-demand-led economy like ours, that is nothing short of a disaster - because, as Brexiters seem to keep forgetting, someone needs to keep buying the stuff, or else nobody will pay taxes or earn wages, or innovate any more. Whoops.

I'd also counter your point regarding immigrants and skills.

Why was it OK for you to go fruit picking in France but not for others to come here?

There have been numerous industries that have said that restrictions on freedom of movement would inhibit their ability to operate, increase costs, and therefore increase prices. Construction was a major one and an economic think tank also said that the idea of lowering immigration would marginally increase wages for the lowest but put firms in industrits under pressure.

I'm sorry if you are offended, but I'll remind you that you attacked me first, but until you actually explaineed your objections to freedom of movement properly I'm confused to the origin of your motives.

For example 60 percent of EU migrants have a job prior to arrival, would you be fine for these people to come? Or for that to be he restriction? If we impose costs on eu migration similar to outside of the EU the fall would be significant.

I didn't think Anne McElvoy's article was all that enlightening. The thing is what is needed now is constructive suggestions about what to do next. Not the pie in the sky stuff about how the whole planet is rushing to trade with us, but the practical issues - how to resolve the Northern Irish question, what to do about Gibraltar, for a couple of starters. I am not sure that I have seen any Leave leader address those two issues.

Then there was the MEP concerned about Scientific Research and saying that we must tell people that the country is open for business on this, when we have just told one large group of people that we will be slamming the door in their faces. Well, no not quite, in the small print we said that those already here could stay, but how many people read the small print?

Truthfully Corcory - you might welcome immigration from all the world. Do you really think that a sizeable number of Leave voters share your views? Immigration was probably the key issue of the last couple of weeks.

I did say it was just my opinion, maybe I should've specified EU people (professionals or not).
At the moment, moving from Paris or Madrid to the UK is as easy as moving from Preston to Lancaster. After a hard brexit I can't imagine EU doctors / pharmacists / IT professionals falling over themselves to come to the UK, since the perception in the rest of the EU is that the vote for brexit stems mainly from immigration reasons (Der Spiegel, Le Monde and other european papers have touched on this subject) Some countries offer a lot of help for skilled people in terms of language classes etc so, why would they come here?
For unskilled labour, they will probably work seasonally around other EU countries, this market always self regulates. For example, where I live there has been a big influx of Spanish people coming to work in hotels / restaurants during the "summer" (a bit extended, maybe april to october) season as housekeeping, kitchen porters, waiters, etc. If is going to cost them money or it becomes difficult to get a permit they will not come here either.