So the good times are about to roll....are they?

[herethereandeverywhere]

I wanted to ask on another thread, but they are all bunfight-y.

I am a remainer so I feel very depressed about today. I would like some reassurance from brexiters about what I have to look forwards to.

I'm afraid 'taking back control' isn't clear enough to me, so an explanation of what will be different if that's the theme you will go for.

So far, since the vote, my family has lost £10,000s and my husband's current job/role has been placed in jeopardy. I have probably lost the ability to automatically continue to work in an EU country in under 2 years time (I currently live in Germany, though this was intended to be temporary). I have dear friends relocating out of London since the banks are shifting jobs due to Brexit so I'm not sure who I would be moving back to. My house is worth less and I'm less likely to be able to sell it if I do want to move. I'll need to get the kids Irish passports if I want them to benefit from the EU.

So cheer me up - we're set for a brighter future aren't we? What can I look forwards to?

Is remaining for political reasons allowed? One of my major thoughts was political - NI/ROI situation as well as enjoying peace across Europe since WWII wasn't really that long ago. Safety in numbers and better together against any other global threats and probably best pooling efforts to help other nations seemed to override economic reasons.

I would like to see the benefits of leaving for the political situation. I feel like we have just made ourselves super vulnerable, especially if we start courting countries from around the world, then we may well be dragged into something that we won't have the EU to help us with.

And yes, on WTD, all companies seem to give an opt out form as a matter of course these days anyway and we have easy hire and fire policies compared to other European countries so I am also concerned that jobs will be even less secure than they currently are.

I think overcrowding is a grave concern.

I think it was worth sacrificing a lot to limit its impact, yes. I'm not sure a lot will be sacrificed but I know others disagree, of course.

You might not mind working until you're 70 to find our ageing population armpitz, but I do!

I also have small children and it's their generation that will suffer the worst consequences of Brexit. I'd rather they lived on an overcrowded (not that I thought it was- it's UNDERFUNDED, not overcrowded) island but had prospects, than live in a quiet backwater from which they can never escape.

I do wonder what will happen when people realise that immigration really isn't the root cause of our problems.....

Our GP is overcrowded with elderly and lack of GPs - those that staff the out of hours are all from abroad and thank god they're there.

Our housing is an issue as the villages and small towns are populated with retirees not moving so we're all squished in the cheaper areas with no hope of moving and new houses are being built to solve that.

All the immigrants here are working their arses off, setting up new businesses, etc. will be sad to see them go if they do as have more in common with them than the retirees or the more local people who fly the St George's flag in their front garden.

I'm already working until I'm 69, Bolshy, so I think your children are too!

I think our ageing population is a problem in or out of the EU, to be honest. I think euthanasia will become legal in the next decade.

it is not racist to suggest not accepting the right of 500 million Europeans to come and join the 65 million of us already on our small island

This keeps on being repeated. It seems that it's a given that everyone in the world would live in the UK given the chance. I think this isn't true at all.

The march of the robots and consequent productivity gains will deal with the reducing proportion of working age population long before it becomes a problem.

Our GP is overcrowded with elderly and lack of GPs - those that staff the out of hours are all from abroad and thank god they're there

Our housing is an issue as the villages and small towns are populated with retirees not moving so we're all squished in the cheaper areas with no hope of moving and new houses are being built to solve that.

This ^
I live in Wales and we have a large, constant influx of downsizing retirees from England. The over 65s have, statistically, more and more complex medical issues and quite frankly our GPS cannot cope. More than half the patients in our local surgery are over 65s. Don't get forget cultural issues such as the effect of incomers who don't/ won't speak Welsh on traditionally Welsh-speaking communities.

My area has very very low non-UK immigration - this apparently makes it desirable for retired incomers . The only foreigners you see are medical staff and very occassionally catering staff. The place has benefited enormously from European funding. And yet UKIP is very popular and leave won by a wide margin.

Not if we don't have expertise left to implement it, how.

Same here middleaged

What I mean is that you seem to be implying that concern about immigration levels is about people "not liking" immigrants. I really don't think that is the case.

I agree with this. The city I live in is expanding rapidly - and most of the incomers are Swedes as the population shifts from more rural to more urban. There's huge pressure on school places and with the recent tax cuts we are seeing services degrade.

There is no racist agenda there - my little blonde boy has to go all the way across town to nursery because of other little blonde Swedish kids.
I DO have concerns over how the infrastructure is keeping up with the population rise. That's a structural concern, not a racist one. I'm pretty pissed off at our council for not keeping up.
Friends back in the uk have similar worries. Theschools are full, they can't get a gp appointment and the bins get collected once a month. Austerity cuts and rising population is a toxic mix.

Anyway, I too would be interested to hear the positives of leaving - are there any concrete ones?

It's a shame robots don't pay taxes.

mother I have the solution to all our problems- the euthbot. A kindly end of life cyber being that we can patent and export to the world. Decrease the amount of folks. Decrease the amount of work. Increase U.K. Manufacturing and export. Simples.
Do you think dragons den would fund it?

Ok, we've gone off on a bit of a theoretical tangent here, the crux of which is: "many/most of us will be better off with a fall in immigration".

As has already been pointed out, this is problematic for 2 reasons:

1. We need an increasing population due to the retiring baby boomers. as we need increasing numbers of workers to pay taxes to fund their end of years and staff to provide health and social care. Not only have the boomers (generally) benefitted from massive lifetime gains in property prices, they also are the last generation, save for a portion of the public sector, on final salary pensions. Those are the schemes that guarantee a level of retirement income regardless of how much you paid in and how much the funds have made. These schemes are virtually all in deficit and many of them are public sector so propped up by the tax payer. On top of this increasing numbers need NHS and social care support. All need a strong economy and increasing numbers of tax payers to fund and to staff.

1. the squeeze on services and housing is due to underinvestment. We need the population to expand for the reasons stated in (1) above. The fact that the baby boomers have had their whole working and political lives to prepare for 'the ageing population' and instead have left it to us and our children to sort out - and have then voted in droves for Brexit - makes it a double blow. They will be the last generation of working and middle classes to live comfortably throughout their lives.

Brexit will mean:

1. Reduced size of financial services sector which contributes significantly to tax receipts
2. Less skilled health workers (and not enough in the pipeline to replace them)
3. Less unskilled workers to do social care roles
4. Potentially difficult economic times/recession contributing further to reduced tax receipts/more cuts/less investment

Can the Brexiters understand why May and others have indicated that immigration probably won't fall?

Just like many other Leave campaign fictions, strain on public services is not the fault of the immigrants any more than the strain on the NHS is the fault of the sick.

It is a lack of investment, giving low priority to housing, health and social care by the incumbent Tories who are happy to hide behind the immigrant myth - until the day of reckoning when they (May) confess we need immigration too much.

Kaija robots don't pay taxes but those who operate them do. According to Andy Haldane (BoE) monetary policy to support jobs post 2008 "protected" 1 million jobs, (filled by 10 years of immigration above target of 200k per year) at the expense of investment in technology - hence the productivity gap.

I thought this article was interesting.

www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2017/03/one-good-thing-about-brexit-end-honest-conversations-about-immigration

In particular this para:

Reducing immigration comes at a real cost. Britain doesn’t produce enough young people to care for its elderly population. If you reduce immigration to the “tens of thousands”... you can do that but the bad news is that large numbers of people – let’s face it, large numbers of women in the main – will have to give up fulltime work to care for their elderly relatives.

There was one of those fly on the wall programmers on C4 the other week about a 5 star hotel in London (forget name). 80% of the workers were non British. Difficult to see low paying, insecure jobs being popular to Londoners.

Saw a piece about Cumbrian tourism too. Heavily reliant on EU workers - the population is aging so unlikely to find British born workers.

and

Record number of EU citizens quit working in NHS last year

www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/30/record-number-european-staff-quit-nhs-brexit-eu

So is this the situation?

Problems like demand for resources, NHS, services, housing etc are not essentially down to immigration. They are due to government policies and the decisions which we, as a society, have taken over the last decades (lack of adequate funding, planning etc).

So these problems could, if there was the political and societal will, be resolved in another way than reducing immigration.

On the other hand, we have decided as a country to solve the issue of how to pay for the needs of an increasingly aging population and of the need for qualified and trained staff (eg for the NHS) by large amounts of immigration.

And there are no other options for how to deal with these issues which we could consider, given the political and societal will? Large amounts of unplanned and unselective immigration are the only possible solution to this problem. There are no other policies which could achieve the same goal?

Re euthanasia - yes, I think it will become legal. Not because of anything to do with the EU! I just think that more and more people are starting to recognise how cruel it is to entrap people in functioning bodies without functioning mind for years and years.

The problem with 'lots of aged people needing care' = 'we need immigrants to care for them' is twofold. Firstly if we keep the population high, that problem will only be ever kept at bay. Secondly it keeps care work as shocking working conditions, low pay and high responsibility- and why, because someone will always do it.

The problem is that for any civilised country to introduce euthanasia it cannot be for those that lack capacity- that is simply murder. The right to die is for people with functioning minds but failing bodies and where countries have it, very few people go through the process. It would be a very big mindset change from allowing self determination to allowing others to choose to kill.
The problem is, I believe, partly credit changing our culture and an expectation that we should have everything we want. Young people from UK who are unqualified but aren't prepared to do low paid work - so immigration allows us to recruit. The other issue is media that promotes idea of celebrity and creates a view that anyone can become rich and famous by winning a tv show. It's ridiculous, of course, but you only have to listen to some auditions to hear how delusional some people are. I think we've lost the message of working hard bringing its own rewards.

To be fair crumbs, if you think that the younger generation is softer, lazier, and more entitled etc then you're in excellent company, because people have been saying that since the dawn of history.
I agree with everything else you said, though.

Release significantly higher taxes for everyone which will be grossly unpopular and reduce standards of living might be an option. Or we could incentivise all the over 60s to emigrate? Or stop them being eligible for free healthcare and tax their pensions as income? Given the silver vote, how popular do you think that would be?

The bottom line is:
a) the money needs to come from somewhere = tax
b) the work needs to be done by someone

They probably won't be able to go to Spain any more post Brexit.....where can we send them? Am trying to get my parents to join a sibling of mine overseas so I have a chance of getting back on career ladder (who am I kidding, a job would be good enough) post DC instead of going straight into daughterly duties of looking after them as they get older. I know it will creep in slowly but can see it ending up my full responsibility and I'm not ready for that. Plus, if I don't get back to decent paid work soon, I'll have no pension - not that I'll be able to retire.

Is one benefit that DC will no longer be likely to ditch his unexciting parents in the UK to go and have wonderful chances to study and work in Europe without a second glance?

He'll be forced to stay in the UK and be a worker bee and no doubt grow up to be a nationalist as he'll not get so many chances to travel to Europe and see how other countries and people are.