Westministenders: No Brexit is Better than a Bad Brexit

[RedToothBrush]

Happy Anniversary!!!

These Threads are officially 1 year old today.

I don't know who started the very first thread, but it was about how Cameron quitting had handed the Boris a poison chalice because he had to be the one to trigger a50 as Cameron walked away without having done it.

Of course Boris didn't become PM, and we found out that triggering a50 and Brexit were even more complex than even the majority of the most informed thought it would be.

A year on we have a minority government, a zombie prime minister, a government who don't really know what the concept of democracy, millions of EU citizens (who include British nationals) who face an uncertain future, the fear of the cliff edge, a huge scandal over inequality and Jeremy Corbyn appearing on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury within the hour.

Is suggesting people have more children and the government make it more affordable by scrapping the child benefit cap misogynistic ?

Having to prove you were raped to claim a state benefit can't be anything but misogynistic.

Falling and ageing populations give you Japan sized economic problems i.e. two decades of stagnation and counting.

Avoiding this means either accepting and encouraging migration as in Germany, or overtly pro large family social and benefit policies as in France.

I agree that's why I would suggest scrapping the benefit cap (I did say FFS when mentioning the rape clause because that is appalling ). I'm certainly not suggesting some sort of forced breeding programme.

Money in itself is unlikely to lead to sustained population growth. I was born when they first introduced maternity leaves. After about 5 huge yeargroups the effect wore off.
If any of you want generous maternity allowances, Hungary is the place for you (3-year maternity leave and if you have 3 children, you get paid to stay at home till the youngest is 8). But young people basically flee the country with no future and those who stay are not having children.

I'm on the encouraging large or larger families side of that. I think Germany and Sweden have made a mistake that they will regret.

• There are too many people, let's stop foreigners coming in
• But we need the workers
• Breed more
• Who will pay the taxes?
• Government can scrap caps and increase nursery funding

Who pays for that?
The corporations? Well we're gonna be a low tax haven so no.
The workers? Well there's going to be less of them because the women will all be breeding and the foreigners won't be coming in so much, so taxation will have to sky rocket. So no, as that's not an option for a lot of people.
Exports up Imports down? We're gonna struggle with maintaining our own food base, especially with less workers so we will struggle with our jam exports, so probably no.

That magic money tree better give us a bumper harvest.

What has happened to this thread? Some rather disingenuous posting has happened

Elainegreco that is one of the problems with the EU doesn't bring prosperity to people it bring people to prosperity. Brexit will be an absolute cluster fuck but I think that the EU faces a lot of very significant problems and how it will evolve is probably not what anyone wants.

The EU proposal is for all UK expats in the E27 and all E27 expats in the UK to retain the rights they currently have.
It has always been their position that innocent citizens should not lose rights and maybe have their lives ruined by Brexit

May wants to reduce these rights.

So, I don't understand how anyone can claim May is being generous and the EU mean about expats.

The EU have said that expat rights must be agreed before trade talks. That's putting people before money.

lurking :

UK could just wave a wand and say "all EU citizens in the UK are now UK citizens" and then suggest the EU did the same with UK citizens in EU countries

Iirc that is what the Scottish government said would happen to everyone living in Scotland on the day of the referendum (i.e. everyone would "become" Scottish) if the outcome of Indyref had been different.

probably me being thick is what's happened to the thread.

Why won't I have any more children? Lots of reasons. One being the state of maternity care in the UK... I'm not alone in this.

less It is women that have children and even referring to it as replenishment is patriarchal rhetoric. It is about women's choices and if "replenishment" is not happening it is because fundamentally women are choosing to have two or fewer children. In fact the women making those choices tend to be better educated and well off and so clearly as Redtoothbrush says there is something at work across western society. It would certainly be a positive thing for children's lives if child benefits were reinstated but if you think it would tackle the underlying issues you are indeed being extremely patronising to women, and regarding them as a tool of your nationalist agenda.

Perhaps the solution is to share a little of our wealth and opportunity to those displaced by war and other factors, Angela Merkel is certainly of that view?

For those who think expats should just suck it up, because they choose to leave

Well, in some cases they didn't choose: it was a case of accepting a posting abroad or becoming unemployed and maybe homeless and in debt - once you reach age 40 in many jobs, you won't be able to find a similar job, however competent you are.

Also, suppose Scotland chooses to becomes independent:
people have had more warning this might happen, with Indyref1, than the Brexit ref

Would all the English people who made their lives in Scotland and the Scots in England just have to accept ruined lives, or would we demand that no one loses their existing rights ?

Lessworried I don't think you are thick. I think you can see problems but have been directed in a particular way for the solutions. I don't think that direction asks the right questions and instead creates bigger and worse problems. I merely ask you to think about different ways of tackling the same issues and why you are directed towards immigration being the problem rather than more general management of the country.

In essence it's a big cover up. We can all see Trump when he goes 'hey look over there' then does some more shit. The same is going on here and has done for years.

Why and for whose benefit.

Depressingly good summary, Hashi

@michaellcrick
Just in case anyone's interested ....

Women have been choosing to have fewer or no kids for years, in almost all Western countries , regardless of the levels of state support.
That's because many women weigh up how their life would change, risks to their health, how their body will change - not cosmetic changes but e.g. continence, pelvic floor, disability - and decide they have other options

The DUP must not let this Tory deal damage the Good Friday agreement
By Gerry Adams

While extra money for Northern Ireland is welcome, the pact could be costly if it hampers talks to restore the power-sharing executive
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/27/dup-tory-deal-good-friday-agreemnt

Oh, no. Is Gerry Adams appealing to the DUP because he thinks they are saner than the Tories?

lessworried Some people in the EU follow prosperity, others from Hungary can't stand the hateful, nationalistic, pretend-Catholic,
mysogynic and anti-gay rhetoric which would make the DUP sound quite enlightened.

That's clever Gerry. Very clever

SF can't tall against the 1.5 billion. That would be politically very difficult

So pressure the DUP to pressure the Tories about The GFA and the money being delivered. If either are compromised it's the DUP that are at fault

No one has the starry-eyed view that the EU is perfect:

The other 27 countries all have things they wish to change, but overwhelmingly think that they will do better pooling their strength in a union, instead of as individual countries competing with giants like the US, China, India

What makes no sense is a Brexit that leaves the Uk in Year Zero, without ANY trade agreements with the EU and without any outside the EU

• the UK would lose the hundreds of trade agreements and deals that we currently share as part of the EU

As Hammond said
"No one voted in the EU referendum to be poorer"
Leaving the EU, except for the EEA / EFTA option, would make the UK very much poorer.

Making the country broke is one way to stop EU immigration, but it wouldn't stop desperate immigrants from the Middle East, Africa, Asia - even a broke UK would be better than the misery they are fleeing.

An EEA / EFTA Brexit for say 10 years would give time to replace the lost trade deals and the lost agencies.
Time after 10 years to have a 2nd referendum to ask if the country should stay in EEA / EFTA, or go for a Brexit without FOM

Red Bigchoc All those reasons, and that women are more economically effective, either because they have to be, to quote May, to keep the family "just managing" or because they chose to be. Every child comes at an economic cost in terms of a working women's activity. Of course if we had a truly enabling economic environment for women, no discrimination against women who have children, paid career breaks, no loss of career opportunities etc. but what progress had been made in the last century has frankly reversed in this. One small benefit of recent political developments has been that young women are becoming more aware of the issues as opposed to just thinking of it as perfectly fair that they play on a patriarchal playing field, and a boost to their careers in the short term. Certainly in business there is more of a sisterhood developing across the age groups as there was when I first started work and contemplated the glass ceiling.

SF would have a lot of support to oppose the agreement later on, if the DUP bribe includes abandoning charges against former members of the security forces for crimes like murder and incitement.

Or when people see they are pushed down the list for housing and nhs care, because ex service personnel are prioritized over them - I think that's in the deal too.

Thank you for you kind words redtoothbrush, I agree with you by the sounds of things on quite a few issues,

whatwouldrondo I hope I haven't been patronising to women, I wrote a small essay there which I deleted because A) I started giving personal info which I've opted out of having a right to give and B) its not entirely the fault the EU but rather the policies of successive government of both left and right over my lifetime.

I hope Angela Merkel is right for Germanys sake. I'm not sure how importing millions of people with attitudes at least as backwards and patriarchal as mine is the solution but I may be proved wrong. That and the subsequent two years of mayhem and murder was why I decided to vote to leave the EU.