Quick Poll: EU stay or leave?

[BlueSmarties76]

Would you vote to stay or leave the EU?

Quick poll.

Have the major newspapers taken a position yet?

If we can start choosing again who comes here, then it will be better for our country.

it will be a lot slower. suitable candidates for positions will be harder to find. right now, people are free to vote with their feet. you will hurt both european and british workers (and pensioners).

SpringingIntoAction
Wel put! Pleas write to the Times with your well made points - at the moment the letters pages are dominated by superannuated university lecturers terrified of their shadows; people thinking their cheap flights might be afected and people complaining that there will be too much paperwork on exports, like there was before the EU (a time when there was 'paperwork', a whole other time when nothing was online...)

It will definitely hurt companies like sports direct..

How come, ThisCakeFilledIsle? They sell in Britain and they buy their goods from Asia (I think?) and they make full use of every employment law and tax loophole they can find. What will be different?

It was an allusion to the recent bbc story of the town of Shirebrook and overcrowded houses due to SD workforce.

Oh sorry, I didn't see that.

I should try typing longer posts but I'm rubbish!

Stay

I wish one of the politicians would say why they really want the UK to remain. Everything they say is so full of holes it makes no sense. Why not just say the real reason?

They could say:-
It could be the EU is left of centre, so its a way of getting progressive policies through even when the UK has put in a right of centre govt?

My job is as a politician. There will be fewer of us if we lose the EU?

I always dreamed of getting a plum EU job once I am done with being an MP.

I believe in closer political integration and I don't understand basic economics

I don't think we have enough competent people in the Uk to lead us to a situation where the UK can flourish

Lots of my constituents are immigrants and I think saying remain might be a vote winner. Plus I've been promised a promotion in the re-shuffle in August if I toe the party line.

I don't really understand the arguments but I am thinking better the devil you know.

I really believe the UK owes the rest of the world support because of our Imperial past, just as Germany owes Europe because of its Nazi past.

We have an ageing population and I think the way forward is to import people from cultures that tend to have higher birth rates.

Anyone of these could be a real reason for a politician to want to stay in the EU. I wouldn't always agree that they are good reasons, but I can't see how they might lead to a remain decision. I just wish they would say why - whatever the reason.

We have an ageing population and I think the way forward is to import people from cultures that tend to have higher birth rates.

that's a legitimate reason. And so are some of the others you mention.

We are in deep trouble demographically, with no plan out. We can't support pensioners as is. Either deep cuts are needed, or more babies.

But what happens to all these babies we need to breed when they get old? The planet can only sustain so much life, we can't carry on with this trajectory of birth just to make the sort term easier. Each human needs a certain amount of land that is farmed to survive, we need a certain number of trees per family just to breath!! So this attitude of 'build over the green bits' and increasing birth rates is staggeringly short sighted.

Maybe automation could help.

Leave, although when it comes to it I think people will opt for the devil they know and will vote to stay.

I think people will opt for the devil they know and will vote to stay

You see I will be voting the devil I know, which is our UK politicians, however bad good ugly and all in between.

I have no idea who is in Brussels, their backgrounds, are they fraudsters or what? Who knows? They are the devil we dont know!

We can vote out UK Governments that try to give us laws we don't want.

We can't vote out the unelected EU.

So this attitude of 'build over the green bits' and increasing birth rates is staggeringly short sighted.

except that most of our country is not built on. We have plenty of space right now to solve the problems we have right now. Because those pensions that need to be paid in 20 years need to come from somewhere. Any idea where?

We should avoid the problems that Japan is facing. We should be very scared.

There is plenty of unbuilt land; the problem is that it is mostly in places where nobody wants to live. Newcomers are coming to the southeast.

I live in Japan, and of course Japan needs an immigration policy; that goes without saying. But it should not have to be a binary choice between "no immigration whatsoever" vs "no limits on immigration whatsoever."

"We are in deep trouble demographically, with no plan out. We can't support pensioners as is. Either deep cuts are needed, or more babies."

And what happens when they get old? Even more babies? Ever increasing population?

The only sustainable way out is to raise the pension age. With the advance of automation, the number of workers needed to produce economic value will probably decline somewhat anyway.

books.google.co.jp/books?id=2XgxAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA125&lpg=PA125&dq=%22paul+collier%22+immigration+pension&source=bl&ots=Pu0CJ4URBd&sig=okAQTAF_e7UTQyxowY3TBZImvkE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjJhcXByZXLAhXIIqYKHUZvDWEQ6AEITjAH#v=onepage&q=%22paul%20collier%22%20immigration%20pension&f=false

See p. 124-125 on immigration and pensions.

You need to be very careful that you are not replacing one set of problems with another.

The custom is to kick the can down the road - to delay facing the hard choices, to hope in a Micawberish way that 'something will turn up'.

Bring in lots of young, working age migrants to increase the working population and thereby the tax yields - one day th0se migrants themselves will be old and need care. What the, Bring in more migrants? Rinse and repeat?

We are actually a rich country. We can afford elderly care. We just need to go about it in a better way. Why do care homes cost thousands of pounds per resident per week - not talking about nursing homes, where people may have severe medical needs. Seems there is a lot of scope to tackle these ridiculously high fees that independent providers seem to be able to charge. More help at home?

SpringingintoAction, that is exactly what the book I linked to above stated (bear in mind that this is written by a sober, bearded, politically moderate economist, not the Daily Mail):

Given the ineptitude of governments in fixing the retirement age, why not bail ourselves out by some youthful immigration? Why not: because such a strategy would be unsustainable. An influx of immigrations of working age gives society only a temporary fiscal windfall, whereas increased life expectancy is a continuing process. Economics has given us an unambiguous analysis of how a temporary windfall should be handled: it should be saved. For example, the government could use a temporary increase in revenues from youthful immigration to reduce the public debt. What it should categorically not do is use them to incur new, ongoing obligations for spending, such as pensions. Yet that is what the argument “We need immigrations to counter an aging population” amounts to.

Further, the demographic argument presupposes that migrants reduce the ratio of dependents to workers: being young, they are in the workforce and so balance the expanding retired indigenous population. But working migrants have both children and parents. One of the distinctive norms of low-income societies is the number of children that women want; until they adjust to high-income norms, migrants from low-income societies tend to have disproportionately large numbers of children. Whether migrants bring their dependent parents to their host country will depend largely upon host-country migration policy. In Britain, by 1997 the desire among migrants from low-income countries to bring in dependent relatives was so considerable that only 12 percent of migrants were coming for work. Taking into account both children and parents, there is no presumption that migrants even temporarily reduce the A series of recent research papers by Torben Andersen, a Danish professor of economics, investigates the likely effects of immigration on the sustainability of Scandinavian-type generous welfare systems. His conclusion is that far from helping to maintain them, migration may make them unviable because of the combination of the higher dependency ratios and lower skill levels of migrants.

So, we breed and build until we don't have enough land to farm on, or trees to make oxygen. Then what? Some people are already saying we will need to start farming insects to produce a sustainable source of protein. Not really a future I relish tbh.

An influx of immigrations of working age gives society only a temporary fiscal windfall

there's clearly more to anti immigrant sentiment than this. "temporary" windfall is 50 years. that solves the problem for this generation.

There is no doubt this is not infinitely repeatable, but no economic policy is. And kicking the can down the road is necessary given the other suggestion above (reducing benefits to the elderly) is unlikely and politically toxic. What's going to happen if the anti immigration people get their way, is that pension provision won't change until it's a catastrophe.