Quick Poll: EU stay or leave?

[BlueSmarties76]

Would you vote to stay or leave the EU?

Quick poll.

I think the problem is that every generation has had a better lifestyle than the one before for as long as anyone living can remember. We've come to expect it for ourselves - almost as though its part of our DNA.

Similarly, as parents we want our children to do better than us - we expect for example, that they will live longer, have access to better medicine, use newly invented technology to make their lives better than we can dream of.

That's all fine, except we seem to have lost the ability to understand that sometimes things aren't going to be better all round. For example, we have had decades of large number of immigrants arriving and it has made us feel good about ourselves for being such a benevolent society that we can welcome huge numbers in and share what our ancestors built. The truth is we were happy to do that when it did not adversely impact upon us. Now, it has started to, and we are realising that our resources are not infinite. Our island has begum to feel crowded. We're finding that not only do the immigrants staff our hospitals (not for free of course) but also they and their families want to stand in the queues at A&E to use the hospitals. Why is that surprising?

I think we need to be grown up about things. If we want x,y, or z then we need to be ready to change our lifestyle to pay for it.

The same argument applies to the Syrian/ Iraqi /African refugees. By all means have an open door policy as Mrs Merkel is still trying to have, but don't pretend that they will not change our culture.

I can't wait to leave!

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

What a nice attitude (not). Screw our great-grandkids, huh? What about the long-term future of people (and wildlife) in this country.

There is nothing insolvable about pension issues. You start slowing rolling things back now. People will moan, but they may be more amenable if you explain to them that this is what you need to do if you want inflows and outflows to be balanced.

You start slowing rolling things back now. People will moan, but they may be more amenable if you explain to them that this is what you need to do if you want inflows and outflows to be balanced.

good luck with that. bad demographics will lead to young people leaving for better opportunities, spiralling the problem. Watch japan. see how it plays out.

TheNewStatesman - I don't know about that. I was surprised by how many people believed that there was a viable anti-austerity option at the election last year and its made me doubt their ability to do logic.

"good luck with that. bad demographics will lead to young people leaving for better opportunities, spiralling the problem. Watch japan. see how it plays out."

I repeat: It does not have to be a binary choice between "no immigration" vs "unlimited immigration."

I repeat: It does not have to be a binary choice between "no immigration" vs "unlimited immigration."

there is no unlimited immigration, and by many other countries standards, our peak year is just business as usual "Mass" immigration has just exposed how dysfunctional our building and planning systems are, and how terrible our benefits system is. I find the rhetoric behind the whole EU migrants and benefits especially bizarre. For some reason our benefits create all sorts of perverse incentives, but only for europeans.

These are british problems.

I don't know where I land on the actual vote. I don't like the EU either, but I disagree with most people why. free movement is driving 90% of this vote.

*I repeat: It does not have to be a binary choice between "no immigration" vs "unlimited immigration."

there is no unlimited immigration, and by many other countries standards, our peak year is just business as usual "Mass" immigration has just exposed how dysfunctional our building and planning systems are, and how terrible our benefits system is. *

Every EU citizen has the right to live in any of the 28 EU member countries, so no EU member country has the ability to control the migration of EU citizens. In that respect immigration is uncontrolled.
Mass immigration occurs when some countries offer a better life style or more opportunities than the country in which an EU citizen is currently living. All EU citizens must be treated equally by all EU countries, which gives them equal access to health care, social housing, education, jobs etc offered by EU country in which they are living.

Planning for the services any population will need is undertaken by the Census the UK holds every year to collate information about its population and predict what future services that population will need and where the services should be located. ONS statistics help refine that planning of services and infrastructure. The problems start when the statistics forecast a population of say 70 million and for each of the next 10 years we have an additional unforseen and unplanned for 325,000 net immigrants each year, meaning at the end of that 10 year period we will have a population of 73.25 million people, using services planned and developed for a much smaller population.

It would be easier to accept mass immigration into the UK if we has built the schools and hospitals and houses the immigrants would require. We didn't. The scarcity of housing has pushed up the cost of rents. The availability of additional labour provided by immigrants has pushed down wage demands. So the average worker earns less money to pay for an increased housing cost.

I find the rhetoric behind the whole EU migrants and benefits especially bizarre. For some reason our benefits create all sorts of perverse incentives, but only for europeans.

It's not rhetoric. It is absurd to suggest immigration has no effect. If you were the EU citizen of a poor country with no welfare state except your own family, where jobs were scarce and poorly paid and where there was no health care other than basic care which you had to pay for, you'd make the sensible conclusion that life would be much better in a richer EU country where jobs were widely available, where you had access to a NHS free at the point of delivery, where your children would be housed and educated and, if you lost your job, you'd receive welfare until you found another. It would crazy not to avail yourself of those benefits. I would.

So until the benefits systems of all the EU countries all provide the same level of support and their health services are the same etc etc there will always be mass migration within the TU.

These are british problems.

No. They are problems that Britain experiences due to having vastly superior social support than many other EU countries.

I don't know where I land on the actual vote. I don't like the EU either, but I disagree with most people why. free movement is driving 90% of this vote.

Free movement is only driving this vote because people can see the tangible effect it is having on the UK. I'm actually driven by the lack of sovereignty issue, which gives rise to issues such as this mass migration problem.

Planning for the services any population will need is undertaken by the Census the UK holds every year to collate information about its population and predict what future services that population will need and where the services should be located.

what a joke, how do people in transient accommodation who barely say hello in English, all packed into a house, each room turned into a bedroom, 4,5, to a room, paying their LL weekly in cash, know that they need to bother with the census! what a bloody joke! loads of mail coming every day for all the former occupants...

Correction, the National Census is undertaken every 10 years, other statistics are collated and published every year by ONS and local 'census' data can be collected to assist local authority planning.

Well that's the theory. A Census is only as accurate as it is efficiently enumerated.

Is there anywhere we can see the results of the poll?

Bold: It would be easier to accept mass immigration into the UK if we has built the schools and hospitals and houses the immigrants would require. We didn't. The scarcity of housing has pushed up the cost of rents. The availability of additional labour provided by immigrants has pushed down wage demands. So the average worker earns less money to pay for an increased housing cost.

And on top of that the new houses that are being built to accommodate the immigrant population are very heavily taxed by way of so called "developer contributions"... The only problem being that new housing is usuallt bought by the indigenous population.. So in effect anyone buying a mew house is paying tax to provide schools etc for the immigrants.

Some excellent posts, particularly from Springing.

I think the most important message the Leave campaign should be aiming to deliver is that limiting immigration isn't racist. Today there's a news story about the NHS recruiting abroad, because it can't fill its vacancies locally. Leaving aside the underlying reasons for the shortage, if there are vacancies then it's perfectly acceptable for the NHS to recruit the brightest and best from anywhere in the world. However, it makes no sense whatsoever to just open up the borders to all-comers, many of whom are unskilled and have limited or no English.

And we can't just build more houses for ever. The space you see on the maps is valuable farmland and/or floodplain. The more inhospitable bits are National Parks. There isn't any space going begging. A bit of brownfield within existing towns/cities maybe, but building on that will only add to the pressure on public services already there.

Stay

In that respect immigration is uncontrolled.

so in your narrow definition of uncontrolled, it's uncontrolled. OK.

It would be easier to accept mass immigration into the UK if we has built the schools and hospitals and houses the immigrants would require. We didn't. The scarcity of housing has pushed up the cost of rents. The availability of additional labour provided by immigrants has pushed down wage demands. So the average worker earns less money to pay for an increased housing cost.Free movement is only driving this vote because people can see the tangible effect it is having on the UK.

Agreed. And that's what I said. this is a british problem. Why can't we build enough houses, schools and hospitals? Our central bank's governor has mentioned a number of times that we lag his former country in homes building, despite having twice the population here.

It would crazy not to avail yourself of those benefits. I would.

the rhetoric is about both in work and out of work benefits. According to what you wrote, these are primarily immigration problems, which is clearly not true. The former is just broken economics (why are in work people having to claim benefits. Note, the system was broken well before "mass" immigration). As for out of work benefits, if it creates perverse incentives not to work for europeans, surely that applies to british people as well.

I am not saying some of these problems aren't exacerbated by immigration. I am saying that they are problems that predate the recent wave of immigrants and need to be fixed whether or not we stop immigration.

Free movement is only driving this vote because people can see the tangible effect it is having on the UK.

Think of what a non-issue free movement would be if we had adequate housing, and a functioning housing system where homes were dwellings not assets or bank accounts. That problem is 100% home grown. Our central bank controls our interest rates. Our government and local councils control planning and building. That's all down to us. in my view, this is all comes down to housing, and after 15 years of inadequate building, we are still deep in the whole WE dug.

If we leave the EU it doesn't mean there will be no immigration, or less or more. It just means Britain makes its own decisions about it, now and in the future.

Reasons why we just can't build and build:-

• We've got limited space and not all of it is suitable for building on - floodplains, arable land, too far from any population centre etc

• No one seems to want to live more than 3 floors off the ground so any housing uses a lot more ground than it would if we had a taste for soviet era concrete blocks with no gardens.

• planning permission takes a long time to get and its not certain. So a developer sees a field and thinks he'd like to buy it and build upon it. However, he has to sink his time and capital into negotiating and then purchasing the land and then sink more into hiring architects and surveyors and then cross his fingers that planning permission will be granted. If it pays off, then its worth it, but if it doesn't then he's spent a fortune and taken a couple of years of his life to end up with owning a field. So, to compensate for the risk, he charges more to the people who buy the houses he is allowed to build.

• building standards are high. We, as a nation, require buildings to be built to a relatively high standard with more money spent on making the construction energy efficient. It all costs money to create and it has to be paid for -usually by means of long term loans from the banks. As 2006-8 proved, banks need to think carefully before making subprime loans.

• our sewage systems, roads, electricity substations, schools, hospitals and all other infrastructure were built with a certain population density in mind. Throw up more houses somewhere and someone has to pay for all these additional things to be built and fitted out. It obviously costs more to build them in the first place than just maintain them.

I think that young girl on BBc Question time last week said it beautifully (about immigration):
"I would get out of the EU so we could have a fair points-based system so we don’t favour people from outside the EU over people in the EU.
“Because we can have someone unskilled within Europe coming in without any questions but a really skilled doctor from India has to go through a really intensive process."

We've got limited space and not all of it is suitable for building on

every country has limited space. We have a lot more than we pretend.

No one seems to want to live more than 3 floors off the ground

unfixable in today's high rent environment? You build it, people will buy.

planning permission takes a long time to get and its not certain

Yup. it's a disaster. this should be fixed for everyone's sake.

building standards are high. We, as a nation, require buildings to be built to a relatively high standard

you could have fooled me. I see buildings a decade old that look like they are falling apart. I call bollocks on this.

our sewage systems, roads, electricity substations, schools, hospitals and all other infrastructure were built with a certain population density in mind. Throw up more houses somewhere and someone has to pay for all these additional things to be built and fitted out. It obviously costs more to build them in the first place than just maintain them.

none of this is written on stone tablets from Sinai. As for cost, better planning will greatly bring down costs. What's killing us is the cost of land and high rents.

Look at a map of Europe. Cross out the bits that are mountains or lakes. Take the number of people already here and divide by the no. square km and you will see that we are already densely populated.

We would like - or at least I would like - for the UK to still have some farmland left and some national parks.

If you think that there is tons of room, then it is reasonable to ask you exactly how crowded the land should get before someone says it is full?

chilipepper20 - you need to move somewhere where building standards are genuinely low. then you'll see what low is. the UK is good.

Rents are high because of supply and demand and because property prices are high (the landlords look to make a profit - a yield.)

Property prices are high because of supply and demand and because of the cost of building and the scarcity of building land (as per my post).

We are going in circles...

We would like - or at least I would like - for the UK to still have some farmland left and some national parks.

your great great grandkids will be long dead before we see a massive difference in the countryside. Very little of the UK is built on.

If you think that there is tons of room, then it is reasonable to ask you exactly how crowded the land should get before someone says it is full?

what are the estimates? 10% of the UK is built on. shall we say it gets "full" at 20%?

you need to move somewhere where building standards are genuinely low.

what are you comparing it to? I am from the US, and it's pretty shocking here.

Property prices are high because of supply and demand and because of the cost of building and the scarcity of building land

yup. two parts of that. Supply and demand. we build incredibly slowly compared to other places. Can't we fix that?

I thought that 10% 'built on' was bollocks, because they include lakes, rivers, mountains, and even beaches in their 'land' calculations??

Leave, I am not bothered about the money, but I want a choice of who lives in our society (I still value an open society). I would rather the UK be poor, but maintain its values. The greatest wealth the UK possesses is its people and the culture they maintain.

If we approach the world from this initial starting point and move forward they will not turn their back on us like some people would like you to fear.