niceguy2
Manufacturing industries create wealth. Services tend to shift money around rather than add real value.
No they don't. Financial services might, but services covers everything that isn't manufacturing. If I get paid for doing a job, even if I didn't build something, that's still creating wealth.
One of the reasons why we were so exposed to the financial meltdown is because our financial services industry is out of whack to the rest of our economy. Same reason in Iceland except they were even worse!
An issue we could have shrugged off if Gordon Brown hadn't spent the next 30 years of tax money buying votes in Scotland by 'rescuing' his failed banks, but that's another matter.
The only way our country will grow and keep up in the world is if we have competitive exporters. By leaving the EU we'd make it harder for our exporters to compete to our largest market!
How? This claim comes up time and time again, but how would it be harder? By what process does being outside the EU create difficulties for manufacturers?
You say we are kowtowing. But it seems to me that many of the rules we'd lose would simply be replaced or not wanted in the first place. You mentioned earlier that one advantage is that we could let staff go easier.
I didn't mention that. Perhaps someone else did.
Another I guess is we could ignore the working time directive and people can be made to work more than 48 hours a week.
Is that really what most people want?
I'd like Parliament - my elected representatives to have the right to choose rather than having those laws imposed on them. If people want a working time directive, they should be able to petition Parliament for it. But saying that we shouldn't leave the EU because it makes some laws you happen to like smacks of dictatorship.
vadus
It's nonsense to say that the UK's service industries don't rely on the EU. Tourism is an example of a service industry which relies quite heavily on it
No, Tourism relies on tourists, who would still come to the UK if we were outside the EU. They're not coming here because we're in the EU, they're coming here because the UK is a great place to visit. We're outside Schengen, so they still need to show their passports. That wouldn't change if we were outside the EU.
And like it or not, the UK's service industry has benefited considerably from cheap labour from the eastern EU member states.
Some aspects certainly have. Whether or not that's comfort to the 2 million unskilled workers unable to find a job because of that uncontrollable flood of cheap labour, I don't know. Nobody seems to care about them, what with them being poor and undereducated and unskilled and largely invisible.
So the question is whether the penalties of unlimited migration from poorer EU states is worth the benefits to businesses. I suspect that in the long run, it won't be.
It's worth pointing out that common EU regulations don't just benefit British businesses (by helping them to export), they also benefit British consumers: Common EU regulations means its easier for companies from other EU countries to sell their goods and services to UK consumers, which means more choice, and lower prices due to greater competition.
Actually, no. The EU creates monopolies when it intervenes in markets. Agriculture, fisheries, telecoms, aerospace, defence are good examples. The way it works is this: The Commission decides that it wants to make laws about X. It invites the representatives of the large businesses who do X and asks them what sort of laws they want. The large businesses choose the laws (with the EU) which create an artificial monopoly which squeezes out smaller competitors.
Monopolies are always bad for consumers. Adam Smith wrote:
?People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.?