In historic vote, Britons decide they hate 70 years of peace and prosperity:
“Yes, we remember recovering from World Wars caused by national pride. We then enjoyed our lives in the EU, but now I would much rather go out of this world feeling nationally superior, than allow our younger generation to enjoy that same integration, peace, and opportunity that we were able to enjoy.”
-70 y.o. Codger in the Midlands
Please share widely!
Really bad news. Nativism is stronger than ever. It’s easy to underestimate its appeal. Think of how many years Jesse Helms and his ilk were able to live off stories about UN black helicopters.
If anyone can feel comfortable at all about the November elections, all I can say is that I envy him or her. On top of that, the uncertainty caused by Brexit will bad for our economy in the short term–not a good thing for the incumbent party.
The overconfidence/complacency about the election in November (by many, but not all, Democrats) is scaring the bejeezus out of me. If something this unexpected can happen in the UK, then I think all bets are off here in crazy land (esp. since no one really expected Trump to become the presumptive nominee either). I fear that the Brexit vote will embolden Trump supporters to come out in even more force this November. If Trump wins in November, I might very well put in for a transfer to my company’s Montreal office. I wonder if I could seek political asylum there…
What of the working class family that’s been shafted for years and years because of myopic corporatism and the “global economy”?
of more immigrant bashing and isolationism to remedy the economic pain caused by the previous cycle of immigrant bashing and isolationism.
Wait and see.
…doesn’t such a move make a race to the bottom even more likely? That can’t help the working class.
When I was in the UK last year I encountered a lot of people from other parts of Europe working in service jobs. Some of them were even ex-professionals from other countries like Spain, working in the UK because their own countries had no work.
They were not happy, they were simply bearing it. They were working long hours for little pay in a place that was very expensive.
Those people will presumably no longer be able to work in the UK. Their jobs will need to be taken by UK workers. Those UK workers will probably demand better wages because although desperate, they are probably not as desperate as someone from Spain. The jobs will probably not be as efficient because they will now hire a less capable UK worker rather than bringing in someone with enough skill to be a teacher in Spain to be a waiter in the UK.
However, it will distribute the wealth more evenly in the UK. It will force British companies to hire from their young ethnic minority communities rather than “outsourcing” from the continental labor pool.
Rather than concentrating the pain on small groups of minorities, everyone will feel a little pain, but overall I think it is going to work out better for them. And if they need to put some slack into the labor force, they can do it on their own terms.
…that a UK business hiring from the continent is “outsourcing”. I thought that it was a fully integrated market with labor standards across the board. That would be like a Massachusetts firm hiring from Mississippi and calling it outsourcing. In general, I think unity best meets the standard of the greatest good for the greatest number. Besides, certainly there are areas in which the UK benefits by being able to sell their goods in a common market.
And anti-globalization. The British equivalent of Donald Trump thinking that Apple should be “forced” to manufacture iphones in North America, and it will all be fine, because everyone will just pay a few thousand dollars more for their iphones and it will be peachy.
It works so well every time it is actually tried.
every time things like NAFTA and TPP are tried?
These agreements open our products to the world market too, remember. We saw 20+ million new jobs and rising incomes at all levels under the President who also concluded NAFTA. Protectionism to me is the international equivalent of saying we got ours and the rest of you can fend for yourselves, which we hate when the one percent does. I want neither physical walls keeping people out or virtual walls isolating us from the world market. To me globalization is inclusive and therefore liberal. We should be vigilant against abuses which we can do much better inside these agreements than out, but people in other countries need jobs too.
As I have said many times over, incomes have not risen for most Americans and for people like me (white guy), they have lowered.
…when she says that during her husband’s presidency incomes rose at all levels? If so, prove it.
Figure E White Men 1993-2001 wages down all but one year. So “technically”, she did not lie because wages did rise for one year out of eight and in lawyer talk, yes, income did rise. But frankly, I’m tired of that shit.
The trend line for every demographic (not sure why you singled out white men) is higher in the year 2000 relative to where it was in 1993, so not just one year, but an overall trend – no lawyering necessary. Many of the lines had trended downward from 1980 to 1993, but a Republican was in the WH then, thus supporting Clinton’s claim that everyone does better when Dems are President.
American-made iPhones would cost $30-40 more, per MIT. I’d pay that — just as I’d pay another nickel for McDonald’s for paid sick time.
That is what the British elites thought too – that it is a really great thing to hire former teachers from Spain to serve their tables (because they’re better employees) while displacing the lesser quality people in England who used to serve their tables. They get better table servers for the same wages. Big win for them, right?
They ignored the displaced table workers, who voted yesterday to leave the EU. You just can’t continue to screw your own voters like that in a democracy.
The problem is that there is no parity across Europe, there is no “Euro” government that will help out various parts of the “country of Europe” via social welfare programs to try and equalize conditions. That wage imbalance is what causes ex-teachers from Spain to seek work in England as a table server.
It actually is “outsourcing” for a British company to hire someone from continental Europe at cheaper wages displacing British citizens. It’s a crappy thing to do to anyone. No one willingly wants to be a martyr and give someone else their job just so they can pay a few dollars less for .
Can you imagine if, whatever your job is, your boss came to you and said “hey, I just found this guy from Croatia, he can do the same job that you do but because he is from Croatia, he is willing to work for 30% less money. Sorry, you’re fired”. You might be more than a little ticked off, especially if you are paying $400/month for your student loans, loans you needed to take out to land your job to begin with, and $1k/month for the house that you bought to give your kids the American dream.
Now imagine that you go to lots of other companies and you apply for your job, but you find out that there are now Croatians everywhere working for less money than you can possibly accept. The Croatians aren’t paying student loans; they are content to live in tiny apartments doubling up (because it’s better than Croatia), they are willing to ride a bike to work and not own a car. They don’t care about living in the “right” community because any school in the USA is better than Croatia.
Oh, and maybe it’s not “outsourcing” because we have an agreement with Croatia whereby it is as if there are no borders between our countries. You can freely choose to move to Croatia and take a job there – which will, of course, be at 50% of your existing wages, and you will need to live in congregate housing and ride a bike to work, and deal with crappy schools.
Any kind of trade has to be between equals, or there have to be rules. Anyone who ever traded baseball cards must understand this. I can’t come to the table with a box of 1980 Topps cards if you’re at the table with your 1952 Topps cards and demand that we “trade equally”.
The people who constantly sneer “what do you want, protectionism?” are very likely immune from these forces. They don’t realize that in order for the master plan of “raising up all workers across the planet” to happen, that means that US workers will need to lower themselves by 90% so that the other 90% of the planet can rise up by 10%. Meanwhile the oligarchy is completely immune from this because they now control the global capital and they are out of the reach of any one government because there is no world government.
The difference between the US and the EU is that the US at least attempts to have a common standard of living. The EU was more focused on punishing certain countries, and that forced conditions in them to diverge from the average, which in turn caused massive immigration and job displacement. Additionally, the US has a longer history of being a single country – so if my company hires someone from Mississippi to do a job, I’m not going to look at this as hiring an “immigrant”. Most EU countries do not see themselves as part of the same “union” – there are still Greeks, Italians, Spainiards, etc. They have very different cultures and languages. So when you get fired and replaced with someone from Greece – because that person from Greece is starving and will work for less than your salary – you don’t think it is your fault for asking for too much money, it is their fault for being willing to accept too little money.
At least as of when I took classes on the EU a few years ago, they were economically at least basically one country with several states like we are.
This map shows how the average wage is quite different among EU countries. For example, it is 756 Euros in Poland, 2,318 Euros in the UK.
That means that the UK workers are under pressure from Polish workers who are used to being paid a lot less. There are reportedly 850,000 immigrant Poles working in the UK. I’m sure they are willing to work for less money than a native worker because they are coming from an economy that paid them, on average, half of what the UK pays.
Let’s say that you could move to New York and make 50% more salary than you do now, and were able to live in better housing and work 10% fewer hours. Would you jump at that opportunity? Would you care that the rest of the workers in NY were doing the same job for 75% more than your current salary and were working 20% fewer hours? Probably not, because the 50%/10% deal was way better than you could get in Poland.
That is how the downward wage pressure occurs in the EU.
Besides, are there no wage standards throughout? I would have thought EU would have been ahead of the US in that regard. Plus, I suspect 756/2318 only tells part of the story because you have to account for cost of living differences. Unity should be able to bring some sort of equilibrium to the labor markets, it would seem. Here in the US we don’t complain when people move from one state to another for a job, and we certainly don’t refer to them as “immigrants”. If Poles moving to the UK are referred to and thought of as immigrants there is still a bigger problem of mentality. They should just be seen as fellow Europeans just like in your example to a native New Yorker I would expect to be considered a fellow American if I were to move there.
The phrase became such a commonly used description of transient labor it has it’s own wickepedia page.
This is simple math: UK labor is fluid and can come from any EU member country, but only UK citizens have the right to vote – then it is not surprising this gave great boost to Brexiters.
It’s another aspect of broken EU governance that led to all this. People should have right to vote where they work.
Same observation applies to undocumented immigrants in the US.
…but in the case of the EU I think it makes sense to federalize citizenship and people can vote where they legally reside at the time. Usually this will be close to the place of work, but I did once work in NH while living in MA. I could not vote in NH nor would I expect to.
..and Bulgaria, and Armenia, and Slovakia…who do you think does all the work on Cape on H2B visas here in MA in the summer?
It’s full of Romanians on Cape Cod. All those jobs, too few American college age kids interested in taking them.
…taken to it’s logical extreme of every member going its own way, they would now be in competition trying to attract businesses with as few regs and taxes as possible. That is the race to the bottom I was referring to. Geography mandates that there would still be a lot of border-hopping that we usually associate with states on this side of the pond. Europe is not automatically immune to conflict and the EU is the best hope for maintaining a continent whole, free, and at peace.
… far more likely to happen, in the short term, is that the majority of these jobs will simply evaporate as England sinks into a recession. In the long term, Scotlands potential exit from the UK and the Irish reaction will rock the English economy and many of those jobs may never return.
This was a suicide note, pure and simple.
The problem is manifesting itself via nationalism and nativism, but the problem is that most people are getting screwed under the neoliberal economic path we are taking.
It is easy to see how immigrants can be scapegoated – they do contribute to the problem, though not as much as people think. When you have a certain set of economic circumstances and you know how much you need to make in your job, and you see your profitable business bringing in immigrants specifically because they will undercut your wage by 20% or more, why should you be happy?
This is happening in this state. Mass Mutual, one of our largest companies, has been outsourcing its IT jobs for years. They are sending them to companies like Cognizent, who bring in foreign workers on H1-B visas at lower rates, with fewer ties to US society (i.e. they don’t feel the pressure to not live in congregate housing), and who are much more afraid to fight for their rights because a dismissal means being forced to leave the country. US workers know that this is bad for them, and to compound the problem, they know the laws are being abused (because H1-B is supposed to be for high-skill workers when US workers can’t be found – not to replace US workers).
Wanna bet that those hundreds of IT workers who got thrown out of work are going to vote for Donald Trump? Of course they will. They have seen just how bad the system is, and they want to burn it down.
We need a certain amount of protectionism in the workplace because our standard of living – and thus our economic circumstances – are very different from those in other countries. Yes, people in China could do many of our jobs very easily for 1/10 the wage. Does that mean that we are overpaid by a factor of 10? In a global sense, yes, but in a local sense, no, because none of us could take a 90% pay cut both psychologically or economically.
This is the fundamental struggle – the global economy works best for the global elites because they can straddle countries and do very well for themselves. It works for people at the upper end of our incomes because we get to pay less for our goods and services while still enjoying relatively high income – as long as we can stay on top of the apple cart. It really sucks for more and more people because it has shifted our opportunities elsewhere and has greatly weakened the economic bargaining power of the average American. Don’t like your job? Don’t complain too much, because there are 100 people in India willing to do it for 1/10 the cost, and plenty of companies who will bring in immigrants to do it for 1/2 the cost.
Not so much protectionism, I think, as leveling of after-tax incomes.
I would have preferred a really firm yes or really firm no.
My guess, all the short-term effects will return to normal fairly soon. The long-term effects are more jarring. The EU has been, warts and all, a roaring success. I’m not sure why England (at least a loud piece of England) became dissatisfied with it.
It is about the same difference as the Pres Obama vs Romney in 2012.
I think it shook out to 52-48%, which does strike me as pretty close for a question of such magnitude. Presidential elections are rarely popular vote landslides.
Is that I think that Pres Obama has a pretty clear vote of confidence by the American people by a 4% point win. It has never been said here that Pres Obama only won by 4% and that is not “a really firm yes or no” on him.
So, why isn’t a 4% win for BRExit “a firm yes or no”? I guess a presidential vote is not of the same magnitude, but it is pretty close.
52-48 is better than what I saw last night, which was more like 50.5 to 49.5. But it is still pretty close, considering the stakes.
Choice of moderate Democrat President vs. Republican President isn’t really comparable. Maybe if both houses of Congress turned on that vote too.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/23/europe/eu-referendum-live-blog/
Final tally gives victory to Leave — 17,410,742, Remain — 16,141,241 (52% v. 48%)
“myopic nationalism” might be unfair. I don’t trust US reporting on European politics in these cases. It might be more subtle than that.
There is a special called The Big Vote, which I think is re-running doing excellent analysis.
One interesting thing – a spokesman for the Labour Party is talking about the split between young progressive ideologues and traditional working constituencies and how that has hurt the party and he sounds exactly like John, that many of you mock….
This vote is part of a larger pattern, and I think it’s facilities to attribute it to something as simple as nativism. In Europe as here. The social contract where the current system benefits the lion’s share of the population is breaking down. Productivity, work hours, and education are all up, and real wages are down.
So people are looking for change. An inexperienced Syriza government in Greece. A new party co-founded by a comedian is poised to win the mayorlty of Rome. The Front National will likely win the first round of the French presidency. The far right came within a whisker of the Austrian presidency. Spain is doing a second election in a few months after the recent one was a four-way tie. Ireland’s recent poll was similar.
The established political order is paying the price for the economic stagflation throughout the West. (Donald Trump, anyone?) The responses differ from place to place, but the cause is constant. Nativism is the response in some but not all places – the left is resurgent in Italy, Spain, Greece, Canada, and arguably the US under Sanders. That’s the lesson I take from this – the legitimacy of the status quo is increasingly shaky, and people are willing to try many diffe re nt things as a consequence. Brexit is just one of those.
This action will have bad consequences. The fact that the problem is real does not justify doing something which will make things worse.
The apologists for Brexit have concentrated on pointing out that the status quo is bad. No one yet has made a case that leaving the EU will lead to anything better.
Greater control over many competences, fishing, agriculture, immigration, workforce movement, trade deals, consumer regulation. Less subsidy of other parts of the EU. You or I may not agree with it, but it’s there and thoroughly argued. Your dismissive reaction to it is just like David Cameron’s was….and why Remain lost.
… but the problem is not the control, lack-thereof, or wish for more, but that all these things…
every. last. one.
… will need to be re-negotiated from scratch. Even if it does result in greater control (a debatable foresight) it’s implementation cost is likely to be extreme.
I don’t think it was thoroughly argued at all. And as much as I dislike Cameron, his dismissive reaction was my dismissive reaction because what I saw was a transparently naive and breathtakingly mendacious campaign for ‘Leave.’ I guess my belief in the ability of others to see that for themselves is mistaken.
cited by David Axelrod:
66 percent of people who left school at 16 voted for Leave. 71 percent of those with university degrees voted to Remain.
Labor voted to leave and the elite voted to stay, in large part.
…the Labour Party was more unified to stay than the Tories. Frankly, this really is one of those areas where the better educated you are, the more of a sense of ALL the consequences you probably have. I’m not the least bit surprised at this statistical breakdown and would take the elites anyday.
….never really ever seem to include the common laborer. That’s the problem with the big plans of the well educated.
A major argument for Leave was to be free of onerous regulation. What onerous regulation? French/German style labor regulation, with its maximum hours, required sick/vacation time, and rights not to be fired arbitrarily. As opposed to the Anglo-Saxon model of pure at-will employment, which is shared by the US. Common laborers didn’t give a shit about any of that because polacks.
This was an issue eight years ago. Street fruit and vegetable vendors were ordered by the EU to stop selling their wares measured in pounds. It was in violation of EU regulations.
If you didn’t comply, this would result: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3179333/Market-trader-in-shock-at-conviction-for-selling-fruit-and-veg-by-the-pound.html
In this excerpt, you see that an edict from Brussels can be enforced to the letter, locally:
Can you see this happening here? You local farmers market can sell vegetables using any measure they want.
It’s just a small example, but if it can get down to this level of regulation imagine how much there is on a major business.
Almost all of the people I used to work with in the UK, college educated, management types, were for Leave.
And there’s a similar story about some crank that wanted to sell his warm beer in actual pints, rather than glasses that have “ml” marked near where the pint would be. It is also worth noting that retailers that refuse to post the information that the guy in your story refused to post are usually out to screw people over. A lot of continental Europe is far more tolerant than is the Anglo-American culture, where we instead chide the fleeced customer for being a dumbass.
But there is such a thing as cost-benefit tradeoffs. They freed themselves of some petty bullshit (yay, freedom!) at the cost of (i) the largest and most important sector of their economy; (ii) significant short and medium term economic contraction; and likely (iii) Scotland, as well as (iv) likely a significant chunk of their quite-popular welfare state in the long term. And not to mention tossing overboard (and undermining) an institution specifically designed to prevent war on the European continent, and which has been successful at doing so for 70 years. Not a good trade! (Sad!)
And it isn’t like any of the irritating stuff is going away, because the giant economy that dwarfs yours and is your largest most crucial trading partner isn’t going anywhere. They reduced themselves to being Canada– dragged along in the cultural and economic wake of the whale next door, whether they like it or not.
but the perception is strong in the UK that they’re being pushed around.
“Economists say” is a term that everyone discounts (like economists say the TPP is a net positive).
This is only your opinion:
And this is not true. Britain joined the EU in 1973. I’m sure the peace will be kept without them:
So they cut off their nose to spite their face.
They get to either (i) work a deal like Norway, in which they get access to the common market, in return for (a) adhering to those pesky regulations (but getting no input into them at all); (b) contribute to the EU budget; and (c) allow the free movement of people with EU passports. Which is essentially exactly what they had, except now they don’t get a vote.
Or they can work a deal like any other foreign nation, and trade with the EU in the same way that the US, Japan, or China does, which means some pretty significant tariffs on just about everything with their largest trading partner by far, and would cause significant economic contraction in the short and medium term.
In either event, the engine of their economy for the last 25 years–The City– has to shrink as business moves to in-EU cities.
And now the big pro-Brexit guy is going all Trump– saying “well, I never said that 350 million pounds a week would be made available to the National Health Service if we leave the EU” even though:
but that’s certainly not the opinion of BMG.
Again all the other things you postulate will happen are just speculation.
Maybe there won’t be tariffs (why would EU countries want to pay more for British goods?)
Why is there going to be trouble for the City? New York’s not in the EU. Last time I noticed Switzerland wasn’t in the EU, and their financial services companies seem to get along just fine. What about all the money in the Middle East and all their ties to the UK?
The UK economy needs the Continent much more than vice versa just because of the relative size. And it would be very hard to just keep things as is because a large chunk of those UK exports is agricultural products. Agriculture in continental Europe is even more politically entrenched than it is in the USA, where even GOP-dominated Congresses and Presidents can’t kill huge farm subsidies. If UK is not in the EU, how can you let them import without tariff without doing the same for others, such as the USA, who has some serious tonnage of subsidized grain to sell Peirre and Fritz, dirt cheap, without also violating WTO treaties designed to prevent trade wars? You can’t.
I think you have some serious misconceptions about the scale of The City relative to the financial centers on the Continent. Chicago has a financial sector, but it ain’t no Wall Street. Wall Street exists because the US has been the worlds largest economy for quite some time.
The City exists, not because of the vibrancy of the British economy, but because (i) London is in the EU, and (ii) they speak English there, which makes it a great place for American firms like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to set up shop in a way that allows access to the EU market on “member” terms. It helps that the huge Asian centers–Singapore and Hong Kong have financial sectors that have an easy fluency in English as well. But if a Morgan Stanley office in London has the same outsider access to the EU that they have in NY, what is the point of having a London office, really? (At least at the scale they have).
They will have to move operations to somewhere within the EU. Frankfurt, Paris, Luxembourg, or Dublin, if the language remains a big factor. London’s ability to be the crossroads between two of the world’s largest economies–the US and the EU– will not exist.
If New York’s Wall Street ever shrank to the scale of the financial sector of Chicago or Boston, it would be catastrophic for NYC and NYS. That’s why this is so baffling. Its as if NYC decided to kick Wall Street across the Hudson to NJ, and then called it a big win.
… that the ‘leave’ side did not, at all, consider any of the consequences of ‘brexit’. I suspect they didn’t really think it was going to win either.
It’s one thing to say the EU is bad and let’s chuck it. But to say that and then, blindly and unthinkingly, go for it with no plan or road map… it’s unfathomable to me the sheer blind dumb pigheadedness of it all…
The EU is going to cut itself off from sources of capital? Do you think borders matter when you’re talking about NY, Tokyo, Hong Kong or London? I just don’t see it.
The financial center isn’t the “source” of capital. It is just a crossroads, and they develop in places where various factors make it a convenient crossroads. The City (the London equivalent of Wall Street in NY) because it is a convenient point of access for Asian and North American capital to Europe. Capital flows like water via the path of least resistance. If you have a billion dollars of pension fund money to invest in BMW, you will find a way to do that, using whatever path makes the most sense. In other words, you have the power dynamic reversed.
And the financial sector is very heavily regulated by national governments, and is therefore ALWAYS excluded from free trade deals, like NAFTA. US bank regulators would never, ever permit US capital markets to be run from offshore, thus free of regulation. Nor would any other government, because an unregulated capital market is untrustworthy and will evaporate. That’s why, if you have ever tried, it is complicated and difficult to buy foreign equities in plain-vanilla American 401K account, unless your service provider has access to those markets.
The financial sector is excluded from free trade, that is, with the notable exception of the European Union, the members of which negotiated for years and years to match regulations so that access in one is access to all.
Plus you just miss the political reality. It is a competitive world, and there is really no particular reason that a large financial center should exist HERE rather than THERE. Why on earth would the EU permit a non-member to set the regulation of its capital markets? Especially when there is a list of in-Union places that could do just as well as London, which just set the house on fire?
It is super easy for the sector to just flow somewhere else. The physical infrastructure is minimal. The real investment is the aggregation of professional skill and supporting professions like law and accounting. But if the rules shift so that it is easier to access the EU market from Frankfurt or Dublin, guess what will happen? Someone with the professional skills will notice, go there, and make a huge amount of money, which will attract others with professional skill and pretty soon office space in the City of London is getting cheap again.
..the City here refers to the City of London, which is only a part of what we think of as London. By this model the government buildings are in the City of Westminster, also within Greater London. The City of London constitutes the financial district and is ceremoniously presided over by the Lord Mayor (again, not to be confused with the democratically elected Mayor of London).
.
… You forgot to point out (although the article you cite does mention it) that the… ahem… ‘convicted’ seller was charged under the UK’s “Weights and Measures Act” an act which predates the EU, initially FORBADE metric quantities but was amended in the 1960’s to first allow metrics and then require them. The adoption of the metric system in the UK predates the EU and is part of a process that dovetailed particularly cleanly with the intents of the EU. So this particular situation was likely, with or without the EU.
The person was charged in a British court and assessed penalties for breaking British Law. The law in question REQUIRES metric quantities but ALLOWS imperial quantities to be displayed alongside. All the seller had to do was to weigh in metric and do math conversions to imperial. But, I guess, “GRRR EU ARGGHH” makes more sense…
and why would they want to do this?
Jeremy Corbyn, Labor leader, was MIA in the campaign. He said it was a “7.5 out of 10” to stay. True, Remain won in Scotland — but I bet those were SNP voters. Who do you think was voting leave in Scotland, then? In Wales, a Labor heartland, Leave won.
What a fiasco. I guess it makes all of us who keep thinking “nah, the voters won’t really do something dumb” a little nervous about November.
Yesterday Trump didn’t know what “brexit” is and when told, cheered, and then said he hadn’t bothered to talk to any of his foreign policy people about it. It just, what, a pillar of US security policy in Europe for the last 70 years? Who cares? It’s not like the US has ever had any security interests in Europe anyway. They have their little wars, and it isn’t like we even notice.
I guess the populists will be happy, because it will cost The City a lot of money. The City exists because it is an entry point to the EU. Now that it won’t be the financial sector will shift to Paris, or Luxembourg. If English-speaking is needed for American businesses, I bet there is office space available in Dublin.
Scotland narrowly voted to remain a part of the UK just 2 years ago, and the primary argument that won the day for unionists was the UK’s membership in the EU. Scotland voted 2-1 to remain in the EU yesterday. I can’t imagine that there won’t be another independence referenfum, and that it won’t be successful.
And for what? Being free of onerous regulation? Over half of UK exports go to the EU. They’ll have to live with the regulations anyway. Being free of immigrants? If Scotland is re-admitted to the EU, will they have an armed, controlled English-Scots border? Benefits to “the working men (and women)”? Absent the EU, they’ll have WTO tariffs. Everything imported gets more expensive, and everything exported is less competitive. That’s fewer jobs, and everything more expensive. The “productive” sectors of the economy shrinks, and the (hated) “financial” sector of the economy (which is a HUGE part of the UK economy) moves in significant part to Dublin, Frankfurt, and Paris.
It is going to be very tough to pay for their NHS with a smaller country and a smaller tax base.
What a fiasco.
Well said.
If Scotland is re-admitted, there will be, at the least, customs agents at the border and travellers will require passports.
With the Republic of Ireland remaining in the EU, and now Northern Ireland out, this same border situation will obtain with, with (i fear) disastrous results. The Brits and the Scots have always considered themselves separate, and indeed Scotland voluntarily joined the British Union in 1707. I think that they could leave and have that situation and it wouldn’t be bad. The Irish people never voluntatrily joined and have never made the same distinctions between the north and the south of the country. The fact that England’s ham-handed politics has, again, sundered their country is going to stir up a lot of animosity towards England in both Ireland and Norther Ireland.
The entirety of the Northern Ireland peace process has depended on the EU. With both the Republic and the UK as members, the issue of what country Northern Ireland is in was essentially irrelevant, which lowered the temperature enough for 22 years of tenuous peace.
…that Ulster might want to vote on unification with the Republic now!
that the Republic would rather talk about just about ANYTHING else
It was suggested by Sinn Fein, who suggests such a vote on a regular basis. Hell, that vote wouldn’t pass in the Republic, much less Ulster. Remember, Northern Ireland is the most socially conservative part of the UK, and Ireland just overwhelmingly voted for marriage equality. Some Irish I know see the northern Catholics as somewhat embarrassing distant relatives they’re not in a hurry to invite back home.
It seems there is a cosmopolitan majority that wants integration which transcends sectarian divisions. If might be right at home in the New Ireland where curry is the national dish instead of shepherd’s pie. From an economic standpoint it now makes more sense to reunify.
The cultural and nostalgic arguments don’t hold water in either direction. The Ireland of De Valera and Joyce SF wants to rejoin doesn’t exist anymore, and it hasn’t for decades. The Protestant, Royalist, Imperial UK the unionists want to remain part of will consist of just them, Wales and the Falklands soon enough. Even Gibraltar is talking about a separate relationship with the EU.
THAN IGNORANCE IN ACTION. ” GOETHE
And that is all I have to say about the rise of Trumpist neo-Fascism in the world
And if it ever comes to power in my country I will head for the bunker and never be seen or heard from again.
Fred Rich LaRiccia