Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

[villa4europe]

stay but it needs to introduce more common sense, i dont mean where the media will draw the battle lines which will be the overloading of the NHS and the free houses everyone supposedly gets but stuff like the heating allowance for pensioners living in spain

think it'll go the same as the scottish referendum and the general election, lots of noise from the smallest voting demographic

[tonyh29]

6 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

My point was that we won't know if they are Syrian, Irish, British or Vulcan unless we set up border controls and physical check points all along the Irish / Northern Irish border.

Whether we are happy to let them in, whether we want to allow Irish in but not Algerians etc., is for a later debate. But first, for this to make any sense and to have 'control' we need to set up a physical border with check points from Newry, Crossmaglen, Garrison, and Derry / Londonderry.

Once we have physical border guards we can decide on the entry criteria.

Do we really want to go back there?

 

only if we can start with Wales first  

[Demitri_C]

Not being funny but if we left what stops us striking deals with other countries outside the EU? there are plenty successful countries out there outside EU that are doing very well for themselves Canada for example. 

[villa89]

It'll be a disaster for Ireland if the UK vote to leave which I think will happen. In reality Ireland would be better off joining the UK and becoming like scotland with some moderate independance but still part of the UK. Of course, due to historical reasons, that won't happen but it would be for the best economically.

[chrisp65]

3 minutes ago, villa89 said:

In reality Ireland would be better off joining the UK

I'm vague on the detail, but hasn't that been tried before?

[Chindie]

15 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

Not being funny but if we left what stops us striking deals with other countries outside the EU? there are plenty successful countries out there outside EU that are doing very well for themselves Canada for example. 

In theory nothing. And nothing stops us doing that now. So we do. Although it's possible that the market might prefer dealing with us as part of the EU for whatever reason (ease, reciprocal relationship, opening other markets up inside the Union, etc). We could also arrange deals with EU countries when out of the Union as well, but it'll be more difficult and it's possible that that might make these markets look elsewhere in the EU for ease/cost/spite.

[Demitri_C]

1 minute ago, Chindie said:

In theory nothing. And nothing stops us doing that now. So we do. Although it's possible that the market might prefer dealing with us as part of the EU for whatever reason (ease, reciprocal relationship, opening other markets up inside the Union, etc). We could also arrange deals with EU countries when out of the Union as well, but it'll be more difficult and it's possible that that might make these markets look elsewhere in the EU for ease/cost/spite.

The thing is if we leave I am pretty sure various other countries will consider leaving the EU. No doubt Greece will be next. i dont think it will be that difficult, to be honest. My concern with leaving is job losses for people and cost of travelling in EU will go up . 

[Dante_Lockhart]

I just want us (UK) to sort ourselves out. Borders, economy, benefits etc... etc.. It'll probably take a long time to do that, but it'll put us in a stronger position going forward and would arguably help us help other countries more in the future.

What I want us to be like is Australia, border wise anyway. We need to be ruthless sometimes and weed out the ones who are trying to come into the country by pulling the wool over our eyes. We should have the power to refuse somebody entry into our country, and also the power to evict people from our country.

[Rodders]

OBE's post summed it up perfectly for me. Both choices are depressing nowadays. Either option will see the status quo remain, the nation state's influence has been ravaged to the point it is merely a tool for the obscenely rich to carry on as it were. Globalisation is so firmly entrenched in the system with all the connected telecom infrastructure etc I can't see a viable lefty socialist option whereby people rally behind the positive role of governmental action anymore, so staying out is bad, forever neoliberalism and the stagnation of wages and the loss of any institution worth protecting ( beeb, rampant state mouthpiece, bordering on fox news levels of misinformation nowadays, nhs will continue to have stealth charges added step by step and continually broken up under the laughable notion of efficiency - a modern day rule-of-thumb meaning fire the profits right up to the top, 'accidentally' ignoring the taxman along the way) and all the lobbyists ensure that staying in the corporate expansionist domain will rule for evermore. 

Perhaps people will say well, twas ever thus but I do think that's a lazy way of viewing things. Since, oh I dunno around 1979-81 - things have really gotten shit for those with a stake in equal opportunities and fairer means of distributing wealth, and creating genuine opportunities, rather than providing a series of utterly crap options. You can have two of these part time jobs without contractual security cos you know, it's a tough life being employers, we need to be flexible in case we need to downsize rapidly if our CEO's miss out on the annual Bentley etc etc. And if business' don't get their profits we'll just go and sue the government as well ( TTIP is the strongest reason for leaving at the moment, even though I absolutely know full well it'd be just as bad if we were not in the UK ) 

We're all doomed, doomed, doomed. 

 

[villa89]

50 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

I'm vague on the detail, but hasn't that been tried before?

Not through choice

[HanoiVillan]

STAY for a panoply of reasons, several of them personal (because what's the point in denying):

• Recently, my fiancee and I decided to work and live in the UK. We teach English as a second language. Language schools around the country live and die by migration: I anticipate that a leave vote will crush the industry. Probably it would be reduced in size by 50% or more, and I would be returning to Hanoi to live. 
• I have an attachment to the idea of an outward-looking, confident Britain. I'm not a particularly patriotic person (at all) but one of the things that does make me happy to be British is that it is a country that accepts people from all around the world. I don't dislike hearing different languages, eating different foods, meeting people from different countries. I'd rather live in a world of Polski Sklep than Love Thy Neighbour. I think a leave vote will turn the country in on itself; we'll become unsure, conservative, inward-looking. 
• I want to live in a fairer, more equal society. Some people on the left seem to believe that leaving the EU will somehow lead to that, as if handing the right wing of the Tory party their biggest political victory for thirty years at a time of Tory-majority government is somehow going to lead to Jerusalem. Give me a break. 
• There will be serious knock-on effects to the British economy, especially in the West Midlands. Manufacturing wants to stay for a reason; we face losing access to the Common Market, and even if we were to regain it it would inevitably be under worse terms (see below). 
• We know what future negotiations will look like. War-gaming of post-leave vote negotiations with former heads of state (mentioned in the TTIP thread) showed that after a leave vote there will be no goodwill for the UK amongst any of the countries of Europe. Even those who agree with us on most issues (the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, some of the eastern Bloc) will be furious with us for abandoning them. There will be a strong incentive to punish the UK by setting punitive terms for entry to the Common Market, in order to deter further countries from leaving. There will be reason for Paris and Frankfurt to encourage banks and larger companies to leave London, and there will be a strong attempt to remove London's status as the financial capital of Europe. 
• Advocates of a leave vote are expecting a significant leap of faith. They tell us - vociferously - that David Cameron won't be able to get a good deal out of the EU before the referendum, but that of course he (or more likely someone else, because whatever he says he will almost certainly have to resign if he loses the referendum) will be able to get a great deal afterwards. This stretches credulity, to put it mildly. 

There are others, but this post is already long enough. Doubtless I'll be adding more to this thread as the year goes by. 

EDIT: I should probably add, I thoroughly expect to lose this referendum. I'm very pessimistic, I don't think there's much chance of a stay vote at all. 

Edited February 16, 2016 by HanoiVillan

[HanoiVillan]

32 minutes ago, Dante_Lockhart said:

I just want us (UK) to sort ourselves out. Borders, economy, benefits etc... etc.. It'll probably take a long time to do that, but it'll put us in a stronger position going forward and would arguably help us help other countries more in the future.

What I want us to be like is Australia, border wise anyway. We need to be ruthless sometimes and weed out the ones who are trying to come into the country by pulling the wool over our eyes. We should have the power to refuse somebody entry into our country, and also the power to evict people from our country.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but we absolutely already have that power, and in extremely rare cases where we don't (eg, being unable to repatriate asylum seekers from Zimbabwe) it has nothing to do with the EU. 

[tonyh29]

17 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

that David Cameron won't be able to get a good deal out of the EU before the referendum, but that of course he (or more likely someone else, because whatever he says he will almost certainly have to resign if he loses the referendum)

to my knowledge he hasn't said which side he will be campaigning for yet  .. I got the impression if the negations didn't go well he could / would  join the leave camp ?

 

trouble is I watched Yes Minister as a youth and I already know that Cameron is painting it as defeat so he can pluck a last minute victory out the air as Brussels "caves in " on his demands

 

[blandy]

1 hour ago, tonyh29 said:

he hasn't said which side he will be campaigning for yet

Not with words in a sentence, no. But I'll give you clue  - "stay in". There are no circumstances under which he will recommend a "leave" vote in this referendum.

 

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, tonyh29 said:

to my knowledge he hasn't said which side he will be campaigning for yet  .. I got the impression if the negations didn't go well he could / would  join the leave camp ?

trouble is I watched Yes Minister as a youth and I already know that Cameron is painting it as defeat so he can pluck a last minute victory out the air as Brussels "caves in " on his demands

 

What you've done there is isolate the difference between his position in theory and his position in practice. 

The key point is this: how bad would the deal have to be for him to join the leave camp? Pretty bad, because we know he doesn't want to leave. And who would have negotiated that deal? Well, that's Mr D. Cameron. Admitting he got a bad deal is tantamount to resigning, which he would be obliged to do. The negotiations after a leave vote will be unbelievably important, affecting the country for decades and centuries to come. We could be locked out of the Common Market, lose our influence with America, see our balance of payments destroyed, see the manufacturing industry collapse. They're going to be really important, there's no way Tory backbenchers go into battle with a guy whose record reads 'Played 1 Lost 1'. No, the deal he comes up with is Cameron's ship, and he's already said it's going in to battle, so he either captains it to victory or he sinks to the ocean floor, there's no middle ground. 

Your second paragraph is more on the money. He'll inevitably announce any deal as a 'success', whatever it contains. 

[mjmooney]

This whole referendum really boils my piss. 

This is probably the most complex, delicately balanced political decision in this country's recent history. The result will have momentous consequences, one way or the other. It should not, repeat NOT, be decided as if it were the **** ing X Factor. 

Look, I like to think I'm a fairly intelligent, well educated bloke. I take an interest in politics. I have a degree in International History and Politics, FFS! And you know what? I don't feel I understand the issue well enough to cast a yes/no vote on it. So what chance have the average Joe and Jane got? This is EXACTLY the sort of decision that needs to be taken by our elected representatives. It's what we pay them to do. It doesn't split on party lines, so it could even be done by a cross bench team, acting on the advice of the very best economists they can come up with. 

But no. This HUGE decision is going to be made by a mass of undereducated, ill informed and confused punters, who WILL be acting on exactly the sort of emotive and bigoted gut feelings parodied by Pompey on page one of this thread. 

It scares me shitless. 

FWIW, I have irrational and emotive feelings about it, too. I'm a namby pamby wet lefty, I hate nationalism, and for that reason alone, I approve of anything that brings countries together, rather than dividing them. European Super State? Bring it on. Hopefully followed by an eco-socialist world government. But that's a utopian fantasy, even I can see that. The EU is clearly nothing of the sort, its flaws are obvious and many. But what would leaving it mean in terms of knock-on effects? I have absolutely no idea. And neither, it seems, do our elected leaders. So they are sticking their heads in the sand and leaving it up to The Plebs (c) (tm). I suppose they think that when it all goes horribly wrong (either way), they can say "Oh, don't blame us, we only did what YOU wanted". 

Not good enough. 

It will be interesting to see what the turnout is. 

 

[tonyh29]

9 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

This whole referendum really boils my piss. 

This is probably the most complex, delicately balanced political decision in this country's recent history. The result will have momentous consequences, one way or the other. It should not, repeat NOT, be decided as if it were the **** ing X Factor. 

Look, I like to think I'm a fairly intelligent, well educated bloke. I take an interest in politics. I have a degree in International History and Politics, FFS! And you know what? I don't feel I understand the issue well enough to cast a yes/no vote on it. So what chance have the average Joe and Jane got? This is EXACTLY the sort of decision that needs to be taken by our elected representatives. It's what we pay them to do. It doesn't split on party lines, so it could even be done by a cross bench team, acting on the advice of the very best economists they can come up with. 

But no. This HUGE decision is going to be made by a mass of undereducated, ill informed and confused punters, who WILL be acting on exactly the sort of emotive and bigoted gut feelings parodied by Pompey on page one of this thread. 

It scares me shitless. 

FWIW, I have irrational and emotive feelings about it, too. I'm a namby pamby wet lefty, I hate nationalism, and for that reason alone, I approve of anything that brings countries together, rather than dividing them. European Super State? Bring it on. Hopefully followed by an eco-socialist world government. But that's a utopian fantasy, even I can see that. The EU is clearly nothing of the sort, its flaws are obvious and many. But what would leaving it mean in terms of knock-on effects? I have absolutely no idea. And neither, it seems, do our elected leaders. So they are sticking their heads in the sand and leaving it up to The Plebs (c) (tm). I suppose they think that when it all goes horribly wrong (either way), they can say "Oh, don't blame us, we only did what YOU wanted". 

Not good enough. 

It will be interesting to see what the turnout is. 

 

Can't argue with most of that  ...

I guess though on the same logic we would also have to  stop people voting for a government in a GE as well  ...  most people don't understand that either  

 

then we kinda wave good bye to democracy and have to replace it with something else .. Dictatorship ?

[Genie]

@mjmooney i think people will vote based on things relevant to them. They dont need to know the ins and outs of the impact of every other person in Europe, that is what you personally are looking for. Collectively, all of these individual viewpoints will form the UK decision.

There would be uproar if this decision was not delegated to the people.

What's the worst that can happen with a 'no / out' vote?

[sharkyvilla]

I've tried replying a few times in this thread but keep deleting it.  I am completely on the fence about it, which means I'll probably vote for the status quo.  

[snowychap]

I don't know how I'll vote but I lean towards voting to stay in something that I don't particularly like (the EU as is) for the following reason(s): that the timing of the referendum and thus the timing of any vote to leave would be of such significance for the continent of Europe, to already existing nationalist movements and governments across the EU and to the kind of action about borders which we have already seen that we could end up in a very dark place as a continent very quickly. The channel would not insulate us from that kind of development.