The now-enacted will of (some of) the people

[lapal_fan]

Pathetic comments and a really weak argument. The issues are not about people coming here, they are about the numbers, our infrastructure cannot cope with the numbers arriving in the country and the rate.

I know a lot of intelligent , educated people who want to leave the EU as they can see the unsustainable burden being placed on this country.

As for the illegal immigrants, that's the only thing you got right, they do need to be dealt with as well .

Not my opinion, ta.

Others who've used those arguments TO ME.

You're right, pretty pathetic.

[lapal_fan]

And the resources thing? HAHAHAHAHAHA!

Brilliant.

[colhint]

42 minutes ago, Wainy316 said:

 

 

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16 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

We already produce less than 60% of the food we eat, so the notion it's some kind of 'last line of defence' is pretty questionable. And while areas might need hosepipe bans, on a global scale we're one of the least-adversely affected countries in terms of water issues. 

That's only by choice, we like to eat italian food so import tinned tomatoes, we like peppers in our food so import them, we like salami so import it. We like tea and coffee so import them. The list is endless. More importantly we need farmland for our basics, bread meat and veg. 

I'm sure you are right on water, we don't have the problems they do in Africa. But we do have an unusual geology in the uk. Huge amounts of rainfall just run off the land and back to the sea. And as the water collects in different areas they have different geological qualities of their own. It makes it impossible to have a complete interconnecting water supply. Birmingham collects it's water from wales, it couldn't just connect to a pipe to send some to the South East if they were short.

 

[chrisp65]

49 minutes ago, colhint said:

yet we are the most densely populated country in europe.  That countryside you are talking about is farmland. Now the most basic needs in life are food and water. Would you not think a reasonable assumption be that the country needs farmland to feed it's population? Or should we just import all our food?  If that's the case you may as well disband the military, anyone wanting to attack us will just starve us. Then we need water. For 26 of the last 30 years there has been a hosepipe ban in some form in England. Now we have a few more million who need water, at what point do we fail to provide enough water for the population?  The thing is you can't just magic up water, we only have a limited resource.

I didn't say we weren't densely populated. I was saying there is still plenty of land.

As it happens, the 15 million tons of food waste we produce per annum suggests there is an over production of food too. Just as the 3 billion litres of water lost everyday suggest we don't take any water shortage seriously.

It's all about not spending on onfrastructure. Drains, water supply, trains, hospitals, roads. 

If somebody doesn't don't want more immigrants here, that's a perfectly ok stance. But they shouldn't blame it on a lack of space and a worry about hose pipe bans.

[colhint]

 I'm not against immigration. I'm against immigration without planning for the consequence.  If we need 1m more people, Someone should say we need about 10 new hospitals the size of the QE we will need about 100 new schools and the staff to go with it. Roads, buses and the like also. Then we have to say this is how it's going to be paid for. It would be nice to think google and starbucks will foot the bill, but as they have been getting away with it for decades under both governments I don't think they will lose much sleep. So then it's raise  tax.

ok reasonable question, what would you think would be the maximum number of people England could support. in land and infrastructure. Because it is my belief that at some point the hosepipe ban wont just be a hosepipe ban, it will be a limit to how much water a person can use.

[chrisp65]

I'm not sure what the maximum is. There must be one, being realistic. Current population of england is about 53 million, So a finger in the air first ever guess, 60 / 70 million? That's based on about 5 minutes thinking.

Perhaps if houses harvested rainwater we'd have less flash floods and we'd have less drinking water used to flush toilets. Infrastructure. 

It's a technology that's been used all over the world for decades.

[colhint]

i know there is lots we could do, I'm saying we should be doing them now, if we are planning for an increase. but I don't see any planning at all

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, colhint said:

That's only by choice, we like to eat italian food so import tinned tomatoes, we like peppers in our food so import them, we like salami so import it. We like tea and coffee so import them. The list is endless.

 

I think this confusion is possibly my fault, because my post wasn't worded very well, but the 60% figure refers to total food mass, rather than any individual foods. 

[Xann]

3 minutes ago, colhint said:

... but I don't see any planning at all

Plans cost money and there's dividends to pay to disinterested shareholders.

Besides, demand staying high is good for business.

[HanoiVillan]

I found this blog post had me nodding my head quite a bit - clarifies one of the main issues with the Leave campaign, that of the lack of an actual plan for the future:

#Brexit: strategic incompetence for fun and profit

'Out funder Peter Hargreaves thinks leaving the European Union would be “like Dunkirk” and would turn us “into Singapore”.

That he mentions two of the most catastrophic disasters in our history is surely Freudian. Dunkirk saw the British Army booted off the continent of Europe, forced to sabotage every bit of its equipment heavier than a Bren gun, let down by a serious failure to prepare adequately. But at least they made good their escape. You couldn’t say that about the Singapore campaign, during which the total means of national power were all comprehensively thrashed, jointly and severally. In this case, there was a strategy, laid down years before, and a huge investment in infrastructure, but it was profoundly unrealistic and poorly thought through. This time, there was no escape.

Does that remind you of anything? It should. People keep saying how much the referendum campaign reminds them of the Scottish referendum campaign. In the Scottish campaign, it became painfully obvious that despite having had 40 years to think about it, the SNP hadn’t managed to answer a question as basic as what currency would circulate in an independent Scotland. In the referendum campaign, it is painfully obvious that despite having had even longer to think about it – right back to the 1950s – the Outs haven’t come up with anything like an alternative. As @Scientists4EU says, with 40 days to go, the SNP had published a 670-page white paper on independence detailing how they planned to unpick Scotland from the UK, and do you see anything like that from the Outs?

. . . 

Ideas there are. Part of the problem is that they are entertaining quite so many options. Perhaps we could be like Norway, Switzerland, Canada, Singapore, or Albania? Each one comes with a little national flag, a sort of enamel lapel pin, for the sake of easy reference. But they have next to nothing to do with the countries named.

Take Norway. Being like Norway sounds pretty sweet! Anyone for some prosperous, egalitarian Nordic social democracy? It goes without saying that none of the Outs have any intention of, say, legislating that all public companies should have 50% women on their board of directors, or worse, that their boards should include worker representatives. It also goes without saying that there’s no way Brexit would cause more oil to appear in the North Sea.

What “Norway” means here is that we’d leave the EU but stay in the European Economic Area, thus keeping (mostly) tariff-free access to EU markets so long as we respected EU regulations. I say “mostly” tariff-free, because in fact there are nontrivial tariff barriers between the EU and Norway on agricultural products. Actually, one of the main selling-points here is that we could be more protectionist towards farmers and fishermen. On the other hand, we’d still have to pay into the EU budget, respect the rules, and accept freedom of movement for labour. Also, financial firms in the UK would have to get regulatory approval for each EU country where they wanted to do business.

. . . 

What about Singapore? This is the one that really gets on my nerves. A lot of right-wing people imagine that Singapore is a libertarian utopia because the public sector share of GDP is quite low. But this is silly. Singapore doesn’t have big spending ministries, but it does have a huge sovereign-wealth fund that owns major industrial and infrastructure projects in the country as well as financial investments worldwide. Rather than pay welfare benefits out of tax money, Singapore made it compulsory to pay into private insurance, through the so-called central provident fund, a little like a much more comprehensive version of Obamacare. Oh, and basically everyone lives in a council flat.

After independence (from Malaysia, and Britain) the Singaporean political and business class took a joint decision to develop the port as the major regional transport hub, and to take advantage of that to build up industry around it, notably chemicals and computer/semiconductor manufacturing. Their thinking was that economic development in Asia would create a huge opportunity for this role. This worked really well, but it’s worth noting that it was very much a succession of joint decisions by government technocrats, political leaders, and investors rather than some sort of idealised libertarian hands-off process. That is supposedly more true of Hong Kong, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a myth too. You’ll note they didn’t start off by creating a new tariff barrier between their massive port facility and the market it serves.

Also, Outers tend to imagine that the Singaporean financial centre is completely unregulated. Financial people find this intensely funny. Anyway, it’s much more accurate to think of Singapore as one of the so-called “coordinated market economies”, like Germany or the Netherlands. Now, does anyone think the Outers have any plan to be more like Germany? Thought not. They want to get Out precisely in order to avoid being more like Germany.

In the end, this shows us two things about Out. One thing is that they have failed – haven’t even tried – to put forward a coherent strategy to avoid their Dunkirk moment turning all Singapore. The second is that, as with the SNP, there are reasons for that.

Sticking with their original plan to join the Euro would have shown up that an independent Scotland might be a lot less nice than they made out, and certainly no haven of protection against recession. Using sterling would mean admitting that independent Scotland wouldn’t be all that independent. Inventing a new currency would mean admitting that the social basis of independence would be a huge bet on the oil price. They didn’t answer the question, because the question threw light on all kinds of other questions they didn’t want asked.

Similarly, the Outers don’t want anyone to ask about their post-Brexit plans because the content of their plans, such as it is, is invariably vastly unpopular. How many people want to turn the country over to Mosseck Fonseca as a libertarian tax-haven? Well, Peter Hargreaves probably does, and he has a billion reasons for that. What is it that first attracted billionaire financier Peter Hargreaves to Brexit? It looks like we found the missing link between Out and ski-ing – money! But let’s not pretend he is normal. Similarly, does anyone want the common agricultural policy but with more farm subsidy? Only people who stand to collect, and they’re a tiny minority.

The answer, then, is strategic incompetence. You can avoid having to answer the difficult questions about your post-Brexit policy by simply failing to have one. That this strategy appeals to Boris Johnson ought to be obvious.'

http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2016/05/15/brexit-strategic-incompetence-for-fun-and-profit/#comments

[TheStagMan]

Not my opinion, ta.

Others who've used those arguments TO ME.

You're right, pretty pathetic.

In which case I apologise, i took it as your view. But yes we agree then, it is a pathetic argument, and all that this type of statement does is weaken the remain sides argument (just like claiming WW3 will start if we leave).

[TheStagMan]

And the resources thing? HAHAHAHAHAHA!

Brilliant.

Which bit?

[lapal_fan]

Which bit?

Food and water bit.

It's just not true.

[blandy]

20 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

I didn't say we weren't densely populated. I was saying there is still plenty of land.

As it happens, the 15 million tons of food waste we produce per annum suggests there is an over production of food too. Just as the 3 billion litres of water lost everyday suggest we don't take any water shortage seriously.

It's all about not spending on onfrastructure. Drains, water supply, trains, hospitals, roads. 

If somebody doesn't don't want more immigrants here, that's a perfectly ok stance. But they shouldn't blame it on a lack of space and a worry about hose pipe bans.

I dunno about that Chris. As you rightly say, wherever there are population increases it puts strain on the existing infrastructure and resources. I view land as a resource. Whether farmland, parkland, green belt or rivers and lakes. Pollution increases, traffic increases, a whole ton of stuff like air quality deteriorates more than it would have done.

The waste food thing is a bit of a red herring, I think. Rich folk chucking food away that's past its sell by date and shops doing the same isn't the same as us producing more than we need. We import more food than we grow already. If we are to produce more food, that means more farmland, more pesticides, more intensive and nature destroying agriculture.

If 300+ thousand people turn up every year, then that's a heck of a lot of houses, roads, gravel, tarmac, bricks and so on. I agree the Gov't should have been investing in building infrastructure instead of cutting, but I don't like the impact on the environment that we share of rapidly expanding population. The world and the UK needs to much smarter and much wiser.

[chrisp65]

Unless we are proposing enforced contraception, those people are going to be alive and eating food and burning food somewhere. So I'm not sure that overall it's any more impact on the environment if they are in Northumberland or Spain. Other than, if it's in planned cities with decent infrastructure then the numbers must mean economies of scale will reduce overall pollution, a little. Obviously there will be a localised impact where there previously wasn't a city, but I'm fairly sure there's room for one more city in Lancashire, and another in Yorkshire, Northumberland, Lincolnshire ...

Once we really are facing a genuine squeeze, perhaps we will genuinely start looking at energy efficient housing. Perhaps we'll harvest rainwater. We might even put green roofs on buildings or sports fields on top of schools. Once we're genuinely concerned about the environment, we might reconsider the 1,400,000 tonnes plus of pet food we buy in the UK every year. 

This island isn't too small. It's just quite badly organised compared with what it could be.

[TheStagMan]

Unless we are proposing enforced contraception, those people are going to be alive and eating food and burning food somewhere. So I'm not sure that overall it's any more impact on the environment if they are in Northumberland or Spain. Other than, if it's in planned cities with decent infrastructure then the numbers must mean economies of scale will reduce overall pollution, a little. Obviously there will be a localised impact where there previously wasn't a city, but I'm fairly sure there's room for one more city in Lancashire, and another in Yorkshire, Northumberland, Lincolnshire ...

Once we really are facing a genuine squeeze, perhaps we will genuinely start looking at energy efficient housing. Perhaps we'll harvest rainwater. We might even put green roofs on buildings or sports fields on top of schools. Once we're genuinely concerned about the environment, we might reconsider the 1,400,000 tonnes plus of pet food we buy in the UK every year. 

This island isn't too small. It's just quite badly organised compared with what it could be.

Yeah, great, let's cram as many people in as we can..... life is just like Tetris yeah?

Fill this country to bursting point and leave other areas of Europe pretty much empty (especially the poorer ones).

Quality of life and peace and tranquility are also important...... let's cram the cities full and intensively farm the rest..... No!!

we are not robots to be packed into ever smaller living and personal space.

What then? when we want peace and to get away from it all we can go and visit the empty bits of Europe????.

All the things you mention about environmental pollution and energy efficiency are good things to do anyway, and are not linked to remaining in Europe.

Packing us in like sardines is not a sensible plan.......

[chrisp65]

I'm not sure I've suggested packing or cramming us in like robots or sardines or tetris or damaging the quality of life?

Quite the opposite. I've suggested we have hundreds of thousands of empty houses and vast areas of the UK that are under populated.

As for getting away to the country for peace. I'm not sure those already rammed and crammed in our inner cities can do that at present. It's generally the ones with a softer lifestyle to begin with that can escape their stresses for a quiet week in a nice cottage in Devon or Yorkshire. 

I don't even think the ever growing population is linked to whether we remain in europe. If we stop euro entry to the UK that's only half of our immigration stopped and far less places for Brits to emigrate to. Indian restaurants will simply have to start employing Bangladeshi chefs again once the cheaper supply of Bulgarian chefs is cut off. I think the population would still  grow by a six figure sum the year after we left europe and the years after that. It's just that those coming in wouldn't be French or Portugese.

I don't think we've even started to have a sensible conversation (as a country) about this whole thing, we've just got 50% of the population hoping that a vote to leave will return us to a golden age.

[Fairy In Boots]

I just knew this referendum would descend into a migrant argument. Migrants are irrelevant the real question is do you wish to susceed democratic powers to an organisation you have little real say over and the answer to any sane person is no. The constant talk of migrants and financial forecasts is just muddying the water and playing into remains hands.

The EU is a bloated mess and a cesspool of corruption, it's almost like FIFA, will it last a decade I very much doubt it. If we leave it will struggle to see 2018, it needs radical reform both our main political leaders agree, the question is do you think if we remain we'll get it? Given Pig lover Dave and I'm really out but the unions that put me here have pulled my strings to vote remain Corbs are the clowns charged with getting it then my answer is no. However we pull out let the unsustainable deck of cards we've been half helping holding up collapse then yes we will out of nescessity.

It really is such a simple question and the answer of leave is such a no brainier the sheeple of the U.K. Are in danger of **** it up. The EU started off with good intentions and very quickly became something very unnecessary and long term potentially very dangerous, shame but such is life. One thing I will say is if we don't get the political shackles off this time I thing we'll have to do it by force eventually because the EU is showing itself to be a vile little bully in its rhetoric to any who question it and that's the hallmark of any budding dictatorship. This is not about one nation controlling another this is about a small multinational group of politicians and powerful people subjugating nations. For the good of Europe we must vote out.

[lapal_fan]

Nah, I'd rather be part of team Europe.

Stronger together.

Imagine how shit the country would be should the Tories/Labour be given 100% free reign.

Although, you make the point that the politicians vying for no.10 would have to up their game.

[villa4europe]

taken them a while to get it going but id expect the leave campaigners to jump of the general disliking of dave and run with the story that he might quit if he loses

"not really sure of which way to vote? cameron might quit if we leave"

thats a sales pitch and a half to a lot of people