[roughbeast]

Originally Posted by TheDaddy

Wages are rising, I'm pretty sure of that, we might all be worse of because of inflation but as the company I work for provides services to some of the countries biggest companies after speaking to their workers I'm certain wages are going up, substantially, I do recall smug saying that we'd have cheaper food, clothes and footwear straight away he was quite emphatic about the straight away bit to whereas the only thing he did straight away was move his company/ fund/ whatever to Ireland, it's a shame they didn't tell him to shove it, you campaigned for this, suck it up

Wages are mostly rising because of runaway inflation. No employer, even the government, could ignore that completely.

---------- Post added at 22:05 ---------- Previous post was at 20:59 ----------

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

Oh well - another load of Remoaner tripe to rebut.



We joined the Common Market. Had it stayed like that, including the development of the Single Market and Customs Union, then we would still be there. But no, they had to do the WTD trick to remove our veto. Why the WTD? France needed to protect its uncompetitive working practices. What else did France want to protect? Its share of our fishing waters and their inefficient farming practices.

On the bit that I've highlighted, we weren't so 'DNA inter-twined' as to have joined the Euro. The Euro got itself into serious trouble and individual countries were then at the mercy of Germany (again). We avoided all that. I still believe that the Euro is the EU's Achilles heel.




Extracting us from the EU's 'nervous system' had a considerable transition and grace period. That helped. The FTA has helped - all it needs is decent customs forms software to make it easy on our exporters. Their exporters see a huge market here and don't want to lose that - a decent pragmatic situation.




You dismiss the value of sovereignty too lightly. What 'checks and balances' are you referring to? Did those rules deal with German excess when they fixed the value of the Euro against the DM? Did they curb French excesses on the agriculture front? No, they curbed poor old Greece when it tried to get out of an economic mess. There are no environmental rules that we haven't kept; the common standards make sense and if we don't maintain them, we won't sell them very much. Likewise food ingredients - we're not going to go soft on those standards. We don't need the EU for that and if I recall correctly, we developed most of the standards.




Utter tripe. What controls are missing now. You've just said that, hypothetically, our sovereign government could take us in directions that Brussels would not like. Your fear of electing the wrong sort of government could happen whether or not we are in the EU is a tilt against democracy - however undesirable you and I might find it. But we need to have that degree of freedom and I doubt that it will happen. Your case for remaining in the EU tilts toward the possibility of the UK straying outside the EU's preferred political boundaries.




You are even dafter than I previously thought. Do you really think that the Red Wall and other Leavers were taken in by the hype? They didn't like being a subsidiary of the EU - simples. The promises were nice-to-haves. A competent government could have delivered most of the promise, more or less. However, COVID didn't help and choices made by the government cost us a lot of money which we are now paying back. The EU is/was totally irrelevant .

You then bring racial prejudice (highlighted) into this. That's a foul low blow. This immigration row is entirely political points scoring and very shallow. I've not seen a proper labour requirements analysis that we could debate. It's all headline stuff playing to the electoral roll.




Who knows? Maybe. Democracy will decide. Don't forget that.

1. Still name-calling? Why are you behaving like a troll instead of like a grownup?

2. In 1975 I voted against staying in the EEC because it was just a capitalist club. With the introduction of the Social Chapter and other measures forcing capitalism to show its acceptable face, I warmed to the project. I was particularly impressed at how the Commission was used to overcome the natural democratic deficit that comes with size. Again, because the EU is a democracy, France didn't get to bully its way and states didn't vote to remove the veto on anything that mattered. France had to concede that it would have to do without the CAP over time.

3. We were intertwined with the EU right down to the minutia, but because of political opposition Brown had to fake the argument that our economy wasn't congruent with the Eurozone economy yet. Blair was for joining.

The only country to fall foul of the rigour required to be in the Eurozone was Greece. Greece had faked its economic data to make it appear ready to join. Blame Greece not the EU.

4. We may have gained technical sovereignty in some respects, but we have lost control and influence in many ways.

5. In good times, before the UK political pendulum began to swing to the right, we helped create, and often initiated, EU law regarding environment, product standards, worker rights and human rights. We still are arbitted by the ECJ regarding products for the reasons you gave. That is the price of tariff-free trade with economic blocs. However, because we aren't signed up to a customs union we have to have our goods checked. Regarding worker and human rights and the environment we are already eroding those standards. Also, Whitehall has been asked to systematically go through all EU laws that Parliament adopted to winkle out which bits The Tories don't want.

6. Again you insult someone. Why accuse someone for being "dafter" than you thought, just because their take on red wall voter motives is different than yours. Adult debate, requires adult conduct.

In my view the red wall voted Leave out of frustration that their lives had become blighted since 2010 with the effects of dogma-driven austerity. The genius of Farage, Cummings and Tice was that they successful spun that our woes were due to the EU and particularly immigration from the EU. EU workers were blamed for longer waiting times in the NHS and for lack of school places. The real immorality here was that even though EU workers paid their way and increased our GDP the extra revenue was not put into extra hospitals or school places or into towns with high EU immigration like Boston. Austerity dogma won! Farage also successfully linked the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees with the EU through his disgraceful Breaking Point poster.

The good thing is that red wall voters have seen the flow of asylum seekers increase since we left the EU, legal immigration soar and their lives have get worse, albeit all for multiple reasons, not just because we left the EU. How did The Who put it? "We won't get fooled again!" Red Wall voters won't be voting for those who deceived them again.

7. We might agree about your last point. A shallow game is being played by the political combatants with inhumane, surface-scratching, headline gestures such as Rwanda, detention barges and stopping worker's families coming with them. Starmer is as shallow as any, with no real policies to increase our skills set to combat excessive immigration and no attempt to stop the boats by opening up controlled safe routes for everyday asylum seekers. A year ago, he made that suggestion, but buried it again when red wall voters appeared not to like it.