[Expat in the UK who could not vote but followed this all quite closely... All of the numbers I quoted can be found in wikipedia if you want to go digging.]
[Expat in the UK who could not vote but followed this all quite closely... All of the numbers I quoted can be found in wikipedia if you want to go digging.]
Why say you're sticking to the facts and then repeat pretty much the facts I stated with a different perspective?
8.5b (I think I had it at 7b, it depends on various valuations but ultimately it doesn't matter much as it's roughly the same) on the British economy (roughly 1.9 trillion pounds) is a fraction of a percent, I stated about 0.3%, you're stating around 0.45%, again, it's not much different, they're all figures in the same ballpark.
This 0.45% I cite because it's British GDP. I'm talking from the perspective of Britain having to give up part of its GDP as a contribution to the EU. That contribution is 0.45% of its economy, in return, you got 10% of the EU vote. That's reality and facts, no?
That's a tiny price to pay. Imagine you could pay 7b a year for 10% of the vote in the US, or in China, or hell imagine China or the US could purchase a 10% vote in the EU for 7b, it's a ridiculously silly small amount of money.
How am I not sticking to reality and facts.
However I do believe you've neglected the other points of the post which were about the value of access to the European market place and that 10% say in how said market is run. Those are costs / benefits which are not so easily counted before the painful divorce is complete.
In reality, most significant European trading partners with UK just want to keep on trading with them mostly as they have been, and will work out deals that allow such trading to mostly continue. There doesn't seem to be much reason to think such trade deals will be radically changed in a way that damages anyone for the long term.
As a snarky side remark, what will the UK do in the future instead of continuing to import cars, regardless of terms? Rely on its domestic automotive industry?
One of the more credible arguments for leaving the EU is so the UK can negotiate their own international trade deals, as they feel the EU has been slow in negotiation. Opening up free trade to the US and Japan would probably be a priority.
And how the deal will be better than the deal between EU and USA/Japan?
Obviously it's a huge risk as well since they're a smaller economy.
Do you know what you're talking about? That's a sincere question. My understanding is that the UK's significant trading partners are members of the EU, and that it's the EU, not the individual partners, who will have to decide on any new trade deals with the UK. As others have said, what sort of precedent would the EU be setting if they gave a withdrawing member the same benefits it had as an actual member? The EU does not want more members withdrawing.
What countries would want to leave the EU? I'm not aware of any of the poorer countries wanting to leave. And it would not affect the EU much. For the richer countries, the EU is an enormous benefit, so leaving would be rather silly.
The UK is the only country that has been questioning its EU membership for many decades. But it seems to be unique in the position.
So for normal trade in goods and services, it doesn't make sense for the EU to impose too many barriers.
The financial sector is an exception. It does make sense for the EU to grab more power there.
The big issue however, is that many countries have significant parts of their population that are against the EU. So there is a real risk that the UK will be hit with sanctions, not because it makes sense for the EU, but because it makes political senses in some of the EU member countries.
That would be sad, but that's the world we live in.
http://openeurope.org.uk/today/blog/how-would-key-export-sec...
Some key UK export sectors - especially finance - have a very low probability of being able to carry on as normal.
The German car industry accounts for around 3% of GDP. Sales to the UK are less than 1% of German GDP.
The UK financial industry accounts for around 10% of GDP. Sales to the EU are around 4% of UK GDP.
As a rough guess estimate, post-Brexit disruption is going to lose 1-2% of that, and could lose more - because there's very little London can do for Europe that can't be done just as easily in Frankfurt.
The UK has a lot more to lose than Germany does.
But the EU traditionally plays hardball with negotiations. Ask Greece.
So there is no chance at all the UK isn't going to have to make significant - expensive - sacrifices to keep trading.
This vote is literally the most staggeringly stupid and self-destructive act I've seen in my lifetime.
Take away the jingoism and the flag-waving and the blatant lies about immigration and sovereignty, and you have a country which relies on a huge captive market voting to - at best - change the terms of access to that market in ways that cannot possibly be more advantageous than they are now.
Some trade will continue, but the overall effect on the UK is going to be very negative indeed.
Seems like good evidence that the parties will want to ensure trading continues mostly the same as it has been. A big question is whether the rest of the EU would be able to block such arrangements. I don't think they will either want to or be able to.
There were no mass rapes, gropings, etc.
Would you believe the papers if they said Jews were out in force, drinking the blood of your Christian babies?
Edit: Oh forgive me for pointing out the blood libel. What could ever go wrong from framing an entire ethnicity for stealing our jobs and raping our women?
That's an ineffective way of communicating your point.
Although i get why the person above is frustrated with people spouting lies about immigrants their reaction is indeed not favourable to a healthy discussion :S
On the order of 1000 women got assaulted. One person got sentenced thus far, to the best of my knowledge - and he is indeed a "fresh immigrant".
You have absolutely no basis for your claims.
That's 5 too many rapes, and 2k assaults (groping etc) too many, I've been molested before and it's obviously unacceptable. But it's also a far cry from rape, usually, like in my case.
Yet the media at times reported on this as if there were thousands of women getting raped in the streets. Those were blatant lies.
Some viewers and some sections of the (social) media, particularly online, also interpreted these alleged mass rapes as some kind of savagery that only a foreigner could engage in. Uncivilised barbarism only a muslim refugee could engage in. Yet every single year at Octoberfest, about 10 women report getting raped, and cases of sexual assault by drunk partygoers is orders of magnitude larger. Even outside of large festivities, about 20 women in Germany are raped every day, again, minorities have no monopoly on these criminal acts. Hell, for a brief example of the same city, Cologne, only a few months ago a reporter was sexually assaulted by white Germans who groped her, kissed her and made sexual remarks.
That's the point the guy was trying to make. Obviously none of this is acceptable, but immigrants or foreigners have no monopoly on criminal, unacceptable acts. The one or the other group may be overrepresented in crime figures, the data shows that, too. But the same data shows in study after study that when you control for things like age (young people commit more crimes), socioeconomic status (poor, unemployed people commit more crimes), gender (obvious) etc etc, ethnicity plays no role in crime. i.e. there's nothing inherent about an ethnicity or religion that programs people to such savage acts.
And this is obvious, we don't say these things about jews for example. But we used to, that's where the comment on jews drinking blood of babies comes from, because that's the silly rhetoric we used to spread, which led to widespread prosecution against them. Today we see, particularly on less sophisticated but all too popular social media, mistaken narratives about immigrants or foreigners or muslims or various other minorities, coming here to rape our women. That's a narrative we should reject because it's not true. It wasn't too long ago we somehow had a story of a 13 year old girl getting gang-raped by arabs for 30 hours, in the daily mail. Obviously that's a shitty paper, but it's also very well read. Turns out it was a complete fabrication, but who remembers that? But it's that exact narrative that leads people to unreasonable fear (there's enough of actual issues to be scared for, no need for unreasonable fears on top), fear that inspires things like this leave vote.
So did more than 1k women get assaulted? Yes, undoubtedly. Were there mass rapes? No. Are rapes and assaults by Germans a daily phenomenon, just like it is in every other place on the planet where people's rights are never 100% fully respected? Yes.
In short, it was horrible, but sometimes also blown out of proportion with bs rhetoric and blatant lies we don't need to have.
One day looking at women is rape. The other day mobs assaulting women in a Taharrush is blowing things out of proportion.
I won't even comment on the former, it's akin to a silly stereotype of the feminist movement you see on 4Chan.
Mobs assaulting women is not blowing things out of proportion, in and of itself. All of that deserves attention, none of that is acceptable, and I welcome these facts being presented.
But groping a woman and raping a woman are two different things, and you simply shouldn't report the former as the latter. If you do, you blow it out of proportion, there's nothing strange about this. Similarly there's a difference between punching a man and shooting a man, between stealing a pair of shoes and stealing a car. Just stick to the facts. 0.25% of incidents involving rape, is not mass rape. 5 reported rapes on NYE, while more than 20 are reported daily in Germany, and twice as much happen every year during Octoberfest, is not some new level of mass rape. If you don't report that honestly and blatantly lie about that (and other things, like e.g. a 13 year old getting gang-raped for 30 hours which never happened, but incited fear and hatred, which have led to increased hate crimes in the past year) then yes, you are blowing things out of proportion. That isn't a mixed signal.
Oh that's OK then.
In terms of positives here is a list.
1) People have woken up to the disastrous gap between rich and poor, realizing, I hope, that there is no communication between the provenances and the technocrats and that while you can bully and marginalize the poor you are simply unable to ignore them without resorting to repression. A vote like this is much better than a ring of estates where law breaks down and people are condemned to hopeless disassociation from the society that funds them. Now, will the UK's elite front up and start helping our fellow countryfolk? I doubt it, but that's the test on the table - create meaningful engagement in life and society for the bottom 25% rather than just hoping that they shut up and go away.
2) The EU can now reform its financial and governance arrangements to fit the needs of the Euro, if the EU doesn't do this the Euro is going to collapse, so I hope it does. This will make the EU more prosperous than it would otherwise be. Guesses please - the European state's GDP post a Euro collapse vs. the EU's GDP with a reformed and functioning single currency?
3. The UK will break up enabling Scotland to further develop its distinctive and hopefully very successful economy and national identity, in particular it will be interesting to see if this results in Edinburgh rebuilding itself as a financial centre as opposed to Frankfurt, Paris and London. If I were the SNP I would be planning a bloody great hub airport and some other very shiny infrastructure (high speed rail to Newcastle, Leeds and Manchester? Cross rail for Edinburgh/Glasgow?)
The real winners here are probably going to be Hong Kong and Singapore. Those are top of mind alternatives when finance strategically places organizations in London, and with low tax and compatible legal systems (from what I understand Hong Kong's is pretty much a carbon copy of the UK) they basically got one competing city of the game.
> the blatant lies about immigration and sovereignty
The immigration nonsense disturbs me. Even if the UK leaves the EU, surely the freedom of movement will remain just as with the other non-EU European countries. Leaving won't make a difference. Plus with the commonwealth and all, the country is basically built on migrants. I hope that it influenced the vote only for a minority of people, and that the outside media image that this was important is just that, a stupid media image.
Even if one accepts that existing trade will be accommodated through direct agreements, that only protects existing industries. What does it mean for future industries and how existing industries grow and change? When a new industry develops and wants to export, they are going to find they face trade barriers until such time as the EU and UK get around to negotiating a new (or modified) trade agreement. That's a huge disadvantage and will see a lot of investment, especially in tech companies go to the EU where previously it might have gone to the UK.
London, one of the 3 financial capitals of the globe, will lose its status in favor (probably) of a more diverse mix of European cities.
This will have downstream effects on other trade flows in and out of the UK.
Take an obvious and very direct example. Cleaning staff. Not having to compete with EU illegal immigrants will improve their labor conditions. Building workers and Polish guest workers who send all money back home and live in extremely poor conditions, same. Yes that probably means the next time you need your toilet repaired, you'll pay more, but you'll pay more so the plumber can have a better life.
Even for tech startups, this may be an improvement. I know over 4 London-based startups that don't directly sell to customers. They "consult" for a foreign entity (a US company in 50% of the cases, other 2 use Asian proxies), which then sells to EU customers because selling digital products to EU customers from outside of the EU is far cheaper and simpler than doing it from inside the EU.
One thing I absolutely do not get is why socialists and even those left-inclined are so massively pro globalization. That just makes no sense whatsoever. There are constant complaints about globalization here. How Monsanto/Big finance/Suez/... convinced congress/EU/ECB/... that X is going to happen/be legal which means state/city/even small town Y gets shafted in Y way. For once, that becomes a little harder.
But yes, it's probably the wrong thing for center London tech and finance workers and managers.
The EU is reacting, imho, in the worst possible way. The press in France, Netherlands and Belgium is full of articles on how it was stupid, boneheaded, evil, weak for Cameron to allow the vote in the first place. It's generally all being blamed on Cameron, and his mistake is allowing people to vote in the first place. Very EU, being so overtly anti-democratic.
But let's face facts here: the EU will try to make this work the same way the other referendums worked [1][2]. When the votes turned against the EU, they canceled the rest of the voting ("postponed" the term used, but they never happened). And then they cheated (the referendum happened because the law said it should happen before the law was changed. The law was changed without referenda). So I'm giving the odds of a Brexit happening at best 30-40%. Granted, that's far better odds than I gave it yesterday, so maybe I'll be wrong again. But the EU has a long history of ignoring democratic votes.
The sky is not falling, this is not the worst thing to ever happen, and frankly, the market is wrong. This is a massive overreaction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_European_Constitution_r... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_European_Constitution_re...
If now there are "illegal", how will change when the UK leaves?
They do work in the construction sector.
My understanding is that selling digital products within the EU to other EU countries is annoying. The main reason I hear is having to collect VAT for each B2B transaction at the rate of the country you're selling to.
When it comes time to settle the taxes it is handled in an aggregated manner with one filing under a VATMOSS scheme, which distributes the collected VAT to the member states in one go. This attempt at simplification seems to have backfired with many calling it 'VATMESS'.
However, from what I read online, US based companies selling into the EU technically have to charge this too (although they can aggregate it as well under a 'Non-Union' VATMOSS filing).
With the above in mind, is the structure you talk about in place for other reasons than VAT?
https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/public...
I don't know why people are crying about the financial sector. They have fucked over ordinary people time and time and time again and for once they get the short end of the stick. They're extractive parasitic economic actors who drive up costs and don't produce anything of value.
Well, they can have the same deal that Norway or Switzerland have with the EU. The problem is that to have that deal they have to agree to be part of Shengen Area
2. It is quite possible to opt out of EU regulations while part of the EEA. But the Norwegian government do not have the balls to do so.
3. Norway had an older agreement with Denmark and Sweden about passport-free travel. It was not Shengen compatible. So either Norway had to join Shengen, or Norwegians had to get used to getting passports to visit said nations.