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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

>it's all the fault of Brexit driving away the foreign workers who had to do the jobs

Forgive me since I’m American, but wasn’t getting rid of foreigners taking jobs one of the selling points of Brexit?

The primary driving force was nativism. Even right up to the end the UK wanted to remain in the common market, but part of being in the common market is freedom to migrate.

It also exposed the loss of influence the UK had in the EU. Many provisions were carved out for them in the 80s. But when it came to the EC the EU was not making any exceptions for them this time.

Yup. Immigration was the issue. Bunch of other stuff around the edges like English exceptionalism.

Note that laurent92 talks about "Englishmen" not "British voices". That's incredibly telling.

It was, but now that they're gone it's only become more obvious that locals simply don't want those jobs.

Of course nobody wants these jobs. A lot of positions were filled by tourists and travelers who stayed there for a little while and worked a bit to earn side money.

- Staff at a restaurant is £8 an hour, that is minimum wage.

- Expect two shifts far apart, around 11am-2pm and 7pm-11pm.

- Work on Saturday and Sunday and some of the week. You will never know more than a few days ahead when you are expected to work.

- Have your shifts cut in retaliation because you couldn't/wouldn't come in to cover on your day off.

It was, especially getting rid of the kind of immigration that turned blue-collar working-class jobs into something that no-one local could possibly live on. Perhaps more importantly, all the educated influential opponents of Brexit insisted that this wasn't happening, that the idea EU immigration was driving down wages was a cynical lie. I'm pretty sure that it is not lost on most of the supporters of Brexit that the media is trying to spin the fact companies are having to put up wages now we've left as further proof Brexit was based on lies.

> that the idea EU immigration was driving down wages was a cynical lie

It was a lie, EU citizens in the UK earn significantly more than the locals. If I wanted to be a member of the underclass, say a cleaner, I’d be in Germany, where I wouldn't have to pay 6K£ for pregnancy and 12K£pa to send a child to a half-decent primary school.

The thing is, from what I can tell the migrant workers doing these kinds of poorly-paid jobs didn't have to worry about the cost of pregnancy or sending kids to a half-decent primary school because their families weren't actually living here - they came over, worked, and sent money back home to their families in their home countries with lower cost of living. It's that which made it possible for them to work for less. You're right that if they and their families had to live in the UK permanently they'd need to be paid a lot more.

I am not saying that the set of poor Europeans living in the UK is empty, nor I’m saying that no grocer in the UK ever hired a Spaniard or a Frenchman for 11.1£ per hour while a local would have cost 11.6£ per hour, or whatever the poor earn in the UK, but that’s not a social phenomenon, it’s a guy, it’s at best an anecdote. Similarly EU citizens living under bridges to send remittances home, is not a social phenomenon in the UK, it’s a Brexit myth. You can check the data yourself. Again, you may know a guy that…, but that’s an anecdote. The mythological poor EU citizen that goes abroad to send money home and live in a rathole with 17 other poor souls, assuming it exist, is way better off going to Germany than to the UK. On a side note, remittances from Germany are 2.5 times those from the UK, from France 1.5.

EU citizens living in the UK on average earn a lot more than the locals and are better qualified. So saying that migration from the EU was driving down wages was indeed a lie.

But even if we assume that the UK had been swarmed by millions of illiterate cretins, there isn’t any evidence anywhere in the world that immigration suppresses wages permanently (there may be some temporary short term effects, but before, you say anything, the UK has been in the EU for decades, so we are indeed in the long run).

No, it was recovering the freedom that was getting eaten by Europe, and listening to the vote of the UK people again. Whether it ends up in “getting rid of foreigners” or anything else would only be a second-order result of listening to the Englishman’s vote, if that is what they still vote for in 10 years. The goal of Brexit was democracy, not particular measures left or right.

Amusing you equate democracy with the English vote. Sincerely, Scotland, Wales and NI

I understand there are other factors at play (to say the least) in NI, but can you explain the incentive Scotland and Wales have to stay in the UK? I'd have thought they'd be gearing up for full scale separation referendums by now.

It’s the same incentives the UK had to stay in Europe. Ninety plus percent of their trade is with each other.

I’m equating democracy with listening to the most numerous. You have been thoroughly defeated with 3 blatant-majority votes in 4 years. If you don’t like it, you were never in favour of democracy, and if you are not in solidarity with your English mates, tell me about solidarity with an entire continent.

Name a single country that succeeded to leave EU without retaliation from said EU and I’ll eat my hat. EU is not a choice for most of us on the continent. We’re not free to leave, and we were manipulated into joining.

Long story short: The simple fact that it required not 1 but 3 blatant-majority votes for elites to register that yes, UK people wanted to leave EU, is a sufficient proof that EU is not listening to the most numerous.

And let’s not even talk about the quantity of funding, sponsorship and 4x3 billboards it took to swerve Scotland’s, Wales and NI in favor of EU. Manipulation is in plain sight here.

Personally I see the b/s scaremongering, the likes of the Farage bus and the hateful rhetoric of the Daily Heil as the "plain sight manipulation" in creating a manufactured problem with the EU which simply never existed, but each to their own.

That's isn't just one kind of democracy.

> Forgive me since I’m American, but wasn’t getting rid of foreigners taking jobs one of the selling points of Brexit?

That's what the media like to repeat, but I would suggest that you ignore them and take a broader view.

Reality is that both the UK and EU government failed to keep the population happy and continuously messed up. So much so, that the majority of people voted to leave the EU as they were discontent with their current situation. As someone who lives in the UK is that very little really has changed yet pre-brexit and post-brexit. It turns out outside of some temporary instabilities, things aren't doom and gloom. They're still crap like before though.

The only place where housing was really affordable in the UK was in Northern Ireland and sure enough, it's still very affordable in Northern Ireland.

General rule for getting on the housing ladder in the UK is the best time to buy was yesterday, the next best is now. Even if the housing market has a price crisis. It will never return to pricing to match up a decade ago; so don't live a fantasy waiting for it.

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