Should the UK remain a member of the EU

[cloggypop]

I can't see most of the lads in Sunderland getting sponsored by European employers if Nissan fucks off.

[Denny Crane]

So you're suggesting Universities in Europe will no longer accept UK students? I dont think so. Even the uK still accepts foreign students in Universities.

 

You're also suggesting UK people wont be able to work in Europe? Sure, there wont be the 'free movement' element and you may have to do a bit more paperwork to be able to do it but it isnt going to be stopped.

Working in Europe falls under article 45 a key principle in EU law that voting out is a rejection of.

 

The Brexit gang have made it clear they want to renegotiate this.

 

As for studying, students at present can't be discriminated against if they are from a member state.

 

So the Netherlands can't charge a different rate to UK citizens. As they are all treated as citizens due to their membership of the European Union.

 

The Netherlands could easily decide to treat UK citizens the same as the UK treats students from Asia or Africa.

[Paul]

Genuinely baffled by this narrative that's emerged that the old have ruined the future for the young.What future? How has leaving the EU given you 9k student fees, destroyed pensions or worker rights?This is the most docile generation of young people I've ever seen. Universities used to be hives of activism both social and political, don't blame pensions because you're all too busy wandering around coffee shops taking selfies and thinking you understand the world because you spent six weeks in fucking Byron Bay.

That's not the narrative. The narrative is the old have taken the choice away from the young.

[Section_31]

Some interesting quotes from around the EU on the BBC website. Leaders using phrases like wake up call and reform. Maybe this was the foot up the arse it needed.

 

I'm gutted we're leaving but only because I know the financial system will conspire to unleash the hounds of hell on us, because that's how it rolls. And I also quite liked Wales.

 

But, I think people are viewing the EU with rose tinted glasses.

 

I used to be a fundraiser in the third sector and around 2006 or so all that objective one money vanished and went to Poland (and rightly so) so it's been lean pickings from the EU for a while. So are people lamenting its loss now or the loss of what it was?

 

The European Union needs reform, it could be a great organisation - it could actually be a great socialist organisation in fact, but its current path is based purely on a broken financial model, and its only answer to any problems is to pour more and more paraffin on a fire.

[Paul]

Interesting, this. Totally unrealistic mind you, but still interesting.

 

We need to build a new left. Labour means nothing today

 

Labour was the right party and the right word for the 20th century – or at least part of it. But now it truly seems a spent force. We need an invigorated left alliance

Jeanette Winterson, The Guardian

 

‘7am and woken up to UKIP England. Never cried for my country before. But it isn’t my country anymore. Now we have to build a new Left’

 

This is what I tweeted this morning. And in someone’s reply were the words “nothing left”, which is where we are. The left has nothing and is nothing. Corbyn was the wrong kind of protest vote. Labour – the word itself – is outdated. Labour was the right word and the right party for the 20th century – until the Thatcher-Reagan takeover. The Blair years disguised the problems of the left because Blair was persuasive and charismatic, and there was plenty of money flying around. Cue the Iraq war – and the left rightly started to wonder what a Labour government stood for, when its comrade in arms was George W Bush.

 

Then came 2008 and the global crash, and Labour’s failure of response in any direction except to prop up late capitalism against the interests of ordinary people.

 

At the last election, Ed Miliband refused to work with the progressive Scottish National Party, and failed to understand why his party no longer spoke to working people with no work. The result was depressing but not surprising.

 

What did surprise me was that Cameron and Osborne would risk the first full-power Tory government in decades on a gamble with an unelected cartoon character from a time-warp. Nigel Farage is ridiculous. But he has won. There was no need for this referendum. What we needed was a firm cross-party consensus explaining why the EU is not the problem facing Britain. And as the party in power, the Tories could have faced down their own Eurosceptics and the darker side of the right. If the left had been anything like a serious opposition, the Tories would not have had the luxury of infighting, or this testosterone-fuelled fight to the death with Ukip – a party with just one MP.

 

Now we face the vision of Boris Johnson as prime minister and that mediocre nonentity Gove as chancellor. I don’t know what happens to Farage and his flag-wavers. But they’ll be wanting plenty of seats at the new table.

 

Meanwhile Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen are hailing Brexit as a triumph for democracy.

 

So what can we do?

 

I am an optimist by nature. I believe in solutions. We need solutions to the absolute failure of the neoliberal Project Few, whereby capitalism has been hijacked to serve the rich, where investing for the long term has been replaced by short-term profiteering, and where globalisation has been allowed to wreck local economies in the name of free trade.

 

Too many people in Britain face no future at all – no security at work, no certainty of a home, diminishing access to education and resources, not even a library to sit in on a rainy day. Certainly this is political failure – of the right and the left, but none of this will change because immigrants are going home or because we scrap all those annoying EU directives on workers’ rights and employers responsibilities.

 

Brexit is a vote for change – and if the left can accept that, then change can happen, starting today, here in the UK, and working together across the world, as Varoufakis has proposed with Diem 25, a movement for equality and social justice that stands against the baleful rise of the extreme right.

 

What I’d like is for the Women’s Equality Party to remake itself as the Equality Party. It’s a relevant name, a powerful name, and naming matters. I’d like to drop Labour and New Labour as words that don’t mean anything anymore. If you still needed proof of that after the last election, Brexit just gave it to you.

 

The word Conservative means what it means, and what it will always mean. The left is by nature progressive. It changes. Change is what we need now, and an invigorated left, with a strong economic argument and some real solutions for what the world of work is going to look like in the future. The world of work isn’t going to be heavy industry, labour-intensive agriculture, office jobs, careers for life. The middle class is feeling the hit as much as the working class. The old story is told. It’s history.

 

I am a writer and I understand the power of the stories we tell. Everything starts as a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Every political movement begins as a counter-narrative to an existing narrative.

 

The media is mainly run by the rich and the right-wing. They are telling their stories their way, and as Brexit shows, their narrative is working. It’s the immigrants, it’s the EU, it’s the feckless unemployed. It’s welfare, it’s climate control, it’s (what’s left) of the unions.

 

If we’re living in a post-facts world – let’s have better stories. Inequality is not a law of nature, like gravity. We make it up as we go along. The world does not have to be run for the benefit of the Murdochs, the Koch brothers, the offshore trusts and the tax havens. The left can tell it better and do it better. But only if we come together.

 

A long time ago, when I was 16 and living in a Mini in Accrington – a working-class town in an area that is today losing its libraries to the pack of lies that is Osborne’s austerity – I realised that I needed to read myself as a fiction as well as a fact. The facts weren’t looking good for me – I had nothing and I was nothing. And I thought that if I understood myself as a story I might do better, because if I am the story I can change the story.

 

To change the way we are telling the story of our country, the story of our world, does need more than facts. The facts aren’t working – that much is for sure. Young people, people who are left out by politics, want to hear a new story. The Brexiters latched on to that with spectacular and disastrous results.

 

It reads to me like Labour, as a party, is finished. The creative forces that make up the left are far from finished. We can find a narrative that unites us, not one that divides us. We can find a left alliance for the 21st century.

 

Equality Party, anyone?

[Section_31]

That's not the narrative. The narrative is the old have taken the choice away from the young.

You could say that about any election though, I'm sure Scottish teenagers said that at their referendum. It's bizarre indeed to suggest old people don't have the right to shape the world they live in because they might be dead in five years. It's Logan's run style shit.

 

[jimmycase]

Working in Europe falls under article 45 a key principle in EU law that voting out is a rejection of.

 

The Brexit gang have made it clear they want to renegotiate this.

 

As for studying, students at present can't be discriminated against if they are from a member state.

 

So the Netherlands can't charge a different rate to UK citizens. As they are all treated as citizens due to their membership of the European Union.

 

The Netherlands could easily decide to treat UK citizens the same as the UK treats students from Asia or Africa.

 

Article 45 is regarding the free movement. Even though the UK has voted to leave the EU, are you suggesting EU member states will start discriminating against UK people and not allow them to work in EU states?

 

I think you'll find that EU Universities including ones in Holland will still take UK students. As for cost, we'll have to wait and see as you suggest.

[jimmycase]

Some interesting quotes from around the EU on the BBC website. Leaders using phrases like wake up call and reform. Maybe this was the foot up the arse it needed.

 

I'm gutted we're leaving but only because I know the financial system will conspire to unleash the hounds of hell on us, because that's how it rolls. And I also quite liked Wales.

 

But, I think people are viewing the EU with rose tinted glasses.

 

I used to be a fundraiser in the third sector and around 2006 or so all that objective one money vanished and went to Poland (and rightly so) so it's been lean pickings from the EU for a while. So are people lamenting its loss now or the loss of what it was?

 

The European Union needs reform, it could be a great organisation - it could actually be a great socialist organisation in fact, but its current path is based purely on a broken financial model, and its only answer to any problems is to pour more and more paraffin on a fire.

 

Correct. And noises coming from mainstream germany is they want to cut a deal with the UK and would like to discuss the UK being an 'associate' member of the EU.

 

Meanwhile juncker acts like a dictator that he is and storms off the podium when asked a question about the EU's future. Class act. He's one of the men people seem to think we should cowtow to. No thanks.

[Section_31]

A bizarre comparison.

 

Tuition fees here are 1400 quid as opposed to 9000 in the UK. It works out at about half the price to do a degree as in the UK. Leaving the EU will take away this opportunity.

 

http://www.studyinholland.co.uk/a_comparison_of_costs_in_uk_and_netherlands.html

That's a fair point but in many ways echoes what I said about those wanting to leave having nothing to lose, because I wonder how many working class kids would consider studying abroad or even feel it was possible, or certainly working abroad, save for a few bar shifts in Rhodes in the hopes of getting their balls emptied once or twice.

 

This EU is invisible to the people at the bottom, it probably never used to be, but now all it means is communities changing at breakneck speed and high minded politicians like Chuka Umuna with friends in the city telling them how thick they are.

[Paul]

You could say that about any election though, I'm sure Scottish teenagers said that at their referendum. It's bizarre indeed to suggest old people don't have the right to shape the world they live in because they might be dead in five years. It's Logan's run style shit.

I didn't say they don't have the right. They clearly do. I just said they'd taken the choice away from the young. Like they had the easier working conditions, earlier retirement, better benefits, more generous pensions, free education, etc, etc, ad infinatum. They are - generally speaking, of course - a selfish, backward-looking, malign force and I resent them for it: socially regressive, economically selfish and contribute very little to the general good.

[Denny Crane]

Article 45 is regarding the free movement. Even though the UK has voted to leave the EU, are you suggesting EU member states will start discriminating against UK people and not allow them to work in EU states?

 

I think you'll find that EU Universities including ones in Holland will still take UK students. As for cost, we'll have to wait and see as you suggest.

Jimmycase, Brexit have spoken of a points system. So the UK are making an active choice to pick and choose who they will allow to work in the UK.

 

These things tend to be tit for tat. The main thing to remember it is the UK who wants to renegotiate and for every action there is a reaction.

 

Not that we actually know what the plan is because there is no plan offered up yet.

 

Or how this will affect the 3 million EU citizens working in the United Kingdom and loads of UK citizens working around Europe.

[Bobby Hundreds]

Must admit I do hate that fucking Juncker he is an absolute bastard of a man. His ideology seems to be fuck everybody as long as I'm alright. No reason to vote leave like but still.. hes a twat.

[FanchesterCity]

Strange, in my experience, company recruitment is based on who's the best candidate not who can start the quickest although the latter does happen. In cases Ive seen where the quickest to start candidate has been selected, the recruiter has then generally regretted the decision and had to bin that 'quicker starter' off.

 

Like I said, depends. 80K aircraft specialist job in Germany - they'll wait 6 weeks for the right man.

Urgent 6 month project role in France for a 30K a year guy, they won't wait 6 weeks. In fact, they'll probably just not bother to advertise it in the UK at all.

[cloggypop]

[Jairzinho]

 It's bizarre indeed to suggest old people don't have the right to shape the world they live in because they might be dead in five years.

 

Plenty of old people I've spoken to have actually agreed that they probably shouldn't have had a vote.

[FanchesterCity]

Jimmycase, Brexit have spoken of a points system. So the UK are making an active choice to pick and choose who they will allow to work in the UK. These things tend to be tit for tat. The main thing to remember it is the UK who wants to renegotiate and for every action there is a reaction.

 

Sort of true, but it's not the government advertising the jobs, it's the business, and they won't discriminate on nationality. They WILL discriminate on convenience though (depending on the cost / benefit). If it's more inconvenient to hire a Brit than a French guy, then yes, it will tip the balance in many cases. If any points based system on either side starts to take too long to approve a hiring, then yes, that's a huge hurdle to the hiring firm and will influence who gets the jobs.

 

For instance, will you get a standard 'points passport' giving you enough points to apply for any job, or will you have to be vetted on a per job basis, and how long will the approval process take? who pays for the approval? 

 

As far as I'm aware though, there are no EU plans to introduce any points based system on UK migrants seeking work in the EU, it's only the UK seeking to do so for any migrants coming in (from anywhere).

[Sputnik1]

Plenty of old people I've spoken to have actually agreed that they probably shouldn't have had a vote.

 

 

Then that isn't a democracy. 

[Jairzinho]

Then that isn't a democracy. 

 

*Shrugs*

[FanchesterCity]

Plenty of old people I've spoken to have actually agreed that they probably shouldn't have had a vote.

 

It's a dangerous road to go down though... the 'worthiness' to vote:

 

Should a terminally ill person have less right?

If you migrate after voting, what then?

If you pay 10m in taxes should you have a bigger say than the guy who paid 10k?

If you have an IQ of 160 should you have more influence than someone with 60?

 

Some people seem to think democracy is some panacea when it's not. It comes with a whole load of issues, but it seems to be the best system we have so far.

[RoboRiise]

Strange, in my experience, company recruitment is based on who's the best candidate not who can start the quickest although the latter does happen. In cases Ive seen where the quickest to start candidate has been selected, the recruiter has then generally regretted the decision and had to bin that 'quicker starter' off.

 

In the white collar world, yes.  However the economies of Europe are not exclusively based on white collar jobs.

[RoboRiise]

You missed the part of them not actually having to do it? 

 

Mark Carney has said the Bank of England is ready to inject £250bn into economy

 

I said to my kids that they should vote the way they want, however they should try as much as possible to make an informed decision on the facts. I do not believe that it was only the Leave voters that had their share of people voting without knowing what they were actually voting for. 

 

Now there's an online petition to have another referendum, I think some of the Remain voters need lessons in what a democracy is.

 

That's an interesting take on it in view of these people who voted leave but keep appearing on the news to say 'actually I think I might have made a total cunt of myself there'.

 

I do agree that there was no doubt a decent chunk of both voting blocks who acted without making any real effort to educate themselves about the issues on which they were voting.  You can say that that about every referendum and general election we've ever had though, taking pride in ignorance is increasingly one of the defining traits of this 'Britishness' I hear so much about.

[Jairzinho]

It's a dangerous road to go down though... the 'worthiness' to vote:

 

Should a terminally ill person have less right?

If you migrate after voting, what then?

If you pay 10m in taxes should you have a bigger say than the guy who paid 10k?

If you have an IQ of 160 should you have more influence than someone with 60?

 

Some people seem to think democracy is some panacea when it's not. It comes with a whole load of issues, but it seems to be the best system we have so far.

 

I've no idea if your "some people" is aimed at me, I was only commenting that some people I've spoken to think that it is unfair that they are voting on something that will have far more effect on the next generation. 

 

This vote was democratic, but we really haven't got much of a democracy when it comes to general elections.

 

Democracy is also deeply flawed when your media is owned by half a dozen billionaires.

[clangers]

Ultimately an individual has a right to vote on any basis they see fit. Personally I can't help but feel that many of those who voted leave did so on a false prospectus however that's their right.

 

Trying to get traction for a 2nd referendum isn't going to be constructive, whether we agree or not we somehow need to collectively focus on trying to make this work as best as possible.

 

As has been said the whole of our political class deciding to park this huge issue and instead turn inwards to focus on party political decisions could be one of the most appalling, indulgent and dangerous acts in modern times.

[Strontium]

I saw them described as a 'dream team' earlier.  Gove, who looks like his head is caving in from the inside whilst he's eating sour Haribos and Boris fucking Johnson.  Fuck me.

 

 

UKIP, a diverse bunch of lads, in full.

[jimmycase]

So, the 'generation' who were banging on about democracy pre vote are now claiming everyone shouldnt have the ability to vote based on their disdain for the way the democratic vote turned out?