Brexit

I wonder if Prince Philip was one of the racist majority?

What I don't understand about the Brexit people who say they are taking back control of excess regulation etc... is that to trade with Europe, they are still going to have to meet the European regulations.  Given the relative size of the markets most businesses will want to export to Europe and will have to meet those regulations anyway.  All they seem to have done is given up any role they have in forming those regulations.

Also, there is now a land border between Republic & Northern Ireland to figure out how to deal with, with customs & immigration.

In a general election no, in something which has much, much longer term issues then perhaps. The young people of the UK already have to pay off one of the highest debt per capita ratios in the world, they have severe trade deficits, and now they have left what was one of their only advantages. The trade deficit is only going to grow now. It wouldn't hurt for the older generation to at least consider what the next generation in line wants. But of course they will never do that, this is the generation that refuses to budge more than any other before it. It's full of climate change deniers, racists, bigots, homophobes. They lock the housing market up with investment properties and quickly become slum land lords, they fuel a lifestyle of new cars, big houses, large tv's and general excess all on debt which someone else will have to pay for.

It's a hard one to solve.

This is going to cause widespread issues throughout Europe, the UK has long been the preferred destination for people from Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, etc. Everyone knows English, no one knows French or German. And despite the reputations that these people have the UK has benefited directly from educated, hard working, and most importantly cheap labor. Despite the inflows of Baltic People which have caused this xenophobia, the UK has quite low unemployment - especially be European Standards. 

If these people now have to return home, where there are no jobs (30% unemployment in some places), then they are going to be an unsettling influence over their countries. It's not the same as New Zealanders going to Australia. Daugavpills, for instance, is the second largest city in Latvia and they still don't have sewerage in all streets. Plenty of towns, like Bauskas, have town wells as houses don't have running water. Cities like Riga, Warsaw, Villnius are developed European metropolises, but the towns in those countries are a very different story and its night and day compared to living in a place like the UK.

So back to the top point, whether or not young peoples votes should be counted more. Of course they shouldn't, but the older people should be respectful of the wishes of the next generation to run the country. Generally I think younger people are becoming more liberal - at least in the cities, there is more of a concern for the environment, more concern for our communities and society, more concern for animal rights, and more of a connection with the rest of humanity through the internet. Yet there is this massive conservative movement that we see in Australia, the US, now the UK, and even here. And so there is this big disconnect and open hostility between peoples in our community.

 If you look at how people react in the comments on stuff for instance, they get dismissed for being a stupid greeny, regardless of their actual political affiliation, if they have even remotely sane ideas, and there is this umbrella of bigotry which is used to simply dismiss people on the lower end and become quite hostile and threatening on the upper. You see it with the drivers who try and ram cyclists off the road, those people who refuse to recycle, etc.

Will this lead to a domino effect?

Whadaya mean? They still have the Colonies to trade with. They don't need no stinking Euro smegs.

They'd have to ask nicely, because they've locked us out for years in favour of Europe.

Yeah - I know. Was being sarcastic. Should have added an emoji or something. 

Yeah because that worked really well last time...

A high turnout at 72 %.

Anyone care to speculate that the "young demographic" made up the vast majority of the 28 % who did not vote ?

Just checked, 1 pound STG = $1.93 NZD or $1.00 = 52 pence

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/grant-...

Older generation’s vote to leave will unleash long-term problems they won’t be around to endure.

SPEAKING to my father can be an illuminating business. Here’s a man who was born just before the outbreak of the Second World War but who has shared the same benefits as the Baby Boomers who followed in his wake after peace broke out across Europe.

Discussing the present housing shortage, and why it was so difficult for many of my generation to buy their own home, I asked him to talk me through his property purchases down the decades.

The story that followed was one of ever increasing profit – houses bought and sold at a healthy return as price increases outstripped wage hikes. The average home now costs 10 times as much as it did in 1980. The average wage back then was £6,000, today it is £26,500. Yet hidden in that latter figure lies a yawning pay gap.

Four in five new jobs are in sectors averaging under £16,640 for a 40-hour week. Working full-time on the hourly minimum wage would gross just over £13,000 in a year. The explosion of part-time and zero-hour jobs means millions of workers can’t even earn that pittance.

So for many, salaries have barely doubled in the best part of four decades, while the cost of buying a home for their family has risen ten-fold.

Having long since paid off their own mortgages, the Baby Boomers have turned landlords, snapping up buy to lets and charging younger generations struggling on stagnant salaries a premium to rent them, thereby paying off their mortgages for them.

And yet to listen to their reasons for voting to leave the European Union – and polling data reveals that it is their generation that was the most heavily in favour of Brexit – the housing crisis was one of them.

The blame for this, they insisted, lay with immgrants. Not the selling off of social housing from which they benefited, buying up homes at a fraction of their true value and, in many cases, selling them on at vast profit. Nor their artificial inflation of the property market through the purchase of rentals to top up their final salary pensions and build a tidy nest egg. Of course not. Perish the thought.

It is just one of the examples of how, for so many older voters who backed Leave, it was far easier to look outward rather than within for the causes of the social problems that blight Britain.

Boomers may well respond by citing the high rates of interest they paid on their mortgages and the low rates they now endure on their savings. That may be so, but paying high interest rates on cheap property is better than not even being able to scrape together a deposit because prices have gone through the roof. And low rates on savings pale in comparison to the bleak future of much of today’s workforce who won’t have a final salary pension to look forward to.

No, Brexit will come to be seen as the Baby Boomers’ ultimate betrayal of younger generations and those that will follow. A knee-jerk response to a series of red herrings, a protest vote with the potential for long-term catastrophe that they won’t be around to endure.

And red herrings are what the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson have fed the Leavers. Thriving on the perfect storm presented by the refugee crisis, terrorist threat and continued financial difficulty, they painted a narrative that bore little resemblance to the truth. Issues were conflated, broad brush strokes applied to crucial questions they didn’t want to confront.

The Leave campaign was wrapped up in the rhetoric of “taking back our country”. How exactly? According to the independent House of Commons library just 13 per cent of our laws are made in Brussels. In the last five-year parliament there were four bills out of 121 that came out of Europe.

Then we had the infamous Ukip poster showing a sea of brown faces marching into Britain. Hold on, I thought leaving the EU was meant to keep Eastern Europeans away, where did these other ethnic groups come into it?

Besides, immigration into this country from outside the EU is greater than that from within it. Part of the reason for that is the mass influx of workers from Commonwealth countries in the post-war period when we were crying out for them to fill jobs. In so far as putting some sort of cap on the generations that have followed, that ship has pretty much sailed.

Then there is the question of our ageing population. It’s universally acknowledged that immigrants from all over the world prop up the NHS and our social care system.

Who exactly do the Baby Boomers think will fill the void those workers leave behind? Or do they simply figure that it’s a long-term problem they don’t need to worry about?

There’s a distinct a whiff of short-termism about the Brexit vote. A hefty slice of misplaced nostalgia too in the idea of a magical return to a merrie olde England which only really existed in the pages of Nigel Farage’s night-time reading.

And here is perhaps the greatest irony of them all. Whilst the Baby Boomers may tell themselves that their vote to leave the EU will create a more stable, prosperous Britain for their children and grandchildren, it has removed the steady hand of David Cameron and risked it being replaced with the flibbertigibbet fingers of Boris Johnson, with Donald Trump licking his lips at the prospect.

Thanks, once again, for nothing.

A lot of people are failing to recognise that it's not simply a question of age - it's a question of people being disempowered. The same thing is happening in the US with that numb nuts orange rug head. 

When the gap between wealth and poverty increases, those that have the wealth retain the power - until such time as the disempowered become the majority and have the opportunity to have an impact.

It's not simply a question of age, but of opportunity to access wealth (the older you get, the less there is).

Agree

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3659091/...

But how does the brexit help those who don't have wealth? It's just going to remove jobs. Lots of companies are in the UK because they want to be in an English speaking country and have access to Europe. There is talk that Nissan will leave Sunderland (which voted to leave Europe) which will cost 8,000 jobs. Tons of companies are thinking about leaving or reducing their presence in the UK. London's position as a financial capital has to be at risk, Morgan Stanley is rumored to be considering cutting 2,000 jobs. Basically the UK was an easy doorway for Asia and North America into Europe, it's not anymore. 

I think that Ireland will be the big winner in this, and Scotland when it (now inevitably) leaves the union.

The other thing is that the UK has had very low unemployment and very high economic growth by European standards. This is built on the fact that they have access to cheap eastern European labor and free access to the largest trading block in the world. Are these people who don't have wealth and voted for the brexit going to take the minimum wage jobs that the immigrants have? Or is there going to be a huge labor shortage? If unemployment is low whats the real problem?

Going off topic here, but we're on the verge of a huge revolution in labor, while we've seen some jobs automated since the industrial revolution what has happened in the past is nothing compared to what's coming. I wouldn't want to be a truck driver right about now, in ten years all the big logistics companies will have automated truck fleets. Virtually no job will be safe from automation in the medium term. 

IMHO most countries are going to have 30%+ unemployment within the next 20 years. The trick is not going to be trying to retain jobs by having xenophobic attitudes, the successful countries are going to be the ones that look ahead and reorganise their economies for the new reality. There just won't be enough work to go around.  Eventually no profession will be safe, even those of high skill can be done better by machines.

So by trying to retain jobs, and bring back the glory days of midlands industry, the UK is taking a step backwards, and it will make the inevitable harder when it does come.

Rather than worrying about jobs they (and we) should be looking at concepts like universal wages as unemployment, or partial employment, is going to be the new reality for most.

what hope they have won't last long. They really are at the mercy of the EU and how magnanimous they're feeling.

How can you speak for the people of the UK?  They have decided what they believe to be right. I for one don't know what is going to happen and neither do you.

Over the 40 years that they have been in the Euro the polls have changed many times, but I guess that they don't trust the government in Brussels. 

The first responsibility of any government is to look after its citizens. The EU has failed miserably on this count. No border control-- great if you are on holiday, but criminals etc just ghost in untroubled. This is where I think they have let themselves down.

Think you will find that there are a few other countries that will also want out.

They will want access to the eurozone but the EU may well want to set an example of then so no one else leaves. 50% of exports from the UK goto Europe. Of course that would hurt Europe but some of the countries might want to take the hit. Having tariffs to Europe well severely hurt the UK.

I think John Harris's article is very balanced and sums it up well. What comes across was not the failure of the EU but the heinous acts of neglect and contempt that successive governments from Thatcher onwards have rained upon the fabric of the UK. . 

The tragic thing is with this campaign people thought to take back power and change this inequality. All they've done is swap their masters. 

Different guys from the same old school..

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/...

As Cameron said it is the will of the British people , you know democracy innit

They survived two world wars- so I think they  will get over this. Lets hope so.

Having family in those "areas". The eastern Europeans have also proved to be hard working and good people who have contributed to the community that's according to my mum who lives there.

Agreed the unions were out of control but look at what we have now. Is it better? Back then we had an NHS,  museums, parks, jobs. So don't try that old bollocks. I grew up in the 70's.

Yeah and where are those communities now? 

Living in one room??? (grabs rolled up newspaper...)

Thatcher sent all the wealth south to London. If you are from the North you should know that.

The thing is this, I don't even care about the brexit, I've literally spent significantly more time in Latvia than I have in the uk. What I care about is what it represents, I'm sick of closed minded conservatives ignoring the blatantly obvious because it's uncomfortable and taking the rest of us down with them. It's a problem in NZ as much as the UK. Destroy your own future but don't destroy mine.

I'm sure they will, they're too big for the world to let them struggle. Europe well make the concessions that they want and things will be fine. But with an aging population and limited industry they aren't as well placed to recover as they have been.

Affluent? No jobs or sharkty jobs at best? no football pitches, no NHS? The stuff we took for granted.

Its weird that my half my family is from Manchester and wouldn't agree with you.

Stick to the left wing policies then. They really work. :)

Yeah right wing politics work well too.