The EU: IN or OUT?

AndyBSG

I voted OUT after much deliberation.

When the referendum was first announced I was firmly in the Remain camp but when I sat down and thought about it the only reason I had for remaining was because I thought it was too much of a risk to leave so I wasn't voting for what I believed in but what I was scared of.

Simple fact for me is that by remaining in the EU too many of the important decisions that affect my life and the future of my family are being made by people who are not making those decisions for the benefit of British citizens.

Over the last 20 years i've seen more and more EU laws overruling our own laws, prisoner’s rights to vote, tampon tax, VAT on E-Books, how straight bananas are, diabetics being banned from driving, etc. Over the next 20 years that is only going to get worse and while some of these may be trivial some such as prisoners rights to vote are not things that should be imposed on us but things we should be deciding ourselves

The recent relaxation of Ukrainian Visa rules made by the EU commission despite Holland refusing to agree to it is another prime example of the way the EU is going

So, my vote is not for financial reasons because we all know a Brexit is going to hit us hard in the short term and will probably add costs to simple things like holiday visa's etc. My vote isn't because I disagree with the idea of us having common policies with our closest trading neighbors which benefit us all. My vote isn't because of the mass immigration which is crippling our welfare system.

My vote is because all of those symptoms mentioned above are not the root problem with the EU.

My vote is because the problem with the EU is it is 28 very different countries economically, culturally and politically trying to impose laws which fit all, laws which are imposed on us by people who have not been elected to represent the interests and wishes of the British people(and in the case of the EU Commission, people the EU citizens haven't even voted for).

I'm voting for our right to make our own decisions not to have decisions made for us by 27 other countries that do not have Britain’s best interests at heart.

If that costs me financially then so be it because I’m not sure what price you put on independence but even if it costs me a few hundred quid a year it’s worth every penny in my opinion.

Heithinn

JohnRo wrote: »

I watched in disbelief as a TV interview of people in the street collared one woman who said "I'm voting leave but I don't know why"

Perhaps she used her intuition to cut through the Euromerde of the Remainders.....

gardner1

A leap in the dark as some have said.......well it's got be be better than the shambles we have now

VOTE LEAVE

benjus

gardner1 wrote: »

A leap in the dark as some have said.......well it's got be be better than the shambles we have now

VOTE LEAVE

If we have a shambles now, it's largely due to the incompetence of British governments. The Leave campaign has made it a policy to blame everything on the EU. For example, if there aren't enough school places, it's because the government hasn't done its job.

ManofLeisure_2

I guess we will now have to wait and see, but the private banking polls yesterday evening were not good news for Leave. That is why the £/FTSE rose so sharply.

I have done the deed and voted Out.

AndyBSG

benjus wrote: »

If we have a shambles now, it's largely due to the incompetence of British governments. The Leave campaign has made it a policy to blame everything on the EU. For example, if there aren't enough school places, it's because the government hasn't done its job.

In the last 10 years net immigration to the UK has almost doubled.

Counting EU nationals only, the net immigration to the UK over the last decade has been just a whisker under 2 million.

Last year the UK population grew by 513,000 and the net migration figure was 315,000 so we actually had more migrants coming into the country than we actually had in terms of the net increase of the indigenous population.

270,000 of that 315,000 net migration increase was from EU nationals.

So, more than half our population increase last year was from migrants we have no power to prevent entering the country

NOTE - All these figures are from the office of national statistics which is about as independent as you can get but does also only include the ones who entered legally and I suspect the number of people entering illegally that the ONS can't provide figures for will change the numbers quite a bit.

enthusiasticsaver

I have no idea which way the dice will fall but I have voted to REMAIN. No matter how many times leave voters (and there are many in Cornwall including our MP) keep telling me things were better before the EU and that leaving the EU will solve our problems I have not been convinced. The only thing I am sure about is that in the short term the economy will suffer if we vote to leave and my elder daughters job is in university research heavily dependent on EU funding. Most of our problems in this country are to do with globalisation and decisions made by our UK government so if the Leave voters think things will be better out then it will be interesting to see how much worse things can get with a smaller economy, higher prices, a falling £ and not much difference to immigration so still high housing costs. Add a very right wing government to the mix and who knows where we will go. Being a naturally cautious person I do not want to take the risk.

I work in a university and many of my colleagues and a lot of students are remainers but lots of my neighbours, relatives, friends etc are voting out. Whatever the result we will be fine I am sure but I can't help thinking Brexit sets us up for a decade of uncertainty if this is the end result.

veryintrigued

FTSE up 1.5% and the Oddschecker Brexit odds longer than they've been for a very long time.

They know something we don't?!

aspiration_2

benjus wrote: »

If we have a shambles now, it's largely due to the incompetence of British governments. The Leave campaign has made it a policy to blame everything on the EU. For example, if there aren't enough school places, it's because the government hasn't done its job.

I do not believe that any government can plan (accomodation, schools, NHS etc) for an unknown number of millions waiting to enter.

enthusiasticsaver

AndyBSG wrote: »

In the last 10 years net immigration to the UK has almost doubled.

Counting EU nationals only, the net immigration to the UK over the last decade has been just a whisker under 2 million.

Last year the UK population grew by 513,000 and the net migration figure was 315,000 so we actually had more migrants coming into the country than we actually had in terms of the net increase of the indigenous population.

270,000 of that 315,000 net migration increase was from EU nationals.

So, more than half our population increase last year was from migrants we have no power to prevent entering the country

NOTE - All these figures are from the office of national statistics which is about as independent as you can get but does also only include the ones who entered legally and I suspect the number of people entering illegally that the ONS can't provide figures for will change the numbers quite a bit.

Many of those migrants are working and paying tax though? In the university I work in we have many EU lecturers in mathematics due to the chronic shortage we have of mathematics post- graduates. In our local hospital we have agency nurses (from inside and outside EU, mainly Philopines) and locum doctors earning thousands of pounds for just the odd shift due to a shortage of nurses, doctors, midwives etc. Someone told me today there is a massive shortage of paramedics so again if we do not use migrants and there are no British born paramedics training what happens then? Our local GP has come out of retirement because they could not find a replacement. This is Cornwall by the way not a horrible place to live. If we did not have immigration who is going to do the jobs left by the migrants?

Myself and a colleague jokingly said do we have to send back our German and Italian maths lecturers and very hard working Polish cleaners and get back a load of elderly ex pats from Spain? If we had a points based system we will still have lots of immigrants due to skills shortages in this country. That is not due to the EU but a massive problem with training people in this country in the right skill sets and getting people to train for these jobs in the first place. Low paid, unskilled workers may be a different issue but the problem there is unscrupulous employers. I am not sure a right wing Conservative government will do anything about that especially without the EU to watch over them.

The EU is not perfect by any means but isolating ourselves in the way Brexiteers want to is not the answer in my opinion.