Should the UK stay in or leave the EU?

This is where I'm at with it. Why leave something so colossally important up to the voting public? I'm not sure that all the important information from either side has reached people effectively. It's most prominent when one side (usually Brexit) is being called out for lying about something or making up statistics.

At the moment I am leaning to Remain. I'm always somewhat sceptical of arguments based around 'controlling immigration' and that's all the Brexit side seems to talk about. Economically staying in seems a great deal easier.

But I don't feel like I really know too much about it either way. I can still vote. If I'm being honest, I like the romantic idea of Europe and that's the biggest factor for me leaning remain. Nothing policy related.

@bollard: Just observing, but I really hope that the one hour thing and the discourse in general in the public is more structured and based on facts than the 10 min dude, because he mixes in demagogic arguments and fear mongering so much that his speech could have been directly from a Lega Nord/Front National/etc convention (i'm not exaggerating for effect, it's straight up the same stuff)

I'll vote Remain. But man, the debate from both campaigns has been fucking dire & overwhelmingly negative. Coming less than 2 years after the Scottish independence referendum, what a difference. At least there was positivity then. Here it's just "you've got two shit choices, pick the lesser evil, but don't hope on the politicians saying anything useful because they are all too busy racing to the bottom". The EU is not something I think is particularly great, it needs urgent reform, and the way they have meddled in Greece & shown no respect for their sovereignty while being quite happy to let right wing populist parties (which is putting it politely) in Hungary & Poland to run with little interference. Which is typical liberalism really. But the alternative is leaving & being stuck for the next 4 years with a government who want to slaughter worker protections, human rights protections, & a whole bunch of other things that protect the plebs from the ruling class. Fuck that for a game of chickens.

At least the other nations in the EU seem to be turning against TTIP. That's in the EU's favour.

Voting for the least worst option is always shit, this is reminding me a lot like the AV referendum in that regard, along with the horrificly negative campaign. Remember the billboards like a picture of a baby in intensive care with "She needs a new heart, not a new electoral system" or whatever it was? Quality. AV was pish & I'll never forgive the Liberals for accepting such a terrible compromise that nobody who wanted proportional representation was actually passionate for, but that campaign against it was absurd.

@bicycle_repairman: It is not only border controls that mean the UK increases by over 300,000 new citizens every year. The nature of work in the UK; with zero hours contracts, agency work-forces, pay that drives down UK wages but is still many times what some Euro nationals can make in their home countries and "hot-bedding" by dividing private housing into Edwardian-style dormitories is a big problem. It also demonstrates how ineffective EU legislation actually is regarding employment law, workers rights and the standard of living.

All the above is great for the UK and EU economies though, so if we do manage to stop this new era of cheap labour, there will be a cost to big business. Good, I say - we've already abolished slavery. Border controls would be far easier to implement in an Island nation such as ours and they can be controlled in the same way that they were before.

The UK has always welcomed immigrants. We are an immigrant nation. The UK is objectively one of the most cosmopolitan places in the world. Immigration itself is not the issue - it is the rate of immigration that can not be sustained. How can you plan for infrastructure (schools, hozzies, roads, houses, etc) when you don't know the numbers you'll be planning for? I would say that it is better to offer immigration to the population of the world, so that the best placed people are able to come here from all the cultures. I think it more xenophobic to restrict immigration just to EU nationals than to have a global outlook that favours required skills instead.

You really shouldn't conflate immigration from the EU with the refugee crisis. The only similarity is that the UK can't really control either of them. The recent Dutch vote to reject closer economic ties between the EU and Ukraine shows that the UK is not a lone voice in expressing dissatisfaction with the current EU. There is plenty of support across Europe for re-imagining the EU. I predict that if the UK leaves, it will be the start of a process that defines a new European partnership without the federalist intent.

Do you think that's a wrong thing? What right does the EU have to interfere with a democratically elected government of a sovereign state?

Sorry, I didn't look it up and I didn't study politics. I guess I'm just well read!

If Johnson gets in - at least I'll be able to vote him out. Totalitarianism isn't cute.

You'll notice that this EU vote cuts across party politics, with people on the left and right joining both sides of the EU debate, despite both political main party "in" proclamations. That's why we can't leave it to the politicians. (Do you think Cameron is really "in"?) Also, in England politics is done by consent. Without such consent, what are you left with? All you have is a pop song by a couple of teenage boys.

I think if they are willing to meddle in left wing governments which disregard the EU's economic status quo then they should absolutely meddle in democratically elected governments which verge uncomfortably towards fascism & disregard the EU's social status quo. I know which one scares me more, & it's not the country who were just trying to deal with horrific poverty & suffering.

Cameron says that if the UK leaves, the economy will collapse, the NHS will go under, and the Calais refugees will swarm over. Also, all of Europe could descend into war. That all sounds really bad, so Remain, I guess?

@dudeglove: For a start our parliament isn't particularly representative. The number of MPs each party has is massively out of line with the number of votes they achieved.

UKIP (an anti-EU party) has 1 MP from ~3.8m votes while the SNP (pro-EU) has 56 MPs from only ~1.5m votes. The makeup of parliament absolutely does not reflect the will of the people on this issue.

Also the Conservative party in government ran both of the last 2 general elections promising an EU referendum in their manifesto. They were 'entrusted' to deliver a referendum on this issue, not to decide it themselves.

I'm not in the UK but from what I have seen it seems as though it boils down to people deciding whether or not they think the EU will do positively or poorly in economic terms in the future. Although there are other arguments in there I think most people will be voting on the issue of "Will we be better off from an economic point of view if we leave?" and the issue with that is that no one knows, no one can know and anyone who says they do know is lying. You can make all sorts of predictions but at the end of the day no one is able to tell you with any sort of certainty how the EU will go economically in the future and so you may as well flip a coin if that is what you are basing your vote on. Because of this I would be very surprised if the UK left. Staying has its risks no doubt but better the devil you know.

Yeeeeeah I was leaning towards leave but now I'm definitely voting leave.

Is the UK like the Texas of Europe? Super independent spirt, not the close mindedness.

It's more a split between people who want to do most of our trade with our neighbours in Europe, or those who prefer closer relations with people who "are culturally closer to us", ie were part of our empire, so the Commonwealth nations & America. The Texas comparison doesn't really work imo.

@flstyle: Taking political advice from a bigoted racist sounds like maybe a bad idea

Also calling the EU a European Soviet Union is hilarious

I don't know who he is but he made a lot of sense about European big wigs we have no democratic power against making laws for the UK.

@core1065: England and Texas couldn't be futher apart in almost every definable way.

I checked out that Brexit thing posted & that 10-min video and all I can say is it's pretty interesting to watch anti-regulation / free-market stuff like this from a removed perspective for once (USA man here).

@aethelred:The NHS is already being righteously screwed by the Tory austerity cuts: 5 doctors strikes this year, Tories need 22 Billion more in NHS savings by 2020, Most NHS trusts already overspent this year's budget, longest queue wait times ever in A and E (4+ hours waiting times increasing and having ambulances now wait outside A and E units is both scandalous and potentially murderous), training courses cut for UK medical students, upcoming TTIP EU-USA trade deal threatening NHS from US trade litigation.

The Calais camp "Juxtaposed Controls" deal is separate from EU and between UK and France only. The UK pays France to maintain and police these camps. Migrants prefer to claim asylum in the UK because it is said they believe that France is more hostile to asylum seekers than the UK is. If France stops the "Juxtaposed Controls" deal, the existing migrant processing and repatriation facilities at Dover will need to be expanded and a centre near London Kings X to hold asylum seekers thought prone to disappearing would have to be made available. However, France sells us a lot of their spare nuclear electricity, wine, cheese and cars - more than we sell to them. Would they risk loosing out on trade restrictions for the sake of spite?

Euro war - EU thankfully have no army (yet) but we do have NATO instead, which has nothing to do with the EU. Nor does the UN. Or the WTO.

@flstyle:Pat Condell is not a racist. Ad-hominem attacks are always logical fallacies anyway, even if he was (which he's clearly not - and I've watched all of his YouTube series).

Find out if the arcane methods of electing the President of the European Council, or electing President of the European Commission, or electing President of the European Parliament, or electing Presidency of the Council of the European Union, or election of any one of the Presidents for institutions of the European Union is done democratically. Then research how EU strategy and law is created, amended and regulated and you might start to find some similarities with Russia - with no public involvement, minimal representative political involvement, no financial auditing (despite having an EU institution and President for this), secret policy meetings and zero accountability.

Personally, I'm with Yanis Varoufakis (ex Valve economist, ex Greek Finance Minister), who would like to remodel the EU entirely. I think his reasoning and dire warnings are the most compelling reasons to stay in EU so far. Unlike him, I think leaving it is the only way to change EU policy, since the UK has no influence from within and I think the EU is partially responsible for the rise of the right in Europe. His interview with Owen Jones is worth a watch for both sides:

@bicycle_repairman: Deciding how you handle immigration is a basic tenet of sovereignty. That's what sovereignty is: having the power to make your own decisions.

Whether you succeed or not in enforcing that policy is a seperate issue. The issue with the EU isn't that we're failing to enforce our policy, it's that we no longer even have the right to decide what that policy should be.

The refugee crisis is, again, a seperate issue to limitless immigration from EU countries.

Sorry in advance if this seems like I am having a go at you. This is not the case. However, the bold part I want to question. If we leave the European Union, what exactly do you think will happen here? If wages go up due to less labour, then the cost of living will also go up. Products and services will cost more because it costs more for the staff producing/learning/doing the jobs. For house prices, if people leave, then demand drops, what happens? There is a possibility of house prices going down, but, how would you feel if you just got a mortgage for your house to find the value of the mortgage of the house was valued far higher than the value of the house itself?

I do not want to push anybody to vote any way other than the way they want. But, I do not see trade agreements just magically being resolved, the argument against the EU I hear from time to time is that it is slow, now imagine our government (regardless of party, they all take their time to work on whether things are legal and so forth) and add that to the argument that the EU wants to control everything but is slow to move (i.e how it acted with Greece, slow and unfair in some ways) then I do not see a trade agreement just working. When international companies are flat out saying "hey, if you leave the EU, we may leave your country" those are not idle threats. The exit campaign is doing a very poor job on the part of explaining where our growth will come from and where all the jobs we could potentially (not saying 100% we will, but I think we will loose some) loose will be replaced by? A lot of companies here are being invested into by external companies, will countries, like say, China, be willing to buy UK firms if we are no longer in a free trade agrment with the members of the European Union?

I also keep hearing about a idea of doing what Norway does. People are ignoring that Norway has to follow a lot of EU laws to do trade there (i.e. following European safety standards etc for the CE mark). I thought the argument against Europe was not following the EU laws, but if we leave and follow the Norwegian path, then we are doing what we are now, just with no vote at all in the laws we have to follow to trade.

Anyway, I hope this does not come across as mean spirited or aggressive. Everybody is free to vote how they wish. There are pros and cons on both sides of the vote for sure, but I really want to see actual facts being discussed in the debates over the general tone set by public officials right now (Boris Johnsons speech over Obama saying we should stay in the EU was disgraceful, I usually like Johnson but there is a side to him I have not seen before in this EU debate which I must admit I do not care for, but each to their own).

Isn't this a bit heavy for the GB forums?

It seems like a big part of the Leave crowd is, they don't like Muslim refugees, and want an excuse to keep them out.

I don't really have a stake in this but Brexit is an awful name for anything except maybe a high-fiber breakfast cereal.

The right thing to do is to stay but if they want to leave whatever. Europe is a political catastrophe at the moment anyway and they aint exactly helping either way.

As an American, I'm pretty interested in seeing how this turns out, though obviously I can't speak for either side myself. I hope you UK duders get out there and vote for what you think is best for your country.

"Cheap foreign labor" is also one thing that EU battles. Workers should have equal rights and salarys in whatever country they work in is one of EUs goals. How could leaving EU possibly improve that?

You'd best separate from Scotland while you're at it.

As someone living in the UK i find it extremely annoying that both sides only ever argue the positives of their position and the negatives of the other, both sides have positives and if you're ignoring them then you aren't being honest.
Without getting too deep into the arguments, i'm voting to leave, i believe if business wants to keep making money they will make new trade deals regardless of our standing in the EU, i think we need more control over immigration, we need new laws on human rights which allow us to deport criminal asylum seekers, we need to stop sending so many billions of pounds as part of our EU membership. A year or two ago David Cameron said that the UK would be fine if we left the EU, now he is hell bent on staying, i can only assume the reason he wants to stay in is because it would be easy, this Conservative government has done a great job at reducing the national debt which previous governments have wrought on this country, i think they are capable of keeping this country going on its own and i want to see them take on the challenge, if we signal to the EU that we're staying it's like giving Brussels the green light to do whatever they want, it's too late to say no after that.
But in the end i don't think it matters, the people of this country have a long history of voting safely, leaving sounds scary, so they will vote stay, their local government will tell them they won't be able to go on a European holiday, which is a lie, and they'll vote stay... just so they can go on holiday.

Accurate.

Actually, the increase in house prices vs wages hasn't much to do with with population growth. It's part of it, but overwhelmingly the explosion is down to a massive increase in (often short sighted and irresponsible) bank lending.

http://ec.europa.eu/immigration/who-does-what/more-information/explaining-the-rules-why-are-there-eu-rules-and-national-rules_en

National Immigration Rules

Each EU country alone decides:

• The total number of migrants that can be admitted to the country to look for work;
• All final decisions on migrant applications;
• Rules on long-term visas – stays for periods longer than three months; and
• Conditions to obtain residence and work permits when no EU-wide rules have been adopted.

I know nothing of this soooooooooo Leave the Union. EVERYONE FOR THEMSELVES!!!

@thomasnash: Pretty sure that is referring to rules for immigration from outside the EU. Setting a cap on intra-EU migration would pretty clearly violate freedom of movement.

All the racist, unionists in my area in Northern Ireland are voting leave as they worship Nigel Farage. Mind you, I wouldn't mind having a pint with the lad.

P.S.

Not all unionists, obviously... just the ones in my area :D

I don't know what to vote, to be honest. :/

@pcorb: Yeah, you're correct. I was under the impression that the conversation was mostly about extra-EU, but looking back on it that might just be a mistake on my part!

With that said, I think it's also fair to say that intra-EU migration is a much less pressing issue? For example, this page suggests that nearly twice as many EU migrants come to the UK with a definite job as migrants from outside the EU. There are fewer who come to join their family members as well which seems to be a big bugbear of the UKIP types.

With all that said, I suppose intra-EU migration is the only one that will really be affected by brexit. I don't think leaving the EU will have any impact on the volume of Syrians that come over.

EDIT: I should also note that the UK is one of three countries that chooses which EU-wide rules to accept on a case-by-case bases, according to the EU page I posted in my last post.

@irish_giant_bomber: Are you saying that Unionists are racist as a block, or there's a strain of racist ones?

The DUP are telling their supporters to vote Leave while the UUP are telling theirs to vote Remain.

@dave_tacitus: Not all Unionists in NI are racist but as someone who grew up here, raised as an atheist and pretty neutral, and lived in both unionist and republican areas, the more extreme areas are all very racist and more likely to vote leave due to MUH IMMIGRANTS TAKIN R JOBS.

NI is a weird af place to live. Stormont is filled with scumbags... I'd rather be ruled solely by Cameron at this stage. It's all ruled by religion and it's just really grating... the politics, the racism, the sectarianism is all so depressing as fuck.

FYI, I went to an 'integrated,' school and they were all racist bigots from unionist areas. Bad on both sides of the politics.

Either way, the ones I know are all voting leave due to muh immigrants basically.

edit: the main problem imo is that the politics in this country isn't taught well enough in schools so most people, including myself don't know what to think on any of this shit.

@irish_giant_bomber: The people I know who identify themselves as unionist are either voting Remain or are undecided. It's not as black and white (arf!) as you're making out.

See, I'm an Ulsterman too. :)

@dave_tacitus: no man sorry wasn't making it out to be black and white! I ain't good in explaining myself lol

just my area, the ones I have talked too! I have no idea about as a whole obviously :D

didn't mean to offend u man im just sick of this country and its BS i guess im ranting a little lol

I feel like the word 'Democracy' is lost on you both. While I grant that the voting public can be incredibly uninformed in their decision making, it's still their fundamental right to make that decision, for good or ill.

My own two-cents: The EU is a sinking ship that is run by un-democratically elected bureaucrats that, in 'caring' about everyone, actually care about no-one. They are lying, manipulative charlatans, and the UK - a nation with a rich democratic history - needs to come to it's senses.

I truly hope this is just the seed of a new era(?) when every EU nation will come to it's senses, get out, and form their own independent trade and commerce agreements, control their own borders and flourish! We should not be told how much tax women in our society should have to pay for having a wonderful, luxurious period

EU reform is impossible at this point. There is no democracy when we have no control over our own nation. We are at the heel of 1984 style super-state and it needs to stop.

To be clear: I vote out. Waaaaaay the fuck out.

@thomasnash: I believe his point was that, regardless of whether EU immigration is an issue, the fact that control over it doesn't rest with national governments is a violation of sovereignty.

@pcorb: Yes I was drifting off point a bit. I only came in to say that actually the UK has quite a lot of sovereignty on that issue.

The EU has a parliament which is elected every 5 years. The Comission initiates legislation, and the Parliament has an advisory role in that process. It can block, amend and refuse to pass laws. And, ironically, it's the people who are most vocal in opposing the EU and its lack of democratic legitimacy who usually stand in the way of a more powerful Parliament.

While I think a united Europe is better than not, I think "Leave" is going to win. I also think that might actually end up being good for the EU long term.

The whole EU just seems like it needs a complete reboot. Bureaucratically, it seems like a complete clusterfuck, to the extent that when I ask people from Europe just how it's structured and how/whether they vote for the European Government, no one seems to be able to explain it to me. They also can't really tell me who their representatives are. As an outsider, when someone says mentions the "European Council," I immediately think of the Spectre meeting room from Thunderball. It strikes me that people don't seem very connected to "Europe" as a government, despite it have a pretty massive impact on their lives. I'd describe the situation almost like the pre-Civil War United States, where people identified most strongly with their home state as opposed to "America." Except in modern Europe, the EU gov't is much, much bigger and more involved in everyday life than the American Federal Gov't was.

I think part of the problem is that the EU seems to have kind of stumbled into existence being built over a number of years by treaties and nation-nation agreements. And then in the 90s they all of a sudden realized the thing kind of looked like a gov't and the EU was born. I think one of the consequences of that is that a lot of disputes generated out of the disparate cultures and identities of the individual member-states never really got discussed. And when those issues came up, they got addressed piecemeal as opposed to all at once. And those identity issues seem like the ones that are really in the background of all the other arguments for leaving/staying.

So to get back to my original point (after taking the long way around the barn, as my father would say), it's that the EU just needs to start over again. Throw out the creaky structure the current thing is built on and actually generate a structure that gets some buy-in from everyone. If a member-state leaving is the shock needed to start that process, then I think it's better it be a nation on the geographic periphery that never really seemed committed to the whole idea in the first place, hence why the UK is the best possible place for this to happen right now.

Well, leaving might spice up eurovision a little bit...

@pinner458: i mean, we have steaming debates about shopping carts and pumping gas. This clearly belongs here.

@pcorb Forgive my laziness is presenting an article from The Express of all places to further press my original point, but there's plenty of this sort of thing to go around. The thinly-veiled excuse that is EU democracy does not work to the betterment of the UK. One size doesn't fit all.

And, ironically, it's the people who are most vocal in opposing the EU and its lack of democratic legitimacy who usually stand in the way of a more powerful Parliament.

I'm not entirely certain what you're getting at with this part, so I can't really comment on that.

@tehpickle: That article does absolutely nothing to show that the EU is undemocratic. If a majority of MPs from Scotland or Greater Manchester oppose something, it isn't an indictment of UK democracy if it's passed anyway, because most MPs aren't from Scotland or Manchester. Likewise, things in the EU Parliament are passed when a majority of MEPs agree to pass it. UK MEPs are a minority in the European: if they could unilaterally decide to block legislation, that would be undemocratic.