The EU referendum - IN / OUT or Shake it all about.

[DJ Barry Hammond]

so they might now come back? as might dyson.. etc.. JCB might be worth looking at their gaffer wants out..

Based on my understanding, that would be unlikely - one, because of Slovakia's geographical location, it's in a good position to connect it to its African producers.

Secondly for the UK to be seen as a beneficial proposition, it would need to negotiate a decent import rate with the EU on cane sugar... but if the EU does that, it would have to give the same concessions to other WTO members, thus negating the UK's back door advantage to the EU market - they may as well continue with the Slovakia operation.

Thirdly - I believe they sold their Greenwich plant quite some years ago and it has since been closed down, so the costs of re-establishing could be prohibitive.

[Strokes]

Boris Johnson

You know when someone is losing an argument because they suddenly get all rattled, and personal, and sometimes even a little bit menacing. It is clear from their style of debate in the last few weeks that the Remain campaign is conscious that it is losing the argument, and losing comprehensively. To many fair-minded people – including those who had not previously given the matter much thought – it now seems obvious that the UK should leave the European Union.

Whatever the noble ambitions on which it was founded, the EU is an anachronism. It is increasingly anti-democratic; its supranational system is being imitated nowhere else on earth; and its economic policies are causing misery in many parts of the EU. It is sclerotic, opaque, elitist: different nations bound together by a centralised bureaucracy that ordinary people can neither understand nor vote out. It is an attempt to build a United States of Europe; to create a single political structure. And yet no senior Remainer has so far had the honesty to defend the project for what it is. No one on the Remain side has shown any shred of explicit federalist idealism; no one has called for Britain to join in “building Europe” or in creating a “European identity”. That is because they know that this ideology – though dominant in Brussels – would be viewed with alarm by the British public.

So what do we get, instead of idealism? We get an unending and intensifying diet of fear. We are being bullied and brow-beaten into remaining in this failing system – and I think the public can see through it. As time goes on, I find more and more people can see that Britain would have a great future outside the EU – trading freely with the EU and the rest of the world, while engaging fully at an intergovernmental level with all the political and diplomatic questions in Europe. On every major question it is possible to take back control – and thrive.

Whether you express the figure as £350 million a week gross or £10.6 billion a year net, most people are amazed to discover how much we pay just to be in the EU. We could do with having that cash back. They can see that our current immigration policy is unfair and unbalanced and out of control – and they can also see that the Remain campaign has failed for months to answer the fundamental question. How can we control the rate – 333,000 net last year, a city the size of Newcastle – as long as we are in the EU?

The Remainers have nothing to say. Their mouths just open and shut, wordlessly. Above all, people are rumbling the great big fat lie at the heart of the whole thing: that the sacrifice of democracy – the 2,500 new EU laws imposed on us every year, costing £600 million a week for business – is somehow worth it for the economic benefits of the so-called single market.

In the last week we have had amazing testimonials from two of the biggest heroes of modern British manufacturing. I was thrilled when they spoke out, because I know the kind of pressure that all UK business leaders are facing from Project Fear. In their optimism, their vigour and their belief in this country, they sum up what the Leave campaign is all about. They are (Lord) Anthony Bamford, of the mighty digger firm JCB, and James Dyson the billionaire entrepreneur and inventor.

Now these people make machines: beautiful, complex, cutting-edge bits of technology. You might have thought that it was precisely for them – and their kind – that the “single market” was invented, so that their vacuum cleaners and backhoe loaders can circulate freely across the 510-million strong territory. You might have imagined that they would be passionate advocates of the system.

On the contrary – they both export colossal quantities to EU markets, and will continue to do so; but they both think we should get out of the EU, and that the whole thing is going in the wrong direction. Dyson is the No 1 brand leader in the German vacuum-cleaner market. Does he worry about tariffs, if we left? Of course not. The Germans would not dream of it: we Brits buy 820,000 German cars every year, worth about 20 billion euros. In fact we buy one fifth of Germany’s entire car output. As Dyson points out, tariffs would mean the Germans would be cutting their own throats. It won’t happen.

He wants to take back control of our law-making system, because he is fed up with the Brussels stitch-up, by which British ministers can be outvoted to the detriment of his company. And he wants to take back control of immigration – not because he is in any way hostile to immigrants. He is just infuriated by the imbalance in the system. There is no limit on EU migrants, but he has no way of hiring enough postgraduate engineers, because most people doing research in science and engineering at British universities are from outside the EU.

As for Lord Bamford, he has seen that the “single market” is in reality a political project that is turning inexorably into a single government of Europe. There is no need to be part of this expensive legislative machine in order to export goods or services into the EU. The latest figures show that between 1993 (the dawn of the single market) and 2015 there were 36 countries – including India, Russia, China, America, New Zealand, Canada, Brazil – who did better than the UK at exporting to the single market. They weren’t “in” it. They didn’t have Brussels making 60 per cent of their laws. And yet they did better than us.

It is time for this country to show some of the self-belief of these two great companies. It was only a few months ago that the Prime Minister was saying we would thrive mightily outside. He was right first time. As James Dyson says: “We will create more wealth and more jobs by being outside the EU. We will be in control of our destiny. And control, I think, is the most important thing in life and business.”

Boris Johnson put this on his Facebook yesterday, I thought it was a decent account of mine and others feelings.

[DJ Barry Hammond]

A day late and a dollar short...he might bring 3 magic beans as well.... do you think a man who has described anybody who leaves as "deserters" is really going to change?   Clause 4 was binned by labour because it was past its sell by date... free movement was also of its time when the the Eu could not envisage the mass  and easy movement of peoples across the continent... it has to and will be dropped whether we stay in or not.

I agree on the last part - which is why I wonder whether something to that direction will be promised... a bit like 'the vow'.

Now question is, would that be too late to change the direction of voting here? It wouldn't catch the postal votes, but it could grab a lot of the undecided and some of the narrow leave voters.

[Guest MattP]

Jean Claude Juncker coming to Britain to campaign.

That's the clearest indication yet that the polling is being believed and the "remain" camp think they are in the last chance saloon.

[Strokes]

Jean Claude Juncker coming to Britain to campaign.

That's the clearest indication yet that the polling is being believed and the "remain" camp think they are in the last chance saloon.

I'm beginning to think we could win this, a few days ago I would have bitten your hand off for just a close vote. Maybe Scotland will vote out to get itself a UK referendum, that would be very funny.

[Guest MattP]

I'm beginning to think we could win this, a few days ago I would have bitten your hand off for just a close vote. Maybe Scotland will vote out to get itself a UK referendum, that would be very funny.

 

Same, I'm genuinely starting to believe it's going to happen.

 

Partly due to polling, partly due to the desperation of remain, can we shove Eddie Izzard and Polly Toynbee on television all week?

[Strokes]

Same, I'm genuinely starting to believe it's going to happen.

 

Partly due to polling, partly due to the desperation of remain, can we shove Eddie Izzard and Polly Toynbee on television all week?

They are rolling out Gordan Brown aren't they, he isn't as popular here as he is in Scotland. Could be another mistake by remain.

[johnny the fox]

I agree on the last part - which is why I wonder whether something to that direction will be promised... a bit like 'the vow'.

Now question is, would that be too late to change the direction of voting here? It wouldn't catch the postal votes, but it could grab a lot of the undecided and some of the narrow leave voters.

Think you will find the trust is lost .. nobody will believe a last desperate throw of the dice...just like tom watson's assertion today... A major change ! sometime never.....what we all have to realize is these people do not live among us and do not experience what we do...i don't remember a time when Labour were so far away from their core vote...both parties have taken us for granted and have treated us for mugs for far too long...the fallout will be seen very soon.

[johnny the fox]

Based on my understanding, that would be unlikely - one, because of Slovakia's geographical location, it's in a good position to connect it to its African producers.

Secondly for the UK to be seen as a beneficial proposition, it would need to negotiate a decent import rate with the EU on cane sugar... but if the EU does that, it would have to give the same concessions to other WTO members, thus negating the UK's back door advantage to the EU market - they may as well continue with the Slovakia operation.

Thirdly - I believe they sold their Greenwich plant quite some years ago and it has since been closed down, so the costs of re-establishing could be prohibitive.

There are thousands of private companies who are waiting to throw off loads of unnecessary regulations that hold them back , you never know captain Birdseye might get a job..he has been laid off by the EU fishery regs for a very long time..

[Thracian]

There are shades of racism and bigotry without needing to be a full blown racist/Bigot

 

Sadly the population will still be as racist and bigoted after it pulls out as it was before.

 

 

 

I'd argue there's more racism now than ever, because I hear the grumbles and disatisfaction every day.

 

And much of it's down to the deliberate and systematic downgrading of white men (even referred to in one political speech as 'the trouble is elderly white men' - many of whose fathers actually fought to defend the freedoms and benefits of our land but left their naive offspring to gradually give those freedoms and benefits away).

 

There's the shamelessly blatant racism of the BBC, the many who've taken advantage of human rights legislation, the widely advertised positive discrimination, the relegation of white English people on the council housing lists, the unfair stealing of jobs by incoming workers through gangmaster fiddles and suchlike, the perception of English owned houses being purchased en bloc but sold or let only to foreign tenants, the lengthy waits at doctors surgeries and hospitals, the dramatic overcrowding and foreignising of schools and their staff and other seemingly weighted situations.

 

Have you noticed how advertisements now feature dominant black males with white women and smaller white males in less prominent positions but extremely rarely do they feature white men with black or asian women or in the more dominant positions.

 

Have a careful look. It's not done my accident. Yet, when I look around my work places there are big white men and lots of smaller foreign guys too. But that's not the political message. It's all about elevating some and downgrading others. Don't believe me, just be honest enough to look for yourself.     

 

It's subtle thought conditioning and is really both insulting and blatantly manipulative.  

 

Representative? Not at all. Threequarters of my mention-worthy girlfriends have been foreign including West Indian, Kenyan and Chinese and it's not representative of my youngest son's last five girlfriends either,  who've been American, Indian, Polish (2) and Romanian. 

 

But many foreign girls are not allowed freedom of choice and the BBC hardly helps improve that situation with their ideological impressionism despite their holier-than-thou attitude.

 

Why don't they show Middle Eastern women with white men or West Indians? Or campaign for immigration to revolve around 95% women to give them a real chance of being able to enjoy completely free choice?

 

They won't because they're full of activists with their own agendas. The same as their debates are so often conditioned to deliver the views they support, again, sometimes quite subtlely but entirely noticably if you look carefully enough.             

 

I despise racism but don't approve of being socially engineered one bit - or the constant kicks that go with it in today's climate.  

 

I believe in fairness but the only people not being treated fairly and with due consideration in the UK right now are white English people.

[Thracian]

Jean Claude Juncker coming to Britain to campaign.

That's the clearest indication yet that the polling is being believed and the "remain" camp think they are in the last chance saloon.

 

 

 

If he serves to help the Remain campaign with his threats I'll be amazed.  

[Captain...]

Jean Claude Juncker coming to Britain to campaign.

That's the clearest indication yet that the polling is being believed and the "remain" camp think they are in the last chance saloon.

 

I seem to remember a similar swing in the Scottish referendum, if anything it got more people out voting, probably the worst thing that could happen for the Brexit campaign.

 

As for James Dyson, it's all well and good someone who has an established market in Europe wanting to leave, Dyson's will sell regardless, if they have to pay import duty to buy a Dyson they will, because they are the best. It is companies that rely on imports from the EU that will be affected, any sort of import duty will push up costs and any company that is trading in a saturated market place could lose competitive advantage. Or a British exporter that competes with other European exporters, you add import duty to the British supplier then all of the other options become cheaper.

[Thracian]

There are thousands of private companies who are waiting to throw off loads of unnecessary regulations that hold them back , you never know captain Birdseye might get a job..he has been laid off by the EU fishery regs for a very long time..

 

 

 

We might even have High Street butchers opening again - if only as the kind of social museum exhibits seen in Dudley!    

[Webbo]

I seem to remember a similar swing in the Scottish referendum, if anything it got more people out voting, probably the worst thing that could happen for the Brexit campaign.

 

As for James Dyson, it's all well and good someone who has an established market in Europe wanting to leave, Dyson's will sell regardless, if they have to pay import duty to buy a Dyson they will, because they are the best. It is companies that rely on imports from the EU that will be affected, any sort of import duty will push up costs and any company that is trading in a saturated market place could lose competitive advantage. Or a British exporter that competes with other European exporters, you add import duty to the British supplier then all of the other options become cheaper.

The EU imposes tariffs on good from countries outside the EU, we wouldn't have to impose these if we weren't in. Imports of goods and raw materials could be cheaper if we left.

[Thracian]

They are rolling out Gordan Brown aren't they, he isn't as popular here as he is in Scotland. Could be another mistake by remain.

 

 

Brown and Juncker are such irritants they're the political equivalent of earache and headache.   

[Captain...]

The best thing Juncker could do is say that should Britain leave it will be offered a chance to join EFTA on the same terms as Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechstenstein.

 

So free trade and movement of people and part of Schengen and specify however much we would have to pay to be a part of EFTA.

 

This would force the Brexit campaign to say what they would do, rather than just trade on ifs and buts, I think having to decide now whether they would join EFTA would expose their differences, those that are campaigning for financial reasons and those that are campaigning purely to stop immigration.

 

Cameron would also be asked what he would do, and as the PM it would be him and his government that decides on how we exit, should we vote to exit.

[Captain...]

The EU imposes tariffs on good from countries outside the EU, we wouldn't have to impose these if we weren't in. Imports of goods and raw materials could be cheaper if we left.

 

They could be, or they could be a lot more expensive, we don't know. Trade deals are long and complicated affairs if we leave there will be a lot of long drawn out negotiations. A vote for Brexit is still a vote for the unknown.

[johnny the fox]

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/brexit-facts-not-fear/  Toby young's 15 minute film on why our sovereignty matters...last chance saloon..

[bovril]

Complimenti to Thracian and his son on his success with international ladies. Keeping alive the British tradition of top shagging.

[Thracian]

Well of course you can do things such as stock options where you can win when there's a price fall - but that's advanced investing for my mind / pocket, so I'm looking for something a bit more straight forward.

What if... he brings with him a change to the Freedom of Movement Principle?

 

 

 

I wouldn't trust any promise of change by the EU now.

Juncker's nailed his bullying colours to the mast and no amount of contrived compromise would lessen my belief that we'll be better off looking after ourselves. Once we've regained our independence we can debate anything. 

Juncker and the EU have had ages to temper their dictatorial desires. Instead of doing so, they've remained defiantly autocratic to the point where the whole house of cards looks ready to crumble.

It didn't need to be. But it's too late now.

I just hope we have the sense to take this chance and that includes the incomers because everyone will be better served in the medium term and we might even get some truly far-thinking politics that shows our country capable of setting an example to the world.

But it won't come from Cameron and it won't come from the current Labour Party.

The country needs change and sustainable ideas that make the best of everyone. Membership of EFTA on acceptable terms could be discussed without pre-conditions. I've never seen the UK as being isolated from Europe. More a good friend that expects to be treated with respect both for its views and its freedoms.           

[Thracian]

The best thing Juncker could do is say that should Britain leave it will be offered a chance to join EFTA on the same terms as Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechstenstein.

 

So free trade and movement of people and part of Schengen and specify however much we would have to pay to be a part of EFTA.

 

This would force the Brexit campaign to say what they would do, rather than just trade on ifs and buts, I think having to decide now whether they would join EFTA would expose their differences, those that are campaigning for financial reasons and those that are campaigning purely to stop immigration.

 

Cameron would also be asked what he would do, and as the PM it would be him and his government that decides on how we exit, should we vote to exit.

 

 

 

I'd rather see Cameron gone. He's left a stain on his credibility that'll be hard to shift. We need some sincerity in politics and people who tell it as it is and the reasons why. All the deceit can be done without.   

[johnny the fox]

I wouldn't trust any promise of change by the EU now.

Juncker's nailed his bullying colours to the mast and no amount of contrived compromise would lessen my belief that we'll be better off looking after ourselves. Once we've regained our independence we can debate anything. 

Juncker and the EU have had ages to temper their dictatorial desires. Instead of doing so, they've remained defiantly autocratic to the point where the whole house of cards looks ready to crumble.

It didn't need to be. But it's too late now.

I just hope we have the sense to take this chance and that includes the incomers because everyone will be better served in the medium term and we might even get some truly far-thinking politics that shows our country capable of setting an example to the world.

But it won't come from Cameron and it won't come from the current Labour Party.

The country needs change and sustainable ideas that make the best of everyone. Membership of EFTA on acceptable terms could be discussed without pre-conditions. I've never seen the UK as being isolated from Europe. More a good friend that expects to be treated with respect both for its views and its freedoms.           

Any club that has to threaten you to want you to stay, is no club I want to be in ...........

[Thracian]

They could be, or they could be a lot more expensive, we don't know. Trade deals are long and complicated affairs if we leave there will be a lot of long drawn out negotiations. A vote for Brexit is still a vote for the unknown.

 

 

You make some good points but with a market as big as ours I'd not see it in anyone's interests to put barriers in front of any negotiations. The basis of many trade agreements is already written down.

I don't see why any that have worked well couldn't be used as a basis for another, so reducing timescales.

The EU might be irritated by our potential departure but they'll not help themselves by alienating us even more. Indeed they may be better off confronting the reasons and making themselves a better group to be part of. From the inside or as an associate.           

[Thracian]

Complimenti to Thracian and his son on his success with international ladies. Keeping alive the British tradition of top shagging.

 

 

Haha, thanks. But if anything I said painted me as a stud, it was entirely misleading. I've been around a long time!   

[johnny the fox]

User Actions

  Follow

Isabel Oakeshott‏@IsabelOakeshott

1/2 Rumour circulating that @@tom_watson told v high level media contact postal voting results from northern towns are 'shocking' for Remain

 

• RETWEETS
  
•