The Grauniad continues apace with its scaremongering. Brexit will cause a credit crunch, destroy the NHS and is bad for Muslims. Thing is, we shouldn’t be bothering to worry about it, we should be facing it head on and pointing out that these things aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Change can be good.
And yet apart from a few isolated examples, I see few signs of the pro-Brexit camp saying that this disruption will be a positive good thing; if anything,
Well, I’m saying it. And the more the Grauniad and other snivelling apologists for the vile EU project and its anti-democratic, unelected, unaccountable oligarchy tell us we should remain in this corrupt project, the more determined I am to vote to leave.
Credit crunch, ‘Destroy’ the NHS and be ‘bad’ for Muslims? Win-win methinks.
I’ve never quite been able to understand the anti-Brexit scaremongering that, if the UK left the EU, each and every skilled EU worker would flee the country with immediate effect. Do they honestly think that those running the country post-Brexit would compulsorily expel all the people who are here doing jobs that we need them to do? Of course they wouldn’t! It would be economic suicide, and they know it. But they could, of course, sling out any who weren’t fulfilling a useful function or contributing to society in a meaningful way – so, in essence, it’s those people who the anti-Brexit folks are arguing for us to stay in the EU and be obliged to keep. Which, to be frank, doesn’t make the “loss of immigrants” argument greatly persuasive.
What the anti-Brexit camp conveniently omits to mention is that, out of the EU, the UK could (and, indeed, probably would) decide to allow European nationals who are here fulfilling a genuinely useful role to stay, as now, sans visa or work permit – why, after all, would they want to burden their cut-to-the-bone civil service with a whole load more people to process? It would just cause even more wails and protests from the civil service unions, and would give those unions some very handy numbers to chuck about to support their argument for more funding, more staff, more services etc etc. No sensible Government with any intention of reducing public spending (as the Tories seem, rightly or wrongly, determined to do) would dream of giving the unions such wonderful, hard-and-fast evidence to support their claims!
We had immigration before we joined the EU and we’d have immigration if we left it. The difference would be that the nature and scale of that immigration could be decided by our own MPs with regard to what is best for the UK, not by a bunch of remote EU officials based in a completely different country with regard only to what is best for their cherished and starry-eyed vision of a United States of Europe.
PS: What exactly is a “positive good thing?” A bit of Newspeak á la “doubleplusgood,” methinks!
Anyone (EU or not) in the UK legally for 5 continuous years is entitled, under existing British law unrelated to the EU, to stay permanently. If the UK leaves in 2018, then all EEA citizens who first came in 2013 or before can’t be kicked out without retrospective changes in the law, which can’t be ruled out but is unlikely for the reasons you say.
One thing that puzzles me about the anti-Brexit camp is the bizarre notion that the EU = Europe. Leaving the EU will not suddenly cause the British Isles to sail away over the horizon towards Newfoundland. The continent isn’t going anywhere. The British Isles as a whole will still trade with nations both within the European Union and without it as it has been doing for millennia.
All we’re talking about here is leaving a *political* entity, but the pro-EU camp are acting as if doing so would also involve backfilling the Channel Tunnel with concrete, scuttling every Dover-Calais ferry, and cutting the undersea cables linking our Internet to the continent’s.
London actually connects a vast chunk of Europe with the Americas. There are advantages to the UK’s geographical location and those advantages won’t vanish just because we’re no longer a member of a glorified gentlemen’s club.
Have you heard the latest? If we leave the EU we won’t be able to employ foreign footballers. This is so obviously untrue but even if it were true, so effing what?