* Combined with the sovereign debt crisis and the migrant crisis, this could be the end of the EU (perhaps unlikely, but)
* The UK leaving the EU with the Republic of Ireland staying in (there's little support for RoI leaving) could create problems in Northern Ireland
* The UK voting to leave the EU, with Scotland having voted to stay, could lead to another Scottish independence referendum
* The UK voting to stay in the EU, with England having voted to leave, might (though I don't know how likely it is) upset people in England
* Whatever way the result goes, it might bring down the current UK Government and force elections
* If the UK leaves, other countries might consider it as well
* If the UK stays, other countries might want to renegotiate their terms as well
* This will bring up the European Convention on/Court of Human Rights, and Human Rights Act, issue again - what happens if the UK actually does leave the ECHR or repeal the HRA? Especially in Northern Ireland, where the HRA is part of the Good Friday Agreement, and in Scotland, where laws must comply with the ECHR
I'm not an expert on any of this. It'll be interesting to see what happens, certainly.
By leaving the EU, all our existing legislation that has been enacted will stay. It just means that our elected government will have the power to remove legislation without getting permission from unelected commissioners.
Under the Lisbon treaty, we will continue to be members of the EU for two years following a vote to leave. I expect if we vote to leave, there will be another referendum in 2017 after the EU has had some serious introspection about the democratic deficit. I would expect them to try to keep the UK as a member.
In the news yesterday, before the deal was announced, there was talk of incorporating a specific guarantee that any decision this time would be final, and the EU would not then come back to the UK offering an improved deal later, precisely because of the issue you raised there.
Any mention of that has been notably absent in every news report I've seen so far today. Does anyone know what happened there?
Oh I am well aware. I am referring to the Conservatives' manifesto promise to repeal the Human Rights Act, which so far has been kicked into the long grass due to opposition and infeasibility. But since the ECHR is a European thing, EU or no, I think it will inevitably be brought up again with the referendum.
(Side note: The EU is actually trying to join the ECHR as member in itself. Wondering when that process will be finished.)
> By leaving the EU, all our existing legislation that has been enacted will stay.
Sure, most of it, but what of it? We nonetheless lose participation in the Single Market etc.
[edit for clarity]
By being a net importer from the EU in trade terms, a net contributor in EU budget terms, and having net immigration from the EU? Or by not fully participating in the ever-closer political union and the Eurozone, neither of which has exactly been a huge success in recent years?
This is a complicated issue with several reasonable arguments both for the UK remaining and for the UK leaving. There is a fundamental underlying tension because the UK simply has different priorities in some areas than its European neighbours, such that while no party is inherently right or wrong, not everyone's goals are aligned.
Still, the idea that England is just dragging everyone else down is silly. That's why most of the other EU leaders have been trying, with varying degrees of subtlety, to encourage the UK to stay.
A small anti-EU, right-wing party could have stolen just enough votes on this issue to turn the tide on the two party system result due to the brain damage of first-past-the-post[1], so the main right-wing party started this hare-brained scheme in motion to head that off.
This, in a nation where PR and full democracy is derided because... well actually mostly because the status quo benefits the powerful and well connected.
Footnote 1: just struck me what a misleading name this is. I've never seen a horse race where a horse with a similar color Jersey to you going faster, can slow you down.
"The UK and Republic of Ireland have opted out. The UK wants to maintain its own borders, and Dublin prefers to preserve its free movement arrangement with the UK - called the Common Travel Area - rather than join Schengen."
So either UK will be in EU as with all other or not at all. The current state of affairs as we are in EU only for the good stuff mightily annoys me.
In any case, neither the aid nor the 'consequence' you list above would be fixed by magic-ing the EU away.
"A small anti-EU, right wing party" - UKIP got nearly 13% of the vote and would probably be part of a coalition government with the Conservative party if we had a proportional representation system. Instead they have 1 MP. The SNP got only 8.6% of the vote and they have 56 MPs.
The referendum is happening because finally the grassroots of the Conservative party prevailed on the parliamentary Conservative party that we had to have one. Polling has historically shown that at least 40% of the country want to leave the EU. All of the traditional parties support the EU membership.
The UK joined an economic community that has somehow transformed into a superstate. You need to have democratic process if you want to make a change that big.
I've seen some variant of this claimed time and time again, but I don't really get it. The EU has always been supranational, always been pro-harmonisation and -integration. The scope of what it covers may have expanded somewhat over time (and that's been actively participated in by the UK anyway), but is it really a fundamentally different institution in 2016 from what there was in 1975? The main thing it did in 1975 and does in 2016 is set common rules for trade. Okay, it has nominal leaders now and some semblance of democratic process, but that's a feature of the UN, too, and nobody describes it as a superstate.
[1] http://ec.europa.eu/civil_service/docs/hr_key_figures_2016.p...
Though obviously, if the rules changed then everything would change, new parties, new alliances, less tactical vote buying, more democracy.
Had we had anything resembling proportionate representation in the House of Commons after the election, it is not unlikely that UKIP would have held the balance of power in a hung parliament, and that as effectively a single-issue party they would then have demanded action on their main issue as the price of co-operation. Whether any of us would agree with them or not, the fact is that nearly 4 million people did vote for them, so it's hard to argue that the current situation is somehow unjustified.
My personal view is that one good way to bring more accountability into British politics would be to make more use of direct democracy on specific issues, moving away from the transparent fiction that whichever party wound up in power despite almost always receiving a minority of the popular vote somehow has a popular mandate to implement any policy that was in their manifesto on any issue. From that point of view I'm happy to see a referendum that splits party lines take place on such a controversial issue anyway, regardless of my personal preference for its outcome.
Traditional political logic was that every vote for UKIP was a Tory vote wasted. In reality, they wasted quite a few Labour votes as well.
The UK being "kinda-sorta part of the EU" is not a wonderful thing, but being out of it entirely would be far worse for real people. Fight for more integration with the EU if that's your thing.
I'll note that Scotland would likely become independent and join the EU a few years after a British EU exit, but there's plenty of English, Welsh and Northern Irish people who'd get stuck.
[1] http://www.echr.coe.int/Pages/home.aspx?p=press/factsheets&c...
On the other hand I'm tempted to have the anti-EU Brits win and let them see what a disaster that will be for the UK, shutting them up once and for all. Then have them come back with their tails between their legs asking to be let back in.
Reality is that the result will depend on the major newspapers bias, namely Mr Rupert Murdoch. He is traditionally anti-EU, but that has previously been based on back room deals with different political parties promising him one thing or another. Since his fall from grace his power has been somewhat diminished, do it will be interesting to see how the press play this out.
> It’s a peculiarity of this referendum that Commonwealth citizens may vote in it, whereas French, Italians and Germans who have lived here for many years, and are much more directly affected, may not.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/20/how-to-...
Not to mention that even a vote to exit will take years and there will be provisions to maintain current status it's highly unlikely that the UK will kick out millions of residents not to mention have to take in millions of UK nationals that are living in other EEA countries (which on it's own could cost the UK economy much more in the short term, as when people are forcibly kicked out of their country are quite often not in the best financial position to make that move).
While it's true that the UK takes in a large amount of EU nationals they export almost as many there is a slight difference that the ones that leave the UK often posses high paying jobs in the first place while many individuals that come in come in often as a qualified job seeker meaning that they might receive more benefits at least initially than paying out as far as taxes go.
This situation is also quite common among immigrants from lower income EU countries like Poland and Romania which also historically exported allot of their income back home, it wasn't that uncommon for them to immigrate to the UK for 3-5 years just to make enough money to buy a house in their home country and then return there which is some what of an issue on it's own also.
There probably should be a better process to ensure that there isn't considerable wealth drain on the stronger economies due to economic immigration but more importantly that there isn't a brain and skill drain on the poorer EU members, pretty much any one I've spoken too from Bulgaria and Romania curses the EU more than your average UKIP voter mostly because it seems that joining the EU caused a massive exodus of anyone who could leave for greener fields which often are the most educated and better off people in the first place, those who can actually drive the country forward.
This creates an interesting political minefield for the UK's current Conservative government, since their stated policy is to abolish the Human Rights Act (the current UK legal foundation for respecting the ECHR) in favour of a British Bill of Rights, yet as of today their stated policy as a government is also to campaign to remain in the EU. These policies seem to be incompatible under Maastricht, not to mention almost polar opposites in the underlying philosophy they represent.
Hardly a "small regional player".
The Bill recognises the Scottish Parliament and a Scottish government as permanent among UK's constitutional arrangements, with a referendum required before either can be abolished. In addition new powers/control given to the Scottish government include:
* The ability to set Income Tax rates and bands * Control over several benefits and removable taxes including Air Passenger Duty and Disability Living Allowance * The right to receive half of the VAT raised in Scotland * Extended powers over Employment Support and Universal Credit
How does that work with Norway and Switzerland? Or is that different because they're members of the Schengen?
The argument runs like this.
The UK's current level of migration is seen as a problem by the current UK government, by a significant proportion of British citizens, and probably even by a good few in the left-leaning parties. While the UK's in the EU, there's almost nothing that can be done to curb skilled or unskilled migration from the EU. Any government of a UK in the EU that wants to curb migration has to do so by clamping down on non-EU migrants. There's already no legal unskilled migrant route to the UK, so that means cutting back on skilled migration.
That clamping down is for me a personal pain, so much of a pain that it feels like every time I see Theresa May in the news it's because she wants to make it harder for me and other non-EU nationals to work in the UK. (I try really, really hard not to hate her.) If the UK left the EU, that'd allow the British government to apply the same rules across the board (to EU citizens as well as non-EU citizens) which'd probably lead to any UK government (from migration-hating UKIP to migration-loving Greens) having a more sensible approach to skilled migration. And not only is that in my own interest as a non-EU Commonwealth national, it's also in the UK's interest as far as having a sensible skilled migration policy goes.
This argument is, of course, too narrow on something as broad as the UK's members in the EU to be enough: it doesn't deal with the host of other things around British EU membership (wealth, security, environment, international influence etc). But my working visa issues are so frustrating that I find it a very, very tempting argument.
The only reason EU countries have border controls on flights landing in their respective countries from the UK, is because the UK applies border controls on their citizens entering the United Kingdom. I can fly from Germany to Spain without ever showing my passport at my destination, but if I fly to and from the UK I need to show my passport on both sides.
I expect this to become 100 fold worse in the UK tries to leave the EU.
In 1975 there wasn't even a flag - the circle of yellow stars was a symbol used by different pan-national organisation (that still exists) with no relation at all to the EEC.
Under its current name, yes, but the European Union we know today is really the successor to the European Communities of yesteryear.
> Since 1975 there is a currency (and monetary policy),
Which the UK doesn't participate in, mostly.
> there is a proper and separate legal system,
This isn't new. There has been EU law since before the UK joined. The European Communities Act 1972 specifically provides for the conversion of EU law into UK law, and its supremacy over UK law.
> there a real political process with a parliament and an executive and many other changes.
The European Parliament existed long before the UK joined, and has been named that since 1962. But in fairness, it only started having elections in 1979 (it was previously appointed).
The European Commission, the executive, also existed before the UK joined. It has been a single body since 1967 (and there were three executives before that - their merger is sometimes considered the beginning of the modern EU).
> Trade is now only a part of a much bigger story.
It's always been part of a bigger story. The European Economic Community, after all, was only one of the three European Communities we joined.
> In 1975 there wasn't even a flag - the circle of yellow stars was a symbol used by different pan-national organisation (that still exists) with no relation at all to the EEC.
So? Lots of international organisations have flags. The Commonwealth of Nations has its own flag, and it's never considered a superstate.
Clearly you think that it is the same body. I hope you can also see how others could be cynical about this expanded scope and view it as surprising and undesirable.
That's really unlikely, though that would be a hilarious hit to the "power" of the UK passport (in terms of countries you can enter visa-free).
On the other hand, I don't know if the general public understands the EU now, either.
The problem with term limiting is that you almost ensuring that people will not make long term plans which leads to drain of capital. This is also why for example the current Tier 2 Inter-company Transfer UK visa's are moronic, they force very high minimum pay (50K GBP or more per year) but limit the term to upto 5 years without any option to extend that duration or even switch to another UK visa (with the exception of marriage/partnership).
The idea behind the term limit was to make the local workforce especially in IT more competitive the result was that companies still bring allot of employees from outside of the EU paying them very high salaries, have those employees gain experience and then after 5 years take all their knowledge and capital out of the UK because they can't settle.
The immigration policy in the UK is one of the least efficient and most self defeating immigration policies I've ever seen, it's pretty much structured to shoot it self in the foot every time with idiotic regulations that do no effect those who actually cause the highest financial drain but disenfranchise those who could actually benefit the country.
The EU immigration policy could be more adapted slightly to be better, the general immigration policy in the UK really needs a rework, move to a point based human capital value approach as it's currently one of the few countries that actually would kick out some one who spent 5 years studying in the UK getting a master degree then offered employment with a salary of over 100K$ because they are not from the EU and do not want to provide hospice and nurse the elderly.
What's your reasoning for this? I think it might be attractive versus simply leaving altogether, but who says that's what'll happen?
Consider that the EEA might be unpalatable to people against EU membership due to migration.
EU individuals do not make the bulk of the economic immigration into the UK while making the majority of the high paid migrant workers.
If the UK want to deal with immigration "family" visa's and bogus work permits for people who end up earning below the minimum wage is a far better target than EU nationals.
Perhaps, but I'm not worrying about actual problems here, but rather public perception.