sadmanbarty
Well-known member
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I'd be interested to see a source for that. Unless it's just one of those "everyone knows" statistics.
My point was that there are social, economic and demographic consequences to an annual population growth rate of 400,000 that have nothing at all to do with race or culture.
People need houses to live in, jobs to do and schools for their kids whatever their religion, native language or skin colour. (Of course, there are issues associated with culture as well, but they're certainly secondary to the main issues of population to anyone who isn't tub-thumping for one side or the other.) The Right insists on seeing everything through the lens of culture (or, in the case of the far Right, race per se) and the Left is only too happy to oblige them by insisting that there is no non-racist reason to object to the orthodoxy that all immigration is good and more immigration is better.
And please, for heaven's sake, I did not say "it's all the Left's fault", I said the Left bears *some* of the blame.
Britain needs at least 150,000 a year.
I'm still pretty confused over which way to vote, but I think I'm going to go for remain because I distrust and, indeed, hate most of the prominent spokespeople for Brexit
Update: now veering towards abstaining, like a wanker.
This piece on why "Lexit" is a pipedream is pretty good and includes a bunch of other good looking links at the end:
Particularly given that history suggests that the British electorate tend to be fairly quick to buy the right-wing "tough medicine" line in hard times, and hard times are pretty much guaranteed to be what we'll be looking at on the back of leaving.I’m more willing to gamble on a left-wing government winning left-wing reforms, or holding a left-wing referendum if that fails, than I am gambling that the Tories don’t do too much damage before they are replaced.
Plus I really think we need to stop all this teenage "a vote for Remain is a vote for Jo Fox, a vote for Leave is a vote for Thomas Mair" moralising.
Or at least admit that a vote for Remain is a vote for Cameron, etc.
I was being tongue in cheek with that stuff.
The TUC back remain.
The more important point is that the people who the left try to protect will be worse off with a leave and the people the left oppose will be better off with a leave.
It's all well and good being an armchair revolutionary but there are real people whose lives will be worse if Britain leaves the EU.
And they will be worse off if we stay in the EU, though perhaps not quite as much.
I'd see staying in the EU as having pros and cons - you just have to look at the reasons that right wingers complain about it to see that we're a long way ahead of where we would be without it in terms of environmental protection, labour law and human rights law - whereas leaving is all cons and no pro.The quandary for the left is that a leave victory is also a victory for the worst excesses of racism, the right and actual fascism, whereas a victory for remain is a victory for anti-democratic monolithic neoliberalism (though this is probably also true for leave).
Nobody is able to offer an improved standard of living to ordinary people though, are they?
It is all about damage limitation.
Abstaining or protest votes won't change that. I hope you vote remain to significantly limit the damage.