Nobody else reads this, but I will, when I come back just as undecided in future.
The sticking points for me are
The sticking points for me are
subsidy,
good tariffs & bad tariffs.
- immigration is too difficult so I don't like to think about it
[Added July 2016] I have just realised that a low pound partly answers this. If money from the New Zealand is worth less in the UK, I am less likely to go sheep-shearing there for a few months. On the other hand, less people will come to the UK to do leek-picking for a few months and I might have more chance of a job near home for that reason.
Add to that the chance that that UK products and services will be more in demand, so perhaps employing steel workers and call centre workers and everything else.
On the telly "pound falls" is bad; I think "pound falls" is good news.
[Added 17 July 2016] I have just realised that a politician would need to sell the idea of a low pound to the electorate.
Petrol prices are a problem; some kind of fix on fuel duty would be good. So that the basic rate of fuel duty is on the dollar price, and there is some extra compensation if the pound falls against the dollar, if I'm right that oil suppliers price in dollars.
Pensions for ex-pats are a problem if the ex-pat has a state or a private pension in pounds and has discovered that it goes further in another country like Spain. These ex-pats could be compensated by some scheme by which the UK government has investments that pay in euro (and maybe other currencies) and can offer a currency swap for your pension. This would be a state-run service to do something that the private sector can do in theory, but would do much more expensively I think and reach far fewer punters. The service could be run so that it is only available to people on fixed incomes in pounds who wish to spend most of their money in other currencies. - Shared trading standards are another headache but I can live with them, as exporters will do anyway when exporting to EU countries. Oven glove insulating standards. Bananas. That stuff.
- What next after the referendum
Subsidy.
Most people now know that the figures are about £10bn lost forever and more that comes-back for farming or folk-dancing or regional development. I don't see any continued deceit by Brexiters - just a patronising use of headline figures that the electorate have now worked-out. Presumably the UK could opt-in to schemes for EU-wide funding of something, like science research, if there is a good reason to do it collectively, so complaints by nobel-prize-winning scientists are just stupid. Odd, isn't it?
Fullfact.org refers to this government web page with the figures
€10,879 (£8473) million and €16,586 (£12,918) million if you include vouchers claimed-back. I assume the figures describe grants claimed from the UK. (Not money spent by an EU employee on blue flags, that happen to be made in the UK, which is a distraction.)
£64.1m was the population of the UK in 2013, and rising.
€10879million / 64.1million =
€170 (£132) a year per head.
(Therefore more during the parts of our lives when we pay income tax but a big chunk for all of us because we all use goods that have VAT in the cost, even when we are babies, and when retired we still pay for the goods and so pay VAT).
€259 (£201) before claiming vouchers for various special offers that reduce the total price.
The cost in 2013, the year of the population census, was slightly higher; costs have fallen.
The cost in a few years might be much higher as the rebate deal ends and the EU's commitments increase. A system in which 28 countries can vote but only a few are net contributors is going to spend more, most likely.
€170 (£132) a year is the bill in a country that can't afford social care.
It's the kind of money per head spent on pensions. Or health.
If you don't mind about the lack of social care, or benefits sanctions, or low rates of housing benefit, or under-funded ministries, then it's no problem, you can enjoy grand designs as grandees do. They don't mind where the money for the flags comes from. They're on BUPA.
Immigration
I don't like to think about this, because my preferred option would be to insist that countries like Romania have a welfare state before they are allowed free movement of people, and the Eurozone devalues its currency before being allowed free movement of people.
I also hope that the Eurozone gets itself sorted-out with a devaluation. There are also Eurozone countries with far less of a welfare state than the UK - Romania is just the extreme example - and I'd like that problem sorted out.
And I want tariffs used to keep countries like Turkey or Egypt on course to getting a decent democracy, human rights and welfare state too. Neither is in the EU. Niether has free movement of people. Both have trade deals which allow them free trade without decent levels of human rights. As a result, there are asylum-seekers refugees, students, and well-qualified legal migrants all coming-into Europe from the south just as europeans move north to the UK looking for jobs. A different trade deal would sort this out.
No political group offers me this option.
Meanwhile I see on telly that 30% of new jobs and 10% of current jobs are held by people born outside the UK and realise that, as a rather past-it kind of employee, I would have little chance competing with them for ordinary accessable jobs which are apparently paid 10% less nowadays as a result of immigration. These people may be fit, honest, nice, hard-working, taxpaying, and willing to live in shared bedsits sometimes, but that's the problem if you have to compete with them for work. Those who claim that bad employers wouldn't survive without desparate staff seem to miss the point as well: there is always a cartoon character who says you can't get the staff without immigration. I think of these characters as like Fanny Cradock and her assistant Sally.
There follows a debate about public services. With or without cheap, willing, intelligent staff, public services need to expand very quickly the moment demand increases, and they don't. When I look at a row of politicians and think "could that lot organise a way of funding schools in proportion to pupils?", I think they couldn't. They're too thick. There are also technical problems getting english-speaking trained consultants and GPs, but those arguments are above my head, so I'm a bit think about this as well.
Then there is the problem of housing on a crowded island with a green belt and not much industry. Is the UK really going to give-up a green belt and build one or two new towns? Or relocate clusters of work and traders to run-down parts of the UK to take jobs there? If not, what other way exists of bringing affordable housing anywhere near accessable jobs in the UK?
Good Tariffs & Bad Tariffs
Remain campaigners on TV last night simply muddle; I dislike them so much that they put me off remaining. They muddle the idea of a single tariff zone like the EFTA with a single shared set of trade standards like the EU. The free trade zone already exists; it does not need to be negotiated-into.
What's possible is that EU governments would be so piqued by lack of subsidy, if the UK left, that they would find some way around EFTA deals and impose some kind of spite tax like 5% on financial services or such like. Or exclude from any shared discussion of standards on financial services and find ways of making the market difficult for UK companies, just as Swiss companies have tariffs and such imposed from the EU.
If that's possible, it makes me all the more anxious to leave before the EU people get any worse. Now I have to remember immegration. That's such a fundemental point to EU members that they would be piqued; I need a better account of what each EFTA member state gets as a tariff deal before I have enough facts.
Lastly, I want good tariffs. I want tariffs against goods from India or Bangladesh or China because those countries have lower costs for lack of a welare state. They also have lower costs because of cheaper housing, but I think that's a UK issue; the lack of a welfare state is something the UK government can't control except by tariff. So their goods are cheap. Attempting free trade gives them all the money and us a large pile of plastic appliances for landfill, by which time the rich in those countries will have bought a lot of assets in the UK and the poor will be just as poor as before. Mr Johnson of the Brexit campaign suggested a trade deal with China and an Asean of East Asia. Once in place, market forces would force parliament to decide that the UK had to be more competative and could no longer afford a welfare state. These politicians would negoatiate tariffs without experience; they are over-confident. They're already tried to negotiate a dodgy TTIP trade deal with the USA and got rescued from it by (I think) an EU backlash at the last minute.
Shared trading standards
Shared trading standards on oven-glove insulation properties are over-done, I guess, but would exist anyway if the EU left and UK oven glove manufacturers had to sell into the EU. The ideal would be to re-join a slimmer version of the organisation set-up with sympathetic and similar countries. The trouble is that the UK doesn't seek them out.
So
At the moment I want to vote Brexit because the remain side are so very, very annoying, but I'll probably change my mind at the last minute and vote remain. In fact I did, but am happy that Brexit won.
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Oh, this came-up in the news:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2016/jun/15/eu-referendum-live-osborne-punishment-budget-farage-flotilla-thames?Micheal Gove had a story that his father's choice to sell-up a firm in the fishing industry, some time in the early 80s. The Guardian link shows a transcipt of their phone call to Earnest Gove, former fish firm owner and worker, word for word. I can't find Earnest Gove as a former limited company director, so I don't know how to check the dates exactly.
I studied economics in the early 80s, about the same time that my own father had to wind-down a business and just about everybody else's father who had a business to wind-down. The problem was a newly over-valued pound allowing cheap imports via the new container ports. The choice to over-value the pound was quite deliberate. It was sold to the public as a way of reducing inflation, and it was done by raising the interest rate enough to tempt-in overseas investers for things like government stock. That sloshing-in of money made the pound rise, import prices fall, and export prices rise. Anyone competing against goods from other currency zones was in trouble, whether it's fish or anything else.
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What next after the referendum
The good bit is now: lower pound, hopes of £10bn+ to save in future, and the EU likely to transform as other donor countries rebel too.
The bad bit is if the likes of Johnson and Gove try to negotiate trade deals. The only recent one negotiated, that I know of, is one for Bangladesh sponsored by the UK, which got them 0% tariff and did neither side any good.
I hope we join EFTA, and MPs will ask for this in the next EU debate. I hope they win. I hope we can somehow get around the need for an "australian style points system" as a lot of voters hoped they were promised by voting "leave" in the referendum, because I guess, without really knowing, that things like tariffs both ways on european trade or EFTA membership are not possible without free movement of job-seekers. This leads to some other bad bits for voters who hoped for the points system.
A bad bit.
The problem with a lot of job prospects in the UK is that they are available but pay less than the cost of housing. The problem with a lot of commentry and political debate is that it is not related, doesn't know, isn't interested. In summery: "Ordinary people aren't educated enough to know that low wages make all of us richer", and "housing - what's that?".
So I hope that whatever comes of this there will be a lot more housing or a lot of better-paying jobs or both. (oh - here's a map of one of them) Preferably
- more jobs in places where housing is cheaper, and
- more housing in places where jobs pay better.
And better training in self-employment, better workshop availability for the self-employed, better availability of information to say who makes what in the UK, better use of that information to send-out government tenders... it is possible to write a list of things that could be done, like this linked post
A bad bit.
The reason that loads of europeans seek jobs is that there aren't enough jobs in other parts of europe. It would be good to sort that out by lowering the price of the euro, but now Lord Hill has resigned his job at the EU commission, I don't know how anyone in the UK - voter or politician - has anything to do with this. Stating a case is about all that anyone can do. So even if the UK had a lower exchange rate, good ideas for helping job creation, and massive housing developments where there used to be green belt or offices, then there would still be a lot of people coming-in from Europe to fill-up the housing and do the jobs.
A neglected bit.
Government ought to charge enough tax for the public services that people want and provide them where wanted. The cabinet finds niether task possible.
A school pupil system by which a school got a few thousand a year from the day an extra pupil registered would be good. I think something like that is planned. A system by which schools could get the grant for the first pupil without proving demand would be good.
A GP patient system by which GPs get paid by the patient exists, so I don't know where that system fails.
I do know that the Barnett formula is a deliberate attempt to provide services in the wrong places, and should end.
Oh, did you know that there is a vegan shoe shop that sells mainly UK-made vegan shoes? It ought to do a bit better on a lower pound. I just need to get the web site working in a 21st century way.
