Significant numbers of Indians, Pakistanis and peoples of ex-colonies and British commonwealth countries like South Africa and Trinidad and Tobago were welcomed into the UK in WW2 and after, both to fight and help rebuild. Many that are in the UK today have been there for multiple generations already.
I am quite aware of that, but here we have some numbers from 2015: The top country of origin was China (46,000 arrivals). Second place is shared by Spain and India, at 33,000 a piece. A further 11,000 came from Pakistan, 29,000 from Australia, and 20,000 from the USA. Yes, the UK could not do anything about controlling the flow of Spaniards, Poles, Germans, and other EU nationals - but it could have accepted the Chinese in triple digits if it wanted to, not in the tens of thousands. Ditto for the Indians.
Furthermore, here it says that EU nationals accounted for 49% of non-British inflow in 2015 - meaning that a majority of immigrants to the UK in 2015 - 51% - were not EU citizens, i.e. the decision to admit half the immigrants was completely under British control and these people were admitted purely under the discretion of the UK government. It was rather disingenuous of the Brexit camp (esp. UKIP) to blame immigration on the EU, when most of it was a result of UK government policy that had nothing to do with free movement.
Of course it won't be, the UK will just be in for a lot of short-term pain, and some medium-term pain as well. Beyond that no one can really tell. Depending on who you are and what you do, you might feel this pain acutely or not at all.
However, as per your examples, you should be aware that
- Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland are part of the EEA, meaning they are completely part of the EU market, and accept total freedom of movement. They also have to implement most of EU law domestically (without getting to put much input into how it's made). They are "almost-members" of the EU who basically pay (in cash, and in terms of influence in Brussels) to officially stay out so that they can protect some things which they treasure above all others from EU interference (e.g. fisheries in Iceland). The UK will not, as far as we can see, have such an arrangement with the EU, it will not be part of the EEA.
- Switzerland is an "almost-member" of the EEA, so not as close to the EU as the EEA members, but very close - it's part of the Schengen borderless area (like the EEA members), and has something like quasi-free movement (free movement with the old Western members, but not fully with the new Eastern members). It's doubtful the UK's new relationship with the EU will be this close.
- Canada is not in Europe. The closest equivalent for Canada to Brexit would be leaving NAFTA.
Mots Brexiters votes actually had very little to do with immigration.
Really? To me it seemed like immigration absolutely dominated the Leave campaign. That, and "we'll get millions back for the NHS and such".
Btw - all this gripe about immigration: yes, the UK could not control immigration from other EU countries. However:
The UK could completely control non-EU immigration. It didn't, rather it accepted droves of immigrants from non-EU countries (in fact, if I remember the stats correctly - most immigrants were from non-EU countries). Those Indians and Arabs GP is describing, well, they didn't come from other EU countries now, did they? If the UK thought it had too many immigrants, it could've cut the number of them coming from Pakistan, India, Africa, the Middle East, China etc. to effectively zero. It did not.
The UK had the option to impose a 7 year delay on immigrants from the "new" EU states that joined in 2004 (Poland, Hungary, etc.) - and didn't. This was purely the decision of Tony Blair's government. Almost all the other EU countries imposed the limitations (I can think of only Sweden that did not). Since the UK was the only large EU economy not imposing this limitation, it naturally attracted droves of immigrants (e.g. from Poland). Had the UK waited for 7 years like the other big rich EU countries, the effect would've been much less dramatic, Poland would have developed more and less immigrants would come out, and those that did come out would've been spread out among the rich EU countries (the majority would've ended up, most likely, in Germany).
Heh. There was some article from The Onion that I can't find now, that talked about how the Balkans were continuing to subdivide into independent nations to the point that nearly every man, woman, and child was their own country. The represented the "nations" by halftoning a map of Yugoslavia.
Never thought I'd see the same thing happen to the UK.
The Onion was not being very original there. Just before Yugoslavia broke up, a famous satirical show from Sarajevo (Bosnia) called "The Surrealists' Top Chart" (Top lista nadrealista) had an episode in which every street in the city proclaimed itself its own republic, erecting fences and border guards and everything. They also had an episode in which every constituent part of Yugoslavia declared its own separate language and denied that they were speaking a common one (called Serbo-Croatian back then), making fun of the idea that phrases that sound exactly the same could be made by decree into "completely different and distinct" languages. That part actually came true (today we have Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin).
I guess the difference is that the UK is already made up of different countries. Scotland is a country, not just a region or something. And it used to be an independent country too.
Yugoslavia was before it's break-up a full-fledged federation, unlike the UK. Also, Serbia and Montenegro were independent countries just before Yugoslavia was created, as were Croatia and Bosnia, although much earlier (back in the Middle Ages). The difference between the UK and Yugoslavia was just that the UK was created a lot earlier and has lasted for a lot longer, building up a "British" identity. Also, the UK has generally been a successful country. Yugoslavia, in the end, was not.
UK out of the EU....Ireland in....what to do, what to do?
There would be a lot of irony in Scotland voting to basically dissolve the UK, considering that the vast majority of unionists in Northern Ireland, for whom Northern Ireland as a separate "home country" was created just so they could stay a part of the UK after the rest of Ireland left are in fact....people of Scottish heritage. Ulster Scots.
It's very, very difficult to consider something to be "democratic" when the holders of these various positions are not directly elected by the people they govern over.
How is this any different from how the government in the UK works? In the UK, the *ONLY* people you elect directly, as a voter, at the UK level are Members of Parliament - and just YOUR member of parliament in your constituency. Voters don't elect the ministers and secretaries, nor the prime minister, nor the Lords, nor the Queen.
I fail to see how EU-level government is therefore significantly less democratic than UK-level government, keeping in mind the differences that must exist due to one being a multi-state, multi-national confederation and the other a nation-state which has existed for hundreds of years.
I think we're not being creative enough in our thinking. I'm not saying there is nothing to worry about - there is. Also, some of the things you mention are probably good ideas to help out people whose jobs will be gone with them too old to retrain into something other than burger flipping or Walmart shelf stacking. I just think we're not fully capable of imagining all the jobs - or "jobs" - of the future.
Imagine going back 200 years, and telling everyone only 2% of people will work in agriculture 200 years from now. They would find such a future hard to imagine. What would all the displaced farmers do?
Go back a 100-150 years, and tell people that millions will be employed in the entertainment and professional sports industries. They would laugh at you, tell you those aren't "real jobs" and that no economy could ever function so.
Heck, one of my sister's previous jobs was to be the "social media presence coordinator" for the company she worked in, i.e. spend all day on Facebook and Twitter. If anybody told me 10 years ago people would be paid full time for that, I would've laughed. In fact, my attitude (being older and having no facebook/twitter account) is still that this is a BS job and a waste of money, but she was paid $40k per year for it.
Who knows what people will do in the future, which to us may look like a laughable "fake" job, not worth paying, but which will be taken seriously in 2050.
Also, there are other things which can alleviate the loss of work overall:
- people staying in school longer, entering the workforce later (remember in Victorian England we had massive child labour; then that was banned; then slowly the age of entering the full-time workforce went from 15ish to 20ish to 22ish and now even 25ish for many people): just as people say now "the bachelor's degree is the new high school diploma" maybe this will be true for PhDs in 20-50 years
- cutting down the number of work hours in the week (say 6 hrs per day instead of 8), going to a three-day weekend (remember, once it was normal to work 7 days a week, then 6 - my mother e.g. went to school every Saturday - then down to 5, why not 4? Why not 3?)
- more stay at home parents (not necessarily just moms, stay-at-home dads are common now too) - trade income for childcare costs
- remove teenagers from the part-time workforce, opening more full-time jobs for adults
For this too work however, the productivity gains have to accrue to the workers as well, and not just to the owners and the management. There's that graph that shows decoupling of productivity and wages in the US starting the late 70s or early 80s, that is the bad trend. If the money is spread around (instead of concentrated), then those who still have jobs will spend it to create new jobs for those left without.
This is a very good point. It doesn't take 7 billion to feed and clothe 7 billion (although this is a bit reductionist, the more advanced a society is, the more it consumes beyond food and clothing, but nonetheless the point is valid even if take account of other "needs"), but we'll get to a point where a good chunk of that population will be too old to work anyway. Add in the children, and the variously-disabled, and otherwise incapacitated for work (e.g. incarcerated), and you're probably looking at 50% of the population which will be removed from that 7 billion figure when trying to figure out a labour force pool.
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Significant numbers of Indians, Pakistanis and peoples of ex-colonies and British commonwealth countries like South Africa and Trinidad and Tobago were welcomed into the UK in WW2 and after, both to fight and help rebuild. Many that are in the UK today have been there for multiple generations already.
I am quite aware of that, but here we have some numbers from 2015: The top country of origin was China (46,000 arrivals). Second place is shared by Spain and India, at 33,000 a piece. A further 11,000 came from Pakistan, 29,000 from Australia, and 20,000 from the USA. Yes, the UK could not do anything about controlling the flow of Spaniards, Poles, Germans, and other EU nationals - but it could have accepted the Chinese in triple digits if it wanted to, not in the tens of thousands. Ditto for the Indians.
Furthermore, here it says that EU nationals accounted for 49% of non-British inflow in 2015 - meaning that a majority of immigrants to the UK in 2015 - 51% - were not EU citizens, i.e. the decision to admit half the immigrants was completely under British control and these people were admitted purely under the discretion of the UK government. It was rather disingenuous of the Brexit camp (esp. UKIP) to blame immigration on the EU, when most of it was a result of UK government policy that had nothing to do with free movement.
Of course it won't be, the UK will just be in for a lot of short-term pain, and some medium-term pain as well. Beyond that no one can really tell. Depending on who you are and what you do, you might feel this pain acutely or not at all.
However, as per your examples, you should be aware that
- Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland are part of the EEA, meaning they are completely part of the EU market, and accept total freedom of movement. They also have to implement most of EU law domestically (without getting to put much input into how it's made). They are "almost-members" of the EU who basically pay (in cash, and in terms of influence in Brussels) to officially stay out so that they can protect some things which they treasure above all others from EU interference (e.g. fisheries in Iceland). The UK will not, as far as we can see, have such an arrangement with the EU, it will not be part of the EEA.
- Switzerland is an "almost-member" of the EEA, so not as close to the EU as the EEA members, but very close - it's part of the Schengen borderless area (like the EEA members), and has something like quasi-free movement (free movement with the old Western members, but not fully with the new Eastern members). It's doubtful the UK's new relationship with the EU will be this close.
- Canada is not in Europe. The closest equivalent for Canada to Brexit would be leaving NAFTA.
Mots Brexiters votes actually had very little to do with immigration.
Really? To me it seemed like immigration absolutely dominated the Leave campaign. That, and "we'll get millions back for the NHS and such".
Btw - all this gripe about immigration: yes, the UK could not control immigration from other EU countries. However:
The UK could completely control non-EU immigration. It didn't, rather it accepted droves of immigrants from non-EU countries (in fact, if I remember the stats correctly - most immigrants were from non-EU countries). Those Indians and Arabs GP is describing, well, they didn't come from other EU countries now, did they? If the UK thought it had too many immigrants, it could've cut the number of them coming from Pakistan, India, Africa, the Middle East, China etc. to effectively zero. It did not.
The UK had the option to impose a 7 year delay on immigrants from the "new" EU states that joined in 2004 (Poland, Hungary, etc.) - and didn't. This was purely the decision of Tony Blair's government. Almost all the other EU countries imposed the limitations (I can think of only Sweden that did not). Since the UK was the only large EU economy not imposing this limitation, it naturally attracted droves of immigrants (e.g. from Poland). Had the UK waited for 7 years like the other big rich EU countries, the effect would've been much less dramatic, Poland would have developed more and less immigrants would come out, and those that did come out would've been spread out among the rich EU countries (the majority would've ended up, most likely, in Germany).
Heh. There was some article from The Onion that I can't find now, that talked about how the Balkans were continuing to subdivide into independent nations to the point that nearly every man, woman, and child was their own country. The represented the "nations" by halftoning a map of Yugoslavia.
Never thought I'd see the same thing happen to the UK.
The Onion was not being very original there. Just before Yugoslavia broke up, a famous satirical show from Sarajevo (Bosnia) called "The Surrealists' Top Chart" (Top lista nadrealista) had an episode in which every street in the city proclaimed itself its own republic, erecting fences and border guards and everything. They also had an episode in which every constituent part of Yugoslavia declared its own separate language and denied that they were speaking a common one (called Serbo-Croatian back then), making fun of the idea that phrases that sound exactly the same could be made by decree into "completely different and distinct" languages. That part actually came true (today we have Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin).
I guess the difference is that the UK is already made up of different countries. Scotland is a country, not just a region or something. And it used to be an independent country too.
Yugoslavia was before it's break-up a full-fledged federation, unlike the UK. Also, Serbia and Montenegro were independent countries just before Yugoslavia was created, as were Croatia and Bosnia, although much earlier (back in the Middle Ages). The difference between the UK and Yugoslavia was just that the UK was created a lot earlier and has lasted for a lot longer, building up a "British" identity. Also, the UK has generally been a successful country. Yugoslavia, in the end, was not.
UK out of the EU....Ireland in....what to do, what to do?
There would be a lot of irony in Scotland voting to basically dissolve the UK, considering that the vast majority of unionists in Northern Ireland, for whom Northern Ireland as a separate "home country" was created just so they could stay a part of the UK after the rest of Ireland left are in fact....people of Scottish heritage. Ulster Scots.
It's very, very difficult to consider something to be "democratic" when the holders of these various positions are not directly elected by the people they govern over.
How is this any different from how the government in the UK works? In the UK, the *ONLY* people you elect directly, as a voter, at the UK level are Members of Parliament - and just YOUR member of parliament in your constituency. Voters don't elect the ministers and secretaries, nor the prime minister, nor the Lords, nor the Queen.
I fail to see how EU-level government is therefore significantly less democratic than UK-level government, keeping in mind the differences that must exist due to one being a multi-state, multi-national confederation and the other a nation-state which has existed for hundreds of years.
I think we're not being creative enough in our thinking. I'm not saying there is nothing to worry about - there is. Also, some of the things you mention are probably good ideas to help out people whose jobs will be gone with them too old to retrain into something other than burger flipping or Walmart shelf stacking. I just think we're not fully capable of imagining all the jobs - or "jobs" - of the future. Imagine going back 200 years, and telling everyone only 2% of people will work in agriculture 200 years from now. They would find such a future hard to imagine. What would all the displaced farmers do? Go back a 100-150 years, and tell people that millions will be employed in the entertainment and professional sports industries. They would laugh at you, tell you those aren't "real jobs" and that no economy could ever function so. Heck, one of my sister's previous jobs was to be the "social media presence coordinator" for the company she worked in, i.e. spend all day on Facebook and Twitter. If anybody told me 10 years ago people would be paid full time for that, I would've laughed. In fact, my attitude (being older and having no facebook/twitter account) is still that this is a BS job and a waste of money, but she was paid $40k per year for it. Who knows what people will do in the future, which to us may look like a laughable "fake" job, not worth paying, but which will be taken seriously in 2050. Also, there are other things which can alleviate the loss of work overall: - people staying in school longer, entering the workforce later (remember in Victorian England we had massive child labour; then that was banned; then slowly the age of entering the full-time workforce went from 15ish to 20ish to 22ish and now even 25ish for many people): just as people say now "the bachelor's degree is the new high school diploma" maybe this will be true for PhDs in 20-50 years - cutting down the number of work hours in the week (say 6 hrs per day instead of 8), going to a three-day weekend (remember, once it was normal to work 7 days a week, then 6 - my mother e.g. went to school every Saturday - then down to 5, why not 4? Why not 3?) - more stay at home parents (not necessarily just moms, stay-at-home dads are common now too) - trade income for childcare costs - remove teenagers from the part-time workforce, opening more full-time jobs for adults For this too work however, the productivity gains have to accrue to the workers as well, and not just to the owners and the management. There's that graph that shows decoupling of productivity and wages in the US starting the late 70s or early 80s, that is the bad trend. If the money is spread around (instead of concentrated), then those who still have jobs will spend it to create new jobs for those left without.
This is a very good point. It doesn't take 7 billion to feed and clothe 7 billion (although this is a bit reductionist, the more advanced a society is, the more it consumes beyond food and clothing, but nonetheless the point is valid even if take account of other "needs"), but we'll get to a point where a good chunk of that population will be too old to work anyway. Add in the children, and the variously-disabled, and otherwise incapacitated for work (e.g. incarcerated), and you're probably looking at 50% of the population which will be removed from that 7 billion figure when trying to figure out a labour force pool.