Tursiops
Friday 23rd May 2014 9:23pm [Edited]
Welwyn Garden City
9,788 posts
Quote: Jennie @ 23rd May 2014, 9:51 PM BST
This is the kind of attitude the political parties need to engage with. This is the perception but not the reality. Being part of the EU is a positive thing for our economy. The free movement of peoples is a positive thing for our economy (with benefit restrictions, which we have imposed).
EU regulations are usually limited to stuff like agriculture. I cannot think of a single EU law that has adversely affected my life.
Speaking as a civil servant it it creates an enormous amount of work for me, and I do find the imposition of one size fits all solutions on such a rag bag of nations a bit daft (even if most of them just ignore EU legislation), but the EU on balance probably does some good and no real harm. It is difficult to see how we could withdraw without damaging trade (in order to have free access to EU markets we would probably end up having to comply with EU regulations without being able to vote on them), though it would give us more freedom to protect UK economic interests against EU competition, not that our politicians, who are free trade ideologues to a man, could be trusted to make good use of that freedom.
Immigration is the issue that has swept UKIP along. Economic theory is that immigration is a good thing, and our country is very much run by economists. Unfortunately economic theory is always twenty years out of date, if it was ever right to start with. Statisticians have purported to prove that immigration is a good thing, but I work with statisticians a lot and frankly I have more faith in astrologers. Certainly with a question as complicated as this there are too many factors, too many intangibles, too much to which must be assigned arbitrary costs and benefits, too much which can be left out.
But even if immigration is good for the economy, that is not necessarily the same as being good for individuals within the economy. The popular perception, and quite possibly the reality, is that it increases competition for jobs and drives down wages. That keeps down the cost of goods and more particularly, as we no longer manufacture anything, services. This is wonderful if you are in a well paid job; not so good if you are unemployed or on minimum wage and trapped in rented accommodation. But the real time bomb for the politicians is that even those with well pay jobs and their foot on the property ladder are seeing their children leave uni with huge debts, worthless degrees and no prospects other than to compete with immigrant labour for minimum wage jobs. The tide of feeling against immigration is only going to increase.
And contrary to what the politicians would like you to believe when they blithely smear UKIP voters as closet racists, it is not the immigrants that people hold to blame, it is the politicians. The benefits of mass immigration has been an all party consensus in the past couple of decades, even if only the LibDems have been naive enough to admit it (it almost certainly cost them a breakthrough share of the vote at the last election).
UKIP, who personally I think are ghastly, might or might not make some kind of breakthrough at the next general election, but they are not going to go away, or at least the immigration agenda is not.
