Brexit Wins- UK to Leave the EU

In order for a dodgy employer to be able to exploit a workforce, there has to be someone willing and able to be exploited.

It is easier to exploit someone who doesn't have a great education, doesn't speak the language, does not have recourse to the legal system and is unaware of their rights. Migrants are perfect for this, illegal ones more so.

 

What they were promised was often a lie, though being poor in the UK is probably better than being poor in some other countries.

This doesn't include the women who were told they were going abroad to be nannies and ended up in the sex trade, they were just lied to.

 

Indeed.

So how aren't these issues best addressed through the protection of basic rights, better education, training and general integration policies at the government level?

Our standard of living is the highest it's ever been in the history of human civilization. If there's not enough to go around, it's due more to poor resource management rather than Zofia or Mbaktu mopping floors for a few quid less.

 

These issues are usually addressed by arresting the employer who is breaking the employment rules and deporting the illegal immigrants. Both are very expensive and there are plenty of other crooked employers and illegal immigrants waiting to take their place.

Our standards of living are high, maybe because we don't rely on illegal immigrants doing the work for less money and not paying taxes. Our standards of living are high because we have a workforce used to decent safe working conditions who pay taxes to help support the National Health System, which is part of why our standards of living are enviable to many people around the world.

If there is not enough to go around maybe it is because there are more people with their hands out than there are resources. You can either increase the resources or decrease the number of people wanting them. Increasing the resources means taxing the people who already pay taxes to fund those who don't. Decreasing the number of people with their hands out is probably the best way to go. Increased border control and tougher sentences for illegal immigrants and the people employing them would be an option, still an expense and probably not a disincentive to either the dodgy employers or the immigrants.

There is no shortage of poor people in the UK, there is no need to be doing other countries a favour by importing more of them. The UK already gives charity to other countries in the form of foreign aid

If the UK really wants to make a positive impact on the poor people of the world they could drop fewer bombs on them, but no need to give them a home and a pay cheque for life.

 

Our standard of living is currently high in the west because we are borrowing money to support it.

It is unsustainable and our standard of living is going to take a hit soon enough.

 

Not just a Zofia or Mbaktu working for a few quid less though is it?

I can understand that it is a good tactic to play the numbers down a bit or make light of a situation but other than reinforcing your opinion what do you hope to achieve by doing so?

You may say that it is ok for people who are doing the right thing to pay for those who are not doing the right thing and that in fact it is an obligation for people better off to support those who are less well off, that is your opinion and is probably the opinion of just under half the UK population. It is obviously a touchy subject though as it has helped to split the country down the middle and paved the way for the UK to leave Europe.

Maybe if people felt less threatened by immigration they would have been happy to stay in Europe.

I am sure there were other issues but I wasn't following the vote campaigns.

 

Yeah, I agree, but I don't see how that's an EU problem or a migrant problem more than it is a domestic UK policy problem.

If you ask any business owner whether they'd prefer higher sales or lower wage costs, they'd choose more sales. Scale that up to a whole economy and you need more people creating more economic activity to get more sales, so you can either breed more or import people from elsewhere. And then you go back to that data that says migrants in the UK are, economically, about on par with UK natives and you get to the conclusion that any given migrant is no more of a drain on the taxpayer (and the NHS) than any given UK native, but collectively they help create a bigger economy.

Whether that economy is efficient or inefficient is influenced, in a large part, by domestic government policy. It doesn't matter that much how many people there are because they're all basically the same in terms of what they need and what they can offer. Having a small number of people working inefficiently isn't any better than having a large number of people working inefficiently, and vice versa.

From personal experience, anyone I've met who claims their wage costs are too high has much more serious problems with their business than the staff who want to be paid a living wage.

 

Well maybe now the UK can change its domestic policy without the need to get approval from Europe. How they decide to change it would be another matter.

This all relies on a model of perpetual expanding business.

Business needs to expand to keep an expanding population gainfully employed so they can pay more taxes to pay for the expanding social costs.

But if the population stops expanding (ageing population, smaller families) there seems to be an idea that we need to keep importing people so that the economy can keep expanding.

Why this desire to make more than we need?

If we can feed and employ the dwindling population with what we already have then that is a bonus. Business might like to keep expanding to make the bosses richer but from a welfare point of view how do the people benefit?

 

Sadly this is true and not something that is likely to change, not only do people desire more than they need but some desire to have the most.

But it is unsustainable, though will probably last longer than me or the next generation so no need to worry about it, like global warming, it will be someone elses problem to deal with

 

It isn't just a case of scaling down (if that's what people in the UK thought they were voting for), but being able to scale down proportionally and sustainably. That's not going to happen by simply leaving the EU.

For example, Britain's fertility rate is 1.8 births per woman. You need 2.1 just to replace the native population as they get old and die, otherwise the population shrinks. If that's what you're aiming for, that might sound great but 2.1 to 1.8 is a very big drop. Even that 1.8 figure is being propped up by migrant families who have a higher birth rate of about 2.25. Obviously that's a relatively small group compared to the total population, but subtracting those second generation migrant babies and the net figure would be even less than 1.8. For perspective, 1.4 is considered "wasteland in 3 generations" territory.

The problem is that halting and stabilizing that kind of trend is very difficult.

Population replacement is important because there's going to be a hell of a lot of old aged pensioners hitting up the taxpayer for an income and healthcare in the years to come. They're going to go from being net contributors to net recipients of taxpayer funded welfare.

Across the EU (and Britain is roughly average) there are about 3.5 workers per retiree. By 2040, that's going to drop to about 1.9 workers per retiree. The ratio is going to pretty much halve, which means the workers are going to have to double the amount of resources they devote to looking after old people. Hopefully new technology and increases in productivity will make up some of the difference, but there will have to be a cash component to that as well i.e. taxes. Basically, the UK is going to need a lot of young people to come in to maintain the amount of economic activity going on so that the government can keep appropriating bits here and there to pay for the old people. The alternative is a lot of old people living in poverty.

Again, that kind of trend is very difficult to stop once it gets going. If taxes have to increase, native born young people leave and foreign born young people never come in the first place. The burden falls on those who remain and the whole thing becomes a vicious cycle.

Purely keeping Britain's economy and population stable means it needs to keep importing young people. In order to scale down sustainably, it would need to get rid of a lot of old people.

Ironically, it seems the old people voted to stay where they are and cut off the supply of young people, which is basically the exact opposite of what they needed to do in order to protect their own interests.

 

Anglo-celtic, are people of british and irish decent, not anglo Saxon's who are people of german decent. ffs get it right

 

Andrea Leadsom and Michael Gove are the prominent pro leave campaigners that are in the race to become PM and both sound like they are legit on leaving, first ballot is on tomorrow.

 

And the Royalists here are SUCH hard negotiators.

 

What all those who complain about cheap labour and labour exploiatation fail to grasp is supply demand economics. You cannot ultimately protect workers through regulation. Lots of employers will and do indeed just ignore the rules and illegally underpay in cash to migrant workers or even take advantage of native workers by mistreating them because they know that most employees don't have the capacity or willingness to take issues to court, etc. You are just looking at the symptoms.

The cause of poor working conditions and low pay for workers is a lack of demand for labour. If the government eliminated taxes and red tape and intervention completely there were would be a massive boom in the economy and there would be a shortage of labour. Wages would would explode upwards and there would be virtually no unemployment and employers would have to treat you well because they know you could just leave and get another job in a week if you were not happy. If you read for example about the history of Germany post world war two under finance minister Ludwig Erhard who had a relatively free market philosophy you will see there were labour shortages and rising wages.

 

BigA.D. countries like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have managed to grow their economy strongly over the past decade despite declining populations. I am not convinced that population growth is a necessary ingredient for economic growth. Yes in a declining population the burden on workers to support the elderly will increase, but on the other hand the burden of the effects of overpopulation such as more traffic congestion, higher than otherwise land prices, more pollution, etc will be avoided. Greater taxes paid by workers will be partially offset by the lower cost of buying a house (population growth pushes up land prices).