Can anyone explain to me how come Gibraltar got a vote and is even less part of UK??? Does the UK Government actually rule the Rock and send a block grant as per Wales and Scotland? Do Gibraltarians pay tax to UK? I know the CIs have self government, we had a unit on Guernsey and I went there a few times, but I wouldn’t have thought the Isle of Man was freer of UK rule than Gibraltar!!
At a guess, it’s because Gibraltar is an overseas territory, who gets its laws directly from the UK and is geographically close to Europe, while the others are Crown Dependencies, which make their own laws (subject to Westminster veto) and are not considered part of the UK at all.
So St. Helena is too far from Europe? Despite having been picked by UK as a good place to which to send Napoleon?
St. Helena is almost midway between the south of Africa and Brazil, while Gibraltar is physically attached to Europe. It was picked as a good place to send Napoleon because it was too far away for him to ever return to Europe.
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It actually makes me appreciate the British Navy of that era when considering the distances! I had known the reasoning and why it was picked, but have never realised quite how far it was!! It only recently lost its mail boat. Ah well, the Empire really is at an end!
I can think of quite a few politicians I’d like to vote for right now to form the government … of St Helena!
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I just felt I needed to say that I voted leave, not because of anything I saw or heard in the media (either national or local), but because of my experiences of every day life here in Newport, South Wales. It was the same for many of my family and friends too. It is true that immigration to Wales is low overall, however immigrants are not distributed evenly throughout the country but are concentrated in certain areas which has a huge impact on these areas. I will say no more but I didn’t want anyone to think that people like me are so ignorant that we base our views on what we read in the Daily Mail or the Sun!
That’s fair enough. The problem is, however, the problems aren’t (for the most part) caused by immigration. Immigration is a very easy thing to blame, because it looks and sounds perfectly reasonable; we see more immigrants, and it sounds perfectly reasonable that the more people there are, the fewer jobs there are going to be and the more stretched services will be. The thing is, statistics (that most people will never read either because they didn’t know they were available or they simply don’t have the time to go looking) show that this is largely incorrect. Globalisation is the main cause of lost jobs - the fact that it’s often cheaper to build and staff a factory in India or China and ship the goods from there than it is to build and staff a factory here means that large companies will do just that. Can you imagine what consumer electronics would cost if the people making them were being paid British minimum wage? This is a large part of the reason why trade tariffs exist - to protect local businesses. One such tariff was going to be on Chinese steel imports, but the EU’s attempt to impose those tariffs was blocked by David Cameron, using the direct veto that the UK (and in fact every member state) has always had on anything voted through the European Parliament. Had it not been for that, the tata steel mill might have actually become profitable again as people started looking for EU produced steel.
Also, what do you see our trade with the EU being in the future? Within the single market, or with individual trade deals for just about every single thing? Because here’s the thing: trade deals aren’t only about the removal of tariffs; they’re about making sure that both parties are making things to a common standard. This is why those (often ridiculed) EU regulations on pillows and foods and all kinds of other things exist; so that people can know the standard of what they’re getting if they buy anything from anywhere in the EU. As such, we’re going to have to accept those EU standards (because we’re certainly not going to get them to change them) if we want to trade with the EU at all - or most likely even just individual EU countries. This is how Switzerland interacts with the EU, and the common consensus there is that we’re insane for wanting to do it their way. If we did, however, it would probably take a decade or so to set everything up. In the mean time, any country or company who do business with us because of our access to the single market take their business elsewhere.
If, on the other hand, we want to trade with the EU within the single market, that involves joining the EEA. This comes with massive membership fees (probably more than we were already paying), without the rebate we were getting and probably doesn’t give us access to EU funding. It also requires us to accept free movement of labour, and could even require us to enter the Schengen treaty, which would require us to open our borders entirely. It would also require us to accept just about every single law the EU Parliament pass, but without having any say in any of it. This is how Norway interacts with the EU.
We are not going to get a better deal with the EU than either of those two. The fact of the matter is that if the EU give us a deal better than one of those, other countries are going to follow our example and the EU will fall apart, so they quite simply can’t afford to give us a good deal. In fact, it’s probably in their best interests to offer us a significantly worse deal than either of the above.
Alternatively, we don’t trade with the EU. At which point, we suddenly remember that we no longer actually have the skilled workforce required to produce all of the stuff that we’re currently importing from the EU.
Note that this is just regarding immigration; none of this takes into account what would happen if Scotland were to decide that EU membership means more to them than UK membership. Given that they voted to remain in the EU by a far greater margin than they voted to remain in the UK, and many of them voted to remain in the UK because they didn’t want to risk being unable to rejoin the EU, it really isn’t that unlikely. It also doesn’t take into account that Westminster are highly unlikely to replace any of the funding that the Senedd receive from the EU, or for that matter fund any of the small businesses that rely on EU funding to even get started, or any of the research that the EU commonly funds. Nor does it take into account what may now happen in Northern Ireland as a result of them being dragged out of the EU. Nor does it take into account the millions of British people living and working in the EU, or the fact that many graduates in technical and scientific fields are now considering leaving the UK permanently as they see their prospects in this country vanish.
All things considered, I truly hope to be proven wrong about what I believe Thursday’s vote means for this country. But I don’t think I will be.
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Gibraltar isn’t in the UK but is in the EU, Isle of Man and channel islands aren’t in the EU so don’t get any EU funding
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Hectorgrey, diolch o galon am dy gair di.
I will say no more but I didn’t want anyone to think that people like me
are so ignorant that we base our views on what we read in the Daily
Mail or the Sun!
The precedent having been set, I feel free to announce that I voted “Remain”. I’ll summarise my reasons below but, first, I must say that I have never assumed that people who voted “leave” read any particular newspaper. I could find nothing in your post, however, to disabuse me of that notion even if i believed it. Apart from a vague reference to immigration, you haven’t actually given your reasons.
My reasons for voting to remain in the European Union are
- My experience as Prifysgol Aberystywth’s first Swyddog Cyswllt Ewrop / European Liaison Officer during which I had first hand knowledge of the Billions of ECUs/Euros that came to Wales/Ceredigion/Aberystwyth to support and develop Training, Enterprise, Infrastrucure and, in the case of the universities, pan-European research. if any of these billions was mis-spent, it was our fault not the European Commission’s. Many of us who have worked with the European Commission to secure funds for the so-called "Amcan/Objective 1 areas (roughly speaking West Wales and the Valleys) are astounded and sickened by the irony that the strongest votes to leave came from precisely these areas.
- My belief as someone born on the last day of the the second world war in Europe that solidarity and entente with our neighbours on the European mainland is the best way to minimise the chances of such global horror re-occurring - and yes I believe it has been much more important than the militaristic deterrence of NATO.
- I do not see immigrants as “unwlecome foreigners”. In fact I identify much more with “foreigners” who share my values, beliefs, commitments and energies than with many of my Welsh or British compatriots.
No-one has yet shown me a better alternative to democracy so I accept the outcome of the vote and, like many people on both sides, remainers and leavers alike, i intend to try and make the best of the unknowns that lie ahead of us all.
Huw - a valleys boy, Welshman, Briton, European and, most importantly, human.
@aran If you decide to remove this post because it is too contentious, I shall fully understand - in fact, I probably would do so myself in your position. I hope you accept, however, that I replied only in response to the earlier post and that I am so embarassed in front of all my European friends, colleagues and forum members as well as being very, very, very sad.
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Thanks for sharing. It is much more important that people express how they think, than hide it away inside. It’s so easy to get trapped in bubbles of similar people, my social media media has been full of people expressing real upset that remain didn’t win, I know lots of people from other European countries from working at a university in Wales, worried that they may have to move back to Germany etc). The press, only express a narrow view of things, we all need to keep talking to each other.
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This is why I posted about not being influenced in my decision by these newspapers.
I was being mindful of the SSiW forum rules and did not want to upset anyone by recounting the details of my experience of immigrants and how they have changed my local area of Newport.
I also voted leave because I think it is important that we make our own laws and not have them imposed on us by faceless, unelected EU bureaucrats. I’m hoping we will be able to have decent light bulbs again at least!
Thank you for sharing your reasons. I’m also glad to note that you don’t read the Daily Mail or Sun. I wouldn’t like people to think I did either.
Your experience of immigrants is clearly very different from mine which, I’m glad to say, has been mostly positive in the cities as well as the rural areas I have lived and worked in.
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Not everyone voted “leave” because of immigration. (from outside the EU, inside the EU, or from England.)
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The last chance that those of us who were around got to vote on Europe was in 1975, and two thirds of us voted to stay in. But the EU today is not the same thing that a lot of us voted to stay in in 1975. It was then just a trading partnership (the EEC, and then the EC). But we’ve had a series of treaties since then which changed the situation fundamentally, making us all citizens of a Union with its own passports and everything. Although some other countries did, our governments of the day did not give us the opportunity to vote on whether we accepted them or not. It’s not really surprising then that after all this time, when we were finally allowed to have a say that many people thought … hang on…this has all gone a bit too far; where is it going to lead?
I speak as a Europhile culturally…(I spend far too much of my time attempting to learn the languages of Europe, and I’d love to spend more time travelling there), but in recent years, especially since the financial crash of 2007/8 and all that that led to, I’ve begun to have grave doubts about the EU as an institution. It was only after much heart-searching that I did in fact vote Remain in the end, for a whole complex mix of reasons. I must admit that I thought Remain would probably win by a smallish, but still comfortable majority, and of course I was completely wrong about that.
I won’t say any more, but I’ve been looking at some YT videos featuring Gisela Stuart MP, who surprised me by coming out for Leave (given that she is German and an immigrant herself, and was once quite pro EU). She makes quite an interesting case which I have some sympathy for.
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Edit: Well, I’ve had nearly half an hour to calm down since writing this. I’m still upset, and I’m going to leave the bit towards the bottom where I finished off in tears, because I feel that it’s important that people see what they’ve actually done, and realise that yes; this referendum was just as personal for those of us on the losing side as those of you who voted to leave. The rest of this post is what I originally wrote.
Edit 2: In case it isn’t clear, the final paragraph was something of an overreaction. I can get a little bit irrational after a few drinks (as some of you may have noticed ;)), particularly if I’m dealing with a number of emotions that I don’t quite know how to deal with.
Well, either way I’m now in a position where if I want a future, I need to leave the UK. That’s not a decision I’ve made; that’s a decision that’s been made for me by a lot of people who didn’t even know (for the most part) how the EU even works - which is a large part of why, quite frankly, I never thought it should be a referendum in the first place. As a student, I have the time to go and look these things up; most people with jobs to do don’t have that time, and so they rely on the media to tell them (and pretty much all of the media did a terrible job of this, not just the media on the leave side). A friend of mine, who’s doing a PhD in international politics, has never until last Wednesday ever given his opinion on an election prior to polling day, because he believes so much in democracy - but he advised everybody he knew to vote remain because, as he put it, he had never seen a campaign so utterly divorced from reality.
I used to work in an Italian restaurant. I went to visit them tonight; a bunch of them are really, really worried because if we don’t maintain free movement of labour from the EU, almost all of them - including those with wives and children here - are going to be deported because having a wife or child here doesn’t automatically give you the right to remain, and the visa to stay costs about two grand in fees.
Also, note how the leader of Wales’s leave campaign was talking about how the Senedd is now going to need £500m a year extra out of Westminster now that EU funding is going to vanish in a couple of years. Good luck with that.
I probably shouldn’t write any more; I’ve had a few to drink tonight and I’m liable to cause offence if I say much more. All I can say is that I, and many of my peers, feel like we’ve been horribly ****ed over, and a lot of the people I know don’t feel safe remaining in the UK any more as a result of this referendum. Those of you who voted leave; I sincerely hope you get what you wanted out of it. What’s done is done, and I for one feel that the idea of either ignoring this referendum or holding a second might even be worse than what we’ve already got, but I’m leaving. I’m done with this country, as this country has made quite clear that I’m not welcome here. I refuse to remain where people consider me and those with my opinion to be traitors.
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I’m really sorry you feel that way. It’s heartbreaking. I voted to stay, but I don’t feel like that. Hopefully these feelings of yours may subside, but it is terrible to hear you feel so badly at the moment.
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Out of interest, why would he withhold his opinion because he believes in democracy?
My sympathies are with you all of you in Britain. Even here in Australia, we’re already feeling the shockwave of the vote. Hopefully things will settle down soon, but our thoughts are with you.
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