Brexit - yes or no?
Reply #53 - April 23, 2016, 09:13 PM
Thanks, I will read it tonight. But lemme explore one aspect of the debate and tell me what you, toor, think.
It is about too much reference being made to immigration in the debate (to which Cheetah has validly drawn our attention in Feb) and it being bound up with the whole thing. That is something which would likely concern those low-skilled Europeans whom the contingency of people you mentioned above are likely to dislike and triumphantly look down on.
If so, British politicians of all hues properly know that fully turning the British welfare system into a contributory system would instantaneously solve the problem with soi-disant EU welfare tourism.
Instead of opting for this legal, fundamental and permanent solution to such a (real to some but perceived to others) problem, which would certainly be commenting a political suicide at home, Britain is effectively seeking welfare discrimination against EU citizens in the same way it succeeded, like the rest of EU countries, in exercising discrimination of this sort against non-EU citizens for the mere foreignness of these other nationals.
Britain knows it cannot be part of the EU and at the same time discriminate against EU citizens on things like universal welfare, but Britain seeks and will always seek preferential treatment (i.e. discrimination by another name) and try to maintain what the current government calls ‘a special status’ within this union of the otherwise equal. This is because of something that strikes me as obvious but it doesn’t seem politically tactful to make it explicit, and it is often hard to articulate without drawing charges of supremacy (or what David Miliband refers to in a recent Guardian article as “acting as though the world owes us a break”).
This something is that the European Union is not made up of equal states in many, many respects and this basic negative statement is objectively true, regardless of the particular political leaning of its maker.
To draw an analogy, it is ridiculous to suppose that America’s membership in the United Nations should compare to that of my country of origin, Chad, because they both subscribe to the same political entity. No. There’s more to it than that. Equally ridiculous is to suppose that Britain’s standing in the EU — its military power, its language, its technological advancements, its economy, currency and purchasing power, its political clout etc etc etc — should compare to that of, say, Romania, Portugal, Finland or Lithuania. The EU might be an equalised union but it is decidedly not one of equivalence. This might be the keenly felt, rarely articulated ratiocination behind it all.
Thus, if it’s at all an issue, then it is Britain’s misfortune – as far as its annual EU budgetary contribution is concerned – to have the second biggest GDP in the union as well as being the fastest growing economy. Britain cannot agree to a contributory percentage and then get worked up about paying more into the EU budget as a result of it being more economically prosperous than most members or it being more than what it gets back in rebates.
The other relevant issue pertaining to EU immigration is of course that of Britain having higher wages in comparison to some EU countries, with the recent Living Wage, making it more attractive for workers from these countries to exercise their treaty right to come to work and live in Britain.
So for Britain when it comes to EU immigration, it is either to discriminate and seek preferential treatment without facing any resistance from the EU and without changing the nature of its own welfare system OR making it unattractive for low-skilled EU workers to come and work in it by virtue of giving them lower wages without having that impact on its own British people. In your opinion, is there a way to square this circle?
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Topic: Brexit - yes or no?