EU, impartial facts. Where to find

[Mike Muz]

. And the brexit lot complain about a lack of democracy in the EU.

Just had to respond to that statement. Quite ironic that it's the brexit brigade that complained about extending the deadline for registering to vote after the governments computers crashed.
They want more democracy, but not if it allows more people to vote! :?
Work that one out!

Anyway, off to prepare bikes for racing now!

Over to you

Mike

 

[M-Power]

Re:

Nobody on this forum is gonna change their minds, no matter how much 'insinuation of intellectual inferiority' there is in voting Brexit :facepalm: Most highly educated people I know and I know many, are not taken in by all this remain BS and fearmongering. If the EU was so wonderful we would not be having this discussion at all. Divorce of whatever form is not something to go into lightly. I think many people just enjoy arguing for remain for the hell of it and maybe don't really believe all the ridiculous EU hype.

If you lean left, as most do on this and all other bike forums, then anything with a left agenda is wonderful. They can do no wrong. It will never be questioned. Thats the way it will always be.

 

[technodup]

The US is super power and gets to dictate terms it is not an equal relationship

And you're suggesting the EU is an equal relationship? Romania and Germany? Equal? France and Greece? Equal?

That's one of the more outlandish claims I've heard. Germany is the superpower within the EU. Followed by France. The PIGS get what they're given. We sit on the sidelines and complain about things.

I can't deny that bottom group makes me feel proper sad.

Poor folk, old folk and stupid folk. Sounds about right. :facepalm:

I wonder which category I fall into...

The good thing is I believe the bottom groups is larger than the top. 7% lead today. It's actually getting quite interesting. The 'status quo' should be romping this. The fact they're not is simply because they have no positive and engaging message of the benefit of the EU.

An England win on Monday and I think this could be in the bag.

 

[highlandsflyer]

Re:

I am voting out.

Indeed no one will change my mind.

In we have no control over an EU potentially dominated by right wing politics.

Who was it who suggested Retrobike is mainly left wing?

Not the impression I get at all.

Perhaps conservative with a small 'c', but definitely not left wing.

..and plenty of vanilla.

 

[technodup]

Re: Re:

In we have no control over an EU potentially dominated by right wing politics.

No bad thing imo. Surely you're not hoping that a certain J Corbyn is going to overturn that trend here?

Who was it who suggested Retrobike is mainly left wing?

Probably me. As I remember it any past suggestions of tax cuts, NHS privatisation, benefits of fracking or the principle of personal responsibility is met with jeers. Miliband was going to win the election and I think I have a bet that Corbyn won't win the next one. You can debate degrees of leftism but it is a bit lefty.

Plus there seems to be a trend towards remain for no real reason other than some notion of 'inclusiveness'. It's all a bit Eddie Izzard for me. And having seen him on QT that's not a look I would choose.

 

[M-Power]

Re:

This site cracks me up sometimes It's like moths to a flame for some of us, we cant help it, must be a middle aged thang to have a good rant

RB would be a boring place if we all agreed about everything

 

[brocklanders023]

Re:

You've a long way to go to reach the levels of nonsense and childishness displayed on the Singletrackworld forum Brexit thread!

 

[kingoffootball]

How about some more analysis? Today's FT has some interesting data.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/32414e3e-2804 ... z4BZ6Ldn4k

If we take this at face value (and yes, we'll probably end up arguing it's merits) it pretty much sums up this thread and it's original intent: finding impartial, actual facts is far too hard to find, thanks to too many vest interested and agenda's not least our politicians and media outlets. Just one example, someone previously commented about how the current "issues" today are impacting the young, the graduates in terms of jobs, competition, pricing (housing, etc). Here, they actually appear to be supportive of the EU and I'm not surprised by that based on my experiences and interactions.

I can't deny that bottom group makes me feel proper sad.

Wait a minute, am I mis-reading that or is the percentage of UKIP supporters intending to vote leave less than 100%?!

 

[hamster]

Thought this extract from AA Gill in the Times was worth a read:

We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty. It’s the knowledge that the best of us have been and gone, that nothing we can build will be as lovely as a National Trust Georgian country house, no art will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as If, no writer a touch on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow as lovely as a cottage garden, no hero greater than Nelson, no politician better than Churchill, no view more throat-catching than the White Cliffs and that we will never manufacture anything as great as a Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.

The dream of Brexit isn’t that we might be able to make a brighter, new, energetic tomorrow, it’s a desire to shuffle back to a regret-curdled inward-looking yesterday. In the Brexit fantasy, the best we can hope for is to kick out all the work-all-hours foreigners and become caretakers to our own past in this self-congratulatory island of moaning and pomposity.

And if you think that’s an exaggeration of the Brexit position, then just listen to the language they use: “We are a nation of inventors and entrepreneurs, we want to put the great back in Britain, the great engineers, the great manufacturers.” This is all the expression of a sentimental nostalgia. In the Brexiteer’s mind’s eye is the old Pathé newsreel of Donald Campbell, of John Logie Baird with his television, Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb, and Robert Baden-Powell inventing boy scouts in his shed.

All we need, their argument goes, is to be free of the humourless Germans and spoilsport French and all their collective liberalism and reality. There is a concomitant hope that if we manage to back out of Europe, then we’ll get back to the bowler-hatted 1950s and the Commonwealth will hold pageants, fireworks displays and beg to be back in the Queen Empress’s good books again. Then New Zealand will sacrifice a thousand lambs, Ghana will ask if it can go back to being called the Gold Coast and Britain will resume hand-making Land Rovers and top hats and Sheffield plate teapots.

There is a reason that most of the people who want to leave the EU are old while those who want to remain are young: it’s because the young aren’t infected with Bisto nostalgia. They don’t recognise half the stuff I’ve mentioned here. They’ve grown up in the EU and at worst it’s been neutral for them.

The under-thirties want to be part of things, not aloof from them. They’re about being joined-up and counted. I imagine a phrase most outies identify with is “women’s liberation has gone too far”. Everything has gone too far for them, from political correctness — well, that’s gone mad, hasn’t it? — to health and safety and gender-neutral lavatories. Those oldies, they don’t know if they’re coming or going, what with those newfangled mobile phones and kids on Tinder and Grindr. What happened to meeting Miss Joan Hunter Dunn at the tennis club? And don’t get them started on electric hand dryers, or something unrecognised in the bagging area, or Indian call centres , or the impertinent computer asking for a password that has both capitals and little letters and numbers and more than eight digits.

Brexit is the fond belief that Britain is worse now than at some point in the foggy past where we achieved peak Blighty
We listen to the Brexit lot talk about the trade deals they’re going to make with Europe after we leave, and the blithe insouciance that what they’re offering instead of EU membership is a divorce where you can still have sex with your ex. They reckon they can get out of the marriage, keep the house, not pay alimony, take the kids out of school, stop the in-laws going to the doctor, get strict with the visiting rights, but, you know, still get a shag at the weekend and, obviously, see other people on the side.

Really, that’s their best offer? That’s the plan? To swagger into Brussels with Union Jack pants on and say: “ ’Ello luv, you’re looking nice today. Would you like some?”

When the rest of us ask how that’s really going to work, leavers reply, with Terry-Thomas smirks, that “they’re going to still really fancy us, honest, they’re gagging for us. Possibly not Merkel, but the bosses of Mercedes and those French vintners and cheesemakers, they can’t get enough of old John Bull. Of course they’re going to want to go on making the free market with two backs after we’ve got the decree nisi. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

 

[JohnH]

What is unsustainable though is not taking in the numbers we do. Our population is aging. What the leave camp have not said is how by say 2050 if migration is reduced to the 10,000's how pensions e.t.c will be paid for. With a aging population either the concept of retirement will give or we need a bigger working age population. Since we are not having enough children there is only one way to bring the dependency ratio down.

no point in burying our collective head in the sand. whether migration is reduced or not big social changes are coming the thing is which change do we prefer. I would like the NHS and state pension to exist for me in 30 years time (I am 40 and expect to work till I am around 70).

You're right, the demographic time bomb is certainly real and should be planned for.

But the time bomb exists because government pension schemes are essentially a giant Ponzi scheme: there is no pension 'pot' and there is no fund growth. Today's contributions are simply being handed over to today's pensioners. And as you say, when the number of contributors is less than the number of recipients, the game is up.

However, simply importing more people doesn't correct this flaw; if anything, it makes it worse because what happens when those extra migrant workers retire? What do we do then? Import yet more people to cover their pensions? At what point to we admit that simply importing more and more people has reached its limit?

Germany took in 1m refugees last year not because they are feeling generous but because there population is aging and falling! They saw an opportunity to reverse that trend and avoid a demographic time bomb. Merkel has balls to plan for the future.

Well, maybe it's best not to count those chickens before they've hatched...

Fewer than 500 of 163,000 migrants find jobs in Sweden
Leak: 81 per cent of migrants to Germany are unskilled, government predicts 400,000 new welfare claimants
65 per cent of Syrian refugees can't even read or write, claims German academic
Migrant crisis: Two thirds of arrivals are 'basically illiterate'

"In expressing his concern, President Lenzen is affirming the statement in December of Munich University professor Ludger Woessmann, who said:

“We have to prepare ourselves for the fact that the majority of young refugees will fail a three-year full time training course with a high proportion of theoretic content. According to the Chamber of Commerce of Munich and Upper Bavaria, 70 per cent of trainees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq who started lessons more than two years ago have already dropped out”.

Referring to a 2011 educational study conducted in Syria, the professor said 65 per cent of 18 year-olds in the country lacked “basic skills” and were therefore “functionally illiterate”, compared to just 16 per cent in Germany.

Even these shock figures are reasonably generous compared to the internal figures of the German government, which were leaked at the end of 2015. The internal paper from the Federal Employment Agency suggested 81 per cent of migrants to Germany were unskilled, and just eight per cent had academic qualifications of any kind.

Projecting their own likely spending, the agency estimated the migrant influx would lead to Germany taking on hundreds of thousands of new benefit claimants."

Come up with another policy.

Governments shouldn't be in the pension business. When they are, everyone imagines that the government will "take care of everything", individual 'pension pots' get merged into one giant communal bucket, the ponzi scheme begins and governments borrow money (which can never be repaid) to keep the system solvent.

In either Sweden or Holland (I forget which one), the government doesn't manage the public sector fund itself; big financial companies compete to manage the fund and the government caps the percentage of fees that the management company can take for itself. The percentage is only small, so most of the investment growth benefits the value of the fund -- but the fund is so colossal that even a tiny percentage makes good money for the company who manages it.

If workers were responsible for their *own* pensions or if companies were responsible for their workers' pensions, then (a) the number of pensions would match the number of workers, so no dependency ratio, and (b) fund managers would be much more accountable to the people who have entrusted their contributions to him/her.

However, this "cold light of day" approach might reveal (a) just how much money we all have to put into a pension to get a meaningful return, (b) how meagre the returns are on the fund manager's investments and (c) how much the fund managers take for themselves. So it all ends up being left with the government, as that's the best place to sweep it under the carpet.

Now whilst I believe our feckless and workshy should be forced into work before we import labour it also makes perfect sense to take who we need for the roles our plebs cannot do.

^ This. If 2 or 3 million immigrants can walk into this country and find a job, I find myself wondering why 1.8 million unemployed Brits can't.

The most important thing about change is it is always uncomfortable and no society is ever in control of it. Thd best you can do is mange the change to limit the impact like building more houses, spending more than 6.46% of GDP on the nhs (that's declining too it was around 9% in the labour years but some of that got wasted on pfi) e.t.c.

Our problems are home gorwn and not imported. We can fix them without withdrawing from the eu.

Sorry fella, this is what the BBC doesn't tell you: Gordon Brown couldn't use government money to finance Labour's promised NHS spending spree, because the European Union had put a cap on how much member states could borrow (At the time, countries like France and Greece took absolutely no notice of this cap and borrowed what the hell they wanted -- but that probably goes to show how bloody daft we Brits must be). Anyway, how does Gordon fulfil the manifesto pledges without borrowing more? Answer: Private Finance Initiatives. This, thinks Gordon, will take the borrowing off the government's books and put it onto the balance sheet of Carillion or Marillion or whoever made a fortune out of building hospitals and renting them out.

So it was the *EU* which forced Labour to resort to PFI.

But do you know what the punchline is? When the EU examined the whole sorry situation, they told the British government that it didn't matter that the debt was on the books of privately owned companies -- they were going to include it in the government borrowing figures anyway! Heh-hey! Bah-boom-pish!