Winseer:
I’m completely baffled as to why ‘half the British working class would be laid off’… You’re going to have to elaborate on this one. The way I understand it, at very most, the only ones being laid off would be those civil servants who point-blank refuse to start pulling the strings and levels that prevent the money going to Brussels. Anyone involved with “Goods in Transit” is NOT going to be affected, for reasons I’ve already explained.
Because of the amount of disruption you’d cause - not just from the necessary effects of any policies you pursue, but from the consequences of retaliatory actions, and from the perception of Britain being seen as a loose cannon (not just in the eyes of foreign nations, but of British bosses literally asking “Am I going to have a European market to sell to tomorrow, if I pay out wages for production today?”).
Even if the state stepped in to control the economy, maintain order, and guarantee profits (like it did with the banking crash), the costs borne would quickly exceed the membership fee saved (and remember you’ve won a referendum by a wafer-thin margin based on promising money savings, not of promising to spend a lot of money and cause a lot of economic upset simply to make a symbolic point with no other payoff).
It’s like I say, I don’t even know why we’re having this argument. Not even the most extreme, hard-right Brexiteers suggested flatly reneging on our existing commitments the day after the referendum (which are easily affordable, even if you see them as illegitimate and should never have been agreed to in the past) - at best, those commitments were to be treated as a bargaining chip (for example, Boris arguing that the EU could “go whistle” for our contributions, if they did not agree to a trade deal).
The reality is, it took both world superpowers running at full steam, a variety of resistance movements in almost every European nation, plus the British economy on an total war footing that left almost everything utterly worn out by the end of the war and lumbered it with 60 years of war debts, just to bring Hitler to his knees. You’re living in the clouds when you imagine that if Britain defaulted on its (modest and freely-entered-into) obligations for just the next couple of years, that it would be their problem rather than ours. I would agree that It indeeed took a gargantulan political effort to even get so much as Lend Lease out of America, with them not coming into the war for an indecently prolonged period whilst Britain stood alone, looking like losing. If only such “gargantulan efforts” politically could be made to get Brexit done, rather than support the losing side of Remain.
Indeed, and the simple fact is that Britain would have folded against the Nazis had it not been for worldwide support. But how concerned do you think the world is going to be to support an irrational political convulsion by a tiny minority of Brexiteers over EU membership fees? There would be no point going crying to the US, because it has political and military interests in the EU project and strong alliances with the other member states, so if it was forced to take sides on this particular issue it would take the side of the EU.
If you’re against laziness, then you are primarily against shareholders collecting dividends in exchange for idleness, or idle beneficiaries who inherit wealth and family trusts, and you are also primarily for a policy of full employment, both of which are left-wing policies, not right-wing ones. You probably don’t hear about these wealthy idlers however, because you probably don’t reside in the same areas and social circles as they do, and you don’t read the sorts of papers that constantly make an example of them. I’m not sure where your coming from there… It sounds like you are against “Unearned Income” which would have to include “Interest on Savings”, something it is the very wealthy and elderly savers who voted Brexit - are suffering over, with the prevailing low interest rates for as long as they have been. Shares paying Dividends though? - I just cannot see that as an Evil. What I WOULD like to see “Reformed” are to make it compulsory for ALL shares to pay a dividend, no matter how small - plus “One Shareholding equals One Vote” replacing the current 1 institution with a million shares gets to outvote 9,000 small investors with 100 shares apiece. THAT is a total travesty of Justice, let alone Democracy!
I don’t want to go off on a tangent about pensions (obviously I support the principle of workers’ pensions), but on shareholding, if you want democracy then you agree with collective ownership and control.
Even if shareholders had one vote per shareholding, the reality is that the rich would just buy up all the shares - and would outbid poor people for those shares.