Winseer:
“Blue passports, and all that other guff - are just white noise. So is “Immigration”. Even if we voted solidly for Brexit, it’s going to take many years to change the culture whereby we actually kick out the criminal immigrants and keep the hard working taxpaying ones - simply because no politician in history has yet to divide up the two”
But for god’s sake man, how many criminal immigrants do you think really exist? Do you think all crime is carried out by immigrants? That they are responsible for the loss of industry, the cuts in public services, the biggest drop in wages since before Queen Victoria was on the throne?
Why are you focussing on some sensationalist stories in right-wing newspapers, and building your political views around that?
I’m not sure why you seem to be running off at a tangent here, but I thought I was saying at the top there that we should be getting Brexit done first (by halting the payments to Brussels)
It’s your tangent, and I’ve dealt elsewhere with the point about “halting payments” on which there doesn’t seem to have been a comeback.
At the very minimum, paying nothing into the EU budget is going to mean a loss of political clout and participation - it’s going to mean our judges do not sit in the courts, it’s going to mean our parliamentarians do not sit in their parliament, it’s going to mean our officials have no institutional presence, it’s going to mean our industries or specialities are at the back of the room in terms of political concerns. Our influence will be limited to doorstepping and arranging meetings with those who actually do have clout.
All the other major EU nations - the Northern and Western ones which we consider our social and economic peers - are net contributors to the EU. Germany, by almost twice as much. None of our peers are living high on the hog at our expense. The real beneficiaries are the poorer Southern and Eastern countries, mainly to try and stabilise them politically and bring them up to whack economically. The benefits of this are in terms of political power on the international stage - retaining international sovereignty.
Now, you can take a view on whether the whole thing is worth it in the long-term. Personally, I don’t even know enough about it to have a view - it’s not something that has an immediate impact on daily life, and in terms of net economic contribution it’s not a big project. By contrast to a net EU contribution of £3.5bn, our Housing Benefit bill (a subsidy to landlords) is £26bn, our Tax Credits bill (a subsidy to employers) is £30bn, our defence budget £40bn, and our NHS £100bn.
In terms of UK workers (about 30m of them), whose economic productivity is near £70k a year each, the EU net contribution amounts to about £100 a year (or about 5 pence an hour from the median worker’s pay which is about £10.70 an hour, if workers were literally paying out of their pay packets of £22k a year on average, which they are not).
So economically, it’s a small issue. And why, I ask, is a small economic issue (whose underlying rationale I know barely anything about and most people probably know even less), being hyped as the most grievous assault on the interests of the UK nation since Hitler declared war?
The real question is whether you support (or want to participate in) the EU’s strategic political goals that that £100 a year (out of £70k a year) helps. I can’t in all honesty express a view on it, but what I can express a view on is that either way, the net contribution is not an economic issue.
If the issue turned purely on the economics, that is if you’d otherwise be happy to stay if the EU waived the net contribution (or even if they actually gave us more money than we pay in), then I’d say the money at stake is a tiny price to pay for being inside the tent politically.
And if your position doesn’t turn on the economics, if you truly have an objection to the EU’s political goals, and want us out for political reasons, then let’s hear (at least amongst ourselves here on TruckNet) the argument about that, rather than waging a proxy war about the economics of the membership cost. And also, if this is the case, be honest with yourself that it’s got nothing to do with membership fees, and everything to do with politics.
Or if, after all this, you still insist that it is the economics of the net contribution that aggrieve you most, then why is it the biggest political issue of our time for you, when so many other important political issues exist?
and worry about getting rid of the criminal elements later, which in turn cannot be done until politicians start to refine the “decent” immigrants that pay the taxes and do our undesirable jobs (including Trucking) and “Criminal” immigrants who at very least, are only here to claim benefits, bed-block our NHS rather than work in it, and provide an affront to law-abiding secular society, in the name of “Koran-Thumping” akin to what Christianity did around the time of the Renaissance, some 500 years ago…
But bringing in immigrants to do “undesirable jobs” just keeps (or makes) those jobs undesirable, not just for the immigrants who come in but for the settled workers who also do them. I don’t find trucking inherently undesirable - what’s undesirable about the industry is falling pay and increasingly poor working conditions.
As for “criminal immigrants”, as I say how many do you think exist? You don’t seem to realise that the EU has no “Islamic” members - even Turkey which has wanted to be a member of Europe for a long time, has been Western-looking for a century or more and is officially (and quite substantially) a secular state.
Even a film that characterise Turkey in popular culture, like Midnight Express, was filmed (if I remember correctly) mostly in North Africa with North African actors - not in Turkey, and the Turkish went mad about the film (which was, essentially, a story about an American drug dealer being caught and jailed in a poor country, along with the dregs of Turkish society). If you go to Turkey today, it’s no different from any Southern Europe nation or a Greek island, and no more socially conservative (if at all) than Britain was in the 1970s - it’s not characterised by ayatollahs and women roaming the streets in burkas and so on.
The main “Islamic” community in Britain is mainly from the former British India, and they’re on their 3rd or 4th generation by now - they’re not foreigners, they’re Brits who were born in British hospitals, went to British schools, work in British jobs, and socialise in British nightclubs. The scare stories in the right-wing press are mainly about a tiny minority of right-wing Islamic extremists (no different from the right-wing Christian extremists, like those putting Great Ormond Street hospital under siege the other week).
The same with organised crime - there might be a few gangs around of those who are ethnically Middle Eastern (because they comprise a lot of the local population) who are exploiting young teen girls, but those sorts of gangs and rings have existed amongst the whites as well (including apparently involving members of parliament). You expect the police to smash those gangs, but you don’t suddenly assume that the whole bloody community is involved. Get perspective on things.
As for “Industry” - we lost the plot when the worlds best industrialists so far in the 21st century - have out-bred us 4.5-to-one on average.
What do you mean by “out-bred”? All developed nations are suffering poor birth rates, partly because raising children has become harder and women have better things to do, and partly because the economy itself is intolerant of the effort and responsibilities of having children. Even highly homogenous societies, like Japan, are losing population at an alarming rate.
Thatcher was correct in managing the decline in our industries perhaps (no, I’m no Thatcherite, and never voted Tory whilst she was leader) but she made the mistake of not encouraging the youth of the day (which included myself) to be trained up in those top-dollar trades of the future.
But even if she had, wages in the “top-dollar” trades would have fallen - if everyone was trained to be a doctor, doctors would be on zero-hours contracts struggling to put the heating on, because the nature of the free market is that those doing common and widely-understood work (even doing essential work at a good standard) get paid a pittance.
I trained for Laboratory work for example, only to find there was “no job” at the end of it, not even a low-paid job. 
I finally bit the bullet, and signed up with RM because I wanted to get a HGV licence. A complete change of path for me right there, and I’ve not looked back since. At my job interview, I said I wanted the nearest thing to a “job for life” (i.e. clear intent on staying around a while, rather than just taking a stepping-stone job…) and most of all - I wanted to survive the next great recession, which I duly did. 
The former Science training, at least keeps me alive, with the consideration that I’ll recognize approaching “physics-related” dangers better than average of course.
So you went into the public sector and a national monopoly where unions were fairly strong? 
If you’re trying to brand me as some telegraph/express/daily wail sheep because I have clearly defined my outlook, you’re either deliberately mis-interpreting my words, or trying to make the entire argument about something different. I’ve consistently upheld EE’s in my posts on this site, whilst attempting to slam down Non-EU immigrants with Ill-Intent torwards their proposed future host nation. That their intended destination nation couldn’t be somewhere next door to them, or the first bit of European soil they set foot on - adds insult to injury of course. It’s time we DID seperate the good 'uns from the bad’uns then, and you’ll read nothing of the sort in the Black and White press which is even slipping it’s veil now (thanks to the centerists) who would make us turn against EE’s, whilst at the same time hug a 35-year-old no-papers “child” refugee who says he’s from Syria, despite having an accent more like Africa or at least some other Islamic nation in the middle east… Never seen THAT argument put in one of the publications we were referring to here… 
I invite you to post an article proving me wrong that I can link to… 
I’m probably going to conflate your views and those of Carryfast at some point so I’ll apologise in advance if I do, but indeed I am trying to brand you as a Daily Mail sheep on this particular aspect of your views, to be perfectly frank, although I’m not simply dismissing your arguments.
Like I say above, I don’t see the link between membership of the EU and non-EU immigration. Indeed, the EU stuffed cash into Turkey’s mouth to assimilate the tide of refugees that followed interventions in 2011 onwards - interventions that had nothing to do with EU membership, and everything to do with the sovereign foreign policy of the UK and other nations (as exemplified by the ruinous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which the US and the UK were the main players, not the other EU nations).
Most non-EU immigration that occurs here is the choice of the British government - it continues the policy because it’s a source of cheap labour, and such policies especially undermine the living standards of those who are ethnic minorities who have already settled (and in most cases nowadays, are British born).
The actual “refugee” or “asylum seeker” figure is a tiny fraction of the overall non-EU immigration, and of course the answer to that is to stop causing the destruction of states and economies in the Middle East and North Africa, which creates these tsunami tides of refugees (many of whom will be quite understandably damaged by past experience, not just from the destruction at home but also from the journey of getting here, which might involve deaths of family members and rapes and exploitation, and amongst whom criminals and undesirables from these foreign societies will also lurk).
A while back in Germany there was a terror attack (or an attempt) by someone who quite clearly was a youth, who had come in as an orphaned refugee - that is the reality of the consequences of bombing out “brutal dictators”, it is to inflict the same or even more brutality that we claim we are saving them from. In most cases, the answer to a brutal dictator is to haul them before a court, not to keep smashing their entire societies. Thankfully the British public seems to be getting wise to these ruses by our own militaristic politicians.
"But it’s like I say, all the EU has to do is threaten the City’s banks and tell them to leave, and that’s why the Tory party is in such a muddle - because the Tories represent the interests of the rich, of the wealthy, who have lost nothing when coal mines and manufacturing workshops were shut (because they just moved their manufacturing investments to India, for example), but will lose billions if the banks and insurers are prevented from trading with the EU. And the EU will not lose out in that event - because other EU nations have their own banks and insurers, who will make a killing if the British are forced out of the EU market."
On this, I find myself in agreement with you. That’s where “Commercial Aggression” comes in. A bit like what Trump appears to be doing, rather successfully so far, if the Chinese announcement that “They will now buy a lot more stuff from America, to narrow the trade gap Trump has complained about.”
But China is doing well out of the international status quo, and can afford to negotiate some symbolic concessions (which won’t really enrich the American worker, but makes good political theatre for Trump to feather his own bed with).
The other aspect of the problem is that there really is a systemic dysfunction with the US-China relationship, and even China can see that it can’t maintain such a huge deficit indefinitely.
The difference with the EU (and Germany and France in particular) is that they aren’t poor developing countries like China. They’re out-competing us on the high road, not the low road as with the US and China. Which is even more worrying in many respects. That’s why Corbyn is proposing industrial investment, to do via the state what the British capitalist class have refused to do, which is invest. Our economic growth was steaming ahead of France and Germany until 2008 - our problems are politically self-inflicted, because we keep voting for high-private-profit, low-investment, low-wage governments, and have allowed our economy to become concentrated on financial services which is great for the monied classes and bankers but it’s no good for the majority of workers.
Our politicians ARE far too much in the pockets of the EU powers, be they unelected EU officials, Banks, or Big Businesses that like to think that their billions of numbered paper can always beat the hundreds of millions of EU citizens - simply by lying and misleading just enough so the electorate only ever vote out those that don’t make a difference - and replacing them with more of the same in elections. To vote for anyone else outside that bubble would no doubt bring howls of “Hey, that wasn’t the result we paid…I mean hoped for. “There were election irregularities”. Someone, somewhere either didn’t take our bung, or worse - took our bung, and acted against us anyway!!!”
But the “EU powers” to whom you refer are really the European rich - including the British rich. It’s not other nations, it’s the other class. Other than that I agree with what you say.
I don’t have a problem with either Corbyn or Farage being in government. It is the rest of the party machine they bring in behind them, that will cause the downside to the arguments on both sides.
Farage would make a splendid minister, but UKIP as the party behind Farage still, are rotten to the core. Corbyn is a decent enough guy to make a decent PM, but at the moment - we really need a PM that goes for the throat, and exploits every weakness in those foreign powers that think they can use their unlected bureaucratic dictatorship to push our struggling democracy about. We shouldn’t really rule out EITHER of ever being in government though, as Farage is more feared by the Right than the Left, if Cameron and May’s shenanigans to ensure Farage doesn’t even get a parliamentary back-bencher seat - is anything to go by. Corbyn has been warming those same seats for over 40 years - and whilst not backwards at coming forwards, has done less in 40 years as an actual MP than Farage has done in 0 MINUTES as an MP. You and I might deem it unthinkable for the way foward - being a Labour/Farage link-up - but a lot can change between now and the next election. It would be very negative to “only” consider the possibility that “one or both guys might not even be alive by that point” nor “WE might not be alive by that point” of course. I actually think a Corbyn-PM and Farage-Chancellor combination would bring the acceptable Brexit that both Left and Right actually want in this country, and of course - dwindle away the Remainer aspect in the form of “lost seats” getting rid of those who’d be stuck on Remain, regardless of how successful any kind of Brexit turned out to be, even after the event.
All in all, our main parties are weak weak weak in the face of concentrated EU political raw power. That we could win two world wars militarily with the help of the rest of the world, but not defeat that same country using our own language and lack of religious faith to unite Europe against us, whilst dividing Britons apart over petty issues - shows us all just how dire things have become in the name of “Soma-Style” and “Directorship”. Brave New World - it ain’t. 
Farage will never be PM because he’s a free-wheeler without a party behind him, and he enjoys being a popular troublemaker probably more than he’d enjoy being accountable to a party of government (I don’t mean that in a bad way either). But politically he is already represented in the Tory party anyway - I’d say Farage is just David Davis with more bombast and less responsibility.
Labour don’t win power, Farage never becomes an MP, and the British People openly surrender to the EU and it’s everlasting austerity upon us. Perhaps we’ll get to fight and die in an unwanted war against Russia in Ukraine as well, or who knows - perhaps America in Iran, if the EU’s current friendly stance towards Iran is anything to go by!