It's looking to be a close run thing but whichever way the vote goes I think the referendum has at least shone a light on the EU and its workings together with possibly people engaging again in the voting process. Maybe if we don't leave when the next MEP's vote comes along it will get more attention ?

There has been an apathetic response in recent votes particularly the police and crime commissioner appointments in my neck of the woods.

Some of the remain orchestrated meetings and events have been questionable particularly in my view Tony Blair and John Major scaremongering about impact on the peace in NI & border controls. I thought this was disgraceful. Dublin & London agreed free passage across the border which has been in place since 1923, so why suggest Brexit would change this.

The reason that the PCCM appointments were and are so poorly attended are twofold: First, people don't see a need and didn't ask for one, and resent having such a thing forced upon them as a political interference; and second, because it was widely advertised before the first election that it was apolitical and yet *every* candidate elected was vocally aligned to one or another political party.

Why might that be? Nothing to do with the fact that the independents didn't have anything like the money that the political parties did to get themselves elected, and in many cases were simply priced out of the market.

The first PCCM election is the first and only election in this country in which I have deliberately not voted (though I voted *against* rather than for in the recent elections).

PCCM, can you please verify please. Although I'm up to speed on things, I'd like to see what certain letters mean. Thanks.

It's Police and Crime Commissioner Jim.

They are supposed to oversee safe and effective policing in a police area. I think it only happens in England and Wales.

There were actually 3 independents elected in 2016 out of 40 areas.

Not sure what the "M" in barnacle's post stands for though.

Thank you PeteP. In all seriousness the fiddling with services such as police in our area has been drastic. People have lost their lives due to the services one way or another incompetence. May sound an over the top comment, but the policing in Scotland at the moment is questionable & full of unanswered questions.

If I'm honest & probably nothing to do with the EU, there is quite a lot wrong with how our country is run. Scotland has more or less just under five & a half million, quite a low number indeed. It's not our time & it's long gone, sorry for off topic.

On another observation from the young team I speak to, European seems to be the buzz word of the moment.

Excellent

I have to ask the question, why do people think that the government would be able to guide us through Brexit at all? Over the last few decades they've managed to fccuk up most of the things the EU allow us to deal with. I don't want to give them more freedom to make a mess

I have to ask the question, why do people think that the government would be able to guide us through Brexit at all? Over the last few decades they've managed to fccuk up most of the things the EU allow us to deal with. I don't want to give them more freedom to make a mess [/quote]

I'm confused here Jonny! Are you saying the government, Britain, cannot be trusted & should not be given more freedom to make a mess of our own countries rules/regulations & leaving that to Brussels. What exactly have we f????d up that the EU has "allowed" us to deal with?

One aspect of the referendum aftermath that I think could raise its head is further infighting within the Conservative party and possibly an earlier general election. I wonder if labour have been keeping a lower profile (my view guys) over the referendum in the hope they could pick up the pieces after a possible lack of confidence vote ?

I'm not sure they're allowed to have a general election early, under the current rules: I think it has to be every five years come hell or high water. That was introduced to stop a party thinking 'we're doing all right at the moment, but we think it might go tits up in a couple of years, so we'll sneak an election in and likely get another five'.



Neither am I. Dunno what happened there: Police and Crime Co Missioner?

There might be something in this. Leaving the agitators to squabble and dig their own holes could leave a tidy space for a Labour government.

There's also the tricky position of their leader, with a history of having voted against a large number of EU actions, trying not to conflict with his beliefs. JC's statements so far have been fairly carefully worded (and infrequent) to implicate his party's position as opposed to his own.

Not this JC!

Fortunately for the Tories, the one body on Earth less electable than them is the Labour Party.
The aftermath of this referendum will be like Game of Thrones goes to Westminster, but the Conservatives (in one form or another) will still end up in power, possibly in an unholy (yet entirely fitting) alliance with a resurgent UKIP.

I am fearful for the future.

Dare I suggest our voting system should change to one based on Proportional representation? There would at least be some checks and balances however in reality would this simply lead to a blunt instrument of a government.
One thing seems certain in the repercussions of the referendum will be felt for some time to come.

Neil you're normally such a sensible chap but isn't this level of sarcasm directed at the opposition's views just another illustration of how far the debate has fallen ?

However expert they are no one can tell the future, especially financial and economic analysts. If those people you obviously disagree with wish to disbelieve those experts that is their choice.

Many of the things you champion don't have to disappear if the vote is to "Leave". Working week, border tariffs don't have to go or come back. Neither is it unfeasible that some of the "good rules" introduced whilst in the EU wouldn't have been introduced by a UK out of the EU. Not only can we not tell the future we can't tell what would have happened in a parallel universe.

What both sides need to do is state what they WILL try to do if they win to make the best of the wishes of the British electorate, either way.

This whole debate has become predicated on information no better than can be provided by a fortune teller with a crystal ball.

I think the future within Europe is a lot more predictable than the future out of Europe: we know the rules of the current game and we have some trajectory to predict future path.

Changing the rules to being out is where the rule book is thrown away. And part of the issue is that those explaining how the changes will be made aren't actually in power to make those changes. More than that, many of them aren't even in the same party. On top of that, being "out", we won't be able to predict how others will respond to us either.

Shall we agree on a certain amount of sarcasm? The debate fell through the floor weeks ago...

Some of those points are more valid than others, and of course you are quite correct that - to quote Yogi Berra - it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

Of *course* there is no reason to put new standards in place, or to expect that there would be immediate changes in the employment laws, or to slap tariffs on everything, or any of the other things I mentioned - but there's nothing to stop it. And when things that the exit guys tell me are obviously going to happen, for example a free trading zone on existing terms with Europe but absent the requirement for free movement, are flatly contradicted by the European heads of state... well, I can't help wondering how much else they're getting wrong.

Nonetheless, I look at the people who are pushing so hard for separation and to be honest, most of them make my skin crawl. Farage, Gove, and Rees-Mogg are possibly the three most odious people in public life. I'd vote against any or all of them on general principles no matter what they were supporting, I fear.

Like a few of the others on here, I'm old enough to remember what the UK was like in the seventies and how things improved once we were a Euro member. I'm not suggesting that leaving will cause an immediate drop to those levels but I do firmly believe that the disadvantages of leaving exceed those of staying.

But then, I'm one who firmly believes that it is always better to negotiate from within than to take my ball home and play on my own. That our current politicians can't negotiate is not a reason to leave; there will, unfortunately, be other politicians over time.

\

You missed out Johnson. Agree with everything else you said but it's not over until 24th June.
Hopefully people will wake up to the certainty that this unholy alliance of bigots and opportunists are never going to have the interests of working people at heart. I'll be campaigning for every Remain vote right to the last minute.

Out of interest/debate (you understand) how do you reconcile that if you find Farage,Gove et al "odious" then at least you have the weapon of a vote to use against them whereas if you find Dhragi or Junkers odious they can continue being in your face odious and there's nothing you can do about it and they can continue to set the laws you operate under.)

(And I don't necessarily disagree on appropriation of odiousness)

OK last post I'm making because these sort of things degenerate quickly...

Just because people are concerned that unlimited immigration to our country is putting strain on our healthcare, housing and social infrastructures does not make them racist and/or bigots, neither does it make them opportunists, neither does it automatically make them opponents of the working class. That's just the same silly attitude that characterised the 70s that Barnacle was bemoaning.

That's me done

So am I. Three day week, streets full of rubbish, dead unburied, brown outs. I give Maggie more credit for stopping all that.

I don't consider all those who want to leave to be bigots or opportunists. I was referring to the named politicians who are cynically exploiting the issue of immigration. There are about 2.5 million EU citizens from other countries in the UK and roughly 2.2 million Brits resident in other EU countries. Talk of 'uncontrolled immigration' is simply untrue. But the poorest areas of the UK bear the brunt of new arrivals, and the answer to that is to provide the resources, jobs and housing that those areas need, which won't be forthcoming from Boris et al. If we leave the EU the economy will suffer and that will hurt the low-paid and the regions worst of all.

Glenn, I have no idea where you got your figures from, but it's typical of the Brexit campaign to misquote or ignore the official figures.

Your population figures highlighted above are pure fantasy. The population of the UK has been rising steadily since at least 1964. Graph below from the National Archives, courtesy of the ONS (Office for National Statistics). And one more thing, births in the UK have been way higher than the number of deaths per year since at least 1992.

For more information, see here.

ok,the population may have risen slightly between the sixties and the mid eightes, but in no way does this resemble whats happened over the last 20 years. The population now is nearly 65 million , just keeps going up in big chunks every year.

I think part of the reason for the ferocity of the debate is not differences of opinion on what the outcome will be, but differences on whether that outcome is desirable.

By the way, as AndrewR of this parish eloquently wrote here , if you're sick of all this EU stuff now, just wait until it's over.

Jim, I've a feeling you may have alluded to AndrewR's piece before, but your link isn't working for me to re-read it...

Apologies for duff linkage - now rectified!

I normally regard AA Gill with the kind of distaste I reserve for the sole of my shoe after an encounter with organically-processed dog-food.

However, this article (that has been doing the rounds elsewhere) struck a chord - casual nastiness notwithstanding. Apologies for the lengthy quote:

"It was the woman on Question Time that really did it for me. She was so familiar. There is someone like her in every queue, every coffee shop, outside every school in every parish council in the country. Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, over-made-up, with her National Health face and weatherproof English expression of hurt righteousness, she’s Britannia’s mother-in-law. The camera closed in on her and she shouted: “All I want is my country back. Give me my country back.”

It was a heartfelt cry of real distress and the rest of the audience erupted in sympathetic applause, but I thought: “Back from what? Back from where?”

Wanting the country back is the constant mantra of all the outies. Farage slurs it, Gove insinuates it. Of course I know what they mean. We all know what they mean. They mean back from Johnny Foreigner, back from the brink, back from the future, back-to-back, back to bosky hedges and dry stone walls and country lanes and church bells and warm beer and skittles and football rattles and cheery banter and clogs on cobbles. Back to vicars-and-tarts parties and Carry On fart jokes, back to Elgar and fudge and proper weather and herbaceous borders and cars called Morris. Back to victoria sponge and 22 yards to a wicket and 15 hands to a horse and 3ft to a yard and four fingers in a Kit Kat, back to gooseberries not avocados, back to deference and respect, to make do and mend and smiling bravely and biting your lip and suffering in silence and patronising foreigners with pity.

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 love, 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?”

Have no doubt, this is a divorce. It’s not just business, it’s not going to be all reason and goodwill. Like all divorces, leaving Europe would be ugly and mean and hurtful, and it would lead to a great deal of poisonous xenophobia and racism, all the niggling personal prejudice that dumped, betrayed and thwarted people are prey to. And the racism and prejudice are, of course, weak points for us. The tortuous renegotiation with lawyers and courts will be bitter and vengeful, because divorces always are and, just in passing, this sovereignty thing we’re supposed to want back so badly, like Frodo’s ring, has nothing to do with you or me. We won’t notice it coming back, because we didn’t notice not having it in the first place.

Nine out of 10 economists say ‘remain in the EU’

You won’t wake up on June 24 and think: “Oh my word, my arthritis has gone! My teeth are suddenly whiter! Magically, I seem to know how to make a soufflé and I’m buff with the power of sovereignty.” This is something only politicians care about; it makes not a jot of difference to you or me if the Supreme Court is a bunch of strangely out-of-touch old gits in wigs in Westminster or a load of strangely out-of-touch old gits without wigs in Luxembourg. What matters is that we have as many judges as possible on the side of personal freedom.

Personally, I see nothing about our legislators in the UK that makes me feel I can confidently give them more power. The more checks and balances politicians have, the better for the rest of us. You can’t have too many wise heads and different opinions. If you’re really worried about red tape, by the way, it’s not just a European problem. We’re perfectly capable of coming up with our own rules and regulations and we have no shortage of jobsworths. Red tape may be annoying, but it is also there to protect your and my family from being lied to, poisoned and cheated.

The first “X” I ever put on a voting slip was to say yes to the EU. The first referendum was when I was 20 years old. This one will be in the week of my 62nd birthday. For nearly all my adult life, there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t been pleased and proud to be part of this great collective. If you ask me for my nationality, the truth is I feel more European than anything else. I am part of this culture, this European civilisation. I can walk into any gallery on our continent and completely understand the images and the stories on the walls. These people are my people and they have been for thousands of years. I can read books on subjects from Ancient Greece to Dark Ages Scandinavia, from Renaissance Italy to 19th-century France, and I don’t need the context or the landscape explained to me. The music of Europe, from its scales and its instruments to its rhythms and religion, is my music. The Renaissance, the rococo, the Romantics, the impressionists, gothic, baroque, neoclassicism, realism, expressionism, futurism, fauvism, cubism, dada, surrealism, postmodernism and kitsch were all European movements and none of them belongs to a single nation.

There is a reason why the Chinese are making fake Italian handbags and the Italians aren’t making fake Chinese ones. This European culture, without question or argument, is the greatest, most inventive, subtle, profound, beautiful and powerful genius that was ever contrived anywhere by anyone and it belongs to us. Just look at my day job — food. The change in food culture and pleasure has been enormous since we joined the EU, and that’s no coincidence. What we eat, the ingredients, the recipes, may come from around the world, but it is the collective to and fro of European interests, expertise and imagination that has made it all so very appetising and exciting.

The restaurant was a European invention, naturally. The first one in Paris was called The London Bridge.

Culture works and grows through the constant warp and weft of creators, producers, consumers, intellectuals and instinctive lovers. You can’t dictate or legislate for it, you can just make a place that encourages it and you can truncate it. You can make it harder and more grudging, you can put up barriers and you can build walls, but why on earth would you? This collective culture, this golden civilisation grown on this continent over thousands of years, has made everything we have and everything we are, why would you not want to be part of it?

I understand that if we leave we don’t have to hand back our library ticket for European civilisation, but why would we even think about it? In fact, the only ones who would are those old, philistine scared gits. Look at them, too frightened to join in."

AA Gill, don't know the guy - been out of the UK for too long I guess - but I get the feeling he is right on the money on this one and he has precisely described the the "Dad's Army brigade" on the Jaguar forum

Strangely sad times, fussing so much over a vote that seems only to be dividing people and is unlikely to gain anything concrete

Being open and engaged only created more wealth and, if you don't believe me, just look at China. Being more isolationist created nothing - N Korea anybody?

The Little Englanders are too myopic to see that being open and inclusive makes things better for everybody in the long run.

Having an Empire and plundering it's commodities created more wealth. We survived losing that.

Funny, I don't *recall* writing that... but it's remarkably similar to the points I made in a long post a few pages back!