UK immigration policy was quite restrictive.
https://fullfact.org/immigration/uk-migration-policy-2010-general-election/
“some of the leavers” are not the British government.
But that’s the rub, Tom. Whether in the US or in the UK, those voters on the winning side are going to want things done THEIR way. A great many of the “leave” voters want immigration substantially to end. I think that’s irrefutable. A corollary on the US side would be if the male candidate wins and says “oh, by the way, we’re not building that wall after all.” There would be a revolt.
Forty years ago, England was going through crippling strikes if my memory is correct.
It’s not clear that Scotland would need to apply for membership and be voted in. There’s an argument that an independent Scotland would be one of two (or more) successor states to the UK, and thus already a member of the EU. It would be the other successor state, England-Wales, that leaves the EU, while Scotland simply stays. There’s precedent for this. Greenland, part of the Danish Realm, was granted home rule in 1979 and in 1982 Greenland voted to leave the EU; the rest of Denmark stayed in the EU without needing to re-apply. Similarly, Algeria was a Departement of France and as such part of the EU until its independence in 1962; at that point, Algeria exited the EU, while the rest of France remained a member without needing to reapply.
ETA: Actually in both cases it was the EEC, the predecessor to the EU which did not yet exist, but the precedent still stands.
As to Algeria, that’s impossible – the EU didn’t exist in 1962, or for another 31 years thereafter.
Guadeloupe and Martinique, however, are part of France and, as such, are EU members. Not all overseas territories receive such treatment, however; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_member_state_territories_and_the_European_Union
I’m talking about broad strokes of history, @hebegebe, and I should have said 36 years if you’re going to be picky, because it started in 1980. Since that time, the policy makers of the western world have gradually but inexorably made life easier for the wealthy and harder for everyone else. Union-busting, resistance to a living wage, deregulation, erosion of pensions, the soaring cost of education, lack of affordable housing – these are some of the ways in which life has gotten worse for the working class since 1980. Over the same period, those same policy makers were massively reducing the tax burden of the wealthy and making it easier for them to ship good jobs to third-world countries.
If Scotland did vote to leave, then its divorce probably won’t occur until after the ink has dried on the Brexit divorce. The Scots would already be out of the EU begging to get back in.
During the Scottish referendum, there was no guarantee Scotland could join the EU. France has also got its own Basque separatist headaches, so France would probably go along w Spain in blocking Scottish membership in the EU.
In 18th century America, the business owning Tories who didn’t want economic uncertaity also thought the separatists were a bunch of dumb bubbas.
Look, I’m not saying this is a done deal, only that there’s an argument to be made that Scotland wouldn’t need to go through the normal application process. A lot of people think the context is so radically different now than in 2014 that the Spanish and French objections to Scottish membership in the EU no longer carry the same kind of weight—it’s no longer a question of creating incentives for member states to split up, it’s a question of salvaging as much UK membership as possible now that England and Wales have voted to leave. You make some good points on the timing, but at least some legal experts think the EU could fairly easily amend the treaties to name Scotland as the UK’s successor EU member without going through the normal application process.
I would think the EU would make it easy for Scotland, since it will hurt the UK to lose one of its essential parts.
Interesting theory.
However, the following link states that real median incomes in the UK increased after 1980 and continued to rise until the recession of 2009. Ironically, the fastest rise came during the time of Margaret Thatcher, who was getting the unions back in line towards improved productivity:
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/real-wages-and-living-standards-the-latest-uk-evidence/
hebegebe, I direct your attention to the second graph in [url=<a href=“http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/charts-income-inequality-middle-class-census%5Dthis%5B/url”>http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/charts-income-inequality-middle-class-census]this[/url] piece, Average Household Income 1967-2012. (This is for the US). You’ll notice that the bottom 80% of us have flat-lined in that period.
The final graph, Share of Total Income1917-2012, starkly tells the long-term story of how the wealthy have done relative to everyone else over the last century, and how that story is related to events. For example, right before the stock market crash of 1929 and the decade-long depression that followed, the rich were doing very very well compared to everyone else. At the end of the war, the lines diverge, and the bottom 90% make a good wage for a generation. It is not a coincidence that this was the great period of prosperity in the US. Then you can clearly see that beginning right around the year I citied earlier, 1980, the lines steadily draw together again, and now the top 10% are once again making as much as the bottom 90%.
This isn’t good.
“It is not an amicable divorce, but it was also not an intimate love affair.” – European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker
It’s all about l’amour! Gotta love this very French approach to Brexit. (Juncker is actually from Luxembourg, but he studied in France, so close enough.)
L’amour?
The Leavers thought they were the battered spouse. The comfortable trappings of home were not worth the price of living with an abusive partner who spends all your earnings and slaps you around.
While a discussion of US inequality would certainly be interesting, this Brexit thread isn’t the place to do it. However, I will note that our two linked articles cannot directly be compared because my linked article used individual income and yours used household income, which causes distortions due to the changing structure of families along income lines.
There is a lot of talk about the three million plus signatures on the redo petition. Does anyone know how many of those signatures are from people who voted to Remain?
Probably mostly Remain camp. It’s like Sanders supporters petitioning to redo NY primary. Calling it Regrexit is cute making it sound like leave camp is changing its mind. Elites haven’t learned a thing.
From a chart I once saw, the distinct onset of inequality was NAFTA. The 80s may have paved the road to it but the catalyzing event is NAFTA or globalization. That seems to agree with most experts observation.
Bill Bryson (former chancellor of Durham University) weighs in on Brexit:
He wrote “Notes from a Small Island” back in the early 90s and has journeyed around the country to write a sort of sequel called “The Road to Little Dribbling”. He found that the standard of living has markedly improved since the '80s and 90s.
Also this:
His first book was just hilarious so I will be looking for the new one!
I wonder who Bryson was talking to. My own experience, from frequent work-related times spent in Britain in the mid-2000s, was the opposite. Many under 40 were incredibly stressed, particularly about housing (resigned to life-long renting), and the constant threat of being made redundant. In the British company I worked for, there was a stark contrast between those who managed and those who were managed. It seemed like the two groups couldn’t even talk to each other at times. I remember a particular instance in which the Managing Director gave a holiday party for the employees at his tony estate, in lieu of a year-end bonus. He thought he was being generous, but the employees stayed away en masse.