At 6/25/16 11:47 AM, yurgenburgen wrote:
At 6/25/16 11:44 AM, squidly wrote:
No more pound. No more connections with the EU. And no more reasons to do business in the UK.
That would be a sound argument if it weren't immediately disprovable.
There's a subtle difference between doing business 'with' the UK and doing business 'in' it, but it's a difference that's going to be felt in at least some of the very areas that think this will be a good thing.
To use an example: There's a town called Wisbech just outside Cambridge, which voted 70% in favour of leaving. Most of the leave voters pointed at the significant amount of eastern Europeans living and working in the town as the reason they want tighter controls on immigration. Assuming the leave vote means less ability to migrate here from Europe (some people are doubtful of if it's actually going to have any effect, but that's another matter), these workers will have much less reason to stay here for the sake of their jobs, and probably move back to Poland.
Sounds exactly like what the leave campaign wanted, right? Well, 2 problems:
1. These Polish workers were doing jobs you can't convince British people to do for the wages the companies were offering (it's mainly food processing plants around there; any higher salaries would bankrupt the company thanks to supermarket food prices being so low in the first place). The average Brit really would rather be unemployed than do this sort of work, despite it being a necessary part of the process of feeding the country, so expecting that tougher immigration laws will see a straightforward increase in the number of British people in employment is just plain unrealistic.
They didn't take 'our' jobs; they created an industry by being willing to do 'their' jobs here and save us the import costs on finished products, which are higher than raw materials they then turn into finished products here.
2. When most of a company's workforce leaves the area, and not enough people come forward to fill the resultant vacancies, where do you think that company's going to go? Yup, that's right: Some of said companies have already said that, with their prior experience of British unwillingness to do these jobs, the only way to continue is to leave with the workforce. I know this type of industry because I work in a food safety testing laboratory; I would not be surprised at all if they followed through with their statements.
Some people will respond to this with: "Well good: They're all gone and it's back the way it was!" Sorry, but it won't be. Many of the native businesses have grown heavily reliant on selling to the immigrant population, and without them propping them up, Wisbech would likely shrink to less than the size it was before the immigration to the area started in any great numbers, putting many of the locals out of business in the process.
This is only a localised example, and I'm deliberately keeping it that way since trying to up-scale any of these arguments runs into complexities even people who've spent their whole lives analysing EU economics data can't predict right now. It's an area, and an industry, I know enough about to say with confidence that the leave voters have shot themselves in the foot over; How much this will apply to other towns, or the country in general, remains to be seen.
Going back to the original point: Yes, people will be willing to do business 'with' those organisations who can handle overseas sales and transactions, but the amount of them willing to come and give the ordinary workers jobs by doing business 'in' here just dropped markedly, simply through the uncertainty itself. Sort of stupid given nothing has actually been changed or negotiated yet, but that's what happens when you announce the country's going to head in a direction many of its investors don't like the sound of.
