David Davis has been today on about paying for access to the EU single market (which means accepting the rules, so much for "takng back control" ) along with saying he expects to see “pretty free access” to the UK for skilled labour as he doesn't want to create labour shortages.

Apparently according to him the government's focus is controlling immigration when we just had immigration figures out for the year to June showing 289,000 migrants arriving from outside of the EU, 284,000 from within plus 77,000 returning Brits. Net figure is 355,000 so he could in theory more than halve that figure and even exceed the government's own target of 100,000 net without going to the trouble of leaving the EU just by tackling non-EU immigration.

You could not make this stuff up.

The point being you clearly don't know what you are talking about. The EU commission is made up of 1 President , 7 Vice Presidents and 28 members, one from each state. The president is elected by the European Parliament which is of course made up of elected M.E.P's. The president then chooses the 28 commissioners based on nominations of the elected national governments of the member states but the final makeup of the commission must be approved by the Council - which is made up of 28 ministers from national governments who are of course elected and it must also approved by the European Parliament which as I said is of course made up of elected M.E.P's.

Law making in the EU is now undertaken by what is known as the "ordinary legislative procedure" which works on the principle that consent from both the Council and European Parliament are required before a law may be adopted. The EU Commission may propose a new law but it must go through this process to become law.

So to summarise neither the EU Commission nor Council are unelected, the EU commission cannot pass laws only propose them (EU parliament can and does also propose laws) and laws can't be passed without the agreement of the elected representatives of the Council and EU Parliament.

So your suggestion we turned law making over to an unelected body is complete and utter hogwash. It's also ironic since we in the UK have an unelected House of Lords and government often does appoint unelected Lords as government ministers. The EU is far more democratic than our own government.



So what do you expect to happen? We close the borders? Well you were told today by Davis he expects to see “pretty free access” to the UK for skilled labour and also that we allowed in 289,000 migrants from outside the EU. The government's own target is 100,000 net.

Unless you naively think the UK can function with closed borders you are going to have to accept some migration to the UK. How many will you accept? Do you think all EU migrants are low skilled fruit pickers (they aren't) and don't bring skills we need?




The latest OBR prediction of the cost is based on less pessimistic assumptions than all the other economic bodies. It is still a disaster waiting to happen. On what do you base your prediction that "Long term, however, we will reap the benefits"?

You should have realised by now freedom of movement or not, you are not going to see a significant reduction in migration and if we want to retain access to the EU single market we will pay for it and obey its rules (David Davis again) and that the government wants to do this because it knows the alternative is to put it mildly, not good. You have been well and truly conned.




The Euro is complete irrelevance.

We aren't in it because G Brown had the sense not to join and I just can't believe people ignore the outright corruption of Goldman Sachs's fiddling Greek books and Greek incompetence where basically paying tax was voluntary! The mess many of these countries are in (including Italy) is as much their own doing as anyone else's. But like I said we are not in the Euro so it is irrelevant to the Brexit debate.

As to Turkey you are making that up from start to finish. It is nothing more than UKIP inspired lies.



Good grief you must have been watching too many reruns of Dad's Army. Germans are stubborn? Really? What about the rest of the EU nationalities? Do they not have a say in matters (of course they do just as we do). Are we going to start vetting the racial characteristics of the countries we want to make trade deals with outside the EU when we leave?

Perhaps many Europeans like the EU and see it as a positive? Recent polls suggest so. It's probably got a lot to do with their own governments not blaming the EU for everything that goes wrong unlike our own which has always used it as a scapegoat for its own incompetence.

The saying about "you dont know what you've got till it's gone" may be relevant over the next few years.
With the UK giving up on clearing the national debt and with massive inflationary pressures already in the system (yesterday's news on oil will further add to this), our economy will be severely tested and we will then find out which "side" was right.
The vast majority of people are worse off, in real terms, than they were 10 years ago and things are likely to get worse before they get better. Therefore, rubbing your hands at the thought of being on the outside, may be a little premature.

One of the more worrying aspects of all this, is the popularity of a party (UKIP), who are more right wing than the Tories, who most traditional voters would previously never have even considered voting for.

As May allegedly wasn't invited to the EU's end of term dinner (part funded by you and I), why is the UK still paying its contributions? If they are treating us as if we have already left, shouldn't our government have the guts to reciprocate by withdrawing funding until negotiations have been completed?

Because its not just about a ing dinner.

On free movement, I hope you're all happy with the possibility of schlepping to London to apply for a visa to go and support your team in Perpignan, or hit the clubs of Ibiza, or the beautiful beaches of Greece, or the Canary Islands.

1.4m British people (approx.) live and work in the EU at the moment and if we kick out the EU citizens here, imagining there won't be some reciprocal kicking out is daft. Still, all those expats from Spain can pick veg and work in hotels eh?

That's fine , except NOBODY , I mean NOBODY , has suggested any EU nationals already in the UK will be repatriated , so WHY are YOU suggesting they will ?

As regards the cheap labour market for farmers , so I assume you are happy to see essentially slave labour from other countries working over here ? , how very noble , how very ' European '

Look at the situation in Lithuania ATM , virtually all their Tax paying workers are/have left , leaving the place full of the very young and the very old , joining the EU is killing their country

So stop using the project fear to try to make a point

But they are 'ex-pats,' which sounds all nice and fluffy; whereas when people come here, they are 'immigrants,' which has all sorts of nasty, job-taking, school-filling, GP-misusing, benefit-claiming connotations attached to it.

But, they are all well informed, well educated people Bren, definitely not racist or xenophobic, they are just fed up with immigration
Seriously, the rhetoric used by Farage and Trump in their respective campaigns would not be tolerated in "normal" life, yet it seems that in the modern world, it's absolutely fine to target certain groups of people.
The real worry at the moment is that "typical" Labour supporters, who would never dream of voting Conservative, are more than happy to support Farage and his anti immigration stance.
In typical Daily Mail style, he has marginalised thousands of decent hard working people and sewn the seed that everyone from outside the UK is a benefit scrounger or murderer, it's ugly politics, with little thought on how the country and it's inhabitants will move froward, once we actually exit the EU.

When they talk about free movement, they mean about moving to live and work! We did not have visa requirements pre-EU (save for going behind the Iron Curtain) and it is very unlikely we will in future.

It is great. The result just goes to show we must have had 17m ill-informed people voting (I am being polite...) many of whom fell for a pack of lies.

You only have to read comments around the web to find out just how plain ignorant many people are about what the EU does, what it has done to the good in the UK, how it does it and what its relationship with the UK actually is.

People are lazy. They want their opinions handed to them on a plate. When someone says the EU isn't democratic do they bother to inform themselves of how it makes laws? Do they ****.

What many people don't realise is they are being manipulated. The people doing the manipulating are really not interested in the UK or the people in Wakefield, Wigan or any other depressed area.

Really ?

And the number of people in that audience who seemed to think we could suddenly change tomorrow and that there would be no problem.
How companies would buy or sell anything from within the EU never got a mention or the "hit" that we will take when article 50 is finally invoked.
Also you may have noticed that following David Davis' comments (a Brexit guy) about paying to pay to stay within the single market, the Pound suddenly jumped in value against the Euro.
Most people say that they want to be out of the single market completely and put an end to free movement and whilst there is little doubt that mot want net immigration to fall substantially, there seems little understanding on how the free market works and what the choices are outside it, something that the leave campaign dint't bother telling people about.

Which is ironic, given that just 5% of the total population of Wakefield were not born in the UK; and that includes non EU individuals as well as those from within the EU. So the strong likelihood is that the negative side of immigration some of those embarrassing representatives of Wakefield are most familiar with, is that which The Sun, The Daily Mail and Nigel Farage told them about, rather than experiences from actual real life.