peanut- posted:

It probably won't really. Some banking functions will be moved, but financial centres are sticky and comprised of people that are quite happy where they are. The back office stuff that mostly doesn't happen in central London is much more at risk.

There's a lot of markets that operate out of London that EU members states will continue to need unrestricted access to. The City is one area where the UK has a lot more negotiating leverage than most others.

ukle posted:

Its more than just leverage for Britain in talks, it also provides an impetus for the EU nations to ensure that its completed as quickly as possible. Hence why various EU countries have asked that talks should have already started as many are very worried about the affect that reducing the options to liquidity for business that access to the London capital markets provide. Spain just last week raising this point, along with Italy and various Eastern European countries have all raised this issue has to be resolved as quick as possible. So its safe to assume an interim banking deal very early on in the BREXIT talks, assuming France doesn't do a France and try and block everything.

quote:

Arguing that the EU was not aiming to take business from the London financial centre, he added: “What we want is to preserve the integrity of the internal market and preserve the preferential status of those countries that are inside the union. But that does not mean weakening the City.”

The Big Read
No right turn for Spanish politics
Despite an economic meltdown rightwing populists failed to gain a foothold in the country. Why?

Mr Dastis added: “We would have preferred to keep the UK inside the EU but with regard to other member states I think the deal with the UK will have to be pretty amazing for them to say: ‘Yes, now we also want to leave’ . . . I don’t think the case of Brexit is repeatable.”

The foreign minister also argued that Brexit would bring advantages for Spain and other remaining states: “This is an opportunity for the EU to make a leap forward. We can now have greater cohesion than we had when the UK was a member.”

Mr Dastis dismissed as “probably unnecessary” British warnings that the country could adopt a low-tax Singapore-style business model in an effort to lure companies to post-Brexit Britain.

“I don’t think it is a very realistic scenario,” he said, pointing out that the “UK needs tax revenues” and that an uncontrolled race to lower tax rates “hurts everybody”.

jBrereton posted:

"Despite an economic meltdown rightwing populists failed to gain a foothold in [Spain]. Why?"

Because the meltdown was caused very directly by the right lol

quote:

Villacañas still bears the scars of Spain’s economic crisis. Driving into the small Castilian town, the first thing you see is a row of vast, silent factories. Some are plastered with faded “for sale” signs. Others face a slow, losing battle against the weeds encroaching from all sides.

These factories were once the pride of Villacañas. Although home to just over 10,000 people, the town used to be known as the “door capital” of Spain. Before the collapse of the country’s decade-long housing boom in 2008, it boasted 10 large manufacturers that produced millions of doors a year. Local unemployment hovered below 2 per cent and workers had money to burn: luxury cars became a common sight, fancy overseas holidays a regular treat.

When the property bubble burst, six of the main manufacturers were forced to close. Some 3,000 workers lost their jobs. Unemployment in the area increased more than tenfold, eventually peaking at 28 per cent in 2012. So jolting was the transformation that Villacañas became famous once again: as a symbol of Spain’s crisis and its economic woes.

In political terms, however, the real story is what happened next — or what didn’t happen. For all the obvious parallels with the rust-belt states in the US or the hard-hit industrial heartlands of England and France, Villacañas experienced no populist backlash, no anti-immigrant wave and no revolt against globalisation. Despite brutal economic decline and mass unemployment, the political centre held in towns like Villacañas, and across the country.

A decade after the start of the crisis, Spain has yet to see the arrival of a populist far-right party like the National Front in France, an anti-immigration platform like the Alternative for Germany, or an anti-EU movement like the UK Independence party.

Outside Spain, only a handful of smaller European countries, such as Portugal and Ireland, have been able to resist the tide. But recent polls and election results all point to the same conclusion: Spaniards are overwhelmingly in favour of EU membership, and remain untroubled by immigration.

“People here worry about jobs, not about migrants,” says José Manuel Carmona, a member of the Villacañas local council for the centre-right Popular party, the ruling party in a minority government. “If they blame anyone for the crisis it is the politicians.”

Sentiment towards the EU has been profoundly marked by decades of subsidies for local farmers and — once the crisis hit — for retraining workers who were laid off during the downturn. “I think locals here understand that the EU is an institution that has provided funds and help,” says Santiago García Aranda, the town’s Socialist mayor.

Rise of the left

On the face of it, Spain has long seemed like an inviting target for political parties with an anti-EU and anti-immigration message. Since the collapse of the housing boom, the country has suffered a deep recession and a sharp rise in unemployment and inequality. A budget crisis meant Madrid had to slash spending and raise taxes — measures that were blamed at least in part on EU pressure. Trust in the political elite was shattered by corruption scandals.

Moreover, the crisis erupted at the end of a decade that saw unprecedented numbers of migrant arrivals. In 1998, immigrants accounted for just 3 per cent of the population. By 2008, the share had jumped to 13 per cent — one of the highest in Europe — according to official data. And yet, at no point has a far-right anti-immigrant party gained traction at the national or regional level. At last June’s general election, the only party that came even close to fitting that description, a three-year-old movement called Vox, secured just 0.2 per cent of the vote. In Villacañas, Vox obtained just 10 out of 5,771 votes — far behind the local offshoot of the animal rights’ party.

The main political beneficiary of the crisis has been the far-left, not the far-right. Since its creation three years ago, the anti-austerity Podemos party has emerged as a powerful force, winning 21 per cent of the national vote last year. It is, in many ways, a proudly populist movement, whose leaders rail against the elites and are not averse to using divisive rhetoric.

However, the party’s base of supporters and its political platform have little in common with far-right populists: Podemos backers are typically found among the young, well-educated and urban population, who are generally open to migration and support EU membership.

What, then, explains the Spanish exception? Analysts argue there is no single reason, but rather an idiosyncratic bundle of causes and conditions. Lack of strong leadership is one obvious factor. Another is the complex legacy of the Franco dictatorship, which has instilled a profound scepticism towards rightwing authoritarianism. There is also a collective understanding that tough times force people to seek work abroad — as many Spaniards did during the 1960s, and then again during the crisis. A fourth cause cited by researchers is the nature of the recent migration flows into Spain: many of the arrivals hail from Ecuador, Peru and other Latin American countries. They were foreigners, but familiar ones — with the same language, religion and culture as the native population.

These explanations, however, only go so far. Latin America indeed accounted for a significant number of migrant arrivals, but the two largest groups were from Romania and Morocco. According to official data, there are 1.4m migrants from the two countries living in Spain — almost a third of the foreign population.

For a deeper understanding of Spain’s resilience, two additional elements help to set the country apart: national identity and the welfare system.

“The main difference between Spain and other European countries is that, here, people see no link between immigration and national identity,” says Carmen González Enríquez, a senior analyst at the Real Instituto Elcano think-tank. “The sense of national identity is generally rather weak in Spain. You sometimes hear local complaints. People will say: ‘All the local shops have gone’. Or: ‘This village has changed so much’. But it is never expressed in any political form.”

In a forthcoming report for the Elcano Institute and Demos, the UK think-tank, Ms González Enríquez argues that the sense of identity in Spain continues to be shaped by the experience of dictatorship. “The overuse of national symbols and of references to national identity during Francoism caused a countermovement which still persists. The pro-democratic opposition to the regime rejected the exhibition of national symbols, the flag and the anthem, and Spanish nationalism was completely absent from their discourse. Instead, they looked to Europe,” she argues.

Even today, the attachment to Europe and the EU remain strong. According to a poll conducted for the Elcano/Demos study, only 10 per cent of Spaniards want to leave the EU, compared with 22 per cent in France and 45 per cent in the UK (though more than half of British voters chose to leave in June). That level of support reflects Spain’s status as a net recipient of EU funding, but also less tangible factors. For many Spaniards, the EU continues to represent modernity and progress — while Spanish membership of the union offers reassurance that the country has finally joined the European mainstream.

Regional focus

A political appeal to Spanish national identity is further complicated by the long-running tensions between the central state and its regions, specifically Catalonia and the Basque country. Many Catalans and Basques claim a national identity that is not just distinct from the Spanish one but in direct conflict with it. Both regions have strong secessionist movements that hope to eventually achieve statehood and independence from Spain.

For any rightwing movement seeking to activate nationalist sentiment, that presents an immediate problem. If its leaders try to tap into Spanish pride, they risk losing support in two crucial regions that account for almost a quarter of the total Spanish population. If they appeal exclusively to Catalan or Basque national identity, they shut themselves out of the rest of Spain.

At the same time, the political conflict between Spain and the regions has allowed the ruling Popular party, led by Mariano Rajoy, to protect its rightwing flank without stoking or pandering to anti-immigrant sentiment. “The PP has been able to remain a catch-all rightwing party, in part because it has a strong message about defending the unity of Spain. That is a key issue for rightwing voters,” says Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, a political scientist at Diego Portales University in Santiago, Chile.

Spain’s centre-periphery tensions aside, analysts also highlight a welfare system that grants generous access to core services such as health and education but offers little in the way of social housing and direct support payments.

“You don’t have this conflict between natives and non-natives over welfare that you have in other countries,” says José Fernández-Albertos, a political analyst at the CSIC research centre in Madrid. “Spain has pretty good public services but when it comes to housing and cash benefits it’s very weak. And those are precisely the areas where it becomes visible that the state is making transfers from one sector of the population to another.”

As a result, headlines about foreigners claiming benefits and migrant families living off welfare are rare in Spain. “Part of this is always about competition for resources. When there are no resources to compete for, the potential for conflict decreases,” says Sergi Pardos-Prado, a researcher at Oxford university.

It is an argument that goes hand-in- hand with another feature of Spain’s crisis: the fact that migrants were usually hit much harder than the native population, which could rely on family networks to cushion the blow. Foreign workers had no safety net to fall back on. It was, as Mr Fernández-Albertos points out, “objectively difficult to argue that Spain treated its migrants too well during the crisis”.

FT Comment
The side of Spain that seeks sound governance
It is to Spaniards’ credit that they have denied a political market to populist xenophobia

Back in Villacañas, that is certainly the impression of hard-hit locals. At the height of the boom, migrants accounted for 5 per cent of the town’s population — but their share has decreased markedly in the years since. “When the crisis came, most of them just left,” says Mr García Aranda.

Looking ahead, most experts voice confidence that Spain will continue to resist the populist far-right surge. Most of the factors that explain the country’s exceptional status are deeply rooted in its history and society, and are therefore unlikely to change in the short term. What is more, Spain is in the midst of recovery — annual growth in gross domestic product hit 3.2 per cent last year — suggesting that some of the social and economic pressures will recede.

For the leaders of Europe’s political centre, the story of Spain after the crisis offers a glimmer of hope — but not much more than a glimmer. The Spanish exception is less the result of smart politics than of historical accidents and complex social trends that are hard to replicate. Policymakers in Berlin, Brussels and London will find plenty to admire in the country’s resilience to the populist backlash — but not a lot to copy.

jBrereton posted:

You'll need a special passport for that, and doubters are off the list of potential claimants.

Pochoclo posted:

Och aye! Build Hadrian's Wall Again!
I do love Scotland and have seriously considered moving to Aberdeen.

Namtab posted:

I Dont know who Chris Leslie is but he's rammed in All The Amendments, so that parliament will get like 5 minutes to discuss each. Can't people who want to soften brexit coordinate these things?

Namtab posted:

That's the stupidest strategy since Corbyn announced he would never vote no to an unamended brexit

Pochoclo posted:

Technically, they've managed to communicate that idea of opposition better. It's not that they oppose the Tories, it's that they've done better marketing around that identity than Labour.

Which really speaks more about Labour than it does the Libdems.

Pochoclo posted:

I mean they're not bad promises, the only problem is that it's so drat obvious that he's lying.

Iamthegibbons posted:

The Lib Dems are something of a federal party and they are split into two distinct camps. There are the left-leaning liberal socialists, and there are the laissez-faire style libertarianism guys. The socialists tend to have a strangehold on the partys main policies, and this is why most of their manifesto has policies in this line.

All of them are generally against authoritarian intervention by the government. They generally oppose military intervention against foreign countries, oppose ID cards and are in favour of equal rights and civil liberties. All of them tend to be in favour of implementing electoral reform too, mostly since it will increase their share of seats.

But these differences mean depending on your constituency you could be voting for a crazed Orange Booker who wants to place less emphasis on national insurance and increase the role of private insurance in healthcare or someone who wants to nationalise everything and introduce concepts like basic guaranteed 'citizens wages' for all.

I think it's quite cynical to discount them anyway. I think they have excellent and well considered policies in their manifesto. The Green party is the choice for a strongly socialist leaning government, but fat chance of them getting much say in the commons with the FPTP system.
Iamthegibbons hosed around with this message at Apr 6, 2010 around 19:56

ZoDiAC_ posted:

Is there any point in strategic voting? I doubt there is for me, I live in a safe Lab seat but want to vote Liberal since 1) they actually reflect my views more than the other two parties and 2) though I wouldn't mind labour getting in again, I'd really rather not vote for them.

How can I best use my vote?

I have friends who "won't vote" which I actually don't agree with.

ConanThe3rd posted:

I'm voting Lib Dem because my Constituency (E. Dunbartonshire) has been doing quite well with our Local MP, thanks.

Does this mean I hope for them getting in to parliament ret-large? Nah, I'm not that delusional...

Kara Thrace posted:

This too, is my first General Election and I am thinking of just voting for Labour. I've had them for most of my life and to be honest, I don't see anything wrong with it. All I know is that if the Conservatives get in, things would not be any better. I am so desensitized to British politics I just don't give a poo poo who gets in. They're all the same but at least Labour doesn't have a smug oval office as leader and an annoying cabinet.

That's probably the only reason I'm going to vote Labour.

Although I really don't want too.
Kara Thrace hosed around with this message at Apr 6, 2010 around 21:01

ranathari posted:

Fallon posted:
Is there any point in strategic voting? I doubt there is for me, I live in a safe Lab seat but want to vote Liberal since 1) they actually reflect my views more than the other two parties and 2) though I wouldn't mind labour getting in again, I'd really rather not vote for them.

How can I best use my vote?

I have friends who "won't vote" which I actually don't agree with.

Opinion's divided between those who advocate voting along party lines no matter what and those who advocate voting for the candidate in your constituency whose views you agree with the most. Given the whip system and the rise of the career politician, I'm inclined to say that voting along party lines is more productive than voting by individual candidates but it does depend how likely your choice is to rebel.

My constituency is solidly Labour with Respect being the next biggest. I'll be voting Lib Dem simply because I refuse to vote Labour after their shift to the middle but I don't want to vote Respect because that runs the risk of them winning and hurting our chances of stopping a Tory majority. Not the most logical of reasons but it lets me vote without feeling bad about myself.

Pissflaps posted:

Well, you would, because you're being asked to pay a whole extra £100 for access to the NHS.

Lots of foreigners get ongoing, free at the point of care, treatment from the NHS entirely legitimately. Describing it in as simple terms as you are is not entirely honest.

Pissflaps posted:

It wouldn't address health tourist concerns as it's specifically for people living here on a long-term basis (over six months).

Pissflaps posted:

Somebody who is described as a 'health tourist' is specifically somebody who has come to the UK to take advantage of the NHS, from whom payment is not recoverable. That costs £200 million a year. These people aren't paying for NHS treatment.

You might consider the amount spent on them to be unimportant, or the issue not worth much attention, but to say that some other people do pay for the NHS is neither here nor there.

Pissflaps posted:

These are increased charges for some foreign visitors using the NHS, not the International Health Surcharge we've been discussing.

...is correcting you 'contrarianism'?

quote:

Visitors from outside the EU who receive treatment in NHS hospitals in England are now being charged 150% of the cost under changes brought in to discourage "health tourism".

Non-EU citizens settling in the UK for longer than six months are also being required to pay a "health surcharge" as part of their visa applications.

The new rules from the Department of Health came into force on 6 April.

Pissflaps posted:

So, literally from your article, the surcharge being applied is in addition to measures designed to discourage health tourism.

Health tourists are by definition short term visitors. They're not students or others on long term visas living here.

Pissflaps posted:

The fact that there is an identified £200 million health tourist bill makes it obvious that this surcharge being applied to other people that aren't health tourists is not covering the cost, and is not intended to.

quote:

Ms May said the details of a charge for immigrants to use NHS services had yet to be worked out.

But she said: “It’s not fair for hardworking people if they see people able to come into the UK and access public services that they haven’t paid into and so we’re going to be introducing a health surcharge for certain categories of people coming into the UK and that’s what’s going to be in the bill. One of the things the NHS has always been quite bad at is charging people who they should be charging – people who don’t actually have a right to have free access to the NHS, and recovering those costs from them, and we’re going to improve the way that that will be done.”

Laradus posted:

If you want the breakdown of other parties or responder demographics, the data is on the YouGov site here (and other questions such as how well or badly the Government is doing at negitiating Brexit) ;

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/3hy4qn55vq/TimesResults_170131_VI_Trackers_W.pdf

I know some folk are more statistically minded than me.

PS Not sure still in strong position for next PM at 36%

Guavanaut posted:

Engineers are overrepresented among terrorists though.

forkboy84 posted:

How cosmopolitan of him.

learnincurve posted:

I think it's more the fact that he got her a job in politics after he met her when she was a waitress, and then she syphoned off hundreds of thousands of pounds of EU money to UKIP that's raising eyebrows rather than her age.

quote:

Nothing proven, just anti-UKIP mainstream media intentionally making tenuous assumptions. Yet Keith V@z - even with his utterly abh0rrent antics proven - still lands himself an esteemed job with the Parliament's Justice Committee. And he's just one of a multitude that have never really suffered for their genuinely depr@ved lifestyles. The Lab/Con Establishment looks after its own, no matter what the public sees and thinks.

Pochoclo posted:

The DMGT group editors all hate each other's guts, but each of them will consistently publish whatever piece of poo poo they think will give them audience and advertising money because they only really care about that, in the end. They don't give a poo poo about pushing a political agenda.

Jose posted:

the donalds brain is definiteyl on its way out

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/828575949268606977

HJB posted:

Tesseraction posted:

That's No2EU who are the EU parliamentary candidates for the Trade Union/Socialist Coalition, who are the main opposition to Left Unity. The Lexit group was Left Leave http://www.leftleave.org/

quote:

The left defends the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)
adopted by the Council of Europe, a completely separate body from the
EU that Britain would remain a member of whatever the referendum
result.

quote:

Most health and safety legislation originates
in the 1970s, a time of union strength. The national minimum wage was
won by the labour movement—not given to us by the EU. The EU has
not defended workers against any of the 12 Tory anti-union laws since
1980.

quote:

“Fortress Europe” is also developing a military dimension, which EU
treaties openly link to Nato.

quote:

If Britain votes to leave, it won’t automatically mean a move to
the right. The Tories are being torn apart by debate over the EU.
If Cameron loses, he will almost certainly go. If a Conservative
government survives, it will be hopelessly fragile.

quote:

Not only will the government be weakened. The rich and powerful
overwhelmingly support British membership. The City, the Confederation
of British Industry and the Institute of Directors all support the status
quo. So do at least two-thirds of large British firms surveyed by the
Financial Times last year. A crisis for our rulers can open up a greater
space for the left.

Tesseraction posted:

Out of interest how would you defend the EU from a left-wing perspective that isn't a negative about leaving but a positive about staying?

Tesseraction posted:

Firstly, thanks for the reply - I'm not out here to poo-poo them but wonder how it could be sold to the public. Let's be honest the Remain campaign basically waved pictures of bomb sites and made ghostly noises.

(a) has its merits, although I'm curious as to how the effect of lobbying has changed in recent times. The ability of TPP to get as far as it did behind closed doors before popular unrest undid it made me suspicious whether we can necessarily rely on it. What can be done to counter a narrative of "they do things in secret and don't have our best interests at heart" in a Leave campaign?

quote:

(b) also has its merits, but how does it deal with the rising nationalist tendencies in countries like Poland and Hungary? What problems can the EU point to in recent times as examples? Currently it feels like pointing to Greece being hosed (by the admittedly separate institution of the Troika) or Spain being paralysed or Portugal being eyed at arm's length or Italy circling a giant turd-clogged drain are more pertinent negative examples than we can produce a positive one.

quote:

(c) I agree here that freedom of movement is a good thing, but how do you explain that to the ol' 'economically anxious' (read: mildly racist) people who don't trust immigration being in their best interest? I'm aware this is a hard one to answer because ultimately you're having to fight a proto-fascist mass media.

quote:

(d) No argument there, although the average Brit is more likely to talk about how we beat the Nazis once so we can do it again... while also stroking their sleeve with the nervousness of someone not wanting to reveal their Celtic Cross.

quote:

(e) Cynically anyone could argue they EU membership doesn't affect this. It looks like we're going to keep partnership with Europol for sure, and I think someone in this thread posted a statement from the gov saying we're going to reaffirm commitment to Euratom? These don't require full EU membership to be part of.

quote:

I suppose when I say "defend the EU" I mean "defend being a full member of the EU rather than partner status like some others"...

namesake posted:

And yet the serious borders we erect around Fortress Europe show that this not some principled position offered for making peoples lives better, it's a way of making Europe a political and economic force of capitalism relevant in the age of superpowers. It's about as leftwing as the Scottish-English border.

kingturnip posted:

Oh, but they're making pro-EU mugs.

Pochoclo posted:

The reason there's not enough houses is that there's actually enough houses but all the rich fuckers from the world just buy them up and leave them unoccupied.

Regarde Aduck posted:

Are there really no other ways to tackle the housing crisis other than destroying green belts?

Everyone is very flippant about them but I don't see the UK turning into megacity 1 being a very good solution. Especially in terms of mental health.

Pochoclo posted:

Economically, yes. Also, workers' rights, yes. Also, public services, unemployment, inflation, anyway, all fun stuff you have to look forward to.

jBrereton posted:

If you want a vision of the future, imagine McDonnell reading the Little Red Book at the budget... forever...

quote:

The immigration minister said on Wednesday that local authorities had said they only had the capacity to provide places for 400 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children until the end of March.

Spangly A posted:

if corbyn's support removed immediately from the a50 bill, would it make any difference?

would it make any difference to the outcome if he whipped against?

If so and only if so can you reasonably say he "propped them up". A rock holding a door open is propping it. If you take the rock away and the door doesnt budge, it wasn't propping it.

Lord of the Llamas posted:

Well your memory of the New Labour years is selective.