The NHS is already fucked. Loosing all those staff is genuinely going to kill people.
The NHS has already lost 10,000 staff. The training organisations haven't seen more students signing up - some saw significantly fewer.
Hunt's plan to forbid access to A&E unless you've been referred shows how desperate the situation is.
JFYI, on the new (British) maps under development it will be marked Beorhthelmes tūn AFAIK, whilst on the new (Euro) ones it should be identified as "Novvs Portvs".
The EU is making motions towards privacy protection (see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/19/eu-outlaw... amongst other similar proposals) where the UK under May and Rudd seems to be wanting to move towards the China model (if the government can't read it, it is illegal).
If that intent remains then once we split there will be a stark difference that will be of concern to any companies who handle (or intends to handle) private data & communications as it will put off their potential userbase.
I doubt this will make existing companies (including startups) move right now, or in the foreseeable future, but it may make brand new startups consider forming elsewhere or existing EU companies think twice if they were considering some form of a UK branch.
There are other concerns with regard to the unclear future of free trade which will have an effect too. But you have to consider the extra hassle of setting up elsewhere: an entrepreneur living in the UK will experience greater "startup friction" trying to setup elsewhere (as they'll have to move at least some of their life) which might be more disadvantageous in the short term.
If enough technical people move for similar reasons then we'll see a skills shortage that will put tech startups off, but that is a much longer term matter.
I note that you mention "EU staff" not "UK staff" - if you are meaning to specifically exclude UK workers with that wording then the growth of people wanting to move may be due to the apparent glut of racist behaviour in the few months following the vote.
I think it's going to be a bit overblown. It's easier for EU tech employees to move their lives, than it is for London tech companies to up and move elsewhere. Because of this, I theorise that there will be an intermittent period where there will be a labor shortage in London, due to lack of EU workers to supplement the demand in London tech. This will balance out with time, with EU companies moving more of their offices out of London.
I think we have started to see this already, at my gig, we have found it quite difficult to get decent candidates through the door, and anecdotally a lot of our better candidates have been from the EU. We are about 50% Londoners, 30% EU, 20% World.
However, increased costs from complying with new legal systems and a shortage of skilled labour pushing up prices are two ways in which the average person will experience Brexit as a bad thing.
(Though personally I think the economic costs are not the most important aspects of Brexit.)
Once that has all died down hopefully there will be some Scottish Independence work or something :-)
Sadly I started contracting too late to get in on the Y2K bonanza.
Every time I go for a new role I get asked "Have you worked on a regulatory project before?" Er, where have you been? Have there been any non-reg projects in the last five years?
The difference between a team of 6 UK/EU devs living in London, vs. 6 EU devs remote working from Poland isn't that much. It's a little trickier to manage, but is cheaper in terms of living expenses and therefore salary.
So far from Brexit bringing back jobs to the UK, it'll just drive away anything that can be done remotely.
This means that the companies will probably still stay in London, but the jobs will go elsewhere.
Much more concerned about the possibility of the current Labour party gaining power actually.
Sorry to do politics on HN but this post needed to be called out, none of these points are a combination of relevant and applying more to Labour than the Tories.
And now look where we are. I'm not sure your optimism is warranted. We're living in strange times.
Depends on whether the hearer likes or dislikes him.
Again - this is not new.
Any additional growth is mostly attributable to Obamaera policy (tho some short term juicing of markets has happened under Trump occasionally).
The only fudge that can work at the 11th hour is staying in the EU in all but name; there is no way the EU can agree to something non-disruptive quickly without risking it continuing on indefinitely, which means it needs to be almost identical to what went before. And I don't think the Tories can sell that to either the public or their own membership.
A mutually beneficial deal will never happen; the UK cannot come out of Brexit better than before. Any mutual benefit can only come after the UK has climbed out of a pit scary enough to put off any further risk of countries leaving.
If public opinion on Brexit changes, then it might be different. I don't see that happening yet though, and the risks all seem to be on the downside - painting the EU as intransigent and punishing.
I think it might. Polls on the subject have been tightening, and even showing signs of moving towards halting leaving[1].
I think as more of the leave voters die off (as they were predominantly older voters), and realisations about the actual real-world consequences of leaving filter through to the public consciousness, the process may be halted, softened, or reversed.
That's mostly conjecture (and hope, honestly) on my part, though.
[1] https://twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/status/918740988365074432
Compare with the situation of Greece. There was essentially very little change in the EU position, and Greece eventually realised they had no leverage and would be worse off outside the EU and had to acquiesce.
The only deals that have a chance of happening are "forget the whole thing, no Brexit" or maybe "Norway" (EEA including free movement, but no voting rights). "No deal" would be a disaster.
And if it's left until the 11th hour plenty of companies will have no choice but to avoid planning beyond that time. Like Ryanair pointing out that they can't take bookings without knowing what legal framework will be in place: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/11/ryanair-chief-mic...
Addendum: this article by Gordon Guthrie, Erlanger and former extremely minor politician, sums up the lack of choice: https://medium.com/@gordonguthrie/no-deal-wont-happen-e185f9...
Thankfully I waited until after the referendum. The ensuing social, political, and economical confusion was convincing enough. I bought a house not far from my hometown, somewhere in southern Europe. I'll move there after some major renovation, some time next year.
I might be biased, but I realized in the few years I lived in the UK that the services, health care, and general quality of life are overall better down there than up here. I obviously have only anecdotal proof of that.
On a positive note, it has been very instructive so far to live in the country where this is happening, and especially in an area that voted in favor of leaving.
You said you live in Birmingham. It's not a city known for it's fantastic services, health care, and quality of life. The UK is a very varied place in all of these metrics. I've known and worked with many EU nationals who've come to the UK, lived and worked in one place for a few years, and formed a strong opinion on things. You might not have a complete perspective.
Still, Birmingham is the second largest city in the UK, so its low quality of life affects a large number of people. Moving to a place like York or Oxford is infeasible for many.
In addition, those Brexit fears are overblown. UK leaves EU and apparently it's doomsday. Did it ever matter to anyone who considered a move there, that US/Canada/Norway/Israel/Australia/NZ/Switzerland/.. has never been part thereof? Was it a consideration in your decision? I bet it was not.
Yes, it was a very big part of my decision when moving to London that I didn't need a Visa to work here, contrary to the country I was residing in before.
Yes it was a big part of my decision that I was free to change job, that I wasn't linked to an employer, that I didn't need to renew said visa it every X year, that my spouse could work with the same rights as me, etc.
UK leaving the EU isn't the main problem. UK leaving the EU in such a bizarrely unstructured and chaotic way without any plan in place is the problem.
What happens to EU citizens living the in the country that wants to leave, and vice versa? What kind of international agreements and contracts should replace what the EU provides? What about obligations to retirement funds of (former) EU employees?
There's a myriad of other questions to discuss, and given the number of states involved, two years is a very short time frame to settle them.
The reporting I heard about the current brexit negotiations might be biased, but I get the impress that the British government doesn't even seem to have well-defined positions on most of these issues, which slows down the negotiations.
The problem isn't so much that the UK is leaving the EU but that the current government as well as other prominent Brexit figures don't have the foggiest idea how they're going to proceed. They have neither vision nor plan (other than "strong and stable", whatever that's supposed to mean) and that's quite a bit unsettling.
The UK hasn't been conducting its own trade negotiations for decades now. They neither have the time nor the personnel required for having trade agreements in place by the time the UK is supposed to leave the EU if everything goes according to plan. It's not even clear if the UK can - as is commonly stated - easily fall back to WTO rules in case no agreement comes to pass because while the UK is member of the WTO that membership currently is contingent on its EU membership.
So, while Brexit might not spell doomsday for the UK this completely haphazard approach of dealing with it doesn't exactly bode well either.
Sounds exactly what my current government (Merkel) is successfully doing for years now.
The difference is that all those countries have lots of international agreements that make trade and travel rather easy.
The UK doesn't have that many international contracts with other EU states directly, because such matters have been handled by the EU. A "hard" brexit would throw back such matters by more than twenty years, and concern many of UK's most important trading partners.
Brexit is real, big players are feeling the pain.
Loyalty is hard earned, and easily lost. We've (the UK) decided to throw away people's loyalty.
Though the left tried to stifle this fact for years, it's now generally accepted that immigration has suppressed the wages of native British workers. Surely we should be more concerned about solving any skills shortage by training up the people that are here already? Or should we just throw them on the scrapheap and import cheap migrants? I don't often get roused to anger by debates like this but when it seems like immigrants are being privileged over native Brits it does seem like a pretty massive pisstake.
In 2017, 14 injured and 3 dead due to terrorists according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
In contrast, 329 people were killed on French roads in June 2017 (3469 killed in 2016 total) (https://www.thelocal.fr/20170724/france-road-deaths-in-june-...)
Your risk assessment is v.poor.
The murder rate is less than a third that in the US and twice that in Germany. Are these really levels of threat that people worry about.
In the entire rest of the 21st century (2000-14, 2017), the total was 25 killed. 1980-99 only had 86 killed. Sure, you can pick the two single worst years to try and make your case but it's intellectually dishonest.
as a french, this is so overblown. You've got much more chance getting shot in the US than in France.
Recent stats give 7800 murders in the US (only by gunshot!) since the beginning of the year, vs 729 overall murders in France:
* https://www.planetoscope.com/Criminalite/1416-meurtres-par-a...
* https://www.planetoscope.com/Criminalite/1201-homicides-comm...
Falling from a ladder also kills more people than terrorism, right, but this is not what people are afraid of. Watch this to understand that we're talking about two different distributions: https://youtu.be/9dKiLclupUM?t=367
Terrorism SUDDENLY increases the odds of you being killed by it. And that is what - rightfully - scares people. Example: Before 9/11 the chances of being killed by terrorism was let's say 0.000000.....1%. After 9/11 the chance SUDDENLY increased a hundredfold. That change in probability never ever happened in the distributions of car-accidents, being shot in the US or falling ladders.
I'm quite happy living in the country - little chance of getting enriched by a truck of peace out here, fingers crossed.
Let me cite some numbers:
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested... "According to estimates from the 2013 ACS, the U.S. immigrant population stood at more than 41.3 million, or 13 percent, of the total U.S. population of 316.1 million. Between 2012 and 2013, the foreign-born population increased by about 523,000, or 1.3 percent."
According to https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/11/germany... the "mass immigration" to Germany in 2015 was about 890k, which with a baseline population of about 82 Million is less than 1.1%. And that was the peak, and has radically declined since then.
I don't have any numbers present right now, but I'm pretty certain that mass shootings in the USA have a higher death toll per capita than terrorism in western Europe.
Update: According to [1] the US has 30 death per 10k population per year from mass shootings. [2] finds 22 death from terrorism in Germany in 2016 noteworthy high, which equates to ... well, you don't even have to do the math to see how much lower it is.
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34996604 [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4052696/Germany-s-ye...
If you have an EU-passport, you can just move here and start looking for a job. If you can code, you can shoot me an email, and I can try to help. (I run coderfit.com, a tech-recruiting agency in Zurich)
In fact, smart businesses will new open offices in UK (outside of EU), just to hedge their bets on the future. Buy low, sell high.
But isn't that what membership of the EU gives the UK today? So give up the membership, you give those up to. It's kind of the whole point of the EU.
Scary how people equate those, without understanding the (monstrous) difference.
All the things you list have either been already implemented in the EU, or their implementation is being actively discussed.
The gradual loss of sovereignty (the so-called "salami method") is also what prompted many people to vote for Brexit. Not everyone was a knuckle-dragging racist.
You appear to be reading different newspapers than I do. They are all reporting "forget it" to these options.
Where power originates with people, manipulating the general opinion is the ultimate source of power. Ever heard of "bank runs"? It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy -- once you manage to scare enough people, you can shape reality. Healthy banks fall. Threads like "Should I leave the UK because of Brexit?" pop up.
What I'm saying is there is (as in, must necessarily be) very little implications of "Brexit", technically speaking. What will really happen is all about what people's emotions make it to be, which are in turn shaped by whose PR prevails.
How (what mechanism) is this a necessity?
Bureaucracies are not productive enough to enact changes like Brexit in a short amount of time.
Europe will need to determine exactly the ruleset which they believe will apply to UK imports/exports, and it will be extremely costly and slow to make any significant changes, since whatever is decided will need to flow down to multiple agencies.
Consider, for example, the cost of rewriting lots of technology to support a new arrangement for the UK. Can it be done in 2 years, 4 years, 6 years in every single country that the UK trades with?
It will be easier to have arrangements to continue with what we have for now and then to grandfather in what already exists at some point.
(This is just my layman's perspective and it's based entirely on intuition so I could be completely wrong!)
On the contrary, it is necessary for the EU as a political project that there are negative implications of Brexit, and that those negative implications are perceived by everyone.
Those are pretty big "ifs," don't you think?
Being in the EFTA would mean continuing to obey EU legislation, continued freedom of movement and paying money into the pot, ie. everything the Brexit campaign was against.
So, no, those agreements will likely not remain in place. The EU wil not agree to give the UK all the benefits of EU membership without the costs.
There may be other benefits to Brexit, but it will not be the case that Brexit will be good because the UK will negotiate a deal that, of itself, is better than the current deal the UK gets.
Not everything. For some people it was about symbolic sovereignty, or even about the legal structure.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/catalans-to-defy-spanish-court-...
In the last two weeks around 400 big and medium companies (national and international) changed their tax domicile from Barcelona to other Spanish cities (Valencia, Malaga, Bilbao or Madrid). Including the biggest catalonian banks, and six of the seven catalonian companies in Ibex 35.
Could happen the same in UK? Nobody knows, but when it starts other companies will follow. No matter what they say now. If we can learn something from this smaller simulation of brexit is that money hates troubles and can run faster than politicians.
1. No certainty that our customers will remain here or that they'll keep buying. We're seeing larger customers slow down spending.
2. No certainty that we can hire the right people from wherever we need to.
3. Little hope that the government will act in a pragmatic, pro-business manner (in fact, red-tape and the corporate tax burden is all but certain to rise for anyone who's not a large multi-national). HMRC (the tax man) are on some crusade to impose some MTD (Making Tax Digital) program and some other disasters on business, tightening up rules on the use of independent contractors, etc. This is not the government showing flexibility, this is the government going about business as usual whilst squabbling over what Brexit means and leaving the economy unattended.
I don't understand how any of that can be considered contentious especially as it's been pushed back to beyond April 2019 for roll out?
Asking your average market stall trader or a small retail shop to now require that they keep their management accounts up-to-date quarterly (when at the moment it needs to be done annually and the average accountant charges several hundred ££) is why its contentious.
Edit: here is a short summary from CIoT: https://www.tax.org.uk/policy-technical/technical-news/makin...
This has been reiterated since day one. EU citizens will have a right to stay and UK Gov will do absolutely everything they can to see that through. The only reason they cannot put it to paper yet is they are waiting for reciprocacy from the EU. Once the EU agrees to provide UK in EU with exactly the same rights as the UK is offering them, it will go down in law.
There is so much bluster and threats from all sides. It takes a bit of digging and close examination to see what really is being said and offered.
Will EU do this though? Seems strange to allow UK both to be in and out of the EU at the same time.
You have it the wrong way around. The EU negotiation team proposed for all EU nationals (EU in the UK, and UK in the EU) to keep the same rights first, and the UK replied with a much worse deal.
I feel London's a bit like Rome or Athens in as much as were a rich elite living off the back of a massive pool of slave labour, or cheap imported labour in this case.
Brexit is only going to have a short term effect on the tech sector, we'll still let highly skilled labour in and probably give them generous tax incentives to stay personally and at a corporate level.
Thinking like that will make you a wise investor.
The median full-time job in the US pays around $45,000. That median person has no four year degree and is not living in a coastal city.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
The data seems to be suggest that Boston is reasonably comparable to London[1]. This isn't my experience though.
[1]https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Internet and TV ~1.5x as expensive. Mobile phone plan ~2x as expensive. Simple things like fresh fruit and veg at least 1.5x. Utilities ~2x as expensive.
Although, that said, we can keep going down the line and look at cities like Raleigh or Austin where wages are not that much lower than here and prices are way lower. Definitely have been tempted by that at times.
In my experience however this does not translate to actually being twice as wealthy :(
And in the NHS, healthcare costs are paid via taxes, which means less take home money. So in fact, you'd expect UK wages to be higher to make up for it.
I'm waiting to see what happens. It's already done a number on my relative wealth through the pound dropping, but just going to ride it out for a bit and see how dumb the govt. is in the negotiations.
As others have said, London is so ridiculously international and concentrated with tech experience and that eases my mind a bit, but if they do crash out and things go tits-up I'll seriously look at leaving.
Brexit means I won't.
At the moment, selling to the EU just requires filling in VAT and EC Sales List tax forms. This paperwork is all automated by accounting software.
If selling from a UK Ltd company ever becomes a problem, it is a simple matter to create a company in an EU country so I can continue to sell services and products via that. Having residency isn't required to setup and run a company in many EU countries, so I suspect I'd be able to continue working without worry.
The only issue would be transferring over income from a foreign country in a compliant manner. If that becomes expensive, then it might be worth moving residency to a different country. But rushing to make a decision seems rather silly when the decision depends on details that haven't even been talked about yet.
I would say that any breakdown in negotiations means that Brexit is going to REALLLLY happen (i.e. Hard Brexit). We are on a 2 year clock and time is running out. Who knows - maybe the UK and EU will pull a rabbit out of the hat. However, I can't get my head around anyone being blasé at this stage.
I wish we could get rid of the whole rancid bunch of politicians, and hire some company to take care of it all with dignity.
Its currently 19%, lowest in the G7, and will fall to 17%
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/corporation-tax-t...
Yes, I want to leave. I believe in the idea of Europe and want to help it succeed.
I work in London. It used to be a great place to be if you enjoy living in an open multicultural environment with fresh ideas. Now it's turning into an old boring and way overpriced place.
The only people I know who have moved to Europe aren't in tech.
(My grandmother was born in Ireland)
So we are not going to move to a none English speaking country for what? easier access to trade?... Just set up a EU based subsidiary company at a later date after launch and translation.
I dont think it's viable. Of course panicked EU citizens will return to homeland due to lack of certainty. Which is odd, that they think UK are not going to be as welcoming after brexit.
Many voted for sovereignty, not to be a star in a flag. They voted for democracy for there voice to be heard in London not a whisper in Brussles. They did not see the economic benefits that are supposed to be the cornerstone.
Where the message is confused is that many did vote to end freedom of movement suggesting unlimited immigration put downward preasure on wages. Though the message from Vote Leave (or other campaign groups) was ever to kick people out who are already here.
There are many of none-eu ethnicity that voted to leave the EU. Why can anyone from EU come? but a pakistani parent can be denied visa to live with children in UK. An issue echoed many times.
Like I was saying it is odd that this message you outline is resonating. I dont know any brexit supporter that would want to kick people out!
Perhaps, for now. If hard trade barriers are in place soon that status will change dramatically.
Digital services are affected by other types of regulation though which won't really change as a result of Brexit (e.g. if you're a British online accounting company selling a version optimised for German companies).