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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

All those experts we've "had enough of"[1], of course. If you think we've got enough faded glory already wait until we set sail on a Brexit low tide and immediately sink.

Rule Britannia!

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGgiGtJk7MA

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The people who voted for Brexit are not going to be hit so bad for this - they weren't the one whos economy was growing and with the workers from Eastern Europe not being allowed in, they will probably get a bit higher salary.

that's a lot of assumptions about people who voted to leave. Not all (or even, I would wager, most) were anti-immigration working class voters. I voted leave, as well as at least 5 other people I know who are open enough about politics to admit it - and they're the minority of people right of Corbyn who are willing to admit it publicly.

I think surveys have shown the leave vote was mostly about immigration:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-latest...

But perhaps you have other data that supports your case?

> Not all (or even, I would wager, most) were anti-immigration working class voters.

If you re-read the above you'll see that I didn't claim to have data on the matter. I'm perfectly open to the idea that a large share of the leave vote is anti-immigration (although that sentiment itself has a broad range of meanings from intolerant to reasoned), but my point was to highlight the perception of leave voters as being generally xenophobic members of the working class as being inaccurate or at the very least, a broad stroke of the brush. Through discussing the vote with the other leavers I know, not once was immigration mentioned as a concern, and we all work in average-to-senior software roles, not Dave the van man who rants about Polish people coming for his job.

Oh ok, so just anti-immigration? Not anti-immigration and working class?

Your anecdotal evidence is not very useful in a reasonable discussion, and it might be more interesting to have a data based discussion (if you have some data).

You seem intent on painting a picture more than reading what I actually wrote:

>Through discussing the vote with the other leavers I know, not once was immigration mentioned as a concern

You seem to be a bit obsessed with backing everything with data. Do you want me to make a survey for the people I've spoken to? I'm not trying to say "immigration is not the issue and I have proof!", I'm saying that immigration isn't the issue for everyone, and that there are people in the main HN - reading demographic (and more than just me and the 5 I know, although I'm sure you're going to ask for a citation) that A. Don't match the image in your head and B. Didn't vote the way they did as some kind of attempt to lock out immigrants.

Your suggestion that discussions can only be had by providing data is just not true. If I were trying to assert a claim large enough to need a sample size then sure, but I'm not.

Your claim here seems to be that there are >1 people who voted for Brexit for reasons other than immigration.

That is reasonably obvious, and not useful basis for a discussion on Brexit.

If you want to gain a better understanding of why people in general voted for Brexit, data would be valuable. Everything else is anicdotal, and not very useful.

I guess that depends on whether your primary concern is getting a handle on the majority vote and the demographic involved, where poorer people voted for a mix of reducing immigration and returning legal sovereignty to British courts, or surfacing the opinions of those who voted leave despite those not being primary concerns and who are in the same income demographic as HN readers who seem to believe that people in their class don't vote Brexit. If you're not interested in the latter then I don't have anything to show you.

In order to support the second point, more data would be required. Essentially all you’ve provided is anecdotal evidence, which isn’t very convincing.

How would you support the claim that people in the “HN demographic” voted in significant numbers for leave?

I don't think it was 'mostly' about immigration, but there were other reasons as well. Of course I don't deny that immigration was a reason for many people to vote leave, but I don't think it is as cut and dry as you suggest.

For example this poll from the referendum shows that the no. 1 reason people voted to leave was 'decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK'

http://lordashcroftpolls.com/2016/06/how-the-united-kingdom-...

Edit: typo

That’s a really interesting link, thanks. The number 2 reason was immigration. I can see that it might be possible that immigration is a subset of “decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK”. I.e. the immigration policy shouldn’t be set by the EU.

It also suggests that leave voter see multiculturalism, feminism, the Green movement, globalisation and immigration as negatives (80%). Overall I see this as supporting the notion that the leave vote was anti-immigration, perhaps as part of a wider distrust of outside influences.

Anti-immigration sentiment in the UK is to a large extent driven by lagging infrastructure.

As just a single example the housebuilding industry has been consistently able to build fewer houses than there are people arriving by a large number, and the statistics over how many people are arriving are themselves deeply suspect - they don't correlate with any other population related statistics, and are based on airport surveys that ask a subset of people whether they plan to stay for a long period.

If politicians allow immigration at levels significantly above the speed at which infrastructure can be built out to support the new people then infrastructure reliability and availability will decline. It is reasonable to be concerned about that if you rely on that infrastructure.

The idea of Brexit voters as incorrigible racists isn't supportable, no datasets of any integrity show that and the brief spike of "omg britain is so racist" died down very quickly after the referendum, simply because the UK is and remains by far the most racially diverse nation in Europe.

The direct claim in the indie that large proportion of folk that have immigration concerns voted leave does not support the thesis that most leavers had immigration concerns, etc.

Can a survey tell you how many people distrust surveys (as in, refuse to take them)?

The numbers I saw, regarding how areas are best positioned to cope with impact of Brexit, suggested that Leave-voting areas would be impacted far worse than Remain-voting areas.

More or less any numbers you see about the predicted economic impact of Brexit come from exactly the same sets of economists who have been proven 100% wrong so far about everything, so have no credibility. They predicted a massive recession in the wake of simply voting to leave, not actually leaving, which never materialised. Then there were claims it would be triggered by the formal notification of leaving - that didn't happen either. They also liked to claim that immigration had no impact on wages, but there have been quite a few stories since about industry leaders complaining about having to increase wages (suspect in and of themselves because immigration hasn't really fallen).

There simply aren't any economic projections of a trustworthy nature right now.

Are you arguing there has been no impact at all? My understanding is that there has been a significant increase in prices since the Brexit vote, generally ascribed to the falling pound (both actual and anticipated). This is obvious in electrical goods but is also affecting the weekly shopping basket, which in turn is impacting people on low pay, or whose pay hasn’t been rising in line with inflation since the banking crash.

That said, not all price hikes are attributable to Brexit. The significant hike in butter prices is apparently more due to a supply shortage across Europe.

Impact worse how? Funny how leftists who claim to be less materialistic and greedy than conservatives can only think in terms of money.

Then we just use the enhanced powers of the parliament to shuffle things around.

That's sort of the point. The uk has rejected market distribution as a fair mechanism

If the enhanced powers of parliament weren't used before to shuffle things around they won't be used after. There were no powers to shuffle things around that parliament didn't already have.

After brexit parliamentary decisions are absolute. Before Brexit entities can use the courts and EU law to overturn acts of parliament.

So as a simple matter of logic there are things you can do after Brexit you couldn't do before - because parliamentary supremacy has been restored.

No that is a fundamental misunderstanding of British law and Parliamentary tradition. Entities could not use courts and EU law to overturn acts of parliaments. The most they could do is tell parliament that they are in breach of EU law and so must decide what to do but it is impossible for a court to overturn an act of parliament. The UK parliament is and always has been completely sovereign. Even UK courts can't overturn an act of parliament. The UK isn't like the US where we have a written constitution where all laws need to conform to it. The times that the EU could affect UK law was when parliament had specifically legislated for the EU to have those powers. Even in those cases though it was an act of parliament that gave those powers.

The closest argument you could make is that if the UK still didn't want to follow EU law when it was in breach then it'd have to make a decision of paying fines (because it'd legislated to give the EU to right to fine it) or leave the EU.

Small businesses will be hit hard, though; e.g., farmers who won't be able to find enough workers to gather the produce off the land.

>All those experts we've "had enough of"[1],

All those experts (~90%) predicted a sharp 20% increase in unemployment in the period between the vote and the finalized deal when surveyed by the bank of England just before the vote because of "uncertainty".

Unemployment didn't spike a massive 20%. It went DOWN.

I'm not even a leaver but seriously... fuck the economists. You're not a smart person if you trust them.

> I'm not even a leaver but seriously... fuck the economists. You're not a smart person if you trust them.

My favorite experience when it comes to economists was back in highschool (~15 years ago), when my teacher showed us a recording of two economists arguing with each other (on the news, I think). One was an expert in macroeconomics, the other in microeconomics.

They were using the exact same evidence to argue opposite positions.

Worth noting that you’re not counted as unemployed if you’re working as little as 1 hour a week, or if you’re on a government training scheme or on Workfare.

Given that many people who work are in poverty it would be more meaningful to track the numbers in poverty.

Officially the UK hit the lowest level of unemployment in like 25 years.

That's bullshit of course. For the reasons you mentioned.

Still didn't go up. Still went down.

The figures for underemployment are down as well.

It's worth noting that we are still in that period and we've only just started to see the economic slow down effects. Unemployment will lag behind the economic slow down. The full effects of Brexit won't be know properly for a while.

>It's worth noting that we are still in that period and we've only just started to see the economic slow down effects

We've been in the transitional period for over a year now. The whole period is only supposed to last about 30 months or so.

Moreover, as far as I can tell zero of leading indicators (shipping, retail, etc.) indicate that this cataclysmic 20% drop will ever come.

We haven't even had a quarter of contraction that can be blamed on Brexit - and we had one of those in 2013!

At what point do you stop saying "too soon to tell"?

At the point where businesses have to make serious decisions. Currently they're almost all saying they're waiting and seeing. Once they stop waiting and start doing we'll be able to tell.

The "wait and see" approach was exactly what was supposed to precipitate the sudden decline in investment and spike in unemployment.

It sort of sounds like you're still trying to argue that the prediction was correct. Are you?

A lot of people derive enormous comfort and security from the belief that there's a social class who can predict the future. In the past they were shamans and oracles reading goose entrails, nowadays they're analysts and economists reading Excel entrails. In the Foundation trilogy they were psychohistorians, basically economists on steroids.

I think it takes a certain amount of bravery to accept that there are no "experts" when it comes to predicting the future.

How was the wait and see approach supposed to drive a spike in unemployment? They're waiting not moving so jobs aren't moving yet. As for a decline in investment we are seeing that and you'd expect the resulting decline in the economy to lag behind that.

Unless you want to argue that the recent economic signs are positive?

There is a reason the word con is in eCONomics.

Yes, because the word has its root in Ancient Greek οἶκος (oîkos), which means house.

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