If the result is Leave, will we leave?

You still ignore it. You can't ignore the facts.

There's a big difference between decisions to do with the constitution and decisions to do with the EU membership. The whole referendum alongside the rise of far right parties in Europe will be a massive wake up call that the EU needs reform or it simply won't survive.

Unnecessary burden regulations that we will have to abide by if we join the trading bloc, but now we have less benefits and no vote on. And if we dont join the free trading zone, well, i've already argued that on this thread.

How we leave depends greatly on who replaces Cameron at the helm of the Tories. Provided it's somebody from the current cabinet and not a hard line skeptic or Remainer then something like the following will happen.. Gove will be dispatched to Brussels to negotiate our exit, his mission being to keep us in the single market while securing an opt out from immigration constraints.. after around 3 months negotiations will break down when the EU plays hard ball and wants us to accept free movement in return for the single market.. after another 3 months the government will start to look stupid and be thinking of 2020 so Gove will replaced.. the new guy will be instructed to capitulate on free movement to secure the deal, the deal is done within a year bar the technicalities, the UK leaves at the end of 2018 to join EFTA.

*Note that both sides will want to make it look good so instead of pure free movement we'll capitulate to something a minimum EU immigrant quota of a couple hundred thousand. The EU will say their citizens still get to come, the government will say they've secured a meaningful cap on immigration from the EU and probably get an exception for new EU members.

I don't think that course too likely, I expect that a hard line on immigration will be maintained otherwise we start looking at a resurgent ukip

Posted from TSR Mobile

I don't think that course too likely, I expect that a hard line on immigration will be maintained otherwise we start looking at a resurgent ukip

Posted from TSR Mobile

You are going to have a backlash against Leave if Leave wins in any event.

A lot of Brexit supporters are going to say "but you never told us it would be like this".

Leave has oversold the lack of adverse consequences if we Brexit.

The Leave proposals on what would happen if we Brexit are laughable

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36534802

Leave is guaranteeing to maintain receipts to existing recipients of EU funding so we have exactly £8.5Bn of money to play with. Yet we are going to cut VAT on energy and transfer £5.2Bn to the NHS.

We are going to square the circle by 2020 of not having a free market in labour but be inside the EU's free trade zone.

What happens in the meantime? We seem to be opting out of the bits of the EU we don't like at our pace but are continuing to enjoy the other bits until we put some alternative in place.

If a hard line on immigration is maintained, you will see falling provision of services, particularly in London and the south-east as labour shortages kick in whilst you will also see rising unemployment in the UK as a whole as the failure to secure a trade deal reduces exports but more importantly curtails investment by multi-nationals.

The discontinuities in the UK economy will become very obvious.

As for a lot of keeping things we like and getting rid of things we don't, care to list the things that we want and can't buy into from outside, besides trade

£5.2bn to the NHS (not sure where you pulled that figure from, I would expect 2-3bn)

£2Bn won't go very far when you have to set up replacement bureaucracies and bilateral treaties for the functions the EU is doing now. That is without Osborne's concern that tax revenues are going to plummet.

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I am a British born muslim patriot who is fighting for a Vote Leave. I care about this country. I want it to succeed. I want every family to have very good wages, opportunity for jobs and nice assets.

We cant have these things if we are in the EU, and have open borders to 330,000 immigrants a year and being forced to give them benefits even if they have temporary stay.

Experts at LSE have calculated that the UK would need to renegotiate 100 trade agreements.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexitvote/2016/03/04/leaving-the-eu-would-mean-renegotiating-more-than-100-trade-agreements/

Each will take at least 6 years to redraft and will involve about 100-200 full time people per treaty here in the UK. That's probably something like £5bn to do all the work.

On top of that, the UK would face annual export tariff costs of almost £6bn.

That's an £11bn price tag on the new Brexiteers 'there will be no change' replacement for the Single Market.

Yet if other EU members do that, we would put tariffs on their goods, which kinda suck for them, being the biggest export market for goods for the rest of the EU. (Proven, a fact, whatever you want to call it.)

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I think that would be unlikely. For one thing, imagine how unpopular it would make a government that suddenly made all imports much more expensive. This will happen anyway to some extent, as the pound slumps against the Euro following Brexit, so the last thing the government will want to do is add yet more cost.

The point being that we hold a lot of leverage.

If they intend to threaten us with increased tariffs, we can also threaten them with increased tariffs, which is bad for them and their interests.

It's not like it's some random negotiable threat - it's standard practise for the EU to place tariffs on non-member imports.

There seems to be something fundamental about the Single Market that Leavers just don't get - that it's better to be inside it than outside it.

The point being that we hold a lot of leverage.

The British government holds as much leverage as the British public will permit it to hold, which won't be much.

The position is asymmetric.

The British public will oppose British tariffs where they perceive this will put up UK prices. British tariffs will be new (because the EU sets our tariffs at present) and will have to be got through Parliament against a lot of special pleading.

EU tariffs will be automatic. We are no longer in the single market. Tariffs will automatically apply to us except to the extent any special deal is done between the EU and UK.

Whilst the British public will put pressure on the British government against tariffs, the same pressure will not be put on the EU Council and Commission, by the European public and in many cases they will be competing producers throughout Europe lobbying for those tariffs.

It is very easy to see EU tariffs on Land Rovers because not enough of the European public cares and European car makers are in favour, but no UK tariffs on imported Mercs and Renaults because the British public won't stand for tariffs on their cars. That is a win-win for the EU. They get their tariffs and we don't impose any back.

Leave see this purely in terms of volume of trade whereas it is about the elasticity of trade.

The attitude of the public to trade barriers is very important. About 15 years ago George Bush imposed steel tariffs on the EU in excess of WTO limits. The EU went to the WTO court and won the right to make retaliatory sanctions. Bush said he would keep the tariffs in place. The EU didn't impose tariffs on American steel. The EU imposed tariffs on California oranges and Detroit cars. Bush caved in within days..The steel producers complained bitterly. They still wanted their tariffs but the Detroit car men and California orange growers were politically more important.

Bush wasn't able to make this a national fight for the US. The EU spoke over his head to powerful groups of Americans.

Imposing harsh tariffs isn't the same as gracefully leaving a union, they simply wouldn't be allowed to apply punitive tariffs because we've done nothing wrong.

Funny that you should argue about Detroit car manufacturers - don't you see the parallel with German ones?

I never said they would. The point I was making was about how the public influences the ability to impose tariffs.




The parallel doesn't matter

The EU public didn't care about imposing tariffs on Detroit car makers. The Detroit public did.

The British public would care about imposing tariffs on Stuttgart car makers, so the question of the German public putting pressure on the EU over tariffs on British goods never arises.

The German car manufacturers would very much care about their sales dropping as Brits import cheaper American cars instead...