13698227:.MASSHOLE. said:
And I'm still waiting on what economists, news sources, poll sources, and pundits I can read. You seem to disapprove of almost every single credible expert.
Don't hold your breath, the Leave campaign as a whole, acts like the mothers who refuse to vaccinate their kids because there is an old wives tale that vaccines cause autism. Every credible scientist says there is no link, millions of experiments have been carried out and none can find any evidence of a link but still the vaccines are rejected and the result is that children get ill and occasionally die. Blind denial is the last refuge of those who cannot argue a point using evidence because none exists.
The reality is there are very few respected experts, very few important businesses, in fact very few people who have any clue about the few facts that actually exist in this debate, who believe Leave is a viable option. In fact, I can't think of a single Leave campaign claim which can't be relatively easily disproved. Leave is however a very successful series of lies and mistruths headed up by a powerful tabloid media and a few populist xenophobes. They may indeed win.
I'm going to leave (ha) the £350m a week saving lie alone because that has been debunked time and time again. And even if it was a real sum (which it isn't) it would take a contraction of the UK economy of less than 1% to wipe out all the money we can supposedly save. The remaining arguments are essentially:
That the UK has given up its sovereignty which doesn't bear any examination even in the most superficial way. If the UK had given up its sovereignty, there would be no point in this referendum. The EU could simply ignore the results, as Spain did the results of a Catalan referendum recently. The UK can call this referendum and decide to leave the Union at any point, ergo the UK remains sovereign.
Fallback argument number one is generally: "The EU is an unelected bunch of bureaucrats, we need a democracy". An argument which has some theoretical merit, but conveniently ignores the fact that in the UK we don't actually have one either, certainly no more of one than the EU. The House Of Lords, which is required to pass all law, is unelected. The Civil Servants who draft nearly all of our laws, are unelected. The absolute majority Conservative government, the only elected element of our system, received only 37% of the vote in the last election. We don't even have a constitution to guarantee that the basic ideals of the country, whatever they might be, aren't ignored. That is not democracy, that is minority rule. The EU has a significant democratic deficit too, its accountability needs to be hugely improved, but is still better than what the UK has.
Fallback argument number two is the old faithful, immigration. There are plenty of lies here too. For example, Turkey is not joining the EU. It started the process of trying to join in 1987 and in 29 years, it still hasn't come close to meeting the EU's required criteria. Then there is the unsolvable issue of Cyprus. Even if all these obstacles were overcome, the UK could still veto Turkish membership, as could all other member states.
The entire argument ignores the fact that, despite popular opinion, immigration is a net contributor to the economy. The fact that the government may not have reinvested said contribution in to improving social services to cope with a population increase is not an EU matter, it is a national political matter. Funnily enough the EU has no say in how the UK budget is invested (except for the less than 1% that is 'paid' in membership to the EU) because the UK is, you guessed it, a sovereign nation. Immigration is however a perfect scapegoat for governmental failure to provide for those who are worst off in society, and has been used as such all throughout history.
At the end of the day though many people don't care that the facts where they exist (and where they don't, the best estimates of those best positioned to predict likely outcomes) all argue one thing. And like it or lump it, that is their prerogative, that is democracy.
**This post was edited on Jun 15th 2016 at 9:24:36pm