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[Lazydocker]

Impressive podcast interview well worth listening to, with UKIP's only MP Douglas Carswell.

http://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2016/02/24/in-a-week-dominated-by-the-eu-ukips-douglas-carswell-is-this-weeks-pbpolling-matters-special-guest/

There are two sides to immigration, the skilled we need and should welcome and the unskilled that could be done by the UK unemployed. Many unskilled unemployed immigrants are being exploited by the unscrupulous at wages well below the minimum, as Ben Judah's book "This is London" shown in his article below:

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/opinions/london-where-people-cling-to-prayer-not-politics-boris-johnson-immigration-minimum-wage

Except a lot of them think they're either above it or are "entitled" to their benefits

Which is why, in those circumstances, they should be told to pick cabbages or starve. When you have them by the balls their hearts & minds will follow. 

Errr... If they don't prove that they are actively seeking work they don't get JSA but it doesn't make them do it

And those that do just make sure they aren't employable... Some of the dross I've had turn up for interview is just mind boggling!

[05omegav6]

At risk of being controversial if there were no benefit system, they would have little choice... that said, there are those who genuinely need the support that benefits provide, so flawed as it is, the current system is a reasonable one imho.

Some people really do need a damn good kick up the arse though, either working for food and shelter* or possibly shooting, but which is preferred depends on your position on the Lenin perspective. Neither really works unless the status quo is torn up.

*Charity or slavery? You decide.

[Sir Tigger KC]

At risk of being controversial. 

If UK firms paid decent wages then maybe youngsters would be more interested in getting out of bed in the morning.  It seems that the default wage these days is minimum wage, or the so called living wage as they now call it.   I don't know much about the benefits system as I've never claimed,  but if you can get money for nothing and it's not much less than minimum wage or in some cases more especially where kids are involved I find it hard to condemn them to be honest.  In many areas the ' benefits culture' is so entrenched that people think it's perfectly normal to claim.   

Between 2001 and 2008, I drove lorries for a living and worked for a firm that hauled chilled foods from food producers into all the major supermarkets distribution centres.  Prior to 2004, all the workers in these places were locals and got good wages.  Sainsbury's for example paid kids £20,000 to push a pallet around.  After 2004 and within a year pretty much all of these youngsters had been replaced by Eastern Europeans doing the same job on short term, minimum wage contracts. 

So while mass immigration has been great for UK plc, I can't think it has been good for Society and I often wonder what happened to all those local youngsters working in the places I used to go to in my trucking career.

I expect I'll get banned now for talking like a socialist! 

[Kevin Wood]

The problem is that our labour market has opened up to include people who are used to living on a very much lower wage than here, mainly because they come from a place where the cost of living is much lower, and are happy to endure worse living standards here for the money. Industry has exploited that.

I suspect the UK has benefited in that Sainsbury's now make more profit on a pint of milk than they did. They are still screwing the dairy farmers into the ground on the purchasing side, so the benefit hasn't gone down the supply chain. Up to the shareholders and CEO, then. Great.

We could increase the minimum wage, but that only exacerbates the problem of cost of living and widens the gap between us and the overseas labour markets. In any case, employers find other ways of getting round the minimum wage, especially for migrant labour where the employees don't know their rights and they can work under the radar.

The same story is happening in all domains around the EU. It was a group of smaller markets, all different, often quite radically different, but coexisting with enough resistance to mobility that they coexisted happily. Remove the resistance overnight and we have all sorts of problems, like trying to run the economies of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland on an economic model that works just fine for Germany.

The EU has put everything into the same pot without allowing enough time (possibly a generation or two are required) for things to level out naturally. In some cases the differences are more cultural, so probably won't work themselves out even given time. Can you ever see Greece or Spain matching German levels of productivity? Can they do so without being culturally ruined in the process? Is there a need for them to do so, other than to make a fundamentally flawed currency union project work?

[Viral_Jim]

I suspect the UK has benefited in that Sainsbury's now make more profit on a pint of milk than they did. They are still screwing the dairy farmers into the ground on the purchasing side, so the benefit hasn't gone down the supply chain. Up to the shareholders and CEO, then. Great.

While I won't argue the corner of the CEO's, before we condemn the amount of money flowing to the shareholders, we should probably consider who those shareholders are. A lot of them, are us. Ok, to be more specific, anyone who has a non-public sector backed pension (and even some of those iirc). Pension companies/funds are some of the biggest institutional investors, they invest and grow our pension pots based on returns (both dividend and capital) from the stock and bond markets. Its not all about the mega wealthy creaming off the dividends from their multi-million pound portfolios.

[Migv6 le Frog Fan]

I have recently read a brilliant book on the subject of the EU - The trouble with Europe, by Roger Bootle.
It isn't propaganda by some swivel eyed loon. Bootle is a very well respected, award winning economist. His default position is that he would like the UK to remain in the EU, but it would require serious reform for that to happen.
Im convinced that Cameron read this book before his Bloomberg speech and was inspired by it, but unfortunately lost his bottle between then and now.
The book isn't light reading by any stretch, but covers all aspects of the EU in great detail, with a highly knowledgeable, intelligent approach.
I would dearly like to see everyone who intends to vote, read this book before they do. If you feel as though you could be better informed, or if you  believe, as I do, that we should all challenge our own beliefs from time to time, then I doubt you could do any better than read this book.

[STEMO]

I'd rather stick pins in my eyes than read anything by him. During the financial crisis of the naughties, old Roger was on the telly every five minutes...telling us how bad things really were and forecasting doom and gloom for all and sundry.
His predictions turned out to be just like every other 'experts', guesswork at best. No one, and I mean no one, can forecast with accuracy the outcome of any changes to the complicated, international financial framework that exists today. And, as Rog is an economist, I take it that was the matter he was offering his opinion on. There are too many outside variables. Other world economic powers can drastically affect the situation within the EU, and the situation is very fluid at this time.
We'll know what leaving will mean if we leave....not before 

[Sir Tigger KC]

I don't know who this fella is, never heard of him but he certainly has a point of view! 

http://www.andywilliamson.com/10-points-to-consider-about-brexit-and-the-eu-referendum/

[Rods2]

There are two sides to economics the maths based part which is useful and used to calculate absolutes and the catastrophe theory side, the flap of a butterfly's wings etc which is human behavioural driven which makes predicting the future have very little accuracy beyond guessing, once you stray much beyond near 'steady state' into volatile situations when you can forget any figures being even of the right order of magnitude.

The last major flap of the butterfly's wings was once bankers realised that the CDOs that they had been sold as AAA investments and loaded onto their balance sheets were actually subprime. You can thank Bill Clinton for that and his law to get everybody on to the housing market regardless of income!

Systems having known calculable and random event sides are not unusual with climate being another good example.

[Rods2]

I don't know who this fella is, never heard of him but he certainly has a point of view! 

http://www.andywilliamson.com/10-points-to-consider-about-brexit-and-the-eu-referendum/

It's a point of view, a highly inaccurate one in many areas, but like you say a point of view.