Thought I'd start a new thread as this is going to be a major talking point this year...have not made up my mind yet...(unlike bucksfizz)....but thinking of voting for an exit as Europe is not doing Britain any good at all it seems....

As you can see from haystacks stupid reply to population density...

IE: "The anti immigration lobby uses population density as a weapon. The reality is that you can get the whole population of the world onto an area slightly bigger then the Isle of Wight."

Ho yes and would they be able to lay down in comfort, or is that standing room only..

Haystacks tries to make out everything would be fine and dandy, and he likes telling us that he dosn't want to have uncontrolled immigration, yet goes out of his way to make excuses for it....SENSELESS!!!..

I don't even want the level of immigration that we have now, but you won't stop it unless you have debates based on accurate data. Headlines from the Express and the Mail are not based on reality.

Most right minded poeple don't want the immigration that's been allowed now. The problem is we can't do a thing about it SO LONG AS WE ARE IN THE EU..

The reason you get headlines like those in the Express/Mail is because the government does not give out the true figures, or non at all, you can't trust them because they've got ulterior motives...At least the papers will be nearer the figures then the government...You can look back to 2005 when Labour said that ONLY around 13000 Poles would come over when they were allowed to vie for the jobs...Look how many came..

An 'Opinium' poll for the Observer puts the LEAVE side on 43% and the remain on 39%..

and therefore 18% undecided

i'ld be very surprised indeed if STAY did not carry the day, but certainly not with my help

true immigration figures are apparently going to be released a few weeks before the referendum, but it's unlikely that those will be any clearer than the hogwash we are currently fed

I don't think the polls will tell us much at the moment .

Maybe i'm just talking to the OUT brigade but most people i ask are voting out .

I get more confident as 'independence' day draws ever closer that the LEAVE side will triumph..One of the reasons been that the remains have been pumping the fear and scaremongering for all they're worth and people can now see it as that's all it is,, scaremongering...

They have made huge mistakes ,the best one being Jeremy Hunt saying leaving the EU could hurt our NHS.

The one from that Morgan women was a stonker to, when she said leaving the eu would jepordise youngsters future, but failed to mention that in Greece and Spain to name just two have under 24's unemployment of 50%....

it would be interesting to know the demographics by age of the unemployed in the eurozone in comparison to uk

The youth under 24's in Greece 48.6%, Spain 46%, Croatia 44.1%..

statista.com/statistics/266228/youth-unemployment-rate-in-eu-countries/

well found gb

the figures are for december '15, but close enough in time
uk is near the best at 13.5%, with nl at 11.2% and germany 7.0%
france is 25.9% and poland 20.5%

.

Do you believe the figures produced by this government and its cohorts?

Unemployment down, Productivity, Deficit, Debt ????

If we were out of EU we could put whatever tariffs we wanted on whatever we wanted to - for god's sake the sooner we are out the better.

One also needs to think -
are we selfish voters - i.e voting for what is good for us as individuals .... or
are we unselfish voters - voting for what is best for the majority

Perhaps we need to sort our own heads out before we try and sort out the EU.
I suspect most of people are what I would call "selfish" voters

Airbus tells staff it makes economic sense to stay in EU . Previously they said they would work in or out of EU , so some pressure starting to be put out there . Of course no mention of any other issues the EU has .

Anyway Haystack I did ask in your circle of friends who will probably be similar to you , are there any of similar thoughts to you as regards wanting out .Pleasy please .

i'm happy to be classed as a selfish voter, and it won't make me change my mind

no one actually knows the long term effects whether we stay in or get out
if we stay in, my own view is that there'll be the slow attrition of taking us ever further towards federal eu and no doubt ultimately sucked into the € whether we like it or not

the unions would probably love it

Typical "selfish" voting being pushed on its staff i.e vote in - it is better for your selfish Airbus jobs

Pity the Port Talbot workers – their country is powerless to help them
Boris Johnson
4 April 2016 • 7:10am

Everyone feels sorry for the 15,000 steelworkers at Port Talbot; everyone in this country will be hoping for a solution that will keep them in work. That is partly because their fate seems so unjust. This disaster isn’t their fault. They don’t have some new strain of the Seventies “British disease”. The plant is not a hotbed of union activity.

"China is not a market economy. It has chosen a dumping strategy that is ravaging European industry. The EU itself risks imploding if Europe persists with the error"
Edouard Martin MEP

On the contrary, these workers have agreed over the past few years to make substantial reductions in jobs and big increases in productivity. They make superb quality steel. They offer it at a reasonable price. It is just that the Wales plant has been overwhelmed by a series of misfortunes over which they – the workers – have absolutely no control; and these misfortunes, moreover, arise in policy areas over which these workers might reasonably expect their elected government to have some control, but which the UK has simply lost; abandoned; surrendered; supinely given up as part of our membership of the EU.

There is the massive global dumping of cheap Chinese steel, subsidised by a Beijing government that is itself alarmed by impending job losses in the sector. Then there are the excessive fuel bills that this country currently imposes on industry. When you are running blast furnaces the cost of energy matters a great deal. A recent report by the Business, Innovation and Skills parliamentary committee said that UK steelmakers were facing energy costs as much as 80 per cent higher than the EU median. Even if that figure is high, there can be no doubt that the UK’s various climate change policies – largely generated by Ed Miliband – have been highly damaging for British manufacturing.

Then, I am afraid, there is Brussels, which is exacerbating both problems. It is one of the features of membership that we must not only accept that about 60 per cent of our legislation – primary and secondary – comes from the EU. We must also accept a fatal loss of flexibility, an inability to take decisions that might be in our national interest – and an inability even to make good our own mistakes.
Sajid Javid meets steel workers in Port Talbot Play! 00:54

Take the glut of Chinese steel. It seems that the EU Commission has been considering a broad range of anti-dumping measures for some time. It is also clear that before Tata took the decision to close Port Talbot, the UK was one of the countries to be lobbying against such tariffs. Some have suggested that this was out of a general desire to suck up to the Chinese; others that it was a principled aversion to tariffs, and recognition that such import duties would hit domestic consumers of steel. Since the Port Talbot crisis blew up, the story seems to have changed. We are now told that the UK does indeed favour anti-dumping measures, though not of the kind that the EU Commission has been proposing.

The result? Probably nothing. Nothing will happen in the near future, if ever, because there is no agreement round the table in Brussels. Even when we want to change tack on tariffs, we can’t – because we have given up control.

Contrast the US, where – wham – they have applied 266 per cent tariffs on dumped Chinese steel. Contrast China itself, which – to add insult to injury – has just slapped 46 per cent duties on steel from Port Talbot. Britain can do nothing to mimic these steps, because we have given up control.

Exactly the same point can be made about energy costs. It is true that much of the burden of these high UK energy bills is self-imposed. There is a sense in which Miliband’s bonkers plan has succeeded. We have certainly cut our CO2 emissions – but only by applying such crippling levies to UK industry that much of this manufacturing has simply gone elsewhere – along with the CO2 production. We may feel virtuous about cutting our CO2, but it is unlikely that the planet notices the difference.

The Conservative Government is sensibly trying to make amends for Miliband’s folly, and to cut the costs of energy for industry – but at every turn we have the problem of the EU, and the objections of Brussels to anything that looks like state aids. Even when we are trying to address our home-grown mistakes, even when we are simply trying to bring down our energy costs so that they are more in line with the rest of the EU, we face the same difficulty: we no longer call the shots, even when thousands of jobs are at stake.

When this referendum campaign began, and I said that the key issue was sovereignty, I remember people giving me pitying looks. No one cares about sovereignty, they said. Well, losing sovereignty is just a fancy way of talking about losing control – and I think people care passionately about it.
Boris Johnson: leaving the EU would be like escaping from jail Play! 01:27

As Michael Howard said yesterday, it is absolutely true that we cannot systematically check to see whether doctors practising in this country can speak good enough English. It is absolutely true, as Priti Patel has pointed out, that uncontrolled immigration from the EU has put a massive strain on the NHS. I spoke to one long-serving Hertfordshire GP who said she had never seen such pressure – and what can we do? Nothing. We can’t take emergency action against dumped Chinese steel, even with British industry on its knees. We can’t cut our own self-imposed energy costs. We can’t set our own language tests for practising doctors. We can’t control our borders.

"It is a fact that at the moment because of EU rules we can't ensure that doctors who want to practice in this country from other EU nations speak English"
Michael Howard

What do we get for this sacrifice of control? Access, supposedly, to the giant EU market. Well, plenty of countries have access to that market. US exports to the EU have been growing faster than ours, and so have Switzerland’s – and both those countries have kept control of their democracies. The EU system is being daily exposed in this debate as an anachronism, and membership is increasingly cumbersome and anti-democratic. Nowhere else are they conducting a giant experiment of trying to fuse so many countries into one.

It is time to ignore the doomsters, get out, go global. It is time to take back control of our country – not to speak of about £10 billion net. We would have more money, and more freedom to rescue the British steel industry – and we might even succeed.