UKC

... the courts have determined that there is no grounds for appeal to the Electoral Commission's conclusion that the referendum was marred by illegality.

Time to revoke A50 and take stock, which probably needs to include scheduling another referendum quite soon - hopefully one run legally this time - to establish the actual 'will of the people' rather than the one resulting from illegal practice.

Edit: link https://twitter.com/ElectoralCommUK/status/1108773235758383104

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/241584

Signed

I fear that there's too much momentum/fear of unrest for Brexit to stop. Hope not though!

A chance for younger people to make their signature count before they can vote.

I think you hit the nail on the head with fear of unrest. Out on site I meet a lot of people who fear what they voted for won't happen and Brexit will be canceled. Mostly these are big hairy men who don't feel they were lied to, they just want to stop Eastern Europeans displacing them from the workplace and driving down wages. I suspect there will be a lot of trouble if we don't exit. 

There will be a lot of trouble also if we exit with no deal. The Remainers are as likely to be just as pissed off as the Brexiters would be in the case of no Brexit (though probably not as violent).

So fear of unrest will potentially carry through the results of a referendum marred by illegality.

Leaving in this way is something bigger than whether it's the right thing to leave or not.

And I can't imagine the Brexiter builders will be overly chuffed either when they find out the promised land of milk and honey they voted for is clean out of milk and never did have any honey.

Yep, fewer EU citizens working alongside them, not that they drove down wages, but the economy screwed and a lot less work and rates at rock bottom.

We've got to stop grumbling and start shouting, I'm thinking, the illegality in the referendum is a really important whatever one's opinion on Brexit. I have the sense I'll kick myself if I don't get involved somehow - beyond signing online petitions. 

On that note I'm off to bed...

They will just have to be happy with their imaginary milk and honey, and imaginary jobs, amongst their herds of unicorns in a land free of foreigners.

How did access to cheap EU labour not drive wages down? When their is a glut of people willing to work for minimum wage why would employers pay more ?  

https://fullfact.org/immigration/immigration-and-jobs-labour-market-effects...

Worth reading it all, but basically it's complicated! It can depress wages a tiny amount for the lower end of payment scale but long term it increases the number of jobs available and we all win from it. 

I would support a higher minimum wage though to minimise the impact on the lower end of payment scale though.

Interestingly, this article also says that non-Eu immigration lowers wages more than EU immigration, but I didn't get why that was the case.

Read the whole thing though rather than relying on my patchy summary

I wouldn't bank on it. You only need one tw*t of a Brexiteer celebrating in front of someone that's just lost their job because of it, and somewhere or other it'll kick off.

I'm absolutely certain that the next time I see someone at my door canvassing for either Conservative, Labour or UKIP the very least I'm going to do is lay into them verbally and tell them in no uncertain terms to "get the hell off my land".

There's nothing else for it - vote LibDem.

I will read it when I get time but if I believe it or not will be another matter. I find it interesting that one type of immigrant effects the wage more than another. What I see on a almost daily basis though is factories staffed by Eastern Europeans working for minimum wage. Yesterday for example I was at a waste recycling plant full of Polish and Romanians. All standing on a line picking different types of waste on minimum wage. I have asked the owner before why and the answer has always been brits won't do this for minimum wage but they will. 

Freedom of movement certainly depressed wages in the building industry in Glasgow. A joiner being paid what a labourer used to be paid.

However after the referendum when the pound's value crashed, many Eastern European tradesmen returned home.

So yes, I see your point about discontent amongst certain groups but I think the issue is with levels of pay rather the availability of jobs as unemployment is at its lowest for 40 odd years.

And the owner failing to invest because it’s cheaper to employ people

I ditched that mindset a few years ago and went for productivity and paying my team more. This was after reading an overview of the uks productivity gap and how it depresses wages. 

Mind you competing in a global market makes it easier and a must  for me to do. Exporting companies in the uk are far more productive than any other sector. 

Employment is frustrating if it doesn’t pay for the basics and still leaves you grappling with the benifits system. I think we’ve spent too long hiding behind crude figures like these that hide a multtude of social ills.

If the 7000 jobs to be lost at Swindon when Honda shuts including all the technical skills and design and managerial jobs were to be replaced by McJobs and warehouse work, the employment  figures would be unchanged, however the local economy would tank, and the wider economy would suffer another cut in its slow death of a thousand cuts.

Sorry for the rant :-/

Rant away Jethro. I agree with you.

Thankfully, its still true whether you "believe" it or not. Several links to wide-ranging academic studies covering a large geographical area is far more robust than just your corner of the world alone.

But of course we don't listen to experts. Look where that's got us.

A former employer of mine in food production had trouble finding Brits to do the work in the factory, and they paid far above minimum wage. Given that the min wage is currently £7.83 / hour, it is far better than any warehouse type or low / semi skilled production operative would have got 5 years ago. It isnt just that Brits wont work for min wage, its sometimes that they just wont do the job.

Actually the owner has invested a few million and is investing in more automation over the Easter break, they have already cut their workforce by 2/3rds and half of the remaining will be finished at Easter. Due to the investment in technology to auto sort rather than have manual pickers the throughput is up by 130% and due to increase again with the new plant. Its shit for the workers but the new lines are fascinating to watch. The rubbish moves that fast on the belts that you can hardly make out what is what but the optical scanners can and blasts of precision compressed air blow bottles in to this hopper and cans in to that etc. 

I fully agree there are a lot of jobs that brits don't want to do for £7.83 per hour, when your mate says he offered more than minimum how much was he talking about? 

I placed an add for a Labourer to work with me on sewage works at £10 per hour and got over 100 applications in 3 days, people will do dirty jobs if the money is there. 

There are lots of academic studies proving all sorts of things. 

My corner of the world as you put it is about 80% of the UK. I will admit most of my time is spent in Yorkshire, Lancashire, teesside, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire but I have customers as far down as Barry Island and as far up as Aberdeen and the one common factor I see in most of the factories I go to is East European Labour. 

It makes my job very difficult when I have to diagnose the problem with the machine but the operator doesn't speak English and I don't speak Polish.  I did try learn Polish both for work and because one of my best mates is Polish but I failed miserably.

£27k pa for 4 x 9.5 hour shifts. Mind you, in low temp, sterile conditions. Hard work, but the sister factory oop north had no problem finding workers of any background; they were seen as very good employers (rightly so) with very low staff turnover, so high productivity, and low HR costs (recruitment / training etc).

What about the Premier League, all those foriegners taking our players jobs because they work for subsistance wages? It's disgusting!

They didn't really want the job. It's just going through the motions...

You mean it’s tough for the low paid non skilled workers.your post helps prove my point.

So when we kick them out which outcome do you think is most likely:

The owner takes less out for themself, pays more.

Owner invests in automation and doesn't re-hire.

They're replaced with minimum wage Africans on shit visas, people who can't settle and integrate.

Owner charges you and I more to process our waste.

We export baled mixed waste to cheap labour and the business folds.

Jk

You forgot:

We take back control, and just send everything to landfill...

From the applications I would say most were genuine. You get quite good at spotting people wanting a job and people just applying to get theceatra £10 for being a job seeker.

This is a big part of the issue. A lot of jobs are created because the labour is cheap, otherwise the job creation does not happen in the first place. If we did not have the infamous Polish plumber, but instead a better paid British one, the homeowner would bothc the plumbing him/herself. If the Romanian farmworker was substituted by a more expensive British one the Lincolnshire farmer could probably not compete with the Ukranian or Brasilian one, so again the job would not exist. There is not a fixed number of jobs. Undoubtedly globalisation not the EU makes life harder for some as we/they have to compete with more workers in other countries, but the Chinese guy is as entitled to live well as anyone in the UK in my opinion, so overall living standards worldwide improve.

It's a bit of a moot point because this owner is already investing heavily in automation with no plans to re hire.

The extra throughput means a 2 year pay back on investment, its called sound business sense in the same way it makes sense to pay £8 per hour to say 100 people than it does to pay £10 per hour.

If people are not available for £8 per hour then business will be faced with choices. Automate more, this is getting more and more viable in lots of sectors every year. Pay more and try pass the cost on to the end user quite possibly starting a chain of events where the extra pay people are earning is swallowed up by the rise in the cost of living or finally the last option is to go out of buisines.

Regardless of access to cheap labour the minimum wage needs to go up a lot. 

I KNEW I should have stuck a smiley on the end...