Brexit Thread

[Husar]

Pinhoe was mostly fields until a few decades ago, the bit that currently connects it to Exeter is an Industrial estate built, irrc, in the early 90's, so during my lifetime. Those fields are for sheep and cows, so as Exeter expands it destroys its own local food supply. Who's buying these houses though? Some are locals, true, but that's because people commute from Exeter to London and Bristol - that's threee hours to London. Rather puts London's quality of life into perspective. Urbanisation is part of a function of over-crowding. As more and more people are born the jobs dry up in rural areas, so people move to the cities, which therefore expand, swallowing the surrounding rural areas and destroying the basis for the rural economy (land). This results in rural over-population which causes people to move to cities and... you get the picture.

I think you got it wrong again. As I understand you, you don't like urban life for yourself, so you see everything through that lens.
I can't seem to find anything that suggests overpopulation were the cause of urbanization. As you say yourself, your population is shrinking without immigration, and immigrants tend to go to cities right away. Job in the countryside are drying up because people are leaving and because the jobs there are increasing automated. Cities also offer other bonuses such as better access to modern technology, economies of scale for the ones offering it and so on. The impact of cities destroying the surrounding economy may exist but it has to be incredibly small compared to every other factor. One might as well claim that more smaller villages mean more road connections, power lines and other infrastructure and pollution from all the driving around that destroys just as much or even more land than expanding cities.

In Britain we're reaching a tipping point similar to the one after WWII where we had our last population explosion. the difference is that this time the population explosion is caused by immigration, without immigration the population would be slowly falling and might stabilise, alleviating the need for so much new housing.

People began to move to cities in the Middle Ages already, the additional housing there is needed anyway. Technically the empty houses in the countryside could be razed though to let the area be reclaimed by nature.

As a result many people are resentful of immigration they see as uncontrolled (because it's enshrined in EU treaty and not a policy they can vote a government out for). This feeling of lack of control is a big part of why many people voted Out and the key theme my father returns to (you may recall he's Swedish, so he can't vote himself). Lack of control over agricultural policy is another reason people voted Out and probably a bigger one where I grew up than immigration.

Now, frankly, I think Pannonion et al bear a significant amount of the responsibility for the rise in racist attacks. It was Remain who said that those who voted Leave were racists and Xenophobes, so when Leave won the racists and Xenophobes felt empowered. That's why I'm annoyed people KEEP going on about it. If you're troubled by the racist attacks you need to find non-racists (like me) who voted Leave for political reasons or reasons of principle and not out of Xenophobia - and you need to engage with them publicly.

I want the same thing for Europe everyone else here does - peace, prosperity and happiness for everyone - I just happen to believe the EU can't deliver those things.

We will see whether curbing immigration will actually help. a shrinking population is a terrible economic prospect if one can't increase exports. Not only does the relation of pensioners to paying workers increase (in addition to medical reasons), it also means the markets shrink whereas businesses want to grow. Of course one business can still grow by cannibalizing another, but if the new business is less labor intensive, you end up with more unemployed people again. Maybe I'm missing something here, but I'm sceptical for now and need to sleep.
Have a good night.