The Clash Question

Should We Stay Or Should We Go?

By Guest Writer – Jamie Flook

Some polls suggest that 2016 could be the first year when the British people come out of Europe before the national football team. Bloomin’ Poles, where do they get off sticking their noses in to our public toilets and telling our elderly when to take their medication? It’s an outrage, they come here stealing all our jobs and at the same time they laze around claiming job seekers allowance. All that money could be spent on the homeless. That would be an outrage as well though because many of them are foreigners. In London 60% of homeless people are foreign so they’re stealing our shop doorways and park benches too.

On top of all this money we hand out to the lazy foreigners stealing our jobs, we also have to pay £8.5 billion in net contributions to the EU every year which is a whopping 0.3% of our GDP. And that’s not the only way they hit us financially. From the start of the financial crisis in 2008 through to 2015, bankers in the UK had to put up with taking only £100 billion in bonuses which was working out at £14.2 billion per year until the meanies at the EU stepped in and put a cap limiting bankers bonuses to 200% of their annual salary. As a result for 2015-16 the bankers were only paid £5 billion in bonuses. That’s a reduction of £9.2 billion and as long as we don’t use maths, we can see that is still definitely less than the £8.5 billion we paid in to the EU over the same period. It’s so cruel that George Osborne appealed against the cap but the EU rejected his appeal because they are like Hitler and want to control everybody.

Of course its not all about money though, let’s touch back on immigration again because everybody I know knows somebody who knows somebody else who has had their lives turned upside down by immigrants. Just this month we have been presented with the news that Syrians are attacking schoolgirls in Newcastle. And we all remember the Rotherham sex abuse scandal which involved criminals of Pakistani heritage. This is another reason why we need to exit the EU. If we leave and assuming the EU admits Syria and Pakistan as EU member states, then we will be able to stop such people from coming here.

Supporters of the remain campaign argue that we get £10 billion or so back from the EU via rebates and subsidies etc but this doesn’t take in to account the fact that they tell us how to spend it. Like that time they told us we need to  spend money cleaning up our beaches so people wouldn’t go down with any good old British diseases like scarlet fever or the like. In true British style though, we told them we would politely comply by declassifying every single beach in Britain as no longer being a beach. Michael Gove quite rightly points out that the EU controls how we spend the money they send us. Some of it has to go to farmers and university research teams for example. In fact university research in the UK gets so much of this money that the UK receives more in university research funding from the EU than all the other member states apart from one. No wonder Stephen Hawking, Peter Higgs, Tim Peake and Robert Winston all support staying in. They’re bound to be in favour of anything scientific and we all know science is evil.

Name-dropping like this shouldn’t really influence a person’s vote unless they don’t follow politics but thankfully a large proportion of the population do know their stuff. This is evidenced by the 47% of those surveyed on an episode of Pointless that said they knew that David Cameron was in the cabinet. And how useful is name-dropping anyway? No idea but for the 53% it might be useful. The remain camp sadly includes many of Britain’s leading lights: David Beckham, J K Rowling, Richard Branson, Banksy, Martin Lewis, Philip Pullman, Richard Curtis, Hilary Mantel, Danny Boyle, Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Izzard and John Oliver in addition to Hawking, Higgs, Peake and Winston. Oh and Simon Stevens who is the chief executive of the NHS. Oh and Angus Deaton the British Nobel Prize-winning economist who used to work at University of Bristol. Oh and Barack Obama, Bob Geldof and the Pope support us remaining too but then they would because they is foreign innit?

Are they all scared of the dark? Quite possibly. Those in the leave camp aren’t scared of the dark though. Specifically I am referring to Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Michael Portillo, Nick Griffin, Rupert Murdoch, Peter Hargreaves, Arron Banks, Katie Hopkins, Ian Duncan Smith, Britain First, James Dyson and Nicholas Van Hoogstraten. And Gove says you should listen to people like Dyson because he creates jobs. Just ask the many hundreds of people working for Dyson in the Far East after he sacked 800 people in the UK in favour of creating jobs in Asia.

Enough about famous names though. Let’s get back to immigration again because that is the one area that blights all of our lives. This freedom of movement thing is terrible. It forces emergency services across Europe to treat any of us if we become unwell abroad and as Farage correctly predicted has resulted in close to 500 million people now coming to the UK. And when I say close to 500 million, I mean 2.4 million. This of course is nowhere near the figure of Brits emigrating to the EU which is 2.2 million.

Why on Earth would we want to be part of the world’s largest economy when we are already the world’s fifth largest among nation states? Aside from benefitting financially from EU membership, some of that £8.5 billion goes to poorer countries and that’s not right is it? It reminds me of the time my brother and I went to Greggs for pasties and doughnuts and he gave 5p to the homeless person outside. I don’t want to go through that again.

The remain camp point to all of the worker’s rights that the EU give us but who cares about rights? We hate rights in Britain. Our default preferred option is to work and live as slaves. We abolished the slave trade in 1807 after African slaves started taking all our slave jobs. Thankfully by Victorian times, the workhouses were being used to great affect for British slaves. Fast forward to 2009 and the times had changed dramatically.

For in 2009, the EU brought in law forcing employers to give eight bank holidays on top of four weeks annual leave to British workers. Previously our poor employers had the option of including bank holidays as part of the four weeks annual leave. Can you imagine the terror of it for poor organisations like Tesco and Lloyds? I think we should each adopt a cuddly super-conglomerate to sponsor. After all we should care about big British businesses. Just not in the same way that they care about us.

The EU can keep all of the above benefits because we hate benefits in Britain don’t we? They can also keep their cheaper flights, consistent data roaming charges across Europe, consumer safety laws, tax-free trading, equal rights for part-time workers, 48-hour working time agreements, cooperation on terrorism and lack of war and keep it where the Sun shines.