My name is evidence, indeed. Powerful argument.

Instead, the scrap heaped ex-workers in coal, steel, shipbuilding, etc, who have lost their cultural and economic base have seen the migrants who are necessarily more adaptable, and often better educated and more ambitious, overtake them.It is because people have lost their place in society that they are in crisis, not because other people have found a place.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-oldham-idUSKCN0ZB0LU

It's all there, ironically expressed by the son of Pakistani immigrants. He is not the problem, it must be those others. It is frankly ridiculous to blame immigrants for the neglect of the infrastructure, the lack of schools, jobs economic activity. The mills have closed and nothing has replaced them. Local government is starved of funds and central government has done nothing. — unenlightened

I live near Oldham, I have an Oldham postcode, in a post-industrial town that now is mostly a commuter town, with one big factory and a few small others, and high unemployment. You can easily find people here like the ones quoted in the Reuters article, but are they (including one voluble taxi-driver, a journalist's version of 'evidence') typical? They aren't typical of people in the town I'm in.

The quality of public debate before the referendum in the UK was astonishingly poor. So, a few slogans, the support of tabloid newspapers and a lack of good information one way or the other, and here we are, having voted to Leave, with a lot of talk about migration. (But quite a few people here hunting for Irish ancestors so they can get an Irish passport!)

All the same, I voted Leave too. I'm the Green candidate in the last local election who got more votes than UKIP! You can't make easy generalisations in this situation.

I share the view that the purportedly competing political elites have all abandoned the needs of the area where I live. The Labour party is inward-looking and mostly hand-in-glove with privatisers and international bankers, though nit retains strong core backing. Even if you think that people shouldn't blame immigration, you have to listen to them when they do, and give them a meaningful response. Negotiating a reduction in European freedom of labour movement will be a meaningful response, and to me it has to happen, whatever my own more liberal views about migration (Reader, I married an immigrant). Maybe we will also have more to spend on the health service and a better system of agricultural subsidies, when we finally stop moaning about how each other voted and get on with facing up to tomorrow.

Even if you think that people shouldn't blame immigration, you have to listen to them when they do, and give them a meaningful response. Negotiating a reduction in European freedom of labour movement will be a meaningful response, and to me it has to happen, whatever my own more liberal views about migration (Reader, I married an immigrant). — mcdoodle

Well actually, I don't think it will be a more meaningful response than pulling all someone's teeth out is a meaningful response to their complaint of toothache; . It will only hasten the decline of the health and education services, the value and hence quality of the housing stock and the availability of work.

But by and large, the EU is an irrelevance, as it is run on the same lines and with the same economic ideology as the British government whichever party is in power. Oldham will continue to decline until it has an economic function restored to it, and no one is making any serious suggestions in that direction.

Well, indeed, the world is going to hell in a capitalist handcart, but if you take such a broad brush line, then you will find no small steps meaningful, and you may as well join the wild optimists in the antinatal Schopenhauer clinic. I'll stand for the Greens again, and do my bit in the local community for peace and understanding, and carry on being one of those middle-class wankers who keep civil society going, however uncivil are the wild beasts unleashed by foolhardy rhetoricians.

Oh no, I'm all for small steps and even crawling, and keep on greening for sure. My indifference to the EU is only relative. Think global act local, you know. We don't have to go to hell, but avoiding it requires correctly identifying the problems and looking where we are going. That's why I'm bothering to blather on about things. There are folks that I think we should make life more difficult for, but they are not those generally thought of as migrants.

My guess is that migration has had mixed consequences for Britain (and many other countries). Some of the consequences are beneficial, some are not. I don't see any reason why migration should be an all-or-nothing proposition. But to choose how to manage immigration means choosing how to manage the economy, and for whose benefit. In many cases, working people see that immigration (and the economy) are being managed for the benefit of the elite, at the cost of the working class.

There are areas in the US where there are not enough workers--at any price. Depopulated agricultural areas don't supply enough labor to run local agri-industrial operations like grain and alfalfa drying, for example, or meatpacking. Migration -- legal and otherwise -- solves the problem. (Besides, American workers don't want to work at wages which are attractive only by Mexican pay standards. Nor should they.)

On the other hand, immigrants can be used to bust unions and drop the prevailing wage and working conditions. At the low wages they make, migrants can't afford to live well at all, so they double, triple, and quadruple up in houses, creating a mini-tenement slum, which has a negative impact on neighborhoods. From the immigrant POV, they are still coming out ahead -- compared to where they are from.

I read statements to the effect that "American [or British] workers don't want to work on dairy farms, don't want to work in factories, don't want to work in meat packing, don't want to work in stores, don't want to do landscaping, etc. No, they don't want to work in these places at very SUB-standard wages, and they shouldn't. Neither should the immigrants.

I also reckon that if there's a second referendum for Scottish independence, they'll vote to leave. They now have more reason - right or wrong - to do so. I don't want Scotland to leave the UK. I think it would be unfortunate.

Scotland is part of the UK, and the UK voted as a whole, and the majority voted to leave. So no, Scottish MSPs or MPs should not attempt to block any attempt to leave. Futhermore, Scotland had the opportunity to decide its own fate on these matters independently from the rest of the UK, but voted to remain a part of the UK. They made their bed, now they have to lie in it. If they don't like it, then they can push for a second referendum, but in the meantime, they ought to respect the UK-wide majority who voted to leave, and they should respect the UK government who represents them. The brexiteers won fair and square (so to speak), and the government is committed to honouring the result. As much as I agree with Nicola Sturgeon, and with the way in which Scotland voted, I do not agree, in principle, with her considering a veto as an optional course of action in this case.

There are good and bad points to EU membership. But I have to say that despite its failings on the day after the vote I felt somewhat claustrophobic and regret the loss of opportunity that Brexit will mean for the younger generation.

We've allowed the bureaucrats of the EU to enjoy large expense accounts, waste time and effort and spend on idiotic projects, so athough I'd have rather have stayed in, we have only ourselves to blame for the vote. Generation after generation have stood by whilst the EU has been colonised by the elites and the corrupt.

I think it would be great if Scotland would become independent once again!

One North European country more.

Now you can refer to Scots as being Pseudo-English.

MPs represent their constituency, not the country as a whole, and the Scottish Parliament represents Scotland, not the UK.

Can someone explain to me the recent Guardian anti-Corbyn campaign? Did Rupert Murdoch buy up the Guardian?

I don't get it either.

With a few exceptions, the Guardian is a fairly establishment publication, supporting the liberal managerial left that changed the political scene from 1997 onwards. Here's an editorial from January 2003, a lovely example of hand-wringing militarism:

"War with Iraq may yet not come, but, conscious of the potentially terrifying responsibility resting with the British Government, we find ourselves supporting the current commitment to a possible use of force. That is not because we have not agonised, as have so many of our readers and those who demonstrated across the country yesterday, about what is right. It is because we believe that, if Saddam does not yield, military action may eventually be the least awful necessity for Iraq, for the Middle East and for the world."

Lefties, it's time to accept that the liberal left is as much a part of the establishment now as Murdoch et al (perhaps more so?).

By the way, I'm not especially enamoured of Corbyn's politics myself, but I think he's pretty good for British politics in general and infinitely preferable to his opponents in the Labour Party.

I see. I only started reading the Guardian when I moved out West and I can see here that those 'preference algorithms' that the big websites use to tailor my newsfeed to my biases has resulted in me thinking that the Guardian consists of commies like Zizek, Varoufakis, and Graeber, and generally anti-establishment people like Glenn Greenwald writing for it as guests.

During Corbyn's rise a while back, the Guardian also seemed to be supporting him overall. It was just a surprise to start seeing them backing some sort of Hillary-esque establishment candidate.

The i, (https://inews.co.uk/) to which I've moved from the Guardian, did a rundown of the biasses in reporting on the referendum. The Guardian was I think the only one strongly biassed for Remain, and the Times and the i itself the only ones that were even-handed.

I agree with jamalrob: the liberal centre-left has found through the referendum campaign that it is in a vast pond of shared values with the conservatives they thought they hated. Some kind of split in the Labour Party seems in the offing. I just wish more of them would recognise they are really Red Greens like me :)

Well, something similar might be happening in the US, which is a split in the Democratic Party.

The clue's in the name. It's a middle class social-worker's rag that tries to teach the working class not to keep coal in their bath, and generally do us good whether we like it or not.

MPs represent their constituency, not the country as a whole, and the Scottish Parliament represents Scotland, not the UK. — Michael

The Scottish Parliament is devolved, not independent. It has some legislative power over Scotland, but other powers are reserved for the UK Parliament. The UK Parliament represents the UK, which includes Scotland. Scotland decided to remain a part of the UK. The UK voted to leave. End of.

The Scottish Parliament does and should represent Scotland, but since Scotland is not independent from the UK, it shouldn't attempt to block a UK-wide decision. The right way to go about it would be to attempt to secure a second Scottish independence referendum, if that is what the Scottish people want. Scotland cannot have its cake and eat it.