The final PMQs before the referendum provided an opportunity for fishing industry groups to make a much publicised journey up the Thames with voting intentions nailed to their masts on Wednesday – with Nigel Farage in tow, and Bob Geldof and Remain supporters making a noisy counter case across the waves. Before that, George Osborne warned what post-Brexit austerity might look like. Here we look at your reaction to those issues, as well as a detailed piece on how Euroscepticism took root in today’s Conservative party.
Click on the links at the end of each section to get involved, or head over to our EU referendum live blog to follow the news and discussion as it happens. Also worth a look is this live debate, which asked whether worry about the EU referendum is affecting your daily life.
1. George Osborne: vote for Brexit and face £30bn of tax rises and spending cuts
With his so-called Brexit budget, the chancellor has delivered a warning of £15bn of tax rises, an increase in fuel and alcohol duties and £15bn of cuts to health, education and defence if Britain leaves the EU. Discussion twisted and turned between allegations of stoking Project Fear and genuine concern that his argument might be the wrong way to make the economic case for remain. Whichever way you appear to be voting, Osborne isn’t making many friends.
The real threat to the economy comes from Cameron, Osborne and their scaremongering threats.
Both are finished, whatever the result.
Osborne could never get his 'punishment budget' through parliament. Not that it matters, because he won't be Chancellor for more than a week after the referendum; his disgusting threats have made him just as toxic amongst Conservatives as he is amongst everyone else.
No. The real threat to the economy comes from Brexiters.
For example, "with Japanese companies employing 140,000 people in the UK, business chiefs from Hitachi, Fujitsu and Nissan are united in warning against leave." See Guardian article.
That's 140,000 jobs in Japanese companies in the UK plus 1000s more in their supply chains at risk in the event of Brexit.
How can people be so ignorant of the negative consequences on jobs, livelihoods, families and communities.
Brexit is sheer folly.
The Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott writes that the budget would “guarantee a recession”, and while Alastair Darling stood alongside George Osborne, John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said the Labour party would never support such an emergency budget.
Interesting times. Tory chancellor has just expressed confidence that Labour members of parliament will vote through massive cuts in NHS and welfare spending to punish people for voting the 'wrong' way in a referendum. You couldn't make it up . Farage's flotilla should have picked up these Quislings from the HOC terrace and transported them to the Tower through traitors gate.
For many of you, Osborne is just not credible.
Osborne has accused his opponents of fantasy economics
- says the man who insists that "austerity" is necessary rather than ideological, and who has consistently failed to meet any of his self-imposed targets, and missed every single one of his forecasts.
And anyway, in the event of Brexit, would he have much say?
The point is moot if there is a Leave vote - both Cameron and Osborne would be out within weeks. Osborne would not have the legitimacy to have a Budget in the aftermath with facing both the Conservative membership and the UK public. There would be another Election by September.
2. Nigel Farage and Bob Geldof clash in rival EU referendum flotillas on Thames
And so to the Thames. Jeremy Corbyn remarked during Wednesday’s PMQs, the final sparring match before the referendum, that he hadn’t seen the flotilla coming, but it was there – perhaps if someone had opened the windows he would have heard it, such was the sound system.
The idea – by fishermen but backed by Nigel Farage – was to sail up to Westminster to highlight the case some in the industry have for a leave vote, but voices were countered and the debate got a little messy.
All those lil boats: brilliant! The Dunkirk spirit is alive & well in ol' Blighty ... two world wars & one World Cup ... true Brits have nothing to fear ... rising prosperity & a renewed pure British culture is our destiny ... facts are irrelevant, all that matters is that we give true Brits the opportunity to realise the triumph of the will ...
The Quitters have Providence on their side ... ignorance is the new knowledge ... what can possibly go wrong? With Magician Boris in control of the fairy dust we can make money grow on trees; with Gorgeous Gove sweet-talking the world, making deals that even the Trumpanzee could never finance with an ever-expanding crop of banananananas; with IDS, the personification of one nation, caring conservatism, looking after our NHS, the envy of the world, & social services; with Farage-rhymns-with-Garage as foreign minister, the voice of reason & diplomacy; with all this allowing us to take back our country, allowing Great Britain to be re-born, purified by fire, a beacon of decency & propriety in the eyes of the world, with all this what could possibly go wrong?
The Geldoff Thames stunt sums up the whole issue perfectly.
Millionaires and celebrities on a pleasure cruiser, drowning out working fishermen on their trawlers, telling them they know best about the fishing industry.
Noteworthy that many Brexiters here throw abuse at Geldorf in reference to his Irish heritage. Tells a lot about the Brexit camp: we see a man who has lived the last 40 years in the UK and been knighted by they queen. They see nothing but a foreigner who doesn't belong here and is a thorn in their eye.
It's a sad day today, the descent into farce, the doom mongers linking arms across all parties, the disastrous relaunches and sniping each other.
A group of hard working fishermen who are trying to defend their industry protest and what is the response? honestly.
Farage is a millionaire and he couldn't be arsed to help the fisherman in the EU parliament.
That’s right, the boats did manage to provoke some debate about the fishing industry: Geldof called him “no fisherman’s friend” and many of you agreed.
Presumably in the fishing nivana stocks never run low and outside the EU we can enforce our own rules.
Unfortunately for them, stocks do run low (if they could they would fish to exhaustion and then look upset when the fish vanished forever) and we currently have to borrow maritime assets from the French.
Fishing as an industry has big problems, leaving the EU will solve exactly none of them.
And, like the sweet stench of morning kippers, the argument that Farage is an inefficient MEP doesn’t go away quickly.
If Farage is so concerned about fishing, he should have turned up to the meeting when they voted on things like sustainable fishing and changed the fishing policy. But then he would have had to get his lazy ass out of the pub and talk to foruns. Farage is no friend of fishermen.
Geldof probably knows more about it than Farage.
I showed up as often as Farage did in the first two years at the EU fisheries position he demanded. Farage got an awful lot more tax-payer money than me for doing nothing tho.
3. Brexit: how a fringe idea took hold of the Tory party
This in-depth piece by Matthew d’Ancona started with the premise that two decades ago the idea of Britain leaving the EU was almost unthinkable and asked the question: how did a generation of Tory Eurosceptics bring it back?
First, a reader in disagreement:
Actually, promising the referendum was a trick devised by Dodgy to win back voters from UKip. Nothing more.
But as is often the case with pieces from the long read desk, the article provoked one of the most populated and involved conversations on the site today. Here are some more of the discussion points that got you talking.
Very interesting piece. I will be voting leave and I knew only some elements of the story. I think it's clear that serious changes like the Lisbon treaty should be put to a referendum. The most popular new remain argument is the public don't know enough to have an opinion. Lisbon was the first time the EU could sign international agreements in its own right on behalf of member states. It took away many powers away from individual nation states that you can just google it's in the documents. We should of been consulted on such a big change and I think bottling it up for so long leads to this reaction.
I'm still genuinely undecided and while I loathe some of the beaurocracy in the EU you just can't help feeling the leave campaign is just all driven by a bunch of toffs who would love to see workers rights returned to Victorian levels. Jeez, what a pickle.
It's not hard too understand why we are on the threshold of Brexit. I hope, but don't expect, that those lazy, arrogant politicians, who are all pro-EU, will apologise to all of us for allowing those anti-Euro messages to grow so powerfully under their political tenures.
For it is a failure of the EU itself that the UK wants to leave it, and not, as we are told, a triumph of nationalism or right-wing anti-immigration phobes. When a superstate, believed by its citizens to be unaccountable, and believed by its citizens to be acting in it's own self interest, ignores the dire concerns of identity, sovereignty, and cross-border movements in this day and age of roaming terrorists, then the result is it's own failure. It is a shaming indictment of the political classes.
You can click on the links on any of these comments to get involved in the conversations.
There is a general sense of malaise and anger. People don't see their living standards increasing and they feel increasing insecurity. The obvious response to this is to lash out; to resort to nationalism, to blame immigrants. We see a probable vote to leave the EU, we see the possibility of a populist demagogue being elected as president of the USA. Even the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader is a symptom of this; a desire to go back to simple solutions. All these things might feel good but ultimately they will not work.
If the problem is globalisation then it can only be tackled globally. Walls cannot be built. If labour can't be imported, jobs can be exported. You can cut yourself off and try the North Korea or Venezuela option, but the evidence is that it will not succeed.
Frightening on so many points, the main one being that we have allowed three media moguls to hijack British Politics and our democracy, and let them keep it for nearly four decades. The rest is purely an escalation from the first sin.....the hijack of our democracy!
Brexit is not a class nor political party issue. Its ignorance. Caused by apathy. Apathy stemming from decades of political spin, pr and lies.
Politics needs a drastic change. This should never have happened.
We’ll be back tomorrow with another roundup of what you’re talking about in the comment sections on the EU referendum. You can help inform what we report on by filling in the form below.
The only good argument is the one they are now making that leaving the EU wil cause prolonged economic chaos, lower the economic growth rate and thus increase the debt burden. To pay it down the Chancellor will have to increase taxes and savagely slash spending on things like the NHS and state pensions. That is not a scare story. That is grim reality. Of course IF he were a Keynesian he would forget about debt and borrow and spend more. But he is not. Middle England is not Keynesian, as this fool Larry Elliott forgets. They are hardline anti-debt fellows. So Osborne will continue to give priority to debt reduction and in that situation Brexit can only hit the poor very savagely indeed.