Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
Well, regardless of my opinion on Brexit - which is on the fence - sometimes the status quo isn't that bad.
They say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", right?
The problem with the Brexit and other similar situations is that they tend to be used by the various parties more to score political points than to actually fight for a cause they believe is just.
So one of the reasons I haven't made my mind up is that I won't bother looking up the various statistics and data that vouch to stay or to leave - the data is easily taken out of context and open to interpretation.
For instance, the "stay in" campaign says
So with that, they have inferred in the past that by exiting from the EU 3 million jobs would be put at risk.
To me that's nonsense. Europe would continue to be Britain's trading partner regardless as to whether Brexit takes place or not. If Britain sells goods and services to Europe, it's because Europe needs it. So by saying all those jobs are at risk is tantamount to scaremongering IMO.
I'm sure similar fallacies can be found on the other side as well. The point is, for the average citizen, it is difficult to determine whether Britain in the EU is broken or not.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Our columnists debate whether there could be some upsides for other EU states if Britain leaves
The EU referendum campaign officially began this week and one area that has not been examined so far has been what would happen to the EU if Britain votes to leave. Much of the debate so far has focused on the consequences for Britain, but Brexit would undoubtedly have an impact both on the structure of the EU and its remaining members. The Financial Times’ commentators discuss whether Brexit would be bad for Europe.
I don't know what to think to be honest, although I have to say I tend to be highly skeptical of all these polls. They always seem to be biased. It seems to me that polls are being used these days just like newspapers: they all carry a political agenda and they all mean to influence readers/users in one direction. There does not seem to be much objectivity anymore.
The warnings to GB inhabitants came from Obama yesterday.
Some questions are allowed to know why USA is influencing a state with a good government.
And why a president "warns" the inhabitants over there.
What profits will have USA for themselves?
Watching all these TTIP problems that will undermine government jurisdiction and in
most cases bring states into troubles having only arbitration tribunals instead of their
own judges working with written rights of their proper state.
Development between the "friendship" of 2 continents is somewhat frightening.
My own guess is that Obama's intervention will do the "Remain" side more harm than good. The British electorate dislikes being told what to do by foreigners just as much as Americans do.
There hasn't been a real vote on this for about 40 years, and the polling companies lack information on how to do it reliably.
For example, when the leading polling organisations do general election polling, they all incorporate a fixed adjustment factor to allow for the fact that a small, but pretty regular proportion of voters on one particular side of the political spectrum conceal their true voting intention from the pollster (i.e. they deliberately lie about how they're going to vote). This adjustment method has developed gradually, over the decades, and all the polling organisations agree about it, have statistically valid evidence of it, and so on. In the case of the Brexit poll, however, there's no equivalent data available, and that makes the findings potentially even less reliable than usual.
Some people believe that a similar, or slightly higher, proportion of "Brexiters" will do the same thing (and I suspect they're right), but there's no real evidence for it: it's only guesswork.
One thing that does seem certain, and reliably so, is that telephone polls are far more indicative than online polls of overall voting outcomes.
The thing that interests me, at the moment, is that the overall proportions of "inners" and "outers" seems not to be changing very much, while the proportion of "undecideds" is apparently shrinking very rapidly.
And for anyone wanting the gossip: Alison Pearson, whom I regard as probably reliable on such subjects, writes in the Daily Telegraph that Samantha Cameron and Sarah Vine (Mrs. Michael Gove) are not at the moment on speaking terms, in spite of Sarah Vine being the Godmother of one of the Cameron children, following Vine's "revelation" in a newspaper column (she's a political journalist) that Cameron admitted privately to Gove that his recently attempted EU negotiations hadn't really achieved anything worth talking about - something I think we all knew anyway?
Not sure that this is really an answer to your question at all, but there seems to me to be a growing consensus among the political commentators/journalists/analysts/academics that (for reasons I don't understand) the most ardently pro-EU voters are "the hardest for the pollsters to reach and include" and that the polls may, therefore, generally underestimate the size of the "remain" vote.