What industry did you work in out of interest? It can't have been retail.

Retailers such as Next and supermarkets manage to keep their prices low by offshoring the large majority of their production and importing into the UK as it is much, much cheaper than producing it in the UK.

The rights and wrongs of that are quite rightly to be debated, but if you think a business like Next can rip up and replace its business model just like that by manufacturing everything they sell in the UK then that is just insane naivety.

Brexiters seems to wilfully ignore, or just be plain ignorant to, how businesses operate in the real world and the reason why people are able to enjoy an uninterrupted supply of cheap essentials. If you want this utopia of 'British jobs for British people making British goods' then fine, but by God are we going to pay for it in terms of businesses going bust, major job losses and prices going through the roof. As ever, it's the lowest paid in society that are most affected by this - job losses, price of the weekly shop going up, price of fuel going up etc.

Edited by DanH (29 Sep 2021 12.16pm)

That’s why labels are extremely unhelpful. I largely believe in free markets and the most efficient use of capital. What we did was leave a large, frictionless free trade area that allowed for goods and people to flow without barriers. Leaving it was always going to cause issues like this to arise that only have pain in the short term.

You said it. Many of us voted for a correction in the labour market and that’s what will happen. I find it funny that some remainers claim we didn’t. The companies and governments have been getting away with poor treatment of workers and those WANTING work and this is where we are.

I genuinely don't recall hearing a jot about a correction in the labour market during the referendum campaigns - have you got any quotes or links to support this?

So do you want better pay for workers or not?

You’re sounding like a labour politician. Always complaining, never solving anything.