The referendum.

On the day of voting, we went away for a 2-week holiday in Ireland. This has had two effects - firstly, stopping me having a chance to properly comment, and secondly, giving me a distinct perspective on the result.

I should point out, to anyone who missed it, that I am a passionate supporter of the remain campaign. Of course, some people will assume that my anger and frustration is because I am on the losing side. It isn't. I am a member of the green party, so I am used to having the good arguments but not winning. I also voted on the losing side on the last referendum about changing the voting system. I am quite used to being on the losing side.

The reason I am angry is simpler than that. It is because leaving the EU would be the single stupidest and economically and politically suicidal action that any country has ever done, a position that would not be changed even if the US were to elect Trump as president.

I will explain why this is later, when I explore some of the implications of leaving. firstly, I want to comment on the campaign, which has been a shambles. More importantly, two academics who looked relatively dispassionately at the claims made for both sides said that the leave campaign produced lies on an "industrial scale". The other, who was doing fact checking on the claims found that, while the remain campaigns claims were broadly supported by their sources, the leave campaigns were totally unsupported - they lied about their claims in every single case.

That seems to me to be deceit of the British public on an unprecedented scale.

I did try to be as balanced as I could and consider the opposing arguments. I wanted to understand them, even if I fundamentally disagreed. There was, eventually, one that I could support. Just one.

The biggest claim, regularly repeated, was that we paid £350M into the EU a week. This was, as many people said, utterly false - after the rebates, we paid something more like £250M.

I should be clear here, I am no expert on EU economics, I am trying to find some real figures that show the actual values, not the headline values.

The rebates are applied before anything is paid, so this is not money we will save - it is money we have already not been paying in. It's more like if you have to pay a speeding ticket. The headline cost of the speeding ticket is £100. If you pay without contesting it, you are eligible for a 50% discount (rebate). So the actual cost of the speeding fine is £50. To argue that it is £100, so by paying early you have £50 spare is obtuse at the least.

On top of that (as I understand it), the EU provides subsidies to a number of businesses in the UK - in particular, farm subsidies under the CAP. The leave campaign promised to continue to pay these, so they have to be removed from the equation, leaving around £170M a week that we pay in. Vastly different from the £350M. And to the farmers who supported the leave campaign - why do you believe that these subsidies will be continued indefinitely? They won't under a right-wing government, because the state should not be providing financial support to any business.

 What do we get for this? We get membership of the EU, and all of the indirect financial benefits that this brings. It serves to attract multinational businesses to our soil, because they can then sell within the EU. It serves to provide a far larger amalgamation of countries to negotiate international trade treaties with, which provide us with far better deals than we could ever negotiate on our own. The current crop of political leaders do not seem to be particularly good negotiators, and I very much doubt that any of them could get good deals from our trading partners across the world.

I have seen some complaints that "we never receive as much from the EU as we put in." This is true, and, as one of the largest economies in the world, is absolutely reasonable. The final figure that we pay is probably around £6B - which sounds like a large figure, but is not in terms of a national budget. For comparison, it is a very conservative figure of the amount lost through tax evasion in the UK in a year. Total tax avoidance - the legal but morally compromised non-payment - is vastly higher than this (I am not quoting exact figures, because they vary from source to source, and depend on how you calculate them).

It is rather like paying to be a member of a golf club. Nobody expects to get back the money they pay to be in the club, because they see it has other benefits. Some of these are the ability to play golf, but others are the chance to discuss business with potential partners. For many, the indirect benefits they receive are far more than the cost of membership. So it is with the EU. I have seen quoted that a 0.5% drop in the economic growth of the UK would wipe out the entire payments we make (although I don't know what figure for payments this uses). So membership has to provide a boost of 0.5% - not much - to balance the payments.

This brings me onto the second issue raised - that we could control our borders. Even aside from the blatant racism that is inherent in this, and the implication that immigration is purely negative (it isn't - on the whole, immigration has proven very positive for our country), this is blatantly untrue. Our biggest trading partner is the EU, and if we were to negotiate an agreement with them, it would be on the basis of having open borders. In fact, it would be on a very similar basis to what we currently have. Leaving the EU would impact our trading relationship mainly in that we would no longer be on the inside to negotiate ourselves - we would have to accept whatever the EU insisted on. That seems a very poor deal in real terms. And it would do nothing to impact immigration from the EU. If we want to impact it from other places, we can do that anyway.

The one argument that held some weigh was that the EU is an irredeemable bureaucratic mess. I can see this point, in that the EU is rather red-tape heavy. I don't believe it is irredeemable though. I do believe that if we in Britain had been wholly in and supporting the EU for the last 10-15 years, and working with others to make it better, more streamlined, more efficient - rather than simply trying to get what we could for ourselves - it might be in far better shape.

So what is - and will be - the impact of the vote and of leaving (assuming nobody decides to actually do something useful and stop this ridiculous process)? I think we saw on the day after the vote the impact it will have on our economy - the stock market and the pound crashed. They have recovered since, but I suspect, if it became clear we were going to go through with this, they would crash and stay crashed. The banks think this is a stupid thing to do.

But that is short term. More importantly, multinational business will stop investing in the UK, because they may as well invest in a country inside the EU, where they can gain all of the benefits. Even those companies who have claimed that they will not leave will, I suspect, withdraw further investment, because their payback is so much greater by investing elsewhere. That in itself will cause us long-term damage. We took many years to attract companies like Toyota to the UK, but we can lose them very quickly, and then will have to spend many years encouraging them back.

Maybe more importantly than that, it is clear that Scotland and Northern Ireland want to stay in the EU. I fully expect that they will try to block an exit, at least until they can separate from England and Wales, and remain as members independently. Being in Ireland, it is interesting that there are even questions about reuniting the country - apparently, people may be prepared to put aside centuries of religious conflict and fundamental disagreement to not be a part of the insanity.

Scotland, of course, were far closer in their vote whether to stay or leave. Being in the North of Ireland, and having been just 12 miles from Scotland, I do wonder whether a "Western Nations" grouping could form - Scotland and a united Ireland. It would leave England as a very minor player in the area.

But it is not only businesses that will leave, though. The fact that all of the academics whose specialism is the EU said that leaving would be disastrous, and they were ignored. The anti-intellectualism we have seen is liable to lead more and more academics to consider whether this is a place they want to work. Additionally, the ease of communication and travel across the EU means that collaboration is comparatively easy, and for many, the ease of this will outweigh any provisions at a particular institution. More and more top level research is done internationally, and this will be impacted. Additionally, of course, the EU does put money into academic research, and if the projects aren't available in the UK, the researchers will move elsewhere.

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg. This is just identifiable sections of the community who may consider a change in circumstances. There are many others, like myself, who would seriously consider it, but I don't have the resources or ability to make a move. But most of all, and saddest of all, I think this entire process, and the decade of chaos that is to come from it, will disillusion many people about the whole of politics. The politicians are in a shambles, and they have utterly lost the confidence of the public at large. That is a dangerous and problematic situation.

Finally, from an Irish perspective, you would have thought the people of the UK would have learned that identifying oneself in opposition to others, vilifying them and spreading hatred does not tend to lead to a happy situation. That is the lesson of history that nobody seems to want to learn.

That EU Clawback debate

There has been a whole lot of discussion about a bill sent by the EU to Britain for £1.7Bn. The whole issue reads rather like a comedy sketch.

Firstly, the fact that this bill arrived unexpectedly - which suggests that the government are not in charge of their own budgets. OK, unexpected bills arrive for everyone, but if we are in control of our lives, our budgets, we should be prepared for these expenses. I prepare for the car bills, the society membership bills, I even try to prepare for the possibility of larger car bills, even expenses for the house. OK, they might be larger than expected, but I make some provision, some preparation.

We are planning some significant work on the house, and have worked very hard to make sure that we have the money for this, including some spare because the final bill might be a little larger. That is preparation and planning. I cannot say that I always do it, but I try to stay on top of potential expenditure, expected bills. Apparently better than David Cameron does.

David Camerons response to this was childish - he simply stated that "we will not pay this". What is interesting is that many people in this country find that they have large bills unexpectedly arrive, or income that is dramatically reduced. The poor in this country struggle with the vicious attacks made on them by - David Cameron. When they say "we will not pay this", they are demonised, called slackers, incompetent.

So George Osborne has been to Europe to see what could be done. He comes back saying that he has negotiated an incredible result - we only have to pay half of the money, and we have more time to pay it. Which is, of course, a whole lot of manipulative deception. As it has turned out, he has not got any reduction on the amount to be paid - it is just that he decided to count in a rebate that we were already going to have. Despite David Cameron's claims that "we will not pay", George Osborne has "negotiated" to actually pay all of the bill. Strangely, I have had negotiations like that, and come out feeling like I have lost, rather than won.

He has managed to get an agreement to pay half of it later. He tells us this is "installments" but it is just a deferring of half - the sort of deal most people could get on a large bill if they were struggling to pay it. OK, it is a deal, it is an improvement on having to pay it all in one go, but I would hardly call it a substantial victory - it is the sort of deal one suspects we could have achieved without a lot of fuss if we had just asked.

Recently, I had a dispute with a mobile phone company. At the end, they sent me a bill that I told them I should not have to pay, because I had previously asked them to cancel the account. If I had agreed to pay half the bill in six months time, I would have been very disappointed. I had the final bill cancelled, which I consider a reasonable and fair result - not a major success, just a reasonable conclusion.

George Osborne has claimed that "The truth is we have achieved a real win for British taxpayers" - that is a lie. He has agreed a minor rearrangement in the terms of the payment. We will not pay any less than we would have otherwise - so David Cameron is shown up as a liar. George Osborne is show up as someone who sill spin minor failures as substantial successes. The truth is that this governments management of the economy and the country is appalling, and incompetent. That is what this farce demonstrates.

Yes, I am not fan of this government, of their politics and their actions. So I will tend to see events in a bad light. I suppose it is up to you to decide whether I am portraying these actions in a deliberately bad light, or whether it is this sort of manipulative spin is the reason that I find the less blatant or obvious deceptions to show them in their true light.

I believe that this government hates us - the ordinary, not-hugely-wealthy people in this country. I don't really understand why, but I believe it is true. That is a bad state of affairs.