There will be job titles you have not even heard of yet. Decades ago, you could not tell a woman that her great-granddaughter would be making a living as an app developer, could you?

If a computer armed with a camera can watch a football game and write a basic report about the proceedings, then I have no complaints.

That would free up journalists’ time to analyse and investigate instead of wasting time on the basics.

Printing presses put scribes out of a job. No one is complaining. It is still heartbreaking, of course, to watch people’s lives being disturbed and their livelihoods ruined but that is the price that has to be paid for progress, and it is why most societies have developed a safety-net.

Still what do you suggest? Working for working’s sake? That sounds equally deplorable.

However it’s not that I don’t agree with you regarding this ‘shrug of a shoulder’ attitude to people being left behind. I’m genuinely concerned.

Is a CME economic system the answer? I’m too ignorant as yet (and I’ll probably remain that way) to really form an opinion so I’m genuinely asking.

Knowing that he was elected to the European Parliament specifically to cause havoc and use divisive tactics all through his time there makes it even worse.

Agreed. However the European Parliament can expel an MEP.

I have always been against the dumping of products, whether it’s China dumping steel or the EU dumping dairy products. The EU has anti-dumping regulations and I support them fully. Trade should be free and competitive but it should also be fair.

The European Commission is currently investigating China’s trade in steel. The glut in steel surely accelerated Port Talbot’s closure but we also have to acknowledge that it wasn’t the only factor that led to it. British steel was a dying industry anyway.

Regarding Nigel Farage, he is wrong on many counts and I have written a separate comment about it. You might be interested in reading it.

1) He says that a victory for Brexit is a victory for the little guy against “big corporates and big banks”. What are big corporations if not small ones which became very successful? If he is against big corporations, he is also against small ones because what he is effectively saying is that he does not want them to succeed., not very much anyway.

Although big corporations and big banks raise several challenges (monopolies and aggressive lobbying being two of them), big is generally beautiful. Big corporations know how to produce great products efficiently and can afford to sell them at a price which the little guy can actually afford. Modern life would simply be inconceivable without the very many services provided by big corporations and banks, whether it is using an ATM while abroad or using a search engine to find this website. Also, big corporations tend to create thousands of jobs

In short, when big corporations fail, it is the little guy who suffers most. The EU needs more big corporations to be able to compete with the United States, China and other countries and not fewer.

2) Nigel Farage says that Britain will have a “strong hand” when negotiating with the European Union. This is simply untrue. Britain exports over half its products and services to other countries of the EU so it’s going to be desperate to reach a deal. Meanwhile, each EU member state exports relatively little to the United Kingdom, with some countries exporting almost nothing at all. These countries will be particularly willing to procrastinate in reaching a deal if they don’t like the terms, and a deal would have to be agreed on by all 27 member states.

Britain is going to have a very weak hand. What is going to happen is that Britain is going to end up following all the EU’s rules anyway because otherwise it will not be allowed to trade with EU countries. The only difference is that, after it leaves, Britain will not get a say in drawing up those rules. The EU is going to have far more leverage in the negotiations than the UK and it will avoid making life too easy for Britain to avoid spreading ‘exit contagion’.

3) Nigel Farage says that “life will carry on” and Britons will still be able to go on holiday or on a student exchange. Yes, they will, but what he fails to say is that it will be at the grace and favour of the other EU countries. Free movement means that it is a right to travel to other countries without the need for a visa or any sort of restriction imposed by the receiving country.

Besides, the main issue is not holidays and student exchanges but, as this website has often pointed out, the right to work and live in other EU countries. All the big European cities need talent and this cannot be found within any one country’s borders. Talent travels to where money, ideas and opportunities are. By leaving, Britain will ensure that the talent pool for the rest of Europe, and much more so for Britain itself, will become smaller. Life will not just carry on because some industries which are heavily reliant on immigrants might very well either collapse or up sticks and move elsewhere.

4) Nigel Farage says that “Every country in the world has access to the single market.” That is true but what he fails to say is that access comes at a price if a country is outside the EU but it is free if a country is a member. The EU has, among others, a 10 % import tariff on cars, a 5% import tariff on car parts, a 15% import tariff on food and an 11% import tariff on clothing. These tariffs are allowed under World Trade Organisation rules and the United Kingdom will have to pay them if it starts trading with the EU without having a tariff free deal.

Farage himself unwittingly acknowledges this when he says that products which come from outside the EU tend to be more expensive than the same products produced within the EU. It’s because the single market makes products cheaper for EU citizens. Do you remember how expensive Italian pasta used to be in Malta before it joined the EU? Well, people think nothing of buying it now.

Those tariffs give the lie to Nigel Farage’s assertion that Britain will not be worse off trading under World Trade Organisation rules than it would be if it stayed in the single European market.

5) Nigel Farage talks about the car industry. He talks about the wine industry. He even mentions bras for a laugh (echoing Boris Johnson’s infamous speech about Britain’s intellectual property in French knickers). What he forgets to mention, not sure if deliberately or simply out of ignorance, is services, even though London sells more services (legal, accounting, financial and so on) than anything else.

Here is some news for him: World Trade Organisation rules still don’t cover services. The Doha Development Round which should cover services was started in 2001 but negotiations have been dragging on ever since with no end in sight. This means that Britain will have to reach separate deals about services with the EU even if it starts trading other goods under World Trade Organisation rules.

Please remember that just because a man is articulate and is chummy enough to come and have a pint with you down at the pub, it does not mean that he is telling the truth or he knows what he is talking about.